Joseph Bonaparte / Makers of History

by John S. C. Abbott

"Napoleon never doubted your good intentions. But he thought that you judged too favorably of your contemporaries. He was forced into war by the English, and into the dictatorship by the war. These few words are the history of the Empire. Napoleon incessantly said to me, 'When will peace arrive? Then only can I satisfy all, and show myself as I am.'

"The aristocracy of which you accuse him was only the mode of placing himself in harmony with Europe. But the old feudal aristocracy was never in his favor. The proof of this is that he was its victim, and that he expiated, at Saint Helena, the crime of having wished to employ all the institutions in favor of the people; and the European aristocracy contrived to turn against him even those very masses for whose benefit he was laboring. The French nation renders him justice; and the European masses will not be slow to say that Napoleon had ever in view the suffrage of posterity, whose verdict is always in favor of him who has only in view the happiness of his country."

On the 15th of February, 1832, Joseph wrote from Point Breeze to the Duke of Reichstadt as follows:

Letter to the Duke of Reichstadt.

"My dear Nephew,—The bearer of this letter will be the interpreter of my sentiments. He has passed several weeks in my retreat. They have been occupied with the souvenirs of your father, and of your future lot. I was born eighteen months before your father. We were brought up together. Nothing has ever diminished the warm affection which united us. At his death he entrusted to me the care of communicating to you his last wishes. But before my distance from you enabled me to fulfill that duty, his testament had been published in all the leading journals of Europe.

"When, in 1830, the house imposed upon France by foreigners was again expelled by the nation, I hastened to address to the Chamber of Deputies, and to his Imperial Majesty, your grandfather, the inclosed letters. But my distance from France still thwarted my wishes, and the younger branch of that same house was again imposed upon France by a factious minority. Innumerable calumnies, intended to alienate the nation from you, were scattered abroad with profusion. A chamber, controlled by the Government usurping the rights of the nation, proscribed us anew. But the voice of the people called you. Of that I have conclusive evidence.

"Let his Imperial Majesty consent to entrust you to my care; let him send me a passport that I may come to him and to you, I will quit my retreat to respond to his confidence, to yours, to the sentiment which commands me to spare no efforts to restore to the love of the French the son of the man whom I have loved the most of any one upon earth. My opinions are well known in France. They are in harmony with those of the nation. If you enter France with me and a tri-color scarf, you will be received there as the son of Napoleon.

"When you were born in Paris, the 20th of March, 1811, your father had become, through the love of the French people as well as through the obstinacy of the English oligarchy making war upon him, the most powerful prince in Europe. The English oligarchy foresaw the prosperity which France, governed in accordance with the liberal doctrines of the age, would attain if she had peace. That oligarchy feared the contagion of the example upon other states. Therefore it did not cease to employ the immense resources which the monopoly of the commerce of the world placed at its disposal to excite against Napoleon enemies at home and abroad, and to stifle, at its birth, the union of the peoples and the kings for the reform of the anti-social privileges of the oligarchy. It therefore provoked incessant war, and thus rendered France every day more powerful, through the victories she obtained under the direction of your father, whom it accused of the calamities inseparable from a war kindled by itself, and with the sole object of maintaining its unjust privileges.

"It was at the close of a strife incessantly renewed, excited by the Government of a nation sufficiently rich to pay the soldiers of the others, and sheltered by its insular position against all attempts against itself, that, after the triumphs of twenty years, your father succumbed beneath the united efforts of the Allies of England, who perceived too late their fatal errors.