‘Here the natural reflection will obtrude itself—what might not this extraordinary being have effected for the happiness of mankind, and for his own everlasting fame and grandeur, had he used but a moiety of the force, or perseverance, in generous efforts to relieve the oppressed which he wasted in rendering himself the monopolist and patron of oppression! But he had left himself no resource. He had extinguished liberty in France, and had no hold upon his subjects, but their love of military glory. Conquest, therefore, succeeded to conquest, until nothing capable of subjugation was left to be subdued. Insolence, and rapacity, in the victor, produced, among the enslaved nations, impatience of their misery, and a thirst for vengeance. Injustice undermined itself, and Buonaparte, with his unseasoned empire, fell together, the pageant of a day.
‘His military administration was marked by strict and impartial justice. He had the art, in an eminent degree, of inciting the emulation, and gaining the affections of his troops. He was steady and faithful in his friendships, and not vindictive, on occasions where it was his power to be so with impunity.
Of the deceased Emperor’s intellectual, and characteristic, ascendency over men, all the French, and some of the other nations besides the French, who had an opportunity of approaching him, can bear witness. He seems to have possessed the talent, not merely of command, but, when he pleased, of conciliation and persuasion. With regard to his religious sentiments, they were, perhaps, of the same standard as those of other Frenchmen starting into manhood at a time when Infidel writings had so domineered over the popular mind, that revealed religion was become a public laughing stock, and in a country where the pure Christian faith was perplexed with subtilties, overloaded with mummeries, and scandalized and discountenanced by a general looseness of morals. Upon the whole, Buonaparte will go down to posterity as a man, who, having more good at his disposal than any other potentate of any former age, had actually applied his immense means to the production of a greater share of mischief and misery to his fellow creatures—one who, on the basis of French liberty, might have founded that of every other State in Europe—but who carried on a series of aggressions against foreign States to divert the minds of his own subjects from the sense of their domestic slavery; thus imposing on foreign nations a necessity for arming to shake off his yoke, and affording to foreign despots a pretext for following his example.
‘The sensation produced by the death of Buonaparte will be a good deal confined, in this country, to its effects as a partial relief to our finances, the expense of his custody at St. Helena being little short of 400,000l. per annum. In France, the sentiment will be more deep and complex, and, perhaps, not altogether easy to define. The practical consequence of such an event may be remotely guessed at by those who have had occasion to watch, in other Governments, the difference between a living and an extinct Pretender. A pretext for suspicion and severity in the administration of affairs may be taken away by a Pretender’s death; but then, a motive to moderation—a terror, now and then salutary, of popular feelings being excited in the Pretender’s favour by misgovernment—is, at the same time, removed from the minds of reigning Princes. Buonaparte’s son still lives, it is true; but how far he may ever become an object of interest with any great party of the French nation, is a point on which we will not speculate.’
The last individual memorial I can find of Napoleon, in a popular form, was published by Hone in May 1821. It is a black-edged sheet, having, as heading, profile portraits of Napoleon, Maria Louisa, and the King of Rome, and down the sides four full-length portraits of Napoleon. It is called:—
Memorial
of
NAPOLÉON
Born 15 Aug. 1769. Died 5 May 1821.He put his foot on the neck of Kings, who would have put their yokes upon the necks of the People: he scattered before him with fiery execution, millions of hired slaves, who came at the bidding of their Masters to deny the right of others to be free. The monument of greatness and of Glory he erected, was raised on ground forfeited again and again to humanity—it reared its majestic front on the ruins of the shattered hopes and broken faith of the common enemies of mankind. If he could not secure the freedom, peace, and happiness of his country, he made her a terror to those who by sowing civil dissension, and exciting foreign wars, would not let her enjoy those blessings. They who had trampled upon Liberty could not at least triumph in her shame and her despair, but themselves became objects of pity and derision. Their determination to persist in extremity of wrong, only brought on themselves repeated defeat, disaster, and dismay: the accumulated aggressions their infuriated pride and disappointed malice meditated against others, returned in just and aggravated punishment upon themselves: they heaped coals of fire upon their own heads: they drank deep and long, in gall and bitterness, of the poisoned chalice they had prepared for others: the destruction with which they had threatened a people daring to call itself free, hung suspended over their heads, like a precipice, ready to fall upon and crush them. ‘Awhile they stood abashed,’ abstracted from their evil purposes, and felt how awful Freedom is, its power how dreadful. Shrunk from the boasted pomp of royal state into their littleness as men, defeated of their revenge, baulked of their prey, their schemes stripped of their bloated pride, and with nothing left but the deformity of their malice, not daring to utter a syllable or move a finger, the lords of the earth, who had looked upon men as of an inferior species, born for their use, and devoted to be their slaves, turned an imploring eye to the People, and with coward hearts and hollow tongues invoked the Name of Liberty, thus to get the people once more within their unhallowed grip, and to stifle the name of Liberty for ever.
He withstood the inroads of Legitimacy, this new Jaggernaut, this foul Blatant Beast, as it strode forward to its prey over the bodies and minds of a whole People, and put a ring in its nostrils, breathing flame and blood, and led it in triumph, and played with its crowns and sceptres, and wore them in its stead, and tamed its crested pride, and made it a laughing stock and a mockery to the nations. He, one man, did this, and as long as he did this (how or for what end, is nothing to the magnitude of this mighty question) he saved the human race from the last ignominy, and that foul stain that had been so long intended, and was at last, in an evil hour, and by evil hands, inflicted on it.
If Napoleon was a conqueror, he conquered the Grand Conspiracy of Kings against the abstract right of the Human Race to be free. If he was ambitious, his greatness was not founded on the unconditional, avowed surrender of the rights of human nature. But, with him, the state of Man rose exalted too. If he was arbitrary and a tyrant, first, France as a country was in a state of military blockade, on garrison duty, and not to be defended by mere paper bullets of the brain; secondly, but chief, he was not, nor could he become, a tyrant by ‘right divine.’ Tyranny in him was not ‘sacred’: it was not eternal: it was not instinctively bound in league of amity with other tyrannies: it was not sanctioned by all ‘the laws of religion and Morality.’
Hazlitt.
Disgusting crew! who would not gladly fly
To open, downright, boldfac’d tyranny,
To honest guilt that dares do all but lie,
From the false juggling craft of men like these,
Their canting crimes, and varnish’d villanies;
These Holy Leaguers, who then loudest boast
Of faith and honour when they’ve stain’d them most;
From whose affection men should shrink as loath
As from their hate, for they’ll be fleec’d by both;
Who, even while plund’ring, forge Religion’s name
To frank their spoil, and, without fear or shame,
Call down the Holy Trinity to bless
Partition leagues, and deeds of devilishness!
Moore.
Even his old enemy, George Cruikshank, whose peculiarly impetuous temper had found a free vent in caricaturing Napoleon, left off doing so when he was in safe keeping, and only designed (in a publication called the ‘Omnibus’) a ‘Monument to Napoleon’ when he died. In a note to this design he says, ‘As for me, who have skeletonised him prematurely, paring down the prodigy even to his hat and boots, I have but “carried out” a principle adopted almost in my boyhood, for I can scarcely remember the time when I did not take some patriotic pleasure in persecuting the great enemy of England. Had he been less than that, I should have felt compunction for my cruelties; having tracked him through snow and through fire, by flood and by field, insulting, degrading, and deriding him everywhere, and putting him to several humiliating deaths. All that time, however, he went on “overing” the Pyramids and the Alps, as boys “over” posts, and playing at leapfrog with the sovereigns of Europe, so as to kick a crown off at every spring he made—together with many crowns, and sovereigns, into my coffers. Deep, most deep, in a personal view of matters, are my obligations to the agitator—but what a debt the country owes to him!’
