Two courses were therefore open to the new power: first, to extort an acquiescence, however distasteful, by consolidating France as the nation and the homogeneous people which the Revolution had made it, by increasing her prosperity, by fostering her genius, by showing an example to the world of what the people of a peaceful, enlightened, industrious state could be in contrast to the case-hardened, unreceptive, and sullen populations who still remained passive under dynastic rule; or, second, to restore the expansive anti-national character of the Revolution, and, using the magnificent military system created in that epoch as a destroying power, to menace the dynasties in their very existence, and thus make them first respectful neutrals and then subservient tools both in their own reconstruction and in the liberation of their subjects. These seemed, in this emergency, the two alternatives at the First Consul's command. Choosing neither permanently, but one or the other at will, as each rising question made it expedient, the result was an interference which brought first this and then that policy into prominence, made both partly successful, but neither entirely so, and ended in the ruin of the schemer.
The responsibility was not his own: he so behaved under the compulsion of the national spirit. The revolutionary tyrannies, one after the other, had adopted the foreign policies of Richelieu and Louis XIV. Nothing could be more definite, nothing more ingrained as the fiber of French existence. France itself must have the boundaries of ancient Gaul, and the Mediterranean must be a French lake. To this end the dynasties must be indemnified: Spain might have Portugal, Prussia the hegemony of North Germany, Austria might expand in Bavaria and Italy. For a bulwark of defence the land frontier must be girt with little buffer states, semi-autonomous but dependent: Batavia, Helvetia, Cisalpina. The still more important sea frontier must be fortified by the exclusion of Great Britain absolutely from the Continent; Italy was to be rearranged, with Piedmont and Tuscany occupied and subdued, the States of the Church distributed among the secular powers of which Roman and Neapolitan republics were to be the chief. It was a stupendous task, but ideals have no physical limits. Glory is the circumambient ether of the French spirit. Repose, order, material prosperity, domestic life, religion--these must be the preëstablished basis of existence, but life is triumph, splendor, power. It was not, therefore, as inheritor and incarnation of the Revolution, but as the embodiment of France and her immemorial policies, that Bonaparte became a student of foreign affairs. With the prospect of peace must be envisaged the prospect of war: war for the frontiers, the heritage of the Gauls; for propagating French thought and influence; for the invasion of irreconcilable lands. The voluminous and careful studies of foreign affairs which he caused to be made by able councilors still exist to show his painstaking zeal in the perpetuation of time-honored and sacred policies, which no man aspiring to capture the heart of the French dared neglect or permit to lapse into oblivion.