The rigid censorship of the press established by the First Consul at the beginning of his supremacy worked well for him. Out of a total of seventy-three corrupt and quarrelsome journals published under the Directory, only thirteen political newspapers had been left in existence. These quickly became the most subservient mouthpieces of the executive, iterating the sentiments which the public was to learn, giving such news as they were allowed to give, and edited most skilfully both to entertain and instruct their readers in all matters foreign to politics. The nation rejoiced in the calm (p.~235) produced by contemplating indifferent things. "Why did not Tacitus explain how the Roman people put up with the wicked emperors who ruled them?" This was a stock question of Napoleon's, his implication being that there must have been a correspondence between the social state of Rome and the character of her rulers which the historian dared not openly explain. The parallel in the case of the French was manifest. They had reveled in Jacobinism until suddenly the thing and the name alike became intolerable; they had then swung to the opposite vicious extreme of an indifference which courted a paternal hand in the government. No act, however arbitrary or violent, could disturb a people so accustomed to revolutionary shifts. When, three years later, the shameful edict was issued which forbade the printing or sale of books or plays that had not been authorized by a committee of revision, there was scarcely a protest anywhere to be heard. But from the beginning there were, nevertheless, emphatic protests of more or less importance against the changes which were transforming the vestiges of the republic into shadowy indications of a coming monarchy. There was a single voice, that of Barnabé, lifted up at the very first from the bench to declare that Brumaire was illegal; and many foolish persons indulged to such an extent in loud seditious talk that a charge of conspiracy was with some show of reason brought against Ceracchi and Arena, two Corsicans, who were particularly violent in denouncing their compatriot. The superserviceable police pretended early in the year to discover details, but the alleged complot was a pure figment. The army, in particular that portion which had fought under Moreau, still cherished much of the republican tradition. The soldiers of the Rhine had shown an angry contempt for the Concordat, and their friends sympathized with them in the instinctive feeling that a courtly religious hierarchy, when legally restored, would lean toward a restoration of monarchy.