industry in expanding the sphere of Spanish influence. Groups of
adventurers were sent out in different directions, and plans were made
which ended in the foundation of Santiago in Chili. One of Pizarro’s
brothers was sent off with an army of 340 Europeans and 4000 Indians
to conquer the country east of the Andes. Led by the usual stories
of the existence of gold and precious stones in far-distant regions,
the Spaniards in this expedition, overcoming the most extraordinary
natural difficulties in their march, succeeded in reaching one of the
tributaries of the Amazon. A boat was then built by means of which
one of the members of the party, Orellana, with a few companions,
made the long trip to the ocean, and finally succeeded in reaching
a Spanish colony on one of the islands of the Antilles. This was a
unique achievement, for the vessel in which he sailed was constructed
of green timber, there was no compass, no pilot was to be had, and
provisions had to be collected from the natives along the bank of the
river, who sometimes received the strangers with no friendly welcome.
Orellana, in relating his achievements, demonstrated the creative power
of his imagination as well as his heroism. He told of seeing nations
so rich that the roofs of their temples were covered with plates of
gold, and also related how he had passed through a republic controlled
by women, who by the force of their arms had acquired the rule over
a considerable tract of country. From these fictions of Orellana
originated the belief in the existence of a region called El Dorado,
and the conviction that somewhere in the center of South America there
existed a community of Amazons.
In 1545 the silver mines of Potosi were discovered, an event which
played an enormous rôle in the colonization of the country, because
its wealth realized the most sanguine hopes of the adventurers.
Upper Peru--or as it is now called, Bolivia--became the greatest
silver mining country in the known world. Meanwhile the success of
Pizarro’s administration stirred up among Almagro’s friends increasing
bitterness, for they saw no chance of receiving a share of the good
fortune which was being showered upon the governor, his brothers, and
his favorites. Almagro’s son, who was in Lima, made that town the
central point of the faction that was bent on Pizarro’s ruin. The
governor, though aware of the existence of these intrigues, affected
to treat them with disdain. He relied on the possession of absolute
power as the complete protection against any plot. This foolhardy
attitude was taken advantage of by the conspirators, who, without much
difficulty, penetrated into his house and put him to death June 26,
1541. Even Pizarro’s own followers, the men who had shared with him the
dangers of the conquest and the spoils of victory, raised no hand to
avenge his murder. His Borgia-like character had alienated all, except
his immediate relatives whom, as has been said, he had elevated to high
positions.
When the governor from Spain, Vaca de Castro, reached the country,
he proceeded to inflict strict justice on the conspirators. After an
armed conflict near Cuzco, between the partisans of Almagro and the
upholders of the authority of the home government, most of those
who were guilty of the murder of Pizarro fell into the governor’s
hands, who promptly executed them as rebels (1542). But the country
was not destined to enjoy tranquillity long. Gonzalo Pizarro, the
brother of the “conquistador,” acquired by force the possession of the
colony, and succeeded in extending his rule over Peru and its various
dependencies. He even sent north a fleet which captured Panama and
so got command of the western ocean. But the usurper’s rule did not
last long, for, when he was disowned by the home government, he found
himself unable to maintain his authority over the colonists. Like his
more famous brother, Gonzalo died the death of a malefactor, and the
vast possessions acquired on the west coast of South America by the
adventurers of the earlier period of Spanish conquest came under the
systematic and regular control of the Spanish bureaucratic machinery.
By the middle of the sixteenth century the spectacular features of
the conquest of Spanish America vanished away. Large and unexplored
territories were indeed added to the monarchy of Spain, but as the
lands so annexed were populated by Indian tribes in no higher state
of culture than those found in the lesser Antilles, the methods of
conquest were but a repetition of those employed by the adventurers
of an earlier period. On the whole it may be said that the treatment
of the natives improved, especially in those districts where there
was no mining or where gold could be discovered near the surface.
Long after the complete administrative organization of the conquered
lands in Mexico, of Central America, of the northern portions of South
America, and of the Pacific slope of that continent, the colonies
on the Atlantic side, even if they were founded earlier, were less
attractive to the colonist. The Jesuits first appeared in Paraguay in
1586, though Uruguay was opened up for settlement some time before.
The town of Buenos Ayres was established in 1538 amid surroundings
which gave little hope to colonial settlement. The original group of
3000 Europeans who entered the new Province of La Plata were almost
exterminated by disease and by the fatiguing and incessant warfare
with the savage races about them.
From the point of view of the old mercantile system of political
economy, Spain’s colonial policy was advantageous to the home
government. It is usual to expose the failure of the government of
Madrid to manage its vast empire under any other ideals than those
of absolutism, but when one considers the size and novelty of the
experiment that Spain was making in these Western lands, and when one
estimates broadly the stage of civilization so soon reached in a large
number of new communities, it must be allowed that to the government
of the peninsula is to be ascribed the credit of accomplishing a task
practically unparalleled in modern history. The work was not thoroughly
done; there were grave and deplorable defects. Yet without accepting at
all the truth of the dictum that whatever is, is right, it can be said
that no colonial possessions of other powers during the same century
offered the same problems as those confronted by Spain, and nowhere in
North America was the progress of extensive occupation and intensive
civilization so definitely marked.
The Spanish colonial empire has had the misfortune of being exposed to
much the same sort of depreciation as the Byzantine Empire; in both
cases investigation has diminished the weight of conventional hostile
criticism. Doctrinaire theories of government, and unfounded social
contrasts, are apt to produce false standards. It is easy to detect
faults in Spain’s management of her colonies, but it is not easy to
reconstruct for her a policy that might have produced on Spanish
soil the sturdy independence of the New England town meeting, or the
collective wisdom of the founders of the American Constitution.
* * * * *
NAPOLEON
I EARLY YEARS
Corsica, during a large part of the eighteenth century, had drawn upon
itself the attention of Europe, on account of its heroic struggle
for independence. Its champion was Pasquale Paoli, whose character
and patriotism provoked the same sort of enthusiastic attention from
his contemporaries that centered upon Garibaldi 100 years later. The
cause of the islanders against the city of Genoa, which exercised the
right of overlordship over them, was so successfully defended that
had not the kingdom of France interfered as the ally of Genoa, the
establishment of an independent Corsican republic would have been
assured. But unfortunately the Genoese surrendered the sovereignty of
the island to France. The French occupied the harbors, the Corsicans
were defeated in a pitched battle, and Paoli retired as a fugitive
to England. All further resistance was abandoned, and the island was
annexed to France.
[Illustration: NAPOLEON I.
(From the portrait by P. Delaroche.)]
In the Corsican deputation sent to Paris to arrange terms with the
conquerors was Carlo Bonaparte, a member of a noble Tuscan family,
whose ancestors had established themselves in Ajaccio 200 years before.
Some time before this visit to Paris his wife, Maria Letitia, had given
birth to a son, Napoleon. There has recently been a question raised
whether the traditionally accepted date, August 15, 1769, is correct,
and some French investigators are in favor of antedating it by one
year. There were eight surviving children, five of them boys, out of
a family of thirteen. Napoleon describes himself as an unruly child
despite the iron discipline exercised in the home by his mother. “I
was,” he says, “self-willed and obstinate, nothing awed me; nothing
disconcerted me. I was quarrelsome, exasperating; I feared no one, I
gave a blow here and a scratch there. Everyone was afraid of me. My
brother Joseph was the one with whom I had most to do. He was beaten
about and scolded; I complained that he did not get over it soon
enough.”
The father, a lawyer by profession, was engaged in unending litigation
in his own behalf, which required frequent trips to Paris, where he was
well known on account of his efforts to recover an estate, deeded by
some relative to the Jesuit order, and also as a representative deputy
of the Corsican nobility. On one of these trips the head of the house
died in 1785; seven years before that date he had been successful in
getting a scholarship for Napoleon at the military school of Brienne,
where the young soldier had just completed his course and received his
commission as lieutenant at the time of his father’s death. At school
Napoleon had made little reputation as a scholar; he stated himself
later on that it was the general opinion that he “was fit for nothing
except geometry.” He was unsociable, with an imperious temperament
that parted everyone from him. One of his schoolfellows writes of his
characteristics as follows: “Gloomy and even savage, almost always
self-absorbed, one would have supposed that he had just come from
some forest, and unmindful, until then, of the notice of his fellows,
experienced for the first time the sensations of surprise and distrust;
he detested games and all manner of boyish amusements. One part of the
garden was allotted to him and there he studied and brooded, and woe to
him who ventured to disturb him. One evening the boys were setting off
fireworks and a small powder-chest exploded. In their fright the troop
scattered in all directions, and some of them took refuge in Napoleon’s
domain, whereat he rushed upon the fugitives in a passion and attacked
them with a spade.”
He had wished to enter the navy after his studies were finished,
but there was some delay until, as his family were in straitened
circumstances, he decided to enter the artillery, where the
applications for admission were fewer. So he passed from Brienne to
Paris, where he again seems to have made no very favorable impression,
except on the mathematical instructor at the military school, Monge,
whose report on Bonaparte at the time he was leaving school reads as
follows: “Reserved and studious, he prefers study to amusement of any
kind, and takes pleasure in reading the works of good authors; while
diligent in his study of abstract science, he cares little for any
other; he has a thorough knowledge of mathematics and geography. He is
taciturn, preferring solitude, capricious, haughty, and inordinately
self-centered. While a man of few words, he is vigorous in his replies,
ready and incisive in retort; he has great self-esteem, is ambitious
with aspirations that stop at nothing. He is a young man worthy of
patronage.”
The new officer, who was assigned to duty at Valence, found garrison
life very tedious; promotion was slow, there were no drills, camp
life, nor manœuvers; he spent, he says, a good deal of his time
reading novels, planned even to write one, and took some part in the
local life of the town, making friends among the society of petty
officials, lawyers, and other persons of middle-class station. He did
some solid reading also, making himself acquainted with Rousseau, Adam
Smith, and Raynal, the last having so much influence over him, that he
acknowledged himself as Raynal’s disciple in his views as to the need
of social reform in France, which, among other things, implied the
abolition of class privileges and the purification of administration.
His literary attempts were various; he was prompted to make them
because his pay of 100 livres a month, though adequate for himself, was
not sufficient to help out his relatives in Corsica, where his mother
and the rest of the family were in a position of financial difficulty.
During the early years of the revolutionary movement in France,
Napoleon spent a large part of the time in Corsica, where the
nationalist party hoped to take advantage of the civil disturbances of
their new rulers, and reclaim their independence. For a time he made
their cause his own, and developed a scheme for driving the French
from the island. But conditions soon changed after Paoli returned
to Corsica. Napoleon, who hoped for high military command among his
own people, failed to secure the support of the old leader, who
suspected the young officer, on account of the radical sympathies he
manifested for the revolutionary party in France. Paoli believed in
a constitutional monarchy, and refused to side with the Convention
which had put Louis XVI to death. Most of the Corsicans followed their
conservative statesman, and in May, 1793, Napoleon and the whole
Bonaparte family were declared outlaws.
After an unsuccessful attempt to take Ajaccio from the Paolists
Napoleon, with the rest of his family, abandoned the island and
withdrew to Toulon. His scheme of self-advancement at home had failed;
he had now only France to look to as the field of his ambition. It was
fortunate for him that during this period his irregular connection
with the French army, in which he still held the rank of officer, was
tolerated. He had made himself marked by his openly declared sympathies
with the anti-monarchical party, and for this reason, his independent
action in visiting Corsica and remaining there as long as he liked was
passed over without criticism from his superiors in Paris; indeed,
his captain’s commission was dated February 6, 1792, a time when he
was devoting his attention altogether to Corsican affairs, in his own
interest.
His arrival in France coincided with the establishment of the Reign of
Terror, and the government at Paris had on their hands an insurrection
in the southern part of the country which sided with the Girondins,
many of whose leaders had been put to death by the Jacobins. Napoleon
resumed his military service at Nice, and immediately took part in
repressing the Girondin insurrection. He also expressed his full
agreement with the Jacobins in a dialogue entitled the _Souper de
Beaucaire_, a pamphlet intended to win adherents to the cause of the
Terrorists at Paris. His apology called public attention to him,--the
dialogue was printed at the expense of the state, and its author
was soon on friendly terms with the younger Robespierre, one of the
commissioners of the Convention in southern France.
In various towns, Marseilles included, the insurrectionists were
losing their foothold. The last important place left to them was
Toulon, where they were being actively supported by English and
Spanish allies. It was necessary to win the place, for preparations
were being made on a large scale by both England and Austria to use
Toulon as a starting-point to invade southern France. Napoleon was
given the command of a battalion of artillery, and it was his scheme
for arranging the batteries around the town that led to the taking of
the city by the French. His services were recognized by promotion to a
brigadier generalship, a fitting reward, for it was his strategy which
had compelled the allied troops of Spain and England to evacuate the
one place on French territory which they occupied.
The younger Robespierre spoke of him in a report to the Committee
of Public Safety as a man of transcendent merit. Bonaparte was
intimate with the commissioner, and that he impressed those who knew
him as an ardent sympathizer with the Terrorists is borne out by a
statement contained in Mlle. Robespierre’s memoranda: “Bonaparte was
a republican, I should say that he was a republican of the Mountain,
at least he made that impression upon me from his manner of regarding
things at the time I was in Nice [1794]. Later his victories turned
his head and made him aspire to rule over his fellow-citizens, but,
while he was but a general of artillery in the army of Italy, he was
a believer in thorough-going liberty and equality.” Yet the fanatical
side of the Robespierre government, with its policy of ruthless
massacre, evidently did not win his sympathy, for there is good
ground for believing that, after the capture of Toulon, he was one
of those who counseled moderation towards the vanquished and opposed
the wholesale execution of the rebels. What attracted him to the
Robespierre régime was its directness and its energy, and there is
no doubt that he had a much higher opinion of the personal capacity
of Robespierre than is held by a later school of historians of the
French Revolution, who see in him a somewhat commonplace and decorative
tool of the obscurer members of the Committee of Public Safety. In a
conversation with Marmont, after Robespierre’s downfall, he said, “If
Robespierre had remained in power, he would have been able to strike
out another way for himself, he would have systematized the laws and
made them permanent; we should have attained this result without shocks
and convulsions because it would have proceeded from the exercise of
power. We are now trying to reach this goal through a revolution, and
this revolution will give birth to a monarchy.”
As a friend and counselor of Robespierre’s younger brother, who had
already become interested in Napoleon’s scheme for an invasion of
Italy, the prospects of his securing an independent military command
were most encouraging, especially as he had just been so flatteringly
recommended by the younger Robespierre to the Committee of Public
Safety. But all chances of such advancement were lost with the downfall
and execution of the revolutionary dictator in July, 1794.
Napoleon was involved in the general ruin of the Robespierre party;
he lost his commission as general and spent a month as a prisoner in
a military fortress. He fortunately had friends who interceded for
him, among them Salicetti, the Corsican, a member of the Convention,
by whose efforts the charge of disloyalty to the Republic was shown to
be baseless and the prisoner was released, reinstated, and given the
important mission of restoring French sovereignty in Corsica, which had
lately declared itself a constitutional monarchy under the protection
of England. The expedition failed on account of the weakness of the
French fleet. For some time after this misadventure Napoleon remained
without a command; the government at Paris was not inclined to forward
the interests of a former partisan of Robespierre.
There were besides a number of young officers quite capable of filling
important army commands, and all that Napoleon could secure was an
assignment in the west under Hoche, who was engaged in repressing the
insurrection in La Vendée. He had no taste for such work, nor did he
desire to serve in a subordinate capacity. Taking advantage of the
weakness of the administration, he delayed his departure from Paris,
although he had received peremptory orders to leave for his command.
He hoped by the influence of friends such as Barras, whom he had known
at Toulon, and who was now a man of weight in the counsels of the
party predominant in the Convention, to secure the acceptance from the
ministry of war of his plan for the invasion of Italy. He was not only
disappointed in this hope, but he found himself again stricken from the
list of French generals because of his refusal to proceed to the post
already assigned him.
There was no encouragement to be got out of the prevailing political
tendencies, which were showing a marked antagonism to the radical
revolutionary party, with whose program Napoleon had been allied from
the first. A restoration of the monarchy seemed not improbable, for the
common people of Paris were showing signs of restlessness under the
régime of the Terrorist factions. The members of the Convention, after
providing for a stable government with an executive power vested in
a Directory of five members, were fearful of the consequences of the
proposed changes they had themselves provided, and they proceeded to
pass a measure by which the newly elected legislative body, the Council
of Five Hundred, should be composed, to the extent of two-thirds of
its membership, of those who had served in the Convention. This action
caused an open revolt. Forty-four out of the forty-eight sections,
into which Paris was divided, were in arms against the continuance of
the tyranny of the Convention. On one side stood the National Guard
of the city; on the other there were only 8000 regular troops willing
to obey the mandate of the government. Barras happened to be one of
the commissioners of the Convention appointed to preserve order. He
was then chosen commander-in-chief of the army, and, acting with the
reluctant consent of the other members of the Committee, he selected
his friend Napoleon as second in command, with full power to act in
defense of the Convention.
No time could be lost, and everything depended on getting artillery
into the city to the Tuileries. Here the guns were stationed, before
the National Guard commenced to advance on the 5th of October. No
one knows who fired the first shot, but the engagement that followed
soon ended in a complete disaster for the insurgents, who were driven
from position to position by the volleys of grapeshot which swept the
streets in the vicinity of the Seine. In recognition of his services
rendered at such a crisis, Napoleon was almost immediately advanced to
the post of commander-in-chief of the Army of the Interior, the way
being made easy for him by Barras’ appointment as one of the Directors
in the new government. Napoleon’s analysis of the situation, made the
day after this fight in the streets of Paris, was characteristically
clear-headed. “Fortune is on my side,” he writes to his brother Joseph,
and from this sudden change in his prospects may be dated that belief
in his star signalized by his favorite motto, “Au destin,” which became
the axiom of his career, as well as its explanation and justification.
Barras’ services did not end here; he realized the young general’s
capacity, seeing in him a man whom it would be useful to have bound to
him by personal obligations, and he suggested, and it is said, even
arranged Napoleon’s marriage with Mme. de Beauharnais, a well known
member of Parisian society, the widow of a nobleman who had fallen
a victim of the Terror, and herself a native of Martinique. She had
fascinated the soldier by her charm of manner and was now prepared,
despite the objections of her friends, to give him the social position
that Barras insisted was necessary for his further promotion. This
advice of Barras was not necessarily disinterested, for there were,
it seems, reasons of a different nature, which may have prompted him
to relieve himself, by making use of Napoleon, of further personal
responsibilities he had incurred towards the lady in question. The
marriage had an immediate influence in advancing the fortunes of the
bridegroom, for two days before it was solemnized (March 4, 1796),
Napoleon attained the long-coveted position of commander-in-chief of
the Army of Italy; and on the 11th of the same month, he set out for
his new post.
II ITALY AND EGYPT