The Cult of Napoleon

HALF a century ago if you had said that there could be no real greatness without goodness, you would have been uttering a commonplace. Times are changed, and encomiastic biographers of Cecil Rhodes tell us that Rhodes was not a good but a great man, with a pretty plain intimation that a man of spirit would rather be great than good. Of men who were great without being good Napoleon is the paragon. Transcendent in genius and energy, raised by Fortune to the most dazzling height, he has hardly been surpassed in disregard of moral ties or in the evil which he wrought his kind. It is not wonderful that the interest in him should now be revived, or that Napoleonic literature should blossom anew. We have had the very interesting work of Lord Rosebery. We now have a Life of Napoleon by Mr. Rose, also extremely interesting, and though perhaps rather Napoleonic in its leaning, generally in fact, and always in intention, fair.

The French Revolution, having devoured all its best children, put Bailly to death on a dunghill, guillotined the Girondists, guillotined Danton, whatever the author of the September massacres might be worth, and ended in a paroxysm of sanguinary madness, found itself, that paroxysm over, in the hands of a majority of the Directory, Barras, Rewbell, and La Réveillière, scoundrels all, and of the lowest kind, corrupt as well as murderous, while the private vices of Barras, the head of the gang, were unspeakably scandalous even in that corrupt age. These men were regicides, in constant fear of their heads from monarchical reaction. They were thus obliged to shrink from the moderate party, to persecute violently everything suspected of monarchical tendencies, and to lean for support on the Jacobins. It was with manifest reluctance that they defended public order against the anarchism of Babeuf. The blood of Louis XVI., put to death, not like Charles I., from a misguided sense of justice, but more from lust and vanity of regicide, was thus avenged. The laws against the émigrés and the priests were made more frantically cruel than ever, and formed a fatal bar against national reconciliation. The executive government and administration were as bad as possible ; life and property were unsafe; crime and disorder stalked unpunished ; communications were broken up ; mails were robbed; commerce and prosperity could not revive. The Chouans were still active. Government was bankrupt, and its finance was plunder. Only in the army, which, remote from the intrigues of the capital, was fighting the coalition, patriotism and Republican enthusiasm survived.

By the coup d’état of the 18 th of Fructidor the Triumvirate pretty well cleared public life of probity, independence, and genuine Republicanism, sending them to die in the murderous climate of Cayenne. The military instrument of this coup d’état was Augereau, called to Paris for that purpose. But behind Augereau was General Bonaparte. Thenceforth the chief of the army was virtually master of France. The confusion which follows a revolution naturally calls for a “ constable; ” but Cromwell had to “ plough ” his way to power. The victorious chief of the French army had only to step into the place which Fortune had made for him. It was wonderful that when there was nothing to oppose his bayonets, his nerve should have failed him in the critical moment, so that he had to be pulled through by his brother Lucien, who, being a sincere Republican, afterwards repented of what he had done.

Napoleon evidently had administrative and business faculties of the very highest order. His powers of work were unrivaled. His memory was capacious of any amount of details. He could pass rapidly from one subject to another, completely concentrating his attention upon each in turn. He had also an insight into men and a power of using them as his instruments, each in the place for which he was fitted, such as can hardly be realized by an ordinary intelligence. His power of keeping at once before his mind’s eye a multitude of agents and a multiplicity of different affairs was almost miraculous. As First Consul he unquestionably did great service. He restored order in France, thereby giving to commerce and industry a fresh life, which was soon, however, to be again thrown back by his ceaseless and reckless wars. Material improvements of every kind, such as roads, canals, and harbors, he promoted with beneficent energy, though in all that he did military objects were sure to predominate. How much he had to do with the Code which bears his name seems matter of conjecture. That he would follow its composition with intelligent interest, especially where law bordered on politics, cannot be doubted. But though supremely able, he was not inspired, and without inspiration a son of the camp could not be an authority on jurisprudence. The principles of the Code were those which European jurists had been previously evolving, with some help from social philosophers such as Voltaire, and which had been approved in the course of the Revolution ; so that it is with some justice that the Code is said to have been found in the Revolutionary bureau. Cambacérès and other professed jurists no doubt were the framers. But valuable as a code may be, respect for justice is more valuable still, and respect for justice, when it stood in his way, Napoleon showed none. Not under his rule could a community be imbued with reverence for the supremacy of law.

Attached to no party, though he had been originally patronized by the younger Robespierre, and was ready to accept help from any political quarter for his designs, Napoleon enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a neutral position, with large powers of arbitration. Under him an end was put to the frantic persecution of royalists and priests, and national unity was as far as possible restored. Royalism was congenial to him; so, as presently appeared, was aristocracy ; and his sagacity soon discerned that a Jacobin liked violence of whatever kind, and could presently be turned into a courtier. The only objects of his political enmity were rivals or critics of his own sway. So far his elevation to power was a relief and a blessing to France.

The monarchist and religious party Napoleon could propitiate honorably by the remission of sentences of banishment against emigrant nobles and priests, and by the repeal of the vile hostage law. The Jacobin party, which he seems most to have feared, and which suspected him of monarchism and of a design of restoring the Bourbons, was propitiated by the execution of the Duc d’Enghien, upon which the Jacobins joyfully exclaimed, “ He is one of us ! ” It is not unlikely that this was the chief motive for the crime. Napoleon must have known that to do an act which would awaken the most intense feelings of vengeance, both political and personal, was not the best way of securing his own life. His moral callousness prevented him from estimating the force of the recoil.

As a moulder of institutions, on the other hand, this man was merely a reactionary autocrat, inspired solely with the desire of concentrating, and at the same time mechanically perfecting, government in his own hands. To call him a child of the Revolution and a propagator of its principles is absurd. He restored in his own person hereditary monarchy with all its paraphernalia, with all its pomp and etiquette, and with adulation outvying that of the Court of Louis XIV. He allied himself by marriage with the most feudal and reactionary of all the hereditary monarchies of Europe. He restored aristocracy, the special object of Revolutionary antipathy, with entail. His institution of the Legion of Honor has been called democratic, but was really autocratic, as all institutions must be which make reputation dependent, not on the verdict of the people, but on the fiat of the Crown. He restored the State Church in its worst form, destroying its freedom, making himself a French Pope, and using the hierarchy and the priesthood as satellites of his rule. Though he did not venture frankly to abolish legislative assemblies, he reduced them to mere ciphers and vehicles of his absolute decrees. He killed public opinion and political thought by waging war against the freedom of the press, which in the end he completely extinguished. Public education he reduced to a mechanical system centralized in his own hands. He wished even to suppress philosophy and the study of humanity, leaving nothing but positive science, as he called it, which could breed no political or social aspirations. The most familiar agencies of his government were espionage and secret police. Nor is there the slightest ground for saying that all this was provisional, and intended, when order had been thoroughly restored, to give place to more liberal institutions. The tendency was all the other way, though in the Hundred Days Napoleon found it necessary to purchase popular support by concessions which, had he won Waterloo, would soon have been withdrawn. His marriage with an Austrian princess showed that he had completely broken with the Revolution, and had linked himself to the old régime of which Austria was the special type. This and his creation of a new hereditary aristocracy in France are the answer to the constant pretense that he was bestowing on the nations equality while he deprived them of freedom. Centralized despotism was from the first, and remained, his ideal ; he looked upon men as beings to be governed, not to be trained and guided to self-government. He would only have sneered at Pym’s saying that the best form of government was that which actuated and disposed every part and member of a state to the common good. His institutions, therefore, neither took, nor deserved to take, root. On hearing of the extraordinary, though momentary, success of Malet’s fantastic conspiracy, he exclaimed in astonishment, “ Did no one think of the institutions of the Empire ? ” The institutions of the Empire were in the tent of the Emperor in Russia, not in the French heart.

Two historical ideals apparently floated before Napoleon’s mind, both of them manifestly false and anachronistic: that of the Empire of the Cæsars, and that of the Empire of Charlemagne. In preferring the title of Emperor to that of King, he was looking to the realization of a plan of conquest which should turn the states of Europe into provinces of an Empire having its seat at Paris. This purpose he in fact avowed. The vision was preposterous ; but the attempt to realize it by the use of an army then far superior in quality to any other army in Europe cost Europe, and France especially, very dear.

Had this man been good, had he even not been very bad, had his heart been open to noble emotions or aspirations, though he could not exactly have played the part of Washington, the material with which he had to deal and the situation not being the same, he apparently might, with the power which Fortune had put into his hands, have founded liberal institutions, and thus have saved France from the century of revolutions and counter-revolutions through which she has since passed.

Peculiarly odious and noxious was Bonaparte’s treatment of the Church. He was himself absolutely devoid of religion. He said that if he had turned his thoughts to such subjects he would have been prevented from doing great things ; and if the story of his rebuking the atheistical savants on the voyage to Egypt, by pointing to the starry firmament, is true, his words must have been merely a jibe. He looked upon religion simply as a force to be brought, like other forces, into servitude to his policy and power. “ With my prefects, my gens d’armes, and my priests,” he said, “ I can do anything X like.” Utilizing everything, he determined to utilize God. He was, no doubt, right in saying that the French people craved for a religion. The simpler sort of them at all events did. But the right and obvious course was to allow them to follow their bent and to give them, not a state church, but a free church in a free state, such as Italy now has. This, however, would not have served his purpose of making the Church and religion political engines at his command.

His statecraft was successful. The Church, under the Concordat, groveled at his feet, sanctified his buccaneering ambition with her prayers and Te Deums, and taught youth The Catechism of the Empire.

“ Q. What are more especially our duties towards our Emperor Napoleon I. ? ”

“A. We owe him especially love, respect, obedience, fidelity, and military service ; we ought to pay the taxes ordained for the defense of the Empire and of his throne, and to offer up fervent prayers for his safety and the prosperity of his State.”

“ Q. Why are we bound to perform these duties towards our Emperor ? ”

“ A. Because God by loading our Emperor with gifts, both in peace and in war, has established him our sovereign and His own image upon the earth. In honoring and serving our Emperor thus, we are honoring and serving God himself.”

“ Q. Are there not particular reasons which should attach us more closely to our Emperor Napoleon I. ? ”

“A. Yes, for God hath raised him up to reëstablish the holy religion of our fathers, and to be its protector. He has restored and preserved public order by his great and active wisdom ; he defends the State by his powerful arm ; he has become the anointed of the Lord by the consecration which he received from the sovereign Pontiff. . . . Those who fail in their duties towards our Emperor will render themselves worthy of eternal damnation.” ¹

Napoleon apparently played with the thought of giving himself out as a divine person, like Alexander, who proclaimed himself the son of Jupiter Ammon. He repined, at least, at having been born in an age when such things were out of the question. A pretty near approach to his deification, however, was made, when on a canopy over a chair of state prepared for him was inscribed, “ I am that I am.”

In character Napoleon may be said to have been not so much wicked as devoid of moral sense. The first principles of morality seem to have had no place in his mind, and it is difficult to see how they could have found entrance there. He had really no country, and consequently no patriotism. Born a Corsican, and setting out with bitter hatred of France as the destroyer of Corsican liberties, he never really became a Frenchman. He never learned to write the language, hardly to pronounce it. France was the seat and fulcrum of his power, his throne, and the recruiting-ground of his armies. Whatever he might say in proclamations, in his moments of sincerity he spoke of the French contemptuously, as a people who were to be governed through their vanity, which it was necessary to feed with a perpetual course of victories. Domiciled in France, he had consorted with a set of adventurers as profligate as any that the world has seen. The only sort of public morality with which he had ever been impressed was the fidelity of the soldier to military duty. The incidents of his history show that there was no crime of any sort which he would not, when interest or passion moved him, commit without compunction. He murdered the Duc d’Enghien, committing a gross breach of the rights of nations at the same time. He murdered Toussaint-Louverture ; he murdered Hofer. Pichegru died “ very suddenly and very opportunely ” in his hands. He massacred in cold blood at least two thousand prisoners of war at Jaffa, because it was inconvenient to keep and feed them. This he afterwards admitted was “ rather strong.” The poisoning of the sick is less clearly brought home to him, nor would it have been so criminal if it had been; though he did or said something which called forth a noble protest from the head of the Medical Staff. He left a legacy to Cantillon for having attempted to assassinate Wellington. From fabrication and forgery he shrank no more than from murder. To further his designs against Venice he, as a favorable biographer states,² suborned a scoundrel to issue a fabricated proclamation, purporting to come from the Venetian authorities, and urging the people everywhere to rise and massacre the French. There is no doubt that he fabricated the famous dispatch which he pretended to have sent to Murat in Spain, exonerating himself in advance for all the miscarriage and disasters there. He habitually fabricated news. “ The notes which you have sent me, upon the powerlessness of Russia,” he says to Fouché, “ are written by a man of sense. . . . Publish them in a newspaper, as translated from an English paper; choose the name of one that is little known.” He fabricated a false account of the battle of Marengo, and put it, instead of the true account, into the archives. When he wanted an heir to his empire he sounded his physician on the subject of introducing a supposititious child. Evidence has now been produced that he embarked in an extensive scheme, to be carried out through infamous agencies, for forging the bank-notes of hostile powers in order to throw their finances into confusion. His own finance was unscrupulous plunder of every State that fell under his power. He was utterly regardless of truth ; the falsehood of his bulletins was proverbial, and not the smallest credence could be attached to anything which he said where his interest or reputation was concerned. Once only he felt, or affected to have felt, remorse. It was when he had brought on a needless engagement in which some of his men fell, to indulge with the spectacle of war ladies who had visited him in his camp.

Talleyrand advised the Emperor to retire from Spain, telling him that it would not be deemed a base act (lache). “ ' A base act! ’ replied Bonaparte ; ‘ what does that matter to me ? Understand that I should not fail to commit one, if it were useful to me. In reality there is nothing really noble or base in the world ; I have in my character all that can contribute to secure my power, and to deceive those who think they know me. Frankly, I am base, essentially base. I give you my word that I should feel no repugnance to commit what would be called by the world a dishonorable action ; my secret tendencies, which are, after all, those of nature, opposed to certain affectations of greatness with which I have to adorn myself, give me infinite resources with which to baffle every one. Therefore all I have to do now is to consider whether your advice agrees with my present policy, and to try and find out besides,’ he added (said Talleyrand), with a satanic smile, ‘ whether you have not some private interest in urging me to take this step.’ ”

Madame de Rémusat, to whom we owe this anecdote, was deeply disappointed in Napoleon, but she did not regard him with malevolence, nor was she likely to traduce him.

Napoleon’s marriage with Josephine having, at the Pope’s instance, been repeated with religious forms before their coronation, it was necessary to have recourse to a most wretched quibble for the purpose of invalidating the marriage and opening the way for a divorce. The Pope was at the time under duress, yet his conduct in failing to protest against this evasion of the laws of the Church, like his conduct in coming, immediately after the murder of the Duc d’Enghien, to crown the murderer, was hardly Hildebrandic or highly creditable to the pontificate of morals. Josephine, as we learn from her friend Madame de Rémusat, when her spouse first intimated his intention of getting rid of her, knowing that she could not be lawfully divorced, did him the honor to suspect that she would be quietly put out of the way.

Even writers favorable to Napoleon admit that his conduct in craftily ensnaring Venice and selling her to Austria must excite our loathing. Excite our loathing assuredly it does, and it is to be noted that the man who deliberately planned and artfully carried into effect this deed of perfidy was still young, and might have been expected, if he did not retain the trace of youthful enthusiasm, at least not to have become a callous villain. But the climax was the scene enacted at Bayonne, where this demigod and would-be Emperor of the West, like a common sharper, kidnapped the King of Spain and his heir, in order that he might rob them of their kingdom. Coleridge has noted the advantage which perfect wickedness enjoys in its absolute singleness of aim. Happily for mankind, it at the same time labors under a peculiar disadvantage in its inability to understand moral forces and make allowance for their resistance to its designs. Napoleon, when he trapanned the King of Spain and stole the kingdom, had evidently no conception of the moral forces which he was calling into play among the Spanish people, or of the resistance which they would offer. There are few more instructive episodes in history.

Napoleon’s perfidy, as he showed in his proceedings at the time of the Peace of Amiens, was boundless. No promises or treaties could bind him. Great Britain’s war with him was a war to the knife for her own independence and that of Europe. Fox, who had opposed the war against the French Revolution, could not help seeing this, and ultimately, after Pitt’s death, coalesced with Grenville to carry on the war.

Thiers, in his History, worships Napoleon as the god of war, which Thiers was always wanting, and at last got. In private, he said to Mr. Senior : —

“ Napoleon’s wars had so brutalized him that he never even took into account the human suffering through which his objects were to be obtained. If Prussia was troublesome, he determined to efface her from the map. ‘ It will cost me,’ he said, ' only two hundred thousand men.’ Berthier was one of the best of the marshals of that period. Forbin, my intimate friend, was his aide-de-camp, and told me many stories about him. He seemed to think men born in order to be killed. In one of the battles of the first Russian campaign a post had been furiously contested between us and the Russians. Berthier came up and saw the field covered with dead, each man lying in his place. ' Ah,’ he said, ' que ça est beau. Tout le monde est à sa place. Il faut faire voir cela à l’Empereur; cela lui fera plaisir.’ Ten days after the beginning of the campaign of 1812 Berthier called together Napoleon’s aides-de-camp. ' How is this,’ he said ; ' we have been ten days in the field et pas un de vous ne s’est fait tuer ? Est-ce ainsi qu’il faut servir l’Empereur ? ’ ” Napoleon himself said to Metternich that he heeded little the death of a million of men.

The field of Eylau strewn with fortyfive thousand dead and wounded, " all,” as Ney said, " to no purpose , ” the sight, in the campaign of Friedland, of a mile of ground covered with a sheet of six thousand naked bodies stripped by camp followers, and some of them still writhing and imploring relief; even the unspeakable horrors of the retreat from Moscow never touched the conqueror’s heart. His bulletin announcing that his army had perished in Russia showed not the slightest feeling, and wound up coolly with the words, “ The Emperor never was in better health.” Not only was he utterly unfeeling, he seems to have been actually possessed by the passionate love of war, and almost to have reveled in carnage. Berthier’s remark, in short, that the sight of the crowd of dead, each man lying in his place, would give pleasure to the Emperor, appears to have been no mere jest. Yet we are expected to feel very indignant about the martyrdom of this man at St. Helena ; the martyrdom consisting in the denial of a title of which his own Legislature had deprived him; bickerings with his keeper, caused mainly by his own peevishness; and a confinement which was alleviated by the enjoyment of every luxury, and was absolutely necessary to prevent him from enjoying, at the expense of his kind, such spectacles as fields of battle covered with carnage and agony. What were the most awful sufferings of the race compared with slight annoyances inflicted on one great man who had brought them on himself by making his confinement indispensable to the peace of the world ? Is there any limit to the servility of mankind ?

The revolutionary ardor which had fired the army when Napoleon took command presently expired, and gave place to mere service of its chief’s ambition, rewarded with a share of his glory, and more substantially by the plunder of conquered countries; while its generals, instead of militant Republicans, became marshals and princes, owing to their Emperor, with their titles, wealth showered upon them out of the fruits of his rapine. At the same time the quality of the army was being constantly lowered, and every vestige of patriotic spirit in it was being smothered by the increasing infusion of forced levies from the foreign countries under the Emperor’s sway.

Napoleon’s supreme military genius has been contested by nobody, except perhaps by the eccentric Colonel Mitchell, on whom Napier, the incarnation of professional militarism, falls with the fury of a devotee, the divinity of whose idol has been questioned. Yet in estimating military success the measure of the opposing forces must be taken, and Fortune must receive her due. Napoleon started on his Italian campaign with an army formed, not of social refuse such as was sent to Marlborough and Wellington, but of the best material called out by forced levies; ragged it is true and unpaid, but full of revolutionary fire and eager for the conquest of rich provinces. The brethren of these men, and probably some of the men themselves, had already conquered under other Republican generals : Pichegru, Jourdan, Marceau, and Moreau. Opposed were the armies of a coalition, Austrian and Piedmontese, whose diversity of territorial interest interfered with the unity of military action. The Austrian troops were devoid of national spirit. They surrendered in masses when they were beaten. They were commanded by generals of the old school, who moreover were trammeled by the interference of the Aulic Council. Alvinzi might have held his own pretty well if the Aulic Council had let him alone. Suppose Napoleon had been pitted at the outset against Wellington or Suvaroff, with the troops which they commanded : he would have been superior, no doubt, to either of them ; but would he have had so easy a game, or have so readily established his military prestige ? At Marengo he was beaten, till Desaix came up and old Melas was compelled by his infirmity to leave the field. It was necessary afterwards to cook the record of the battle in order to show that it had been won by Napoleon himself.

The political element is an important factor in war power. Marlborough was trammeled by political party at home, which robbed him of his final triumph, and by the nervous interference of the Dutch. Wellington had his difficulties at home as well as difficulties of a most trying kind with the provisional governments of Spain and Portugal. Patronage deprived him of free choice of officers. He said he had not power to make a sergeant. Napoleon had from the first practically a free hand, the finance of the Directory depending on his Italian plunder, and as Emperor he disposed at will of all the forces of the Empire, promoted the men of his choice, and had to answer for no miscarriage. Perfect unity was thus given to his operations. This was what Wellington meant when he said that the presence of Napoleon in person would be worth forty thousand men.

Napoleon’s sanguine temperament, sustained by his marvelous physique, led him to dare immense risks. So long as the resistance was senile and spiritless, the results of his ventures were immense and splendid ; an Austerlitz or a Jena. But when the spirit of the nations had been roused by insufferable oppression and insult, the results were no longer the same. Eylau was a drawn battle; almost so was Borodino. The campaign of Aspern and Wagram against Austria, some national spirit even among the Austrians having been awakened and their army having been reformed by the Archduke Charles, was very different from that of Austerlitz. The Spaniards, though easily beaten in the field, were never subdued. Then came the general uprising of the trampled nations, and thereupon the end.

Was there ever anything more insane than the Egyptian expedition ? Europe had been alarmed and roused to arms by the raids made on Switzerland and Rome to provide the bankrupt exchequer of France with the means of fitting out the expedition. War was evidently impending. In face of this, Bonaparte carried away the best army of France and her best officers to be locked up in Egypt. The French admiral Brueys said that if the expedition had fallen in with the enemy on the voyage, ten British ships would have sufficed for its destruction. The British navy had shown its decisive superiority on the first of June, at Cape St. Vincent and at Camperdown. The result was, as it was sure to be, the annihilation of the French fleet and the capitulation, after some easy but useless triumphs over Mameluke or Turkish mobs, of what remained of the French army, left by its commander to its fate. So palpable was the error, that it has even been ascribed to a perfidious intention on the part of Bonaparte to denude the French government of its forces and expose it to defeat, in order that he might more easily become its master. Of this Napoleon may be readily acquitted. Wild dreams of dominion in the East combined with insane hatred of the power which then reigned there were the probable sources of the aberration.

Another instance of supreme folly surely was the projected invasion of England, inspired by the same insane hatred as well as by devouring lust of dominion. If the flat-bottomed flotilla could have effected the passage, an idea which naval authorities derided, the army, landed in England, would at once have been cut off by Nelson’s fleet, and even if it had won a battle, its ultimate fate, in a desperately difficult country, and in face of such national resistance as it would have encountered, could hardly have been doubtful. In fact, it is rather to be deplored that Napoleon did not land in England, where his unmeasured ambition would almost certainly have found its grave. So wild was the scheme, that some have questioned whether it was really intended to be carried into effect, or was merely a pretext for raising an immense force to be employed in more hopeful ways. Such doubts are set at rest by the existence of Napoleon’s medal representing Hercules crushing Antæus, with the inscription, “ Descente en Angleterre — Frappée à Londres.”

Moreover, a part of the enterprise actually took effect, and with signal results. By the Emperor’s cruel and unjust taunts the brave and devoted Villeneuve was goaded, against his own opinion and that of the other naval authorities, into giving battle to Nelson, the certain issue of which was Trafalgar. “ I could not be everywhere,” was Napoleon’s ejaculation on hearing of the destruction of his fleet. But, in truth, he had been at Trafalgar, driving his admirals and fleet by his blind will to assured ruin. He had framed for the enterprise an arbitrary plan, assuming complaisant delays on the part of Nelson. He might surely have known that on the part of Nelson there would be no complaisant delay.

But of all Napoleon’s insanities, for they were nothing less, the climax was the invasion of Russia. What motive can he have had for this, saving delirious ambition, and what was also undoubtedly strong in him, sheer love of the bloody game of war ? He evidently reckoned on encountering the Russian army of defense nearer the frontier, winning an Austerlitz or a Jena, dictating terms as he had dictated them to Austria or Prussia, and returning to Paris in triumph. He was deceived in the character of his enemy. He tried in vain to force a battle at Smolensk. The Russians, instead of fighting him near the frontier, retreated before him, gave up their country to his ravages, compelled him to make a march in which he lost a great part of his enormous host, and after handling him very severely at Borodino, evacuated Moscow, leaving it in flames. They then refused to treat with him. He had consequently to decamp without having provided for retreat or subsistence. He lost almost his entire army in the wintry wastes, and but for the extraordinary conduct of Kutusoff in letting him and his guard pass unopposed, would himself have fallen into the hands of the enemy. This error was on a far more imposing scale and more tragical than any blunder of Beaulieu or of Mack. But was it less of a blunder, or less of a detraction from the reputation of the man of action, or even from that of the commander? It is frightful to think what power a despot has for evil. There was probably not a soul on either side, saving Napoleon himself, who desired the Russian expedition.

At Leipzig Napoleon allowed himself to be held at bay by a greatly superior force, while he neglected the obvious precaution of throwing bridges over the Elster for his retreat, causing thereby a hideous catastrophe. His conduct in this case was severely condemned by Wellington, a perfectly fair critic of opponents. “ If Bonaparte,” wrote Wellington, “ had not placed himself in a position that every other officer would have avoided, and remained in it longer than was consistent with any ideas of prudence, he would have retired in such a state that the allies could not have ventured to approach the Rhine.”

Soldiers say that no two battles ever were worse fought than Borodino and Waterloo. Hannibal found his Waterloo at Zama; but he had there only a remnant of old soldiers with a large body of raw levies to oppose to the tried legions of Scipio. Napoleon, with seventy-four thousand French soldiers, most of them tried, since he had got back his garrisons from Germany, encountered an army of which only twenty-four thousand were British, the rest being of different nationalities and in part untrustworthy. He had also a very great superiority in artillery. True, Blücher came up ; but that was the game ; and Wellington’s acceptance of battle under such conditions was notice that Blücher was at hand. On the morning of Waterloo Napoleon spoke with utter contempt of the English general and his troops ; as did the French commander on the morning of Agincourt. His army was not only beaten but destroyed. He seems himself to have fled from the field without making any attempt to organize and direct the retreat.

It has been truly remarked, as a qualification of Napoleon’s extraordinary success in war, that he had often to deal with coalitions whose action was more or less wanting in the unity of a single will. In the Campaign of Miracles he had to deal with a very cumbrous and disjointed coalition, one member of which, Austria, was half-hearted, while its armies were commanded by Schwarzenberg, who was irresolute as well as secondrate. It is doubtful, even, whether the coalition would have held together, much more whether it would have pressed on to the goal, had not Castlereagh’s force of character prevailed.

Cæsar’s career was one of unbroken success, with the inconsiderable exception of his repulse at Dyrrhachium, where he encountered a first-rate general in Pompey. Marlborough serenely commanded victory to the end, and had not party at home betrayed him, he would probably, after Bouchain, have brought the war to a triumphant close at Paris. Wellington failed only in his attempt to take Burgos without a siege train. Napoleon’s military career closed in utter and redoubled disaster.

Napoleon on his way to Elba had to disguise himself as a courier to escape being torn to pieces by the people. Such was the verdict of France herself on the effects of his rule so far as the happiness of Frenchmen was concerned. In that infuriated crowd there would be few whose young sons or relatives had not been torn from them as conscripts to feed the cravings of a perfectly selfish and insane ambition. Drafts indorsed by a servile Senate, and forestalling the regular conscription, had, during the last years, been sending to the field of slaughter immense levies of mere boys. The stature of the nation had been stunted, and its physique had been impaired by the drain. The wars were represented as waged for the purpose of feeding the appetite of the French for glory, and thereby securing their allegiance to Napoleon’s throne. But the best evidence tends to show that the people had long ceased to take an interest in the distant conquests of the armies, or to sigh for anything but peace. To peace, though repeatedly tendered on terms more than satisfactory to the nation, the despot obstinately refused to sacrifice the dictates of his personal pride. To him it was nothing that France was being desolated by invasion. Like a desperate gambler throwing his last piece of money on the board, he staked his last conscript in the game of war. Then, instead of facing defeat with dignity, and doing what he could in extremity to save the interests of the people who had done and suffered so much for him, he attempted suicide, from which he was saved, once more to break his plighted faith and deluge the world with blood in the interest of his chimerical ambition.

At the point at which France put herself into Napoleon’s hands, had he been honest and patriotic, Republican institutions, so far as we can see, might have been founded. The fever fit was over, and everybody was sighing for stability and peace. Indeed, there was not much fault to be found with the framework of the existing Constitution, consisting of an executive Directory and two legislative chambers. The fruit of Napoleon’s betrayal of his trust was a century of revolutions and convulsions, some of them bloody, all of them disastrous to political character and the foundations of the State. In the series was included a revival, under Napoleon’s reputed nephew, of his despotism, with all its iniquity and corruption, with another outbreak of militarism and another cataclysm of military disaster. Nor is it possible at once to work off all the noxious elements which have been generated in the process, and from the disturbing influence of which the French Republic is even now not secure.

There is a vague idea that the French armies by their occupation of conquered countries inoculated the nations with valuable ideas in compensation for all that they carried away or consumed upon the spot. When the French armies, their revolutionary enthusiasm having expired, had become hosts of disciplined marauders, the sole idea which they universally created among the nations was burning hatred of their insolence, rapacity, and lust. The immediate consequences of the struggle for freedom from French domination were monarchical ascendency and the Holy Alliance; the nations having been fain to rally round their hereditary governments in their struggle for liberation from the foreign oppressor. If afterwards there was a general outburst of European liberalism, no credit was due for it to Napoleon or his system. It was the resurrection of that spirit of progress which had been killed for the time by the extravagances and enormities of the French Revolution, though combined no doubt with the impulses of nationality and liberty generated in the effort to cast off the French yoke. Napoleon III. had studied the policy of Napoleon I., and aped it in everything to the utmost of his power. What he did with liberalism was to clap its leaders into prison-vans, shoot it down in the street, or deport it to Cayenne.

The world at large owes to Napoleon a vast recrudescence of militarism, with all the destructive barbarism attendant thereon; Cæsarism, with its glittering autocracy and its offer of a dead-level equality beneath the Cæsar as compensation for the loss of freedom ; above all, a most dazzling example of immoral success and renown. One lasting benefit, however, he did, though involuntarily, confer on Europe. By the conquests of the Revolutionary armies the territories of France had been so far extended as to endanger the balance of power and threaten Europe permanently with French domination. Napoleon I. in the end lost these extensions with his own acquisitions, and brought French power again within safe bounds. Napoleon III. improved upon the work of his predecessor and prototype in this respect by resigning, after his defeat in the war with Germany, the territorial plunder of Louis XIV.

Goldwin Smith.