Napoleon and his court

by C. S. Forester

THE KING OF ROME

CHAPTER XIV
LIKES AND DISLIKES

PERHAPS now we can see a little more clearly the man who was the centre of so much interest. To appreciate a man’s character it is not so much necessary to realize what he did, as to realize what he wanted to do, what he was fond of doing, and what he would have done had he been able; and on the other hand it is equally necessary to realize what it was he did not like doing. With Napoleon these matters do not bear a great deal of analysis.

One is astonished at first when it is borne in upon one that Napoleon was a man of tepid desires in most directions. It seems almost inconceivable that the man who was the storm centre of Europe, who was capable of rousing overwhelming emotion in others, was nearly incapable of emotion himself. Yet so it was. Napoleon had one ruling desire—for work, and he had one ruling passion—for the army. His secondary passions were small, and his dislikes were equally small. Compared in this light to any full-blooded personality, Dr. Johnson, for instance, Napoleon fades away into dismal uninterestingness. Work was what Napoleon liked best of all in this world. When other men would have broken down under the simultaneous strain of work and anxiety, he throve and grew fat. One of his most famous letters was written on this very subject to his brother Joseph at the height of the Eylau campaign. Joseph, from among the soft delights of Naples, had written complaining of the troubles which beset him while ruling his little kingdom, and Napoleon wrote back briefly and sternly, telling how he was at that moment engaged in a life and death struggle against Bennigsen; how he was encumbered with the difficulties of feeding and manœuvring two hundred thousand men in the boggy plains of Poland, where even he himself could hardly obtain the necessaries of life; how at the same time the affairs of half Europe demanded his attention, and yet for all this he did not allow himself to be worried by these numerous interests; he did all he had to do and delighted in the strain.

It can safely be said that Napoleon never took a holiday. Sometimes it has been hinted that in 1810 and 1811, after his marriage with Marie Louise, he slackened his pace and did not do as much as he might have done. This is true in part, but it is equally true that during that time he got through an amount of work which would have broken down most men. Napoleon was not made for holidays. It is hard to find, during the whole period covered by his correspondence, a single day in which he did not despatch a dozen letters, all of them bearing the hallmarks of the utmost care and thought, and nearly all of them vitally important links in a chain of important decisions. Inactivity was hateful to him. No sooner had he landed in Elba, removed entirely from the usual outlets of his energy, than he flung himself into the business of building up new interests. He laboured harder while governing his little island than did Kings of countries hundreds of times its size. Only when he was lodged in St. Helena, do we find a cessation of his frantic toil. Here circumstances were against him; his gaolers did their best in a blind fashion to prevent him from indulging in either mental or physical activity, while the climate and environments were both conducive to torpor. Yet even at St. Helena Napoleon was responsible for the production of a mass of written material of whose amount an average man might be proud if it were the results of the labour of a lifetime. Hard, unrelenting toil was to Napoleon the breath of life.

His chief relaxation was also in the nature of toil. Napoleon was passionately fond of all things military. Reviews were to him a source of unending delight. On emerging triumphant from a period of intense anxiety his first action almost invariably was to hold a review of all the troops he could muster; the very day on which he took up his residence at the Tuileries after the coup d’état of Brumaire, he reviewed on the Caroussel those battalions which later formed the nucleus of the Guard, while at Tilsit he contrived to arrange for two or three reviews every day. All the pageantry and pomp of war appealed irresistibly to this man to whom so little else appealed. To Napoleon a battalion marching past in column of double companies was worth all the vigour of Schiller and all the passion of Alfieri. Soldiers are a delight to most of us from our nursery days to our maturity; the sight of a long line of bayonets or the brilliance and glitter of the plumes and armour of the Household Cavalry can still make us catch our breath for an instant, but in few instances does this passion become overwhelming. When it becomes characteristic of a nation it usually portends calamity. Frederick William I. of Prussia suffered from it to an extent which has become historic, but in his case his passion for soldiers was so overwhelming that he did not risk losing any of his Potsdam Guards. Napoleon was different; he intended his army for fighting, and fight it did for twenty years, pomp and pageantry notwithstanding. Not the wildest calumniator has ever hinted that the reason why Napoleon did not send the Guard into action at Borodino was because he wanted to keep them to review in peace-time—though this explanation is sounder than some of those put forward. Napoleon indulged his passion whenever possible, but he kept it nevertheless strictly within bounds.

Napoleon had been a soldier from the age of twelve, so that one can easily explain his liking for military detail; he had been human from the day of his birth, but it is not so easy to find any other human traits or weaknesses. The pleasures of the table meant nothing to him; twenty minutes sufficed for dinner at the Tuileries, and he dined just as contentedly on horse-steak in Russia as he did on the elaborate dishes which delighted Marie Louise. So far as can be ascertained Napoleon was never seen drunk, or sea-sick, or dyspeptic. It would be almost with relief that we would read of his suffering from measles, had he ever done so. His freedom from ordinary weaknesses tends to throw the whole picture out of perspective. One can hardly be surprised that even so sensible a man as Thiers lost his head while telling of Napoleon’s exploits. There is only one human touch to which we can turn to gain the measure of the whole. Napoleon loved a lord.

We have already described how ardently Napoleon looked forward to his meeting with his Imperial bride, and the complacency with which he referred to her royal uncle and aunt his predecessors, Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. The same characteristic is noticeable in many of his actions. Perhaps it is going to extremes to describe his origination of the Legend of Honour as a piece of snobbery, but his other arrangements for the provision of a titled nobility are strongly indicative of this curious stray littleness of mind. No one reading his letters can doubt that he preferred speaking of Monsieur le Maréchal Prince d’Essling, Duc de Rivoli, Grand Aigle de la Légion d’Honneur to speaking of plain General Masséna. He delighted in seeing about him Grand Constables, Arch-Chancellors, Grand Chamberlains; it pleased him to walk midst Grand Dukes and Princesses; he preferred conversation with the not over-talented Queen of Prussia to any interview with Goethe. Characteristically, he once invited an actor to come and perform before a “Parterre of Kings.” It may perhaps be pleaded that his painstaking care in the regulation of precedence, and his minute examination of forms and ceremonies were due to his desire to have his Imperial arrangements perfect, but it may be pleaded with equal justice that he entered voluntarily into these arrangements. The Imperial dignity was not forced upon him; he lost as many adherents by his assumption of it as he gained. For all this, once Napoleon decided upon indulging his snobbery, he indulged in such a manner as to gain most profit by it. Just as his delight in military matters tended towards the improvement of his army, so his snobbery tended towards buttressing his throne. Napoleon took advantage of his own weaknesses just as he did of other people’s.

One searches in vain for other prominent characteristics. The selfishness so often attributed to him is not so much the selfishness of Napoleon as the selfishness of the Emperor. One cannot call selfish the young lieutenant who took upon himself the maintenance of a brother when his sole income was thirty pounds a year, nor the man who gave crowns and fiefs and fortunes to his friends, but the Emperor who pried jealously into the management of his subject kingdoms and took them back if he saw fit, the Emperor who refused to share his glory with his general, the Emperor who sacrificed thousands of lives in order to hold down Europe was selfish because he believed the Imperial power would suffer were he unselfish. Even the ambition with which he is usually credited does not appear on close examination to be very remarkable or extraordinary. Ambition is, after all, one of the commonest of human traits, and varies only in degree and not in occurrence. When Napoleon was a young man he wanted to “get on”; he “got on” partly through abundance of opportunity and partly through his extraordinary talent. If it be said that he succeeded through the force of his ambition, it can easily be countered that most of the men who have ever succeeded were ambitious. A quite plausible life of Napoleon might be written showing that he was entirely the reverse of ambitious, and that all the steps of his career towards power from the day of his receiving the command of the army of Italy to his invasion of Russia in 1812, were forced upon him. At the beginning of his career Napoleon had far less chance of gaining supreme power than had Hoche, or Pichegru, or Jourdan, or Moreau, but his rivals dropped out of the race through early deaths, sheer folly, or, perhaps in the case of Moreau, mere inertia. Napoleon is believed to have schemed to seize the reins of government as early as 1797, but half a dozen others, including even Bernadotte and Augereau, did the same. Napoleon was lucky, vigorous, and far more gifted than they, and it was into his hands that the ripened fruit dropped. From 1799 on, from the Consulate to the Consulate for life, from the Consulate for life to the Empire of the French, from the Empire of the French to the visionary Empire of the West, were steps which he could hardly have avoided taking in some form or other if he wished to retain any power at all. The attempt to enforce the Continental System undoubtedly led him further forward than was wise or than he desired. Had Bonaparte been a Washington, he might have retired after the peace of Amiens, but it is perfectly possible that even if a series of Washingtons had succeeded him, the last of them would have been beaten in a great battle some ten years later by the armies of an alliance of nations which had for some time back been oppressed and enslaved in increasing degree by the French. Undoubtedly this train of reasoning is forced and unsound in some respects, but it certainly gives a great deal of plausibility to the theory that Napoleon’s ambition was not so far-reaching and impossibly aspiring as it is sometimes carelessly said to have been. In addition, it is necessary to remember that his restless energy must occasionally have spurred him to further action while a lazier man would have remained tranquil. This is possibly an explanation of his suicidal plunge into Spanish affairs.

In like fashion the other indications of Napoleon’s character are faint and colourless. Women had no vast attraction for him; he appreciated them as a physical necessity, but that was all. Undoubtedly he ranked women in his mind along with exercise and medicine, as things without which men are liable to deteriorate. Wit and humour had very little meaning for him—as witness his distaste for Molière—and Art had even less. He ransacked Europe to fill the Louvre with masterpieces, but he himself did not enjoy them. He was careless of his ease, of his attire, of his comfort. When he fell from power, he did not seem to resent it very much. There is a story of his having attempted suicide after his abdication in 1814, but it is much to be doubted. The details seem far more in agreement with the symptoms of his mysterious illness, or of the malignant disease of which he died a few years later. He did not seem vastly depressed at Elba, or even at St. Helena. Comparable to this lack of depression is his hopefulness during the hopeless campaign of 1814. He stood to lose so much, and he lost so much, but neither the possibility nor the loss weighed upon him unbearably. Perhaps he was confident that more greatness awaited him in the future; perhaps he simply did not care. The furious rages in which Napoleon sometimes indulged seem to have been merely good acting; he himself admitted that he never allowed his rage to mount higher than his chin.