William Milligan Sloane

“ The apparent resurrection of Jacobinism was actually the last appearance of its ghost; for the Directory, shorn of all prestige, was divided and shaky; the army, republican to the core, was weary with its inefficiency and furious with its bankruptcy; the mass of the nation, conservative and royalist, despaired of a restoration, and, sick of war, were for the moment in a humor to accept any strong government. The majority of the administration, the nation, and the army were, therefore, in readiness, while the numerous malcontents in each were at least temporarily silenced. ”

“ And to the vision of one who sees them first from a mountain-top through the dim haze of a sunny day, towns and cities seem strewn as if they were grain from the hand of a sower. The measure of bewilderment is full when memory recalls that this garden of Italy has been the prize for which from remotest antiquity the nations of Europe have fought, and that the record of the ages is indelibly written in the walls and ornaments of the myriad structures—theaters, palaces, and churches—which lie so quietly below. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The landed aristocracy of Great Britain saw all its prestige endangered by Bonaparte's successes; its control of Parliament, its influence in the local governments, its hierarchy in church and state, its absurd control of the suffrage, all stood in glaring contrast to the reforms of diametrically opposed tendency established in France, where burghers and peasants had come to their own and flaunted their rights and powers before all Europe. A British revolution was imminent. The great masters of industry were equally savage and determined. ”

“ If the Russian army in its own territory shriveled as it did before the summer heat by sickness and desertion, it may be imagined how that of the French dwindled. Their terrible sufferings could be ended only by a battle. Heat, dust, and drought wrought havoc in their columns; the pitiless northern sun left men and animals with little resisting power; the flying inhabitants devastated their fields, the horses and oxen gorged themselves on the half-rotten thatch of the abandoned huts, and died by the wayside; the gasping soldiery had no food but flesh. ”

“ This is the method of Napoleon's detractors, except when, in addition, they first magnify his wickedness, and then further distort the proportion by viewing his fine powers through the other end of the glass. We all know how easy great things are when once they have been accomplished, how simple the key to a mystery when once it has been revealed. Morally considered, Bonaparte was a child of nature, born to a mean estate, buffeted by a cruel and remorseless society, driven in youth to every shift for self-preservation, compelled to fight an unregenerate world with its own weapons. ”

“ Russia must therefore not only be an ally, but a hearty ally: as the price of her subscription to the Berlin Decree, and the consequent closing of her harbors to English shipping, she could gratify any reasonable ambition, and might virtually dictate her own terms. With an engine in his hands as formidable as Russia's adhesion to his commercial policy, he could act at the nick of time,—which, as he declared at this very season to Joseph, was the highest art of which man is capable,—could destroy England's commerce, and in a long peace could consolidate the empire he had already won. ”

“ 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 rôle 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. ”

“ The republic, having vaguely enlarged them, had fought for them as France had never fought before, because these things were not to be achieved for a dynasty, and were now illuminated by visions of human regeneration. Still England stood in the way. Bonaparte had given them new shape and new intensity with new definition; logically his success would stand for that most splendid of ideals which has ever dazzled poets, theologians, and kings—the universality of empire for peace and its arts, and the consequent elevation of all mankind. ”

“ In short, France was chaos, and the Salicettis of the time might hope for anything, or fear everything, in the throes of her disorder. Not so a man like Buonaparte. His instinct led him to stand in readiness at the parting of the ways. Others might choose and press forward; he gave no sign of being moved by current events, but stood with his eye still fixed, though now in a backward gaze, on Corsica, ready, if interest or self-preservation required it, for another effort to seize and hold it as his own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the peace of Schönbrunn marked the initiation of a policy which dissolved the peace of Tilsit. There could now no longer be any serious question of marriage between members of the two courts. Compelled by circumstances to choose between a dual alliance with a first-rate power which must share on equal terms in the dominion of the world, and one with a second-rate power whose armies were surpassed by none, Napoleon had deliberately chosen the latter, as the shortest way to absolute and complete supremacy, to the assertion of a sovereign will over a conquered universe. ”

“ During the weeks which elapsed between the address of the senate and the end of April, Bonaparte had made certain that neither Austria nor Prussia would oppose, and that army and people were willing. Indeed the fate of Moreau had, as the officers all felt, cast a limelight on the chances of insubordination, and had illuminated into a dazzling brilliance the possibilities of complaisance. The efforts of historians to prove that France did not want the empire are all failures. Every new contemporary document which sees the light of day contains more or less to prove the contrary. ”

“ These were the events about to take place; they would in the end evolve from the chaos of mob rule first the irregular and temporary dictatorship of the Convention, then the tyranny of the Directory; at the same time they would infuse a fervor of patriotism, into the whole mass of the French nation, stunned, helpless, and leaderless, but loyal, brave, and vigorous. In such a crisis the people would tolerate, if not demand, a leader strong to exact respect for France and to enforce his commands; would prefer the vigorous mastery of one to the feeble misrule of the many or the few. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Is it supposable that a nation could consider for an instant the possibility of destroying itself and its inheritance, for the sake of a peace which would surrender all its advantages to an active and irreconcilable enemy? If there were no alternative except war or suicide, is Great Britain to be blamed for choosing war, however desperate? Moreover, there is another consideration of the first importance, which has a moral quality universally recognized in other spheres. By common consent no occupation of discovered land holds good if it be not permanent and beneficent ”

“ The Emperor's infatuation with the plausible scheme of destroying England's commerce by paper blockades and by embargoes on British goods had not been diminished either by his inconclusive struggle in Spain or by his victory over Austria. It was in vain that he had changed his naval policy from one of fleet-fighting to one of commerce-destroying; that he had seized and was continuing to seize neutral vessels laden with British wares; that he had expanded his political system by conquest until he was nominally master of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Baltic harbors. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is the passionate admiration of a southern nature for a hero as represented by the ideal Paoli. There is the equally southern quality of quick but transient hatred. The love of dramatic effect is shown at every turn, in the perfervid style of his writings, in the mock dignity of an edict issued from the grotto at Milleli, in the empty honors of a lieutenant-colonel without a real command, in the paltry style of an artillery inspector with no artillery but a few dismantled guns. ”

“ If called to surrender his modest life, his consideration as a temperate and simple private man, he must have in return the substance and reality of rule. For instance, to the Italian republic must be added, if Joseph were to be president, all of Piedmont; Murat and the French army of occupation must be withdrawn, and all the fortresses of the frontier toward France must be rebuilt! Joseph could not be a political marionette. But it was exactly a political puppet that Napoleon professed to desire, and Talleyrand had found one. So Joseph was left to ruminate on the charms of a simple life. ”

“ It is not easy to estimate Napoleon's responsibility for what had happened and was about to happen. He was persistently domineering, contemptuous of national feeling and dynastic politics, over-confident in the unswerving devotion of France, inflexible in his policy of territorial aggrandizement, ruthless in applying his peculiar conceptions of finance and political economy, and pitiless in his own self-seeking. On the other hand, Alexander, having received Prussia's autonomy as his part, had proved an untrustworthy ally from the outset. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The contrast between the ferocious bluster of the Directory and the generous simplicity of a great conqueror was not lost on the Italians nor on the moderate French. For them as for Bonaparte, a military and political aspirant in his first independence, everything, absolutely everything, was at stake in those earliest engagements; on the event hung not merely his career, but their release. In pleasant succession the spring days passed like a transformation scene. Success was in the air, not the success of accident, but the resultant of forethought and careful combination. ”

“ A quick burst of Spanish anger, a sharp stab of the Spanish poniard—the frequency of such incidents began to create a panic among the French boy-soldiers. The seizure and sack of a city had for years been a traditional amusement of the grand army, connected in Italy and Germany with little or no loss of life, and enhanced by the acquisition of enormous booty. The young conscripts, who had heard the oft-told tale from their fathers' lips, found to their bitter disappointment that in Spain a sack meant much bloodshed and little, if any, booty. ”

“ The innate coarseness of a giant was, therefore, never diminished, and the society of those who turned pleasing and pleasure into a fine art, who regarded entertainment as the chief concern of life, was generally irksome to a man who looked upon many over-ready women as instruments for gratifying physical passion; to a general who saw in all women the possible mothers of soldiers; to a "scientific" politician who looked on the family and on children as inert factors in a mathematical problem; to a wilful dictator ignorant of the unalterable supremacy of woman in her own sphere. ”

“ Fourteen armies were soon to move and fight, directed by a single mind; discipline was about to be effectively strengthened because it was to be the discipline of the people by itself; the envoys of the Convention were to go to and fro, successfully laboring for common action and common enthusiasm in the executive, in both the fighting services, and in the nation. But as yet none of these miracles had been wrought, and, with Toulon lost, they might be forever impossible.
Such was the setting of the stage in the great national theater of France when Napoleon Buonaparte entered on the scene. ”

“ 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 French interests in Spain were left in a most deplorable condition. The populace of Madrid had received the hero of the age with coldness, and shut themselves up in their houses to avoid forming a crowd or creating any enthusiasm in the streets. They would not even come out to see the gorgeous military parade which was arranged for their benefit. The gentry and nobility had been alike distant and cold. It was clear that Spain could neither be wheedled, cajoled, nor threatened into even passive acquiescence in the new conquest. ”

“ In infancy he had known of Genoa, the tyrant of his island, as strong in the splendid commercial enterprises which stretched eastward through the Levant, and beyond into the farther Orient; in childhood he had fed his imagination on the histories of Alexander the Great, and his conquest of Oriental empires; in youth he had thought to find an open door for his ambition, when all others seemed closed, by taking service with England to share the renown of those who were building up her Eastern empire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The revolution of any public system, social, political, or military, is always a gigantic task. It was nothing less than this which Bonaparte had wrought, not in one, but in all three spheres, during the summer and autumn of 1796. The changes, like those of most revolutions, were changes of emphasis and degree in the application of principles already divined. "Divide and conquer" was an old maxim; it was a novelty to see it applied in warfare and politics as Bonaparte applied it in Italy. ”

“ The appointment of Bennigsen as commander-in-chief, and the results of Pultusk, awakened great enthusiasm among his hungry soldiers, who were now clamorous for a decisive battle. He had ninety thousand men,—at least on paper,—and was not disposed to leave the French in peace to recruit their numbers and physical strength in comfortable winter quarters. Unlike the Prussian officers, he had learned the lessons of recent campaigns, and had the strength of his character been equal to the cleverness of his strategy, he would have been a fair match for Napoleon. ”

“ In a just cause this policy is great and humane; in an unjust cause any warfare is butchery. To assert, as many do, that Marengo was superb, but unpatriotic, is simply to renounce the cause in which it was fought. As to the strategy of the campaign, the final judgment must be that of Napoleon himself: To be a good general you must know mathematics; that serves in a thousand circumstances to clarify your ideas. Perhaps I owe my success to my mathematical ideas: a general should never make pictures, this is the worst of all. ”

“ To him as a patriot, therefore, France, as against the outer world, was first, no matter what her government might be; but the France he yearned for was a land regenerated by the gospel of humanity, awakened to the highest activity by the equality of all before the law, refined by that self-abnegation of every man which makes all men brothers, and destroys the menace of the law. ”

“ In the face of superior numbers, the French had not lost a single important position, and whatever military science had been displayed was all theirs; Blücher made the solitary advance move of the allies, the seizure of Möckern by York's corps; Schwarzenberg had been literally mired in his attempt to outflank his enemy, and but for Alexander's peremptory recall of the reserves destined for the same task, the day would have been one of irretrievable disaster to the coalition. Yet Napoleon knew that he was lost unless he could retreat. ”

“ In the event of success, the invasion of Turkey, the seizure of Egypt, and the gratification of Alexander would be easy. More remotely, the deadly blow at England could be struck in Asia. What a conception! What a debauch of the imagination!
But there was one specter which, though laid for intervals, would not entirely down, and returned with stolid persistency: the existence of the Western empire hung on the thread of a single life; the very crowns of France and Italy had no heir. ”

“ This was the first of those sportive tricks which for years to come Bonaparte was so triumphantly to play with the old dynasties of Europe. The success of this combination temporarily secured the peace of the Continent on terms most advantageous to himself.
The people of France were tired of the awful earnestness which had characterized the philosophical and political upheavals of the eighteenth century, and were ever more and more eager for glory and for pleasure. This was true of all political schools, excepting only a very few men of serious minds. The masses had come to loathe royalty. ”

“ Passing through the phases of constitutional reform, of anarchy, and of military despotism, the movement seemed for a time to have failed, and to outward appearances absolutism was stronger after Waterloo than it had been half a century earlier.
But the force of the revolution was only checked, not spent; and to the awakening of general intelligence, the strengthening of national feeling, and the upbuilding of a sense of common brotherhood among men, produced by the revolutionary struggles of this epoch, Europe owes whatever liberty and free government its peoples now enjoy. ”

“ This was suddenly changed in April, when it was brought home to the nation that the specter of war had again been raised, and that the dynasties were finally a unit in their determination to extirpate the Napoleonic régime as a measure of self-defense. Every man with any means saw himself beggared, and every mother felt her son slipping from her arms to swim once more that sea of blood in which for a generation the hope of the nation had been submerged. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As yet the curse of pillage was not synonymous with conquest, as yet the free and generous ardor of youth and military tradition exerted its force, as yet self-sacrifice to the extreme of endurance was a virtue, as yet the canker of lust and debauchery had not ruined the life of the camp. Emancipated from the bonds of formality and mere contractual relation to superiors, manhood asserted itself in troublesome questionings as to the motives and plans of officers, discussion of what was done and what was to be done, above all in searching criticism of government and its schemes. ”

“ 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 (p. 248) 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. ”

“ 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. ”