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

by Thomas E. Watson

Without England, the coalitions against republican France would have had trifling results. It was England which furnished inexhaustible supplies of money; England which scoured the ocean with her fleets and maintained the blockade.

There had been a time when the French Revolution was not unpopular in Great Britain. This was when the reform movement was under the control of leaders who proclaimed their purpose to be to model the monarchy in France upon that of England. So long as professions of this sort were made, there was nothing to awaken distrust in staid, conservative England. Even aristocracy loves a fettered king. But when more radical men wrested leadership from the constitutionals, and boldly declared that the work of reform must strike deeper, must destroy feudalism root and branch, must consign a corpulent Church to the poverty whose beauties it preached, the lords and the bishops of Great Britain realized that the time had come when they must legislate, preach, pray, and fight against inovations which, if successful in France, would inevitably cross the narrow Channel.

All the machinery of repression was put to work. Books were written against the Revolution, and paid for by pensions drawn from the common treasury. Sermons were preached against the Revolution, and paid for in salaries drawn from the State funds. Parliament was set in motion to enact rigorously oppressive laws, and courts were set in motion to enforce the statutes. The political system in England might be ever so bad, but the people should not discuss it. Public meetings became criminal; public reading rooms, unlicensed, were criminal. By the plain letter of the law of Christian England, if any citizen opened his house or room “for the purpose of reading books, or pamphlets, or newspapers,” such citizen became a criminal and such house “a disorderly house.” Before the citizen could permit others to use his books for pay, he must secure the approval and the license of bigoted Tory officials. No public meeting at all could be held unless a notice of such meeting signed by a householder, and stating the object of the meeting, should be inserted in a newspaper at least five days previous to the meeting. And even then the Tory justice of the peace was empowered to break up the meeting and imprison the persons attending it, if he thought the language held by the speaker of the meeting was calculated to bring the King or the government into contempt. Not even in the open fields could any lecture, speech, or debate be had without a license from a Tory official.

The government spy, the paid informer, went abroad, searching, listening, reporting, persecuting, and prosecuting. No privacy was sacred, no individual rights were respected, terrorism became a system. Paine’s Rights of Man threw the upper classes into convulsions; his Common Sense became a hideous nightmare. Men were arrested like felons, tried like felons, punished like felons for reading pamphlets and books which are now such commonplace exponents of democracy that they are well-nigh forgotten. It was a time of misrule, of class legislation, of misery among the masses. It was a time when the laborer had almost no rights, almost no opportunities, almost no inducement to live, beyond the animal instinct which preserves the brute. It was a time when the landlord was almost absolute master of land and man; when the nobleman controlled the King, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. It was a time when a duke might send half a dozen of his retainers to take seats in Parliament, or when he might advertise the seats for sale and knock them down to the highest bidder. It was a time when a close corporation of hereditary aristocrats controlled England like a private estate, taxed her people, dictated her laws, ruled her domestic and foreign policies, and made war or peace according to their own good pleasure. It was a time when it might have been said of most English towns as the town-crier reported to his Tory masters in reference to the village of Bolton—that he had diligently searched the place and had found in it neither The Rights of Man nor Common Sense.

There was one class which shared with the nobles the control of English national policies, and this was that of the great merchants and manufacturers. The exporter, The Prince of Trade, was a power behind the throne, and in foreign affairs his selfish greed dominated England’s policy.

This governing class, as Napoleon said, looked upon the public, the people, as a milch cow; the only interest which they had in the cow was that it should not go dry. Offices, dignities, salaries, were handed down from sire to son. By hereditary right the government, its purse and its sword, belonged to these noble creatures whose merit frequently consisted solely in being the sons of their sires. To fill the ships which fought for the supremacy of this oligarchy, press-gangs prowled about the streets on the hunt for victims. Poor men, common laborers, and people of the lowlier sort were pounced upon by these press gangs, and forcibly carried off to that “hell on earth,” a British man-of-war of a century ago. One instance is recorded of a groom coming from the church where he had just been married, and who was snatched from the arms of his frantic bride and borne off—to return after many years to seek for a wife long since dead, in a neighborhood where he had long been forgotten.

In the army and in the fleet soldiers and sailors were lashed like dogs to keep them under; and it was no uncommon thing for the victims to die from the effects of the brutal beating.

Considering all these things, the reader will understand why England made such determined war upon republican France. Against that country she launched armies and fleets, bribed kings and ministers, subsidized coalitions, straining every nerve year in and year out to put the Bourbons back on the throne, and to stay the advance of democracy. She temporarily succeeded. Her selfish King, nobles, and clericals held their grip, and postponed the day of reform. But the delay was dearly bought. The statesmanship of Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh, and Burke strewed Europe with dead men, and loaded nations with appalling debts. Upon land and sea, in almost every clime, men of almost every race were armed, enraged, and set to killing each other in order that the same few might continue to milk the cow.

In forming an opinion about Napoleon, it must be remembered that when he first came upon the scene he found these conditions already in existence,—Europe in league against republican France. With the creation of those conditions he had had nothing to do. Not his was the beginning of the Revolution; not his the execution of Louis XVI.; not his the quarrel with England. If Great Britain and her allies afterward concentrated all their abuse, hatred, and hostility upon him, it was because he had become France; he had become, as Pitt himself said, “the child and champion of democracy”; he had become as Toryism throughout the world said, the “embodiment of the French Revolution.”

This is the great basic truth of Napoleon’s relations with Europe; and if we overlook it, we utterly fail to understand his career. In an evil hour for France, as well as for him, the allied kings succeeded in making the French forget her past. It was not till the Bourbons had returned to France, to Spain, to Italy; it was not till feudalism had returned to Germany with its privilege, its abuses, its stick for the soldier, its rack and wheel for the civilian; it was not till Metternich and his Holy Alliance had smashed with iron heel every struggle for popular rights on the Continent; it was not till Napoleon, dead at St. Helena, was remembered in vivid contrast to the soulless despots who succeeded him, that liberalism, not only in France, but throughout the world, realized how exceeding great had been the folly of the French when they allowed the kings to divorce the cause of Napoleon from that of the French people.