It now remains for us to explain why it was that this man was both so strong at the beginning of his career and so weak at its close; why, at a given hour, in the prime of life, at forty-six years of age, his genius deserted him, his fortune betrayed him. The reason is this: he was but an instrument in the hands of God, and when God no longer had need of him He broke him.
I must re-write what I wrote in 1832; eighteen years have rolled by: time has confirmed my judgment in every particular. The Duke of Reichstadt died at Schönbrunn, Louis-Philippe died at Claremont, France is a Republic, and if a Bonaparte is at the head of the French people he is so simply as the titular president, the elected magistrate, the removable head.
In the eyes of historians who simply relate facts, who watch the game of chance being played on earth and not the will of Providence working above, Napoleon was a madman like Alexander, or a despot like Cromwell.
Napoleon was neither the one nor the other. Napoleon belongs to the race of Cæsar and Charlemagne. Just as those two men each had his mission, Napoleon had his.
These three men made the modern world. Cæsar's was the first hand that worked therein, Napoleon's the last.
Cæsar, a pagan, prepared the way for Christianity; Charlemagne, a barbarian, prepared the way for civilisation; and Napoleon, a despot, prepared the way for liberty.
Not one of these three men knew what he did, for, the greater the genius, the blinder is it. It is the instrument of God, that is all: Deum patitur, as Luther said.
Cæsar, the general and dictator, passed across the world with his immense flood of an army, in which fourteen nations were absorbed like so many streams, making one watercourse by their junction, one people out of all their peoples, one language out of their many tongues, an organisation which only passed out of his hands to become under Augustus a single empire out of all the other empires.
Then, when the time was ripe, Christ, the Sun of civilisation, was born in an obscure corner of Judea, in the far East, whence rises the day, and He shone upon the Roman world. The rays of Christianity separated the ancient age from the modern age, and gave light for three centuries before Constantine was illumined by them.