Napoleon: A Sketch of His Life, Character, Struggles, and Achievements

by Thomas E. Watson

“Let him” (Lowe) “send all my friends away, if he will; let him plant sentinels at the doors and windows, and give me nothing but bread and water: I care not. My soul is free. I am as independent as when I was at the head of six hundred thousand men; as free as when I gave laws to Europe!”

Mr. Taine with painstaking malevolence traces Napoleon back to Cæsar Borgia; but this granite formation of character was not Italian, it was Corsican. The spirit which here nerved the solitary captive to brave a world in arms was not that of his Italian father who bent the courtier’s knee to the conquerors of his country; it was that of his Corsican mother, whose firmness of character resisted all fears and all temptations. In Napoleon, Italy may have reached her highest type; but in him, also, Corsica saw the last and the greatest of the heroic race of Sampiero.

“The atmosphere of modern ideas stifles the old feudalists, for henceforth nothing can destroy or deface the grand principles of our revolution. These great truths can never cease to exist. Created in the French Tribune, cemented by the blood of battles, adorned by the laurels of victory, hailed by the acclamations of the people, they can never be turned backward. They live in Great Britain, illuminate America, they are nationalized in France. Behold the tripod from whence issues the light of the world! They will yet triumph. They will be the faith, the religion, the morality of all peoples, and this era will be connected with my name. For, after all, I kindled the torch and consecrated the principle, and now persecution makes me the Messiah of those principles. Friends and foes must acknowledge that of these principles I am the chief soldier, the grand representative. Thus, when I am in my grave, I shall still be, for the people, the polar star of their rights. My name will be the war-cry of their efforts.”

Scores of other quotations might be made to the same effect, and they go far to explain why modern liberalism regarded Napoleon as The Man. He grew to hate democracy? Yes. He crushed opposition to his will rigorously, pitilessly? Yes. He stifled free speech and smothered representative government? Yes. He was more despotic than any Bourbon? Yes. Then how dared he predict that his name would become the war-cry of the people in their struggle for civil rights?

Because he knew that posterity would see at work, within the body of his despotism, the spirit of democracy. He knew that with his system of civil and social equality, and the absolute privilege of every citizen, however humbly born, to rise to the loftiest positions, no real despotism could be possible; and that history would say so. When he, the Emperor, chosen by the people, stood up in his carriage on the streets of Paris and pointed out to his Austrian bride the window of the room in which he had lodged when he came up from Brienne,—a poor boy with his career to make,—his pride in pointing to that mile-post on the toilsome route of his promotion was that of all self-made men, was that of the man who scorns to win where he has not fought, was that of the robust conqueror who wants nothing for which he has not paid the price of manly effort.

It was the same spirit which flashed out of him when Metternich presented from the Emperor of Austria, in 1809, the proofs that he was descended from the nobility of Florence.

“I will have none of such tomfoolery. My patent of nobility dates from the battle of Montenotte!”

It was the same spirit which moved him to chide Duroc, his beloved Duroc, when that highest officer of the palace had been rude to Constant, the valet, Constant being in tears about it.

The same spirit was on him when he stopped to talk with poor Toby, the Malay slave of St. Helena, and to give him money; the same when he rebuked Madame Balcombe, who with angry voice ordered some heavily burdened slaves to give way to her, in a steep, narrow path,—“Respect the burden, Madame!”

Thought, feelings, deeds like these are not born in hearts barren of human sympathy, dead to the sense of fraternity, or alien to the sentiment which inspires the mystic to strive for the good of all.