SOLDIER, STATESMAN, DESPOT
Questionings -- The Industrious Burgher -- The Industrious
Sovereign -- End of the Marvelous -- Public Virtue and Private
Weakness -- The Man and The Age -- Latin and German -- First
Struggles -- Usurpation of Power -- Political Theories -- The
Napoleonic System -- Its Foundation -- Stimulus to Despotism --
The Surrender of France -- The Master Soldier.
[Sidenote: Review]
The tomb of Erasmus in Basel is marked by a stone slab on which are an
epitaph, an effigy, and then the pathetic word "Terminus." Should
these fateful syllables be written over the mortal remains of Napoleon
Bonaparte? No. Beyond his death there was more, far more than the work
he wrought during his life. Men ever love a seeming mystery, and while
they do, a favorite theme of speculation will be the career of the
great Corsican in its historical aspect. Before our long study can be
brought to a close, two questions must be considered, or rather two
sides of one question must be viewed. Why did he rise, and what did he
accomplish? The answers will be as various as the investigators who
give them. But the man as seen in the preceding pages certainly
displays these recognizable characteristics: he was a man of the
people, he had a transcendent military genius, he was indefatigable,
and he had unsurpassed energy.
No mere man, even the most remarkable, can climb without supports of
some kind, however unstable they may be. Napoleon Bonaparte did not
soar, he rose on the ladder of power by stages easily traceable: first
by the protection of the Robespierres; then by the necessities and
velleities of Barras and the Directory; afterward by the encouragement
of all France, which was sick of the inefficient Directory; and still
later by the army, which adored a leader who frankly repaid devotion
in the hard cash of booty, and bravery in the splendid rewards of that
glory which was a national passion. With such opportunities, Bonaparte
unfolded what was certainly his supereminent quality--the quality
which endeared him to the French masses as did no other, the quality
which above all others distinguished him from the hated tyrants under
whom they had so long suffered, the quality which even the meanest
intellect could mark as distinctively middle-class, in opposition to
its negation in the upper class--the quality, namely, of untiring
industry; laborious, self-initiated, self-guided, self-improving
industry. This burgher quality Napoleon possessed as no burgher ever
did. It was no exaggeration, but the simple truth, when he said to
Roederer: "I am always working. I think much. If I appear always ready
to meet every emergency, to confront every problem, it is because,
before undertaking any enterprise, I have long considered it, and have
thus foreseen what could possibly occur. It is no genius which
suddenly and secretly reveals to me what I have to say or do in some
circumstance unforeseen by others: it is my own meditation and
reflection. I am always working--when dining, when at the theater; I
waken at night in order to work." How profoundly this was impressed
upon those intimately associated with Napoleon can be traced in their
memoirs on many a page. It was Soult who said, most sapiently: "What
we call an inspiration is nothing but a calculation made with
rapidity."
Generally there is no mystery in the power of domination: he rules
who is indispensable. The Jacobins needed a man, they found him in the
unscrupulous Bonaparte; the Directory needed a man, they found him in
the expert artillerist; France needed a man, she found him in the
conqueror of Italy. And having risen, he did not intermit his industry
for a moment. Rehearsing his coronation by means of puppets, or
studying with painful care the complicated accounts of his fiscal
officers, or absorbing himself in whatever else it might be, he was
always the man who knew more about everything than any one else.
Throughout his reign he was the fountainhead of every governmental
activity: the council of state sharpened not their own, but his
thoughts; his secretaries were his pocket note-book; his ministers
were the executors of his personal designs; pensions and presents were
given by him to his friends, and not to those who served the state as
they themselves thought best; every French community received his
personal attention, and every Frenchman who came to his general
receptions was treated with rude jocularity. In all this he was
perfectly natural. At times, however, he felt compelled to
attitudinize; perhaps, in the theatrical poses which he assumed for
self-protection or for the sake of representing a personified,
unapproachable imperial majesty, he copied Talma, with whom he
cultivated a sort of intimacy. Possibly, too, his violent sallies were
considered dramatic by himself. "Otherwise," he once said, "they would
have slapped me on the shoulder every day." "It is sad," remarked
Roederer, apropos of a certain event. "Yes, like greatness," was
Napoleon's rejoinder.
Napoleon's preeminence lasted just as long as this effective personal
supremacy continued. When his faculties refused to perform their
continuous, unceasing task, he began to decline; when the material of
his calculations transcended all human power, even his own, the
descent grew swifter; and the crash came when his abilities worked
either intermittently or not at all. Ruin was the consequence of
feebleness; the imagination of the world had clothed him with demoniac
qualities, but it ceased so to do just in proportion as his
superiority to others in plan and execution began to diminish. "There
is no empire not founded on the marvelous, and here the marvelous is
the truth." These were the words of Talleyrand, addressed to the First
Consul on June twenty-first, 1800, just after the news of Marengo had
reached Paris. The marvel of the absolute monarchy was the divine
right of kings: when men ceased to hold the doctrine, the days of
absolutism were numbered. The marvel of Napoleon was his unquestioned
human supremacy: when that declined his empire fell.
In the truest sense of that word so dear to modern times, Napoleon was
a self-made man. By his extraordinary energy he made a deficient
education do double duty; and those of his natural gifts which in a
sluggish man would have been mediocre, he paraded so often, and in
such swift succession, that they appeared miraculous. This fiery
energy, it cannot too often be repeated, was the man's most
distinctive characteristic; when it failed he was undone. Was
consistency, as generally understood, to be expected in this
personage; is it, indeed, found in most great men? Nowhere does the
theory of evolution writhe to sustain itself more than in psychology;
nowhere does it discover a greater complexity--a complexity which
makes doubtful its sufficiency. Admitting that Napoleon was selfish;
that he was lustful; that once, at least, he was criminal; that at
various times--yes, even frequently--he was unpopular, and dared not
in extremity call for a national uprising to sustain his cause; that
he had pitiful limitations in dealing with religion, politics, and
finance; supposing him to have displayed on occasion the qualities of
a resurrected medieval free-lance, or of the Borgias, or of other
historical monsters; confessing that he was launched upon the fiery
lake of revolution by the madness of extreme Jacobinism; sustaining
the awful indictment in each detail--was there no reverse to the
medal, no light to the shadow, no general result except negations? Was
the work of Alexander the Great worthless because of his debaucheries?
Was Catharine II of Russia a mere damned soul because of her
harlotries? Did Talleyrand's duplicity and meanness render less
valuable or permanent the work he did in thwarting the coalition at
Vienna? The answer of history is plain: what the great of the earth
have wrought for others or against them is to be recorded and judged
with impartiality; how they sinned against themselves is to be told as
an awful warning, and then to be left for the decision of the Great
Tribunal. Modern philosophy requires such complicated and yet such
minute knowledge in every department of science that the specialist
has supplanted the general scholar and the system-maker; the man who
aspires to create a plan displaying the unity of either the objective
or the subjective world, or any harmony of one with the other, is
generally regarded as either an antiquated imbecile or a charlatan.
Yet in the examination of historical characters a symmetrical
consistency capable of being grasped by the meanest intellect is
imperiously demanded by all readers and critics. This is natural, but
not altogether reasonable: symmetry cannot be found in the commonest
human being on our globe, much less in those who rise supereminent.
The greater the man, the more impossible to connect in a mathematical
diagram the different phases of his conduct. The search for mediocre
consistency in the character of Napoleon is like the Cynic
philosopher's quest for a man.
This personage strove, and with considerable success, to think and act
for an entire nation--ay, more, for western Europe. In order to render
this conceivable, he first took command of his own body--sleeping at
will, and never more than six hours; eating when and what he would,
but always with extreme moderation; waking from profound slumber and
rousing his mind instantaneously to the highest pitch, so that he then
composed as incisively as in the midst of active ratiocination. He was
able to train his secretaries and servants into instruments destitute
of personal volition--even his great generals, who were taught to act
for themselves within certain limits, never transcended the fixed
boundary, and grew inefficient when deprived of his impulse. He never
failed to reward merit or to gratify ambition for the sake of securing
an able lieutenant, and nascent devotion he quickened into passion by
the display of suitable familiarity. A thoughtful, self-contained,
self-sufficient worker, he was sometimes a trifle uneasy in social
intercourse, perhaps always so beneath his mask of good breeding, when
he wore one; but he played his various roles in public with consummate
skill, except that he made nervous movements with his eyes, hands, and
ears. His little tricks of rolling his right shoulder, tugging at his
cuffs, and the like; his inability to write, and his generally clumsy
movements when irritated, were due to deficient training in early
childhood. Forbidding in his intercourse with ambitious women and
other self-seekers, he was considerate with the suffering, and found
it difficult, if not impossible, to refuse the petitions of the needy.
Loving rough and ready ways in those busied about his person,--as, for
instance, when his valet rubbed him down in the morning with a coarse
towel,--he was yet so sensitive that he had to have his hats worn by
others before he could set them on his own head. It is useless to seek
even homely physical consistency in a man thus constituted.
It is equally useless to ask whether Napoleon could have been as great
a man in another epoch as he was in his own. In any epoch of warfare
he would have been great; it is likely that in any epoch of peace he
would have reached eminence as a legislator and administrator. The
real historical question is this: How did he, being what he was, and
his age, being what it was, interact one upon the other; and what was
the resultant? There was as little consistency in his age as in
himself; the sinuosities of each fitted strangely into those of the
other, and the result was a period of twenty years on which common
consent fixes the name of the Napoleonic age. Does his personality
throw any light on the antecedent period--does his career influence
the succeeding years?
The age of the Revolution has such intimate connection with the
movements of French society that it is very generally called in other
countries the French Revolution. But while the movement developed
itself more easily and took more radical forms in France than
elsewhere, it was due to the condition of civilization the world
around. France has been in a peculiar sense the teacher of Europe; for
in language, literature, laws, and institutions she is the heir of
Rome. In spite of Roman Catholicism, or perhaps in consequence of the
Roman hierarchy, her inheritance has been pagan rather than Christian;
her ethics have been Hellenic, her literature Augustan, her laws
imperial, her temperament a combination of the Stoic and Epicurean
which is essentially Latin, her language elegant, elliptical, and
precise like that of Livy or Tacitus. The Teuton in general, the
Anglo-Saxon in particular, may give his days and nights to classical
studies: he is never so imbued with their spirit as the Gaul. "It is
with his Bible in one pocket and his Shakspere in another," said an
eminent Frenchman not long since, "that the Anglo-Saxon goes forth to
reduce the world in the interests of his commerce, his civilization,
and his religion. The most enlightened has neither the cold
worldliness of Horace nor the calculating zeal of Caesar, but he has
the persistency of faith in himself and his nation which, whatever may
be his personal belief, is a constituent element in his blood, or,
better still, the controlling member of that complex organism to which
he belongs." I venture to believe, on the other hand, that the
Frenchman espouses his cause from an unselfish impulse begotten of
pure reason, an ethereal ichor percolating through society by channels
of sympathy, which diminishes the historic pressure for continuous
national consistency and natural unity, but emphasizes the great
uplifting movements of society. The French armies of the Revolution
went forth to scour Europe for its deliverance from feudalism,
absolutism, and ecclesiasticism, because the French people had renewed
their youthful and pristine vigor in their enthusiasm for pure
principle without regard to experience or expediency. Napoleon
Bonaparte had all their doctrine, with something more: a consuming
ardor unconscious of any physical limitations to the nervous strength
of himself or others, and a readiness for any fate which would
transmute his dull, unsuccessful, commonplace existence into
excitement. When he found his opportunity to heap Pelion upon Ossa, to
supplement himself by the splendors of French devotion, he did indeed
come near to transcending even the Olympians and storming the seat of
Kronos.
It was a long, discouraging, heartbreaking struggle by which he gained
his first vantage-ground. This was no exceptional experience; for
every adventurer knows that it is more troublesome to make the start
than to continue the advance. It is harder to save the first small
capital than to conduct a prosperous business. It is more difficult,
apparently, in human life to overcome the inertia of immobility than
that of motion; at least psychological laws seem in this respect to
contravene those of physics. It is not true that the armies of the
Republic were those of the Bourbons: the transition may have been
gradual, but it was radical. It is also untrue that the armies of
Napoleon were those of the Revolution: they differed as the zenith
from the nadir, being recruited on a new principle, animated by new
motives, and led by an entirely different class of men. A supreme
command having been attained by means curiously compounded of
chivalric romance and base scheming, the man of action did not
hesitate a moment to put every power in motion. Throwing off all
superior control, he set himself to every task in the revolution of
Italy--conquest, political and religious; constructive politics and
administration; social and financial transformation. Winning the
devotion of his troops by intoxicating successes, as a leveler he was
permanently successful; but this typical burgher had no permanent
success in building up a democratic-imperial society out of the royal,
princely, and aristocratic elements which had so long monopolized the
ability of the peninsula; what he wrought outlasted his time, but the
country had to undergo another revolution before its middle classes
were ready for the heavy burden of independence and self-government.
Yet the struggle for what was accomplished appears to have created a
climacteric in the doer. Before the days of Italy his ambitions were
petty enough: employment in the service of Russia or England,
supremacy in Corsica or military promotion in France; but afterward
they enlarged by leaps and bounds: Italian principalities, Austrian
dukedoms, Lombard confederations, the primacy of France in some form,
Oriental dominion--one such concept took form in the morning, to be
swept away at night and replaced by ever more luxurious growths of
fantasy. The realization of these dreams was still more amazing than
their misty formation. The Revolutionary doctrines of the passing age
had stimulated France to over-exertion; her leaders were discredited,
her people exhausted. The same agitation had stupefied the Italians;
but whatever their political disintegration may have been, the Roman
chair and throne retained its moral influence as the bond and
mainspring of society throughout the whole peninsula; and now the
successor of St. Peter was humbled to the dust, willing to escape with
the mere semblance of either secular or ecclesiastical independence.
It was an exceptional moment, a vacillating, retrogressive hour in the
history of Austria, of France, and of Italy. The exceptional man, the
vigorous citizen of a new political epoch, the inspired strategist of
a new military epoch, the unscrupulous doubter of a new religious
epoch--this typical personage was at hand to take advantage of the
situation; and he did so, hastening the disintegrating processes
already at work, seizing every advantage revealed by the crumbling of
old systems, and reaping the harvest of French heedlessness. The
opportunity gave the man his chance, but the chance once seized, the
man enlarged his sphere with each successive year.
This he did by means which were as remarkable as the personage who
devised them--and remarkable, too, not for their negative, but for
their constructive quality. Broadly stated, the Revolution utterly
expunged all the governmental and social guarantees of the preceding
monarchy, destroying not merely the absolute power of one man with
its sanction of divine right, but all the checks upon it to be found
either in the ancient traditions of the people or in their ancient
institution of parliaments. It will be clear to the careful student of
the Revolutionary governments that while there was a gradual
clarifying of opinion antecedent to the Consulate, and a vague longing
for guarantees of individual rights higher than the acts of any
assembly, however representative it claimed to be, nevertheless great
ideas, great conceptions, great outlines, had all remained in their
inchoate state, and that of the several succeeding constitutions each
had been more worthless than the one before. Almost any kind of a
constitution will serve an enlightened nation which has confirmed
political habits, if it chooses to support a fundamental law not
hostile to them; and none, however ingenious, can stand before
recalcitrant populations. The Revolutionary constitutions of France,
excepting perhaps that of 1791, were alike feeble; and in the stress
applied to the one democratic land of Europe by her dynastic enemies
all around, they were not worth the paper and ink used to record them.
Under each had developed a pure despotism of one kind or another, on
the plea that in war there must be a single head, either an executive
committee or an executive man. These persons or person had, on pleas
of necessity or expediency, gradually arrogated to the executive all
the powers of government, befooling the people more or less completely
by the specious formalities of various kinds through which the popular
will was supposed to find expression. No one understood this fact
better than Napoleon Bonaparte; and since it seemed that the supreme
power had to be in the hands of some one man or clique, he was easily
tempted to grasp it for himself when it became clear that the
profligate and dishonest Directory had run its course. He did not
make the situation, but he used it. History does not record that the
French nation was shocked or discouraged by the events of the
eighteenth of Brumaire; on the contrary, the occurrences in Paris and
at St. Cloud seemed commonplace to a storm-tossed people, and the
results were welcomed by the majority in every class.
The reasons for this general satisfaction varied, of course; for the
conservative and progressive royalists, the conservative and radical
republicans of every stripe, had widely different expectations as to
the next act in the drama. But the chief actor was concerned only for
himself and the nation; partizans he neither honored nor feared,
except as he was anxious not to be identified with them. To him, as a
man of the people, it seemed that in the Revolution the third estate
had asserted itself; that the third estate must be pacified; that the
third estate must be prosperous; that the third estate, for all these
purposes, needed only to be confirmed in their simple theory of
government, which was that the power could be delegated by them to any
one fit to wield it, and this once done, the delegate might without
harm to the state be left undisturbed to manage the public business,
while the people should give their undivided attention to their
private affairs. How successful the Consulate was in this respect is
universally known and admitted. With consummate cleverness the First
Consul summoned to his assistance all the giants of his time, whether
they were scholars with their theories and knowledge, administrators
with their tact and experience, political managers with their easy
consciences and oiled feathers, or skilful demagogues with their
greedy followers and insatiate self-interest. These he either enticed
or bullied into his service, according as he read their characters; a
few--a very few--like Barere, he found obdurate, and drove into
provincial exile. At no time did he make a finer display of his
astounding capacity for molding strong men by his still stronger will
than during the early days of the Consulate; and the manifest reason
for his success was that he had a fine instinct for character and for
putting the right man in the right place.
What he thus accomplished has been told. The foundations he then laid
rest solid to-day; the now antiquated edifice he erected on them,
though altered and repaired, still retains its identity. The
Revolution had overthrown the old regime completely, and the ruins of
society were without form and void. From this chaos Napoleon painfully
gathered the substantial materials of a new structure, and out of
these reconstructed the family, the state, and the church. He revived
the domestic spirit, made marriage a solid institution, and
reestablished parental authority while destroying parental despotism.
In civil society he restored the right of property and fixed the
sanctity of contract, thus assuring respect for the individual and the
ascendancy of the law. The finances he reformed by an equitable system
of taxation, and by the establishment of an ingenious treasury system
comparable to that devised by Alexander Hamilton for the United
States. In the Concordat he went as far, probably, as France could
then go in emancipating religion and the church; Protestantism has
prospered under the regulations he laid down, and by his treatment of
the Jews they have been changed from despised and down-trodden social
freebooters into prosperous and patriotic citizens. Upon every class
of men then living he imposed by an iron will a system of his own. The
leading survivors of Jacobinism, extreme royalists, moderate
republicans, proscribers and proscribed, men of the bourgeoisie--all
bowed to his sway and accepted his rewards. It is said that they
yielded to the superior force of his police and his pretorians. Be it
so. The fivefold police system he established was a system of checks
and counter-checks within itself, within the administration, and even
within the army--a body without which, as he firmly believed, the
beginnings of social transformation could not be made. He professed,
and no doubt honestly, that he would divest himself of this police
service as opportunity served, and deluded both himself and his
followers into the belief that the process was almost complete before
the close of his era. Through the perspective of a century we can see
the faults of Napoleon's plan. The Gallic Church is still Roman, in
spite of his intention that the Roman Church should become French; the
extreme centralization of his administrative system still throttles
local free government and makes both oligarchic rule and political
revolution easier in France than in any other free land; the
educational scheme which he formed, although more fully changed than
any other of his institutions, and but recently embarked, let us hope,
on a course for ultimate independence, nevertheless suffers in its
present complete dependence on state support, and in the consequent
absence of private personal enthusiasm which might make its separate
universities and schools rich in opportunities and strong in the
loyalty of their sons. But we must remember that the Consulate was a
hundred years since, and that for its day it wrought so beneficently
that Bonaparte, First Consul, remains one of the foremost among all
lawgivers and statesmen. And that, too, precisely for the reasons
which some cite as condemning him. He took the revolutionary ideas of
political, civil, and religious emancipation: with these he commingled
both his own sound sense and the experience of advisers from every
class, realizing as much of civil liberty and good order as appears
to have been practical at the moment.
But in one respect he failed miserably, and that failure vitiated much
of the substantial gain which seemed to have been made. He failed in
curbing his own ambition. The majestic ridge of his achievement was
the verge of the precipice over which he fell. In the first place, his
signal success as a lawgiver was due entirely to the dazzling
splendors of his victories. Marengo was the climax to a series of such
achievements as had not so far been wrought on the tented field within
the bounds of French history. It is easy to assert that the French
were intoxicated because they were French: there is not the slightest
reason to suppose that any other nation under similar circumstances
would have behaved differently. The Seven Years' War turned the heads
of the English people completely, and they lost their American
colonies in consequence; Rome lost her political liberty when she
became mistress not only of the Latin, but of the Greek and Oriental
shores of the Mediterranean; the distant military expeditions of
Alexander the Great prepared the fall of his ill-assorted empire. In
each case the careful student will admit that social exaltation was
the forerunner of division and of subsequent despotism in some form.
Even in the little states of Greece and southern Italy the tyrants
always arose from the disintegration of legal government, and by the
assertion of some form of power--mind, money, or military force.
It was, therefore, as a military despot that the First Consul
promulgated beneficent codes, founded an enduring jurisprudence,
created an efficient magistracy, and established social order. In this
process he completed the work of the Revolution by exalting the third
estate to ascendancy in the nation. The whole work, therefore, was not
only recognized as his in the house of every French burgher: he was
considered at every fireside to be the consummator of the Revolution
for which France had so long suffered in an agony of bloody sweat. Was
it therefore any wonder that not only he himself, but even the most
enlightened leaders of European thought, considered the safety and
renovation of European society to depend upon the extension of his
work? It is hard for us to appreciate this, because in France
Napoleon's institutions have remained almost as he left them, and
well-nigh stationary, while for a century the processes of ruthless
reform have been continuously working in other European lands, and
some neighboring peoples have outstripped the French in the matter of
a national unity consistent with local freedom. The First Consul felt
that in order to become great he had been forced to become strong; we
can understand that he could easily deceive himself into concluding
that in order to be greater he must become stronger. It was in these
days that he exclaimed, in the intimacy of familiar intercourse: "I
feel the infinite in me." Thereafter democracy in any form, even the
mildest, was offensive. Such men as Roederer were sent to Naples,
Berg--anywhere out of France. The times were not far removed from
those of the beneficent despots, except that this one ruled, not by
hereditary divine right, but by military force. Bonaparte's imperfect
training in politics and history made it possible for such visions as
those which now arose to haunt his brain. The beneficence he had
displayed already; for despotism he had had the finest conceivable
training, first among the sluggish populations of the Italian states
which he had reorganized, then in the myth of Egyptian conquest which
he had created and felt bound to maintain, and lastly in the national
disorders of a France shuddering at the possibility of a return either
to the hideous excesses of the Terror or to the intolerable abuses of
ecclesiasticism and absolute monarchy.
Among other dreadful curses incident to revolution and civil war is
the stimulation of fanaticism. In his seizure of the supreme power the
purpose of the First Consul was justified to himself, and his
procedure was rendered tolerable to the nation at large by the
scandalous intrigues and complots which were hatched like cockatrices'
eggs in every foul cranny of the land. The conspirators stopped at
nothing: bad faith, subornation, murder of every variety, from the
dagger to the bowl. This gave the First Consul his chance to become
himself the arch-intriguer, and as such he overmatched all his
opponents, ultramontanes, radicals, and royalists. Finally only a few
unreconstructed reactionaries were left from each of these classes,
who, though exhausted and panting, still had the strength to be noisy,
and occasionally to make a feint of activity. But in the various
localities and classes of France each of the factions had numerous
silent and inactive sympathizers who had surrendered only as they felt
unable to keep up the uneven conflict. The flames of the volcano were
quenched, and the gulf of the crater was bridged by a crust, but the
lava of sedition boiled and seethed below. It is a well-known nostrum
for civil dissension to stir up foreign conflict, and then to call
upon the patriotism of men from all parties. To this the First Consul
dared not openly resort. In fact, the indications are that if his
enemies in France and his foes abroad had consented peaceably to the
fulfilment of his now manifest ambitions, he would himself have been
glad enough to secure without further fighting what he had gained by
war, and to extend the influence of a Bonapartist France by steady
encroachments rather than by exhausting hostilities. The word of every
man has exactly the value which his character gives it, and treaties
are worth the good faith of those who make them, not a tittle more.
Neither of the parties to the general peace was exhausted, neither was
really earnest. It was a bellicose age: war was then in the air, as
peace is now. The rupture of the treaty made at Amiens was quite as
much the work of George III as it was of Bonaparte the First Consul,
and the two nations over which they ruled were easily led to renew the
struggle. Nothing goes to prove that there was long premeditation on
the part of either; but at the time and since, were it not for the
widespread distrust in Bonaparte's character, popular opinion would
have put the blame of renewed war more upon his opponent than on him.
Thus far the angel and the devil which struggle for possession of
every man had waged a fairly even conflict, and the blame and praise
of what is stigmatized as Bonaparte's conduct must be meted out to his
foes in even measure. He and his times had interacted one upon the
other to a remarkably even degree. But once launched on the career of
personal aggrandizement, every hindrance to consuming ambition was
ruthlessly cast aside. Until 1812 the responsibility for inordinate
bloodshed is all his own.
It is needless to dwell upon the period of the Empire in order to
study Napoleon's character. It shines forth effulgent, but noxious. He
remained personally what he had always been--imperious, laborious,
unprincipled; but, on the other hand, kindly, generous, sensitive to
the popular movements. His thirst for power became predominant; his
lavish contempt for men and money displayed the recklessness of a
desperate parvenu; his passion for war burst all its bounds. Personal
ambition eclipsed principle, expediency, shrewdness--in short, every
quality which makes for self-preservation. The reason was not
conscious despair, but unconscious desperation. Politically he had
fought and won an easy but a decisive battle. Imperialism was firmly
seated. The behavior of the French people was natural enough, but they
lent themselves to his purposes with complete surrender. In this the
world learned a lesson which should never be forgotten: that democracy
is an excellent workhorse, but a poor charger; a good hack, but an
untrustworthy racer. The interest of the plain man is in his daily
life, his family, his business, his advancement. He cannot be an
expert in foreign or domestic politics, in public law, or in warfare;
expertness requires the exclusive devotion of a lifetime. Make the
common person a theorist, and he is an ardent democrat, but a poor
administrator. Hence the necessity in transition epochs for a wise
constitution. It was not difficult to convince the French burgher
that, all other forms of democratic administration having had a chance
and having failed in times of war, the only one so far untried--that
of delegating power to a single superior man--should have a fair
trial, the more as the excellent man was at hand. Even in times of
peace the hard-worked citizen either neglects his political duties
altogether, or, performing them in a thoughtless routine, longs for
some one he can trust to do his thinking and acting: in war, as far as
we have had the opportunity to observe in ancient and modern times,
his imperialism is avowed, and he demands a dictator. We have no
reason to suppose that there is any democracy which could outlast
twenty years of a herculean struggle for national life or death, and
such the Franco-English wars which introduced the last century seemed
to the Frenchman of that time to be.
From the soldier's point of view, Napoleon had likewise such an easy
triumph as has fallen to the lot of few commanders. His opponents were
so conservative that their ideas were antiquated, his own strategy was
so new and revolutionary that it dumfounded them. A favorite method
of detraction is illustrated by the familiar story of Columbus's egg.
What is once done, anybody can do. The strategic reputation of
Frederick the Great is in our day first attacked by the so-called
comparative method--that is, by comparing it with the achievements and
system, not of his contemporaries, but of Napoleon, his successor; and
then the strategic reputation of Napoleon is diminished by sneering at
that of Frederick, with whose antiquated method the new one came into
comparison and contact, to the complete disaster of the former. This
vicious circle may be dismissed with contempt. Napoleon's strategic
genius was, unlike any other talent he possessed, constructive and
original. No doubt he studied Caesar; no doubt he studied Maillebois;
no doubt he studied the work of Turenne and of the great Frederick; no
doubt he was a pupil of the giant soldiers who inaugurated and carried
on the wars of the Revolution; but while others had pursued the same
studies, it remained for him to devise and put into operation a
strategy based upon past experience, but subversive of accepted
dogmas, new, adapted to its ends, and founded on theories which,
though modified in practice by the discoveries of an intervening
century, have, when properly understood, never, not even to-day, been
shaken in principle. His triumphs as a soldier, therefore, are his
own; and it was not until all Europe had learned the lessons which he
taught her generals by a series of object demonstrations lasting
twenty years, that the teacher began to diminish in success and
splendor. The persistent critics of Frederick have been asking and
reiterating questions such as these: Why did not the king begin early
in July, 1756? Why did he not storm the camp of Pirna? Why did he not
continue the war in October? Why did he not renew hostilities the
following year until forced to it? And so on, and so on. By this
method they have shrunk the horizon to their own dimensions, and have
imprisoned their victim within the pale of his faults; but a wider
view and the historic background display his strategy in large
outline, as illuminated by the light of his age; and thus the defeats
of Kolin and Kunersdorf, as well as the victories of Leuthen,
Rossbach, Zorndorf, and Torgau, exhibit the Prussian general as the
great genius which he was. It was not until Napoleon had taught his
rivals what fighting ought to be that men could also pick and nag at
him by asking why Waterloo did not begin four hours earlier, why more
explicit directions were not given to Grouchy, why in 1814 the
desperate man chose to cut off the line of his enemies' communications
rather than withdraw into Paris and call the nation to arms; and so on
to infinity. Judged either historically or theoretically, the strategy
of Napoleon is original, unique, and unexcelled. It is his greatest
achievement, because his most creative.