It is no less remarkable, that Napoleon, though himself a soldier, and a distinguished one, could never allow a tribute of candid praise to the troops and generals by whom he was successively opposed. In mentioning his victories, he frequently bestows commendation upon the valour and conduct of the vanquished. This was an additional and more delicate mode of praising himself and his own troops by whom these enemies were overthrown. But he never allows any merit to those by whom he was defeated in turn. He professes never to have seen the Prussian troops behave well save at Jena, or the Russians save at Austerlitz. Those armies of the same nations, which he both saw and felt in the campaigns of 1812 and 1813, and before whom he made such disastrous retreats as those of Moscow and Leipsic, were, according to his expressions, mere canaille.
In the same manner, when he details an action in which he triumphed, he is sure to boast, like the old Grecian (very justly perhaps,) that in this Fortune had no share; while his defeats are entirely and exclusively attributed to the rage of the elements, the combination of some most extraordinary and unexpected circumstances, the failure of some of his lieutenants or maréchals, or, finally, the obstinacy of the general opposed, who, by mere dint of stupidity, blundered into success through circumstances which should have ensured his ruin.
In a word, from one end of Napoleon's works to the other, he has scarcely allowed himself to be guilty of a single fault or a single folly, excepting of that kind, which, arising from an over confidence and generosity, men secretly claim as merits, while they affect to give them up as matters of censure. If we credit his own word, we must believe him to have been a faultless and impeccable being. If we do not, we must set him down as one that, where his own reputation was concerned, told his story with a total disregard to candour and truth.
Perhaps it was a consequence of the same indifference to truth, which induced Napoleon to receive into his favour those French officers who broke their parole by escape from England. This, he alleged, he did, by way of retaliation, the British Government having, as he pretended, followed a similar line of conduct. The defence is false, in point of fact; but if it were true, it forms no apology for a sovereign and a general countenancing a breach of honour in a gentleman and a soldier. The French officers who liberated themselves by such means, were not the less dishonoured men, and unfit to bear command in the army of France, though they could have pointed with truth to similar examples of infamy in England.
But the most extraordinary instance of Napoleon's deceptive system, and of his determination, at all events, to place himself under the most favourable light to the beholders, is his attempt to represent himself as the friend and protector of liberal and free principles. He had destroyed every vestige of liberty in France—he had persecuted as ideologists all who cherished its memory—he had boasted himself the restorer of monarchical government—the war between the Constitutionalists and him, covered, after the return from Elba, by a hollow truce, had been renewed, and the Liberalists had expelled him from the capital—he had left in his Testament, the appellation of traitor with La Fayette, one of their earliest, most devoted, and most sincere chiefs—yet, notwithstanding all this constant opposition to the party which professes most to be guided by them, he has ventured to represent himself as a friend of liberal ideas! He has done so, and he has been believed.
There is but one explanation of this. The friends of revolution are upon principle the enemies of ancient and established governments—Napoleon became the opponent of the established powers from circumstances; not because he disputed the character of their government, but because they would not admit him into their circle; and though there was not, and could not be, any real connexion betwixt his system and that of the Liberalists, yet both had the same opponents, and each loved in the other the enemy of their enemies. It was the business of Napoleon in his latter days, to procure, if professions could gain it, the sympathy and good opinion of any or every class of politicians; while, on the contrary, it could not be indifferent to those to whom he made advances, to number among their disciples, even in the twelfth hour, the name of Napoleon. It resembled what sometimes happens in the Catholic Church, when a wealthy and powerful sinner on his death-bed receives the absolution of the Church on easy terms, and dies after a life spent in licentious courses, wrapt up in the mantle, and girded with the cord, of some order of unusual strictness. Napoleon, living a despot and a conqueror, has had his memory consecrated and held up to admiration by men, who term themselves emphatically the friends of freedom.
The faults of Buonaparte, we conclude as we commenced, were rather those of the sovereign and politician, than of the individual. Wisely is it written, that "if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." It was the inordinate force of ambition which made him the scourge of Europe; it was his efforts to disguise that selfish principle, that made him combine fraud with force, and establish a regular system for deceiving those whom he could not subdue. Had his natural disposition been coldly cruel, like that of Octavius, or had he given way to the warmth of his temper, like other despots, his private history, as well as that of his campaigns, must have been written in letters of blood. If, instead of asserting that he never committed a crime, he had limited his self-eulogy to asserting, that in attaining and wielding supreme power, he had resisted the temptation to commit many, he could not have been contradicted. And this is no small praise.
His system of government was false in the extreme. It comprehended the slavery of France, and aimed at the subjugation of the world. But to the former he did much to requite them for the jewel of which he robbed them. He gave them a regular government, schools, institutions, courts of justice, and a code of laws. In Italy, his rule was equally splendid and beneficial. The good effects which arose to other countries from his reign and character, begin also to be felt, though unquestionably they are not of the kind which he intended to produce. His invasions, tending to reconcile the discords which existed in many states between the governors and governed, by teaching them to unite together against a common enemy, have gone far to loosen the feudal yoke, to enlighten the mind both of prince and people, and have led to many admirable results, which will not be the less durably advantageous, that they have arisen, are arising slowly, and without contest.
In closing the Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, we are called upon to observe, that he was a man tried in the two extremities, of the most exalted power and the most ineffable calamity, and if he occasionally appeared presumptuous when supported by the armed force of half a world, or unreasonably querulous when imprisoned within the narrow limits of St. Helena, it is scarce within the capacity of those whose steps have never led them beyond the middle path of life, to estimate either the strength of the temptations to which he yielded, or the force of mind which he opposed to those which he was able to resist.