"Dare!"
That word contains the whole policy of our Revolution; they who make revolutions by halves only dig a grave.
Do Bonaparte's bulletins rise above that pride of speech?
Napoleon as writer.
As for the numerous volumes published under the title of Mémoires de Sainte-Hélène, Napoléon dans l'exil., etc., those documents, gathered from Bonaparte's mouth or dictated by him to different persons, contain a few fine passages on actions of war, a few remarkable appreciations of certain men; but, in the upshot, Napoleon is occupied only in making his apology, in justifying his past, in basing on commonplace ideas accomplished events and things of which he had never dreamt during the course of those events. In this compilation, in which pros and cons succeed one another, in which every opinion finds a favourable authority and a peremptory refutation, it is difficult to separate that which belongs to Napoleon from that which belongs to his secretaries. It is probable that he had a different version for each of them, in order that readers might choose according to their taste and, in the future, create for themselves Napoleons to their liking. He dictated his history as he wished to leave it; he was an author writing articles on his own work. Nothing therefore could be more absurd than to go into ecstasies over chronicles by different hands which are not, like Cæsar's Commentaries, a short work, springing from a great head, written by a superior writer; and yet those brief commentaries, Asinius Pollio[376] thought, were neither faithful nor exact. The Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène is good, allowing liberally for the candour and simplicity of the admiration.
One of the things that contributed most to render Napoleon hateful during his life was his inclination for debasing everything: in a fired city, he would couple decrees on the re-establishing of a few comedians with fiats which suppressed monarchs; a parody of the omnipotence of God, who rules the lot of the world and of an ant. With the fall of empires he mingled insults to women; he delighted in the humiliation of what he had overthrown; he calumniated and wounded particularly all that had dared to resist him. His arrogance was equal to his luck; the more he lowered others the greater he believed himself to appear. Jealous of his generals, he accused them of his own mistakes, for, as for himself, he was infallible. Despising all merits, he reproached them harshly with their errors. He would never have said, after the disaster of Ramillies, as Louis XIV.[377] said to the Maréchal de Villeroi[378]:
"Monsieur le maréchal, at our age one is not lucky."
A touching magnanimity of which Napoleon knew nothing. The century of Louis XIV. was made by Louis the Great: Bonaparte made his century.
The history of the Empire, changed by false traditions, will be yet further falsified by the state of society during the imperial Epoch. Any revolution written in the presence of the liberty of the press can allow the eye to probe to the bottom of facts, because each one reports them as he has seen them: the reign of Cromwell is known, because it was customary to say to the Protector what one thought of his acts and his person. In France, even under the Revolution, despite the inexorable censorship of the executioner, the truth came out; the triumphing faction was not always the same; it soon succumbed, and the faction which succeeded it taught you what its predecessor had hidden from you: there was liberty from one scaffold to the other, between the cutting off of two heads. But when Bonaparte seized upon the power, when thought was gagged, when one heard nothing but the voice of a despotism which spoke only to praise itself and allowed only itself to be spoken of, truth disappeared.