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The rule of Napoleon was the nearest the French Revolution came to a period of consolidation. He adopted all three slogans of the Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. He found a political institution to fit only one: Fraternity. The institution that expressed this principle was the French nation, a new idea under the sun and one that endured through all subsequent hardships and was emulated in great or less degree by all other nations. Napoleon's mass conscript armies were raised under the novel notion of "the nation in arms" and fought under the principle of the sovereign state. In time of urgent danger to the state—and only at such times—Frenchmen have been able to unite around the institution of nationalism.
Liberty and Equality fared less well. The Code Napoleon attempted to institutionalize both. To this day, however, the Frenchman has no confidence in equality before the law. In the Anglo-American tradition, Liberty means freedom of the individual from governmental coercion, within an order of society that depends upon the individual's liberty as its main motive force. To the Frenchman (both Left and Right) who has not seriously worked on the institutions of freedom-within-order, Liberty still has the politically adolescent meaning of rebellion. Georges Bernanos put it well: "Liberty vaguely suggests the idea of disorder, a brawling mob, a scuffle with the police, the cost of food going up hour by hour at the grocer's and the butcher's . . ."
Frenchmen by the thousands have died fighting for more Liberty, or against too much of it. What the French have not learned to do is to live with Liberty—in security.
The Great Failure. Socially and economically, the French Revolution was a middle-class revolution. Napoleon and his successors (except Louis XVIII, Charles X and Leon Blum) recognized that. Here, too, the Revolution was frustrated by the strength of the old order. The French bourgeoisie became the dominant class, but never believed it. The haut bourgeois likes to think of himself as an aristocrat. The American middle class exuberantly recognized its own dominance and established its own values as the national values. The British middle class absorbed the aristocracy, including the royal family. But when a Bourbon, Louis Philippe, attempted to be a middle-class monarch in France, he was only ridiculous, and no one laughed harder at his umbrella and surgeon's kit than the French bourgeoisie.
In general, the French businessman down to the present has failed to follow the natural line of development of his class. He is committed to primitive practices of monopoly, high profits, speculation, low wages and—if he gets his wish—early retirement from business to more "aristocratic" pursuits. It would not be fair to the feudal system to say that the French businessman behaves like a rapacious feudal chief. He behaves like a bourgeois propaganda picture of a feudal chief.