Private Study and Garrison Life.
Napoleon as a Student of Politics -- Nature of Rousseau's
Political Teachings -- The Abbé Raynal -- Napoleon Aspires
to be the Historian of Corsica -- Napoleon's First Love --
His Notions of Political Science -- The Books He Read --
Napoleon at Lyons -- His Transfer to Douay -- A Victim to
Melancholy -- Return to Corsica.
[Sidenote: 1786-87.]
In one sense it is true that the first Emperor of the French was a man
of no age and of no country; in another sense he was, as few have
been, the child of his surroundings and of his time. The study of
politics was his own notion; the matter and method of the study were
conditioned by his relations to the thought of Europe in the
eighteenth century. He evidently hoped that his military and political
attainments would one day meet in the culmination of a grand career.
To the world and probably to himself it seemed as if the glorious
period of the Consulate were the realization of this hope. Those years
of his life which so appear were, in fact, the least successful. The
unsoundness of his political instructors, and the temper of the age,
combined to thwart this ambitious purpose, and render unavailing all
his achievements.
Rousseau had every fascination for the young of that time--a
captivating style, persuasive logic, the sentiment of a poet, the
intensity of a prophet. A native of Corsica would be doubly drawn to
him by his interest in that romantic island. Sitting at the feet of
such a teacher, a young scholar would learn through convincing
argument the evils of a passing social state as they were not
exhibited elsewhere. He would discern the dangers of ecclesiastical
authority, of feudal privilege, of absolute monarchy; he would see
their disastrous influence in the prostitution, not only of social,
but of personal morality; he would become familiar with the necessity
for renewing institutions as the only means of regenerating society.
All these lessons would have a value not to be exaggerated. On the
other hand, when it came to the substitution of positive teaching for
negative criticism, he would learn nothing of value and much that was
most dangerous. In utter disregard of a sound historical method, there
was set up as the cornerstone of the new political structure a fiction
of the most treacherous kind. Buonaparte in his notes, written as he
read, shows his contempt for it in an admirable refutation of the
fundamental error of Rousseau as to the state of nature by this
remark: "I believe man in the state of nature had the same power of
sensation and reason which he now has." But if he did not accept the
premises, there was a portion of the conclusion which he took with
avidity, the most dangerous point in all Rousseau's system; namely,
the doctrine that all power proceeds from the people, not because of
their nature and their historical organization into families and
communities, but because of an agreement by individuals to secure
public order, and that, consequently, the consent given they can
withdraw, the order they have created they can destroy. In this lay
not merely the germ, but the whole system of extreme radicalism, the
essence, the substance, and the sum of the French Revolution on its
extreme and doctrinaire side.
Rousseau had been the prophet and forerunner of the new social
dispensation. The scheme for applying its principles is found in a
work which bears the name of a very mediocre person, the Abbé Raynal,
a man who enjoyed in his day an extended and splendid reputation which
now seems to have had only the slender foundations of unmerited
persecution and the friendship of superior men. In 1770 appeared
anonymously a volume, of which, as was widely known, he was the
compiler. "The Philosophical and Political History of the
Establishments and Commerce of the Europeans in the Two Indies" is a
miscellany of extracts from many sources, and of short essays by
Raynal's brilliant acquaintances, on superstition, tyranny, and
similar themes. The reputed author had written for the public prints,
and had published several works, none of which attracted attention.
The amazing success of this one was not remarkable if, as some critics
now believe, at least a third of the text was by Diderot. However this
may be, the position of Raynal as a man of letters immediately became
a foremost one, and such was the vogue of a second edition published
over his name in 1780 that the authorities became alarmed. The climax
to his renown was achieved when, in 1781, his book was publicly
burned, and the compiler fled into exile.
By 1785 the storm had finally subsided, and though he had not yet
returned to France, it is supposed that through the friendship of Mme.
du Colombier, the friendly patroness of the young lieutenant,
communication was opened between the great man and his aspiring
reader.[13] "Not yet eighteen," are the startling words in the
letter, written by Buonaparte, "I am a writer: it is the age when we
must learn. Will my boldness subject me to your raillery? No, I am
sure. If indulgence be a mark of true genius, you should have much
indulgence. I inclose chapters one and two of a history of Corsica,
with an outline of the rest. If you approve, I will go on; if you
advise me to stop, I will go no further." The young historian's letter
teems with bad spelling and bad grammar, but it is saturated with the
spirit of his age. The chapters as they came to Raynal's hands are not
in existence so far as is known, and posterity can never judge how
monumental their author's assurance was. The abbé's reply was kindly,
but he advised the novice to complete his researches, and then to
rewrite his pieces. Buonaparte was not unwilling to profit by the
counsels he received: soon after, in July, 1786, he gave two orders to
a Genevese bookseller, one for books concerning Corsica, another for
the memoirs of Mme. de Warens and her servant Claude Anet, which are a
sort of supplement to Rousseau's "Confessions."
[Footnote 13: Masson (Napoléon inconnu, Vol. I, p. 160)
denies all the statements of this paragraph. He likewise
proves to his own satisfaction that Bonaparte was
neither in Lyons nor in Douay at this time. The
narrative here given is based on Coston and on Jung, who
follows the former in his reprint of the documents,
giving the very dubious reference, Mss. Archives de la
guerre. Although these manuscripts could not be found by
me, I am not willing to discard Jung's authority
completely nor to impugn his good faith. Men in office
frequently play strange pranks with official papers, and
these may yet be found. Moreover, there is some slight
collateral evidence. See Vieux: Napoleon à Lyon, p. 4,
and Souvenirs à l'usage des habitants de Douay. Douay,
1822.]
During May of the same year he jotted down with considerable fullness
his notions of the true relations between Church and State. He had
been reading Roustan's reply to Rousseau, and was evidently
overpowered with the necessity of subordinating ecclesiastical to
secular authority. The paper is rude and incomplete, but it shows
whence he derived his policy of dealing with the Pope and the Roman
Church in France. It has very unjustly been called an attempted
refutation of Christianity: it is nothing of the sort. Ecclesiasticism
and Christianity being hopelessly confused in his mind, he uses the
terms interchangeably in an academic and polemic discussion to prove
that the theory of the social contract must destroy all ecclesiastical
assumption of supreme power in the state.
Some of the lagging days were spent not only in novel-reading, as the
Emperor in after years confessed to Mme. de Rémusat, but in attempts
at novel-writing, to relieve the tedium of idle hours. It is said that
first and last Buonaparte read "Werther" five times through. Enough
remains among his boyish scribblings to show how fantastic were the
dreams both of love and of glory in which he indulged. Many entertain
a suspicion that amid the gaieties of the winter he had really lost
his heart, or thought he had, and was repulsed. At least, in his
"Dialogue on Love," written five years later, he says, "I, too, was
once in love," and proceeds, after a few lines, to decry the sentiment
as harmful to mankind, a something from which God would do well to
emancipate it. This may have referred to his first meeting and
conversation with a courtesan at Paris, which he describes in one of
his papers, but this is not likely from the context, which is not
concerned with the gratification of sexual passion. It is of the
nobler sentiment that he speaks, and there seems to have been in the
interval no opportunity for philandering so good as the one he had
enjoyed during his boyish acquaintance with Mlle. Caroline du
Colombier. It has, at all events, been her good fortune to secure, by
this supposition, a place in history, not merely as the first girl
friend of Napoleon, but as the object of his first pure passion.
But these were his avocations; the real occupation of his time was
study. Besides reading again the chief works of Rousseau, and
devouring those of Raynal, his most beloved author, he also read much
in the works of Voltaire, of Filangieri, of Necker, and of Adam
Smith. With note-book and pencil he extracted, annotated, and
criticized, his mind alert and every faculty bent to the clear
apprehension of the subject in hand. To the conception of the state as
a private corporation, which he had imbibed from Rousseau, was now
added the conviction that the institutions of France were no longer
adapted to the occupations, beliefs, or morals of her people, and that
revolution was a necessity. To judge from a memoir presented some
years later to the Lyons Academy, he must have absorbed the teachings
of the "Two Indies" almost entire.
The consuming zeal for studies on the part of this incomprehensible
youth is probably unparalleled. Having read Plutarch in his childhood,
he now devoured Herodotus, Strabo, and Diodorus; China, Arabia, and
the Indies dazzled his imagination, and what he could lay hands upon
concerning the East was soon assimilated. England and Germany next
engaged his attention, and toward the close of his studies he became
ardent in examining the minutest particulars of French history. It
was, moreover, the science of history, and not its literature, which
occupied him--dry details of revenue, resources, and institutions; the
Sorbonne, the bull Unigenitus, and church history in general; the
character of peoples, the origin of institutions, the philosophy of
legislation--all these he studied, and, if the fragments of his notes
be trustworthy evidence, as they surely are, with some thoroughness.
He also found time to read the masterpieces of French literature, and
the great critical judgments which had been passed upon them.[14]
[Footnote 14: The volumes of Napoléon inconnu contain
the text of these papers as deciphered for M. Masson and
revised by him. My own examination, which antedated his
transcription by more than a year (1891), led me to
trust their authenticity absolutely, as far as the
writer's memory and good faith are concerned. I cannot
rely as positively as Masson does on the Époques de ma
vie, which has the appearance of a casual scribbling
done in an idle moment on the first scrap that came to
hand.]
The agreeable and studious life at Valence was soon ended. Early in
August, 1786, a little rebellion, known as the "Two-cent Revolt,"
broke out in Lyons over a strike of the silk-weavers for two cents an
ell more pay and the revolt of the tavern-keepers against the
enforcement of the "Banvin," an ancient feudal right levying a heavy
tax on the sale of wine. The neighboring garrisons were ordered to
furnish their respective quotas for the suppression of the uprising.
Buonaparte's company was sent among others, but those earlier on the
ground had been active, several workmen had been killed, and the
disturbance was already quelled when he arrived. The days he spent at
Lyons were so agreeable that, as he wrote his uncle Fesch, he left the
city with regret "to follow his destiny." His regiment had been
ordered northward to Douay in Flanders; he returned to Valence and
reached that city about the end of August. His furlough began
nominally on October first, but for the Corsican officers a month's
grace was added, so that he was free to leave on September first.
The time spent under the summer skies of the north would have been
dreary enough if he had regularly received news from home. Utterly
without success in finding occupation in Corsica, and hopeless as to
France, Joseph had some time before turned his eyes toward Tuscany for
a possible career. He was now about to make a final effort, and seek
personally at the Tuscan capital official recognition with a view to
relearning his native tongue, now almost forgotten, and to obtaining
subsequent employment of any kind that might offer in the land of his
birth. Lucien, the archdeacon, was seriously ill, and General
Marbeuf, the last influential friend of the family, had died. Louis
had been promised a scholarship in one of the royal artillery schools;
deprived of his patron, he would probably lose the appointment.
Finally, the pecuniary affairs of Mme. de Buonaparte were again
entangled, and now appeared hopeless. She had for a time been
receiving an annual state bounty for raising mulberry-trees, as France
was introducing silk culture into the island. The inspectors had
condemned this year's work, and were withholding a substantial portion
of the allowance. These were the facts and they probably reached
Napoleon at Valence; it was doubtless a knowledge of them which put an
end to all his light-heartedness and to his study, historical or
political. He immediately made ready to avail himself of his leave so
that he might instantly set out to his mother's relief.
Despondent and anxious, he moped, grew miserable, and contracted a
slight malarial fever which for the next six or seven years never
entirely relaxed its hold on him. Among his papers has recently been
found the long, wild, pessimistic rhapsody to which reference has
already been made and in which there is talk of suicide. The plaint is
of the degeneracy among men, of the destruction of primitive
simplicity in Corsica by the French occupation, of his own isolation,
and of his yearning to see his friends once more. Life is no longer
worth while; his country gone, a patriot has naught to live for,
especially when he has no pleasure and all is pain--when the character
of those about him is to his own as moonlight is to sunlight. If there
were but a single life in his way, he would bury the avenging blade of
his country and her violated laws in the bosom of the tyrant. Some of
his complaining was even less coherent than this. It is absurd to take
the morbid outpouring seriously, except in so far as it goes to prove
that its writer was a victim of the sentimental egoism into which the
psychological studies of the eighteenth century had degenerated, and
to suggest that possibly if he had not been Napoleon he might have
been a Werther. Though dated May third, no year is given, and it may
well describe the writer's feelings in any period of despondency. No
such state of mind was likely to have arisen in the preceding spring,
but it may have been written even then as a relief to pent-up feelings
which did not appear on the surface; or possibly in some later year
when the agony of suffering for himself and his family laid hold upon
him. In any case it expresses a bitter melancholy, such as would be
felt by a boy face to face with want.
At Valence Napoleon visited his old friend the Abbé Saint-Ruf, to
solicit favor for Lucien, who, having left Brienne, would study
nothing but the humanities, and was determined to become a priest. At
Aix he saw both his uncle Fesch and his brother. At Marseilles he is
said to have paid his respects to the Abbé Raynal, requesting advice,
and seeking further encouragement in his historical labors. This is
very doubtful, for there is no record of Raynal's return to France
before 1787. Lodging in that city, as appears from a memorandum on his
papers, with a M. Allard, he must soon have found a vessel sailing for
his destination, because he came expeditiously to Ajaccio, arriving in
that city toward the middle of the month, if the ordinary time had
been consumed in the journey. Such appears to be the likeliest account
of this period, although our knowledge is not complete. In the
archives of Douay, there is, according to an anonymous local
historian, a record of Buonaparte's presence in that city with the
regiment of La Fère, and he is quoted as having declared at Elba to
Sir Neil Campbell that he had been sent thither. But in the "Epochs of
My Life," he wrote that he left Valence on September first, 1786, for
Ajaccio, arriving on the fifteenth. Weighing the probabilities, it
seems likely that the latter was doubtful, since there is but the
slenderest possibility of his having been at Douay in the following
year, the only other hypothesis, and there exists no record of his
activities in Corsica before the spring of 1787. The chronology of the
two years is still involved in obscurity and it is possible that he
went with his regiment to Douay, contracted his malaria there, and did
not actually get leave of absence until February first of the latter
year.