merit, that of durability.  But while the chief civic and material gains of the Revolution were thus perpetuated, the very spirit and life of that great movement were benumbed by the personality and action of Napoleon.  The burning enthusiasm for the Rights of Man was quenched, the passion for civic equality survived only as the gibbering ghost of what it had been in 1790, and the consolidation of revolutionary France was effected by a process nearly akin to petrifaction.

And yet this time of political and intellectual reaction in France was marked by the rise of the greatest of her modern institutions.  There is the chief paradox of that age.  While barren of literary activity and of truly civic developments, yet it was unequalled in the growth of institutions.  This is generally the characteristic of epochs when the human faculties, long congealed by untoward restraints, suddenly burst their barriers and run riot in a spring-tide of hope.  The time of disillusionment or despair which usually supervenes may, as a rule, be compared with the numbing torpor of winter, necessary doubtless in our human economy, but lacking the charm and vitality of the expansive phase.  Often, indeed, it is disgraced by the characteristics of a slavish populace, a mean selfishness, a mad frivolity, and fawning adulation on the ruler who dispenses panem et circenses.  Such has been the course of many a political reaction, from the time of degenerate Athens and imperial Rome down to the decay of Medicean Florence and the orgies of the restored Stuarts.

The fruitfulness of the time of monarchical reaction in France may be chiefly attributed to two causes, the one general, the other personal; the one connected with the French Revolution, the other with the exceptional gifts of Bonaparte.  In their efforts to create durable institutions the revolutionists had failed:  they had attempted too much:  they had overthrown the old order, had undertaken crusades against monarchical Europe, and striven to manufacture constitutions and remodel a deeply agitated society.  They did scarcely more than trace the outlines of the future social structure.  The edifice, which should have been reared by the Directory, was scarcely advanced at all, owing to the singular dullness of the new rulers of France.  But the genius was at hand.  He restored order, he rallied various classes to his side, he methodized local government, he restored finance and credit, he restored religious peace and yet secured the peasants in their tenure of the confiscated lands, he rewarded merit with social honours, and finally he solidified his polity by a comprehensive code of laws which made him the keystone of the now rounded arch of French life.