Napoleon's qualities are so much adulterated in the gazettes, the pamphlets, the poems and even in the songs overrun with imperialism, that those qualities are completely unrecognisable. All the touching things ascribed to Bonaparte in the ana about the "prisoners," the "dead," the "soldiers," are idle trash to which the actions of his life give the lie.
The Grand-mère of my illustrious friend Béranger is only an admirable ballad: Bonaparte had nothing of the good fellow about him. Dominion personified, he was hard; that coldness formed the antidote to his fiery imagination; he found in himself no word, he found only a deed, and a deed ready to chafe at the smallest independence: a gnat that flew without his orders was a rebellious insect in his eyes.
It was not enough to lie to the ears, it was necessary to lie to the eyes: here, in an engraving, we see Bonaparte taking off his hat to the Austrian wounded; there, we have a little tourlourou[379] who prevents the Emperor from passing; further on, Napoleon touches the plague-stricken of Jaffa, and he never touched them; he crosses Mount St. Bernard on a spirited horse amid a whirl of snow-flakes, and it was the finest weather in the world.
Are they not now trying to transform the Emperor into a Roman of the early days of the Aventine, into a missionary of liberty, into a citizen who instituted slavery only for love of the opposite virtue? Draw your conclusions from two features of the great founder of equality: he ordered his brother Jerome's marriage with Miss Patterson[380] to be annulled, because the brother of Napoleon could ally himself only with the blood of Princes; later, after returning from the isle of Elba, he invested the new "democratic" constitution with a peerage and crowned it with the "Additional Act."
That Bonaparte, following up the successes of the Revolution, everywhere disseminated principles of independence; that his victories helped to relax the bonds between the peoples and the kings, and snatched those peoples from the power of the old customs and the ancient ideas; that, in this sense, he contributed to the social enfranchisement: these are facts which I do not pretend to contest; but that, of his own will, he laboured scientifically for the political and civil deliverance of the nations; that he established the narrowest despotism with the idea of giving to Europe and to France in particular the widest Constitution; that he was only a tribune disguised as a tyrant: all this is a supposition which I cannot possibly adopt.
Bonaparte, like the race of princes, desired nothing and sought nothing save power, attaining it, however, through liberty, because he made his first appearance on the world's stage in 1793. The Revolution, which was Napoleon's wet-nurse, did not long delay in appearing to him as an enemy; he never ceased beating her. The Emperor, for the rest, knew evil very well, when the evil did not come directly from the Emperor; for he was not destitute of moral sense. The sophism put forward concerning Bonaparte's love for liberty proves only one thing, the abuse which can be made of reason; nowadays it lends itself to everything. Is it not established that the Terror was a time of humanity? In fact, were they not demanding the abolition of the death-penalty while they were killing everybody? Have not great civilizers, as they are "called," always immolated men, and is it not therefore, as far as has been "proved," that Robespierre was the continuer of Jesus Christ?
Napoleon's popularity.
The Emperor meddled with everything; his intelligence never rested; he had a sort of perpetual agitation of ideas. In the impetuousness of his nature, instead of a free and continuous train, he advanced by leaps and bounds, he flung himself upon the universe and shook it; he would have none of it, of that universe, if he was obliged to wait for it: an incomprehensible being, who found the secret of debasing his most towering actions by despising them, and who raised his least elevated actions to his own level. Impatient of will, patient of character, incomplete and as though unfinished, Napoleon had gaps in his genius: his understanding resembled the sky of that other hemisphere under which he was to go to die, the sky whose stars are separated by empty spaces.
One asks one's self by what spell Bonaparte, so aristocratic, so hostile to the people, came to achieve the popularity which he enjoyed: for that forger of yokes has most certainly remained popular with a nation whose pretension was to raise altars to independence and equality; here is the solution of the enigma:
Daily experience makes us recognise that the French are instinctively drawn towards power; they do not love liberty; equality alone is their idol. Now equality and despotism have secret connections. In those two respects, Napoleon had his fount in the hearts of the French, militarily inclined towards dominion, democratically enamoured of the level. Once on the throne, he made the people sit down beside him: a proletarian king, he humbled the kings and nobles in his ante-chambers; he levelled the ranks, not by lowering but by raising them: the descending level would have charmed the plebeian envy more, the ascending level was more flattering to its pride. French vanity was puffed up also by the superiority which Bonaparte gave us over the rest of Europe; another cause of Napoleon's popularity has to do with the affliction of his last days. After his death, as men became better acquainted with what he had suffered at St. Helena, they began to be moved; they forgot his tyranny to remember that, after conquering our enemies, after subsequently drawing them into France, he had defended us against them; we imagine that he might save us to-day from the disgrace into which we have sunk: his fame was recalled to us by his misfortune; his glory profited by his adversity.