“Russian or French, it’s all the same,” cried Napoleon, furiously; “I want them all cared for.”
His temper was despotic; he could not brook opposition, nor tolerate independence. Hence he banished Madame de Staël, suppressed the tribunate which had the power of debate, and frowned upon voluntary movements of all kinds, whether clubs or schools. His treatment of Toussaint was atrocious, filling the honest biographer with anger, disgust, and shame: but, after all, Toussaint was a rebel, and the way of the rebel is hard. In his own eyes the insurgent, striving for national independence, is a hero: in the eyes of the world he is an incendiary, unless he whips his master and becomes free.
From the grave of Robert Emmett, Ireland can speak of England’s treatment of rebels: from Cuba comes a voice choked with blood, which vainly tries to do justice to Spain’s treatment of the rebel; and from Siberia, Hungary, Poland, Finland, Hindustan, Crete, Italy, South Africa, come awful reminders of the well-known fact,—the way of the rebel is hard. Toussaint L’Ouverture, regarded as a rebel, was cast into prison: Jefferson Davis, regarded as a rebel, was cast into prison: Davis, the white man, was put in irons and came near dying: Toussaint, the black man, was ironed, and died. In each case the motive was the same,—to degrade and to punish an alleged rebel.
Great has been the outcry made by the literary Scribes and Pharisees against Napoleon because of his cruelty to the hero of St. Domingo and to Andreas Hofer, the hero of the Tyrol; until these indignant people indict also the kings and cabinets who have slain their hundreds where Napoleon slew his dozens, we cannot feel much sympathy for the prosecution.
Relentlessly selfish in the pursuit of power, it will be admitted by those who impartially study his career that he used his power, not for personal and selfish pleasures, but for the future welfare of the peoples over whose destinies he presided. The laborious manner in which he worked out the revolutionary principle of lifting the despised Jew into full citizenship, will always be a striking illustration of the liberality of his statesmanship.
He loved to tour the country, to see with his own eyes, to hear with his own ears. He loved to meet the people face to face, to talk with them familiarly, to get at the real facts about everything. The man never lived who had such a passion for making things better. Harbors must be widened, deepened, made more secure. Trade routes must be improved, rivers linked to rivers, or rivers connected with seas. Mountains must be conquered by broad, easy-grade roads; and villages must be planted along the route for the convenience of the traveller. He tore out old buildings to make way for new ones,—larger, better, grander. Crooked streets—narrow, nasty, the homes of squalor, of crime, and of pestilence—he replaced by broad avenues and handsome buildings. Churches, schools, town-halls, arsenals, dockyards, canals, highways, bridges, fortifications, manufactories, harbor works, new industries, sprang up at his touch throughout the realms he ruled. Had he never been known as a warrior, his work as administrator and as a legislator would have made his name immortal. Had he never been heard of as a legislator, his work in Europe as a developer of material resources would have made it impossible for the world to forget him. The manufactories which he encouraged were but the beginnings of a mighty evolution which would have transferred to the Continent the vast profits England had so long reaped. At every seaport, on every canal, on all the highways, in every town from Venice to Brest and Cherbourg, the traveller of the present day sees the footprints of Napoleon the Great.
He rid Paris of the periodical nuisance of the Seine overflow, and along the river ran his magnificent embankments. At St. Helena he expressed a wonder that the Thames had never been thus controlled, and England afterward embanked her river as the great Emperor suggested.
His natural instinct was to make improvements. The first thing he did in Spain was to establish free-trade between her provinces, abolish feudal burdens, suppress one-third of the monasteries where “those lazy beasts of monks” lived in idleness at public expense, and to give the people the right to be heard in fixing taxes and making laws. The first thing the Bourbons did, on their return, was to restore all the abuses Napoleon had abolished.
In Italy, the first thing he did, after overturning the temporal power of the Pope, was to suppress the papal monopolies by which the Albani family had the sole right to manufacture pins, Andrea Novelli the exclusive privilege of selling oil for lamps, Alexandro Betti the monopoly of ferry boats, and so forth. To these benighted Romans he gave the Code Napoléon, trial by jury, home rule in local affairs, equality before the law, and relief from all feudal abuses.
The first thing the Pope did when in 1814 he was restored to temporal power was to abolish all things Napoleonic, and to reëstablish the hateful monopolies, feudal burdens, and papal customs.