We have now given a general glance at the career of the French Emperor, as exhibited to us in these Recollections. He strikingly showed, in all the details of his government, the characteristics of his own nature. Impetuous, daring, and contemptuous of the feelings of mankind, from the first hour of his public life, his government was, like himself, the model of fierceness, violence, and disregard of human laws. Whatever was to him an object of ambition, was instantly in his grasp; whatever he seized was made the instrument of a fresh seizure; and whatever he possessed he mastered in the fullest spirit of tyranny. He was to be supreme; the world was to be composed of his soldiery, his serfs, courtiers, and tools. The earth was to be only an incalculable population of French slaves. There was to be but one man free upon the globe, and that man Napoleon.
We find, in this romance of power, the romance of his education. It has been often said, that he was Oriental in all his habits. His plan of supremacy bore all the stamp of Orientalism—the solitary pomp, the inflexible will, the unshared power, and the inexorable revenge. The throne of the empire was as isolated as the seraglio. It was surrounded by all the strength of terror and craft, more formidable than battlements and bastions. Its interior was as mysterious as its exterior was magnificent; no man was suffered to approach it but as soldier or slave; its will was heard only by the roaring of cannon; the overthrow of a minister, the proclamation of a war, or the announcement of a dynasty crushed and a kingdom overrun, were the only notices to Europe of the doings within that central place of power.
But, with all the genius of Napoleon, he overlooked the true principles of supremacy. All power must be pyramidal to be secure. The base must not only be broad, but the gradations of the pile must be regular to the summit. With Napoleon the pyramid was inverted—it touched the earth but in one point; and the very magnitude of the mass resting upon his single fortune, exposed it to overthrow at the first change of circumstances.
Still, he was an extraordinary being. No man of Europe has played so memorable a part on the great theatre of national events for the last thousand years. The French Revolution had been the palpable work of Providence, for the punishment of a long career of kingly guilt, consummated by an unparalleled act of perfidy, the partition of Poland. The passions of men had been made the means of punishing the vices of government. When the cup was full, Napoleon was sent to force it upon the startled lips of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. The three conspirators were crushed in bloody encounters—the capitals of the three were captured—the provinces of the three were plundered—and the military pride of the three was humiliated by contemptuous and bitter conditions of peace.
But, when the destined work was done, the means were required no more. When the victims were broken on the wheel, the wheel and the executioner were alike hurried from the sight of man. The empire of France was extinguished by the same sovereign law which had permitted its existence. The man who had guided the empire in its track of devastation—the soul of all its strength, of its ambition, and its evil—was swept away. And as if for the final moral of human arrogance, France was subjected to a deeper humiliation than had been known in the annals of national reverses since the fall of Rome; and the ruler of France was plunged into a depth of defeat, a bitterness of degradation, an irreparable ruin, of which the civilized world possesses no example. His army destroyed in Russia by the hand of Him who rules the storm—the last forces of his empire massacred in Belgium—his crown struck off by the British sword—his liberty fettered by British chains—the remnant of his years worn away in a British dungeon, and his whole dynasty flung along with him into the political tomb, were only the incidents of the great judicial process of our age. The world has been suffered to return to peace; while the sepulchre of this man of boundless but brief grandeur has been suffered to stand in the midst of that nation which most requires the great lesson—that ambition always pays for its splendour by its calamities; that the strength of a nation is in the justice of its councils; and that he "who uses the sword shall perish by the sword!"
Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Peru. Reiseskizzen aus den Jahren 1838-1842. Von J. J. von Tschudi. St Gall: 1846.
[2] Untersuchungen über die Fauna Peruana. St Gall: 1846.
[3] An Historical and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years' Residence in South America. Containing Travels in Arauco, Chili, Peru, and Columbia; with an account of the Revolution, its rise, progress, and results; by W. B. Stevenson. London: 1825.