From “The Napoleon of the People”

“But the Emperor, who knew that he was the emperor not only of the soldiers but of all, remembered the bourgeois, and built wonderful monuments for them, to suit their own taste, in places that had been as bare before as the palm of your hand. Suppose you were coming from Spain, for example, and going through France to Berlin. You would pass under sculptured triumphal arches on which you’d see the common soldiers carved just as beautifully as the generals.
In two or three years, and without taxing you people at all, Napoleon filled his vaults with gold; created bridges, palaces, roads, schools, festivals, laws, harbors, ships; and spent millions and millions of money–so much, in fact, that if he’d taken the notion, they say, he might have paved all France with five-franc pieces.”