State-formation and Resistance: The Army and Local Elites in Napoleonic France

Abstract

In Napoleonic France responsibility for local government in towns and villages was entrusted to the mayor and his municipal council, and it is on them — the ‘official’ elites within each locality — that discussion here will be concentrated. The mayor, as defined by the law of 17 February 1800 which laid down the new parameters of local government, was not expected to lie awake at night worrying about where his loyalties or his obligations lay. It was not the government’s intention that his commitment or his sentiments should be in any way divided. He was seen as a servant of the state, and as such was answerable not to the local population but to the prefect, to the Minister of the Interior and, in the final analysis, to the First Consul himself. Henceforth he was to be nominated from a pre-selected liste de confiance in each commune which included the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population.¹ By the same token his nomination could always be withdrawn, his mandate terminated, by order of Napoleon. This, of course, represented something of a transformation from the office that had been created by the Revolution in 1789 as part of its broad package of local government reforms. Then the mayor and his municipal council had been elected by local people, and the mayor could justifiably regard himself as an intermediary between the state and the local community — as an intermediary, indeed, whose first loyalty should be to the people who had elected him rather than to central government or to some distant concept of France.²