A true appreciation.
Our sovereign's illustriousness cost us merely two or three hundred thousand men a year; we paid for it with merely three millions of our soldiers; our fellow-citizens bought it merely at the cost of their sufferings and their liberties during fifteen years: can such trifles count? Are the generations that have come after us not resplendent? So much the worse for those who have disappeared! The calamities under the Republic served for the safety of all; our misfortunes under the Empire did much more: they deified Bonaparte! That is enough for us.
That is not enough for me: I will not stoop so low as to hide my nation behind Bonaparte; he did not make France: France made him. No talent, no superiority will ever bring me to consent to the power which can, with one word, deprive me of my independence, my home, my friends: if I do not say of my fortune and my honour, it is because one's fortune does not appear to me to be worth the trouble of defending it; as for honour, it escapes tyranny: it is the soul of the martyrs; bonds encompass and do not enchain it; it pierces the vault of prisons and carries the whole man away with it.
The wrong which true philosophy will never forgive Bonaparte is that he accustomed society to passive obedience, thrust back humanity towards the times of moral degradation, and perhaps corrupted characters in such a way that it would be impossible to say when men's hearts will begin to throb with generous sentiments. The weakness in which we are plunged as regards Europe, our actual abasement are the result of the Napoleonic slavery: all that remains to us is the faculty to bear the yoke. Bonaparte unsettled even the future: 'twould not surprise me if, in the discomfort of our impotence, we were seen to grow smaller, to barricade ourselves against Europe instead of going to seek it out, to give up our freedom within to deliver ourselves from an illusory terror without, to lose ourselves in ignoble provident cares, contrary to our genius and to the fourteen centuries which compose our national manners. The despotism which Bonaparte left in the air will descend upon us in the shape of fortresses.
The fashion nowadays is to greet liberty with a sardonic smile, to look upon it as a piece of old lumber, fallen into disuse with honour. I am not in the fashion: I think that there is nothing in the world without liberty; it gives a price to life; were I to remain the last to defend it, I would never cease to proclaim its rights. To attack Napoleon in the name of things that are past, to assail him with ideas that are dead is to prepare fresh triumphs for him. He is to be fought only with something greater than himself, liberty: he was guilty towards it and consequently towards the human race.
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Vain words! Better than any do I feel their uselessness. Henceforth any observation, however moderate it may be, is reputed profane: it needs courage to dare brave the cries of the vulgar, not to be afraid of being treated as a narrow intelligence, incapable of understanding and feeling the genius of Napoleon, for the sole reason that, in the midst of the lively and real admiration which one professes for him, one is nevertheless not able to worship all his imperfections. The world belongs to Bonaparte: that of which the ravisher was unable to complete the conquest, his fame usurps; living he missed the world, dead he possesses it. It is vain for you to protest: the generations pass by without listening to you. Antiquity makes the son of Priam say to the shade:
"Judge not Hector from his little tomb; the Iliad, Homer, the Greeks in flight, see there my sepulchre: I am buried under all those great deeds."
The Napoleonic legend.
Bonaparte is no longer the real Bonaparte, but a legendary figure put together from the vagaries of the poet, the talk of the soldier and the tales of the people; it is the Charlemagne and the Alexander of the idylls of the middle ages that we behold to-day. That fantastic hero will remain the real personage; the other portraits will disappear. Bonaparte is so strongly connected with absolute dominion that, after undergoing the despotism of his person, we have to undergo the despotism of his memory. This latter despotism is more overbearing than the former; for, though men fought against Napoleon when he was on the throne, there is an universal agreement to accept the irons which he flings to us now that he is dead. He is an obstacle to future events: how could a power issuing from the camps establish itself after him? Has he not killed all military glory by surpassing it? How could a free government come into being, when he has corrupted the principles of all liberty in men's hearts? No legitimate power is now able to drive the usurping spectre from the mind of man: the soldier and the citizen, the Republican and the Monarchist, the rich and the poor alike place busts and portraits of Napoleon in their homes, in their palaces or in their cottages; the former conquered are in agreement with the former conquerors; one cannot take a step in Italy without coming across him; one cannot enter Germany without meeting him, for in that country the young generation which rejected him is past. Generally, the centuries sit down before the portrait of a great man, they finish it by means of a long and successive work. This time, the human race has declined to wait: perhaps it was in too great a hurry to stump a crayon drawing. It is time to place the completed side of the idol in juxtaposition with the defective side.