Napoleon experienced most difficulty in his path to supreme power was in his relations with the legislature. The sixty-strong Senate was loyal, but the 300 Deputies of the Legislative Council were a burden, and especially troublesome was the 100-strong Tribunal members, which opposed both the Concordat and the later Code Napoleon. But Napoleon had many powerful weapons of counteroffensive. He hit back by increasing the size of the Senate to one hundred in 1803 and halving the Tribunal and Legislative Council members. He neutralized opposition by playing Ministers off against each other or against the Council of State, or diminishing their powers by subdividing and duplicating the Ministries. Later, he liked to appoint younger men bound to him by loyalty rather than the older generation. And, since one-fifth of Tribunes and Legislators were renewed annually, Napoleon used Cambaceres, the Second Consul, to get rid of opponents. Instead of drawing lots, which was the normal procedure, the Senate named the three hundred who were to keep their seats, and simply nominated twenty-four new members, even though the Constitution did not permit this. In the Legislative Body those who were removed were the friends of Sieyes and Madame Stael the so-called ideologues who had made the egregious mistake of thinking that their intellectual preeminence alone exempted them from the task of building a proper political power base.
Napoleon was ruthless towards individual opponents or potential enemies. He kept Sieyes under surveillance at his country estate.
When Barras,was in exile at Grosbois, appealed to Napoleon arrogantly which forced Napoleon send him police to make sure Barras moved his place of exile beyond French borders. When Lafayette opposed the amendment of his consular powers in 1802, Napoleon at once removed the name of Lafayette's son and all his in-laws from the Army promotion list. The enemy he loathed most was Madame de Stad, whose salon, much visited by Moreau and Bernadotte, became the focus for the political opposition. When Germaine de Stad incautiously published Delphine, which contained many obvious coded criticisms of the First Consul, Napoleon exiled her from Paris and forbade her to come within 120 miles of the capital. Not even members of his own family escaped his ruthlessness if they did not act as he wished.
In November 1800 he dismissed Lucien as Minister of the Interior, replaced him with Chaptal, and sent him as ambassador to Madrid. Lucien's crime was his tactlessness. On 8 April that year he had become engaged in an unseemly shouting match with Fouche at the Tuileries. Faced with Fouche's obvious sympathy for the Left, Napoleon's inclination was to conceal for the moment his animosity towards the Jacobins. But Lucien, by arguing for vacuum before his brother had consolidated his power, came close to ruining Napoleon's chess playing strategy.
By 1802 Napoleon had made peace with France's external enemies, suppressed the Vendee, came to an agreement with the Catholic Church, conciliated the emigres . However, the Senate, usually docile, was on this occasion whipped up by Fouche and the Jacobins and offered only the premature election of the First Consul for ten years. Cambaceres, placing an each-way bet, suggested a plebiscite to solve the problem. Napoleon insisted that the wording of the referendum should refer to a consulate for life rather than premature re-election for ten years. The Senate ratified the result on 2 August 1802. Naturally, there was some iregularity in the voting, but the result was probably a reasonable reflection of the First Consul's popularity.
The ratification by the Senate in August 1802 increased Napoleon's powers. He could now decide on peace treaties and alliances, designate the other consuls, nominate his own successor and had the right of reprieve. As an apparent quid pro quo the Senate was given the power to dissolve the Legislature or the Tribunate. But Napoleon could now bring the Senate to heel whenever he wished as he also had unlimited powers to swamp it with new members. He had other powers to constrain the Senate. He allowed senators to hold other public offices simultaneously - previously forbidden - and had the right to distribute senatoreries - endowments of land for life together with a house and an income of 20 - 25000 francs. As Napoleon confided to Joseph, his vision of the Senate was that 'it was destined to be a body of old and tired men, incapable of struggling against an energetic consul.
The provisions of the new Civil Code began to be promulgated in 1802 and the final clauses were published in 1804. Later there would follow a Commercial in 1807, Criminal in 1808 and Penal in 1810 Code. Napoleon's intentions in framing the Civil Code have been much disputed, but he declared that he genuinely wanted to create a civil society, with a middle range of institutions between the individual and the State; this was needed, he claimed, because the Revolution had introduced a spirit of excessive individualism. His famous declaration in the Council of State was that the Revolution had turned the French into so many grains of sand, so that it was now his task 'to throw upon the soil of France a few blocks of granite, in order to give a direction to the public spirit.'
The most important aspect of the Code, was its treatment of women. Until 1794 feminism and women's rights enjoyed halcyon days: in September 1792 the revolutionaries enacted a law allowing divorce by mutual consent, with the unsurprising result that for the rest of the 1790s one in three French marriages ended in divorce. The Directory had attempted to reverse the progressive legislation of 1791-94, but the death blow to feminist aspirations was dealt by the Code Napoleon. The First Consul's misogyny lay at the root of this. Always hostile to female emancipation, he declared: 'Women these days require restraint. They go where they like, do what they like. It is not French to give women the upper hand. They have too much of it already. The extent of anti-female sentiment in the Code Napoleon is worth stressing. The Code retained divorce by consent only if both sets of parents agreed also. Under Articles 133-34 the procedure was made more difficult. Marital offences were differentially defined under Articles 229-230: a man could sue for divorce on grounds of simple adultery; a woman only if the concubine was brought into the home. Articles 308-o9 stipulated that an adulterous wife could be imprisoned for a period of up to two years, being released only if her husband agreed to take her back; an adulterous husband was merely fined. Patriarchy was reinforced in a quite literal sense by Articles 376-77 which gave back to the father his right, on simple request, to have rebellious children imprisoned. And the notorious articles 213-17 restored the legal duty of wifely obedience; these clauses, compounded by articles 268 and 776, severely restricted a wife's right to handle money, unless she was a registered trader. Finally, a woman who murdered her husband could offer no legal defence, but a husband who murdered his wife could enter several pleas.
By 1804 Napoleon's grip on France was complete. His power rested on a social basis of support from the peasantry and the upper bourgeoisie. Normally a single social-economic class forms the basis of a regime's power, but the Napoleonic period was an era of transition, with the declining class too weak to dominate and the ascending class not yet quite strong enough. a trans-class coalition of peasantry and bourgeoisie based ultimately on the sale of national property. Napoleon was not a man of the Revolution, but it was the economic upheaval of the Revolution that made his autocracy possible.
The peasants or third class, those who owned no land and worked as journeyman labourers for others profited from the shortage of farm hands following conscription. There was a 20% rise of their wages between 1798-1801s, enabling some of them to buy small amounts of national property, such as individual fields, and thus become middle peasants, working their own land. By becoming conscious of their scarcity value, and hence power, as a result of conscription, these journeymen workers annoyed the upper peasants Napoleon was forced to head off excessive pay rises by forbidding servants and seasonal labourers and harvesters to form unions or associations.
Napoleon's honours system was a great success, and there was keen competition for the familiar white enamel crosses on strips of red ribbon. Seeing in the Legion the germ of a new nobility, the returned emigres hated and despised it, but they were not alone. The Legislature, packed with notables, absurdly opposed the Legion because it offended the principle of inequality; they saw no such offence in the glaring inequality of wealth and property of which they were the beneficiaries. It is a perennial peculiarity of societies to object to inequalities of race, sex, title, distinction and even intellect while remaining blithely untroubled about the most important form of inequality: the economic. A more telling criticism, which few made at the time, was that the honours system was overwhelmingly used to reward military achievement, usually to honour generals and others who had already done very well for themselves by looting and pillaging. An honours system, if it is to work well, should reward people who have not already received society's accolades and glittering prizes. Napoleon himself came to see the force of this argument and later regretted that he had not awarded the Legion of Honour to people like actors, who had no other form of official prestige.
by a movement of the mouth from left to right, especially when absorbed. Students of Napoleon have often speculated on the possible medical or psychological causes of his many quirks and oddities. An investigation in this area is not helped by the tense relationship that existed between Napoleon and his medical advisers. Although the Bonaparte family in general had a tendency to hypochondria, Napoleon himself took a Shavian attitude to medicine and regarded all doctors as quacks or impostors. He had long-running relationships with many physicians, but never cared for any of them. The surgeon Larrey was the one he respected most (although Dr Yvan, in attendance from 1796-r8r4, was the longest -serving) but he never liked him, for Larrey combined three qualities Napoleon despised: he was introverted, sycophantic and moneygrubbing. Larrey, like a later doctor, Antommarchi, always took the view that Napoleon's health problems stemmed from the liver. The most obvious aspect of Napoleon's medical profile is that he suffered from fits. The seizure he had while in bed with Mlle George was the most dramatic example, and he never really forgave her for making this widely known through her panic and thus bringing him into ridicule and contempt. Medical opinion is divided on whether Napoleon suffered from petit mal, a minor form of epilepsy, or whether, like Julius Caesar, he was a victim of the full-blown variety; still others have claimed that the fits were the result of a disorder of the pituitary gland or (bearing in mind also that he suffered from urinary disorders) were a symptom of venereal disease. Yet another theory is that the temporary loss of consciousness 
