"Kill'd his physician, and the fee bestow'd
Upon the foul disease."
This was the more injurious, as Napoleon's knowledge of the politics, interests, and character of foreign courts was, excepting in the case of Italy, exceedingly imperfect. The peace of Amiens might have remained uninterrupted, and the essential good understanding betwixt France and Sweden need never have been broken, if Napoleon could, or would, have understood the free constitution of England, which permits every man to print or publish what he may choose; or if he could have been convinced that the institutions of Sweden did not permit their government to place their fleets and armies at the disposal of a foreign power, or to sink the ancient kingdom of the Goths into a secondary and vassal government.
Self-love, so sensitive as that of Napoleon, shunned especially the touch of ridicule. The gibes of the English papers, the caricatures of the London print-shops, were the petty stings which instigated, in a great measure, the breach of the peace of Amiens. The laughter-loving Frenchmen were interdicted the use of satire, which, all-licensed during the times of the republic, had, even under the monarchy, been only punished with a short and easy confinement in the Bastile. During the time of the consulate, Napoleon was informed that a comic opera, something on the plan of the English farce of High Life Below Stairs, had been composed by Monsieur Dupaty, and brought forward on the stage, and that, in this audacious performance, three valets mimicked the manners, and even the dress of the three Consuls, and especially his own. He ordered that the actors should be exposed at the Grève, in the dresses they had dared to assume, which should be there stripped from their backs by the executioner; and he commanded that the author should be sent to St. Domingo, and placed, as a person under requisition, at the disposal of the commander-in-chief. The sentence was not executed, for the offence had not existed, at least to the extent alleged;[294] but the intention shows Napoleon's ideas of the liberty of the stage, and intimates what would have been the fate of the author of the Beggar's Opera, had he written for the French Opera Comique.
But no light, which reason or information could supply, was able to guide the intensity of a selfish ambition, which made Napoleon desire that the whole administration of the whole world should not only remotely, but even directly and immediately, depend on his own pleasure. When he distributed kingdoms to his brothers, it was under the express understanding that they were to follow in every thing the course of politics which he should dictate; and after all, he seemed only to create dependent states for the purpose of resuming them. The oppressions, which, in the name of France, he imposed upon Holland, were the direct, and, in all probability, the calculated means of dethroning his brother Louis; and he had thoughts of removing Joseph from Spain, when he saw of what a fair and goodly realm he had pronounced him king. In his wild and insatiable extravagance of administering in person the government of every realm which he conquered, he brought his powerful mind to the level of that of the spoiled child, who will not be satisfied without holding in its own hand whatever has caught its eye. The system, grounded on ambition so inordinate, carried with it in its excess the principles of its own ruin. The runner who will never stop for repose must at last fall down with fatigue. Had Napoleon succeeded both in Spain and Russia, he would not have rested, until he had found elsewhere the disasters of Baylen and of Moscow.
The consequences of the unjustifiable aggressions of the French Emperor were an unlimited extent of slaughter, fire, and human misery, all arising from the ambition of one man, who, never giving the least sign of having repented the unbounded mischief, seemed, on the contrary, to justify and take pride in the ravage which he had occasioned. This ambition, equally insatiable and incurable, justified Europe in securing his person, as if it had been that of a lunatic, whose misguided rage was not directed against an individual, but against the civilized world; which, wellnigh overcome by him, and escaping with difficulty, had a natural right to be guaranteed against repetition of the frantic exploits of a being who seemed guided by more than human passion, and capable of employing in execution of his purpose more than human strength.
The same egotism, the same spirit of self-deception, which marked Napoleon during his long and awful career of success, followed him into adversity. He framed apologies for the use of his little company of followers, as he had formerly manufactured bulletins for the Great Nation. Those to whom these excuses were addressed, Las Cases and the other gentlemen of Napoleon's suite, being too much devoted to him, and too generous to dispute, after his fall, doctrines which it would have been dangerous to controvert during his power, received whatever he said as truths delivered by a prophet, and set down doubtless to the score of inspiration what could by no effort be reconciled to truth. The horrid evils which afflicted Europe during the years of his success, were represented to others, and perhaps to his own mind, as consequences which the Emperor neither wished nor contemplated, but which were necessarily and unalterably attached to the execution of the great plans which the Man of Destiny had been called upon earth to perform, resembling in so far the lurid and fear-inspiring train pursuing the rapid course of a brilliant comet, which the laws of the universe have projected through the pathless firmament.
Some crimes he committed of a different character, which seem to have sprung, not like the general evils of war, from the execution of great and calculated plans of a political or military kind, but must have had their source in a temper naturally passionate and vindictive. The Duc d'Enghien's murder was at the head of this list; a gratuitous act of treachery and cruelty, which, being undeniable, led Napoleon to be believed capable of other crimes of a secret and bloody character—of the murder of Pichegru and of Wright—of the spiriting away of Mr. Windham, who was never afterwards heard of—and of other actions of similar atrocity. We pause before charging him with any of those which have not been distinctly proved. For while it is certain that he had a love of personal vengeance—proper, it is said, to his country—it is equally evident, that, vehement by temperament, he was lenient and calm by policy; and that, if he had indulged the former disposition, the security with which he might have done so, together with the ready agency of his fatal police, would have made his rage resemble that of one of the Roman emperors. He was made sensible, too late, of the general odium drawn upon him by the murder of the Duc d'Enghien, and does not seem to have been disposed to incur farther risks of popular hatred in prosecution of his individual resentment. The records of his police, however, and the persecutions experienced by those whom Napoleon considered as his personal enemies, show that, by starts at least, nature resumed her bent, and that he, upon whom there was no restraint, save his respect for public opinion, gave way occasionally to the temptation of avenging his private injuries. He remarked it as a weakness in the character of his favourite Cæsar, that he suffered his enemies to remain in possession of the power to injure him; and Antommarchi, the reporter of the observation, admitted, that when he looked on the person before him, he could not but acknowledge that he was unlikely to fall into such an error.[295]
When Napoleon laid aside reserve, and spoke what were probably his true sentiments, he endeavoured to justify those acts of his government which transgressed the rules of justice and morality, by political necessity, and reasons of state; or, in other words, by the pressure of his own interest. This, however, was a plea, the full benefit of which he reserved to vindicate his own actions, never permitting it to be used by any other sovereign. He considered himself privileged in transgressing the law of nations, when his interests required it; but pleaded as warmly upon the validity of public law, when alleging it had been infringed by other states, as if he himself had in all instances respected its doctrines as inviolable.
But although Napoleon thus at times referred to state necessity as the ultimate source of actions otherwise unjustifiable, he more frequently endeavoured to disguise his errors by denial, or excuse them by apologies which had no foundation. He avers in his Will,[296] that by the confession of the Duc d'Enghien, the Comte d'Artois maintained sixty assassins against his life;[297] and that for this reason the Duc d'Enghien was tried, convicted, and put to death. The examination of the duke bears no such confession, but, on the contrary, an express denial of the whole of the alleged system; nor was there the slightest attempt made to contradict him by other testimony. He bequeathed, in like manner, a legacy to a villain[298] who had attempted the assassination of the Duke of Wellington; the assassin, according to his strange argument, having as good a right to kill his rival and victor, as the English had to detain him prisoner at St. Helena. This clause in the last will of a dying man, is not striking from its atrocity merely, but from the inaccuracy of the moral reasoning which it exhibits. Napoleon has drawn a parallel betwixt two cases, which must be therefore both right or both wrong. If both were wrong, why reward the ruffian with a legacy? but if both were right, why complain of the British Government for detaining him at St. Helena?
But, indeed, the whole character of Napoleon's autobiography marks his desire to divide mankind into two classes—his friends and his enemies;—the former of whom are to be praised and vindicated; the latter to be vilified, censured, and condemned, without any regard to truth, justice, or consistency. To take a gross example, he stoutly affirmed, that the treasures which were removed from Paris in April 1814, and carried to Orleans, were seized and divided by the ministers of the allied powers—Talleyrand, Metternich, Hardenberg, and Castlereagh; and that the money thus seized included the marriage-portion of the Empress Maria Louisa.[299] Had this story been true, it would have presented Napoleon with a very simple means of avenging himself upon Lord Castlereagh, by putting the British public in possession of the secret.