Soldier, Statesman, Despot
Questionings — The Industrious Burgher — The Industrious Sovereign — End of the Marvelous — Public Virtue and Private Weakness — The Man and The Age — Latin and German — First Struggles — Usurpation of Power — Political Theories — The Napoleonic System — Its Foundation — Stimulus to Despotism — The Surrender of France — The Master Soldier.
Review
The tomb of Erasmus in Basel is marked by a stone slab on which are an epitaph, an effigy, and then the pathetic word "Terminus." Should these fateful syllables be written over the mortal remains of Napoleon Bonaparte? No. Beyond his death there was more, far more than the work he wrought during his life. Men ever love a seeming mystery, and while they do, a favorite theme of speculation will be the career of the great Corsican in its historical aspect. Before our long study can be brought to a close, two questions must be considered, or rather two sides of one question must be viewed. Why did he rise, and what did he accomplish? The answers will be as various as the investigators who give them. But the man as seen in the preceding pages certainly displays these recognizable characteristics: he was a man of the people, he had a transcendent military genius, he was indefatigable, and he had unsurpassed energy.
No mere man, even the most remarkable, can climb without supports of some kind, however unstable they may be. Napoleon Bonaparte did not soar, he rose on the ladder of power by stages easily traceable: first by the protection of the Robespierres; then by the necessities and velleities of Barras and the Directory; afterward by the encouragement of all France, which was sick of the inefficient Directory; and still later by the army, which adored a leader who frankly repaid devotion in the hard cash of booty, and bravery in the splendid rewards of that glory which was a national passion. With such opportunities, Bonaparte unfolded what was certainly his supereminent quality—the quality which endeared him to the French masses as did no other, the quality which above all others distinguished him from the hated tyrants under whom they had so long suffered, the quality which even the meanest intellect could mark as distinctively middle-class, in opposition to its negation in the upper class—the quality, namely, of untiring industry; laborious, self-initiated, self-guided, self-improving industry. This burgher quality Napoleon possessed as no burgher ever did. It was no exaggeration, but the simple truth, when he said to Roederer: "I am always working. I think much. If I appear always ready to meet every emergency, to confront every problem, it is because, before undertaking any enterprise, I have long considered it, and have thus foreseen what could possibly occur. It is no genius which suddenly and secretly reveals to me what I have to say or do in some circumstance unforeseen by others: it is my own meditation and reflection. I am always working—when dining, when at the theater; I waken at night in order to work." How profoundly this was impressed upon those intimately associated with Napoleon can be traced in their memoirs on many a page. It was Soult who said, most sapiently: "What we call an inspiration is nothing but a calculation made with rapidity."
Generally there is no mystery in the power of domination: he rules who is indispensable. The Jacobins needed a man, they found him in the unscrupulous Bonaparte; the Directory needed a man, they found him in the expert artillerist; France needed a man, she found him in the conqueror of Italy. And having risen, he did not intermit his industry for a moment. Rehearsing his coronation by means of puppets, or studying with painful care the complicated accounts of his fiscal officers, or absorbing himself in whatever else it might be, he was always the man who knew more about everything than any one else. Throughout his reign he was the fountainhead of every governmental activity: the council of state sharpened not their own, but his thoughts; his secretaries were his pocket note-book; his ministers were the executors of his personal designs; pensions and presents were given by him to his friends, and not to those who served the state as they themselves thought best; every French community received his personal attention, and every Frenchman who came to his general receptions was treated with rude jocularity. In all this he was perfectly natural. At times, however, he felt compelled to attitudinize; perhaps, in the theatrical poses which he assumed for self-protection or for the sake of representing a personified, unapproachable imperial majesty, he copied Talma, with whom he cultivated a sort of intimacy. Possibly, too, his violent sallies were considered dramatic by himself. "Otherwise," he once said, "they would have slapped me on the shoulder every day." "It is sad," remarked Roederer, apropos of a certain event. "Yes, like greatness," was Napoleon's rejoinder.
Napoleon's preëminence lasted just as long as this effective personal supremacy continued. When his faculties refused to perform their continuous, unceasing task, he began to decline; when the material of his calculations transcended all human power, even his own, the descent grew swifter; and the crash came when his abilities worked either intermittently or not at all. Ruin was the consequence of feebleness; the imagination of the world had clothed him with demoniac qualities, but it ceased so to do just in proportion as his superiority to others in plan and execution began to diminish. "There is no empire not founded on the marvelous, and here the marvelous is the truth." These were the words of Talleyrand, addressed to the First Consul on June twenty-first, 1800, just after the news of Marengo had reached Paris. The marvel of the absolute monarchy was the divine right of kings: when men ceased to hold the doctrine, the days of absolutism were numbered. The marvel of Napoleon was his unquestioned human supremacy: when that declined his empire fell.
In the truest sense of that word so dear to modern times, Napoleon was a self-made man. By his extraordinary energy he made a deficient education do double duty; and those of his natural gifts which in a sluggish man would have been mediocre, he paraded so often, and in such swift succession, that they appeared miraculous. This fiery energy, it cannot too often be repeated, was the man's most distinctive characteristic; when it failed he was undone. Was consistency, as generally understood, to be expected in this personage; is it, indeed, found in most great men? Nowhere does the theory of evolution writhe to sustain itself more than in psychology; nowhere does it discover a greater complexity—a complexity which makes doubtful its sufficiency. Admitting that Napoleon was selfish; that he was lustful; that once, at least, he was criminal; that at various times—yes, even frequently—he was unpopular, and dared not in extremity call for a national uprising to sustain his cause; that he had pitiful limitations in dealing with religion, politics, and finance; supposing him to have displayed on occasion the qualities of a resurrected medieval free-lance, or of the Borgias, or of other historical monsters; confessing that he was launched upon the fiery lake of revolution by the madness of extreme Jacobinism; sustaining the awful indictment in each detail—was there no reverse to the medal, no light to the shadow, no general result except negations? Was the work of Alexander the Great worthless because of his debaucheries? Was Catharine II of Russia a mere damned soul because of her harlotries? Did Talleyrand's duplicity and meanness render less valuable or permanent the work he did in thwarting the coalition at Vienna? The answer of history is plain: what the great of the earth have wrought for others or against them is to be recorded and judged with impartiality; how they sinned against themselves is to be told as an awful warning, and then to be left for the decision of the Great Tribunal. Modern philosophy requires such complicated and yet such minute knowledge in every department of science that the specialist has supplanted the general scholar and the system-maker; the man who aspires to create a plan displaying the unity of either the objective or the subjective world, or any harmony of one with the other, is generally regarded as either an antiquated imbecile or a charlatan. Yet in the examination of historical characters a symmetrical consistency capable of being grasped by the meanest intellect is imperiously demanded by all readers and critics. This is natural, but not altogether reasonable: symmetry cannot be found in the commonest human being on our globe, much less in those who rise supereminent. The greater the man, the more impossible to connect in a mathematical diagram the different phases of his conduct. The search for mediocre consistency in the character of Napoleon is like the Cynic philosopher's quest for a man.
This personage strove, and with considerable success, to think and act for an entire nation—ay, more, for western Europe. In order to render this conceivable, he first took command of his own body—sleeping at will, and never more than six hours; eating when and what he would, but always with extreme moderation; waking from profound slumber and rousing his mind instantaneously to the highest pitch, so that he then composed as incisively as in the midst of active ratiocination. He was able to train his secretaries and servants into instruments destitute of personal volition—even his great generals, who were taught to act for themselves within certain limits, never transcended the fixed boundary, and grew inefficient when deprived of his impulse. He never failed to reward merit or to gratify ambition for the sake of securing an able lieutenant, and nascent devotion he quickened into passion by the display of suitable familiarity. A thoughtful, self-contained, self-sufficient worker, he was sometimes a trifle uneasy in social intercourse, perhaps always so beneath his mask of good breeding, when he wore one; but he played his various rôles in public with consummate skill, except that he made nervous movements with his eyes, hands, and ears. His little tricks of rolling his right shoulder, tugging at his cuffs, and the like; his inability to write, and his generally clumsy movements when irritated, were due to deficient training in early childhood. Forbidding in his intercourse with ambitious women and other self-seekers, he was considerate with the suffering, and found it difficult, if not impossible, to refuse the petitions of the needy. Loving rough and ready ways in those busied about his person,—as, for instance, when his valet rubbed him down in the morning with a coarse towel,—he was yet so sensitive that he had to have his hats worn by others before he could set them on his own head. It is useless to seek even homely physical consistency in a man thus constituted.
It is equally useless to ask whether Napoleon could have been as great a man in another epoch as he was in his own. In any epoch of warfare he would have been great; it is likely that in any epoch of peace he would have reached eminence as a legislator and administrator. The real historical question is this: How did he, being what he was, and his age, being what it was, interact one upon the other; and what was the resultant? There was as little consistency in his age as in himself; the sinuosities of each fitted strangely into those of the other, and the result was a period of twenty years on which common consent fixes the name of the Napoleonic age. Does his personality throw any light on the antecedent period—does his career influence the succeeding years?