But while the chief civic and material gains of the Revolution were thus perpetuated, the very spirit and life of that great movement were benumbed by the personality and action of Napoleon.

The burning enthusiasm for the Rights of Man was quenched, the passion for civic equality survived only as the gibbering ghost of what it had been in 1790, and the consolidation of revolutionary France was effected by a process nearly akin to petrifaction.
And yet this time of political and intellectual reaction in France was marked by the rise of the greatest of her modern institutions.

There is the chief paradox of that age.

While barren of literary activity and of truly civic developments, yet it was unequalled in the growth of institutions.

This is generally the characteristic of epochs when the human faculties, long congealed by untoward restraints, suddenly burst their barriers and run riot in a spring-tide of hope.