He was able neither to compute the days nor to foresee the effect of the climatic changes, which every one at Moscow computed and foresaw. See above what I have said of the Continental Blockade and the Confederation of the Rhine[375]: the first, a gigantic conception, but a questionable act; the second, an important work, but spoilt in the execution by the camp instinct and the fiscal spirit Napoleon inherited the old French monarchy as the centuries and an uninterrupted succession of great men had made it, as the majesty of Louis XIV. and the alliances of Louis XV. had left it, as the Republic had enlarged it. He seated himself on that magnificent pedestal, stretched out his arms, laid hold of the peoples, and gathered them around him; but he lost Europe with as much suddenness as he had taken it; he twice brought the Allies to Paris, notwithstanding the marvels of his military intelligence. He had the world under his feet, and all he got from it was a prison for himself, exile for his family, the loss of all his conquests and of a portion of the old French soil.
Where Napoleon failed.
Here is history proved by facts and deniable by none. Whence arose the faults which I have just pointed out, followed by so quick and so fatal a catastrophe? They arose from Bonaparte's imperfectness as a politician.
In his alliances, he enchained the governments only with concessions of territory, of which he soon altered the boundaries, constantly displaying the reservation to take back what he had given, ever making the oppressor felt; in his invasions, he reorganized nothing, Italy excepted. Instead of stopping at every step to raise up again, under another shape, what he had overthrown, he did not discontinue his movement of progression among ruins: he went so fast that he scarce had the time to breathe where he passed through. If, by a sort of Treaty of Westphalia, he had settled and assured the existence of the States in Germany, in Prussia, in Poland, at his first retrograde march he would have leant his back against contented populations and have found shelters. But his poetic edifice of victories, lacking a base and suspended in mid-air only by his genius, fell when his genius came to retire. The Macedonian founded empires in his course: Bonaparte, in his course, knew only how to destroy them; his sole aim was to be, in his own person, the master of the globe, without troubling his head about the means of preserving it.
Men have tried to make of Bonaparte a perfect being, a type of sentiment, of delicacy, of morality and of justice, a writer like Cæsar and Thucydides, an orator and an historian like Demosthenes and Tacitus. Napoleon's public speeches, his phrases in the tent or the council-chamber are so much the less inspired with the breath of prophecy in that what they foretell by way of catastrophes has not been accomplished, while the Isaias of the sword has himself disappeared: writings on the wall which pursue States, without catching and destroying them, remain puerile, instead of being sublime. Bonaparte was truly Destiny during sixteen years: Destiny is mute, and Bonaparte ought to have been so. Bonaparte was not Cæsar; his education was neither learned nor select; half a foreigner, he was ignorant of the first words of our language: what mattered, after all, that his speech was faulty? He gave the pass-word to the universe. His bulletins have the eloquence of victory. Sometimes, in the intoxication of success, they made a show of drafting them on a drum-head; from amid the most mournful accents arose fatal bursts of laughter. I have read with attention all that Bonaparte has written: the early manuscripts of his childhood, his novels; next, his letters to Buttafuoco, the Souper de Beaucaire, his private letters to Joséphine; the five volumes of his speeches, his orders and his bulletins, his dispatches left unpublished and spoilt by the editing in M. de Talleyrand's offices. I know something of these matters; I have found scarcely any thoughts resembling the great islander's nature, except in a scrap of autograph left behind at Elba:
"My heart denies itself to common joys as to ordinary pain."
"Not having given myself life, I shall not rob myself of it, so long as it will have me."
"My evil genius appeared to me and foretold my end, which I found at Leipzig."
"I have laid the terrible spirit of innovation which was overrunning the world."
That most certainly is genuine Bonaparte.
If the bulletins, the dispatches, the allocutions, the proclamations of Bonaparte are distinguished for energy, this energy did not belong to him in his own right: it was of his time, it came from the revolutionary inspiration which grew weaker in Bonaparte, because he marched counter to that inspiration. Danton said:
"The metal is boiling over; if you do not watch the furnace, you will all be scalded."
Saint-Just said: