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 preeminence 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 21st, 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 communication, perhaps always so beneath his mask of good breeding, when he wore one; but he played his various roles 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 communication 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?
The age of the Revolution has such intimate connection with the movements of French society that it is very generally called in other countries the French Revolution. But while the movement developed itself more easily and took more radical forms in France than elsewhere, it was due to the condition of civilization the world around. France has been in a peculiar sense the teacher of Europe; for in language, literature, laws, and institutions she is the heir of Rome. In spite of Roman Catholicism, or perhaps in consequence of the Roman hierarchy, her inheritance has been pagan rather than Christian; her ethics have been Hellenic, her literature Augustan, her laws imperial, her temperament a combination of the Stoic and Epicurean which is essentially Latin, her language elegant, elliptical, and precise like that of Livy or Tacitus.
The Teuton in general, the Anglo-Saxon in particular, may give his days and nights to classical studies: he is never so imbued with their spirit as the Gaul. “It is with his Bible in one pocket and his Shakspere in another,” said an eminent Frenchman not long since, “that the Anglo-Saxon goes forth to reduce the world in the interests of his commerce, his civilization, and his religion. The most enlightened has neither the cold worldliness of Horace nor the calculating zeal of Cæsar, but he has the persistency of faith in himself and his nation which, whatever may be his personal belief, is a constituent element in his blood, or, better still, the controlling member of that complex organism to which he belongs.”
I venture to believe, on the other hand, that the Frenchman espouses his cause from an unselfish impulse begotten of pure reason, an ethereal ichor percolating through society by channels of sympathy, which diminishes the historic pressure for continuous national consistency and natural unity, but emphasizes the great uplifting movements of society. The French armies of the Revolution went forth to scour Europe for its deliverance from feudalism, absolutism, and ecclesiasticism, because the French people had renewed their youthful and pristine vigor in their enthusiasm for pure principle without regard to experience or expediency. Napoleon Bonaparte had all their doctrine, with something more: a consuming ardour unconscious of any physical limitations to the nervous strength of himself or others, and a readiness for any fate which would transmute his dull, unsuccessful, commonplace existence into excitement. When he found his opportunity to heap Pelion upon Ossa, to supplement himself by the splendours of French devotion, he did indeed come near to transcending even the Olympians and storming the seat of Kronos.
It was a long, discouraging, heartbreaking struggle by which he gained his first vantage-ground. This was no exceptional experience; for every adventurer knows that it is more troublesome to make the start than to continue the advance. It is harder to save the first small capital than to conduct a prosperous business. It is more difficult, apparently, in human life to overcome the inertia of immobility than that of motion; at least psychological laws seem in this respect to contravene those of physics. It is not true that the armies of the Republic were those of the Bourbons: the transition may have been gradual, but it was radical. It is also untrue that the armies of Napoleon were those of the Revolution: they differed as the zenith from the nadir, being recruited on a new principle, animated by new motives, and led by an entirely different class of men.
A supreme command having been attained by means curiously compounded of chivalric romance and base scheming, the man of action did not hesitate a moment to put every power in motion. Throwing off all superior control, he set himself to every task in the revolution of Italy—conquest, political and religious; constructive politics and administration; social and financial transformation. Winning the devotion of his troops by intoxicating successes, as a leveler he was permanently successful; but this typical burgher had no permanent success in building up a democratic-imperial society out of the royal, princely, and aristocratic elements which had so long monopolized the ability of the peninsula; what he wrought outlasted his time, but the country had to undergo another revolution before its middle classes were ready for the heavy burden of independence and self-government. Yet the struggle for what was accomplished appears to have created a climacteric in the doer.
Before the days of Italy his ambitions were petty enough: employment in the service of Russia or England, supremacy in Corsica or military promotion in France; but afterward they enlarged by leaps and bounds: Italian principalities, Austrian dukedoms, Lombard confederations, the primacy of France in some form, Oriental dominion—one such concept took form in the morning, to be swept away at night and replaced by ever more luxurious growths of fantasy. The realization of these dreams was still more amazing than their misty formation. The Revolutionary doctrines of the passing age had stimulated France to over-exertion; her leaders were discredited, her people exhausted.
The same agitation had stupefied the Italians; but whatever their political disintegration may have been, the Roman chair and throne retained its moral influence as the bond and mainspring of society throughout the whole peninsula; and now the successor of St. Peter was humbled to the dust, willing to escape with the mere semblance of either secular or ecclesiastical independence. It was an exceptional moment, a vacillating, retrogressive hour in the history of Austria, of France, and of Italy. The exceptional man, the vigorous citizen of a new political epoch, the inspired strategist of a new military epoch, the unscrupulous doubter of a new religious epoch—this typical personage was at hand to take advantage of the situation; and he did so, hastening the disintegrating processes already at work, seizing every advantage revealed by the crumbling of old systems, and reaping the harvest of French heedlessness. The opportunity gave the man his chance, but the chance once seized, the man enlarged his sphere with each successive year.
This he did by means which were as remarkable as the personage who devised them—and remarkable, too, not for their negative, but for their constructive quality. Broadly stated, the Revolution utterly expunged all the governmental and social guarantees of the preceding monarchy, destroying not merely the absolute power of one man with its sanction of divine right, but all the checks upon it to be found either in the ancient traditions of the people or in their ancient institution of parliaments.
It will be clear to the careful student of the Revolutionary governments that while there was a gradual clarifying of opinion antecedent to the Consulate, and a vague longing for guarantees of individual rights higher than the acts of any assembly, however representative it claimed to be, nevertheless great ideas, great conceptions, great outlines, had all remained in their inchoate state, and that of the several succeeding constitutions each had been more worthless than the one before.
Almost any kind of a constitution will serve an enlightened nation which has confirmed political habits, if it chooses to support a fundamental law not hostile to them; and none, however ingenious, can stand before recalcitrant populations. The Revolutionary constitutions of France, excepting perhaps that of 1791, were alike feeble; and in the stress applied to the one democratic land of Europe by her dynastic enemies all around, they were not worth the paper and ink used to record them.
Under each had developed a pure despotism of one kind or another, on the plea that in war there must be a single head, either an executive committee or an executive man. These persons or person had, on pleas of necessity or expediency, gradually arrogated to the executive all the powers of government, befooling the people more or less completely by the specious formalities of various kinds through which the popular will was supposed to find expression. No one understood this fact better than Napoleon Bonaparte; and since it seemed that the supreme power had to be in the hands of some one man or clique, he was easily tempted to grasp it for himself when it became clear that the profligate and dishonest Directory had run its course. He did not make the situation, but he used it. History does not record that the French nation was shocked or discouraged by the events of the eighteenth of Brumaire; on the contrary, the occurrences in Paris and at St. Cloud seemed commonplace to a storm-tossed people, and the results were welcomed by the majority in every class.
The reasons for this general satisfaction varied, of course; for the conservative and progressive royalists, the conservative and radical republicans of every stripe, had widely different expectations as to the next act in the drama. But the chief actor was concerned only for himself and the nation; partizans he neither honored nor feared, except as he was anxious not to be identified with them. To him, as a man of the people, it seemed that in the Revolution the third estate had asserted itself; that the third estate must be pacified; that the third estate must be prosperous; that the third estate, for all these purposes, needed only to be confirmed in their simple theory of government, which was that the power could be delegated by them to any one fit to wield it, and this once done, the delegate might without harm to the state be left undisturbed to manage the public business, while the people should give their undivided attention to their private affairs.
How successful the Consulate was in this respect is universally known and admitted. With consummate cleverness the First Consul summoned to his assistance all the giants of his time, whether they were scholars with their theories and knowledge, administrators with their tact and experience, political managers with their easy consciences and oiled feathers, or skilful demagogues with their greedy followers and insatiate self-interest. These he either enticed or bullied into his service, according as he read their characters; a few—a very few—like Barere, he found obdurate, and drove into provincial exile. At no time did he make a finer display of his astounding capacity for molding strong men by his still stronger will than during the early days of the Consulate; and the manifest reason for his success was that he had a fine instinct for character and for putting the right man in the right place.
What he thus accomplished has been told. The foundations he then laid rest solid to-day; the now antiquated edifice he erected on them, though altered and repaired, still retains its identity. The Revolution had overthrown the old regime completely, and the ruins of society were without form and void. From this chaos Napoleon painfully gathered the substantial materials of a new structure, and out of these reconstructed the family, the state, and the church.
He revived the domestic spirit, made marriage a solid institution, and reestablished parental authority while destroying parental despotism. In civil society he restored the right of property and fixed the sanctity of contract, thus assuring respect for the individual and the ascendancy of the law. The finances he reformed by an equitable system of taxation, and by the establishment of an ingenious treasury system comparable to that devised by Alexander Hamilton for the United States. In the Concordat he went as far, probably, as France could then go in emancipating religion and the church; Protestantism has prospered under the regulations he laid down, and by his treatment of the Jews they have been changed from despised and down-trodden social freebooters into prosperous and patriotic citizens. Upon every class of men then living he imposed by an iron will a system of his own.
The leading survivors of Jacobinism, extreme royalists, moderate republicans, proscribers and proscribed, men of the bourgeoisie—all bowed to his sway and accepted his rewards. It is said that they yielded to the superior force of his police and his pretorians. Be it so. The fivefold police system he established was a system of checks and counter-checks within itself, within the administration, and even within the army—a body without which, as he firmly believed, the beginnings of social transformation could not be made. He professed, and no doubt honestly, that he would divest himself of this police service as opportunity served, and deluded both himself and his followers into the belief that the process was almost complete before the close of his era.
Through the perspective of a century we can see the faults of Napoleon’s plan. The Gallic Church is still Roman, in spite of his intention that the Roman Church should become French; the extreme centralization of his administrative system still throttles local free government and makes both oligarchic rule and political revolution easier in France than in any other free land; the educational scheme which he formed, although more fully changed than any other of his institutions, and but recently embarked, let us hope, on a course for ultimate independence, nevertheless suffers in its present complete dependence on state support, and in the consequent absence of private personal enthusiasm which might make its separate universities and schools rich in opportunities and strong in the loyalty of their sons.
But we must remember that the Consulate was a hundred years since, and that for its day it wrought so beneficently that Bonaparte, First Consul, remains one of the foremost among all lawgivers and statesmen. And that, too, precisely for the reasons which some cite as condemning him. He took the revolutionary ideas of political, civil, and religious emancipation: with these he commingled both his own sound sense and the experience of advisers from every class, realizing as much of civil liberty and good order as appears to have been practical at the moment.
But in one respect he failed miserably, and that failure vitiated much of the substantial gain which seemed to have been made. He failed in curbing his own ambition. The majestic ridge of his achievement was the verge of the precipice over which he fell. In the first place, his signal success as a lawgiver was due entirely to the dazzling splendors of his victories. Marengo was the climax to a series of such achievements as had not so far been wrought on the tented field within the bounds of French history. It is easy to assert that the French were intoxicated because they were French: there is not the slightest reason to suppose that any other nation under similar circumstances would have behaved differently.
The Seven Years’ War turned the heads of the English people completely, and they lost their American colonies in consequence; Rome lost her political liberty when she became mistress not only of the Latin, but of the Greek and Oriental shores of the Mediterranean; the distant military expeditions of Alexander the Great prepared the fall of his ill-assorted empire. In each case the careful student will admit that social exaltation was the forerunner of division and of subsequent despotism in some form. Even in the little states of Greece and southern Italy the tyrants always arose from the disintegration of legal government, and by the assertion of some form of power—mind, money, or military force.
It was, therefore, as a military despot that the First Consul promulgated beneficent codes, founded an enduring jurisprudence, created an efficient magistracy, and established social order. In this process he completed the work of the Revolution by exalting the third estate to ascendancy in the nation. The whole work, therefore, was not only recognized as his in the house of every French burgher: he was considered at every fireside to be the consummator of the Revolution for which France had so long suffered in an agony of bloody sweat. Was it therefore any wonder that not only he himself, but even the most enlightened leaders of European thought, considered the safety and renovation of European society to depend upon the extension of his work?
It is hard for us to appreciate this, because in France Napoleon’s institutions have remained almost as he left them, and well-nigh stationary, while for a century the processes of ruthless reform have been continuously working in other European lands, and some neighboring peoples have outstripped the French in the matter of a national unity consistent with local freedom. The First Consul felt that in order to become great he had been forced to become strong; we can understand that he could easily deceive himself into concluding that in order to be greater he must become stronger. It was in these days that he exclaimed, in the intimacy of familiar communication: “I feel the infinite in me.”
Thereafter democracy in any form, even the mildest, was offensive. Such men as Roederer were sent to Naples, Berg—anywhere out of France. The times were not far removed from those of the beneficent despots, except that this one ruled, not by hereditary divine right, but by military force. Bonaparte’s imperfect training in politics and history made it possible for such visions as those which now arose to haunt his brain. The beneficence he had displayed already; for despotism he had had the finest conceivable training, first among the sluggish populations of the Italian states which he had reorganized, then in the myth of Egyptian conquest which he had created and felt bound to maintain, and lastly in the national disorders of a France shuddering at the possibility of a return either to the hideous excesses of the Terror or to the intolerable abuses of ecclesiasticism and absolute monarchy.
Among other dreadful curses incident to revolution and civil war is the stimulation of fanaticism. In his seizure of the supreme power the purpose of the First Consul was justified to himself, and his procedure was rendered tolerable to the nation at large by the scandalous intrigues and complots which were hatched like cockatrices’ eggs in every foul cranny of the land. The conspirators stopped at nothing: bad faith, subornation, murder of every variety, from the dagger to the bowl. This gave the First Consul his chance to become himself the arch-intriguer, and as such he overmatched all his opponents, ultramontanes, radicals, and royalists.
Finally only a few unreconstructed reactionaries were left from each of these classes, who, though exhausted and panting, still had the strength to be noisy, and occasionally to make a feint of activity. But in the various localities and classes of France each of the factions had numerous silent and inactive sympathizers who had surrendered only as they felt unable to keep up the uneven conflict. The flames of the volcano were quenched, and the gulf of the crater was bridged by a crust, but the lava of sedition boiled and seethed below.
It is a well-known nostrum for civil dissension to stir up foreign conflict, and then to call upon the patriotism of men from all parties. To this the First Consul dared not openly resort. In fact, the indications are that if his enemies in France and his foes abroad had consented peaceably to the fulfilment of his now manifest ambitions, he would himself have been glad enough to secure without further fighting what he had gained by war, and to extend the influence of a Bonapartist France by steady encroachments rather than by exhausting hostilities. The word of every man has exactly the value which his character gives it, and treaties are worth the good faith of those who make them, not a tittle more. Neither of the parties to the general peace was exhausted, neither was really earnest. It was a bellicose age: war was then in the air, as peace is now. The rupture of the treaty made at Amiens was quite as much the work of George III as it was of Bonaparte the First Consul, and the two nations over which they ruled were easily led to renew the struggle.
Nothing goes to prove that there was long premeditation on the part of either; but at the time and since, were it not for the widespread distrust in Bonaparte’s character, popular opinion would have put the blame of renewed war more upon his opponent than on him. Thus far the angel and the devil which struggle for possession of every man had waged a fairly even conflict, and the blame and praise of what is stigmatized as Bonaparte’s conduct must be meted out to his foes in even measure. He and his times had interacted one upon the other to a remarkably even degree. But once launched on the career of personal aggrandizement, every hindrance to consuming ambition was ruthlessly cast aside. Until 1812 the responsibility for inordinate bloodshed is all his own.
It is needless to dwell upon the period of the Empire in order to study Napoleon’s character. It shines forth effulgent, but noxious. He remained personally what he had always been—imperious, laborious, unprincipled; but, on the other hand, kindly, generous, sensitive to the popular movements. His thirst for power became predominant; his lavish contempt for men and money displayed the recklessness of a desperate parvenu; his passion for war burst all its bounds. Personal ambition eclipsed principle, expediency, shrewdness—in short, every quality which makes for self-preservation.
The reason was not conscious despair, but unconscious desperation. Politically he had fought and won an easy but a decisive battle. Imperialism was firmly seated. The behavior of the French people was natural enough, but they lent themselves to his purposes with complete surrender. In this the world learned a lesson which should never be forgotten: that democracy is an excellent workhorse, but a poor charger; a good hack, but an untrustworthy racer. The interest of the plain man is in his daily life, his family, his business, his advancement. He cannot be an expert in foreign or domestic politics, in public law, or in warfare; expertness requires the exclusive devotion of a lifetime. Make the common person a theorist, and he is an ardent democrat, but a poor administrator.
Hence the necessity in transition epochs for a wise constitution. It was not difficult to convince the French burgher that, all other forms of democratic administration having had a chance and having failed in times of war, the only one so far untried—that of delegating power to a single superior man—should have a fair trial, the more as the excellent man was at hand. Even in times of peace the hard-worked citizen either neglects his political duties altogether, or, performing them in a thoughtless routine, longs for some one he can trust to do his thinking and acting: in war, as far as we have had the opportunity to observe in ancient and modern times, his imperialism is avowed, and he demands a dictator. We have no reason to suppose that there is any democracy which could outlast twenty years of a herculean struggle for national life or death, and such the Franco-English wars which introduced the last century seemed to the Frenchman of that time to be.
From the soldier’s point of view, Napoleon had likewise such an easy triumph as has fallen to the lot of few commanders. His opponents were so conservative that their ideas were antiquated, his own strategy was so new and revolutionary that it dumfounded them. A favourite method of detraction is illustrated by the familiar story of Columbus’s egg. What is once done, anybody can do. The strategic reputation of Frederick the Great is in our day first attacked by the so-called comparative method—that is, by comparing it with the achievements and system, not of his contemporaries, but of Napoleon, his successor; and then the strategic reputation of Napoleon is diminished by sneering at that of Frederick, with whose antiquated method the new one came into comparison and contact, to the complete disaster of the former. This vicious circle may be dismissed with contempt.
Napoleon’s strategic genius was, unlike any other talent he possessed, constructive and original. No doubt he studied Cæsar; no doubt he studied Maillebois; no doubt he studied the work of Turenne and of the great Frederick; no doubt he was a pupil of the giant soldiers who inaugurated and carried on the wars of the Revolution; but while others had pursued the same studies, it remained for him to devise and put into operation a strategy based upon past experience, but subversive of accepted dogmas, new, adapted to its ends, and founded on theories which, though modified in practice by the discoveries of an intervening century, have, when properly understood, never, not even to-day, been shaken in principle.
His triumphs as a soldier, therefore, are his own; and it was not until all Europe had learned the lessons which he taught her generals by a series of object demonstrations lasting twenty years, that the teacher began to diminish in success and splendor. The persistent critics of Frederick have been asking and reiterating questions such as these: Why did not the king begin early in July, 1756? Why did he not storm the camp of Pirna? Why did he not continue the war in October? Why did he not renew hostilities the following year until forced to it? And so on, and so on.
By this method they have shrunk the horizon to their own dimensions, and have imprisoned their victim within the pale of his faults; but a wider view and the historic background display his strategy in large outline, as illuminated by the light of his age; and thus the defeats of Kolin and Kunersdorf, as well as the victories of Leuthen, Rossbach, Zorndorf, and Torgau, exhibit the Prussian general as the great genius which he was. It was not until Napoleon had taught his rivals what fighting ought to be that men could also pick and nag at him by asking why Waterloo did not begin four hours earlier, why more explicit directions were not given to Grouchy, why in 1814 the desperate man chose to cut off the line of his enemies’ communications rather than withdraw into Paris and call the nation to arms; and so on to infinity. Judged either historically or theoretically, the strategy of Napoleon is original, unique, and unexcelled. It is his greatest achievement, because his most creative.
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