CHAPTER XII.
It is strange to read that the armies went on fighting battles automatically, even while there was no central head to direct them. While the ghastly scenes were enacting in Paris, and while Josephine de Beauharnais was at the Conciergerie listening with blanched face to the call of her husband's name on the death roll for the day, a young lieutenant of artillery, only twenty-four years old, was at Toulon, winning his first military honors. He would have been thought a strange prophet who had said that in less than ten years the young Corsican lieutenant would be Emperor, and the prisoner at the Conciergerie Empress of the French! Nor did M. de Beauharnais, as he rode to execution, dream that forty-five years later his grandson would over the same stones be borne to his coronation.
In the anarchy which prevailed after the Revolution, the young hero of Toulon was called upon to quell a riot in Paris. The people realized they had met a master. For twenty-five years from that day, the history of France, and indeed of Europe, was that of one man, Napoleon Bonaparte. Commander-in-chief of the Army, then First Consul of the Republic, then Emperor—the steps in his ascent were as rapid and as bewildering as the movements in one of his own campaigns. France, groping about helplessly among the wreckage of the past, believed what she most desired was liberty and self-government.
This Italian, who was a French citizen even only by merest accident, knew her better than she did herself, and that what she really wanted was a fresh mantle of glory to cover her humiliation, and—a master.
Leading a broken, unpaid, half-clothed army into Italy, he electrified France and all Europe. Before the world had really found out who he was, and whence he had come, he had conquered all of Northern Italy, part of Austria and Belgium, had created a Cisalpine Republic out of the fragments, and was making treaties and dictating terms to kings and princes.
France, discredited and almost disgraced among the monarchies of Europe, found herself suddenly feared and glorious. Napoleon had captured the most imaginative and military people in Europe. The rest of the way was easy. Prudent, discreet, knowing when to wait, and when to come down like an avalanche, this marvellous man held France in his hands, and placed Europe under his feet.
The people which had exerted such superhuman effort for freedom were held by a hand more despotic than Richelieu's, more destructive to popular freedom than that of Louis XIV.; and the more absolute his rule, the more overpowering his authority, the better pleased they seemed to be.
But, was there not equal opportunity for every man in the Empire? Every soldier's knapsack, might it not hold a Marshal's baton? Was not the Emperor himself a living illustration of what a man from the people might become? And then what did it mean to Frenchmen to be suddenly lifted to dazzling ascendancy in Europe? Who would not willingly serve a master who could bring Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanoff, Bourbon, crouching at his feet—who could tear down states, and set them up, and if an extra throne were needed for a retainer, could carve a new state from territory of friend and foe alike, and place a diadem upon every head in his domestic or military household? It was the most stupendous display of personal power ever beheld, England alone standing upright in his presence, and in the end accomplishing his ruin.
When Austria with a reluctant shudder bestowed her princess upon the invincible parvenu, and when France with regretful pity saw the adored Josephine set aside for that disdainful royal maiden, Marie Louise, at that moment Napoleon passed the meridian of his greatness.