L. 1807. rienced at the imperial headquarters, and that the sums CHAP. extracted from them during its continuance amounted to at least a half of those derived from the legitimate taxation of his own subjects. But in addition to this, the internal taxation of France was established on the best principles, by that salutary intermixture of indirect with direct taxation, which can alone diffuse the public burdens, in a just and equal manner, over the whole community. The longer his experience extended, the more was he attached to the admirable system of indirect taxation, the only secure basis for the permanent income of a great nation. "The principle I should wish to see established," said he, on 20th February 1806, "is to introduce a great number of moderate indirect taxes, susceptible of augmentation when the public necessities call for their increase." Nor was Napoleon less alive to the necessity, amidst such immense industrial undertakings, of providing a currency adequate to their execution. He had not embraced the doctrine of the political economists, that the best way to make a nation prosperous is to engage it in vast undertakings, and after rendering its issue of paper dependent on the specie in the hands of the bankers, send its metallic circulation, by means of free trade and a vast importation, headlong out of the country. He increased the capital and shares of the bank of France from 45,000,000 francs to 90,000,000 (£3,600,000.) "The bank," said he, "should be to France what the Thames is to London." At the same time he lowered the rate of interest, where it was six per cent, to five; where it was five, to four. "I am going," said he, "to introduce a law which is not according to the ideas of your idealogues: it is to lower the rate of interest 100,000,000 francs, or £4,000,000, and for this we have the authority of his own words; but no mention of this contribution, any more than of the £3,400,000 paid annually by Spain and Portugal, or the £24,000,000 levied on the north of Germany, appears in these annual budgets. See Séance, 7th April 1806; PELET. What a picture of the result of the Revolution which had confiscated the whole property of the church! Army and ordnance, 336,000,000 francs yearly, or £13,500,000. Religion for 42,000,000 of people, 14,000,000 francs, or £556,000 annually! L. 1807. CHAP. to five per cent." Nor did the important subject of the management of the poor escape his attention; on the contrary, it awakened it in the highest degree. "The principle should be," said he, "that every mendicant should be arrested but to arrest him to put him in prison would be barbarous and absurd. You must make his arrest the means of converting the idle mendicant into an industrious citizen. I attach the greatest importance, and as great idea of glory, to the destruction of mendicity. Funds are not awanting; but everything appears to me to advance slowly. We must not pass over the earth without leaving some traces which may commend our memory to posterity. Use the utmost diligence; make everywhere the necessary in1 Pelet, 236. quiries: you have to aid your intelligent prefects, young Bign. vii. auditors, zealous engineers. The winter evenings are long; Thiers, viii. get ready portfolios which may give us something to occupy them, and enable us to bring that great undertaking, 102, 103. 119, 120, 124. 67. Despotic character of the extirpation of mendicity,' to maturity."1 * But the march of despotism is not for ever on flowers; nor is it blessings and splendid improvements only which the new law it confers upon its subjects. It soon appeared that the of high trea- brilliant public works and bewildering enumerations of son. great undertakings with which the minister of the interior dazzled the eyes of the people, were but the splendid covering with which Napoleon was gilding over the old and well-known chains of Roman servitude. On the 1st February 1810 the penal code made its appearance; and the few real patriots who had survived the storms of the Revolution perceived, with grief, that out of four hundred nal, $75 to and eighty crimes which it enumerated, no less than two 132 to 294. hundred and twenty were state offences. In this long and portentous enumeration were included almost all the offences embraced under the denomination of lese-majesty in the jurisprudence of the Lower Empire; among others, the non-revelation of crimes affecting the security of the 2 Code Pe 131; and § * Napoleon to the Minister of the Interior, November 2, 1807, and September 17, 1807.-BIGNON, vii. 93-108; THIERS, Consulat et l'Empire, viii. 126, 180. L 1807. state which have come to any one's knowledge; illegal CHAP. societies or assemblies of any kind; and seditious offences, committed either by writings published or unpublished, images or engravings. The punishment of such nonrevelation was declared to be the galleys, if the crime not disclosed was lese-majesty; imprisonment from two to five years, if seditionary. So special and minute were the crimes against the security of the state, and so slender the evidence required to establish them, that in troubled times, and in the hands of a despotic monarch, they furnished the most ample means of totally extinguishing the liberties of the people, and rendering every person amen-1 Code Peable to punishment who in the slightest degree obstructed 132-294. the measures of government.1 nal, Arts. 68. the French the Revolu Imprisonment has ever been the great instrument of despotic power; it is not by heart-rending punishments History of inflicted on its victims in presence of the people, but by prisons since the silent, unseen operation of confinement and seclusion, tion. that the spirit of freedom has in general been most effectually broken. Founded as the empire of Napoleon was on the suppression, or rather turning into another channel, of all the passions of the Revolution, and succeeding, as it did, to a period when great political parties had been interested in their preservation, it was not to be expected that this formidable engine was to remain powerless in his hands. It is a remarkable fact, highly characteristic of the ambitious spirit which inspired, and the absence of all regard for real freedom which distinguished, the whole changes of the Revolution, that not one of the successive parties which were elevated to power during its progress ever thought of the obvious expedient, essential to anything like freedom, of limiting by law the period to which imprisonment, at the instance of government, without bringing the accused to trial, could extend. Each was perfectly willing that arbitrary imprisonment should continue, provided only that they enjoyed the power of inflicting it. During the Reign of Terror, this VOL. VIII. N CHAP. iniquitous system was carried to a height unparalleled in L. any former age; and above two hundred thousand state 1807. captives at one time groaned in the prisons of France. Even under the comparatively regular and constitutional sway of the Directory, it was still largely acted upon. The first use of their power made by each faction, as they got possession of the executive, was to consign all the dangerous persons of the opposite parties to prison; and we have the authority of Napoleon for the assertion, that 1 Napoleon at one time the state prisoners under their rule amounted to sixty thousand, and when he took possession of power, they were still nine thousand.1 in Month. i. 178. 69. State pri sons under Napoleon. Under his own vigorous but humane administration, the amount was much lessened, but still it was considerable; and great numbers of persons constantly remained in jail, without any means either of procuring their liberation or forcing on their trial. Their number and unhappy condition had long attracted the attention of the Emperor; and at length a decree was passed regulating their treatment and places of confinement, and definMarch 3. ing the authorities by whom their detention was to be authorised. By this decree eight state prisons were established in France, viz.-Samur, Ham, If, Landskrown, Pierre-Chatel, Fenestrelles, Campiano, and Vincennes. The detention of prisoners in them required to be on a warrant of the private council of the Emperor, on a report of the minister of police, or of public justice. The former was invested with the power of putting any person he thought proper under the surveillance of the police. The captives in the state prisons retained the power of disposing of their effects, unless it was otherwise ordered; but they could not receive any money or movables except in the presence of the governor of the prison, and 1810. Moni- by his authority. All correspondence or intercourse with 3, 1810, and the rest of the world was rigorously forbidden; and any Montg. vii. 11, 12. jailer who should permit or connive at the correspondence of any prisoner with any person whatever, was to be 2 Decree, March 3, teur, March dismissed from office, and punished with six months' CHAP. confinement. L. 1807. 70. offences for sons were prisons. Under this rigorous system, great numbers of persons of the most elevated station and noblest character were Trivial confined in these state prisons during the whole remainder which perof the reign of Napoleon, not only from France itself, confined in but from Piedmont, Lombardy, the Roman States, Ger- these state many, and Switzerland. An order, signed by Napoleon, the minister of police, or the privy council, was a sufficient warrant, in all those countries, to occasion not only the arrest of any suspected person, but his detention in one of these gloomy fortresses, to all appearance for the whole remainder of his life. Nobles of the highest rank, priests of the most exalted station, citizens of the most irreproachable lives, were seized in every part of Europe subject to the French influence, paraded through the towns of the country to which they belonged, with shackles on their hands or chains round their necks, and then consigned to the gloomy oblivion of the state prisons, their to languish in captivity for the remainder of their lives. The offences for which this terrible penalty, worse than death itself, was inflicted, were of the most trivial kind; their being regarded as punishable at all savoured rather of the dark policy of Tiberius than the more lenient administration even of despotic countries in modern times. An unhappy bon-mot, a cutting jest at the expense of any of the imperial authorities, a few sarcastic lines, 1 Pacca's were sufficient to consign their unfortunate authors to 239. close confinement for the rest of their days.1 Mem. i. 237, Pacca's them. Cardinal Pacca, long a victim of the tyrannical govern- 71. ment of Napoleon, on account of the courageous stand Cardinal which he made against his spoliation of the Holy See, account of and who for six years was confined in the state prison of Fenestrelles among the solitude of the Alps, has given the following account of some of his fellow-captives:"On my arrival in the prison, one of the first persons I met was the arch-priest of Fontainelle, in the duchy of |