Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“ The sins of the Superman are unpardonable. But the sins of man are as the hairs of his head. So long as we regard Napoleon as a Superman, we are bound to regard all his cruelties as cold-blooded, all his pride as blasphemous, all his diplomacy as `black causeless duplicity' (as Stevenson said of his own Master of Ballantrae) , all his sins, in short, as sins against the Holy Ghost--and, above all, all his misfortunes as deserved. But if we regard him as Man, we pretty soon find that his sins were the sins of a selfish, simple, generous, crude Corsican officer of artillery. ”

“ The Rights of Man formed his only working and real droits de seigneur. He was popular with soldiers not only because he was a conqueror, but also because he was a soldier. He ruled France not because he had conquered it, but because he had conquered its enemies. A great French writer put the truth in its unfavourable form by saying that men of the world sympathise with Napoleon because he had no internal life. ”

“ His few cruelties were of the half-constrained kind--the kind that twenty other officers of artillery would have committed if they had been in the same hole. His pride was pure vanity; as innocent and as active as the vanity of a schoolboy. His diplomacy was at once less secret and less bullying than nearly all the diplomacy before and after his time. ”