If Napoleon’s qualities as usurper, statesman, and warrior be as remarkable as they appear, why was his time so short, what were the causes of his decline, and what is his place in history? The causes of his decline may be summed up in a single word—exhaustion. There exists no record of human activity more complete than is that of Napoleon Bonaparte’s life. In its beginnings we can see this worshiper of power stimulating his immature abilities in vain until, with reckless desperation, he closed the period of training and made his scandalous bargain with Barras; then, grown suddenly, inexplicably rich, becoming with better clothing, food, and lodging physically more vigorous, he seems mercilessly to drive the rowels into his own flanks until initiative, ingenuity, and ruthlessness are displayed with apparently superhuman dimensions.
The period of achievement is short, but glorious in politics; the age of domination is long and exciting. Throughout both there is the same wanton physical excess and intellectual dissipation. Then comes the turn. Every human age has in it the germs of the next; we begin to die at birth, and the characteristic qualities and powers of one period diminish as those of the next increase. So it was with Napoleon. He compressed so much, both as regards the number and importance of events, into so short a space that his times are like those wrinkled Japanese pictures which are made by shriveling a large print into a small compass—intense and deep, but unreal. To change the metaphor, he found the ship of state dashing onward, with her helm lashed and no one daring to take the task of the steersman in hand. He cut the lashings and laid hold. His unassisted efforts as a pilot gave the vessel a new course; but he had no steam or other mechanical power, no ‘deus ex machina’, to aid him; and, as the storm increased, exhaustion followed; he seemed to be steering when, in reality, his actions were under the compulsion of events he was not controlling; and this continued until the wreck.
But the inertia of his powers resembled their rise so perfectly as to represent continuous growth, and thus to deceive observers: in a few years he had ordered the Revolutionary chaos of western Europe to his liking, and the resultant organization worked by the principles he had infused into it. As he saw his imperfect and shallow theories of society successively confounded, he had no vigor left to reconstruct them and adapt himself to new situations. His efforts at the role of liberator throughout the Hundred Days deserve careful study.
He simply could not yield or adapt himself, except in non-essentials. The shifts to which he had resort would have been ridiculous had they not been pathetic. The governmental forms attempted by the Revolution had been successively destroyed by the furious energy of Jacobinism: the Directory was but a compromise, and when it took refuge for safety in the army its performances seemed to the masses sure to bring back the Terror; the Consulate was only a disguised monarchy founded on military force; and as royalism was impossible, there seemed to vast numbers no other alternative than the Empire. That there was no other alternative was due to Napoleon’s imperious character, now developed to its utmost extent.
He was selfish, hardened, and, though active like his symbolic bee, without capacity for further development. His mother knew that he could not hold out; she said it, and saved money for a rainy day. He himself had haunting premonitions of this truth. His passion to perpetuate himself by founding a dynasty was the real basis for his warlike ardor. Profoundly moved, in fact awe-stricken, by the imperishable hatred of the older dynasties, and yet reveling in his military genius, he waged war ruthlessly and with zest, enjoying the discomfiture of his foes, and delighting in the exercise of his powers. But, after all, war was but a means.
He frequently dwelt on the advantages of hereditary succession; he lingered with suspicious frequency over the satisfaction a dynastic ruler must feel in the devotion or, if not that, in the submissiveness of his people; he was hypersensitive to the slightest popular disturbance; and he must have foreboded his own fall, since he was accustomed to wear poison in an amulet around his neck, so that when the great crisis should arrive he might take his own life. “Ah! why am I not my grandson?” he longingly ejaculated.
This single cause of Napoleon’s fall can be better seen in the record of his second captivity than in any other portion of his life. There is no such thing as absolute exhaustion short of death. But intermittent and flickering exertion is symptomatic of failing powers in a jaded horse; it forebodes the end in a worn-out man. Cheerful and busy at first, because recruited by a long and favourable sea-voyage, he set out in St. Helena at a racing gait to write history and mold the public opinion of Europe.
Playful and energetic, he caught together the scanty remnants of his momentary grandeur, and emulated the masters of ceremony at the Tuileries in organizing a court and issuing edicts for the conduct of its little affairs. His life was to be that of a caged lion—caged, but yet a lion. The plan would not work. In the affairs of Longwood there were, as everywhere, hitches and irregularities. To Napoleon these soon became not the incidents, but the substance of life. With the departure of his secretaries the business of biographical composition became first irksome, then impossible, and the poor muse of history was finally turned out of doors. To regular exercise succeeded spasmodic over-exertion; complaint became the subject-matter for the exercise of both mind and tongue; daily association with kindly but second-rate persons checked the flow of great ideas; the combinations of Austerlitz and Wagram gave place to the small moves in a game of spite with a bureaucratic British governor.
From the days of his boyhood until his alliance with Barras the exile had been a dreamy, vague, indefinite, unsuccessful fellow; his powers were not quickly developed. While he had France and Europe to work upon, he showed the extraordinary qualities repeatedly outlined, mind and hand, thought and deed, working together. Already jaded, his stupendous capacity became intermittent after the fatal armistice of Poischwitz; but it worked, for it still had the raw material of grand strategy and great politics to work on. This continued until after Waterloo. That battle, not a great one in itself, was nevertheless epic, both in its effects upon the world and in its ruin of the brains which had swayed the destinies of Europe for twenty years. Between the flight to Charleroi and the escape to the ‘Bellerophon’, Napoleon shows no pluck and no brains.
In actual captivity his mind was without a sufficient task and under no pressure from necessity. It consequently, though somewhat invigorated at first, intermitted more and more toward the close, working, when it did work, awkwardly and with friction, until the physical collapse came, and the end was reached. The attempts to remodel history, the efforts to delineate his own and others’ motives, the specious summaries of his career and its epochs, the fragmentary expositions of his philosophy in ethics, politics, and psychology—all the stately volumes which bear his name, his literary remains, in fact, present a pitiful sight when closely examined. They are but the scoriae of a burnt-out mind, but dust and ashes; a splendid mass, but an extinct volcano.
It was only natural that his successors and admirers should seek to erect a more enduring foundation for his fame by collecting and carefully editing what he had written when at his best, when acting according to his momentary, normal impulse, and when, therefore, he had the least pose and the greatest sincerity. But it is a proof of their shrewdness that they selected and published less and less after Erfurt, and that out of the voluminous pen-product of St. Helena they chose a 150 pages which the ‘Correspondence,’ intended to be the most splendid monument to the Emperor’s glory, could present as authentic biographical material.
If, then, Napoleon was after all but a plain man, how did he become a personage? Simply because he was the typical man of his day, less the personal mediocrity; the typical burgher in personal character, the typical soldier in war, the typical despot in peace, and the typical idealist in politics; capable in all these qualities of analysis; capable, consequently, of being understood; capable of exhaustion and of being overwhelmed by combinations.
In other words, he was really great because he was the shrewd common-sense personage of his age, considering the ideal social structure as a level of comfort in money, in shelter, in food, in clothes, in religion, in morality, in decency, in domestic good-nature, in the commonplace good things fairly divided as far as they would go round. This was the side of his nature which in a period of social exhaustion planted him four-square as a social force, presented him to France as the rock against which the “red fool-fury” of Jacobinism had dashed itself to pieces, and gave him for a time command of all hearts.
Thus established, he at once fell heir to French tradition—that is, to the continuous policy of the nation in foreign and domestic affairs; which was that France should be the Jupiter in the Olympus of European nations by reason of her excellence both in beauty and in strength. Here was a temptation not to be resisted, the superlative temptation like that of the serpent and the woman, the chance to transcend by knowledge, the opportunity to “hitch his wagon to a star,” to commingle the glory of France with his own until the elements were no longer separable. Into this snare, great as he was in his representative plainness, he fell, and in the ensuing confusion he not only destroyed himself, but brought the proud and splendid nation which had cherished him to the very verge of destruction. He could not sway one emancipated people without swaying an emancipated Europe, and this after Austerlitz he determined to do.
Then he lost his head: his wisdom turned out to be nothing but adoration of mere expediency; his strength proved weakness when, with his imperial idealism, he braved in Spain the idealism of a true nation; his vaunted physical endurance disappeared with self-indulgence, the golden head and brazen loins fell in a crash as the feet of clay disintegrated before the storm of national uprisings.
This being true, we have in his career every element of epic greatness: a colossal man, a chaotic age, the triumph of principle, the reestablishment of historical equilibrium by means of a giant cast away when no longer needed. And this epic quality, which is not in the man alone nor in the age alone, appears when the two are combined, and then only. Looking at him in our cold light, he has every attribute of the commonplace adventurer; looking at the France of 1786 with our perspective, the people and the times appear almost mad in their frantic efforts to accomplish the work of ages in the moments of a single lifetime.
Yet combine the two, and behold the man of the third estate rising, advancing, reflecting, and then planting himself in the foreground as the most dramatic figure of public life, and you have a scene, a stage, and actors which cannot be surpassed in the range of history. To the end of the Consulate the action is powerful, because it represents reality: a nation unified, a people restored to wholesome influences, peace inaugurated, constitutional government established. There is so far no tawdry decoration, no fine clothes, no posing, no ranting. But with the next scene, that of the Empire, the spectator becomes aware of all these annoyances, and more. The leading actor grows self-conscious, identifies himself with the public interest for personal ends and to the detriment of the nation, displays no moral or artistic self-restraint, and soon arranges every element so as to make his studied personal ambitions appear like the resultants of ominous forces which act from without, and against which he is donning the armor of despotism for the public good. The play becomes a human tragicomedy, and, verging to its close, ends, like the tragedies of the Greeks, with a people betrayed and the force of the age chained to a torrid rock as the sport of the elements.
Was this the end, and did Napoleon have no place in history, as many historians have lately been contending? Far from it. From his couch of porphyry beneath the gilded dome on the banks of the Seine, the Emperor, though “dead and turned to clay,” still exercises a powerful sway. The actual Napoleonic Empire had, as we have before remarked, a striking resemblance to those of Alexander and Charlemagne.
Based, as were these, upon conquest, and continued for a little life by the idealism of a single person, it seemed like a brilliant bubble on the stream of time. But Alexander hellenized the civilization of his day, and prepared the world for Christianity; Charlemagne plowed, harrowed, and sowed the soil of barbaric Europe, making it receptive for the most superb of all secular ideals, that of nationality; Napoleon tore up the system of absolutism by the roots, propagated in the most distant lands of Europe the modern conception of individual rights, overthrew the rotten structure of the German-Roman empire, and in spite of himself regenerated the long-abused ideas of nationality and fatherland. It must be confessed that his own shallow political science, the second-hand Rousseauism he had learned from his desultory reading, had little to do with this, except negatively.
One by one he saw his faiths made ridiculous by the violent phases of Jacobinism after it took control of the Revolutionary movement. His heart, his conscience, his intellect, all undisciplined, then revolted against the metaphysic which had misled him, and “ideologist” became his most contemptuous epithet. Controlled by instinct and ambition, he nevertheless remained throughout his period the one thorough idealist among the men of action, Goethe being the superlative, transcendent genius of idealism among the thinkers. Each successive day saw his scorn of physical limitations increase, his impatience of language, customs, laws, of local attachment, personal fidelity, and national patriotism grow.
The result was a fixed conviction that for humanity at large all these were naught. At last he planted himself upon the burgher philosophy of utility and expediency, putting his faith in the loyalty of his family, in homely dependence upon matrimonial alliance, in the passion of humanity for physical ease and earthly well-being. This was the concert by which he sought to create a federation of beneficent kingdoms that would win all men to the prime mover. Space and time rebelled; the lofty ideals of humanity and philosophy would not down; selfishness proved impotent as a support; the dreamer recognized that again he had been deceived.
Haggard and exhausted, he finally turned, in the role of Napoleon Liberator, to the notion of nationality and of government swayed by popular will in all its phases. But it was too late. Instead of being the leader of a van, he had forgotten, in his own phrase, to keep pace with the march of ideas, and was a straggler in the rear, without a moral status or a devoted following.
All this is true; but it is equally true that much of his work endured both in France and in the civilized world. In France, indeed, the work he did has been in some details only too enduring. History is there to tell us that the test of high civilization is not necessarily in great dimensions. Those histories of the ancient world in which humanity seems strange and distasteful, of Egypt, Phenicia, Babylon, and Assyria, were wide in extent and long in duration: those of Greece and Rome, whose poets, statesmen, legislators, and warriors are our despair, were small in proportion and comparatively short in duration, while they were normal and healthy; the world-empires of both were neither natural nor admirable.
It will not do, therefore, to judge Napoleon by the length of his career, nor by the standards of other times and different circumstances. The centralization of administration in the commonwealth which he rescued from the clutches of anarchy was probably essential to the rescue; the expediency which he deliberately cultivated in the Concordat, in the laws of the family and inheritance, and in the fatal Continental System, was possibly a statesman’s palliative for momentary political disease. His artificial aristocracy, his system of great fiefs, his financial shifts—who dares to say that these institutions did not meet a temporary want?
Moreover, it is worth considering whether a direct reaction to moderate, sane republicanism from extreme and furious Jacobinism was possible at all, and whether a reaction from Napoleon’s imperial democracy was not easier and the results more permanent. In other words, is it likely that the third French republic could have been the direct successor of the first?
The question is certainly debatable. No pen can so delineate the sufferings of France under Napoleonic institutions as that of Taine has so ably and scathingly done; his wonderful etching powerfully exhibits painful truths. But who is to blame if a nation is hampered by its administration, by a centralization it no longer needs, by social regulations which it has outgrown, by political habits which do not suit the age? Not alone the man who inaugurated them, for ends partly selfish but also partly statesmanlike; the people who timidly endure are responsible for the doom which will certainly overtake any nation living in a social and political structure antiquated and unsuitable.
One thing at least the new France has done with magisterial style: she has introduced into her political machinery respect for political habit. The French government of to-day is distinctly an outgrowth of conditions, and not of theories. Its constitution has none of the fatal marks of completeness which her other republican constitutions have borne; on the contrary, there never was a period in modern times when to the outsider French institutions seemed as crescive as they do to-day. And they have abundant material on which to work.
There are signs that the system of nations as armed camps, for which Napoleon set the example, is breaking by its own weight; modern armies are mostly national schools controlled by scientific inquisitiveness and permeated by a civic spirit; the pacific federal system of the great European powers sometimes seems feeble and rickety, but it is in existence. Alliances are now federations for peace; the Triple Alliance continues to be a federation for peace; so too the Sextuple Alliance, so energetic and persistent in its support of Turkey, has been a federation for peace. Perhaps the day is nearer than we think when the Hague tribunal shall develop a vigorous, practical working system of international understandings, without appeal to war.
Then certainly, but long before, let us hope, France may anchor her liberties in a bill of rights, destroy judicial inquisition, begin to slacken the bonds of her prefectoral system, emancipate her universities and academies, regenerate public feeling as to the increase of population by modifying her laws of the family, and go on not only to populate her own fertile fields, but to make the magnificent colonies which she has acquired the future homes of countless children, a field for exerting her superfluous energy—in short, when she may slough off her now superfluous Napoleonic institutions.
It would be utterly unjust, however, to plead a justification of Napoleon solely by such a monumental fact as that he was in all likelihood the forerunner of modern France. Even when the country adopted him, his positive, direct influence for good was great. The Concordat whatever its faults, partly secured a free church and a free state, separating thus what God had never joined together in holy wedlock; his splendid codes—for no matter who pondered and shaped them, they were his in execution—have guaranteed the perpetuity of civil equality not only in France, but, as the sequel has shown, throughout great expanses of Europe; the questions of a nation’s right to its chosen ruler and government, agitated in a new form during the Hundred Days, were those with which succeeding generations were concerned until they were answered in the affirmative.
The difference between the France of 1802 and that of 1815 is on one side painful, but on another side it is remarkably significant. The former was transitional and chaotic; the latter had that amazing but completed social union, stronger than any ever known in history, which has saved the country in succeeding storm-periods. In it there was respect for persons, for contract, for property; the administration was unitary, homogeneous, and active; the finances, though not regulated, were restored to vigor; and the processes were inaugurated by which the great cities of France have become healthful and beautiful, while at the same time the internal improvements of the country have been systematized and rendered splendid in their efficiency.
Revolutionary concepts were so modified and assimilated that the efforts of the dynasties, when put to the test of public opinion, failed because they were felt to be absurd by the masses. It was one of Napoleon’s aphorisms that “to have the right of using nations, you must begin by serving them well.” Like a good burgher, he made his servants comfortable and happy. His example, moreover, was reflected abroad throughout Europe; and to the millions of plain and not very shrewd inhabitants of other lands, the Revolution, as Napoleon had shaped it, lost many of the horrors with which Jacobinism, to the everlasting damnation of both the thing and its name, had clothed it. It is a question whether there was in existence a strong liberal France, such as idealists depict, that could pacifically have done this wonderful work.
Examining and duly weighing the desperation of dynastic absolutism, it looks as if nothing but the counter-poison of Napoleon’s militarism could have prevented its annihilating French liberalism. Without Napoleon the conservative liberalism of to-day would have been impossible.
Turning to the field of general history, there are certain facts, admittedly Napoleon’s doing, which quite as certainly are among the most important factors of contemporary politics. Of themselves these would suffice to give him a high place in constructive history. In the first place, he deprived England of the monopoly in what had long been essentially and peculiarly her political ideal. What was the basis of the long conflict between England and France to which Napoleon fell heir? Was the struggle of these two glorious and enlightened sister nations a struggle for territorial ascendancy in Europe?
Not entirely. Was it a life-and-death struggle for ascendancy in the western world? No. The Seven Years’ War had decided that question against France, and the American war for independence had in a sense evened the score in its decision against England; for the prize had been awarded to a new people. No; the conflict did not rage over this. What, then, was the cause? Nothing less than a passion for the ascendancy of one of these highest forms of civilization throughout the globe, including both Europe and America.
This Anglo-Saxon political, commercial, religious, and social conception was, after the Napoleonic wars, no longer confined to Great Britain. Thence onward the great powers of Europe have been chiefly concerned, aside from their care for self-preservation, in partitioning Africa and Asia among themselves; and this process is no sooner complete than they begin to murmur about the Monroe doctrine and to cast longing eyes toward Central and South America. The state system which was once European has become coextensive with the sphere on which we live, and this notion of world-domination, so denounced when held by Napoleon, has become the motive-power of every great modern civilization.
If we consider the national politics of Europe beyond the boundaries of France, history again becomes a record of influences started by Napoleon’s works, either of commission or of omission. Russia’s grandeur as a European power appears to be largely due to the temporary extinction of Poland’s hope for national resurrection.
Had Napoleon, instead of playing his doubtful game with the grand duchy of Warsaw, turned into an autonomous permanency the scarcely known provisional government of Poland, which he actually inaugurated and which worked for a considerable time, and had he restored to its sway both the Prussian and Austrian shares in the shameless partition, we might have seen quite another result to the military migration of 1812.
We can scarcely doubt, moreover, that Poland, restored under French protection, would have been a buffer state between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, rendering the crushing coalition an impossibility in 1813, while in 1814 the allies could probably never have crossed the French frontier, if indeed they had dared to go even so far in their march across Europe. But his positive achievement was quite as important. The Germany of to-day is a great federal state guided, but not dominated, by Prussia. What are its other important members? Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and Baden—all three in their present extent and influence the creations of Napoleon; the nice balance of powers in the German Empire is due to his arrangement of the map. There is even a sense in which all Germany, as we know it, sprang full armed from his head. He not merely taught the peoples of central Europe their strategy, tactics, and military organization: it was he who carried the standard of enlightenment (in his own interest, of course, but still he carried it) through the length and breadth of their territories, and made its significance clear to the meanest intellect of their teeming millions.
Thereafter the longings for German unity, for German fatherland, for the organization of German strength into one movement, could never be checked. The swarm of petty tyrants who had modeled their life and conduct on the example of Louis XIV, and who in struggling to vie with his villainies had debauched themselves and their peoples, was swept away by Napoleon’s ruthlessness, to give place to the larger, more wholesome nationality of the nineteenth century, which was destined in the end to inspire the surrounding nations with the new concept of respect, not alone for one’s own nationality, but for that of others.
What French influence effected in Italy is a topic so recondite as to require separate discussion; for the results were not so immediate or so dramatic as they were in Germany. But the destruction of petty governments was as ruthless as in the north; the ideas which marched in Bonaparte’s ranks found at least a large minority of intelligent admirers among the invaded; and Italian unity, though won by a family he feared and abused, is in no doubtful sense indebted for its existence, not merely to Napoleon’s age, but to the ideas he disseminated and to the efforts at a practical beginning which he made.
As to Austria-Hungary, the new historical epoch which makes her essentially the empire of the lower Danube takes its rise from Napoleon’s time and influence. The relaxation of her grasp on Italy has thrown her across the Adriatic for the territorial expansion essential to her position as a great power. It has been her mission to rescue by moral influence some of the fairest lands in the Balkan peninsula from waste and anarchy. Mere proximity is a powerful factor; the turbulence of Austrian local patriotism has been the seed of wholesome discontent among the Christian populations of Turkey, whose first awakening was largely due to the emissaries sent by Napoleon to fire the hearts of the oppressed and suffering subjects of that distracted land. Servia is one example of this; and in a sense the national awakening of Greece began with the hopes similarly aroused.
The astounding magic of his name in the United States is partly due to a quality of the American mind which makes its possessor the passionate and indiscriminating adorer of greatness in every form. The Americans are more French than the French in their admiration of power. But, after all, this is not the main reason for their interest in Napoleon. They are, dimly at least, aware of certain facts which have determined their history and made them an independent nation; though already stated and discussed, we may be pardoned for recapitulating them in this connection. Their first war for independence left them tributary to the mother-country both industrially and commercially.
It was Napoleon who pitilessly, though slyly and indirectly, launched them into the second war with Great Britain, from which they emerged with some glory and some sense of defeat, but, after all, with the tremendous and permanent gain of absolute commercial independence. In the second place, their purchase of Louisiana, though understood by only a few at the moment, revolutionized their national system both inside and outside. That momentous step destroyed the literal interpretation of the constitution, hitherto enslaving a congeries of jarring little commonwealths in the bondage of verbalism, because, though manifestly beneficent and necessary, it could be justified before the law only by an appeal to the spirit and not to the letter.
Thenceforward Americans have steadily been enlarging their constitutional law by interpretation, and the apparent timidity of amendment which they display is simply due to the absence of necessity for revision as long as expansion by interpretation continues. But certainly quite as important as this was also the displacement, by the acquisition of that vast territory, of what may be called the national center of gravity. Until then the aspirations of Americans had been toward Europe; the public opinion of the country had, until then, demanded the largest possible intercourse with that continent compatible with freedom from political entanglement. Thereafter there was a change in their spirit: a continent of their own was open to their energies.
For two generations their history has been concerned with exploration, with mechanical invention, and with solving the great problem of how to prevent an extension of slavery corresponding to the extension of territory. But nevertheless, steadily and vigorously two correlated concepts were propagating themselves: neglect of Europe, in order to expand and assimilate their recent acquisition; industrial exclusiveness, for the sake of this great home market which immigration, settlement, and the formation of new commonwealths were creating, not at the front door, but in the rear of the states stretching along the Atlantic. This resulted in a temporary ‘about-face’ of the nation; and it is only now, when the prize of material greatness and of territorial unity has been secured, that the people turn once more toward the rising sun, in order to get from older lands everything germane to its own civilization, and to assimilate these acquisitions, if possible, in realizing its own ideals of moral grandeur.
Shopping Cart
