Its analogue in the antique world. - The Roman State from Diocletian to Constantine. - Causes and bearing of this analogy. - Survival of the Roman idea in Napoleon's mind. - The new Empire of the West.
Nevertheless, if we go back in time, beyond modern times, beyond the Middle Ages, as far as the antique world, we encounter during the Roman emperors Diocletian's and Constantine's era another monument whose architecture, equally regular, is developed on a still grander scale: back then we are in the natal atmosphere and stand on the natal soil of the classic spirit. - At this time, the human material, more reduced and better prepared than in France, existed similarly in the requisite condition. At this date, we likewise see at work the prearranging reasoning-faculty* which simplifies in order to deduce, * which leaves out historic customs and local diversities, * which considers the basic human being, * which treats individuals as units and the people as totals, * which forcibly applies its general outlines to all special lives, and * which glories in constituting, legislating, and administering by rule according to the measurements of square and compass.
At this date, in effect, the turn of mind, the talent, the ways of the Roman architect, his object, his resources and his means of execution, are already those of his French successor; the conditions around him in the Roman world are equivalent; behind him in Roman history the precedents, ancient and recent, are almost the same.
In the first place,[30] there is, since emperor Augustus, the absolute monarchy, and, since the Antonines, administrative centralization the result of which is that* all the old national and municipal communities are broken up or crushed out, * all collective existences chilled or extinguished, * local patriotism slowly worn away, * an increasing diminution of individual initiative,and, under the invasive interference, direction, and providence of the State, one hundred millions of men become more and more passive and separated from each other.[31]
And as a result, in full enjoyment of peace and internal prosperity under the appearances of union, force, and health, latent feebleness, and, as in France on the approach of 1789, a coming dissolution.
There is next, as after 1789 in France, the total collapse, not from below and among the people, but from above and through the army, a worse collapse than in France, prolonged for fifty years of anarchy, civil wars, local usurpations, ephemeral tyrannies, urban seditions, rural jacqueries, brigandage, famines, and invasions along the whole frontier, with such a ruin of agriculture and other useful activities, with such a diminution of public and private capital, with such a destruction of human lives that, in twenty years, the number of the population seems to have diminished one half.[32] There is, finally, as after 1799, in France, the re-establishment of order brought about more slowly, but by the same means, the army and a dictatorship, in the rude hands of three or four great military parvenus, Pannonians or Dalmatians, Bonapartes of Sirmium or of Scutari, they too, of a new race or of intact energy, adventurers and children of their own deeds, the last Diocletian, like Napoleon, a restorer and an innovator.
Around them, as around Napoleon, to aid them in their civil undertakings, is a crowd of expert administrators and eminent jurisconsults, all practitioners, statesmen, and businessmen, and yet men of culture, logicians, and philosophers. They were imbued with the double governmental and humanitarian view, which for three centuries Greek speculation and Roman practice had introduced into minds and imaginations. This view, at once leveling and authoritative, tending to exaggerate the attributes of the State and the supreme power of the prince,[33] was nevertheless inclined* to put natural right in the place of positive law,[34]
* to preferring equity and logic to antiquity and to custom, * to reinstate the dignity of man among the qualities of mankind, * to enhance the condition of the slave, of the provincial, of the debtor, of the bastard, of woman, of the child, and * to recover for the human community all its inferior members, foreign or degraded, which the ancient constitution of the family and of the city had excluded from it.