William Milligan Sloane

“ 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. ”

“ Enthusiasm raged in Paris (p. 196) like fire among dry stubble. France, if so it must be, against the world! Liberty and equality her religion! The land a camp! The entire people an army! Three hundred thousand men to be selected, equipped, and drilled at once!
Nothing indicates that Buonaparte was in any way moved by the terrible massacres of September, or even by the news of the King's unmerited fate. But the declaration of war was a novelty which must have deeply interested him; for what was Paoli now to do? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Clarke had reached Milan on November twenty-ninth, 1796. Bonaparte read him like an open scroll, discovering instantly that this graceful courtier had been commissioned to keep the little general in his place as a subordinate, and use him to make peace at any price. Possessing the full confidence of Carnot and almost certainly of the entire Directory, the easily won diplomat revealed to his lean, long-haired, ill-clad, penetrating, and facile inquisitor the precious contents of the governmental mind. ”

“ Why should not their success in the arts of peace be as great as in the glorious and successful wars they had carried on? There was, therefore, both in the country and in the government, as in the army, a considerable and ever growing party which demanded a general peace, but only with the "natural" frontier, and a small one which felt peace to be imperative even if the nation should be confined within its old boundaries. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was magic in the new spell, the charm never ceased to work; with that first call from Nice began the transformation of the French army, fighting now no longer for principle, but for glory, victory, and booty. Its leader, if successful, would be in no sense a constitutional general, but a despotic conqueror. Outwardly gracious, and with no irritating condescension; considerate wherever mercy would strengthen his reputation; fully aware of the influence a dramatic situation or a pregnant aphorism has upon the common mind, and using both with mastery ”

“ Perhaps the old vista of becoming a Corsican hero opened up once again to a sore and disappointed man, but it is not probable: the horizon of his life had expanded too far to be again contracted, and the present task was probably considered but as a bridge to cross once more the waters of bitterness. On success or failure hung his fate. Two fellow-adventurers were Junot and Marmont. The former was the child of plain French burghers, twenty-three years old, a daring, swaggering youth, indifferent to danger, already an intimate of Napoleon's, having been his secretary at Toulon. ”

“ The court at Montebello was not a mere levee of men. There was as well an assemblage of brilliant women, of whom the presiding genius was Mme. Bonaparte. Love, doubt, decision, marriage, separation, had been the rapidly succeeding incidents of her connection with Bonaparte in Paris. Though she had made ardent professions of devotion to her husband, the marriage vow sat but lightly on her in the early days of their separation. Her husband appears to have been for a short time more constant, but, convinced of her fickleness, to have become as unfaithful as she. ”

“ Under his leadership the moderate monarchists, or Feuillants, as they were later called, from the convent of that order to which they withdrew, seceded from the Jacobins, and before the Assembly had ceased its work the nation was cleft in two, divided into opponents and adherents of monarchy. As if to insure the disasters of such an antagonism, the Assembly, which numbered among its members every man in France of ripe political experience, committed the incredible folly of self-effacement, voting that not one of its members should be eligible to the legislature about to be chosen. ”

“ The foreigner we have so thoroughly conquered triumphs and overwhelms us with his contempt; an incapable race, an overbearing and unnatural following, reappear triumphant, throw up our crime to us, wreak their vengeance, and govern us like helots by the hand of a stranger. Thus the defeat of the Convention would crown the brow of the foreigner, and seal the disgrace and slavery of our native land." Such thoughts, his youth, trust in his own power and in his destiny, turned the balance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Consequently its epoch is most interesting, being dramatic in the highest degree, having brought into prominence men and characters who rank among the great of all time, and having exhibited to succeeding generations the most important lessons in the most vivid light. By common consent the eminent man of the time was Napoleon Bonaparte, the revolution queller, the burgher sovereign, the imperial democrat, the supreme captain, the civil reformer, the victim of circumstances which his soaring ambition used but which his unrivaled prowess could not control. ”

“ All the parish priests of Dauphiny have taken the civic oath; they make sport of the bishop's outcry.... What is called good society is three fourths aristocratic—that is, they disguise themselves as admirers of the English constitution."
What a concise, terse sketch of that rising tide of national feeling which was soon to make good all defects and to fill all gaps in the new military system, put the army as part of the nation under the popular assembly, knit regulars, reserves, and home guard into one, and give moral support to enforcing the proposal for compulsory enlistment! ”

“ Outward caprice is, in great natures, often the mask of inward perseverance, especially among the unprincipled who suit their language to their present purpose, in fine disdain of commonplace consistency. The primitive Corsican was both rude and gentle, easily moved to tears at one time, insensate at another; selfish at one moment, lavish at another; and yet he had a consistent character. Although disliking in later life to be called a Corsican, Napoleon was nevertheless typical of his race: he could despise love, yet render himself its willing slave ”

“ In time, therefore, the army became no longer a mere support to the monarchy, but a portion of its moral organism, sharing its virtues and its vices, its weakness and its strength, reflecting, as in a mirror, the true condition of the state so far as it was personified in the king. The French army, in the year 1785, was in a sorry plight. With the consolidation of classes in an old monarchical society, it had come to pass that, under the prevailing voluntary system, none but men of the lowest social stratum would enlist. ”

“ It was by his favor that almost every man of that galaxy of modern warriors who so long dazzled Europe by their feats of arms first appeared as a candidate for advancement. Moreau, Macdonald, Jourdan, Bernadotte, Kléber, Mortier, Ney, Pichegru, Desaix, Berthier, Augereau, and Bonaparte himself,—each one of these was the product of Carnot's system. He was the creator of the armies which for a time made all Europe tributary to France. ”

“ Before a vast altar erected on the drill-ground, in the presence of all the dignitaries, with cannon booming and the air resounding with shouts and patriotic songs, the officials in groups, the people in mass, swore with uplifted hands to sustain the constitution, to obey the National Assembly, and to die, if need be, in defending French territory against invasion. ”

“ Captious critics are never content, and they even charge that when, on the tenth, Wurmser and his garrison finally did march out, Bonaparte's absence was a breach of courtesy. It requires no great ardor in his defense to assert, on the contrary, that in circumstances so unprecedented the disparity of age between the respective representatives of the old and the new military system would have made Bonaparte's presence another drop in the bitter cup of the former. The magnanimity of the young conqueror in connection with the fall of Mantua was genuine, and highly honorable to him. ”

“ Nothing comparable to that inexhaustible storehouse of nature can be found in France, generous as is her soil. Walled in on the north and west by the majestic masses of the Alps, and to the south by the smaller but still mighty bastions of the Apennines, these plains owe to the mountains not only their fertility and prosperity, but their very existence. ”

“ If defeated, he would be execrated by all coming generations, while victory would be almost odious. How could he deliberately become the scapegoat of so many crimes to which he had been an utter stranger? Why go as an avowed Jacobin and in a few hours swell the list of names uttered with horror? "On the other hand, if the Convention be crushed, what becomes of the great truths of our Revolution? Our many victories, our blood so often shed, are all nothing but shameful deeds. ”