His chief aim was to obtain universal dominion, and his inordinate love of glory made him conceive the chimera of a universal monarchy, of which he was to be the chief. Few have denied him to have been an able and daring commander, gifted with great military talents; and the duke of Wellington never hesitated in affirming, that of all the chiefs of armies in the world, the one in whose presence it was most hazardous to make a false movement was Napoleon[90].
“The triumph and the vanity,
The rapture of the strife,
The earthquake voice of victory,
To him the breath of life;
The sword, the sceptre and the sway,
That men seem’d born but to obey.”
It was against this man, and not against France, that Wellington uniformly declared he was leading his troops: “France,” said the Duke in a letter dated June 4th, 1815, “has no enemies, as far as I know: I am sure that she does not deserve to have any. We are the enemies of one man only, and of his partisans, of him who has misused his influence over the French army, to overthrow the throne of the king, in order to subjugate France, and then to bring back to all of us the days of misery which we thought were gone by.... Our state then ought not to be called one of war with France, but of war on the part of all Europe, comprising therein France herself, against Napoleon and against his army, whose bad conduct is the cause of all the evils which are going to happen, and which we all deplore[91].”
Lest our neighbours may think this view of Napoleon’s character drawn by English prejudice, and as not affording sufficient reasons for the determination of Wellington to aim solely at his destruction, and with a steadiness of resolve not to be turned aside till complete success attended the efforts of the allies, I beg to record the following character of Napoleon, and his iron rule over the French people. It will be observed that this character was drawn by the pen of Frenchmen, proclaimed by French authorities, and placarded by them on all the walls of Paris, whose inhabitants knew too well the facts on which the proclamation was founded. The general and municipal Council of Paris thus addressed the people, the year before the battle of Waterloo: