oint, the French are
unanimous; no article of their social code is more cherished by them;
this one flatters their amour-propre and tickles their imagination; it
exalts hope, nourishes illusion, intensifies the energy and enjoyment
of life.--Thus far, the principle has remained inert, powerless, held in
suspension in the air, in the great void of speculative declarations and
of constitutional promises. Napoleon brings it down to the ground and
renders it practical; that which the assemblies had decreed in vain for
ten years he brings about for the first time and in his own interest. To
exclude a class or category of men from offices and promotion would be
equivalent to depriving one's self gratuitously of all the talents it
contains, and, moreover, to incurring, besides the inevitable rancor
of these frustrated talents, the sullen and lasting discontent of the
entire class or category. The First Consul would do himself a wrong were
he to curb his right to choose: he needs every available capacity, and
he takes them where he finds them, to the right, to the left, above or
below, in order to keep his regiments full and enroll in his service
every legitimate ambition and every justifiable pretension.

Under the monarchy, an obscure birth debarred even the best endowed men
from the principal offices. Under the Consulate and the Empire the two
leading personages of the State are Lebrun, Maupeou's old secretary,
a productive translator,[3308] a lawyer, formerly councilor in a
provincial court of justice, then third-consul, then Duc de Plaisance
and arch-chancellor of the Empire and Cambaceres, second-consul, then
Duc de Parme and arch-chancellor of the Empire, both of them being
princes. Similarly, the marshals are new men and soldiers of fortune,
a few of them born in the class of inferior nobles or in the ordinary
bourgeois class, mostly among the people or even amongst the populace,
and, in its lowest ranks, Massena, the son of a wine-dealer, once a
cabin-boy and then common soldier and non-commissioned officer for
fourteen years; Ney, son of a cooper, Lefebvre, son of a miller, Murat,
son of a tavern-keeper, Lannes, son of an hostler, and Augereau, son
of a mason and a female dealer in fruit and vegetables.--Under the
Republic, noble birth consigned, or confined, the ablest and best
qualified men for their posts to a voluntary obscurity, only too glad
when their names did not condemn them to exile, imprisonment or to the