It was also during this journey that Bonaparte began to date his decrees from the places through which he passed.  He had hitherto left a great number of signatures in Paris, in order that he might be present, as it were, even during his absence, by the acts of his Government.  Hitherto public acts had been signed in the name of the Consuls of the Republic.  Instead of this formula, he substituted the name of the Government of the Republic.  By means of this variation, unimportant as it might appear, the Government was always in the place where the First Consul happened to be.  The two other Consuls were now mere nullities, even in appearance.  The decrees of the Government, which Cambaceres signed during the campaign of Marengo, were now issued from all the towns of France and Belgium which the First Consul visited during his six weeks’ journey.  Having thus centred the sole authority of the Republic in himself, the performers of the theatre of the Republic became, by a natural consequence, his; and it was quite natural that they should travel in his suite, to entertain the inhabitants of the towns in which he stopped by their performances.  But this was not all.  He encouraged the renewal of a host of ancient customs.  He sanctioned the revival of the festival of Joan of Arc at Orleans, and he divided the Institute into four classes, with the intention of recalling the recollection of the old academies, the names of which, however, he rejected, in spite of the wishes and intrigues of Suard and the Abby Morellet, who had gained over Lucien upon this point.

However, the First Consul did not give to the classes of the Institute the rank which they formerly possessed as academies.  He placed the class of sciences in the first rank, and the old French Academy in the second rank.  It must be acknowledged that, considering the state of literature and science at that period, the First Consul did not make a wrong estimate of their importance.

Although the literature of France could boast of many men of great talent, such as La Harpe, who died during the Consulate, Ducis, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chenier, and Lemercier, yet they could not be compared with Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, Fourcroy, Berthollet, and Cuvier, whose labours have so prodigiously extended the limits of human knowledge.  No one, therefore, could murmur at seeing the class of sciences in the Institute take precedence of its elder sister.  Besides, the First Consul was not sorry to show, by this arrangement, the slight estimation in which he held literary men.  When he spoke to me respecting them he called them mere manufacturers of phrases.  He could not pardon them for excelling him in a pursuit in which he had no claim to distinction.  I never knew a man more insensible than Bonaparte to the beauties of poetry or prose.  A certain degree of vagueness, which was combined with his energy of mind, led him to admire the dreams of Ossian, and his decided character found itself, as it were, represented in the elevated thoughts of Corneille.  Hence his almost exclusive predilection for these two authors With this exception, the finest works in our literature were in his opinion merely arrangements of sonorous words, void of sense, and calculated only for the ear.