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NAPOLEON 
 
Napoleon 1 
 
NAPOLEON 
 
 A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 Dr. MAX LENZ 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY 
 
 FREDERIC WHYTE 
 
 WITH 50 ILLUSTRATIONS, INCLUDING PHOTOGRAVURE FRONTISPIECE, 
 ALSO MAPS, AND FACSIMILE OF AUTOGRAPHS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 27 & 29 WEST 23RD STREET 
 1907 
 
"> 
 
 Printed in Great Britain 
 
 n6 
 ' 'git 
 
7^' 
 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER 
 I. 
 
 Corsica 
 
 . , 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 II. 
 
 From Toulon to Campo Formio 
 
 63 
 
 III. 
 
 In the East 
 
 • 
 
 138 
 
 IV. 
 
 Sole Ruler and Restorer of 
 
 Peace . 
 
 I70 
 
 V. 
 
 From Boulogne to Tilsit 
 
 • 
 
 223 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Treaty of Tilsit 
 
 • 
 
 277 
 
 VII. 
 
 Crisis and Catastrophe 
 
 . 
 
 3°9 
 
 VIII. 
 
 The Catastrophe 
 
 • 
 
 335 
 
 IX. 
 
 From Elba to St. Helena 
 
 . 
 
 359 
 
 
 Index 
 
 . 
 
 383 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Napoleon. By Delaroche . 
 
 Photogravure frontispiece 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 AjACCIO . . . . 2 
 
 Napoleon's Birthplace . 
 
 
 
 \' 
 
 Marie L^titia Ramolino Buonaparte 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 Charles Buonaparte 
 
 
 
 8 
 
 General Paoli 
 
 
 
 H 
 
 Napoleon Bonaparte. By Philippoteaux 
 
 
 
 H 
 
 Cardinal Fesch 
 
 
 
 38^ 
 
 Napoleon Bonaparte. By J. Guerin 
 
 
 
 64 
 
 Barras 
 
 
 
 80 
 
 Murat 
 
 
 
 90 
 
 Carnot 
 
 
 
 96 
 
 Napoleon Bonaparte. By Applani . 
 
 
 
 104 
 
 Napoleon Bonaparte at Arcola. By Baron 
 
 Gros 
 
 
 114 
 
 Bernadotte 
 
 
 
 126 
 
 Moreau 
 
 
 
 136 
 
 Napoleon Bonaparte. By David . 
 
 
 
 142 
 
 Nelson 
 
 
 
 148 
 
 Napoleon Bonaparte. By F. Gerard 
 
 
 
 160 
 
 SlEYES . 
 
 
 
 172 
 
 Lucien Bonaparte 
 
 
 
 186 
 
 Napoleon crossing the Alps. By David 
 
 
 
 198 
 
 Empress Josephine. By F. Gerard . 
 
 
 
 220 
 
 Napoleon Bonaparte — First Consul. By Isabey 
 
 
 224 
 
 Napoleon in the Imperial Robes. By F. Gerard 
 
 
 244 
 
 Pope Pius VII . . . 
 
 
 246 
 
 The Coronation of Napoleon 
 
 
 
 248 
 
Vlll 
 
 NAPOLEON 
 
 Jerome 
 
 
 FAC 
 
 NG FAGB 
 252 
 
 Marie Pauline, Princess Borghese . 
 
 
 
 . 262 
 
 Frederick William III . 
 
 
 
 • 274 
 
 Sir Sidney Smith 
 
 
 
 280 
 
 Joseph Bonaparte 
 
 
 
 29O 
 
 Louis Bonaparte 
 
 
 
 292 
 
 Eugene de Beauharnais . 
 
 
 
 300 
 
 Empress Josephine at Malmaison. By Prudho 
 
 n 
 
 
 3IO 
 
 Caroline Bonaparte 
 
 
 
 312 
 
 Empress Marie Louise. By Prudkon 
 
 
 
 3H 
 
 King of Rome 
 
 
 
 3l6 
 
 Talleyrand 
 
 
 
 324 
 
 Empress Marie Louise and King of Rome 
 
 
 
 332 
 
 Marshal Ney . 
 
 
 
 • 344 
 
 Alexander I . 
 
 
 
 352 
 
 Elba . 
 
 
 
 356 
 
 Napoleon. By Horace Fernet 
 
 
 
 360 
 
 Wellington 
 
 
 
 368 
 
 Joseph Fouche, Due d'Otranto 
 
 
 
 370 
 
 St. Helena . 
 
 
 
 372 
 
 Napoleon's Grave at St. Helena 
 
 
 
 376 
 
 Longwood 
 
 
 
 376 
 
 Napoleon's Tomb in the Invalides 
 
 
 
 378 
 
 Autograph Signatures of Napoleon 
 
 
 
 380-2 
 
 MAPS 
 
 Battle of Austerlitz 
 Battle of Waterloo 
 Map of Europe 
 
 . 258 
 
 • 374 
 
NAPOLEON 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 CORSICA 
 
 WAS born when my country was dying" — that 
 is how Napoleon himself, with equal force and 
 brevity, has pointed to the moment in which he came 
 into the world. For on the 9th of May, 1769, Pasquale 
 Paoli, with the Corsican militia, had taken the field 
 against the French for the last time ; not long after- 
 wards an English ship conveyed the defeated general 
 to Naples, and that was the end of the freedom of 
 Corsica. It was on the 15th of August in the same 
 year, the feast of the Assumption, that Laetitia 
 Ramolino, the young and beautiful wife of Carlo 
 Buonaparte, gave birth to her illustrious son. 
 
 These words were addressed to no less a personage 
 than Paoli himself, then an exile in England. They 
 formed the first line of the first letter that the young 
 Buonaparte ever wrote to the hero of Corsica, whom 
 he regarded as the incarnation of patriotism ; he wrote 
 it on the 12th of June, 1789 ; that is to say, in the 
 hour when France, who had robbed Corsica of her 
 freedom, was herself on the brink of disaster. 
 
2 NAPOLEON 
 
 The States General, called together by the King, 
 had been assembled at Versailles since May, and on 
 the ioth of June the Abbe Sieves, the leader of the 
 Third Estate, had called upon its representatives to 
 constitute themselves the government of the country. 
 It seems natural to suppose that it was the news of 
 this event, rightly regarded as the real beginning of 
 the Revolution, that moved the young officer, who in 
 his garrison at Auxonne must have been following 
 the course of affairs at Versailles more keenly than any 
 Frenchman, to the penning of his letter. 
 
 There can be no better indication, however, of the 
 whole colouring of Napoleon's mind from early boy- 
 hood than this pithy sentence in which the lion's claw, 
 the Emperor's hand, reveals itself. He was not yet 
 twenty years old, and since his tenth year he had 
 been in France and had worn the King's uniform. 
 His whole environment and the atmosphere in which 
 he lived had been French; he wrote and spoke 
 French, he had almost forgotten the Corsican dia- 
 lect. But all this had not weakened, it had rather 
 served to stimulate and intensify his Corsican in- 
 stincts. Every word of his that has come down to 
 us from that period of his life points to the one 
 emotion : the desire to win back his country's free- 
 dom, together with an inextinguishable hatred against 
 the conqueror. " Thirty thousand Frenchmen," he 
 goes on to say, " vomited out on our coast, flooding 
 the throne of freedom with rivers of blood — that 
 was the hateful scene first given to my eyes. The 
 cries of the dying, the tears of the hopeless, sur- 
 rounded my cradle from the moment of my birth. 
 You had left our island, and with you had gone our 
 happiness and our hope. Slavery followed upon our 
 
CORSICA 3 
 
 submission : subjected to the threefold tyranny of the 
 mercenary, the magistrate, and the tax collector, our 
 countrymen live on despised — despised by those who 
 have the reins of government in their hands. Is that 
 not the most hideous of all the tortures that a man 
 can be put to ? Did the unfortunate Peruvians meet 
 with a worse fate, when they fell victims to the sword 
 of the covetous Spaniard ? " 
 
 How are we to account for this fierce disaffection of 
 the young officer, for his burning hatred against the 
 country to whose army he belonged, to whose King 
 he owed his education and his livelihood ? Is his 
 attitude justified by the measures adopted by the 
 French in Corsica ? Were his countrymen really 
 treated with contempt and placed absolutely at the 
 mercy of the foreign administration ? Were they 
 deprived of their possessions and ground down by 
 taxation ? Nothing of the kind. The French had 
 indeed come as conquerors ; but it must be admitted 
 that once in the position of masters they had done 
 their utmost to win over their new subjects, and in 
 particular the leading families of the island. In the 
 principal court of judicature which they instituted, 
 and to which they gave the same standing as that of 
 the Parlements or high courts of France, there were 
 four Corsicans out of a total of twelve members 
 having seats and votes ; in the eleven lower courts 
 the magistrates of Corsican birth outnumbered the 
 French. The villages and valleys of the island were 
 self-governing in all local matters ; the King appointed 
 an overseer to each of its ten provinces, but these 
 officials were chosen from the Corsican nobility. 
 There was a body of representatives of the various 
 orders meeting at Bastia, the seat of the Government, 
 
4 NAPOLEON 
 
 and consisting of twenty-three deputies taken from 
 the clergy, the nobility, and the commons. There 
 were no fixed dates for its sessions, but in the intervals 
 between them a committee of twelve members of the 
 Second Estate and two delegates specially chosen for 
 the purpose were empowered to represent the whole 
 body in all dealings with the King's Commissioner. 
 The French had deliberately set up divisions between 
 the various classes which had not hitherto been in 
 existence. The children of the people of rank were 
 brought up in French institutions, the sons in semi- 
 naries and military colleges, the daughters in con- 
 vents ; in short, the social and political conditions of 
 the Ancien Regime in France were introduced bodily 
 into the island. The country was, however, exempted 
 almost entirely from taxation, and its administration 
 involved the Crown in expenses far exceeding any 
 revenue brought in. It is true that even the most 
 generous treatment does not make up for the loss of 
 freedom. The real rulers of the island remained the 
 foreigners, the Governor and the Intendant with their 
 officials, civil and military. The Corsican who would 
 secure any favour for himself or his family must bow 
 down before these, and secure their goodwill. There 
 had been no real institution of nobility upon the 
 island before its conquest ; in dress and bearing, and 
 in all their manners and customs, all the inhabitants 
 had been on a level. But the old families, though 
 not a class apart, had been the real leaders of the 
 nation, alike in their civil feuds and in their fight for 
 freedom. It was no consolation to them now for all 
 they had lost that they were raised in rank above the 
 heads of their fellow-countrymen, while forced to bow 
 the knee to the alien. 
 
THE HOUSE AT AJACCIO IN WHICH NAPOLEON WAS BORN. 
 From a drawing bj' F. Clementson. 
 
CORSICA 5 
 
 The Buonapartes, like all their fellow-countrymen, 
 had fought with Paoli for the liberties of their 
 fatherland. Carlo Buonaparte, Napoleon's father, 
 had been a member of the National Assembly which 
 had stood by the Dictator ; he was a well-educated 
 man and had acted as Paoli's secretary. It was he 
 who penned the eloquent proclamation in which the 
 General summoned the Corsicans to their last fight. 
 His wife Laetitia had gone with him into camp, and 
 was present with him at the last battle ; Carlo, 
 however, did not accompany his leader into exile: 
 like most of the other Corsicans, including all his 
 own relatives, he remained at home at Ajaccio and 
 strove to accommodate himself to the new condition 
 of things. The family, which had many branches, 
 all of which clung together, was one of the most 
 respected in the island, but not one of the richest. 
 A house in the town, a couple of farm-houses with 
 some meadows and vineyards hard by as well as a 
 little farther away among the hills, constituted the 
 sum of Carlo Buonaparte's property. He was 
 obliged therefore, in course of time, as the number 
 of his children increased, to ingratiate himself with 
 the conquerors in order to better his fortunes. His 
 natural ability, together with his French education 
 and the good repute of his family, helped him in 
 this. After he had taken his doctor's degree at Pisa, 
 shortly after the birth of Napoleon, he was appointed 
 a magistrate and was twice sent to the French Court, 
 first in 1776 and then in 1778, as a representative of 
 the Corsican nobility. For these honours he was 
 largely indebted to De Marbeuf, the King's first 
 official of the island, who seems to have become an 
 intimate friend of the family, and who stood 
 
6 NAPOLEON 
 
 godfather to Louis Buonaparte. It was by Marbeuf s 
 recommendation that Carlo Buonaparte, on his second 
 journey to France, took with him his sons Joseph 
 and Napoleon as well as his wife's young stepbrother 
 Fesch, with a view to putting them to school in 
 French establishments. Fesch, who was destined for 
 the Church, was placed in the seminary at Aix. 
 Joseph and Napoleon were left in the college of 
 Autun, where the former, who also was intended for 
 a clerical career, was to stay, while Napoleon was 
 only to remain until he had mastered the language of 
 the country. It was on the ist of January, 1779, 
 that the brothers arrived there. In May, Napoleon 
 was transferred to his real destination, the military 
 school of Brienne. 
 
 This was one of the twelve establishments which 
 King Louis XV had founded for the training of his 
 military cadets. Beside the paying scholars, there 
 were in these institutions some six hundred King's 
 Bursars, as they were called, free students for whom 
 the King paid annually 700 francs apiece. To secure 
 one of these scholarships it was necessary, besides 
 producing certificates of poverty and good lineage, 
 to be provided with a recommendation from some 
 person of eminence. This was furnished to Napoleon 
 by M. De Marbeuf. Save for the uniform worn by 
 the youths (blue coat with red waistcoat and trousers), 
 the college at Brienne, which numbered from one 
 hundred to one hundred and fifty students, had 
 nothing about it to remind them of the military 
 vocation. It was under the management of the 
 Minorites, who kept the entire work of teaching in 
 their own hands. The course of instruction, for the 
 most part scanty enough, comprised the study of 
 
MARIE LCET1TIA RAMOLINO BUONAPARTE. 
 From a picture by F. Gerard. Photo by Neurdin Freres. 
 
CORSICA 7 
 
 French literature and composition, history, geography 
 and mathematics, and above all religious doctrine, 
 together with a little Latin and German. No 
 provision whatever was made for drill, or any other 
 kind of preparation for military service. It was, in 
 fact, a boarding-school entirely in keeping with the 
 character of the Minorite Order, and its chief 
 characteristics were its religious atmosphere and 
 seclusion. There were no holidays, not even on 
 Sundays. None of the boys were allowed to receive 
 from their homes either money or presents, nor were 
 they ever allowed a vacation at home. It was, in 
 short, an institution conducted in the true spirit of 
 the Ancien Regime with its combination of Church, 
 Crown and Nobility. The families, whose sons were 
 Napoleon's schoolfellows, had been connected with 
 the service of the Court for centuries. In their eyes 
 there was nothing remarkable or incongruous about 
 the character of the place. 
 
 But what was this young Corsican to think of it 
 all ? Everything about it, the sense of imprison- 
 ment within its cloisterlike walls, the methods of 
 restraint, the arrogance of his French schoolmates, 
 who amongst other forms of teasing twisted his 
 name " Napoleone " into the nickname " La paille 
 au nez," the bleak climate of the barren district of 
 Champagne, made him think longingly of all he 
 had lost, of the freedom and of the blue skies 
 of his Corsican home. As someone has well 
 remarked, his situation was like that of a boy from 
 Alsace-Lorraine placed in a Prussian military academy 
 after the war of 1870. What wonder that his 
 natural independence of spirit should have its 
 outcome in a feeling of bitter hatred, and that 
 
8 NAPOLEON 
 
 he should fall a victim to melancholia and home- 
 sickness ! 
 
 We must not make too much, however, of this aspect 
 of his school existence : he made some friends among 
 his schoolfellows, to whom he remained faithful in 
 after years, and to whom he showed favour when at 
 the height of his power, for it should be noted that 
 with all his powers of hating, Napoleon was never 
 guilty of ingratitude, and was more liable to forget 
 injuries than kindnesses. If we are to attach 
 credence to the statement of one of his chiefs (whose 
 trustworthiness, however, has been called in question), 
 he gave evidence of a friendly, modest, honourable, 
 grateful character, and his bearing was marked by self- 
 restraint. With his teachers he seems to have had 
 quite good relations, and on them, as upon other 
 associates of his youth, he bestowed benefits and 
 honours in the days of his greatness in a measure 
 often far beyond anything they merited from him. 
 But he could not reconcile himself to life in this 
 foreign land. His entry into the corps had been due 
 only to consideration of personal interest. He was 
 bound by no other tie to the King of France, he was 
 drawn by his every feeling to the land of his birth. 
 He did not take a leading place among the students 
 in the institution. The difficulties he met with in 
 mastering French were sufficient to keep him back, at 
 least in the first years. He did, however, distinguish 
 himself in mathematics and in history, as he has 
 himself told us. These things he required for his 
 career, for which he prepared himself with industry 
 and zest from the beginning ; it was for the Navy 
 that he was destined originally, like an older cousin, 
 named Casabianca, who, as Captain, lost both his 
 
CHARLES BUONAPARTE, FATHER OF NAPOLF.ON. 
 From a painting by Anne-Louis Girodet. 
 
 p. 8. 
 
CORSICA 9 
 
 ship and his life at the Battle of the Nile. History- 
 gave him food for the daydreams in which he was 
 wont to indulge in a kind of wooden alcove that he 
 had contrived for himself in a corner of the garden. 
 In this retreat, to which no one else ventured to 
 come, he would read in his Plutarch of the great 
 heroes of olden days who offered up their lives for 
 freedom and fatherland. With the stories of those 
 sublime figures of the ancient world, he would, in 
 his own mind, connect the legends of Corsican 
 patriots down to the days of Paoli himself, that 
 champion of liberty, who personified to him all the 
 martial glories of Greece and Rome. 
 
 He was nearly fifteen years old when he again saw 
 his father, who had come to France to take his son 
 Lucien from Autun, where he had previously been, 
 to Brienne, and his daughter Marianne to stay with 
 two of her cousins at Saint-Cyr. The letter addressed 
 to his young uncle Fesch, in which Napoleon 
 alludes to this event, has always been regarded as 
 a striking indication of the maturity of his character, 
 by reason of the coldly calculating tone by which it is 
 marked. He discusses in it the wish of his elder 
 brother, Joseph, to abandon the idea of becoming 
 a priest and to enter the army instead ; and it is, 
 indeed, remarkable with what seriousness and in what 
 clear, well-balanced language Napoleon enumerates 
 all the objections against this course. He " has re- 
 ceived an education," he writes, " for a clerical career ; 
 it is very late now for him to turn back ; the Bishop 
 of Autun would have given him a good bene- 
 fice, and in time he himself would have become a 
 bishop : what a good thing this would have been for 
 the family. The Bishop has done his best to get him 
 
io NAPOLEON 
 
 to remain, and has assured him that he would not re- 
 gret it, but it is no good, he persists in his idea : I 
 applaud his decision, if it comes from the real voca- 
 tion for the life of a soldier, certainly the finest life of 
 any, and if the great Author of all has implanted 
 in him, as in me, a decided bias towards the military 
 career." But what branch of the King's forces did 
 Joseph want to enter ? His deficiency in mathemati- 
 cal knowledge and his rather feather-brained charac- 
 ter unfitted him either for the engineers or for the 
 artillery ; doubtless he had the infantry in view. 
 " Good ; 1 understand. He will do nothing all day, 
 he will just lounge about ; after all, what is a poor 
 devil of an infantry officer — three-fourths of his time 
 a mauvais sujet? And that is just what neither my 
 dear father, nor you, nor my mother, nor my dear 
 uncle, the Archdeacon, would like to see him. But 
 Joseph has already shown some signs of a tendency 
 towards frivolity and extravagance." " In short," so 
 the letter ends, " a last effort should be made to 
 reconcile Joseph to the idea of becoming a priest. 
 Should this fail, it would be well for his father to 
 take him back to Corsica where he would have him 
 under his own eyes and where they might try to ap- 
 prentice him to a notary." 
 
 This letter would undoubtedly give one the im- 
 pression of an alarmingly precocious mind, were it 
 not that the tones of his father's voice may be 
 discerned in its every sentence. It is quite clear 
 that on the occasion of this visit Carlo Buona- 
 parte had held forth to Napoleon in this vein upon 
 the elder brother, whom Napoleon himself had not 
 seen for years. Carlo Buonaparte had intended to 
 return once again to Brienne, but the condition of 
 
CORSICA 1 1 
 
 his health, as to which he consulted the Paris doctors, 
 forced him to go back to Corsica direct : so this was 
 the first and the last time since Napoleon's departure 
 from Ajaccio that father and son came together, for in 
 March of the following year Carlo succumbed to the 
 illness which was to bring about the death of the 
 Emperor himself in St. Helena. He died at Mont- 
 pellier, whither he had gone by the advice of the local 
 physician in the hope of a cure. 
 
 Napoleon was then at the military school in Paris, 
 which he had entered in October, 1784. This institu- 
 tion also was a creation of Louis XV. It was a repro- 
 duction of the school at Brienne upon a higher plane : 
 it was marked by the same mixture of aristocracy and 
 clericalism : the conditions of the life were still more 
 aristocratic, and were in fact, almost too elegant for 
 students, some of whom were scantily provided for, 
 though many of them came from the first families in 
 the land. Generals, ministers, and Court officials were 
 to be found among the administrators of this establish- 
 ment. Over and above the ordinary curriculum, 
 which was on the same lines as that of the lower 
 institution, the students in this higher course were 
 trained in such accomplishments of a gentleman as 
 riding, fencing and dancing, besides elementary mili- 
 tary drill. In view of their future calling, the students 
 were divided up into companies, and the better, or 
 older ones amongst them were appointed non-com- 
 missioned officers. Among these, Napoleon never 
 took his place, but that was because of the very early 
 date at which he got his commission. He seems 
 to have come out of himself more in Paris than in 
 the provincial town. He made some good friends, if 
 he also made some enemies. Among the latter, none 
 
12 NAPOLEON 
 
 was more notable than De Philipeaux from Poitou, 
 the same who, as emigre, defended St. Jean D'Acre 
 against him ; Philipeaux would seem to have been 
 amongst those who hurt Napoleon's Corsican sensi- 
 bilities. There is a caricature drawn by one of the 
 students, in which Napoleon is depicted preparing to 
 set out to the relief of his hero Paoli, whilst a pro- 
 fessor is anxiously trying to hold him back by the 
 queue of his wig. He made so little effort to dissemble 
 his character as a Corsican rebel at heart, that he would 
 seem to have come into conflict with his teachers in 
 this respect. When, upon one occasion his confessor 
 approached him on the subject and reminded him of 
 his duties towards the King, he quitted the confes- 
 sional brusquely, with the words : " I did not come 
 here to talk about Corsica. It is not a priest's busi- 
 ness to catechise me on the subject." Two notes 
 handed down to us by Las Cases, serve to give us 
 some idea of the strong, but at the same time singu- 
 lar and uncomfortable, impression he made upon his 
 French associates. One of these, from the pen of M. 
 Demairon, who was his master in the art of French 
 composition, characterises his literary style as " granite, 
 hot from a volcano." The passionate rage animating 
 the heavy-handed sentences that mark his youthful 
 epistles, could not have been better described. Our 
 other witness uses a phrase which was afterwards to 
 sound prophetic : " A Corsican by race and nature, he 
 will go far, if circumstances favour him." 
 
 Napoleon became an officer in the autumn of 1785. 
 On the 30th of October, he made his way to Valois with 
 his friend and comrade Desmazis, there to join the 
 De la Fere regiment of artillery. It was one of the 
 best regiments in the army, and it was a distinction 
 
CORSICA 13 
 
 for the young officer to be attached to it. It was 
 here that Napoleon acquired the rudiments of his 
 military education. On the 10th of January, 1786, 
 he received his epaulettes, his commission being made 
 to date from the previous ist of September. His 
 pay came in all to 11 20 francs a year. He received 
 no allowance from home, but by careful economy he 
 managed to get along on these slender means, and 
 he may be said, therefore, to have been quite inde- 
 pendent now at the age of sixteen. In the following 
 September he returned home on leave, after seven years' 
 absence from the island. After he had already been 
 at home six months, Napoleon's leave was prolonged 
 until September, 1787, as the result of an appeal which 
 he made in the spring for this extension on the score 
 of sickness ; on returning to France in that month, 
 instead of rejoining his regiment he proceeded to 
 Paris, where his " semestre," to use the technical 
 expression, was extended once again, so that he was 
 able to return to Corsica on the ist of January, 1788, 
 and to remain there until the end of May: an 
 absence from his corps of, in all, twenty-one months. 
 Strange as may seem to us this long interruption of 
 his military service, there was nothing unusual about 
 it in those days. Napoleon's messmates were almost 
 equally well treated in the matter of leave. And 
 now, owing to the death of his father, his presence 
 in Corsica once again became necessary for family 
 reasons, his brother Joseph (who had taken to the 
 law) not having yet completed his studies in Pisa. 
 This involved a visit to Paris in the autumn of 1788. 
 
 In the meantime the regiment had several times 
 changed its station. During the Dutch disturbances 
 upon the northern frontier it had been sent first to 
 
i 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 Douai, then to the coast, and later, in December, 
 1787, to Auxonne on the Saone. It was at Auxonne 
 that Buonaparte rejoined it, to remain with it for more 
 than five years, and it was now that his education as a 
 soldier began in real earnest. Papers on artillery, still 
 extant in his handwriting, give evidence of his zeal 
 and of his clear grip of his special work both in 
 theory and practice. That he won the approval of 
 his superior officers is shown by the fact that he was 
 appointed a member of a committee of officers by 
 General du Teil, an authority upon the science of 
 artillery. His lot here at Auxonne, as at Valois, was 
 the life of a small garrison town. He proved 
 himself a good comrade, setting store by the good 
 name of the corps, and by the maintenance of unity 
 between all its members, the younger officers in 
 particular ; of this fact also we have written evidence 
 in the shape of a scheme drawn up by the lieutenants 
 of the regiment, for the establishment of a military 
 Court of Honour, the task of the actual wording of 
 this scheme having been entrusted to him. He had 
 the entree to the houses of the best families in the 
 little town, and established friendly relations with 
 them, to which in later years he often gratefully 
 looked back. 
 
 But all this left his inner nature untouched. His 
 soul remained weighted with feelings of loneliness 
 and vague melancholy ; feelings common to most 
 men of mark in the days of their youth, and due 
 merely to unsatisfied cravings after action and power 
 and fame. But in Napoleon's case these feelings were 
 blended with the Corsican's hatred against the race 
 that had robbed him of his home — the race amongst 
 whom he was condemned to live, almost like a host- 
 
CORSICA 15 
 
 age for the submission of his vanquished country- 
 men. Letters which he wrote at this time give us 
 glimpses into his state of mind. In one of them, 
 written on the 26th of April, Pasquale Paoli's six- 
 tieth birthday, we find him expressing himself as 
 follows : " Did the thought ever occur to his father, 
 Hyacinth Paoli, on the occasion of his birth, that one 
 day this son of his would be reckoned among the 
 bravest heroes of the new Italy ? The Corsicans in 
 those unhappy days were bowed down more than 
 ever under the tyranny of the Genoese. They 
 dragged on their wretched and humiliating existence 
 under conditions lower than that of the beasts. In 
 1715 the inhabitants of some of the valleys had risen 
 in arms against their tyrants, but it was not until 
 1729 that that revolution came about which was 
 marked by so many deeds of bravery and patriotism 
 that it may be compared to the great days of Rome. 
 . . ." " Eh bien ! " he exclaims, " let us go into this 
 matter a little. Did the Corsicans do well to throw 
 off the yoke of Genoa ? " And having invoked the 
 history of the island and the teachings of Rousseau 
 in their defence, he concludes with the words, " Thus 
 by all the dictates of justice, the Corsicans were right 
 to shake off the Genoese yoke, and would be right 
 to do the same with that of the French. Amen." 
 Eight days later we get another peep into the sombre 
 workings of his mind. " For ever lonely in the 
 midst of men, I continually withdraw into my inner- 
 most self, to give myself up entirely to sad musings. 
 Whither do my thoughts take me ? Towards death. 
 In this early morning of my days, I have a long life 
 to look forward to. For six or seven years I have 
 been far from my fatherland. How keen will be my 
 
i6 NAPOLEON 
 
 joy, four months hence, when I see my countrymen 
 and my relatives once again ! Can 1 not make sure 
 from the sweet feelings called up in my heart by the 
 memory of the happy hours of my childhood that my 
 bliss will be complete ? What madness is it then 
 that makes me wish for death ? " That is the ques- 
 tion he asks himself, and his answer is, that he wishes 
 to die because freedom has vanished from the world, 
 and because men have become knaves and cowards. 
 " What will be the spectacle that my home will pre- 
 sent to my eyes ? My countrymen burdened with 
 chains and on trembling knees kissing the hand of 
 the oppressor." His thoughts go back to that proud 
 past when the Corsican held himself erect and re- 
 turned home happily to his wife as soon as his day's 
 work was done. To-day the French have put an 
 end to virtue as well as to freedom. " What have 
 I to do in a world which forces me to give praise 
 to men who bid me hold virtue in contempt " ? 
 " Were I able," he exclaims, " to set free my country 
 by a single blow, I would at once plunge the avenging 
 sword in the heart of the tyrant." And the whole 
 passage, with its strange mixture of a sombre melan- 
 choly, misanthropy, and self-pity, concludes with 
 these words, reminiscent of Faust : " Life is a burden 
 to me, for I can no longer experience joy or pleasure, 
 and everything adds to my pain. It is a burden 
 to me because the men amongst whom I live and 
 must continue to live are as far removed from me 
 in their ideas and modes of thought as moonshine is 
 from sunshine. I have nothing that makes life worth 
 living — hence my disgust with everything." At a 
 later date, when Napoleon had learnt to master 
 these feelings, he traced them to three different and 
 
GENERAL PAOLI. 
 From an engraving by Houbraken. 
 
CORSICA 17 
 
 successive frames of mind : sheer boredom to begin 
 with, then low spirits, and then a mood of despair 
 tending towards suicide. The man who has to drag 
 on his existence in surroundings of depressing mono- 
 tony without prospect of change, asking himself day 
 after day why he was born, is in truth the most 
 miserable of mortals. 
 
 It is noteworthy that the first ambition that entered 
 into the head of this genius of action, this mightiest 
 of world-conquerors, was to achieve fame as a writer : 
 he wished to be the historian of Corsica — a wish in 
 truth natural enough in view of his circumstances at 
 the time and those of his country. I can find no 
 evidence of Napoleon's thinking of himself at this 
 period as the liberator of Corsica, as Paoli's successor. 
 The bonds of subjugation were still too heavy, so it 
 seems, to be shaken off : but to kindle a sacred fire of 
 hatred in the hearts of his countrymen, to evoke 
 proud memories of the heroic actions of their fore- 
 fathers, and thus to make ready for the longed-for 
 day of freedom, seemed to him a goal worth strug- 
 gling for. Already in Brienne he had sought to 
 master the history of his island ; his notes written at 
 Valence show him well acquainted with it, and per- 
 haps the idea had come to him even then of telling 
 the story himself anew. The project is revealed un- 
 mistakably in a manuscript which he produced in 
 Paris in November, 1787. This is the rough draft 
 of a preface to what he calls "A Rapid Sketch of Our 
 Misfortune," a work which he proposes to dedicate to 
 his fatherland, impelled thereto by the enthusiasm of 
 youth and aiming at nothing but an accurate statement 
 of facts. "Dear countrymen," he exclaims, "we 
 have always been unfortunate — for the moment we 
 
1 8 NAPOLEON 
 
 are the subjects of a mighty monarchy of whose 
 administration we experience only the defects, and we 
 can foresee no solace for our woes but in the course 
 of centuries." On his return to Corsica he set about 
 collecting fresh material for his work and began to 
 renew his knowledge of Italian. He returned to 
 Auxonne full of his projects, and it was here that 
 the coming collapse of the France of the old regime 
 forced the pen into his hand and led to his writing 
 the first pages of his historical sketch. The King, 
 when he had called together the States General, had 
 appealed to all his subjects to bring their complaints 
 and their wishes before the steps of his throne. 
 While from all the provinces of France and from 
 Corsica itself the official national representatives were 
 making their way to Versailles with their portfolios, 
 Napoleon decided that he would submit a Corsican 
 document on his own account ; speaking, not like 
 those others for a party or for a class, but on behalf 
 of his own ideas of political freedom. This I think 
 explains the form which Napoleon gave to his historical 
 essay : that of a letter to the Minister Necker, the 
 champion of reform in the King's council. Napoleon 
 writes in the person of a venerable man who, in the 
 course of a life of eighty years, has seen the days of 
 his island's freedom, of its struggles, and of its bond- 
 age — a favourite idea of his, to which he comes back 
 in other writings of this time. Unfortunately the 
 young lieutenant did not proceed with his undertaking, 
 in fact we know of it only from two letters from 
 Dupuys, who had been Napoleon's teacher at Brienne 
 in the art of composition and to whom the manuscript 
 was sent for perusal. But from the few sentences 
 cited by Dupuys and from the anxious warnings given 
 
CORSICA 19 
 
 by the good priest to his hot-blooded pupil — to whom 
 he is constantly appealing for " discretion ! discretion ! " 
 — it seems clear that its revolutionary character was 
 pronounced. 
 
 When in the autumn of 1789 Napoleon received 
 fresh leave of absence and returned once again to 
 Corsica, the Ancien Regime had fallen upon evil days in 
 France, but upon the island he found it still in its full 
 force, and the white flag waving over the castles 
 of Ajaccio, Bastia, Calvi ; its officials, intendants, 
 customs employes, magistrates and officers, were 
 still in power. In the States General the nobility 
 and clergy were represented by two adherents 
 to the old monarchy : Count Buttafuoco, who 
 in the war for freedom had already gone over to 
 the side of France, and who was regarded therefore 
 by Corsican patriots as a traitor to his country; and 
 the Abbe Perretti della Rocca, who had followed 
 Buttafuoco's lead ; while in the lawyer Salicetti de 
 Rostino, and Count Colonna da Cesario Rocca, a 
 nephew of Paoli's, the party of Progress could boast 
 two convinced advocates among the representatives of 
 the Third Estate. But if these were to achieve any- 
 thing they must attach themselves to the revolutionary 
 party in France. Their ideas and aspirations all 
 tended in the same direction : the France of yester- 
 day had been Corsica's enemy ; the France of to- 
 morrow must be momentarily at least its ally. 
 Napoleon arrived at Ajaccio just at the moment when 
 the movement, which here, as in France, took shape 
 first in the large towns, began to assume dangerous 
 proportions. We can imagine with what zest the 
 young officer threw himself into it. Tradition has it 
 that it was he who induced his fellow-citizens to hoist 
 
2o NAPOLEON 
 
 the tricolour and to institute a National Guard. The 
 effort at revolt was put down, but it broke out only 
 the more vigorously in Bastia, the seat of the 
 Government. There were sanguinary encounters 
 between the people and the troops, some of whom 
 sided with the insurgents. An entrance was forced 
 into the citadel, and the governor was compelled 
 to put on the tricolour cockade and to authorise the 
 raising of a National Guard. According to a trust- 
 worthy witness, it was Napoleon who, hurrying over 
 the mountains, had brought about this outbreak also. 
 He and his friends scarcely hoped at this moment to 
 bring about the freedom of the country, nor did the 
 revolutionary party in France entertain any fears as to 
 the loss of the island. On the contrary, good rela- 
 tions existed between the revolutionaries on both sides 
 of the water. The addresses and appeals which were 
 despatched to the French National Assembly by the 
 Corsican patriots, and which Napoleon not only 
 signed but for the composition of which he was 
 to some extent responsible, met with cordial response 
 and led to the decision come to on the 30th of Novem- 
 ber to accord to the island the rank of a department 
 of the French State and to repatriate its exiled defen- 
 ders with Paoli at their head in their fatherland. y_ 
 
 The change that had come over the position of 
 affairs is made very clear in a new version of the 
 letter on Corsica which Napoleon undertook in the 
 spring of 1790. Just as Necker was put on one side 
 in France as the result of the revolution, so we find 
 him superseded in regard to this communication. It 
 is addressed to the Abbe Raynal, the author of a 
 philosophical history of the East and West Indies, 
 whose writings had exerted a greater influence upon 
 
CORSICA 2i 
 
 public opinion than those of almost any other French 
 author of the period, and who must have been in 
 sympathy with Napoleon inasmuch as he had foretold 
 the liberation, not only of the French, but also of the 
 Corsicans, from the hated rule of the monarchy. 
 Napoleon had visited him in Marseilles, where he 
 had been residing since his return from exile (1787), 
 and the Abbe had encouraged him to give a history of 
 Corsica to the French literary world. He had begun 
 collecting his materials, so we gather from the intro- 
 duction, and had made some progress with the book, 
 when the Revolution broke out, giving Corsica back 
 her freedom, and thus depriving his task of its original 
 aim, that of contrasting the glorious past with the 
 pitiable present. " From the bosom of the nation," 
 he writes, " which has overthrown our tyrants, the 
 electric spark has gone forth ; this great noble and 
 enlightened nation has become conscious of her power 
 and her rights. She has become free and she has 
 willed that we should become free as well. She has 
 opened her arms to us and henceforth we have the 
 same interests, the same cares. There is no longer 
 the sea between us." It is Napoleon himself who is 
 uttering these words ; he does not put them into the 
 mouth of the old veteran whom he made his spokes- 
 man in the earlier composition. In form the treatise 
 is no longer a single letter ; it would seem to have 
 been originally a series of three letters, of which only 
 two have come down to us complete. Its tone has 
 become in every way more moderate ; it is a victor, a 
 friend of the newborn France, who is holding forth on 
 the great deeds of his own people. There can be no 
 doubt that it reflects Napoleon's new mood. Together 
 with his relatives and adherents, he has sided 
 
22 NAPOLEON 
 
 definitely with the French Revolution. The insti- 
 tutions which it established ; the fact that it threw 
 open to the natives of the island employment in 
 district and departmental administration in the 
 National Guard and in the magistracy, the footing of 
 equality with France upon which Corsica was placed, 
 the fair prospects held out to Corsicans upon the 
 mainland, no less than at home : all these things 
 were calculated to minister to their self-esteem, to 
 silence their old grievances, and to bind them closely 
 and securely to France. 
 
 Napoleon's leave would seem to have been ex- 
 tended for six months, a fever which seized him in the 
 spring involving a further extension until the autumn ; 
 and he then found himself obliged to prolong his stay 
 until January, 1 79 1, so that in all he had once again 
 absented himself from his regiment for more than a 
 year. He was staying at the Baths of Orezza, in the 
 interior of the island, seeking to regain his health at 
 that small watering place, when Pasquale Paoli, who 
 had been loaded with honours in Paris and was being 
 welcomed home in triumph by his countrymen, 
 returned to Corsica. Joseph Buonaparte was a 
 member of the deputation which the Corsicans had 
 sent to greet their General at Lyons, and Napoleon, 
 it would seem, had drawn up the address in which his 
 native city hailed the arrival of the old hero. If, 
 however, we are to believe what Joseph tells us in his 
 Memoirs, the very first meeting between the two great 
 Corsicans was marked by the first sign of that 
 antagonism which was so soon to sunder them. 
 Paoli, we are told, had been pointing out upon the 
 battlefield of Ponte Nuovo, the positions that had 
 been occupied by the two forces, and had been 
 
CORSICA 23 
 
 explaining the course of the engagement, when 
 Napoleon remarked drily, " Such dispositions were 
 bound to have such a result." In any case, it would 
 seem clear that Napoleon had already become 
 conscious of a certain feeling of opposition to the old 
 General. The mistrust that had been shown towards 
 Paoli, due to the suspicion that he was only awaiting 
 the opportunity of setting Corsica free from France, 
 may have been unwarranted ; an old man now and 
 no longer in full possession of his strength, he may 
 well have cherished the hope that the island might be 
 able to secure the essential attributes of independence, 
 while maintaining its political alliance with France. 
 But he cannot be regarded as a friend of the new 
 France at this time. The French world of thought 
 in which Napoleon was brought up and by which, 
 despite his hatred of the oppressor, his whole nature 
 was permeated, was quite foreign to the mind of 
 Paoli. Whilst Napoleon had almost forgotten the 
 language of his own country during his sojourn in 
 France, Paoli could only write Italian. For him the 
 independence of Corsica remained the one goal to be 
 aimed at. The reception which had been accorded 
 him, alike by the French and by his own people, the 
 position in which he had been placed by the French 
 revolutionary government at the head of the depart- 
 ment and of the National Guard of the island, could 
 but fortify him in his views and aspirations. 
 Surrounded by parties, each of which sought to win 
 him for itself, he endeavoured from the first to 
 maintain his independence of them, and assumed an 
 attitude of expectant reserve, even towards a man 
 like Buttafuoco and his associates. Thanks to this 
 method of proceeding, the differences between him 
 
2 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 and Napoleon remained for a time undeveloped. 
 The position of the " General," as he was always 
 called, was so strong, and the common interest in the 
 party of progress still so great, that the rivalry of the 
 ambitious leaders had to be kept in the background. 
 \; In February, 1791, Napoleon at last returned to his 
 garrison. He had taken with him his brother Louis, 
 at that time a boy of thirteen, whom the family had 
 also destined for the career of an artillery officer, an 
 additional proof of the way in which they had linked 
 their fates with France. The letter to his brother 
 Joseph in which a few weeks later he gives an 
 account of the boy's course of study, which he 
 himself directed, is one of the most pleasing that 
 ever came from his pen, and shows us anew, not 
 only the serious spirit with which he set himself to 
 this, as to every other task, but also the close and 
 tender relations which united him with his own kin. 
 " He is getting on capitally at his work," he writes, 
 " and is now learning to write French ; I myself am 
 helping him with mathematics and geography ; he is 
 reading history, and altogether he is becoming a great 
 fellow. All the ladies here are losing their hearts to 
 him. He has acquired quite a French style, light 
 and bright. He goes out into Society, bears himself 
 gracefully, and gives out all the customary social 
 passwords with the gravity and unction of a man of 
 thirty years. I can see already that he is going 
 to be the best fellow of the four of us." 
 
 In view of the growing disorganisation of the army 
 the military authorities rejoiced to such an extent 
 over every officer who came back to the colours that 
 no difficulties were made when Napoleon went beyond 
 the limits of his leave. Indeed, he was not only 
 
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 
 mi a painting- by Philippoteaux. Photo by W. Mansell & Co. 
 
CORSICA 25 
 
 excused, but in addition he was accorded his full pay 
 for the extra three and a half months, and when his 
 regiment was reconstructed upon a new basis in the 
 spring he v/as promoted to the rank of first lieu- 
 tenant. However, he was not able to remain in 
 Auxonne, as he would have wished for Louis's 
 sake, but had to return to his first garrison at 
 Valence, where a detachment of his regiment was 
 quartered. 
 
 It was here that he heard of the great events of 
 21 June, 1 79 1, of the attempt of Louis XVI and his 
 family to seek safety in flight — one of the most 
 momentous incidents in the French Revolution, tear- 
 ing aside the thin veil that covered the ever-widening 
 breach between the crown and the new France. By 
 this act the King made it manifest that he would 
 have nothing to say to the revolutionary movement. 
 The leaders of the National Assembly made vain 
 efforts to postpone the inevitable. The ever-growing 
 breach was especially marked in the south, as Napo- 
 leon had been able to note on his journey to Au- 
 xonne. He had found the people strong for the 
 Revolution, the soldiers particularly as patriots, but 
 the officers against it as aristocrats. " The women," 
 he writes, "are everywhere royalists. There is nothing 
 to be surprised at in that, for freedom is a far more 
 beautiful spouse than them all and cuts them out." 
 His own regiment was a victim to these dissensions ; 
 half of his comrades, amongst them his best friends, 
 left the colours, which they felt were soiled by the 
 Revolution. He himself plunged only the more 
 readily into the revolutionary vortex. As in Ajaccio, 
 so in Auxonne and Valence, he frequented the political 
 clubs and gatherings ; he gave his signature to revo- 
 
26 NAPOLEON 
 
 lutionary addresses, amongst others a document calling 
 for the sentencing of the King to death, came forward 
 himself as a speaker, and daily gathered together his 
 non-commissioned officers to read to them the Paris 
 newspapers. "At ease in my mind," so he writes to 
 a friend, " over the lot of my country and the fame 
 of my friend (he means Paoli), I have now no care 
 save for the common fatherland ; so in this hour of 
 leisure left to me from the day, I shall just indulge 
 in a chat with you, and rest a brain full of important 
 affairs of State, and a heart full of the thoughts of 
 men for whom one has regard and from whom one 
 is unwillingly severed." 
 
 Absorbed though he was in all the great questions 
 of the day, the course of his reading, to which he 
 set himself systematically with his pen in his hand, 
 may be traced with precision. Previously he had 
 been given to reading at random, now books about 
 history, now geography, now natural history ; but from 
 this time onwards he devotes himself to the perusal 
 of political treatises. From a history of the Sorbonne, 
 from the Memoirs of Duclos and from a History of 
 the French Nobility by Dullaur, he extracts instances 
 of the cruelty and treachery of the Anden Regime^ of 
 the degeneracy of the nobility and clergy, and of the 
 despotism of the Church and the throne. Nor did 
 he put aside his own literary projects ; he resumed 
 his old idea of writing a history of Corsica; he now 
 thought of producing it in the form of two volumes ; 
 he entered into negotiation with two publishers on 
 the matter, and applied to Paoli for assistance in 
 regard to material for the work. He was, however, 
 to be disappointed in both respects ; neither the pub- 
 lishers nor the general would have anything to say 
 
CORSICA 27 
 
 to the undertaking. He had sent Paoli at the same 
 time a pamphlet full of violent accusations against 
 Buttafuoco, which he had delivered as a lecture in 
 the club at Ajaccio, and which he had now had 
 printed. But the general looked with equal disfavour 
 on the attack upon his old friend and on the pro- 
 jects for the History of Corsica. He was not in a 
 position to get out his documents from the boxes 
 in which they were kept ; moreover, history was not 
 a task to be undertaken by a man in his youth ; he 
 held also that the history of Corsica was not of suffi- 
 cient importance for the world at large. He advised 
 Napoleon to follow the advice that had been given 
 him by the Abbe Raynal, and to content himself with 
 making a collection of such brief records and anec- 
 dotes as might be adapted for portraying the heroism 
 of the Corsican character. 
 
 The young officer, however, had already begun to 
 busy himself with another project, in which the Abbe 
 Raynal seems also to have encouraged him. The 
 Academy of Lyons had announced that a prize, 
 founded by Raynal himself, should be awarded for an 
 essay upon the question what truths and what feelings 
 were of most importance to men for the achievement 
 of happiness. This was a task that fitted in very 
 well with Napoleon's mood of the moment ; he sent 
 in his essay in August. It is difficult to give a clear 
 resume of its contents, for it is badly put together and 
 full of repetitions. But it is necessary for us to con- 
 sider it side by side with the other products of his 
 pen, for none of them affords us a deeper insight into 
 his soul. It is more than a study of politics and 
 philosophy : it constitutes a series of self-revelations, 
 conscious and unconscious, comparable with those of 
 
28 NAPOLEON 
 
 Jean-Jacques, and calling almost for as much con- 
 sideration as actual incidents in his life. 
 
 It is impossible, for instance, not to have Napoleon 
 himself in mind when we read his description of the 
 feelings one experiences on returning to the land of 
 one's birth. " You hasten through the scenes of your 
 childhood's joys, the witnesses of the emotions that 
 attended on your first experiences of human nature 
 and the first awakenings of sorrow in your heart. In 
 spirit you live those days over again, and taste their 
 happiness afresh. Your love for your fatherland is 
 rekindled in your heart." He conducts the reader 
 to the summit of the Corsican hills, in the glow of 
 the setting sun, or to the shore of the sea that foams 
 around the island cliffs, where the spectacle of the day 
 star setting in the bosom of the infinite expanse fills 
 one with melancholy. He shows us the interior of a 
 peasant's hut at the close of the day's work ; we stand 
 with him on the height crowned by the monument of 
 St. Remy ; below it extends the plain of Provence, on 
 which the Romans set their mark two thousand years 
 ago, and where a hundred thousand of the Cimbri lie 
 buried. The Rhone flows in the distance, swifter 
 than an arrow. A road runs on the left : at some dis- 
 tance is a small town ; nearer at hand a herd in a 
 meadow. " You feel as though you were living in a 
 dream : your heart is a prey to emotion." Pictures 
 such as these do not merely recall Rousseau's pictures 
 of Nature ; they are the records of feelings actually 
 experienced by the writer in the course of those long 
 roamings, of which, like Rousseau, he was so fond. 
 
 No doubt his further reflections on the nature and 
 significance of our feelings towards the State show also 
 recollections of Rousseau. So too the principle that 
 
CORSICA 29 
 
 is made the basis of the whole, that feelings rising to 
 the height of passion must be controlled and curbed 
 by reason, is, as has been rightly remarked, a leading 
 idea ,in Emile. But far more striking than such 
 similarities of thought is what is peculiar to Napoleon, 
 and even more directly opposed to his teacher. This 
 shows itself not merely in his direct commendation of 
 the studies that had delighted him since his days at 
 Brienne ; as when he praises mathematics and logic, 
 and in the same way history, " that basis of moral 
 science, that light of truth, that destroyer of pre- 
 judice," as the surest guides for the path of life ; but 
 the contrast goes much deeper. To use his own ex- 
 pression, the great emotions — that is to say, those 
 which are directed to the world of the State and its 
 ideals — are those that are characteristic of the soul of 
 Napoleon. With him they amount to a passion for the 
 peculiar creative power of the State and of organised 
 society, as contrasted with those more common desires 
 that are destructive of such ideals. What he admires 
 are the great men, who, filled with such emotions, 
 build up states, and give them freedom and power ; 
 his heroes from Plutarch, and the peoples whom they 
 penetrate with their spirit. And yet these noblest 
 stirrings of the soul can work destruction if, like over- 
 flowing mountain torrents, they break over their banks. 
 " Emotion is like the Danube at Donaueshingen : 
 a child could turn it from its course ; but a couple of 
 hours' journey down the valley it may flood whole 
 provinces and bring whole cities to destruction." 
 Reason must ever be stronger than the stream of the 
 feelings, however generously it may flow ; but, under 
 the restraint of reason, the power of the feelings 
 should become mightier and more creative. 
 
30 NAPOLEON 
 
 Rousseau also has written that in strength lie the 
 foundations of every virtue. But the heroic tone 
 ringing through Napoleon's every sentence is not 
 within the compass of the author of the new Heloise. 
 His gospel of nature preaches gentleness and idyllic 
 joys — you seem to hear the notes of the shepherd's 
 flute ; while it is the warrior's trumpet that resounds 
 through these youthful writings of the young 
 Napoleon. Like Napoleon, the Citizen of Geneva 
 was a foreigner in France, having been taken from 
 his own country while still a boy ; but the city of 
 his origin could scarcely boast a history of its own ; 
 its great days dated from many generations back. 
 Although a free state and independent, it was per- 
 meated by the French spirit, and its sons had sought 
 and found riches and honours in Paris. So the 
 greatest of them all had neither tasted the bitterness 
 of such national memories as had poisoned Napoleon's 
 youth, nor experienced the growth in his heart of 
 that sentiment for the State which had been implanted 
 in the young Corsican by the history of his father- 
 land. For Rousseau the State has no other use than 
 to protect the weak, to curb the ambitious, to ensure 
 to every man that to which he is entitled ; and 
 finally to produce men who, like himself, should be 
 able to taste life's joys and appreciate its beauties 
 in full liberty. He is more disposed to hate the 
 State than to serve it. In his eyes the soul of man 
 is disfigured and distorted through the constrain- 
 ing influences of society and civilisation, in which 
 he finds the first cause of all social differences. By 
 nature men are equal like the denizens of the wild, and 
 civilisation is nothing but a falling away of manhood 
 from itself. For Napoleon, on the contrary, man 
 
CORSICA 31 
 
 exists for the sake of the State. Man is born for 
 action ; he must strive for freedom and for the power 
 of the State : for him freedom and power are insepar- 
 able. In Rousseau's theories, as in his life, even the 
 family is placed in the background, while Napoleon, 
 like a true Corsican, is rooted in his family. Finally, 
 Rousseau is absorbed entirely in his own existence, in 
 his own happiness ; whilst Napoleon gives his whole 
 mind to the fate of his country and his family, and the 
 course of the Revolution. 
 
 Napoleon himself was conscious of these differ- 
 ences of outlook. In a brief note which he penned 
 upon Rousseau's famous treatise on the origin 
 and causes of human inequality, he characterises it as 
 being written from the standpoint of the man without 
 home, family or social ties who has existed without 
 strife and without friendship. And he protests his 
 disagreement with the doctrine emphatically. From 
 his own standpoint as citizen of a State it was un- 
 thinkable to him that men should ever have been able 
 to exist without the need of wife or home or friends. 
 " In the progress of centuries," he says, " the peoples 
 thus growing up in a state of nature have multiplied 
 side by side, till as they came to deal with each other, 
 and the earth no longer yielded its treasures without 
 cultivation, there came into existence property, social 
 distinctions and governments, and in their train there 
 came self-seeking, pride and ambition. Man pos- 
 sessed from the beginning sense and reason, other- 
 wise he could never have had the feeling of obliga- 
 tion to virtuous conduct, and the happiness that 
 virtue gives. It is not our Citizen of Geneva that 
 can teach us this." 
 
 It follows from this that the Socialistic element in 
 
3 2 NAPOLEON 
 
 Rousseau's theory of the State is excluded at the very 
 outset from Napoleon's political system. He recog- 
 nises the existing inequalities of society. The Govern- 
 ment may be the highest link in the social chain, pro- 
 vided only that the beggar is not the lowest. " Let 
 this link be," he writes in the Discours de Lyon, " the 
 small proprietor, the small shopkeeper, or the skilled 
 artisan, or every other man who with a reasonable 
 amount of work can feed, clothe, and provide a 
 home for his family." Here again Paoli is his 
 example. He appeals to the agrarian policy and 
 calls it his greatest service to his people that he 
 secured for each sufficient property to supply him 
 with sustenance at a cost of little labour. We already 
 recognise in this and in other points the system of 
 the Emperor, which included among its fundamental 
 principles the security and contentment of the 
 peasants and manual labourers. 
 
 The theory of the State put forward by Napoleon 
 in this essay of his is essentially that of the ruler. 
 For the emotions and the aspirations by which he 
 sets store are those of the ruler, the hero. " The 
 occupations of the husbandman and the artisan," so 
 he writes, "have a restraining effect upon the imagina- 
 tion : the man who is fortunate enough to dwell in 
 the country is free from that restlessness which works 
 havoc with the idler ; he does not stand in need of so 
 highly developed a reasoning power in order to keep 
 his feelings in check." "The man who undertakes no 
 manual labour requires a stronger will : the force of 
 the current is more powerful, and it is necessary that 
 the dams should be more powerful too ; he stands 
 more in need of self-study, he needs the whole force 
 of his reason." These words picture better than any 
 
CORSICA 33 
 
 others that could be used Napoleon's frame of mind 
 — they tell us of his heart full to overflowing with 
 longings after action and power, and at the same 
 time, of a force of will which controlled these emotions 
 with the iron bands of cool observation and calcula- 
 tion. How hard he had to struggle, however, against 
 the force of the fire within him, how keenly alive 
 he was to the tragedy that like a dark cloud attends 
 upon all human happiness and greatness, is made 
 manifest by the truly impressive words with which he 
 proceeds : " does he feel the fire of genius in his 
 veins ? Luckless man if so — I pity him : he will 
 be the wonder and the envy of all those who feel as 
 he does, but the most miserable of them all. The 
 bonds of equality are broken : his whole life will be 
 unhappy ! Ah that fire of genius. But let us not 
 take it too much to heart, for it comes so rarely ! 
 How many years must pass by before even one such 
 individual comes into the world ! Men of genius 
 are like meteors destined to burn in order to illumine 
 the century in which they live." 
 
 It is curious to note the place that Napoleon gives 
 to ambition. He reckons it among the destructive 
 impulses, three in number, which in his eyes are but 
 forms of egoism : he calls it the vice of a man's 
 maturity, the vice that seizes a man when he has 
 grown weary of the enervating passions of his youth, 
 and that dangles before his eyes deceptive dreams of 
 new delights, only to leave him a victim in his old 
 age to his unsatisfied cravings for power. He thinks 
 of this sentiment of ambition as a hideous phantom 
 with pallid features, wild eyes, unsteady gait, and 
 with a sardonic smile upon its lips ; to the man who 
 falls under its mastery misdeeds become moves in a 
 
34 NAPOLEON 
 
 game, cabals mere means to an end : lies, slanders, 
 and abuse, mere arguments and figures of speech. 
 And when at length he reaches the pinnacle of power, 
 the homages of the peoples are a weariness to him. 
 Napoleon instances the great men of theworld who have 
 fallen victims to this vice of ambition : those great men 
 in whose ranks he himself was one day to be numbered. 
 They begin with Alexander and Caesar, and come down 
 to Cromwell and Charles V and Phillip II, Richelieu 
 and Louis XIV. " Ambition," he proceeds, " takes 
 Alexander from Thebes to Persia, from the Granicus 
 to lssus, from Issus to Arbela, and from thence to 
 India ; ambition drives him on to conquer and devas- 
 tate the world, without ever satisfying his lust, until 
 at last, consumed by his own flame, he takes leave of 
 his senses, imagines himself to be a god, the son of 
 Jupiter, and insists upon others sharing this belief." 
 Surely, when he wrote these words Napoleon him- 
 self must have looked Ambition in the eyes. Does it 
 not seem in truth that it must have been given to this 
 youth to have looked into the future as in a mirror, 
 and to have seen himself pictured in it as the world- 
 conqueror ? Does it not seem as though he were 
 trembling over his own destiny ? He turns away 
 from it as from some spectacle of mad frenzy, and he 
 summons up a vision in its place of a different race 
 of heroes, as though he would claim their succour in 
 his resistance against the phantom that has disquieted 
 him : Dion, who rescued the city of his birth from 
 the yoke of tyrants, Fabricius, Cincinnatus, and 
 Lycurgus, all the champions of liberty in the spirit of 
 citizenship, whose lofty features he had pictured to 
 himself as a boy in Brienne, in the days when he was 
 reading his Plutarch and beguiled away the sadness, 
 
CORSICA 35 
 
 that came from his consciousness of subjugation, with 
 dazzling visions of the great days of old. Paoli also 
 takes his place among these ; indeed, he stands out in 
 Napoleon's judgment as the noblest exemplar of the 
 champions of freedom and justice. 
 
 But is there not ambition underlying the actions 
 even of these heroes ? It is noteworthy how Napoleon, 
 even where he has been describing the aspect of this 
 phantom of ambition, comes upon this reflection and 
 how he deals with it : " But the ambitious men may 
 do good ; is it not comforting for the reasoning con- 
 science to be able to say to oneself : I have secured 
 the happiness of a hundred families : I have allowed 
 myself to become a prey to anxiety, but the State has 
 reaped the benefit ; my fellow-citizens live in quiet, 
 thanks to my own unrest : they have reaped comfort 
 from my cares, joy from my sorrows." " That is 
 true undoubtedly," Napoleon proceeds triumphantly 
 (and it would seem as though he were justifying by 
 anticipation the Eighteenth Brumaire) : " but you do 
 not reflect that Fabricius, Cincinnatus, Catinat, thought 
 so too, and these were not ambitious men. He who 
 wishes to come to the front by his own efforts, and to 
 contribute to the happiness of the State, is the man 
 of virtuous principle, full of courage, strength, and 
 genius : such a man will master Ambition instead 
 of being mastered by it, he will turn both emotion 
 and will to account : he is possessed by the spirit 
 of moral liberty." 
 
 So much for the ideal world of which Napoleon 
 dreams in his twenty-second year. But he is aware 
 already that the reality does not correspond with 
 it, that three-fourths of mankind, as he says, are the 
 slaves of their passions, ever seeking, never attaining 
 
3 6 NAPOLEON 
 
 happiness. That sentiment of misanthropy which 
 dogs the footsteps of genius, and which Napoleon 
 himself saw lurking behind the visionary eyes of 
 Rousseau and behind the mocking smile of Voltaire, 
 and which had laid long since its frigid hand upon his 
 own burning brow, confronts us in this very writing 
 amid all his enthusiastic glorifications of heroism'. 
 Alas, if that ideal world should reveal itself to him as 
 a world of illusion, if that enthusiasm for liberty that 
 had drawn him close to the race he once hated should 
 disappear, if the land of his birth should be given up 
 as a prey to the ambitious, and even the hero of his 
 youth be estranged from him in the strife of parties ! 
 And if that sense of isolation, which so often had 
 contracted his heart in those young days of his, should 
 take him captive again in the hour of his greatness, 
 and his thinly disguised misanthropy, grown intensi- 
 fied, should lead him to despise his ideals ! 
 
 In the autumn of 1791 Napoleon returned to 
 Corsica on a fresh six months' leave, his presence 
 having become more necessary than ever, from family 
 considerations. The National Assembly, which had 
 come into existence as the result of the Revolution 
 of 1789, had done its work. The new Constitution 
 had been proclaimed and acquiesced in by the King, 
 and France had begun to breathe afresh. It was 
 almost felt that the Revolution was at an end, that 
 the final victory had been won. In all the depart- 
 ments of the country, as in Corsica, the new insti- 
 tutions had come into being, but it was just at this 
 moment that the movement, which had hitherto 
 manifested itself by a series of heavy isolated blows 
 and in the ever-increasing upheaval of the Ancien 
 Regime^ began to assume, day by day, more universal 
 
CORSICA 37 
 
 and more threatening proportions. The whole 
 organisation of the State was being recast upon 
 the basis of the broadest democracy. The elective 
 principle became established, alike in the Church, in 
 the Government offices, in the Courts of Law, and 
 even in the Army, with which the National Guard 
 had thrown in its lot. This gave the freest scope to 
 the agitation, every election put to the test those 
 principles upon which the central authority of the 
 State had taken its stand, but against which a thousand 
 forces of the Anden Regime^ using the legal forms 
 thus provided, offered a fierce resistance. Election 
 after election added to the forces of destruction. 
 Differences and enmities, dating from hundreds of 
 years ago, but kept within bounds under the old 
 monarchy, broke out afresh with redoubled force. 
 Loyalty and reverence towards the throne and towards 
 traditional customs, conscientious objections and 
 clerical obstinacy, devotion to the ideals of liberty 
 and patriotism, and all the impulses of unbridled 
 ambitions, clashed together and grew into a raging 
 whirlpool of passions and emotions. The noblest 
 and the meanest mingled together. While in France 
 the great majority of the aristocracy had felt them- 
 selves tied to the monarchy, and had been crushed 
 and almost annihilated by the Revolution, in Corsica 
 the leading families who had been robbed of their 
 power by the zAncien Regime^ had now been quickly 
 reinstated in their old position of influence, for it 
 was clear that in view of the general hostility against 
 the old monarchy, their members alone would be 
 held eligible for election to posts in the government. 
 But all the old feuds and struggles for power 
 immediately broke out amongst them, everyone 
 
38 NAPOLEON 
 
 endeavouring to secure the most influential and lucra- 
 tive posts for himself and his relatives. Paoli was now 
 more than ever the ruling spirit of the island. In Paris 
 the fullest confidence was placed in him : he was at once 
 President of the governing body of the Department 
 and Chief of its National Guard, thus combining the 
 highest administrative and military authority. No- 
 election was made to any high office without his 
 sanction, and thus he soon became surrounded by 
 all would-be officials. The Buonapartes, Napoleon in- 
 cluded, were amongst those who sought his patronage, 
 but their hopes of seeing the eldest son, Joseph, 
 chosen as representative of Ajaccio among the six 
 members for the island in the National Assembly, 
 were destined to disappointment. It cannot be 
 denied that the General in getting Joseph Buonaparte's 
 rivals, Pozzo di Borgo and Mario Peraldi, elected for 
 Ajaccio, seems to have acted in the interests of 
 Corsican independence better than if he had favoured 
 the claims of the Francophil Buonapartes. It was 
 only a partial consolation for Joseph to be made a 
 member of the governing body of the Department, 
 and shortly afterwards to be given a post in the 
 Administration by Paoli, especially as this involved 
 his going to Corte, the seat of the Government, and 
 being thus severed from his friends in Ajaccio. 
 The brothers, however, were soon to find their 
 influence increased through the death of their great- 
 uncle the Archdeacon, for they thus had placed at 
 their entire disposal, sources of income, the control 
 of which the latter had kept entirely in his own 
 hands. Joseph tells us in his Memoirs how the old 
 priest called together round his bedside the members 
 of the family of which he had so long been head, and 
 
CARDINAL FESCH. 
 From a lithograph by Delpech. 
 
 p. 38. 
 
CORSICA 39 
 
 comforted the weeping mother by his assurances as to 
 the abilities of her sons. To Napoleon, we are told, 
 he said : " Tu poi, Napoleone, sarai un omone " 
 — " You, Napoleon, will be a great man." 
 
 Napoleon devoted a portion of the money to pur- 
 chasing, in conjunction with his uncle Fesch, national 
 property (probably confiscated church lands) upon the 
 island. How closely he bound up his destinies with 
 Corsica is shown by another step which he took at 
 the same time. The decree of the National Assembly 
 in regard to the constitution of the National Guard 
 had provided for the establishment of four battalions 
 in Corsica. It seemed desirable for Napoleon, and 
 to the interest of his family, that he should secure 
 a commission in the Ajaccio battalion, and the par- 
 ticular post which he coveted was that of adjutant- 
 major, the third rank in a battalion ; he was justified 
 in hoping to get it, as, unlike most other such posts, 
 it was in the gift of the commander-in-chief of the 
 island, General Rossi, a distant relative and good 
 friend of the family, and his appointment would not 
 necessitate his giving up his commission in the 
 Artillery. Rossi was favourably disposed, and at once 
 requested the Minister of War to sanction his nomi- 
 nation of Napoleon. 
 
 He made this appeal on the ist of November, 1791, 
 but there was no answer until January. Napoleon 
 had already begun to feel uneasy, as a decree had 
 been issued to the effect that every officer should 
 rejoin his regiment by the ist of January, on 
 pain of instant dismissal. Moreover, the National 
 Assembly had put the filling of this post into the hands 
 of the volunteers themselves, and, in addition, had 
 ordered the return of every officer on active service 
 
4o NAPOLEON 
 
 attached to the National Guard by the ist of April, 
 with the exception of the chiefs of each battalion and 
 its two lieutenant-colonels. As, however, this decision 
 had not yet been promulgated (although it had re- 
 ceived the assent of the Minister), Rossi did not 
 hesitate to nominate Napoleon for the post. 
 
 Then came the promulgation, however ; and now 
 there was nothing left for Napoleon to do if he 
 wished to remain upon the island and yet avoid 
 having his name struck off the roll of his regi- 
 ment, but to secure his appointment as first or 
 second in command. He succeeded in this, despite 
 the active opposition organised by his rivals, by 
 abandoning the first place in the battalion to the most 
 formidable of them, Giovanni Battista Quenza. With 
 the co-operation of the Departmental authorities — the 
 procurator-syndic of which, Salicetti, the chief execu- 
 tive officer of the island, hastening back specially for 
 the purpose — the choice was made on the ist of 
 April, not without scenes of violence and uproar, and 
 fell upon Quenza and Buonaparte. Their opponents 
 had been intimidated by the fact that the four com- 
 panies of the district had been specially brought into 
 the city, Salicetti having been given full authority for 
 this by the Government; and Napoleon himself had 
 not hesitated to forcibly remove to his home from 
 the house of a rival candidate one of the three Com- 
 missioners of the Department whom he had reason 
 to mistrust. 
 
 But this skilfully executed coup — his first coup 
 d'etat — was to have unpleasant consequences for 
 himself and his friends. His competitors, who had 
 the greater number of sympathisers among the in- 
 habitants of Ajaccio, were, of course, by no means 
 
CORSICA 41 
 
 pleased at the way things had gone. Eight days 
 later, as the result of continual provocations, there 
 was a sanguinary encounter with the military, for the 
 battalion had remained in the city after the muster 
 and selection of officers. It began with a quarrel 
 that broke out in the main street in the course of 
 some game, the players whipping out their knives, 
 with which the Corsican is always provided. A patrol 
 of the National Guard, led by an officer, came along 
 to bring the disturbance to a close ; but the dis- 
 putants now turned upon the soldiers, and were 
 backed up by the gradually increasing crowd of on- 
 lookers, disarmed three of them, wounded a fourth 
 with stabs, and forced the patrol, now the target for 
 bullets from all the windows, to take speedily to 
 flight, to the accompaniment of cries : Addosso alle 
 berrette ! Napoleon, on hearing the sounds of strife 
 and the shots, decided at once to go to the disturbed 
 district. He hurried to the barrack gate, where a 
 detachment of the 42nd regiment of the line was 
 mounting guard ; he called on the officer in command 
 to beat " the assembly," but the latter refused, even 
 when the request was supported by members of the 
 municipality. Thus repulsed, Napoleon collected 
 together a dozen of his own officers to accompany 
 him to the district. In front of the cathedral they 
 came upon a young citizen carrying a gun, which he 
 levelled at them. Napoleon advanced towards him 
 to speak with him, whereupon the man lowered his 
 gun and took a step in advance. Suddenly, seeing 
 five of his comrades coming out of the cathedral to 
 his help, he fired and wounded mortally Lieutenant 
 Rocca della Serra. The alarm was now raised on all 
 sides, and the officers being unarmed took hastily to 
 
42 NAPOLEON 
 
 flight. No more blood was shed on that day, but the 
 officers and soldiers of the battalion now assembled 
 in the barracks near the seminary, and proceeded to 
 make preparations for resisting attack. 
 
 On the following day there was more shooting, and 
 this time on the part of the volunteers, who, enraged 
 at the murder of their officer and bent upon revenge, 
 fired at armed and unarmed alike. Women and 
 children, as well as the Abbe Peraldi, the nephew 
 of the deputy, were among the victims. This state 
 of things lasted, with brief intervals for parleyings, 
 four days longer, the situation becoming more and 
 more serious hour by hour. The National Guard 
 occupied the Capucine monastery of the Genoese 
 tower, whence they commanded all approaches to the 
 city. They cut off the water and food supply, and 
 their numbers being increased by reinforcements from 
 the country, they proceeded to lay waste the vineyards 
 and fields in front of the gates. The civil authorities 
 of the city were at first divided in their sympathies, 
 but presently were carried along by the enraged 
 population, and exerted all their efforts to expel the 
 National Guard. When on top of this M. de Mayard, 
 the regular officer in command of the citadel, who at 
 first had maintained a neutral attitude, decided to 
 comply with their demands, and ordered a hundred 
 men of his regiment with two cannon to advance 
 upon the National Guard, a catastrophe seemed un- 
 avoidable. " We decided," writes Napoleon, " to 
 march out in column form and capture the guns ; 
 it was a case for bold action, for the combination 
 against us had proved entirely successful, and we 
 could only cut our way out of the net with the 
 sword." At this moment the news arrived that two 
 
CORSICA 43 
 
 Commissaries of the Department were on their way 
 from Corte, and would soon be on the spot ; where- 
 upon Mayard, to whom this news had been com- 
 municated by Quenza and Napoleon, ordered back 
 the cannon and a period of quiet immediately set in. 
 We are in possession of the reports of this episode 
 which were drawn up by the various Courts of the 
 Department, together with the strikingly written 
 memorandum from Napoleon's own pen relating to 
 his battalion ; but these documents are all animated 
 by a partisan spirit, and they give us no insight into 
 the imbroglio of hatred, treachery, and intrigue. 
 This much, however, is certain, that it was not a case 
 merely of personal feelings, jealousy on the part 
 of the leaders, revengefulness on the part of the 
 ordinary citizen, but that the influences of the revolu- 
 tionary administration were involved, gradually dis- 
 integrating all the social conditions of Corsica. It is 
 clear, too, that the influence of the Church had 
 produced a division in the ranks of the populace, 
 which had been unanimous two years before in 
 acclaiming the Revolution as bringing with it the 
 dawn of Corsican freedom. Ajaccio was a clerical city. 
 The decrees of the National Assembly against the non- 
 juring priests, and the expulsion of the Capucines — an 
 order of monks standing high in the affections of the 
 citizens — had produced very bad blood. It was on 
 this account that the Companies of the National 
 Guard had been ordered into the city. The clerical 
 party had gone so far as to send representatives to 
 Corte to demand permission for the Capucines to 
 return. The return of these envoys on the Monday 
 in Easter week with an unfavourable reply had 
 naturally intensified the feeling of bitterness ; the 
 
44 NAPOLEON 
 
 non-juring priests had said mass openly on that day 
 in the Franciscan convent and thus called public 
 attention to the schism ; they had contemplated 
 having a procession through the streets, against which 
 the city authorities had set their face a fortnight 
 before ; wild rumours were current to the effect that 
 the constitutional priests were to be driven out and 
 the country people massacred. Napoleon's rivals, 
 Peraldi and Pozzo di Borgo, took no part in these 
 matters ; they still posed as friends of the constitution, 
 and they protested against the way in which Napoleon 
 sought to identify them with the fanatics and re- 
 actionaries. They turned to account, however, the 
 fanatical antagonism of the masses against the enforc- 
 ing of the civil constitution of the clergy. This was 
 the strongest support for all opposition against the 
 party of progress, who, for their part, had to rely 
 chiefly upon the revolutionary anarchical instinct of 
 the people. The gulf was already too wide to be 
 bridged : the Church had no thought of giving in, 
 and the defenders of the Constitution had no mind 
 for a compromise. Whoever, therefore, sought to 
 draw nearer to the Church found himself inevitably 
 drawn into the ranks of the party that would have 
 nothing to say to the Revolution. Paoli was at heart 
 as far from being a clerical as were the Buonapartes 
 and their friends ; but he had been brought into con- 
 flict with revolutionary tendencies at Bastia to a very 
 pronounced degree : there had been bloodshed in the 
 city, and this, indeed, had been the cause of the 
 General's decision to remove the seat of government 
 from that port into the interior of the island. But he 
 was in no way responsible for aggravating the differ- 
 ences, and he had no sympathy with the aggressive- 
 
CORSICA 45 
 
 ness displayed throughout by Napoleon and his 
 associates. Moreover, he had some reason to feel 
 personally offended by Napoleon's action on the 
 occasion of the riotous outbreak : when Mayard's 
 cannon had been directed against the battalion and 
 everything pointed to a catastrophe, Napoleon had 
 sent a message to the Commandant to the effect that 
 he had been ordered by the General to hold the 
 position in the city, although no such order had 
 really been given. Paoli would perhaps have been 
 glad if the National Guard had made its way on this 
 occasion into the citadel of Ajaccio, which the Royalist 
 Mayard had carefully kept closed against him, but, on 
 the whole, he held rather with the people of the stamp 
 of Pozzo di Borgo, who aimed not so much at the 
 carrying out of the Constitution, as at securing the 
 independence of Corsica. 
 
 The sequel, as it turned out, was not all that 
 Napoleon would have wished. The Commissioners 
 of the Department, although sympathising with the 
 Buonaparte faction, decided that it was necessary to 
 remove the battalion from the city. It was sent 
 to Corte : hither also Napoleon made his way, but he 
 would seem to have had an interview previously with 
 Paoli with reference to the question of putting him in 
 command of a new battalion. The General, however, 
 abandoned this idea, and the three brothers learnt 
 now just how they stood in his eyes. He refused to 
 entertain the application of Lucien that he should 
 make him his secretary. " He recognises his talents," 
 wrote Joseph to Napoleon, " but he wishes to hold 
 aloof from us, that is his reason. He is afraid of 
 evoking cries of jealousy, which have been becoming 
 all too frequent of late." Napoleon had intended, 
 
46 NAPOLEON 
 
 immediately after his appointment, to go to Paris on 
 family business, and also in connection with personal 
 affairs of his own — amongst them it would seem 
 the production of a book, as to the nature of which 
 we have no information. One of the chief objects of 
 this visit was to see after his sister, Marianne, at St. 
 Cyr, of whose marriage there was question ; it was 
 doubtful whether she could remain on at St. Cyr 
 pending the forthcoming reorganisation of that 
 institution. There was now another matter to be 
 attended to. The position held in the legislature by 
 the representatives of Corsica held out scant promise 
 for a favourable judgment upon the whole episode, 
 and rendered Napoleon's presence in person abso- 
 lutely necessary ; the more so in that he could not tell 
 how his absence from the roll-call of his regiment in 
 January had been taken, and there was danger that he 
 might be deprived of his military rank in France as 
 well as in Corsica. Without delay, therefore, he now 
 set out for Paris on the 28th of May. 
 
 These were the weeks during which the catastrophe 
 to the monarchy was in progress. There had been a 
 state of war since the end of April, and the first 
 encounters had been defeats. The former leaders of 
 the Revolution, those who had won Napoleon's en- 
 thusiasm in the summer of 1791, had begun to 
 quarrel angrily, just like their contemporaries in 
 Corsica. The new Ministry, which had taken up the 
 reins of government after the fall of Feuillants and 
 which had begun the war, had already fallen a victim to 
 dissensions. Its Girondist wing had been forced to 
 yield to Danton and Robespierre, while the blood- 
 thirsty faction of Marat cried out for a dictatorship, 
 
CORSICA 47 
 
 and the destruction of the King and all aristocrats. 
 Napoleon only saw, like most of his contemporaries, 
 what was happening on the surface ; the irreconcil- 
 able nature and the subtle hostility of the anti- 
 revolutionary policy of the Tuileries was as imper- 
 ceptible to him as the forces and motives which 
 actuated the various factions and their leaders, and the 
 indirect means and secret paths by which they sought 
 to attain their ends. The various parties presented 
 themselves to him only in their rough outlines. One 
 thing only was quite clear to him, as to the rest of the 
 world : namely, that this state of things could not 
 last, that the Constitution, if not the State itself, must 
 experience a general upheaval. That Constitution 
 was at stake to which years before he had taken the 
 oath of fidelity, and which had bridged the sea for 
 him and established bonds of brotherhood between 
 him and the race for which he had felt such hatred. 
 Yet he had begun to look forward to its overthrow and 
 to all that the future might bring, with a sinister calm- 
 ness and indifference. He despised the populace 
 more than ever ; and the demeanour of the King 
 when the Parisians broke into the Tuileries, had made 
 a strong impression on his mind. " The King bore 
 himself well," he writes : " the Jacobins are fools." 
 Lafayette's opposition to the Jacobins, his letter to the 
 National Assembly, his appearance before it in person 
 on the 28th of June, did not displease him. " All 
 sensible and reasonable people approve of his pro- 
 ceedings," he writes ; but he draws attention to the 
 serious and dangerous side of the matter : " The 
 people, that is to say, the lower classes, are fascinated ; 
 without a doubt it will lead to a conflict which will 
 perhaps make an end of the Constitution." " Those 
 
4 8 NAPOLEON 
 
 who are at the head," he proceeds to remark, " are 
 pitiable creatures ; it must be admitted, when one 
 sees all this at close quarters, that the populace is 
 scarcely worth all the trouble that is taken to win its 
 favour. You know the history of Ajaccio ; that of 
 Paris is very much the same ; perhaps its inhabitants 
 are worse still and more petty, more given to 
 grumbling and slandering. You must get the close 
 view of the thing to realise that enthusiasm is merely 
 enthusiasm and that the French race has become 
 senile and has lost its sinews and muscles." 
 
 These words are addressed to his brother Lucien, 
 whose revolutionary ardour had begun to disquiet 
 Napoleon, seeming to him inimical to the family's 
 interests ; their purpose was to produce a cooling 
 influence upon the emotions of the hot-headed youth. 
 They are, however, a trustworthy indication to his 
 real attitude. Patriotism and the love of liberty had 
 been a safeguard to himself against misanthropy. 
 Now he saw things as they were. " Everyone," he 
 proceeds, " is working for his own interests and is 
 fighting for his own hand with every weapon of fear 
 and calumny. Lower methods of intrigue are being 
 employed now more than ever ; these things destroy 
 one's ambition. Those men are to be pitied who 
 have the misfortune to play a part — even those of 
 them who do not need it : to live in peace and quiet, 
 devoting one's self to one's own needs and to those of 
 one's family, that is the kind of life for a man to lead 
 when he is in possession of from four thousand to five 
 thousand livres a year — for the man of from twenty- 
 five to forty, that is to say, who is no longer a prey to 
 wild imaginings." It is to be noted here that Napo- 
 leon no longer contrasts ambition, as he did a year 
 
CORSICA 49 
 
 before, with the eager aspirations of the heart towards 
 high ends. He is talking of the kind of ambition 
 that involves desire for fame as well as devotion to 
 fatherland and to noble ideals, and which he now dis- 
 claims for himself. He has lost even his desire to 
 win immortality by his pen. " My work," he writes 
 a week later, on the 7th of August, "is finished, revised 
 and copied out, but this being so, nobody will print it. 
 So be it, I have not the least desire to shine as an 
 author." 
 
 But Napoleon would not have been himself if the 
 fire in his heart had really burnt out. In the midst 
 of all the agonising experiences that the country was 
 going through — in the midst of all the interests 
 to which he devotes himself, restlessly but cautiously 
 — he managed to find time to take up the study of 
 astronomy. " During my sojourn here," he writes 
 in the same letter, " I have been occupying myself a 
 good deal with astronomy. It is at once a noble 
 science and a very pleasant distraction, and my mathe- 
 matical knowledge enables me to master it with very 
 little application. This has been a great gain for me." 
 " Believe, obey, work, judge not — these are your 
 duties." He had put these words into the mouth of 
 a man of the people, speaking to his son in his Dis- 
 cours de Lyon; but " a lofty soul," he had proceeded at 
 once to say, " a sensitive heart, a wholesome brain, can 
 never be satisfied with this answer." "Virtue," he 
 says, " has its being in courage and strength : energy 
 is the life of the soul as it is the source of the faculty 
 of discernment. . . . The emotions of a Spartan were 
 the emotions of a strong man ; only the strong man 
 is good : the weak man is wicked. . . . Without 
 strength, without energy, there is neither virtue nor 
 
So NAPOLEON 
 
 happiness." He is continually insisting upon this. 
 We find another indication of it in a verse from a 
 translation of Pope, which we come upon amongst his 
 writings in the summer of 179 1 : 
 
 Plus notre esprit est fort, plus il faut qu'il agisse, 
 II meurt dans le repos, il vit dans 1'exercice. 
 
 The world of his ideals lay around him now shat- 
 tered into fragments ; but his genius and will-power, 
 and the impulse to exert himself to conquer and to 
 achieve happiness, were still alive in his breast. These 
 attributes were to be developed more fully now that 
 his pathway became more free from the restraints 
 involved in those duties towards the State which had 
 been assumed only from motives of self-interest. 
 
 Not that Napoleon stood alone in these respects. 
 Moreover, like every great man who has led his con- 
 temporaries towards new goals, he was borne along by 
 their living active influence upon himself. This was the 
 time when the ideals of the century were breathing 
 their last in France. They were meeting their end in 
 common with that old order of things in which they 
 had their origin, but which they helped to undermine. 
 The fountains of the deep had opened, and new un- 
 suspected forces working destruction all around them 
 had come to the front, overwhelming the idyllic 
 dreams of wide-world peace and happiness and free- 
 dom, with which the revolutionists had begun their 
 work amid the jubilation of their contemporaries. 
 Both the fanatics and the dreamers among the men 
 who had lately come into power armed themselves 
 with cruelty and cursing and a violent zeal that knew no 
 limits and no mercy. All the evil spirits of ambition, 
 covetousness, cunning, and fear, and senseless rage, as 
 
CORSICA 51 
 
 well as the good spirits of loyalty, unwavering sub- 
 mission to ancestral faith, intrepid strength of will, 
 and high-wrought patriotism, ranged themselves in 
 the ranks of rival forces that sought to establish and 
 assert themselves, and fought one with the other. 
 
 Everyday motives and incentives came, of course, 
 to the surface, as Napoleon was quick to see ; each for 
 himself became the maxim of the masses, and, to some 
 extent also, of the leaders ; the former seeking to 
 escape destruction from the wave of unbridled passions 
 bearing down upon them ; the latter grasping at every 
 chance of winning profit and securing power and 
 honours from the work of destruction. Napoleon 
 was not one of these, and from the first he viewed 
 their proceedings with disgust. He soon bethought 
 him, however, of his own powers, which he had 
 strengthened by unceasing work. Whither the path 
 was leading him he knew as little as everyone else, 
 but he, the foreigner, could regard matters with more 
 indifference than the Frenchmen whose lot was more 
 closely involved in the fate of their country. It was 
 only the ideals he dreamed of that had for a while 
 drawn him close to the nation he once hated. Now 
 these ideal dreams were vanishing for which he had 
 sacrificed the independence of his native island and 
 almost his love for it. That melancholy whose dark 
 wings had so often brooded over him in the days of his 
 boyhood and youth had passed away from him. He 
 now regarded it as one of those weaknesses that the 
 strong man must not allow to come over him. But 
 the sense of lonely isolation remained. 
 
 Self-mastery, we have seen, was the goal to be 
 aimed at according to Napoleon by the man who 
 would achieve strength, success and happiness. The 
 
52 NAPOLEON 
 
 untiring way in which he had practised his own pre- 
 cepts now stood him in good stead. " I advise you," 
 so he concludes a letter to his young brother Lucien, 
 " to exercise self-restraint in everything — in every- 
 thing, mind you, if you wish to lead a happy life." 
 " Do not let yourself be entangled by anything " ; that 
 is the advice that he gives Joseph, and that he keeps« 
 repeating daily to himself. He had taken up his 
 quarters in the same hotel as his rivals the Corsican 
 deputies. " I have only seen Pozzo di Borgo for a 
 moment, our meeting was formal but friendly." With 
 Peraldi, peace was not to be restored. <c Peraldi has 
 declared war against me, there is to be no quarter 
 between us in future," and he adds, mockingly, " it 
 is very lucky for him that he is invulnerable," in his 
 capacity as deputy, Napoleon means ; he is referring 
 to the request which he had made to his rival at 
 Easter, but with which Peraldi had not complied. Of 
 Arena, he writes at first, that everybody shuns him, 
 and that he lives for himself alone ; but in the next 
 letter Napoleon says, " I got on very well with him, 
 he is an ardent democrat," and he complains of the 
 rather dry tone of a letter written by Joseph to that 
 influential personage, and of the brusque way in which 
 the Department had treated him. " If he looks 
 askance at you, he will make difficulties for you, the 
 others will only give you a weak support ; he enjoys 
 great prestige and he has more ability than they, and 
 belongs to the ruling clique. ... As things stand at 
 present, I am clear only as to one thing, namely, that 
 those should be well treated who have been our 
 friends until now, or may yet become so." " Cling to 
 General Paoli," he writes in his first letter to Joseph, 
 " he is all-powerful and will remain so in that future 
 
CORSICA 53 
 
 which none of us can foresee." The condition of 
 weakness in which Napoleon found France was cal- 
 culated to make him feel that Corsica was on the way 
 to achieve its freedom. " It seems more likely than 
 ever now," he writes on the 1 8th of June, "that all 
 this will result in our independence." But this out- 
 look, once the object of his warmest desires, wins 
 from him now no other words than these : " Bear this 
 in mind in what you do." During the following 
 weeks he seems to have abandoned this view of 
 matters ; we do not come across it again in his letters. 
 At all events, with the full approval of his family, he 
 seems to have directed all his affairs and theirs with an 
 eye to the continuance of close relations with France. 
 He counsels Joseph, for instance, to get elected to the 
 new National Assembly ; he would be a fool if he did 
 not do his best to manage this, for otherwise he will 
 always play a very poor part in Corsica. 
 
 He himself remained long uncertain what to do. 
 At last he decided to give up his post in the 
 Corsican battalion and rejoin his old regiment, for 
 the difficulties which had been caused by his absence 
 from his corps and by the Ajaccio affair had now 
 been smoothed away. Not only had the Govern- 
 ment accepted his excuses, backed up as they had 
 been by responsible witnesses amongst the Corsican 
 authorities, but in addition he had been given a com- 
 mission as captain of artillery, dated from the previous 
 February. The other business, however, after having 
 for a moment threatened to take a serious turn — for 
 his opponents, and especially Peraldi, had not hesitated 
 to report to the Minister the insubordination of both 
 leaders of the battalion — was set right by a reference 
 to the Ministry of Justice under a new law, mainly 
 
54 NAPOLEON 
 
 by the Artillery Committee rejecting these complaints 
 against him. Napoleon, who had not allowed himself 
 to be troubled by all this, refers to it in a letter dated 
 the 7th of August, the eve, as he himself points out, 
 of " a big blaze," so that he writes, " however matters 
 may turn out I shall find myself established in France." 
 Three days later the event occurred that overturned* 
 the Bourbon throne — the storming of the Tuileries 
 by the Parisian populace. Napoleon was enabled to 
 see everything at close quarters from the house of 
 a brother of Bourrienne in the Place du Carrousel. 
 When the palace had been seized he made his way 
 into the Tuileries Gardens in the midst of the raging 
 mob just as the Swiss Guards had fallen victims to 
 the treachery and violence of their cowardly assail- 
 ants. Never had he set eyes upon such a field of 
 carnage, so he said afterwards at St. Helena. His 
 feelings on the subject are revealed in a letter to his 
 brother Joseph, who alludes to it in his Memoirs, but 
 who unfortunately did not preserve it. The King 
 would have conquered, so Napoleon wrote, had he 
 shown himself on horseback. He retained this view 
 afterwards in exile, and it is interesting in this connec- 
 tion to remember a phrase he used in April, 1792, in 
 his account of the riot of Ajaccio : " It is well known 
 how the populace is encouraged by success, but how 
 easily it loses heart when it meets with the slightest 
 set back." In this letter to Joseph he described 
 another experience which is too characteristic to be 
 overlooked. Just after the fighting he came upon a 
 Marseillais who was in the act of striking down one 
 of the King's bodyguards. " I said to him : * man 
 from the South, let us leave this poor wretch his life.' 
 — * Are you from the South too ? ' — ' Yes.' — * Well, let 
 
CORSICA ss 
 
 him make his escape.' " Hundreds of others turned 
 away their eyes from such spectacles and passed by in 
 silence, even when they sympathised with the luck- 
 less victims, and were on their side of politics. The 
 young Corsican belonged to no party and had no 
 sympathy with any section of the mob ; hardened to 
 scenes of blood and violence, the drama being enacted 
 in Paris had no terrors for him, but the sight of this 
 unarmed man about to be sacrificed to an aimless lust 
 of massacre invokes his pity and his sense of honour 
 as a soldier, and he intervenes between the murderer 
 and his victim, and he displays the insight and under- 
 standing of the psychologist in the way in which he 
 touches his man at the only point where he is vulner- 
 able at the moment, softening him as though by a 
 touch of magic by the memory of his native place. 
 Though his political enthusiasm had burnt down to 
 ashes, Napoleon had not outgrown the humane feelings 
 and lofty sentiments that were so striking in him in 
 his youth : the manliness, the sense of honour, and 
 we may even say that attraction for the heroic, that 
 had filled his soul as a boy still find their place in his 
 heart. 
 
 The fall of the monarchy was to effect a change in 
 Napoleon's plans. On the 1 6th of August, the Royal 
 School of St. Cyr was done away with, and the question 
 of Marianne's future was thus settled. The tem- 
 porary home that had been found for her there by 
 aristocratic friends was closed. Napoleon decided to 
 take her back to Corsica, whither he himself was going, 
 and on the 15th of October brother and sister arrived 
 at Ajaccio. 
 
 Meanwhile the elections to the Convention had 
 been completed. If Joseph once again had failed to 
 
56 NAPOLEON 
 
 reach the goal of his ambition, at least his party had 
 come out victors in the contest. Out of the six 
 representatives of the island in the National Assembly, 
 in whose hand the destiny of France now lay, four, 
 among them Salicetti, were opposed to Paoli. The 
 Revolution and the war were developing at a rapid 
 rate. The defensive had already been abandoned 
 for the offensive. In the north, as in the Alps, 
 the Republican armies advanced beyond the existing 
 frontiers. The seizure of Belgium led to the breach 
 with England, while the Spaniards also joined the 
 enemies of France. Thus the theatre of war was 
 now extended to the south and the waters of the 
 Mediterranean, and Corsica was to prove one of the 
 most difficult positions which the young Republic 
 had to defend. Thus Paoli's post became more 
 important than ever, the Government at Paris having 
 deliberately made him, as far as possible, all-powerful 
 on the island. To his various other duties they had 
 added, in September, the command of the military 
 district of Corsica, comprising the 23rd Divison. 
 The question now was whether Paoli could adapt 
 himself to this new condition of things, which must 
 link his country by close bonds to the nation against 
 which he had formerly championed it, still further 
 diminish its independence, and make it, with no choice 
 of its own, subject to the ideas of the French Gov- 
 ernment. Could he now become an enemy to 
 England, which had given him twenty years of hos- 
 pitality, and which, like his nearest neighbour, Sar- 
 dinia, had ever been the friend of Corsica ? It was 
 a complete volte-face^ a nullification of his whole past, 
 that the Revolution required from him. It had been 
 his wish to remain above parties : that wish was not 
 
CORSICA 57 
 
 to be fulfilled. He had seen hope for Corsica's well- 
 being in the maintenance of a neutral position between 
 France and England ; that hope also was now to 
 prove illusory ; he found himself forced to make the 
 tricolour supreme over the waters around Corsica. 
 At the time of the elections for the Convention he 
 had allowed himself, being ill, to be taken unawares 
 by Salicetti ; but he again exercised universal influ- 
 ence over the elections to the provincial assemblies 
 which had now to be held, according to a decree of 
 the Convention, for a complete renewal of their mem- 
 bership. The administrative bodies of the Depart- 
 ment, the Town Councils, the Courts of Justice, and 
 the Staff of the National Guard and Gendarmerie 
 were all manned by his followers ; in short, the General 
 had so contrived that he had Corsica in the hollow 
 of his hand ; he had moved the seat of Government 
 and the local Treasury into the interior, to Corte. 
 The citadels of the seaports he had garrisoned with 
 detachments of the National Guard, under the com- 
 mand of officers upon whose fidelity he could rely. 
 
 In France, the General's proceedings did not escape 
 notice ; and in the clubs of Toulon and Marseilles 
 they came in for very sharp criticism, while in Paris 
 his opponents, Salicetti, Bartolomeo, Arena, and 
 Volney, were influencing the opinion of the Conven- 
 tion and of the public. "The Corsican elections," 
 wrote Salicetti to Napoleon at the beginning of 
 January, " amount to a revolt against the Revolu- 
 tion." He was not alarmed by them, however ; he 
 felt sure that the eventual result would be to the 
 advantage of " Liberty " in Corsica in spite of the 
 dark clouds over the horizon ; in three or four 
 months they might hope to see more clearly. " If 
 
58 NAPOLEON 
 
 they are reckoning in Corsica upon the Republic fall- 
 ing to pieces, they are making a mistake, and perhaps 
 we shall see our opponents swallowed up in the abyss 
 that is opening beneath their feet." The letter 
 indicates both the intimate relations existing between 
 the two men and the way Napoleon was now siding 
 definitely with the Revolution. It shows, too, how 
 clearly they saw through the disingenuous intentions 
 of their opponents. 
 
 The crisis was brought about by the expedition 
 against Sardinia, which was attempted, after long 
 preparations, in the middle of February, with Corsica 
 for its base, and in which Napoleon was to take part 
 with his battalion. It was the first big affair in which 
 he was engaged ; it proved unsuccessful, but certainly 
 not through any fault of his, but through the fault 
 of his superiors, that is, of Paoli and of the officers 
 who were his partisans. Things came to such a pass 
 that Napoleon had to abandon the guns with which 
 he had succeeded in capturing the enemy's position. 
 The squadron had to return without success and not 
 without losses. 
 
 Napoleon's attitude towards Paoli during these 
 weeks of extreme tension is characteristic of his far- 
 sightedness and self-control. The General, in his 
 eyes, belonged even yet to the class of those persons 
 who had been friends in the past or might be in the 
 future. Paoli, on his side, wore an equally inscrutable 
 mask, being no whit inferior to his opponent in the 
 art of dissimulation. When the members of the 
 Convention, who in February, 1793, were sent to 
 Toulon — amongst them Salicetti — invited him to go 
 thither, he excused himself on the ground of illness 
 and advancing years, and he advanced the same pre- 
 
CORSICA 59 
 
 text for non-compliance when Biron, the Commander- 
 in-Chief of the army of the Alps, sent for him. 
 Salicetti came himself to the island to Bastia ; and 
 when Paoli refused to meet him there, Salicetti ven- 
 tured to make his way inland to Corte into the lion's 
 den. He also wished to prolong the game. It is 
 possible that Paoli still hoped to maintain a position 
 between the two parties and a strong attitude in his 
 dealings with the men in power in France. But the 
 course of the Revolution was not to permit of this, 
 for just at this moment, the beginning of April, a 
 decisive event had occurred in Paris. Dumouriez's 
 treachery had become known, and the " Mountain " 
 had triumphed over the Girondists, when these tried to 
 turn the catastrophe to their own account and against 
 Danton. On the same day that Dumouriez was 
 unmasked, a denunciation was launched against Paoli 
 from the tribune of the Convention : the blow was 
 struck by no less a person than Lucien Buonaparte. 
 In Toulon, whither he had gone in February, he had 
 denounced the General, in the Jacobin Club, as a 
 traitor to the nation and as a despot of the island, 
 and it was a report drawn up by him that raised 
 the storm against Paoli in the Convention on the 
 2nd of April. The Convention decided to remove 
 the General from his position and directed the Com- 
 missaries of the Republic to conduct him, as well as 
 Pozzo di Borgo, out of the island. 
 
 Even after this we find Napoleon making an effort 
 to maintain the General in his position. Among his 
 papers are drafts of two addresses from the Ajaccio 
 Club to the Convention and to the City Council 
 of Ajaccio, in which documents he defends Paoli 
 as the patriarch of Corsican freedom and as the 
 
6o NAPOLEON 
 
 pioneer of the French Republic. Paoli also bore 
 himself as though a reconciliation was still possible. 
 In a manifesto to his fellow-countrymen he appealed 
 for unity, and gave expression to the hope that the 
 Convention, on being more fully informed, would 
 make good its unwitting error ; he addressed to the 
 National Assembly a letter in which he excused him- 
 self for not attending in person, on the ground of old 
 age and ill-health ; there was nothing he wished for 
 more than the love and esteem of the noble French 
 nation, and he would remain true to the cause of 
 freedom. So long as the strife between the French 
 parties continued, one might, he felt, hope to change 
 the view taken by Convention ; even as late as the 5th 
 of June, after the fall of the Girondists, he was devising 
 a plan for this purpose. 
 
 But it was all too late, and these efforts were really 
 nothing more than a show, under cover of which the 
 parties to the quarrel pursued their rival policies. 
 Upon the island the cause of the friends of France 
 had been lost since Lucien's denunciation had become 
 known ; they held now only a couple of seaports in 
 the north, Bastia and Calvi. When Napoleon was 
 seeking to make his way over the mountains to 
 Bastia, at the end of April, he found his road barred 
 by enemies ; it was with difficulty that he succeeded 
 in getting back to Ajaccio, nor was it possible for him 
 to remain even there any longer. He dared not 
 show himself in his own home, and had to hide 
 during the few days of his visit in the house of some 
 relatives, in a suburb. When Giovanni Girolamo 
 Levie learnt of his presence here, a party of his 
 enemies forced their way into the house, and it was 
 only through the presence of mind of his host that 
 
CORSICA 6 1 
 
 he escaped. He contrived to get to Maginajo on a 
 sailing vessel, and thence to Bastia, where he arrived 
 about the ioth of May. He was still indisposed to 
 throw up the game. On the 23rd of May he and 
 the Commissaries of the Republic, with a small squad- 
 ron, put out to sea from San Fiorenzo in order to 
 make one more attempt upon Ajaccio, but the effort 
 proved unsuccessful, and this put an end to all their 
 hopes. A proclamation had already been issued 
 against him and his followers by the Consulta, which 
 Paoli had assembled in Corte. His mother and 
 sisters had also been obliged to make their escape 
 from Ajaccio. Napoleon had met them at Torre 
 Capitello, at the entrance of the bay, and had sent 
 them on to Calvi, whither he now followed them him- 
 self. Thence he despatched a report upon the condi- 
 tion of the Department of Corsica, in which he 
 mercilessly exposed all Paoli's intrigues, and in which 
 he suggested a plan by which the island might be 
 reconquered. He insists upon the importance of 
 Ajaccio : " Without this harbour the island would 
 have no importance for a hostile Sea Power." It is 
 to England that he thus alludes, the country to 
 which Paoli looked for help. He gives some account, 
 too, of the position of the parties on the island : 
 the party of Independence, entirely devoted to Paoli, 
 forms a small body, he says, but derives strength 
 from its alliance with the Aristocrats or opponents of 
 the Revolution. Only by a policy of alternate threats 
 and flattery, and of connivance at plunder and dis- 
 order, had the General managed to keep the Corsicans 
 on his side. " One has to belong to one Party or 
 another, and one chooses that which is triumphant 
 and can indulge in ravaging, looting, and arson ; 
 
62 NAPOLEON 
 
 when you have to make the choice, it is better to 
 devour than to be devoured." 
 
 With this expression of opinion, this judgment 
 upon his countrymen and upon the hero of his early 
 days, Napoleon bade farewell to his home ; on the 
 nth of June he set sail with his relatives for Toulon. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 FROM TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 
 
 T>UT in what condition did Napoleon find France ? 
 It was the year of the Terror. The downfall of 
 the monarchy had been sealed with the blood of the 
 King ; his slayers were already tearing each other to 
 pieces over their prey. Enemies of the country were 
 threatening its frontiers, or had already crossed them, 
 while entire French provinces and great cities had 
 allied themselves with the invaders. All the parties 
 that had gone under since the year 1789, Legitimists, 
 Constitutionalists, and Moderate Republicans, were 
 forced to one side. There was no longer any pos- 
 sibility of standing neutral. One had to drift with 
 the torrent of blood and fire and to be a partisan of 
 the blind power that was itself the mere creature of 
 anarchy, and that could not for one moment be sure 
 of being its master ; or else one had to join hands 
 with the reactionaries and the enemies of France. We 
 need not discuss the question whether some other de- 
 velopment might not have been possible — whether in 
 the Revolution a principle of life had gained such an 
 ascendancy that it was impossible to make peace until 
 limits had been set to its action by superior force ; or 
 whether it was only that this principle was not given 
 time and opportunity to develop in peace and freedom 
 for the salvation of France. Enough that in the 
 
 63 
 
6 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 
 summer of 1793 destiny must take its course. The 
 old State was destroyed ; the new must be organised 
 in the midst of the struggle. There was no other 
 way to carry out the laws to which France had sworn 
 fealty, and build up on a new basis the army and ad- 
 ministration, public worship and legal procedure. The 
 greater the danger, the more powerful the enemy, the 
 more terrible the internal disorganisation, the more 
 resolutely must the Revolution pursue its aims, the 
 more closely must it associate itself with the ideals of 
 the nation, the more relentless must it be to all those 
 who set themselves in opposition to it, and to the 
 might of France. There was no other way. The 
 path of the Terrorists led to what the nation desired 
 — strength and unity, victory and greatness for 
 France. 
 
 For Napoleon and his associates also there was no 
 choice. There was nothing for them but to side with 
 those Jacobins whom Napoleon, a year before, had 
 set down as " fools " ; only in this way could they 
 hope for revenge against their enemies, for the re- 
 demption of their homes and belongings, or for some 
 compensation for what they had lost, some refuge in 
 their exile. They were able to count on a warm wel- 
 come, for in the general disorder the Government was 
 forced to open its arms to every ally. Napoleon 
 found his regiment on the coast, which it had to 
 defend against the Spaniards, who had been joined by 
 the English. At the end of June he arrived in Nice, 
 and was appointed to the coast batteries by General 
 Jean du Teil, the brother of his old chief. At the 
 beginning of July he would seem to have been 
 despatched by the General into the interior to 
 Avignon, to bring up guns and ammunition. He 
 
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 
 From an engraving after the picture by J. Gu 
 
 p. 64. 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 65 
 
 found the city and the lower Durance in the possession 
 of the enemy, the insurgent Marseillais. Relief was 
 near at hand, however ; a portion of the garrison of 
 Lyons, under Carteaux, now making their appearance, 
 and the insurgents evacuating the city without any 
 serious attempt at struggle. It is uncertain whether 
 Napoleon took part in this affair ; it is possible, per- 
 haps probable, that he accompanied the column as far 
 as Beaucaire, a little to the south of Avignon ; it is 
 certain, however, that he remained behind in Avignon 
 when Carteaux continued his march. 
 
 He was kept here, not only by the mission entrusted 
 to him by the General, but also by the production of 
 a new literary effort which has always been regarded 
 as one of the most valuable documents in connection 
 with his biography, by reason of the light it throws 
 upon the development of his character, namely, the 
 Souper de Beaucaire. Like so many of his other 
 early writings, it took the form of a dialogue. Two 
 merchants from Marseilles and one from Nimes, 
 together with a manufacturer from Montpellier, and 
 a soldier, meet together over their meals at Nimes. 
 They engage in a discussion of the question of the 
 day. It may be assumed that there was some founda- 
 tion in fact for this imaginary incident. What is 
 most remarkable in the pamphlet is the nature of the 
 arguments with which the officer, who is clearly 
 Napoleon himself, brings home to both the Marseil- 
 lais the unwisdom of their revolt. He does not take 
 his stand upon political principles and the differences 
 between parties, the only allusions to these things 
 being put into the mouths of the men from Nimes 
 and Montpellier. " It is as clear as noonday," he says, 
 " that the Marseillais have hindered the operations of 
 
66 NAPOLEON 
 
 our armies and have fought against freedom ; but all 
 that is not now in question : what I should like to know 
 now is what they can hope for, and what party they 
 can now expect to join." Their disunion, their lack 
 of discipline, their inexperience in war, their inade- 
 quate equipment, especially in the matter of artillery, 
 these are the weaknesses which in his eyes render in- 
 evitable their overthrow by the Revolution. Their 
 alliance with the enemies of France will help to ensure 
 this result. He makes no account of the fact that 
 the Marseillais had declared for the Republic and the 
 tricolour ; Paoli had done the same thing, in order to 
 win time, throw dust in the people's faces, and get rid 
 of the true friends of freedom. He concedes that 
 the " Mountain " had been carried away by its partisan 
 spirit and had been guilty of having recourse to 
 calumnies and slanders, but that he holds was no 
 excuse for the " Brissotins." They ought to have 
 thrown away their arms out of regard for the Con- 
 stitution and sacrificed their private interests to the 
 public welfare. For the sovereign power is to be 
 found only in the centre of the nation, that is in the 
 Convention itself. " But," he exclaims, " it is easier 
 to cite Decius than to imitate him." The manner of 
 this document is in keeping with the matter. The 
 vague, misty, undecided diction of his youth has 
 disappeared ; even when, as in this last sentence, 
 there is some reminiscence of his earlier manner, the 
 language is concise and clear cut. It is the first of 
 his writings that can be said to bear the marks of 
 what we think of as the Napoleonic style. 
 
 Genius and good fortune must go together to 
 achieve great deeds. It was fortune that gave 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 67 
 
 Napoleon his first chance of displaying his great 
 powers. In August the English had appeared before 
 Toulon, where the enemies of the Convention had 
 got the upper hand, and these, hard pressed as they 
 were, had admitted them into the great naval harbour, 
 the only one on the south coast of France. 
 
 On the 30th of August General Carteaux, who had 
 meanwhile reduced Marseilles, had appeared before 
 Toulon and begun the siege. But he was ill prepared 
 for it, and was especially badly provided as to a siege 
 train ; and to add to his difficulties, Major Dommartin, 
 his chief artillery officer, was so badly wounded at an 
 early stage of the attack that he had to leave the 
 camp. At this moment, on the 16th of September, 
 Napoleon, on his way back to Nice, arrived at the 
 camp. He had with him guns and ammunition, 
 which were so badly needed, and he himself could 
 replace Dommartin. The Commissaries of the Con- 
 vention, Salicetti among them, were glad to have such 
 a substitute for the wounded officer and exercised 
 their authority by appointing him to the vacant place. 
 Thus it was that the young hero made his appearance 
 upon the scene where he was first to come under the 
 gaze of a wider circle and win his place in the 
 pages of history. He began at once to give proof of 
 all those wonderful qualities which marked him out 
 as a born leader in war — his untiring industry, his 
 sound judgment, his daring courage, and his invincible 
 calm. It would be too much to say that he alone had 
 discerned and suggested the direction given to the 
 attack so as to obtain the command of the inner 
 harbour, and thereby the overpowering of the English 
 fleet ; but it was he who first and at once pointed out 
 the key of the enemy's position, the Fort Aiguillettes, 
 
68 NAPOLEON 
 
 at the extreme end of the peninsula of Le Caire, 
 which divided the inner harbour from the outer road- 
 stead, and he insisted repeatedly upon the necessity of 
 making the first attack on this point, and himself 
 directed it. If the attack failed, that was due to the 
 bad leadership of the general commanding, who, 
 although the son of a soldier, and although he him- 
 self had seen service in his youth, had since forsaken 
 the sword for the artist's brush, and had only latterly 
 returned to the career of arms. The English got 
 wind of their danger in good time, and by strengthen- 
 ing the defence at the spot succeeded in keeping it for 
 some time against its assailants. Napoleon remained 
 the life and soul of the siege. The fact that he had the 
 Commissaries on his side made him to some degree 
 independent of the general, to whom the impetuosity, 
 combined with the scarcely disguised contempt shown 
 him by this " Capitaine Canon," as he peevishly 
 dubbed him, was a source of continual embarrassment 
 and annoyance ; but it called for a degree of daring, 
 a consciousness of power and mastery such as only 
 Napoleon possessed, to venture upon a step which in 
 the event of failure would bring him almost inevitably 
 to the guillotine. His action was, however, justified 
 by success ; he kindled officers and men alike with his 
 own fire. Carteaux, and after him another general of 
 the same stamp, had to leave the camp, but the 
 third commander, Dugommier, fell in entirely with 
 Napoleon's views. The general who had lately been 
 placed in command of the artillery, the younger 
 Du Teil, left his friend practically a free hand. By 
 December, after many fruitless assaults, the revolu- 
 tionary army were at last in a position to storm the 
 enemy's works, and once again we find the young hero 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 69 
 
 foremost in the fight : a horse was killed under him ; 
 and although he was wounded for a second time (in 
 September, on the occasion of the first assault, he had 
 been grazed by a bullet) by a shot through the thigh, 
 he was one of the first to get within the enemy's 
 entrenchments. The victory was complete : everything 
 fell out exactly as Napoleon had foreseen. In a few 
 days the enemy's ships cleared out of both harbours 
 under a deadly fire from the French guns, and the 
 luckless city had to surrender, abandoned by the 
 foreigners to the vengeance of its remorseless con- 
 querors. 
 
 When Napoleon set himself at St. Helena to tell 
 the story of his life, he began with Toulon. And 
 rightly, for it was at this point that the star of his 
 marvellous career rose into sight. All that preceded 
 now lay buried, and a future full of brilliant hopes lay 
 extended before his ambitious brain. In the army 
 there was a universal feeling of wondering admiration 
 for the young military genius. " We are at a loss for 
 words," writes Du Teil to the Minister of War, " to 
 describe adequately to you Buonaparte's conspicuous 
 services ; to say that he showed the greatest insight 
 and knowledge and extraordinary bravery is to give 
 a very inadequate account of the merits of this ex- 
 ceptionally good officer." Dugommier writes to the 
 same effect : " even if his services were to go un- 
 rewarded and unappreciated, this officer would make 
 his way to the front all the same on his own merits." 
 But the Government was appreciative. In September 
 Napoleon had been promoted to the rank of major, 
 and immediately after the taking of Toulon the 
 Commissaries made him a brigadier-general, at the age 
 of four-and-twenty ; on the 6th of February the 
 
7o NAPOLEON 
 
 Executive Committee of the Convention ratified the 
 promotion. 
 
 By this time France had almost rid itself of its 
 invaders, and the rebels had been overthrown or 
 reduced to silence (for thousands the silence of 
 death). Even the insurrection of La Vendee for the 
 moment at least was choked by the streams of blood 
 it had set flowing. The victorious Republic was 
 exerting itself already to attack its enemies within 
 their own confines, behind which it would find wait- 
 ing for it as allies disunion and weakness, and a mass 
 of ambitious factions, eager for change ; for Republi- 
 can agents were at work in swarms all over Europe 
 from Naples to Amsterdam. The armies of the 
 Republic concentrated in the spring of 1794 towards 
 the north, where the allies were still in possession of 
 some French places, and where they had massed 
 all their strength for the defence of Belgium. Here 
 the French triumphed beyond expectation : the opera- 
 tions of Pichegru and of Jourdan in May and June 
 resulted in the rout of the enemy and again brought 
 the sons of the young Republic to Brussels. 
 
 The Alps and Pyrenees still remained the theatres 
 of war. After the English had made their appearance 
 in the Mediterranean, however, it became clear that 
 the Allied Powers, among which dissensions had broken 
 out, must use some special effort to co-operate just at 
 the point where Napoleon happened to be in com- 
 mand. The great danger which had threatened France 
 through the revolt of Toulon had ceased to exist since 
 the 22nd of December. The French were at least now 
 in possession of their own coast line, and there was 
 no longer any possibility of a combination between 
 the allies from the Pyrenees and the Alps. It was all 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 71 
 
 the more important for the English to make sure of the 
 Genoese coast because the passes over the Apennines 
 offered here the best opportunity to the Allies of 
 combined operations, and to the French the best lines 
 of invasion into Piedmont and Lombardy. This 
 meant bringing Genoa into the conflict, as the mistress 
 of part of this coast, besides involving other Italian 
 states, among which Rome and Naples had already 
 taken sides with the adversaries of France. The 
 English had not delayed to profit by the occasion. 
 Already in October they had made their way into 
 a harbour of the neutral Republic and had captured a 
 French frigate and the ships under its convoy carry- 
 ing grain destined for the use of the French army. 
 This, then, was the situation with which Napoleon 
 found himself face to face after the recovery of 
 Toulon. No one knew the lie of the land better than 
 he. As " Inspector of the coasts " and as Commander 
 of all the artillery of the "Army of Italy," as the 
 French force massed here under General Dumerbion 
 was called, he was almost in a position of inde- 
 pendence. 
 
 Among the Commissaries attached to this section 
 of the French forces the most conspicuous was the 
 younger Robespierre, who had already taken his place 
 beside Salicetti at Toulon. Napoleon entered 
 now into very close relations with him and his col- 
 league Ricord, thus putting into practice his precept 
 about keeping on the side of power. In truth he 
 could not do this better than by keeping in with the 
 brother of the great Tribune, who during these very 
 months was rising to the very pinnacle of power in 
 Paris. It was not merely this consideration that drew 
 Napoleon towards Robespierre. He was impressed 
 
72 NAPOLEON 
 
 by the systematic way in which the proceedings of the 
 brothers were always directed to the objects they had 
 in view and their untiring energy that did not hesitate 
 at employing any means, choosing such means, not for 
 their own sake, but for the sake of the power to 
 which they opened a way. He has given expression 
 more than once to his feelings on this subject. " If 
 Robespierre," he said a little later to Marmont, who 
 was then one of his intimates, " had remained in 
 power he would have been able to strike out another 
 way for himself, he would have systematised the laws 
 and made them paramount ; we should have attained 
 this result without shocks and convulsions because it 
 would have proceeded from the exercise of power ; 
 we are now trying to reach this goal through a revolu- 
 tion, and this revolution will give birth to many 
 others." 
 
 Augustin Robespierre, as appears from a letter to 
 his brother in April, 1749, was more impressed by 
 the talents than by the expressed convictions of the 
 young general, whom he thought of chiefly as the 
 Corsican exile and opponent of Paoli, but whom 
 he took into his confidence, a privilege which was 
 to cost Napoleon dearly enough. There was a ques- 
 tion of an attack upon Piedmont. On the 21st of 
 May, at Colmars (Basses- Alpes) there was held a 
 conference of the Commissaries of the Convention 
 and of the Commanders of both the French armies, 
 that of the Alps and that of Italy, at which a plan 
 for combined action, with Coni as its objective, was 
 discussed. It would seem that Robespierre and Ricord 
 together with Buonaparte wished to extend this plan, 
 which had been sanctioned by the Committee of 
 Public Safety, in the direction of placing the starting- 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 73 
 
 point of the attack on the coast farther to the east, 
 and of thus making the army of Italy do most of the 
 work. The object at which they aimed is indicated 
 in a memorandum from the pen of Buonaparte which 
 Robespierre took with him to Paris, whither he was 
 called by disquieting news of his brother. In cam- 
 paigns, as in sieges, he maintains in this document, it 
 is important to concentrate one's fire upon one single 
 point, to bring all one's forces to bear upon one attack 
 instead of dissipating them in several. " Once a 
 breach has been made, the enemies' power of resist- 
 ance is broken ; nothing more is needed to capture 
 the place." The blow must be struck at Germany, 
 then Spain and Italy would fall of themselves ; no 
 cool-headed man could dream of taking Madrid ; 
 and as long as Germany maintained a threatening 
 front it would be dangerous to penetrate into Italy. 
 Buonaparte concludes his paper with these words : 
 " The two armies — the Army of the Alps and the 
 Army of Italy — must be made into one with a common 
 centre and animated with the same spirit." Apparently 
 we have before us here the ground lines of the plan 
 followed by the young general in his Italian campaign, 
 for it was directed from the beginning as with a view 
 to an ultimate advance through the Alps against 
 Germany, and we shall see presently his attitude 
 towards the separation of the two armies and the pre- 
 mature invasion of Italy. 
 
 According to Buonaparte's plan, Corsica was among 
 the positions most to be aimed at. The English were 
 now putting out all their efforts to get possession of 
 the island. In February they had taken San Fio- 
 renzo. The attempt upon Bastia which Nelson then 
 undertook had an immediate effect upon the opera- 
 
74 NAPOLEON 
 
 tions of the Army of Italy. This had to put a stop to 
 its advance and detach some of its troops for an 
 expedition which was to be sent from Toulon to the 
 relief of the threatened town ; but before this expedi- 
 tion had set sail Bastia had capitulated on the 24th 
 May. This was a decisive event for Corsica. On the 
 1 8th June the National Assembly at Corte declared' 
 the island a kingdom under the rule of George III 
 of England, and a few weeks later, on August ist, 
 Calvi, the last place held by the French, capitu- 
 lated. And during these weeks we find Buonaparte, 
 in conjunction with his friends the Commissaries, 
 carrying out plans which involved the abandonment 
 of his country to its own devices and a concentration 
 of the forces of France towards the north. In the 
 night of July 1 5 he arrived in Genoa with full powers 
 conferred on him by Ricord. The demand that he 
 had to put before the Senate referred to the strength- 
 ening of the coast batteries of Genoa, the reinforcing 
 of them with French artillery, and the improvement 
 of the roads along the coast and over the mountain 
 passes. He had no sooner returned to Nice (we do 
 not know with what reply from the Senate), than 
 news arrived that the heads of both his high-placed 
 friends, the Robespierres, had fallen in Paris under 
 the guillotine. 
 
 This terrible blow, which shook France from one end 
 to the other, evoked no greater emotion anywhere than 
 in the south, which was aflame with excitement. But 
 the friends of the dead men could not think of rising 
 in revolt — they were too much taken up with their 
 own personal danger, and sought for safety either in 
 flight or in submission and disavowal of the "Ty- 
 rants." The latter alternative was adopted by Napo- 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 75 
 
 leon, from whose pen we have a letter, dated the 7th 
 of August, which, on the face of it, can have had no 
 other object. " I am somewhat moved," he writes, 
 " by the fate of the younger Robespierre, whom I 
 loved, and in whose purity of mind I believed ; but 
 had he been my father, I myself should have stabbed 
 him had he helped to maintain tyranny." But this 
 time-serving attitude was of no use to him. On the 
 6th of August the Commissaries attached to the Army 
 of the Alps had denounced him already as a traitor to 
 the Committee of Public Safety, and on the 10th 
 he was placed under arrest. His papers and his 
 sword were taken from him, and he was shut up in 
 Fort Carre, near Antibes. He remained ten days in 
 custody ; then the Commissaries intimated to the 
 Government that they had found nothing suspicious, 
 and they set him free again, but only provisionally. 
 Attached to the head-quarters of Dumerbion, he drew 
 up a plan for an attack upon Dego which was carried 
 out successfully on the 2 1 st of September, and placed 
 the French in possession of that important Apennine 
 pass. 
 
 The two official documents which we possess, both 
 written in very guarded terms, fail to reveal the 
 grounds of this intrigue. It should, however, be said 
 that the suspicion against Napoleon which was in the 
 minds of the Commissaries as to his having relations 
 with the enemy (there were rumours about the sum 
 of a million francs having been sent from Genoa for 
 the purpose of bribing a general) was without justifi- 
 cation, and that it was only the difference of opinion 
 alluded to above that had given rise to the feeling of 
 mistrust. It was no less a person than Salicetti, 
 Buonaparte's fellow-countryman and former associate, 
 
76 NAPOLEON 
 
 who took the initiative in the matter. He had, it 
 seems, taken up an attitude of opposition to Napo- 
 leon and to both the other Commissaries with the 
 Army of Italy in regard to the attack upon Corsica ; 
 he had wished himself to accompany the ill-fated 
 expedition in May. The others had excluded him 
 from their councils after that, and had not arranged 
 for him to take part in the mission to Genoa. This 
 gave him the idea that a treacherous game was being 
 carried on, and he was strengthened in this suspicion 
 by the fact that on the occasion of his journey to the 
 Army of the Alps in the beginning of August he had 
 a narrow escape from assassination (possibly at the 
 hands of bandits), and that Napoleon's friends, amongst 
 them Ricord himself, took themselves off on learning 
 of the catastrophe in Paris. Napoleon, however, re- 
 mained at his post, and the fact that he dared to 
 weather the storm seems to us the best evidence that, 
 apart from his relations with the Robespierres, he had 
 nothing to reproach himself with. 
 
 The incident, however, gave him a lesson which he 
 took to heart for the future. He had forsaken for a 
 moment, from motives of self-preservation, that 
 maxim of his about sparing former friends, and 
 henceforth we find him exercising greater caution 
 in all he does. He set himself at once to carrying 
 out instructions issued from Paris in connection 
 with a new expedition against Corsica. It was organ- 
 ised on a large scale, Napoleon being put in charge 
 of the artillery, and setting out at the beginning of 
 March. It met with the same fate, however, as the 
 previous one. In the first encounter with the English 
 two ships were lost, and the others were forced 
 speedily to make for the safety of the harbours. 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 77 
 
 Indirectly this result was evidence in favour of 
 Napoleon's plans ; it was clear that the flag of France 
 was to triumph only on land. 
 
 Napoleon's career was now to take a new and 
 unexpected turn. He received orders from Paris to 
 join the Army of the West immediately, and was to 
 take command of the artillery in the new campaign 
 of La Vendee. This order came to him at the 
 beginning of April in Versailles ; he prepared to 
 obey, but did not hurry over his arrangements. He 
 did not set forth on his journey until the beginning 
 of May, and then he proceeded first to Paris. Im- 
 mediately on his arrival he was witness of a new 
 phase in the Revolution — the outbreak of the ist of 
 Prairial, when the Jacobins sought to stamp out the 
 reaction which was gathering strength, both in the 
 capital and in the Convention. Many of Napoleon's 
 friends took part in this ill-fated incident — among 
 them was Salicetti, to whom Madame Permon, a 
 Corsican lady, whose house Napoleon often visited, 
 gave refuge, and whom, a fortnight later, she helped 
 to escape ; disguised as a servant, Salicetti accom- 
 panied Madame Permon and her daughter to Bor- 
 deaux, whence he managed to cross the frontier. 
 Napoleon was aware of all this, but he did not seek 
 to avenge Salicetti's denunciation of him in the 
 previous August. He confined himself to writing a 
 letter to Madame Permon on her departure, in which 
 he lets them both know that he has long been in 
 possession of their secret, and in which he contrasts 
 his conduct with that he had experienced on the part 
 of Salicetti : perhaps the latter might conclude that 
 his benefactress had saved him from vengeance ; it 
 
7 8 NAPOLEON 
 
 was true that this consideration had its weight, but 
 the mere fact that Salicetti was unarmed and banished 
 was enough to save his head. " Look into your own 
 mind," so ends this remarkable missive, "and 
 above all, respect my motives : they deserve respect, 
 for they are noble and lofty." 
 
 Throughout this crisis, so far as we can see, he 
 held himself apart. These conflicts between the fac- 
 tions meant nothing to him ; he was as indifferent in 
 regard to them as he had been three years before ; all 
 that he required was a sure footing for himself. For 
 this, however, he must remain in Paris in touch with 
 the men who had the favours of Fortune to dis- 
 tribute, and at the centre of power, in which he 
 hoped to have a share. First he used a leave of 
 absence to absent himself from his new post ; and 
 when Aubry, the military member of the Committee 
 of Public Welfare, an old Constitutionalist, who had 
 but recently returned to France, struck his name off 
 the list of generals of artillery and put him in com- 
 mand of an infantry brigade in La Vendee, he re- 
 ported himself as sick. He lodged a protest against 
 the slight, but did not allow this wrangle with the 
 authorities to disturb him any more than that caused 
 by the trouble in his native city in 1792. Never did 
 he show himself less anxious in regard to the future. 
 " One can live here in the utmost comfort and free- 
 dom, provided one goes straight ahead with due cau- 
 tion, and paying no attention to anybody but one's 
 friends." Thus he writes to his brother Joseph, with 
 whom he keeps in regular correspondence. He 
 laughs at his uncle Fesch, who is already beginning 
 to think of returning to Corsica, and who has a habit 
 of living only in the future ; the present counts as 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 79 
 
 little with him as the past, the future is everything. 
 " Be quite at your ease in regard to the future," he 
 says in one of these letters, " be quite content with 
 the present, cultivate cheerfulness, and learn how to 
 amuse yourself a little." And two days later, " I 
 have got into a state of mind such as I have experi- 
 enced on the eve of a battle — a state of mind in 
 which one feels that if death is in our midst about to 
 bring everything to an end with a single blow it were 
 folly to worry oneself on that account. Everything 
 combines to make me defiant of death and fate ; and 
 should this condition of feeling endure my friend I 
 shall come presently to such a point that I will not 
 step out of the way when I see a carriage rolling 
 towards me. My reasoning faculty stands amazed at 
 this, but the spectacle this country now presents, and 
 one's familiarity with the game of dice which is being 
 played by fortune, have brought me to this standpoint." 
 In these words Napoleon gave utterance to the 
 universal feeling, at least amongst those who took the 
 lead and had the power in their hands. The Revolu- 
 tion had not yet found anchorage in calm waters, and 
 what the morrow might bring it was still hard to 
 guess ; but that sense of dread which had been pro- 
 duced by a year of terror and a long succession of 
 desperate conflicts, was vanishing from the land. The 
 foundations in the new State now withstood all 
 attempts to shake them, and the numbers of its 
 enemies at home and abroad had at least been 
 lessened. The vanquished, moreover, could count 
 upon toleration, if only they kept quiet, whilst 
 those in whose hands the exercise of authority had 
 been definitely placed were able to feel that they could 
 use it in the interests of themselves and their friends, 
 
8o NAPOLEON 
 
 without at every moment imperilling their lives. The 
 condition of these latter illustrated curiously the 
 power of luck, the workings of chance. They con- 
 sisted of men who had mostly played quite a secondary 
 part in the Revolution, or rogues and cowards who 
 had been the jackals of the great tyrants, and who 
 had probably smeared themselves with more blood 
 than they ; only to desert and betray them when the 
 wheel of fortune had turned and their own heads 
 were in danger. Some of these — and very poor 
 specimens of the class, men like Barras and Freron — 
 were old acquaintances of Napoleon, and they showed 
 themselves as ready as anybody to make the most of 
 the good things that Fortune had emptied into their 
 lap and to distribute them amongst their favourites. 
 Their wives and their fair friends reigned in the 
 salons that were thronged by the Society of the new 
 France, striving to forget the dark past in unbridled 
 indulgence in the joie de vivre. Napoleon held him- 
 self aloof at first from this mode of existence, though 
 it had its attractions for him ; he was not much in 
 touch with such circles. He had, however, entree to 
 Barras's salon from the beginning and with him he 
 established a close relationship. " For," as he wrote 
 afterwards in St. Helena, " Robespierre was dead, 
 Barras was playing a role of importance, and I had to 
 attach myself to somebody and something." 
 
 To the influence of Barras may be attributed a 
 commission which Napoleon was given in the middle 
 of July by the Committee of Public Safety and which 
 placed him forthwith in a central position in the field 
 of action. This was nothing less than the making 
 out of a plan for the prosecution of the war against 
 the coalition. 
 
BARRAS. 
 
 From a lithograph by Delpech. 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 81 
 
 The Peace with Prussia had been followed by the 
 peace with Spain ; it looked also as though Naples 
 and Parma were ripe for peace ; while Prussia's North 
 German allies were beating a retreat from the scene of 
 hostilities, and it was hoped that the other German 
 States would now forsake the flag of Austria. As, 
 moreover, the attempt of the English and of the 
 emigres by means of an expedition to northern France 
 to overthrow the authority of the Revolution by a 
 rising had ended in failure at Quiberon, supplies 
 of troops were set free on all sides, and there was 
 ground for hoping that the theatre of war might be 
 limited now to the frontiers held against Austria and 
 Sardinia. It was in this direction that Napoleon in 
 the previous summer had wished to direct the most 
 important operations, and circumstances were now 
 combining to bring about the fulfilment of his plan. 
 If they did not anticipate the enemy on the coast it 
 was certain that the allies would be able to combine 
 forces in this quarter. They had already occupied 
 Vado, thus interrupting the French communication 
 with Genoa. Supplies could no longer be drawn from 
 Italian harbours, and there was difficulty in securing 
 provisions for the army which had lately been rein- 
 forced. Therefore Buonaparte maintained it was neces- 
 sary to retake Vado, cross the Apennines, and shift 
 the theatre of war into Piedmont and Lombardy in 
 order to make war support war. We must cut off 
 Sardinia from Austria, he declared, in order to force 
 it to make a separate peace, and then strike the great 
 blow at Austria in the spring — that is, we must con- 
 quer Lombardy, become masters of Alessandria and 
 Mantua, and pressing forwards through the passes of 
 the Trentino simultaneously with the advance of the 
 
82 NAPOLEON 
 
 Army of the Rhine into the hereditary dominions of 
 Austria, there dictate terms of peace. Such was the 
 plan that he put before the authorities in Paris in a 
 succession of drafts and schemes. The year before 
 these ideas had nearly cost him his command and 
 his freedom ; now they were a step towards greatness. 
 When Aubry, who had looked on him with jealous 
 eyes, retired from the Committee on the 7th of August, 
 and his successor, Doulcet de Pontecoulant, indicated 
 his approval of Buonaparte's plans, fortune seemed 
 entirely upon his side. He gave but little thought 
 now to La Vendee ; in his letters to his brother he 
 talks of coming to Nice ; he was counting evidently 
 upon being employed in the campaign, the plans for 
 which he had been making out. At the same time he 
 was seriously engaged on a plan for entering into the 
 Turkish service. There was question of an official 
 mission to Sultan Selim, who was anxious to have his 
 artillery reorganised by French military instructors, 
 and who had approached the French Government in 
 the matter in July. For Napoleon, whose fancy had 
 always been captivated by the East, this was a fasci- 
 nating project. He contemplated taking with him his 
 brother Joseph, for whom he proposed to obtain a 
 Consulate in the Levant, and he offered his services 
 for the purpose to the Government in due form ; but 
 the Committee did not see its way to letting him go. 
 Doulcet and Jean Debry bestowed upon him the 
 most glowing commendations. The former declared 
 that he was indebted to the advice of General Buona- 
 parte for a great part of the regulations which he had 
 brought into use for the Army of the Alps and of 
 Italy ; he recommended him either for the artillery or 
 for any other branch of the army, or, if need be, for 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 83 
 
 the Diplomatic service. Debry declared that the 
 Committee should not send away so distinguished an 
 officer to such a distance ; he proposed, in the first 
 instance, to offer Napoleon advancement, if possible, 
 in his own branch of the service, and only take his 
 project into serious consideration if he should still 
 persist in it. Accordingly the Committee sent word to 
 the general in command in La Vendee on the 30th of 
 August that a substitute was to be found for Brigadier 
 General Bonaparte, as it had decided on the 4th of 
 August to employ him in working out plans for prose- 
 cuting the war. Napoleon himself we find writing a few 
 days later to his brother Joseph, that the Committee 
 had declared that as long as the war lasted they could 
 not send him out of France, that a new post would 
 probably be found him in the artillery, and that he 
 would probably be attached to the Committee of 
 Public Safety. He was more contented than ever 
 with his lot. " Come what may," he writes, " you 
 must not be anxious about me. All the most im- 
 portant people of every party and every school of 
 thought are on my side." And on the 8th of 
 September : " Everything is looking very satisfactory 
 as regards the future, but if it were otherwise I should 
 simply contrive to live in the present. A man of 
 spirit must disregard the future." 
 
 In these circumstances it arouses one's surprise to 
 find the Committee on the 15th of September putting 
 forth a decree to the effect that Brigadier General 
 Bonaparte " who hitherto has been attached to the 
 Committee of Public Safety " has been struck out of 
 the list of generals on active service, upon the 
 grounds " of his refusal to betake himself to the post 
 to which he had been appointed." This step has 
 
8 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 always been regarded as involving the removal of 
 Napoleon from his post and as a punishment ; a 
 really serious blow to him, putting an end to all his 
 hopes, and in truth the order is curtly worded and 
 can have been written by no friend. There is extant 
 however another decree, published on the same day 
 by the Committee, to just a contrary effect. This 
 was the leave of absence for the purpose of a journey 
 to Constantinople, and the order to undertake the 
 military mission to the Sultan. In this document the 
 General's profound knowledge of the science of war, 
 and in particular his mastery in regard to artillery, is 
 set forth, together with particulars as to the honours 
 he had Won at Toulon and in Italy, and his being 
 sent is represented as a proof of the friendship and 
 regard felt by the Republic towards its esteemed ally. 
 A complete staff of officers selected by himself, 
 amongst them Junot and Marmont, was attached to 
 him, the rates of pay and the grants for the 
 mathematical and surveying instruments and the 
 books required by the General being settled in 
 accordance with his wishes. The same Commission 
 which was to see to the execution of the other decree 
 was to execute this also. The decree of removal had 
 been signed in the first place by Cambaceres, who 
 was later to become one of Napoleon's intimates, and 
 on the 29th of September we find him writing with 
 regard to the question of the young General's going 
 to Constantinople, that there was no longer any 
 obstacle in the way, except Buonaparte's own demand 
 to take certain officers with him. 
 
 Bearing all this in mind, it is clear that we must put 
 a different interpretation upon that brusquely worded 
 decree. If Napoleon was to undertake the mission to 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 85 
 
 the East, it became necessary that his name should 
 be removed from the list of the generals on active 
 service ; and if a pretext for this were made out of 
 his refusal to serve in La Vendee, that may have been 
 because there was no other to put forward, as illness 
 could no longer be advanced as an excuse. In any 
 case, we have nothing from Napoleon's pen to 
 substantiate the usual view on this subject and no 
 change is discernible in the tone of his letters to 
 Joseph. " His journey," he writes on the 26th of 
 September, " would have been finally ratified were it 
 not for the rekindling of excitement in Paris and the 
 danger of new tumults breaking out." It is to the 
 reactionary agitation of the Parisian populace against 
 the new Constitution which the Convention was 
 seeking to force upon the country that Napoleon is 
 alluding in these words. We come now to the 
 epoch-making day when his iron will made itself felt 
 for the first time in the centre of the State, and 
 opened out a new phase of the rule of the Revolution. 
 
 Since the summer of 1789 the National Assembly, 
 under its successive names of Constituent Assembly, 
 Legislative Assembly, and Convention, had been the 
 ruling body of France. Now for the first time it was 
 making a serious attempt to abdicate and to separate 
 the executive from the legislative department of the 
 State. That is the real meaning of the Constitution 
 of the Year III, which, after having been discussed in 
 the Convention down to the end of August, was 
 submitted in September to the approval of the nation. 
 It seemed possible that this attempt might be crowned 
 with success, for the numbers of the opponents of the 
 Revolution had been still further reduced, and a last 
 
86 NAPOLEON 
 
 effort to secure that universal peace hoped for by 
 everyone seemed likely to achieve its object. Hated 
 by the Royalists, this new Constitution was at the 
 same time a harsh renunciation of those socialistic 
 ideals towards which the democracy had steered its 
 course under Robespierre. Not only was universal 
 suffrage not conceded, but a fixed domicile and the 
 payment of a tax were made conditions for the right 
 to vote, and only men of property could become 
 members of the Legislature. Public worship was to 
 be made independent of the State ; freedom was 
 promised to the Press, to labour, commerce, and 
 industry ; and all the purchasers of national property 
 were guaranteed in their possession of it. Every 
 effort was made so to balance against each other the 
 powers in which the national sovereignty would 
 henceforth have its being, as to avoid the predomi- 
 nance of any one over the others and keep the 
 foundations of the Constitution intact. 
 
 With this end in view, the executive power was en- 
 trusted, not to a single chief, but to a Council of Five, 
 while the Legislature was divided into two bodies : a 
 Council of Five Hundred composed of men of at least 
 thirty years, and a Council of Elders, half as numerous 
 and composed of men of over forty ; to the former 
 were allotted the duties of introducing and discussing 
 new laws, to the latter that of discussing and actually 
 voting them. The powers and functions of the 
 Directory, in which the Committee of Public Safety 
 survived, were very extensive ; war and public policy, 
 justice, administration, and finance lay in its hand ; 
 ministers, commissaries, and generals remained under 
 its authority. But that energy which the Committee 
 named by the Convention had brought to its decisions 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 87 
 
 was not to be reproduced by the Directory, because it 
 had been divorced from the National Representative 
 body without being made independent of it. It was 
 dependent from the moment of its installation upon 
 the wishes of the two Chambers, its members having 
 been chosen from the Senior Chamber from lists 
 drawn up by the Lower. It was deprived of all 
 initiative in the matter of legislation, and it was 
 bound by the views of the representative bodies in 
 regard to the declaration of war and peace. The 
 nation itself could give direct expression to its views 
 only in the election of the two Councils, and even 
 then only within the limits of a narrow suffrage ; so 
 that the national sovereignty, upon which the Revo- 
 lution was based and which the Convention had 
 personified, could now only develop into action 
 through three separate organisations. It was decided 
 that the elections should be held every four years, and 
 in order the better to prevent the continued holding 
 of power by those in office, and to keep them under 
 closer control of the national will, it was provided 
 that every year one-third of the two Chambers and 
 one member of the Directory should retire. Take it 
 for all in all, it was a most ingeniously thought out 
 and logically developed system, to which nothing was 
 lacking except the thing which was most important — a 
 centre on which the main weight of power could 
 rest ; the tendency of the scheme was rather to avoid 
 this point and to split up the sovereignty instead 
 of concentrating it. 
 
 The majority were not disposed to agree to a 
 general election. In spite of Quiberon, the unrest in 
 La Vendee had not yet been stilled. In the south 
 also there had been some sharp fighting, while the 
 
88 NAPOLEON 
 
 reaction in Paris had been assuming dangerous pro- 
 portions. The Convention decided therefore to 
 append to the Constitution two decrees, in accord- 
 ance with which two-thirds of its members were to 
 be transferred to the new chambers, and only the 
 remaining third had to be re-elected. On the whole, 
 this step was well calculated. The Constitution was 
 passed almost unanimously ; for each party felt that 
 it could turn to its own account the powers which it 
 would place in the hands of the Government. In 
 most of the Departments also the decrees were well 
 received ; the army, above all, was unanimous in 
 supporting the decisions of the majority. But in 
 Paris the reaction carried the day. Only one single 
 section of the city declared in favour of the decrees ; 
 in all the other divisions they were rejected. And 
 when the Convention issued orders for the partial 
 elections, this decision was for the Parisians the signal 
 for revolt. 
 
 Napoleon had observed with equanimity the fer- 
 mentation which had been in progress in the capital 
 since September ; he was not given to attaching great 
 importance to popular agitation, and in truth the 
 actual powers at the disposal of the reactionaries 
 were slight enough, but the Parisians reckoned upon 
 the unpreparedness of the new administration, upon 
 the indecision and lack of unity of the majority 
 which comprised the remnants of the revolutionary 
 parties that a year before had been at daggers drawn, 
 upon the indifference of the masses, and above all on 
 the predominance which belonged for the moment to 
 the capital ; for against the National Guard number- 
 ing thirty thousand, whom the sections of the capital 
 could muster, the Convention could produce only 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 89 
 
 about five thousand men, including the Guard of the 
 Convention, a regiment of the line which it had assigned 
 to itself on the ist of Prairial, and a couple of brigades 
 taken from the neighbouring Departments. Thus it 
 happened that when on the night of the 12th of 
 Vendemiaire the Assembly got word of the imminent 
 revolt, it became a prey to confusion and panic. The 
 general in command of the Army of the Interior, 
 Menou, had, it was true, put down the revolt of the 
 ist of Prairial. On that occasion the insurgents were 
 Jacobins, and Menou had always been among their 
 opponents ; but he now seemed unequal to the 
 occasion. In the course of a stormy night-sitting 
 it was decided to remove him from his post, and even 
 to put him under arrest, and to entrust the command 
 to Barras, the chief of the Thermidorians. 
 
 Barras had served as an officer and was not lacking 
 in resolution, at least in such situations as this, where 
 his own head was at stake. But for the task which lay 
 before him he required an assistant more accustomed 
 than himself to the leadership of an army in the time 
 of war. His choice lay (and what could be more 
 natural ?) on the general whose abilities and energy 
 had been known to him since Toulon, and who was 
 as much interested as himself in securing the victory 
 of the Convention. Napoleon was thus reinstated in 
 the position which he had filled a few weeks before ; 
 that is to say that he was attached to the executive 
 power, which for the moment was entirely in Barras's 
 hands, as a chief of the General Staff so to speak : he 
 gave the orders and directions to which Barras put his 
 name. It became all-important to bring the artillery, 
 especially the guns parked at Le Sablon, on to the 
 scene before the National Guard had a chance of 
 
9 o NAPOLEON 
 
 seizing the cannon. This was achieved. Captain 
 Murat, who had already distinguished himself on the 
 ist of Prairial, was entrusted with the task of bring- 
 ing the cannon from Le Sablon ; this was the first 
 occasion upon which Napoleon and he, so often to be 
 united later in good and evil fortune, were brought , 
 together. It was on the battlefield of the ioth of 
 August that the struggle for the supreme power in 
 France was fought out. The Convention was holding 
 its sittings in the Tuileries, and it was in this direc- 
 tion that the Parisians, just as they had done three 
 years before, advanced to the attack on the 13th of 
 Vendemiaire ; all around the palace of the late king 
 stood massed the troops who were to defend his 
 assassins. The Parisian National Guard, made up in 
 those days from the well-to-do middle classes, had 
 refused to stand by its King, though it had ar- 
 tillery at its disposal, and he could or would only 
 entrust his defence to foreign mercenaries. Now 
 those same citizens of Paris were to be seen making 
 the attack, and five thousand sons of their country 
 and of the Revolution stood against them to protect 
 the Assembly that upheld the Republic they had 
 founded, thus asserting its own authority. But 
 their commander was a foreigner, a Corsican emigrant 
 who once had hated the King and the people of 
 France, and then had learnt to despise them, and who 
 was now saving the Republic only to overthrow it 
 later on, and in this royal palace to set up his own 
 imperial throne. 
 
 This was to be the last serious crisis for the 
 Revolution, for it did not take much to dispose of 
 its opponents in the brief struggle on the 1 8th and 
 19th of Brumaire. On the 13th of Vendemiaire, 
 
PRINCE JOACHIM MURAT. 
 From a picture by F. Gerard. Photo by Neurdin Freres. 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 91 
 
 however, the Reaction put forth its strength once 
 again ; it had never shown itself more resolute in 
 Paris, and the thousands of well-armed citizens ad- 
 vancing in regular order formed a much stronger 
 force than the unruly mob which had served to win 
 the day for the Revolution a few years before. But 
 in "Capitaine Canon" they found their master. When 
 they came within range of the artillery which he had 
 stationed at the various points of vantage, they 
 stopped short, soon to be completely routed. Within 
 a few hours the sanguinary work was over ; a couple 
 of hundred bodies lay strewn upon the ground ; 
 during the night the remnants of the insurrectionary 
 mob were overpowered in the outlying quarters of 
 the city. 
 
 " Fortune is on my side," wrote Napoleon, on the 
 day of this event, to his brother Joseph ; and in 
 truth Fortune was lavishing her richest gifts upon 
 the young general. On the 10th of October the Con- 
 vention, at the instance of Barras, appointed him 
 second in command of the Army of the Interior ; on 
 the 1 6 th he was promoted to be a general of divi- 
 sion ; on the 20th, when Barras became a member of 
 the Directory, he nominated him his successor as 
 commander-in-chief of the Army of the Interior. The 
 number of the troops over whom he now assumed 
 command was not great, only about twenty thousand 
 stationed in Paris and the surrounding Departments ; 
 but the task that lay before him gave the utmost 
 importance to his position. He was constituted the 
 right hand of the Directory and the Council — the safe- 
 guard of their power; and in addition to his position 
 as commander-in-chief he came in for many other 
 privileges not at all to be despised. How often had 
 
9 2 NAPOLEON 
 
 he yearned to possess a house of his own, with horses 
 and carriages, in order, as he writes somewhere, " to 
 be able to transact his affairs more speedily " ! He 
 was now to find everything at his disposal that he 
 could wish for — an official residence, a staff of servants, 
 table money, carriages, as well as a complete staff of 
 officers and officials ; all doors were open to him — for 
 had he not himself the key to many of the doors of 
 influence ? We know already what regard Buonaparte 
 had always paid to the interests of his family. When, 
 instead of going to La Vendee, he had remained in 
 Paris, he had borne them in mind, for like himself 
 they had been hard hit by the death of Robespierre. 
 His letters to his elder brother, to his best friend 
 as he called him, were never more tender, more 
 pleasing, than at this period. " At the moment of 
 sending these few words," he writes on one occasion, 
 " I am conscious of a feeling of excitement, such as 
 I have seldom experienced in all my life." He saw 
 the time approaching now when he could be of use 
 to them all. Joseph should have his consulate ; 
 Napoleon addressed a memorial on the subject to the 
 Directory at once. For his brother Louis, whom he 
 had placed at the military school at Chalons, he 
 secured a commission as lieutenant and appointed him 
 to be his own adjutant. Lucien, who had been for a 
 time a prisoner in the summer, but whom Napoleon 
 had already managed to set free, received a post as 
 commissary in the Army of the North. Made happy 
 by a good appointment, Uncle Fesch, who had 
 hastened at once to Paris, allowed himself to forget 
 his aspirations as a Corsican patriot. The youngest 
 of the brothers, Jerome, was placed by Napoleon in 
 a college in Paris. To his mothers and sisters he 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 93 
 
 sent money, huge sums ; how he came into possession 
 of them is unknown. So it was with all his other 
 relatives and friends ; scarcely one of them was for- 
 gotten. It was a manifest joy to Napoleon to lavish 
 benefits, to give proofs of his gratitude, winning for 
 himself at the same time friends and followers ; this 
 was one of the advantages of the power that he had 
 won. 
 
 With Barras he remained on intimate terms. And 
 now it was Barras again who was to give to his life a 
 new direction and a new colour. Amongst the 
 young and lively ladies who frequented the salon of 
 the member of the Directory was Josephine, the 
 widow of the Marquis Alexandre de Beauharnais, 
 who had ended his life under the guillotine the 
 year before. Like Napoleon, she was a native of 
 an island that had come under the rule of France. 
 Brought up under the tropical sun of Martinique, it 
 was in the autumn of 1779 that she came to Europe 
 to celebrate her marriage. Young as she was 
 (though the senior of the young Corsican by six 
 years), she had already an eventful life behind her. 
 Her husband, for whom she had had no great affection, 
 and who was not faithful to her, soon returned to the 
 West Indies, of which he also was a native, leaving 
 her to console herself in her loneliness as she well 
 knew how. Eventually there was a complete separa- 
 tion ; then Beauharnais had been drawn into the 
 whirlpool of the Revolution, which had brought him 
 first into official life, then to the command of the 
 Army of the Rhine, finally to the scaffold as one of 
 the last victims of the Reign of Terror, a few days 
 before the 9th of Thermidor. The Revolution had 
 reunited husband and wife, and Josephine had 
 
94 NAPOLEON 
 
 shared imprisonment with her husband. She was 
 to be more fortunate in her lot, however, than the 
 luckless Marquis. The 9th of Thermidor set her 
 free from prison, and led her, together with her fellow- 
 prisoner, the beautiful Cabarus (soon to be the wife 
 of Tallien), to Barras, in whom she was to find a 
 protector and, as there is reason to believe, something* 
 more. 
 
 Napoleon had already given thoughts to the ques- 
 tion of marriage when in the south. Desiree Clary, 
 the sister-in-law of his brother Joseph, who later was 
 to become the wife of Bernadotte, and thus the ances- 
 tress of the royal family of Sweden, had for a time 
 been the object of his affections ; but he had given 
 that idea up. After Vendemiaire, he is said to have 
 made advances to Madame Permon, whose husband 
 had just died, and to have been repulsed. At all 
 events, it was not until he had assumed the command 
 in Paris that he began to address himself to Josephine. 
 I need not retail here all that is related in the Memoirs 
 in regard to the development of this affair : it is 
 dangerous ground, and even if the records were more 
 trustworthy it would scarcely be the duty of the 
 biographer to go over it all again. One naturally 
 refers, in the first place, to what Napoleon himself 
 has told us on the subject, and I am not disposed, in 
 spite of the warnings and protests of Barras, to dis- 
 regard entirely what the Emperor tells us of his first 
 meeting with his future wife, though the story may 
 be embellished : how he had acceded to the re- 
 quest of her son Eugene to be allowed to retain his 
 father's sword when all arms had to be handed up 
 after the crushing of the revolt ; how the mother 
 had herself come to thank him, and had then in- 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 95 
 
 vited the General to dine with her. That Barras had 
 talked to him about Josephine, Napoleon mentions 
 himself. It is not hard to understand the grounds 
 upon which Barras advocated the match ; Josephine 
 could boast of social standing equally with the old 
 regime and with the new ; marriage with her would 
 strengthen the General's position, enable him to live 
 down the sobriquet of "The Corsican," and convert 
 him completely into a Frenchman, for her house was 
 the best in Paris, and by this time Napoleon, as he 
 himself bore witness, wished for nothing better than 
 to be regarded as French. Of all the insults that 
 were hurled at him, there was none to which he 
 had become more sensitive than this nickname. 
 In order to secure a footing in French society there 
 was clearly no better way than an alliance with 
 Josephine Beauharnais. The Memoirs tell us that 
 Napoleon had, until this period, been very careless 
 of externals. He made his appearance in com- 
 pany without gloves and wearing boots that were 
 dirty and badly made, so we learn from the wife of 
 his early associate Junot ; with his thin yellowish face 
 and his unkempt hair hanging in long coils over his 
 shoulder, there was something sickly about his per- 
 sonal appearance : but his angular features were lit 
 up by a pair of eyes that spoke of acuteness of in- 
 tellect and power of will. It would be quite wrong 
 to suppose from such accounts of him that the young 
 Corsican carried himself like a trooper in the polished 
 circles of Paris. The former cadet of the military 
 schools of Brienne and Paris, the friend of such men 
 as Desmazis and Marmont, the son of Carlo Buona- 
 parte, must have compared favourably as regards 
 bearing and culture with the very mixed society which, 
 
96 NAPOLEON 
 
 freed now from the curse of the Terror, was draining 
 the foaming cup of life and holding revel among the 
 ruins of the old monarchy. Napoleon had had but 
 little experience of camp life indeed ; in Nice, Toulon, 
 Marseilles, as previously in Ajaccio and his French 
 garrisons, he had moved in the highest circles. But 
 the gaiety and high spirits of the Parisians were un-> 
 familiar to him ; their light-hearted elegance and love 
 of pleasure, their combination of grace and sensibility, 
 were things incompatible with his brooding, uncom- 
 municative, intense, strenuous nature. As a youth, 
 when he was wont to discuss love with Desmazis, he 
 used to glory in his opposition to his friend's frivolous 
 indulgence in the enjoyment of the moment. Now 
 that he had come to man's estate and face to face with 
 the society in which the art of enjoying life was re- 
 garded as an essential, and which held out promise of 
 the things he coveted to those who knew how to take 
 advantage of it, he was fascinated by its brilliancy, 
 and learned to regard his own awkwardness as a defect, 
 causing him the more discomfiture the more anxious 
 he became to be acknowledged as a Frenchman. 
 
 In such circumstances it was that he met this French- 
 woman of old family, who smiled on him despite his 
 shortcomings, and who quickly gave him unmistak- 
 able proofs of her regard. He overlooked the fact 
 that her reputation was not without blemish, that her 
 beauty was not beyond dispute, and even that she had 
 passed her first youth ; the world in which she lived 
 was tolerant of such failings as hers, and Josephine 
 knew how to make up for the lost charm of girlhood 
 by her skill in dress, grace of manner, and vivacity of 
 speech. Clever flatterer that she was, she singled out 
 the young soldier from all her circle for special marks 
 
CARNOT. 
 From an engraving. 
 
 p. 96. 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 97 
 
 of esteem, spoke out her admiration for his military 
 genius, and thus implanted in him just that feeling of 
 self-confidence in his new surroundings which he had 
 lacked. The warmth and softness of her yielding, 
 clinging, Creole nature appealed to him strongly, from 
 their very contrast with his own disposition. Her 
 praise intoxicated him ; he followed her about every- 
 where, and the joyous, lovable widow was soon mis- 
 tress of his heart. 
 
 The assertion made by Barras that it was he who 
 provided his protege at this same hour with the com- 
 mand of the Army of Italy, and that it constituted a 
 kind of dowry for his friend Josephine, belongs to ( 
 the flood of idle chatter about Napoleon that takes its 
 rise at this period in his career — a flood of mingled 
 truth and falsehood, of slander and misapprehension, 
 with which it is impossible to cope. As a rule one 
 cannot satisfy oneself wholly as to the accuracy or 
 inaccuracy of such statements, but in this case we can 
 bring the slanderer to book, for we have the word of 
 Carnot, the lover of truth, to set against him. Carnot 
 has recorded that it was he himself who nominated 
 Napoleon to the command, and that the decision was 
 ratified unanimously by the Directory. And indeed, 
 if the war was to be prosecuted in Piedmont and 
 Lombardy there could be question of no one else 
 for the post than the general who had drawn up all 
 the plans for the campaign, and who for nearly two 
 years past had been pressing for their being put into 
 execution : Scherer, the actual general in command 
 on the frontier, having dissented from the project, and 
 Hoche also refusing to have anything to say to it. 
 
 The matter was gone into again in January ; it was in 
 February that the decision was come to, and it was in 
 
9 8 NAPOLEON 
 
 the same month that the marriage was decided upon ; 
 for, as one can easily understand, Napoleon did not 
 wish to set out on the campaign without being first 
 united with his beloved. His appointment dates from 
 the 2nd of March ; he received his instructions on the 
 6th ; on the 9th followed the civil marriage, at which, 
 characteristically enough, Josephine's friends, Barras 
 and Tallien, were witnesses, and the complaisant 
 official took six years off the age of the bride, and 
 added one to the age of the bridegroom. Three 
 days later Napoleon took his seat in the carriage 
 which was to take him back to the coast ; on the 27th 
 of March he arrived at his head-quarters at Nice. 
 
 " Au Destin /" — such was the motto that Napoleon 
 had engraved on Josephine's wedding ring. This did 
 not imply a blind trust in Fate ; it pointed rather to 
 a resolute prosecution of his aim in defiance of the 
 buffets of fortune and the dangers of death, but with 
 acquiescence in the inevitable. He could not tell and 
 did not ask whither "the wild steed of life" might be 
 carrying him. " That man will not get far," he once 
 said later, " who knows his destination from the start." 
 But he had found the right field for his efforts, the 
 background for his solution of the riddle of life : that 
 revolutionary France which he had saved, and which 
 he was now leading to new victories. The honour 
 and renown, the power and greatness of this land had 
 now become his goal. Henceforth his destiny was 
 entwined with that of France. 
 
 Hitherto Napoleon had kept to the Italian form of 
 his surname, Buonaparte. It is to be found thus 
 written in his signature to orders as commander-in- 
 chief of the Army of the Interior. Now, at the outset 
 of his Italian campaign, in his first despatch to the 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 99 
 
 Directory announcing that he has reached the army, 
 and taken over the command, he alters the form of the 
 name that is so soon to resound throughout the whole 
 world. It was his desire to tread the soil of Italy as 
 a Frenchman, now that he was setting forth to con- 
 quer it for France. 
 
 To make war support war was the object that he 
 placed before the Army of Italy and that he now strove 
 to achieve. The condition in which he found his 
 troops necessitated this decision. They numbered 
 about 40,000 men, most of them from the Alps 
 and Southern Provinces, collected together out of old 
 regiments of the monarchy and from the volunteer 
 corps of the Revolution, hardened veterans, but in 
 an indescribable state of neglect and destitution, ill- 
 disciplined and ill-conditioned. The officers also were 
 drawn in part from the old army, members of the 
 ancient nobility, ex-students of the military academy 
 such as Serrurier and Berthier, Marmont and 
 Dommartin ; while others, such as Augereau and 
 Massena, were products of the Revolution, men who 
 not long before themselves had knapsacks on their 
 backs. They all eyed with disfavour the young 
 general, "the protege of Barras and his women," 
 who until a year ago had been in a position subordi- 
 nate to so many of them. But now that he was 
 in the midst of them asking shrewd questions as to 
 the dispositions of the army, as to the strength and 
 spirit of each of its units, and then gave out his com- 
 mands with not a word too many or too few, display- 
 ing an absolute knowledge of the ground and all its 
 conditions, they bowed before the power of this 
 strong will and masterful intelligence. 
 
 LOFC. 
 
ioo NAPOLEON 
 
 The army was stationed along the Riviera, facing 
 northwards between Voltri and Albenga. Three 
 roads led over the Genoese Apennines, one by the 
 Col di Tenda, one over the Altare Pass, and one 
 through the Bocchetta. The central road, which 
 Bonaparte chose, sent two arms out into the 
 mountain, one by Dego and Acqui towards Alessan-' 
 dria and Milan, the other by Millesimo and Ceva 
 towards Turin. Here, between the Austrian and 
 Sardinian positions, Napoleon determined to make 
 his advance in order to strike at his enemies separately. 
 The Austrians, startled by a French move in the 
 direction of Genoa, which had not been ordered by 
 Napoleon, were the first to attack. On the ioth and 
 nth of April they forced back, under the leadership 
 of Argenteau, La Harpe's advanced division stationed 
 near Voltri. But their advance was checked by the 
 entrenchments on Monte Legino, and on the 12th 
 they were surprised by superior numbers at Monte- 
 notte, surrounded, and dispersed. Napoleon gave his 
 enemies no rest. On the 13th a Sardinian corps was 
 defeated at Millesimo, and on the '14th the rest 
 of the army was placed hors de combat. On the same 
 day the coup de grace was given to Argenteau at Dego, 
 and the commander-in-chief of the Austrian forces, 
 Beaulieu, who had under him at most 20,000 men, 
 saw himself cut off from his allies by Bonaparte. 
 There was nothing for him to do but to retreat into 
 Lombardy. Napoleon let him go in order to devote 
 himself to the Sardinians ; falling upon them at once 
 in crushing force, he defeated them, first at Ceva, 
 then on the 22nd of April at Mondovi. 
 
 The first stage had been completed. Far and wide 
 the French columns spread out over the rich plains of 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 101 
 
 Piedmont. King Victor Amadeus now remained 
 in possession only of his fortresses. The Austrians 
 were far away, and his army had been destroyed. He 
 had no alternative but to submit. He appealed to 
 the victor for a truce. Napoleon acceded to his 
 request on condition of his surrendering three fort- 
 resses and opening the passages through the Alps 
 to the French. In so doing he went beyond his 
 powers, for the Directory had not given him authority 
 to enter into such negotiations ; but his decision was 
 dictated by necessity. Hesitation and delay would 
 have been an advantage to the enemy, and " time was 
 everything," as Napoleon himself had declared two 
 years before in regard to this very advance which he 
 was now carrying into execution. He made his 
 excuses to the Directory through his brother Joseph, 
 whom he sent back to Paris for this purpose ; and 
 granted peace with the King. He put the French 
 Government in possession of all the facts of the 
 case: "Have confidence in me," he wrote, "and 
 Italy is yours." 
 
 Thus freed from danger in the rear, he proceeds 
 with his advance against Beaulieu. While the latter 
 makes good his retreat to the north of the Po and 
 across the Ticino, Napoleon, instead of crossing the 
 river at once, as he made the enemy think was his 
 intention, keeps to the south and crosses it in the face 
 of slight resistance at Piacenza, with the result of 
 forcing the enemy to abandon Milan and to continue 
 his flight beyond the Adda. Then comes the victory 
 of Lodi, the day which, as Napoleon has said himself, 
 first evoked in him the consciousness that he had won 
 for himself a place in history and was destined to 
 great things. And for his own and later times it 
 
io2 NAPOLEON 
 
 presented that ineffaceable picture of him in the 
 midst of his generals and adjutants storming the 
 bridge like a veritable god of war, heedless of death 
 and fate, leading on his troops to victory. 
 
 It was at this moment of his conquering march on 
 Milan, whose gates lay wide open to his coming, and 
 where triumphal arches were being erected to welcome' 
 the liberator of Italy, that he received from Paris 
 instructions to hand over the command in Lombardy 
 to Kellerman, and himself with a part of his army to 
 set out for the south, and undertake raids against the 
 other Italian States, including Rome and Naples. We 
 have seen how already, in the summer of 1794, 
 Napoleon had set his face against the idea of advanc- 
 ing into the Italian peninsula, and how he had directed 
 all his plan towards an advance through the Alps, so 
 as to make a blow at the very heart of Austria. On 
 the day after the battle of Lodi he had indicated this 
 aim to the Directory. Their decision meant therefore 
 that he was to resign the theatre of war in which the 
 big things must happen into the hands of the hero of 
 Valmy, whose fame still outshone his own, but who 
 had not much experience of fighting in the Alps. He 
 was perfectly ready to carry out the raids which the 
 Directory called on him to undertake, but these loot- 
 ing expeditions, as they might be called, were trivial 
 matters that could have been effected by flying columns 
 and mere negotiations — indeed, he might have levied 
 contributions without fighting, as the result of the 
 prestige of what he had accomplished, the terror that 
 went before him. But what was intolerable to his 
 pride was the thought that he must share power with 
 another. He came to an instant decision on the sub- 
 ject. In two letters, one of which was addressed to the 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 103 
 
 Directory as a whole, the other significantly enough to 
 Carnot instead of to Barras, he expressed his feelings. 
 He recognised but two alternatives : either he must 
 retain full command, or he must resign. 
 
 These letters are very striking productions, alike 
 from the resolute spirit breathing through them, and 
 their weighty and impressive form. The General recog- 
 nised that he owed everything to the Republic, even 
 the sacrifice of his own convictions ; and he declared 
 his belief that Kellerman could lead the army as well 
 as he. " For no one is more assured than I am," he 
 declared, " that our victories have been due to the 
 courage and the keenness of the army itself." It 
 would not be for him to complain if the command 
 were to be given to another ; it would but double his 
 anxiety to earn the approval of the Directory in what- 
 ever post they might entrust to him. But he made it 
 clear that it was essential that the sole command should 
 remain in the hands of one man. " I believe," he 
 says, " that one bad general is better than two good 
 ones. The art of war, like the art of government 
 itself, is a matter of careful handling {une affaire de 
 tacte) ... I cannot allow myself to have my feet 
 entangled. I have begun with some success, and I 
 wish to continue to show myself worthy of your 
 esteem." The Directory was inclined not to take these 
 words seriously, but to regard them as a mere ebulli- 
 tion of injured pride ; Napoleon could not imagine 
 that the chief command would be taken from him, and 
 his letters were the outcome of mere pique. But this 
 interpretation did him an injustice. " Unity of com- 
 mand is essential to success," he had already declared 
 in his memorial to Robespierre. " The Government 
 must put complete trust in its general and must give 
 
io 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 him a free hand, if they wish him to attain the object 
 at which it aims " ; thus had he written in a letter 
 in January at the time when there was still talk of 
 appointing Scherer as leader of the expedition. All 
 his plans had been based upon this essential unity, 
 upon which he insisted in his despatch to the Direc- 
 tory. This had been the idea that he had sought to 
 expound in the Souper de Beaucaire — this had been the 
 ruling feature of every battle, every operation, every 
 command, for which he had been responsible : this 
 had been the foundation of all his successes, the 
 essence of all his plans, the sum of all his achieve- 
 ments. One need not argue whether the conviction 
 that he himself was the man to be entrusted with the 
 work should perhaps be described as ambition. It 
 was the consciousness of his own power, his clear 
 grasp of the end set before him, and arising from this, 
 the passionate desire to attain it. It was the " Vainer e 
 ou mourir" that he had sent to the Directory as his 
 motto at the beginning of the campaign, and that led 
 him on to the bridge of Lodi. Therefore we need not 
 discuss whether Napoleon really believed that the 
 Directors would not dare to displace him. So Bis- 
 marck in his later years can hardly have believed that 
 his old master would ever accept his repeated offers of 
 resignation ; and yet one may rightly deem it a super- 
 ficial view to suppose that the founder of the German 
 Empire was merely playing upon his Emperor, and 
 had not made up his mind to carry his policy through 
 or to go. But Napoleon had not only the power in 
 his hands — that might indeed have been taken from 
 him ; but he had right on his side. As has been aptly 
 remarked, he judged the situation precisely as history 
 judged it later on, and his judgment was justified by 
 
NAPOLEON EONAPARTE. 
 From an engraving after the picture by Appiani. 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 105 
 
 his subsequent successes. And we can well believe 
 that men like Carnot were at least as much influenced 
 by this insight of his, as by the fear of raising enemies 
 against the Government and making the army itself 
 hostile, if the General were overthrown. It is enough 
 that he and his colleagues yielded the point. " The 
 Directory," he wrote in reply to the determined 
 soldier, " has seriously considered your communica- 
 tion, and its trust in your talents and in your zeal for 
 the Republic has led it to decide the question in the 
 affirmative. The commander-in-chief, General Keller- 
 man, will remain at Chambery." 
 
 Henceforth Napoleon had full power for his own 
 designs. More than once again before the Peace of 
 Campo Formio he either offered or threatened to 
 resign, always insisting on the alternative that either 
 he would have everything under his control, or would 
 withdraw into " the mass of the citizens." And the 
 Government never made more than a trifling show of 
 opposition, and always ended with flattering requests 
 that he would remain, and by conferring the fullest 
 powers upon him. 
 
 A fresh victory of Borghetto on the 30th of May gave 
 the French possession of the line of the Mincio, and 
 forced Beaulieu to take refuge behind the mountain 
 walls of the Trentino. Henceforth, except the garri- 
 son of Mantua, which was immediately besieged, 
 there was none of the Imperialist army south of the 
 Alps. 
 
 Italy had been abandoned to Napoleon. Already on 
 the 9th of May he had compelled Parma to agree to an 
 armistice. After his entry into Milan he induced 
 Modena to open negotiations, whilst at Paris the 
 envoys of King Victor Amadeus were granted by 
 
io6 NAPOLEON 
 
 the Directory the peace that had been dictated by 
 Napoleon's victories. That the Austrians during their 
 retirement had occupied Peschiera, the Venetian 
 fortress on the Lake of Garda, gave Napoleon a 
 welcome pretext for bending the Government of 
 Venice to his will. It was compelled to evacuate 
 Verona, the fortress that watched the line of the< 
 Adige, and henceforth there hung over this decrepit 
 republic the dark thunder-cloud from which soon the 
 destroying bolt would flash down upon it. On the 
 5th of June the envoys of Naples yielded before 
 the threat of a French invasion. The conditions on 
 which they obtained an armistice for their Court were 
 expulsion of the emigres, the closing of their harbours 
 against the English, the recall of their troops from the 
 Austrian army, and of their ships from the English 
 fleet. On the 8th of June Napoleon entered Bologna. 
 The Legations were occupied, and the " Transpadane 
 Republic," the first of the ephemeral states of Napo- 
 leonic Italy, was proclaimed. All the world now 
 expected a march upon Rome. The Directory wished 
 it, and Napoleon himself threatened the Spanish 
 ambassador with it, when he came to his head-quarters 
 as a mediator (for Spain was now allied with France). 
 But on the 23rd of June he conceded the Monsignori 
 what they had hardly expected, an arrangement for avert- 
 ing the invasion by paying a ransom. Eight days later 
 he was in Florence (the city from which his family 
 originally came), as the unwelcome guest of the 
 brother of the Emperor with whom he was at war, 
 while one of his divisions made a raid upon Leghorn, 
 and lightened the warehouses of its English mer- 
 chants of some hundreds of thousands of pounds' 
 worth of property. 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 107 
 
 For above all else, the one object and condition of 
 these campaigns and negotiations was to secure booty. 
 It was the oft-repeated command of the Directory. It 
 was the wish and thought with which Napoleon him- 
 self had trodden the soil of Italy. Already war was 
 not only supporting war, but it was supporting the 
 French Republic also. Thus the first of the treaties 
 he had concluded — that with Parma — put at his dis- 
 posal, besides a contribution of two millions of francs, 
 1200 horses, with their harness, 2000 oxen, and 
 10,000 bushels of corn ; and besides, the Duke had 
 to hand over twenty paintings from his gallery. And 
 so it went on. Gold and corn, oxen and works of 
 art, paintings by the great masters of the Renaissance, 
 and ancient statues, Etruscan vases, priceless manu- 
 scripts, made up the ransoms with which the Italian 
 governments had to purchase their safety. " Send 
 out of Italy everything that can be moved and that 
 can in any way be useful to us," so ran the instruc- 
 tions of the Government. Napoleon was not the 
 inventor of this system of looting. Already, after the 
 conquest of Belgium and Holland, they had taken 
 away with them valuable Rubens and Van Dycks. 
 Such conquests were considered as contributing to the 
 glory of the Republic. It congratulated itself on being 
 thus able to adorn the land of liberty and its capital 
 with the monuments of the art and culture of the 
 vanquished, as old Rome had been filled with the 
 works of the great artists of Greece. But hitherto no 
 one had understood how to apply the principles of 
 modern France so systematically and with such results 
 for himself as Bonaparte. The more of such treasures 
 he secured, the stronger would be his own posi- 
 tion, and this because he not only won the Govern- 
 
io8 NAPOLEON 
 
 ment to his side, but also the hearts of Frenchmen, 
 for whom the war, that had long been an intolerable 
 burden, was now being made a source of wealth and 
 glory. And the Italians themselves seemed hardly to 
 take ill this conduct of the conqueror. The educated 
 classes indeed saw in him a liberator from the oppres- 
 sion of their reactionary governments. 
 
 The idea of nationality which had taken form in 
 France, and which he brought forward in his speeches 
 and proclamations, inflamed their hearts, and made 
 progress in Italy too through his victories. And if 
 amongst the lower orders, and especially among the 
 peasantry, hatred against the foreigners spread more 
 and more, and here and there (as, for instance, in 
 Parma and Venetia) led to wild outbreaks, this 
 chiefly gave expression to the rage excited by the 
 excesses of the French soldiery, and resulted from 
 their priests rousing them against these plundering 
 enemies of the Church'. Napoleon himself, in conse- 
 quence of these troubles, turned his attention to 
 removing the causes of complaint. Although he was 
 squeezing the governments, and thus at the same 
 time laying heavy burdens upon their people, he 
 tried to keep his army under better discipline. He 
 kept the promise he had made to his hungry and 
 ragged army at the beginning of the campaign, that 
 he would lead them into some of the richest regions 
 in the world ; but he also kept his other promise, 
 that any excesses would be punished. He could turn 
 a blind eye to the proceedings of the officers, especi- 
 ally those of high rank and of the Commissaries 
 whom the Government had sent him ; but against the 
 marauders he proceeded without any leniency. " I 
 shall maintain order," he had already written to the 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 109 
 
 Directory from Piedmont, " or I will resign the com- 
 mand of these brigands. I have adopted all means to 
 restore discipline. Victory will do the rest." But 
 above all he sought to secure respect for the religious 
 feelings of the vanquished, and in this he showed a 
 wide divergence from the views of the Directory. 
 The first execution of marauders that he ordered was 
 for the plundering of a church. When Archbishop 
 Visconti of Milan, a venerable prelate of eighty years, 
 welcomed him at the head of the clergy on his entry 
 into the city, he dismounted from his horse. " The 
 Republic," he said in reply to the addresses of this 
 prince of the Church and of the other deputations, 
 " desires that each shall contribute to the welfare of 
 all ; that each shall enjoy his rights and make un- 
 selfish use of them. Each will be free to express his 
 faith in God and follow the religion that his con- 
 science dictates. Each will enjoy the possession of 
 his property." 
 
 The Directory bade him lay hands on the famous 
 treasury of the Casa santa of Our Lady of Loretto, 
 which had been accumulating wealth for fifteen 
 hundred years, and to go to Rome and overthrow the 
 " fanatical priests." But Napoleon did not touch the 
 sanctuary of Loretto and did not go to Rome. He 
 only used the orders of his Government to squeeze 
 the Roman envoys and screw a larger ransom out of 
 them. The Directory thought first of getting millions 
 out of Italy ; but Napoleon looked further, and 
 thought of obtaining power and influence. The 
 closing of the harbours against England, the occupa- 
 tion of the fortified seaports, especially of Ancona, 
 were for him more important than any treasures. He 
 did everything with method and system. He organ- 
 
no NAPOLEON 
 
 ised robbery itself; but he made the subjection, not 
 the destruction, of his antagonists his object. The 
 Directors were merely the men of Thermidor, who 
 had overthrown Robespierre the organiser of the 
 Terror. They were the successors of Hebert and 
 Danton, through whose insubordination they had 
 climbed to power. But Napoleon, on the other hand,- 
 was, even in his policy towards the Church, the heir 
 of the tribune, and of his brother, who, as Commissary 
 of the Republic, had already made the toleration of 
 the old religion in the conquered territories a law for 
 the Army of Italy. He was, as was wittily said of his 
 appearance on the 1 8th of Brumaire, "a Robespierre 
 on horseback." And this, too, in the fact that when 
 the need arose he knew how to employ terror. It 
 was at Binasco that he first acted with the severity 
 that made his name so feared. "Here," he wrote to 
 the Commissary, " you must burn and shoot freely, 
 so that terror may be spread, and a striking example 
 made." He spared as far as he could, that is to say, 
 so long as he was obeyed ; but he hurled to earth 
 without mercy whatever opposed the system he set 
 up. " The French army," he said in his proclamation 
 to the Lombards, " which is as magnanimous as it is 
 strong, will treat with paternal kindness those who are 
 peaceful and orderly ; but it will be terrible as the fire 
 of heaven to the rebels, and to the villages that afford 
 a refuge to them." Each one might live, work, and 
 worship God as he pleased, provided only he would 
 obey. We have seen the same idea already in the 
 Discours de Lyon. There he had imagined a lot such 
 as this for the working classes, but would allow to the 
 leaders among a people freedom, and the living of 
 their lives in their own way according to the measure 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO in 
 
 of their social influence and their powers of mind. 
 But fate willed it that the wider his power extended, 
 the smaller became the circle of those who could thus 
 live free, and that at last no one was to be master 
 of his own will, except himself. He believed in his 
 system, for where would he have been if this belief 
 too had been shaken ? And all his experiences in 
 Corsica, in France, and on the 13 th of Vendemiaire, 
 had only made him feel all the more that the masses, 
 left to themselves, were weak, and never by themselves 
 capable of spontaneous action, and that only organised 
 strength signified anything in the world. In Italy, too, 
 his experiences had the same result. In his speeches 
 and proclamations he made free use of such high- 
 sounding words as, Freedom, the Nation, the Memory 
 of the Glories of Italy of old, and the great deeds of 
 their ancestors ; but for himself all this was mere 
 empty sound. It was not on the love of the peoples 
 for freedom and equality that he reposed his confi- 
 dence. " These," he wrote to the Directory in the 
 days of Campo Formio, u have been of little or no 
 assistance to me. But good discipline, respect for the 
 people's religion, carried even to flattery with the 
 priests, fair dealing, and above all great activity and 
 swift punishment of the evil-minded, these have been 
 what have really helped the Army of Italy. All one 
 has to say in proclamations and printed discourses is 
 mere romance. Intelligence, discretion, skill, are 
 needed for great ends. And nothing else is wanted." 
 He was full of profound contempt for the people 
 whom he called to freedom. 
 
 But if he had been defeated the Spanish ambassador 
 at Rome would have been fully justified in his pro- 
 phecy that in that case not one Frenchman from the 
 
ii2 NAPOLEON 
 
 Italian peninsula would ever have seen his native 
 country again ; for the exasperation of the people 
 against the plundering, godless foreigners had spread 
 widely and deeply. But victory had brought security 
 to Napoleon, and seemed to fully justify his calcula- 
 tions. He had still long to wait until he saw the 
 error in his reckoning. 
 
 Though at Verona he had its gateway in his hand 
 and the road open, he had to change his mind as to 
 his plan of pushing forward through the Tyrol, 
 because at the end of May the armies of Jourdan and 
 Moreau, that were to join him there from the Rhine, 
 had hardly moved from their standing camps. More- 
 over, he soon found himself in the position of having 
 to defend the ground he had won. On the 26th of June 
 Count Wurmser, an, old experienced warrior, who had 
 commanded on the Rhine, had marched up to Inns- 
 bruck with 25,000 fresh troops, and there formed 
 a junction with the remnant of Beaulieu's army. At 
 the end of the month the Austrians, divided in two 
 columns, came pouring down the valleys of the Adige 
 and Chiese. There was a moment when Napoleon 
 himself thought the game was lost — at least, he 
 thought of retreat in order to get out of the entangle- 
 ment that threatened him. Verona had already been 
 abandoned, and the Austrians were out of the moun- 
 tains. Augereau's spirit of reckless daring at last put 
 an end to his chief's hesitation and persuaded him 
 to hold on ; and then the mistakes of the Austrians, 
 and above all Wurmser's delay in crossing the 
 Mincio at the right time and at the right points, gave 
 Napoleon time to concentrate his troops after raising 
 the blockade of Mantua, and then to take full advan- 
 tage of his position on interior lines. On the 3rd 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 113 
 
 of August the right Austrian column, on the 3rd and 
 5th the left in the battle of Castiglione, were stopped, 
 beaten, and driven back into the Alps. 
 
 Mantua, again besieged, was still a thorn in the 
 side of the French, and the Austrian general made 
 another attempt to succour the fortress, this time by 
 the Brenta Valley, at the same time guarding the 
 upper valley of the Adige with a detached force under 
 one of his generals, Davidovitch, so as to protect the 
 Tyrol. But Napoleon now threw a superior force 
 against Davidovitch. Step by step the Austrians 
 were driven northward along the Adige valley ; the 
 barrier they tried to maintain at Trent, where the 
 upper valleys of the Adige and the Brenta lie close 
 together, was broken through ; and as a result of this 
 success Wurmser himself was threatened with disaster. 
 Thrice, four times, assailed by the French coming 
 down along the Brenta on his rear, he saw his army 
 broken up bit by bit. Two thousand Austrians 
 extricated themselves by the side valleys ; the rest 
 under their commander-in-chief were driven down 
 upon Mantua, and had to take refuge in the fortress 
 that they had hoped to relieve. 
 
 The roads northward into Austria by the upper 
 Adige and the Brenner Pass were now for the second 
 time open to the victor. But during the very days 
 in which he was carrying out this campaign, which 
 will always be a marvel to the student of strategy, the 
 fortune of war had turned to the side of the Austrians 
 north of the Alps. On the 3rd of September Jourdan, 
 who was already in retreat, was decisively defeated at 
 Wurtzburg by the Archduke Charles, and thereby 
 Moreau, who had already advanced across the Lech, 
 was also forced to retire. The defeat with which fate 
 
ii 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 seemed to threaten the French in Italy, thus fell upon 
 their brethren in Germany. In hurried retreat and in 
 complete disorder, these reached the Rhine, and could 
 not feel safe till they were behind the great river. 
 
 And so once more the whole burden of the war fell 
 upon Italy and on Napoleon's shoulders. This time 
 the enemy, who gave him only a few weeks' rest,' 
 made the main attack from the eastwards, from Friuli. 
 And once more a moment came for the French when 
 all seemed to be lost. It was on the 1 5th of November, 
 in front of the bridge of Areola, when Napoleon had 
 concentrated all his strength on one spot, and was 
 trying by means of a bold frontal attack like that of 
 the bridge of Lodi, to force the line of the little 
 river Alpone, behind whose marshy banks the 
 Austrians lay. With the colours in his hand he was 
 himself trying to bring the troops on to the attack 
 along a narrow embankment between the swampy 
 rice-fields. Torn by the deadly fire of the Croats 
 lying down behind the river dykes, the column was 
 thrown into confusion. An aide-de-camp was killed 
 at his side. Others of the officers around him were 
 wounded. He himself stumbled and slid down the 
 bank. With difficulty his comrades, Marmont and 
 his own brother Louis, saved him and extricated him 
 from the tumult. The column rallied and the bridge 
 was stormed, though already a flank column of the 
 Austrians, issuing from the Tyrol, had after some 
 victorious engagements advanced close up to Verona. 
 But Napoleon never wavered from his plan of using 
 to its full extent the superiority of force that 
 concentration on one point gave him. Leaving the 
 enemy he had driven back from Areola, he swung 
 round to the north of Verona, and on the 17th of 
 
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE AT ARCOLA, NOVEMBER, 1796. 
 
 Detail from the picture by Baron Gros. 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 115 
 
 November, fell on the front and flank of the column 
 from the Tyrol and drove it northwards. Both of 
 the Austrian armies were now in full retreat. 
 
 Yet once more, for the fourth time, and again from 
 the Tyrol, the Austrians tried to relieve the fortress 
 on the ramparts of which the banner of Austria still 
 flew. On the 1 5th of January (1797), the attempt ended 
 in disaster on the ice-covered plateau of Rivoli, bravely 
 though the Austrian regiments charged at the French 
 batteries on that winter morning. On the 3rd of Feb- 
 ruary, the French made their entry into Mantua. 
 
 The indefatigable conqueror used the short respite 
 now given him by his persistent opponents, to 
 completely clear the ground in his rear. The rulers 
 of Rome had misinterpreted the forbearing attitude 
 adopted by Napoleon in the spring. When the 
 Austrians advanced to the relief of Mantua in 
 November, they once more took a hostile attitude, 
 withheld the money they had agreed to pay, and 
 began to prepare to defend themselves. Napoleon 
 decided to call them to account. On the ist of February, 
 he issued a declaration of war from Bologna, at the 
 same time promising, nevertheless, that there should 
 be no interference with religious matters. He 
 declared his hostility against the Government of 
 Rome, not against its subjects, against the temporal, 
 not the spiritual power of the Pope. On the 3rd of 
 February, there was an engagement on the Senio. 
 Monks with crucifix or sacred picture in hand were to 
 be seen hurrying through the ranks of the 6000 soldiers 
 and armed peasants that had been put in the field 
 by the Papal Government, calling on them to fight 
 against these children of the devil. But as soon as 
 the firing began there was a general rout. A few fell, 
 
n6 NAPOLEON 
 
 hundreds were made prisoners, thousands ran away. 
 Two days later Napoleon was at Ancona, the finest 
 harbour on the Adriatic, the only one besides Venice, 
 as he wrote to the Directory : " It is invaluable for 
 our relations with Constantinople," he said. " In 
 twenty-four hours from here one can be in 
 Macedonia." " We must," he added a few days later, 
 " hold Ancona till there is a general peace, and it 
 must always remain French. This will give us great 
 influence with the Ottoman Porte, and make us 
 masters of the Adriatic Sea, as Marseilles and the 
 island of Corsica will give us command of the 
 Mediterranean." On the 19th, when he was again 
 on the move and had reached Tolentino, three days' 
 march from Rome, he dictated peace to the trembling 
 envoys of the Curia. The main conditions which he 
 laid down and carried through were the closing of 
 the ports against the English, the cession to France 
 of Avignon, the Venaissin territory, and the Legation 
 of Bologna, the occupation of Ancona until there was 
 a general peace, and further contributions to be levied 
 on the wealth of churches, monasteries and treasuries. 
 But he forbore making an entry into the Holy City, 
 and thus saved it from the sack for which the 
 Jacobins and all the rabble of Rome were longing, 
 and which would have doubtless followed if the Pope 
 had been forced to take refuge in flight from the 
 conqueror. Half as if he were excusing himself, he 
 wrote to the Directory that an additional contribution 
 of thirty million francs was ten times better worth 
 getting than Rome, where he did not expect he 
 would have found more than five millions, as nearly 
 everything had already been sent away to Terracina. 
 " This old machine will go to pieces of itself," he 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 117 
 
 added. But he sent his aides-de-camp to the Pope 
 to assure him of his personal respect, of which he 
 wished to give him proof at every opportunity ; as 
 he had already sent word to him in October, that his 
 ambition was to have the name of the preserver far 
 rather than of the destroyer of the Holy See. He 
 actually had in his hands a letter from the Directory, 
 in which they indicated to him as his mission that he 
 was to extirpate the Roman religion, extinguish the 
 torch of fanaticism in Italy, and destroy the centre of 
 Roman unity ; but they had nervously added that 
 this was not an order, but only an expression of their 
 wishes, and that whatever the General might decide, 
 they would see in it a proof of his desire to serve 
 the interests of France. This was Napoleon's answer 
 to their letter, and he did not hesitate to inform them 
 of his own policy which was so directly opposed to 
 theirs. " I have said nothing of religion," he wrote, 
 " for it is clear that by means of argument and by 
 giving them something to hope for, these people can 
 be persuaded to take more than one step that will 
 really be of advantage for the internal peace of our 
 country." It was the policy of the Concordat for 
 which he thus declared. 
 
 And now he was to strike the decisive blow against 
 Austria. Not by the Brenner Pass, and not by co- 
 operation with the Army of the Rhine as he had first 
 planned it, but he was to carry it out with his own 
 army alone, and by the long Alpine roads through 
 Friuli, Carinthia, and Styria. In the district of 
 Friuli, the enemy were waiting for him, and had 
 concentrated their forces under their one victorious 
 leader, the Archduke Charles. In a few days the 
 triple barriers presented by the river lines of the 
 
n8 NAPOLEON 
 
 Piave, the Tagliamento, and the Isonzo had been 
 forced by the French, and Charles had been com- 
 pelled to retire northwards, while a second French 
 army advancing through the Tyrolese Alps by the 
 Pusterthal valley was steadily pushing forward against 
 the Austrian line of retreat. In vain in a series of 
 sanguinary encounters, from the 19th to the 22nd 
 of March, the archduke tried to beat off Massena, 
 who here did splendid service. He had the utmost 
 difficulty in extricating himself. The greater part of 
 his troops were lost, many of them prisoners ; he had 
 only 13,000 of them left with him, and the campaign 
 was practically decided against the Austrians within 
 ten days after it began. 
 
 The archduke had abandoned Klagenfurt and re- 
 tired into the valleys of Styria, still pursued with the 
 same energy by Massena, when on the 30th of March 
 Napoleon entered the capital of Carinthia, and made a 
 short halt there. He employed the time in writing 
 to the archduke a very " philosophical " letter, to use 
 his own description of it, in which, after summing up 
 the military situation, he offered him nothing less 
 than peace. There had been enough men killed, he 
 argued, enough misery inflicted on the world. They 
 might perhaps kill a few thousand more, but then 
 after all they must come to an understanding, "for 
 everything has its limits, even the passion of hate." 
 Were they going to embarrass themselves any longer 
 with the interests of England ? " You, General, you 
 who by your birth stand so near a throne, and are 
 placed so high above all small ambitions, will you 
 earn the fame of a benefactor of humanity, a saviour 
 of Germany ? As far as 1 am concerned," he says 
 in conclusion (and we imagine we are hearing some 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 119 
 
 phrase from the Discours de Lyon), " if these overtures 
 of mine are the means of saving the life of one single 
 man, I would be prouder of the civic crown so earned 
 than of the sad glories of success in war." Words 
 like these, though so different from the style of 
 diplomatic negotiations, were nevertheless singularly 
 well chosen for the occasion. They harmonised with 
 the pacific feeling that already prevailed at the 
 Austrian head-quarters, and were calculated to dis- 
 credit the warlike policy that the minister still in 
 power at Vienna, Baron von Thugut, was advocating. 
 It has been argued indeed that Napoleon may have 
 been led to take this changed tone through some 
 apprehension as to whether his force that had been 
 pushed too far to the front could overcome the re- 
 sistance of the Austrians. And indeed, he was not 
 without cause for anxiety. For the Army of the 
 Rhine was still tied to that river, and he could hardly 
 think of forcing his way through to Vienna with his 
 army, weakened as it was by its losses in battle and 
 the detachments he had to leave behind ; while there 
 was danger of the levy en masse being called out in 
 the Tyrol, Austria, and Hungary, and he had just 
 received news of a popular rising in his rear in 
 Venetia. In his letters to his Government Napoleon 
 had several times dwelt upon these considerations. 
 On the other hand, his line of communications with 
 Italy was quite safe ; in any case he could with very 
 little difficulty suppress the Venetian rising, and we 
 know that he was not the man to have much fear 
 of mere undisciplined levies. In his letters to his 
 immediate chief, the Minister of War, he said nothing 
 of such anxieties, but only that he wanted to have 
 20,000 more men and the co-operation of the Army 
 
120 NAPOLEON 
 
 of the Rhine. We may therefore venture to say that 
 the letter to the archduke really expressed the political 
 ideas by which Napoleon was then influenced ; he 
 wanted peace. 
 
 He had indicated it in the summer of 1794 as the 
 object of the campaign against Austria. Now on the 
 first opportunity that offered he tried to secure it. 
 He already stood where he had wished to conclude 
 it, in the heart of the enemy's territories. And with- 
 out troubling about his line of retreat, he did not 
 hesitate a moment to push his columns still farther 
 forward. On the 7th of April Massena had reached 
 Leoben. On the 13th Napoleon himself was with 
 these advanced troops, and there, at the chateau of 
 Göss, 73-J- miles from Vienna, he received the plenipo- 
 tentaries sent to him by the Austrian Government in 
 response to his communication. 
 
 ****** 
 
 So far Napoleon had compelled only small states to 
 make peace. If now the great power which had 
 begun the war against the Revolution, and had put 
 forth the greatest efforts to carry it to a successful 
 issue, was to lay down its arms, the result must be 
 a general peace, at least so far as the Continent was 
 concerned. In this Napoleon was meeting the desire 
 of the whole nation, and felt that he was also in 
 accord with the army, though not with the Directory, 
 with whom the aggressive tendencies of the Revolu- 
 tion still prevailed. They flattered themselves still 
 with delusive hopes of bringing Prussia into the war 
 against Austria, winning the whole course of the 
 Rhine as the frontier of France, and revolutionising 
 the empire, as well as Italy. In direct opposition to 
 this policy, which could only reunite the enemies of 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 121 
 
 France and perpetuate the war, the preliminaries of 
 peace, negotiated at Leoben, followed what one can 
 only call a policy of moderation. Napoleon wanted, 
 not to strengthen the coalition, but to break it up, to 
 bind Austria to the interest of France, and thus place 
 the latter in a position that would enable her at her 
 choice to act with either of the two Powers that were 
 predominant in Germany. It would thus be easy 
 for her to have a voice in the affairs of the German 
 Empire. " If," he wrote in May, " this corps Ger- 
 manique did not exist already, it would have to be 
 created expressly in our interests." 
 
 As in his strategical combinations, so also in his 
 diplomacy he sought to gain possession of interior 
 lines. What his sword had won, he wished to domi- 
 nate. He insisted on Austria's giving up the Duchy 
 of Milan, and also on the entry of Modena into the 
 new state to which after these further annexations he 
 gave the name of the " Cisalpine Republic." In the 
 north he demanded the cession by Austria of Belgium, 
 which she had long lost and practically abandoned ; 
 and further the " Constitutional Frontier " for France, 
 which the Convention, shortly before its dissolution, 
 had solemnly decreed as the boundary of the Republic 
 on the ist of October, 1795. This was not the line of 
 the Rhine ; for neither Holland nor Cologne were in- 
 cluded in it, but it took in Luxemburg and Limburg, 
 and the regions along the Rhine which the victories 
 of the summer of 1794 had won for France. The 
 integrity of the Empire was expressly safeguarded in 
 the negotiations, and on the other side there was to 
 be compensation for France within the frontiers thus 
 laid down, and as they were fixed by the decree of the 
 Convention. Thus in the north also Napoleon kept 
 
122 NAPOLEON 
 
 to the basis of what the sword had won. It was not 
 his fault that the arms of France had not been more 
 successful in this direction. He had in his hands the 
 means of bringing Austria to these arrangements, and 
 also, as he hoped, into close union with France. The 
 decrepit old Republic of Venice, which after years of 
 ill-guarded neutrality was already in the agonies of 
 death, had long been a coveted object of Austrian 
 ambition. But Napoleon did not mean to let out of 
 his hands the predominant position in Italy, and had 
 no intention of transferring to the Austrians, Adria, 
 the immediately adjoining territory of the old Re- 
 public. He offered them the City of the Lagoons, 
 and as being land immediately in front of the Alpine 
 provinces, a portion of the continental possessions of 
 the Republic forming the northern corner of Adria. 
 Outside this, north and south of the Apennines, 
 France was to be the dominant power in Italy. It 
 was the policy of the Empire of a few years later, the 
 fundamental lines of which were already coming into 
 sight. On this basis the preliminaries of peace were 
 concluded on the 1 8 th of April, and Napoleon led 
 his troops back to despoil the unfortunate Govern- 
 ment of the Lagoons, which the vanquished were 
 now ready to accept as a gift at his hands. 
 
 The Directory was angry, but could not think 
 of making any opposition. For Napoleon had the 
 power in his hands ; nor did this consist merely of his 
 army, which after all was only a portion of the forces 
 of the Republic ; nor of his position as the master 
 of Italy, the devotion of his soldiers, the renown he 
 had won by his victories, the reckless determination 
 of his iron will — it was above all the power de- 
 rived from his policy, which was in accord with the 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 123 
 
 will of the nation, and on which he had staked his own 
 and his soldiers' fortunes. This gave him an un- 
 limited advantage over the Directory, and forced it to 
 follow his lead. And this all the more because at the 
 moment the Government was seriously embarrassed 
 by home politics. In April, during the peace negotia- 
 tions, the elections had been held for the renewal of a 
 third of the representatives of the nation. On the 20th 
 of May the newly elected members took their seats, 
 and gave a complete majority to the opposition, which 
 had been already strengthened during the winter. At 
 the same time the retiring Director, the Radical Le 
 Tourneur, was replaced by a member of the oppo- 
 sition, M. de Barthelemy being elected. He had 
 been the negotiator of the treaty with Prussia and 
 Spain at Basel, in 1795. Carnot had already been 
 making a change of front, and in the course of the 
 summer had become more inclined to a moderate 
 attitude, so that divisions thus found their way into 
 the Directory also, and increased the influence exer- 
 cised on the Government by the opposition majority 
 in the Chambers. This majority had not exactly 
 become Royalist. It was made up of the most 
 diverse elements, and its unity arose essentially from 
 the feeling against the Jacobin policy which the 
 majority of the Directors, Barras, Reubell, and La 
 Reveilliere (the Triumvirs, as their opponents called 
 them), followed in both internal and external affairs. 
 The programme of the opposition was the re-estab- 
 lishment of the prosperity of those interests that 
 the policy of the Triumvirs endangered, industry, 
 agriculture and trade ; the amicable settlement of 
 Church questions ; and above all the restoration of 
 peace. The danger arose from the fact that these 
 
1 2 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 objects coincided with the programme of the Royalists, 
 whose hopes thus received a new encouragement, and 
 who were thus again brought to the front. The old 
 Jacobin general, Pichegru, the conqueror of Holland, 
 who had led the armies of the Revolution to victory 
 in 1793 and 1795, had already been won over to 
 them ; for two years he had been in relations with 
 the exiled court of Louis XVIII. When he was 
 chosen President of the Five Hundred, the Chambers 
 were drifting into a course that threatened to lead 
 to the breaking up of the Constitution. They had 
 hardly assembled when the opposition began its 
 attack. They demanded that there should be an 
 investigation into the squandering of public money 
 and alleged peculation, that the finances should be 
 put on a sound basis, and the burden of taxation 
 lightened. They passed decrees that would facilitate 
 the return of the emigres, and assured some toleration 
 for the Catholic religion ; and above all they demanded 
 peace and some moderation in the reckless conduct of 
 foreign affairs. 
 
 And here they not only set themselves in opposition 
 to the tendencies of the Directory, but they also 
 demanded a revision of the policy which Napoleon 
 had adopted with regard to Venice. He had dealt 
 with the City of the Doges as the partitioning Powers 
 had formerly dealt with the Poles. First he had 
 fostered the spirit of disorder, then when the fruit of 
 it ripened, and the country folk rose against the 
 foreign intruders, and the demagogues in the towns, 
 and massacred some hundreds of them, he had 
 demanded vengeance of the timid, helpless Govern- 
 ment — all with the predetermined plan of thus obtain- 
 ing a pretext for destroying the unfortunate Republic, 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 125 
 
 and having in his possession what he meant to give to 
 Austria. He had just occupied Venice itself, fresh 
 disturbances having given him a new opportunity for 
 action ; he had displaced the Government and put 
 the democracy in power there ; this again in view of 
 having a fresh security in hand for his further dealings 
 with Austria. His head-quarters were at this time at 
 the castle of Monbello, near Milan, where he held his 
 court like a Proconsul in princely state. Around him 
 were his staff- officers and generals, the comrades of 
 his fame ; Berthier, who had been at his side as his 
 chief-of-the-staff, since the victory of Montenotte, 
 Lannes, and Murat, Marmont, Augereau, and Leclerc, 
 to whom he had just given the hand of his sister 
 Pauline. Josephine, too, had come, and for a while 
 Laetitia, who now saw her daughter-in-law for the 
 first time, and her sons and daughters were there also. 
 Then there was the crowd of officials and delegates, 
 foreign envoys, suitors, flatterers, and those who 
 were drawn by mere curiosity, but all at the beck of 
 the one man. As absolute as only a Caesar could be, 
 Napoleon ruled over the conquered land, levied con- 
 tributions and taxes, organised the states that he had 
 pieced together out of the fragments or the older 
 Italy, gave to one, took from another, and was in it 
 all himself, the bringer of order and peace, the Master. 
 It was here that he heard of what the legislature 
 had dared to say, the resolutions it had ventured to 
 adopt against his policy, not without at the same time 
 due praise for his exploits. Whatever may have been 
 his attitude towards the Triumvirs, these proceedings 
 brought him back to their side, made him their ally. 
 They at once overlooked his arbitrary action, and left 
 entirely to him the carrying through of the negotia- 
 
126 NAPOLEON 
 
 tions with Austria ; he in return entered the lists 
 against their opponents with all the weight of his in- 
 fluence. And it must be noted that in so doing he 
 was only giving expression once more to the feeling 
 that prevailed in almost the entire army, including 
 not only the troops in Italy, but also those on the 
 Rhine. How often has Hoche been spoken of as* 
 the true son of the French Revolution, the unselfish 
 and obedient servant of the Republic ! But it was 
 precisely he who now placed himself entirely and un- 
 reservedly at the disposal of the Triumvirs, ready to 
 " forcibly disperse " those lawyers and talkers, those 
 " conspirators of the clubs of Clichy." This was in 
 July, on the occasion of the change in the ministry, 
 when the Triumvirs drove the most moderate of its 
 members out, and replaced them by General Scherer 
 at the Ministry of War, Talleyrand, who now comes 
 again upon the scene, at that of Foreign Affairs, and 
 Francois Neufchäteau at that of the Interior. To 
 support their action, Hoche, who commanded the 
 Army on the lower Rhine, marched on Paris. But 
 still the Chambers did not give up the game as lost. 
 Carried away by the Royalist feeling in the capital, they 
 strongly protested against the troops coming inside 
 the barriers of Paris as a breach of the Constitution. 
 The Directory, without resources, above all without 
 money, lost courage and gave way. It made its ex- 
 cuses to Hoche, and he had to retire, and withdrew to 
 his quarters on the Rhine with rage in his heart. 
 
 At this moment Napoleon unmasked his batteries. 
 On the 14th of July, the day of the storming of the Bas- 
 tille, he issued a proclamation to his soldiers in which 
 he reminded them of their victories over Europe, 
 their struggles for freedom, and threatened relentless 
 
BERNADOTTE. 
 From an engraving. 
 
 p. 12 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 127 
 
 war against the enemies of the Republic and of the 
 Constitution ; as on eagles' wings they would, if need 
 be, pass over the mountains to defend the Constitu- 
 tion and Liberty, the Government and the Republic. 
 In all the garrisons similar demonstrations followed, 
 on the Rhine as well as in Italy. Then Napoleon 
 sent, one after the other, to Paris three of his most 
 trusted comrades, Lavalette, Augereau, and Berna- 
 dotte, the last taking with him the captured standards. 
 At the same time he sent, what Hoche could not give, 
 money. The details of how the intrigue now pro- 
 ceeded will probably never be known, for of the more 
 secret dealings that went on between the organisers of 
 the coming coup d'etat there are either no records or 
 very unreliable ones. Above all, we have none of 
 Napoleon's letters or other communications on the 
 subject, and the scanty accounts given by Lavalette 
 and Augereau can hardly supply their place. But 
 when it is asserted that Napoleon himself directed 
 the blow that now fell upon the Royalists, certainly 
 far too much is said. He had, indeed, urged that 
 a decisive step should be taken ; yet it is prob- 
 able that Augereau, a fierce Jacobin, and Barras 
 went further than he himself would have done. He 
 was not in favour of extravagantly violent courses, 
 and we may well believe what he said at St. Helena 
 against the useless cruelty of the victors of the 
 1 8th of Fructidor (September 4th), who sent their 
 opponents in barred cages like wild beasts to Roche- 
 fort and then banished them to the pestilential swamps 
 of Cayenne. He was in favour of the coup d 'etat \ for 
 it was in accord with his policy, and secured the 
 development of the Revolution in his sense. But, 
 far away from Paris, he had no part in the final decision. 
 
128 NAPOLEON 
 
 He let the Triumvirs act, because he assumed that 
 they would on the whole go his way, and he had a 
 firm determination not to allow himself to be forced 
 out of that way. 
 
 In fact, after the triumph of the Triumvirs the old 
 differences immediately broke out again. But again 
 there was proof of the impregnable power of the 
 commander-in-chief of the Army of Italy. In the 
 days when preparations were being made for the 
 decisive step at Paris, the final peace negotiations had 
 begun, on the 30th of August at Udine. They were now 
 expressly left in Napoleon's hands. Acting alone, 
 and accompanied only by his two secretaries, he met 
 the four Austrian plenipotentiaries with Ludwig 
 Cobenzl, the intimate confidant of Thugut, at their 
 head. The negotiations turned especially on two 
 points, the cessions of territory to be made by the 
 Empire, and the delimitation of the acquisitions of 
 the two Powers in Italy. Napoleon was determined 
 not to allow the Austrians to have a foothold any- 
 where beyond the Adige or the Po. Cobenzl, on the 
 other hand, hoped to get, besides Venetia, Modena and 
 the Legations for his master. What interest, he 
 asked naively, had France in not allowing Austria to 
 cross the Po ? Napoleon replied promptly : " The 
 interest of preventing you from being the masters of 
 Italy." " Our ideas," he declared, " are very far 
 from yours. I would deserve to be hanged at Paris 
 if I gave you the Legations." To which Cobenzl 
 answered back : " And I would deserve to be sent to 
 prison in a fortress, if I did not oppose your having 
 Mayence, and even any of the left bank of the Rhine." 
 However, the Austrian negotiator soon let it be seen 
 that he was ready to listen to reason on the subject of 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 129 
 
 Mayence ; but all the more firmly he held out for 
 some compensation for the Emperor in Italy. On 
 the other hand, the Directors were plying Napoleon 
 with letters and instructions, which Barras's secretary, 
 Bottot, personally conveyed to him, and in which 
 they urged him not to give up anything in Italy, but 
 rather to extend the realm of liberty over all of 
 Venetia. In their view the possession of the whole 
 Rhine frontier was a necessary condition of peace. 
 They wanted to revolutionise the Empire as well as 
 Italy, continue the war, and call Prussia to their aid 
 against the Hapsburgs. 
 
 Napoleon was thus placed between two fires. He 
 had to hold his ground against the Austrians, and 
 against his own Government. One can understand 
 how this twofold strain brought him into an ex- 
 cited state of mind, that even at the beginning of 
 the negotiations showed itself in violent outbursts 
 against the Emperor's ministers, and finally came to a 
 climax in that scene which he himself at St. Helena 
 described to his companions as the highly dramatic 
 concluding effect at the Conferences ; how he snatched 
 up a costly porcelain vase, a present from the 
 Empress Catherine to Cobenzl, and declaring that so 
 would he shatter the Austrian monarchy, dashed it on 
 the ground, and left the room. The truth about this 
 story, on which we have the direct testimony of Cobenzl, 
 makes it bear a somewhat different aspect. The incident 
 occurred on the nth of October, five days before the 
 close of the Conferences. It is true that there was a 
 very violent scene. Napoleon, who had not slept for 
 two nights and was excited by the opposition of the 
 Austrians, and the effect of some glasses of punch he 
 had taken, allowed himself to indulge in most out- 
 
i 3 o NAPOLEON 
 
 rageous language, and then with his hat on his head 
 rushed out of the room. The Austrian Count had 
 the best of the incident, for he maintained a collected 
 and polite bearing in presence of the angry young 
 Republican. But it was clear to him, from the con- 
 duct of Napoleon, that he could not obtain what he 
 claimed, and that the passionate outburst, the brutality 
 that Napoleon showed towards him, was probably not 
 entirely unpremeditated, however much he may also 
 have been carried away by the feeling of the moment. 
 Napoleon wanted peace, but he also would not allow 
 there to be the slightest doubt that he was ready for 
 a renewed conflict. So he had already written to 
 Talleyrand : " Let us show Monsieur de Thugut 
 war like Medusa's head, and we shall soon bring him 
 to very acceptable conditions." For himself there 
 were only two ways ; one must follow him, or fight 
 him. 
 
 In this, as in many other points, we have a reminder 
 of Bismarck. So too in the way in which he used 
 the very opposition of the Directory to his plans, in 
 order to bring pressure to bear on his opponents. 
 Never perhaps were his hands so tied ; and he had to 
 obey if he was to preserve his influence and popu- 
 larity. How often did Bismarck in the same way turn 
 to advantage his differences with the King in his deal- 
 ings with foreign negotiators, for instance in the scene 
 with Benedetti in Moravia. 
 
 The end was that on the 17th of October, at the 
 neighbouring village of Campo Formio, Cobenzl put 
 his signature to the conditions dictated to him by 
 Napoleon. Mayence was ceded to France, and the 
 Empire left to take care of itself. In Germany 
 Napoleon promised not to oppose the annexation by 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 131 
 
 Austria of Salzburg and a part of Bavaria. But in 
 Italy he held fast to the line of Adige and Po ; the 
 City of the Lagoons and its people, " who have 
 neither land nor water," he let go. 
 
 Towards the Directory too Napoleon displayed all 
 the passionate energy of his character. He gave it 
 once more only the choice between submitting to him 
 or dismissing him. " Nothing is left for me," he 
 wrote on the 10th of October to Talleyrand, "but to 
 return to a place among the mass of the people, take 
 the plough of Cincinnatus in hand, and give an example 
 of respect for those in power, and dislike for that 
 military domination which has brought to ruin so 
 many republics and more empires." But at the same 
 time he did not hesitate to put the Directory face to 
 face with an accomplished fact ! At that very moment 
 the draft of the Treaty of Peace was ready, and 
 he counted on signing it that very evening ! The 
 Directors had told him that he was to call the Italians 
 to arms. Napoleon pointed out to them that such 
 hopes were Utopian ; as if liberty could arouse such 
 an effeminate, superstitious, boastful, and lazy people 
 to great deeds : " What you ask of me are miracles, 
 and I can work no miracles." It is the same letter 
 from which we have already taken the words in which 
 he set forth his disbelief in the power of such unreal 
 things as the love of the peoples for freedom and 
 equality. He adds to it a short essay on the character 
 of his own, the French, nation, and on the principles of 
 true policy. " The most salient characteristic of our 
 nation is that it can be roused to action. If only 
 true policy, which is nothing else but the calculation 
 of combinations and chances, is made the basis of all 
 our undertakings, we will for a long time to come be 
 
132 NAPOLEON 
 
 the great nation and the arbiters of Europe. I say 
 more : we hold the balance of Europe, and it is for 
 us to say which way it shall incline. Yes, if it is the 
 will of fate, I hold that it is not impossible that in 
 a few years those great ends may be attained, which 
 a heated and enthusiastic imagination can shadow 
 forth, but which only the coolest, most persevering, 
 and most calculating intellect can secure." How 
 often have these words been quoted, but always with 
 a view to pointing to the heaven-storming ambition 
 of the young Titan as the source of his plans for 
 universal dominion. But if we put them in the 
 context from which they have been torn, we recognise 
 that it is really an admonition in favour of modera- 
 tion. The Directors are those on whose policy, 
 verging on fantastic exaggeration, Napoleon wished to 
 place the rein of coldly calculating reason. It is as if 
 he gave them an extract from his Discours de Lyon 
 to read, only that now a conception had been added 
 to it which was a stranger to the trustful mind of the 
 young man, but had become clearer and clearer to 
 him now that he was striving for mastery, with a 
 mind ripened by experience and by his own deeds — 
 a sense of the power of the incalculable — of something 
 not to be reckoned upon, the fate that remains hover- 
 ing like some all-ruling force over the world of 
 politics, and over each individual, however varied may 
 be his activity, however well calculated his plans. It 
 was the Destiny of France, we repeat, with which 
 he had linked his own. He ventured to cast the 
 horoscope for her, and therefore at the same time for 
 himself. He sees the hour approaching when France 
 will dictate the law to Europe, if only reason with its 
 clear insight will dictate the necessary conditions, and 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 133 
 
 and if all-controlling fate will permit it. This feeling 
 dominated him, and already when he summoned the 
 Austrian negotiators to meet him at Udine, he had 
 declared to them that as the representative of France 
 he considered himself higher than all the kings ; and 
 at Leoben, that the Republic had no need of being 
 officially recognised, for it was in Europe what the 
 sun was in the sky ; the worse for them who could 
 not see it, and would not derive any advantage 
 from it. 
 
 It was the last struggle that he would have to carry 
 on with the Directors. Henceforth they left him un- 
 disturbed ; the last time also that his will encountered 
 opposition. His was the victory, his the peace — and 
 his the power which both brought to France. 
 
 After all that had happened it was obvious that he 
 would be first among the plenipotentiaries in the 
 sequel of the conferences of Udine, the Congress of 
 Rastatt, at which the peace of the Empire with France 
 was to be concluded, the boundaries between the two 
 Powers defined, and the compensation fixed that the 
 former was to receive for the possessions it was 
 deprived of on the left bank of the Rhine. But 
 before this he pronounced sentence of death on his 
 own creation, the democracy of Venice, and handed 
 it over to Austria. France was not going to offer up 
 the blood of her sons for a foreign state, he told the 
 Venetians ; they might try if they liked to defend 
 themselves against Austria. He cleared their har- 
 bour of its warships, and the dockyard and arsenals 
 of cannon, and whatever else might be useful for the 
 equipment of the French fleet ; he took away the 
 lion of St. Mark, the Bucentaur, the most beautiful 
 works of art, and the most valuable manuscripts from 
 
134 NAPOLEON 
 
 the churches and palaces ; after he had torn the 
 diadem from the brow of her who was once Queen of 
 the Adriatic, he robbed her also of her arms, her 
 treasures, and the symbols of her old renown. He 
 gave the Cisalpine Republic a constitution, arranged 
 for annexing Ancona from the states of the Church, 
 ordered Admiral Brueys to station his fleet off the 
 Ionian Islands, and sent agents to Malta and Turkey. 
 Then, on the 17th of November he began his journey 
 to the Rhine. Wherever he appeared in Savoy, in 
 Switzerland, he was received with public demonstra- 
 tions ; he turned his attention to setting affairs in 
 order, and negotiated and intrigued with rival parties 
 that vied with each other in bringing their interests 
 before him. 
 
 On the 25th of November, before the arrival of the 
 Emperor's envoy, he made his entry into Rastatt in a 
 carriage drawn by eight horses, and was surrounded, 
 courted by all the prominent men there, as if he were 
 Destiny itself. As soon as the Emperor's envoys 
 arrived, with Cobenzl again at their head, a settle- 
 ment was arrived at on the ist of December. As had 
 been arranged at Campo Formio, first of all Austria 
 declared her renunciation of Mayence, and only then 
 was Venice ceded to her. 
 
 The protocol was hardly signed when Napoleon, 
 acting on the invitation of the Directory, started 
 for Paris. As he had secured for himself the 
 advantage of the interior lines in the politics of 
 France, he could leave everything else to the other 
 representatives of the Republic at Rastatt. These had 
 at once to put aside an attempt of the Austrians to 
 bar the maintaining of the " constitutional frontier " 
 of France, already adopted at Udine. The Austrian 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 135 
 
 proposal had for its object to safeguard the pre- 
 dominance of the empire in Germany, and above all, 
 to prevent Prussia from obtaining anything on the 
 right bank of the Rhine. They proposed giving 
 France the whole left bank, on condition that the 
 Empire should receive compensation on the right. It 
 was a matter on which France had been pledged to 
 Prussia since the treaty of Basel ; now that the left 
 bank was lost to the latter, her interests seemed to be 
 best protected by giving her the secularised territory 
 of the prince bishops, instead of what she had to 
 abandon ; and the Prussian envoy at once received 
 precise instructions to this effect from his Govern- 
 ment. In this, as Ranke has strikingly shown, lay 
 France's advantage, that she held the two great 
 powers of Germany bound to her by these internal 
 questions, and had at the same time set them in 
 opposition to each other. The position of the French 
 diplomats was an unprecedented one. They were 
 asking nothing for themselves, wanted to satisfy 
 everyone, and were setting them all against each 
 other. It was the attitude of a protector, who 
 divides that he may rule. The policy of the future 
 Confederation of the Rhine was already coming into 
 sight. 
 
 On the 5th of December Napoleon entered Paris. It 
 was not two years since he had left the city whose 
 streets he had reddened with the blood of her citizens 
 amidst the murmurs of the people, who saw in him 
 not only the man of the 13th of Vendemiaire, but 
 also the foreigner and the protege of the hated Barras. 
 Now the same Parisians received him with unbounded 
 rejoicings. For he had brought them, or they could 
 hope at length to obtain, what for years they had 
 
136 NAPOLEON 
 
 been longing for, peace and order, the restoration of 
 all the prosperity that war and revolution, anarchy 
 and the terror, had destroyed, and that only victory 
 over the enemies of France could ensure to them. 
 
 Everything had now united to raise this one man 
 above the world around him, above all competitors, 
 and to conduct him to the summit of the Capitol. 
 Not only the fame of his victories, deeds such as the 
 old annals of France hardly knew, but also circum- 
 stances, chance, fortune had conspired to lay on his 
 shoulders the chief burden of the conflict, and at the 
 same time to place on his head its most abundant 
 laurels. All the men who before him, or in his time, 
 had taken a leading place in politics and war, had 
 either left the stage or had in various ways suffered a 
 loss of influence. Of the great leaders in war, whom 
 the Revolution had produced, the first, Pichegru, was 
 still in the swamps of Cayenne ; the second, Moreau, 
 had suffered defeat in the field, and was compromised 
 by having been privy to Pichegru's conspiracy, a fact 
 which Napoleon himself had discovered ; the third, 
 Lazare Hoche, the only one who was perhaps compar- 
 able to Napoleon in genius and renown, and might 
 have been his rival, had but lately been cut off in the 
 flower of his manhood by an insidious malady. All 
 parties saw in Napoleon their man, and might so 
 regard him, though in fact he had never belonged to 
 any of them. The official society of Paris prepared for 
 him brilliant feasts and ovations on a grand scale. On 
 the 10th of December, at the Palace of the Luxembourg, 
 richly decorated for the occasion, he conveyed to the 
 Directory, at the " Altar of the Fatherland '" erected 
 there, the formal notification of peace. Talleyrand, 
 as Minister of Foreign Affairs, greeted the conqueror 
 
MOREAU. 
 
 From an engraving by S. Freeman. 
 
 p. 136. 
 
TOULON TO CAMPO FORMIO 137 
 
 with an extravagant speech. Then Napoleon himself 
 spoke, in broken sentences, and not over clearly, for 
 he was no orator. He told of the triumph of the 
 new Constitution of the Year III, based on reason, 
 over eighteen hundred years of prejudice ; of the 
 genius of Liberty that had opened to France the gates 
 of two fair lands, alluding to Italy and Holland ; and 
 of the future, a new era in which the fortune of the 
 French people, and with it the freedom of all Europe, 
 would be based upon the best organisation of the laws. 
 The Directors, with their minds divided between 
 mistrust and hope, invited him from the very first day 
 to assist them in their business. He had influence on 
 the nomination of Ambassadors, and the arranging of 
 commands for generals, and gave his advice on the 
 Italian, the Swiss, and the Dutch questions, which 
 daily presented new problems to the Government ; but 
 the chief influence, the actual supreme direction of 
 affairs, Napoleon neither possessed, nor did he ask for 
 it. He did not wish to appear as the accomplice of a 
 Barras. He preferred, as he had written from Italy, 
 to play the part of a Cincinnatus. He avoided pub- 
 licity ; put the services of his comrades before his 
 own, as he had done in that speech at the Luxem- 
 bourg ; and preferred to appear in civilian dress. 
 With the public, which quickly forgets, his star actu- 
 ally began to grow a little dim, and outside observers 
 might well think that he would soon be out of fashion. 
 But all the while he was working away with the 
 Government at new and gigantic plans, the execution 
 of which could be placed in his hands alone. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 IN THE EAST 
 
 "OUT it was only on the Continent that peace had 
 been established. England — the strongest adver- 
 sary of all — was still in arms and had no idea of laying 
 them aside. For her the conflict was not a mere 
 politician's war, but a national affair that drew Govern- 
 ment and people together, and instead of dividing 
 them, formed a link between the two parties in the 
 country. It was no enmity of to-day, or yesterday, 
 but a heritage of the Republic from the times of the 
 monarchy ; and the interval between the last treaty 
 of peace and the renewed outbreak of hostilities in 
 the spring of 1793 had been short enough. In 
 France, too, no wars of the old monarchy had been 
 more popular than those against England. In the 
 eighteenth century, between the Bourbons and the 
 great Powers of the Continent, there had been alter- 
 nations of war and negotiations, friendship and 
 alliance. But England, on the other hand, except 
 during a short truce that had been unprofitable for 
 France, had always been in the ranks of her enemies. 
 She too was the foe against whom Napoleon had 
 seen his first war service in the French army, and 
 from whom he had won his first laurels. At Toulon 
 he had led the storming columns against English 
 defences ; he had fired shot from his cannon against 
 English ships ; he had received his first wound from 
 
 138 
 
IN THE EAST 139 
 
 an English bayonet. The batteries he had erected 
 along the Ligurian coast, the raid upon Leghorn, the 
 closing of all the Italian ports that he had brought 
 under the rule or the influence of France, the plunder- 
 ing of the Venetian arsenals, the restless activity 
 of naval preparations, the designs on Corfu and 
 Sardinia, Elba and Malta, and the despatch of the 
 Italian brigades that were moving towards the southern 
 and western coast — all these measures were directed 
 against the English. 
 
 For a while it had seemed as if France could make 
 peace also with this enemy. In October, 1796, and 
 again in the summer of 1797, there had been negotia- 
 tions with this object at Paris and Lille. On the 
 first occasion they were broken off by the English ; 
 on the second, after the 1 8 th of Fructidor, by the 
 Directory. Napoleon had thoroughly agreed with 
 the course taken by his Government, for his policy 
 was as strongly hostile to England as it was actively 
 in favour of peace with the Continental Powers. 
 "Let us concentrate," he wrote, "our entire activity 
 in the direction of the sea, and destroy England. 
 This done, Europe will be at our feet." 
 
 If an attack was to be made on England, there 
 were three ways open for it. The shortest, which 
 struck at the heart, was across the Channel. But 
 even if the soldiers of the Republic, like Caesar's 
 legions of old and the mail-clad horsemen of William 
 the Norman, might hope, with little trouble, to drive 
 before them this island people, unaccustomed to the 
 sight of war, they had not the means of conquering 
 the floating fortresses that protected the coasts of 
 England. Yet thrice already the French had made 
 the attempt. First in 1794, when their armament 
 
i 4 o NAPOLEON 
 
 was shattered in the sea-fight of the First of June. 
 Then in the late autumn of 1796, under Lazare 
 Hoche, whose favourite idea it had been : those old 
 allies of England, the winds and the waves, had 
 driven him back into the French harbours, and to the 
 storm that held his ships in its grasp was due the 
 beginning of the illness that so quickly wasted away 
 the young soldier's strength. A year after, when the 
 peace negotiations had for the second time broken 
 down, a new expedition was planned, based on the 
 coasts of Holland. But the Dutch fleet, which was 
 to protect it, suffered at Camperdown the same fate 
 that had already more than once befallen the fleets of 
 the Republic, disorganised as they were by the 
 Revolution, and England remained mistress of the 
 seas. 
 
 The second way of striking at the enemy led across 
 the Rhine, into the ancestral dominions of the 
 English Kings, the Hanoverian territory by the 
 mouths of the Ems, Weser, and Elbe, which would 
 thus be closed to the English. In the year 1756 the 
 French had crossed the Rhine and thus come into 
 conflict with the power of Prussia. How could the 
 Republic now venture to penetrate into territories 
 virtually protected by this great neighbouring state, 
 whose neutrality it had purchased three years ago 
 precisely by recognising North Germany as its sphere 
 of influence ? The result might be the breaking up 
 of the peace of the Continent, and the old enemies of 
 France, who had only just been separated, would thus 
 be driven to side with each other again. 
 
 Only one course therefore was left : to attack Eng- 
 land in her colonial possessions, unless, as Napoleon 
 himself wrote, one could be content to make peace. 
 
IN THE EAST 141 
 
 Beyond the Atlantic, where the old monarchy had 
 tried to assail her, there was nothing more to be done, 
 for the people of the United States, notwithstanding 
 the advent of Liberty and a Republic in France, had 
 not the remotest idea of repaying the help they had 
 had from Frenchmen for the establishment of their 
 own freedom. The West Indian islands were too 
 small a prize for the conflict, for even their loss would 
 have been a mere scratch for England. It was in 
 India, and there only, that one could hope, if not to 
 strike at the enemy's heart, at least, to wound his 
 heel. Here too allies were to be found in the native 
 princes, against whom the brothers Wellesley were 
 still carrying on a fierce struggle. But how was one 
 to go so far, seeing that the English were lords of all 
 coasts and seas of Africa and Asia, were making 
 prizes of French, Dutch, and Spanish ships and 
 colonies, and had taken possession of the Cape of 
 Good Hope ? There was just one way, much shorter 
 than the Cape passage round Africa, which seemed 
 to be as practicable by land as by water, at least for its 
 second half. It lay through Egypt. If one could 
 get possession of the mouths of the Nile and the 
 shores of the Red Sea, there was no need of the Cape 
 route, for one would hold the double gateways be- 
 tween East and West. It was a plan that can neither 
 be said to be new to French history, nor over-venture- 
 some. For we need not go back to the earlier days 
 of old France, and recall the expedition of St. Louis, 
 and how the French knights were the first to carry the 
 banner of the Crusades into the East, or how the 
 busy brain of Leibnitz had worked out a similar plan 
 for Louis XIV. In the eighteenth century, and since 
 the beginning of the struggle in India that had gone 
 
1 4 2 NAPOLEON 
 
 so unfavourably for France, the idea had become 
 a popular one. Publicists like Raynal, Volney, and 
 Laclos, and practical statesmen, like the Due de 
 Choiseul, who had been forced to conclude the Peace 
 of Versailles, had turned their thoughts to it. And 
 quite lately a report had been received from Charles 
 Magallon, the Consul-General of the Republic at 
 Alexandria, in which he set forth the ease with which 
 Egypt might be conquered, and the advantages which 
 that country offered through its fertility and its posi- 
 tion. So little reason is there for saying that the 
 plan sprang from the wild imagination of Napoleon, 
 and was a proof of his lust for conquest, urging him 
 into schemes of boundless ambition. He thought, 
 as indeed others did, especially in view of the 
 actual situation, more of the trade of the Levant than 
 of that of Eastern Asia, more of the mastery of the 
 Mediterranean than of dominion in India. He had 
 dreamed of this while he was still a Corsican ; in his 
 earlier writings he had connected the future of Cor- 
 sica with the mastery of the Mediterranean. Still 
 more must he have entertained such ideas since he 
 had thrown in his lot with France. In a document 
 written so far back as the winter of 1792, he had, 
 from this point of view, recommended the seizure of 
 the Maddelena Islands (on the north coast of Sar- 
 dinia). 
 
 The project for the fortification of the Bay of San 
 Fiorenzo (North Corsica) which he drew up a little 
 later, dwells on the advantages the place might offer 
 to the enemies of France " if we lose the trident of 
 the Mediterranean or if our right to it is challenged." 
 Every step which he took in the conquest of Italy, 
 and above all in the occupation of Ancona, Genoa, 
 
., 
 
 NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 
 From a study by David. 
 
 p. 142- 
 
' 
 
IN THE EAST 143 
 
 and the Ionian Islands, had this object in view, and 
 each step brought him. nearer to the point when he 
 would be tempted, and even compelled, to make an 
 effort to secure this end. Then we must not forget 
 that the English had the same idea. If they wished 
 for the dominion of India, they must hold the way 
 through the Mediterranean as well as the route by 
 the Cape. And for them too the command of the 
 Mediterranean was an object to which, for its own 
 sake, their policy must naturally direct itself. For 
 a century, thanks to the rock fortress of Gibraltar, 
 they held at least its gateway. The war against the 
 Revolution had led them to take far-reaching action 
 in its waters, and even to occupy Corsica and Toulon. 
 They had lost both these places, and lost them 
 through Napoleon's victories. In Corsica, in the 
 summer of 1796, they had had to evacuate the last of 
 the fortified places that Paoli had handed over to 
 them, and had taken away with them into a now 
 unwilling exile the old hero, who at last had quar- 
 relled with them. But their fleet had remained in 
 Mediterranean waters, and found in the harbours of 
 Sicily, Naples, and Sardinia friendly sources of supply 
 and a base of operations for watching the enemy's 
 coasts. If Napoleon on his voyage to Egypt had let 
 slip the opportunity offered him of seizing Malta, a 
 coup de main for the possession of that incomparable 
 maritime fortress would have been carried out by 
 Nelson, sooner or later. The Directory rightly put 
 forward as a reason for the expedition to Egypt that 
 it was an anticipation of possible English action there. 
 But the conquest of the Nile Valley was in itself an 
 object that must have been highly attractive to French 
 politicians. There were not only its strategic situa- 
 
144 NAPOLEON 
 
 tion on the dividing line between two quarters of the 
 world and the prospect of shortening the trade route 
 to the Indies, but also, as Napoleon pointed out to 
 Talleyrand in September, 1797, there was the wealth 
 of its soil, which would soon recompense the nation 
 for the products of the West Indies that had been 
 lost and gone to England. Let us add that the cut- 
 ting of the Isthmus of Suez had also a place in these 
 projects, and we see their significance as a forecast of 
 the development of the Egyptian question in the nine- 
 teenth century. Napoleon's expedition to the East 
 was not so much a repetition of the campaign of 
 Alexander, with which it has been so often compared, 
 or of the Gesta Dei per Francos in the Middle Ages, as 
 the brilliant overture to the drama which was played 
 out in the last century, and the closing act of which 
 we probably witnessed some twenty years ago, when 
 England took possession of the land of the Pharaohs. 
 This prophetical character of Napoleon's policy is 
 seen also in the fact that his attempt on Egypt for the 
 first time brought upon the stage the whole sphere of 
 the Eastern question. The problem that was intimately 
 connected with the Egyptian expedition was, how 
 would Turkey regard it? And would it be possible 
 to carry it through without agitating the whole East, 
 above all without drawing into it the Christian powers 
 of the East, Austria and Russia ? The maintenance 
 of friendship with the Porte was a part of the oldest 
 traditions of French policy. Only thus had it been 
 possible in earlier times to make a stand against the 
 preponderance of the Hapsburgs, especially in the 
 Mediterranean, and during the last ten years the new 
 as well as the old France had been faithful to this 
 policy. Her rivals, Russia and Austria, had always 
 
IN THE EAST 145 
 
 been the opponents of Turkey, which was engaged in 
 a hard fight with them at the very moment when the 
 Revolution began. It was in view of this that, as 
 early as 1785, the Porte had asked for French officers 
 to reorganise its army and navy, and we have already 
 seen how in the autumn of 1795 Napoleon himself 
 had tried to obtain employment of this kind. There 
 is no doubt that he was even now inspired by friendly 
 intentions towards the Porte. He wished and hoped 
 at least to keep it on his side. It is true that Egypt 
 belonged in name to the Sultan, but in fact it was in 
 the hands of the Mamelukes, and what Napoleon and 
 his Government hoped to secure on the Nile was not 
 the sovereignty of the country, but what we now 
 call a protectorate, and therefore he had in view quite 
 a modern method of extending a nation's power. 
 The object, the attainment of which he had most at 
 heart, was to come into possession of Egypt as a pro- 
 tecting power on behalf of Turkey. The idea was 
 that immediately after the occupation had been 
 effected, Talleyrand himself should arrive in the 
 Bosphorus on a frigate as ambassador, and place the 
 power of France at the disposal of the Sultan against 
 his enemies, and if need be against Russia. 
 
 But what if the Sultan should decide to take up 
 an unfriendly attitude towards the not altogether 
 correct policy that France was pursuing ? In this case 
 Napoleon and his friends would go to work in 
 another way. They thought it would be time to 
 bring about a revolt of the Christian subjects of the 
 Porte. It was especially on the Greeks that they 
 reckoned. They would, wrote Napoleon, be called 
 to arms in the name of liberty, as had been done 
 in the past in the name of religion. He considered 
 
i 4 6 NAPOLEON 
 
 that they would be even more accessible to French 
 than to Russian influence. It is worth noting that in 
 this plan Austria was supposed to take a place on the 
 side of France. It was thought that by means of 
 a partition it would be even easier to satisfy her than 
 Russia. Thus, as so often happened in the Middle 
 Ages, a campaign in the East might turn into a stroke 
 at Constantinople. The rashness of the policy which 
 the Directory resolved upon in the spring of 1798 
 arose from these possibilities and dangers of the 
 future, and the prospect of the peace that had hardly 
 been established on the Continent being again broken 
 up, bringing about new coalitions against France, 
 and disturbing the old traditional basis of French 
 policy. 
 
 But first of all, in February, Napoleon had actually 
 turned his attention to the direct attack upon England. 
 On the 8 th of February, after he had been already 
 named commander-in-chief of the " Army of England," 
 he proceeded to the north coast to examine the chances 
 of the enterprise. He soon convinced himself that 
 in the existing state of the French armaments it was 
 not to be thought of, and then he turned to the plans 
 for Egypt with that peculiarly restless energy that was 
 all his own. But the frontal attack was only deferred. 
 By the end of September, according to his calculations, 
 the Brest squadron and the fleet of transports could 
 be placed in readiness on the coast by Boulogne 
 and Dunkirk. He himself hoped to get over the 
 expedition to Egypt, found the colony, and yet be 
 back by autumn, and in the long nights of October 
 or November personally direct the great stroke 
 against England. He might assume that the conquest 
 of Egypt would draw a part of the English fleet 
 
IN THE EAST 147 
 
 in that direction and would keep it tied up in the 
 Mediterranean. 
 
 By the 22nd of April all the preparations were com- 
 plete and Napoleon was on the point of starting for the 
 south, when news came from Vienna that threatened 
 to unsettle everything again. The French ambassador, 
 General Bernadotte, had been most gravely insulted, 
 not without having himself given some provocation, 
 for he had irritated both the Court and the people by 
 his conceited, overbearing conduct, and by the in- 
 trigues he had set on foot with some members of the 
 Opposition. It had ended in a riot in front of the 
 embassy. The mob had torn down the tricolour 
 from the balcony, smashed windows and doors and 
 forced their way into the house, so that Bernadotte 
 had to face them with sword and pistols. He had 
 then demanded his passports and gone back to France. 
 As matters stood, nothing could be more unwelcome 
 to Napoleon than this incident. At the moment he 
 had the most urgent interest in keeping the Continent 
 at peace. For Austria too the affair was most in- 
 opportune ; and so both parties were anxious to try to 
 reach a settlement. One of the Directory, Francis de 
 Neufchateau, and Cobenzl had a meeting on the sub- 
 ject at Selz in Alsace. Napoleon waited a little longer 
 at Toulon than had originally been intended, and was 
 further delayed by unfavourable winds. On the 19th of 
 May he put to sea. By the 29th he had been joined by 
 the divisions that had embarked in the ports of Italy. 
 More than four hundred transports, escorted by a 
 strong fleet of warships under Admiral Brueys, con- 
 veyed eastwards 35,000 men of the Army of Italy, 
 under the generals who had led it to victory under 
 Napoleon. Besides his old comrades in arms Napoleon 
 
i 4 8 NAPOLEON 
 
 was accompanied by a staff of savants, engineers, 
 writers, and interpreters, amongst them men like 
 Monge, the great mathematician, who had been with 
 him at Udine, and the chemist Berthollet. 
 
 Everything had been planned on the grandest 
 scale. It was intended to secure the archaeological 
 treasures that were to be looked for in the land of the 
 old civilisation of the Pharaohs, seek them out, and 
 transfer them to France, as had been done with the 
 masterpieces of Italian art. And at the same time 
 the intended colony would have at its disposal the 
 scientific direction that would be required for the 
 increase of its natural resources and for the cutting of 
 the isthmus of Suez. So this expedition began, which 
 will always be noteworthy for the wonderful good 
 fortune that seemed to protect it. For now the English, 
 who about the 20th of April had got some idea of 
 what was in progress, were on the alert, and had sent 
 Nelson with a squadron to the south coast of France. 
 On the 17th of May he lay in the Gulf of Lions on the 
 look out. A storm dispersed his ships, and he had to 
 spend eight days on the south coast of Sardinia, 
 repairing damages. When he came back he found 
 that the birds had flown. He at once sailed for the waters 
 on the coast of Tuscany, where on the 7th of June he 
 received considerable reinforcements, but could get no 
 intelligence as to where the enemy was to be found. 
 During these days, Napoleon, who knew nothing of 
 Nelson's arrival, was on his way to Malta. Brueys 
 had already appeared before the island in February to 
 reconnoitre it. But nevertheless the Maltese had 
 neglected to make any military preparations, and they 
 were utterly surprised when on the 9th of June the 
 French fleet showed itself off the harbour. It would in- 
 
NELSQN. 
 From a mezzotint after the picture by John Hoppner, R.A. 
 
 
IN THE EAST 149 
 
 deed have been no difficult matter to hold the immensely 
 strong fortifications for at least a few days till the 
 English could come. But on the island, as in the 
 French fleet, there was no idea that they were so close 
 at hand. And then among the knights there was 
 embarrassment, perplexity, and probably treason, 
 excitement among the people, and helpless stupidity 
 on the part of the head of the Order of Malta, the 
 timid and narrow-minded Count Hompesch. In short, 
 after a few days of feeble opposition a surrender was 
 accepted and the French flag flew over all the forts. 
 And then Napoleon, leaving a garrison of three 
 thousand men, shaped his course for the East. He 
 was off Crete when news came that Nelson had sailed 
 from Naples for Malta. Then on the 28 th of June, for 
 the first time, he informed the army by a proclamation 
 what was the task that was set before it. He out- 
 lined the inestimable results that the conquest of 
 Egypt would have for the civilisation and trade of 
 the world, and told how England would thereby be 
 wounded in the heel. " We shall have wearisome 
 marches," he said ; " we shall fight some battles. All 
 will go well with us. Destiny is on our side." Crete, 
 which they had left to the northwards, had hardly 
 been passed when more precise news of the enemy 
 arrived. On the 30th of June a frigate, which had been 
 sent on in advance to Alexandria, brought back the 
 information that Nelson had appeared before that port 
 with fourteen ships of the line ; but as no one there 
 knew anything of the French fleet he had gone off 
 to the northwards two days ago. 
 
 This was, in fact, what had happened. When 
 the Admiral reached Malta, the French fleet had 
 just got away. Immediately he had crowded all 
 
150 NAPOLEON 
 
 sali to overtake them, and he had done the voyage 
 so quickly that he was at Alexandria before them. 
 Burning with eagerness to come up with the enemy, 
 he set his course on the same day for the Syrian 
 coast, then, as he could get no news there also, he 
 sailed for Asia Minor and so back to the westward. 
 " The devil's children," he wrote, " have the devil's 
 luck. This Bonaparte commands his troops at sea 
 just as well as if they were an army on land." 
 Napoleon's luck was indeed unparalleled ; but he knew, 
 too, how to make full use of it. On the ist of July 
 he arrived before the city of Alexander the Great. 
 The day was nearly at an end ; the sea was stormy ; 
 the surf on the shore dangerous. But without hesi- 
 tation, and not without some loss, he got his troops 
 on shore. Early next morning the walls of the city, 
 which were hardly defended, were stormed at a rush 
 and all opposition crushed. On the same day he 
 announced in a proclamation in Arabic addressed 
 to the Arabs and Copts that he came as one who 
 honoured God and the Prophet ; as the destroyer 
 of the Papacy and of the Order of Malta, and as 
 the friend of the Sultan, to free them from the 
 tyranny of the Mamelukes. These were not a tribe, 
 but a band of soldiers chiefly recruited by the purchase 
 of slaves. Originally the bodyguard of the Caliphs, 
 they now numbered some 10,000 horsemen. Fanati- 
 cal, brave, but badly armed with old muskets and 
 hardly any cannon, they were not a power that could 
 oppose any strong resistance to the French. But 
 these had other obstacles to fear — the march through 
 the sandy desert under blazing heat, without shade, 
 without water ; the resourceless poverty of the villages ; 
 and when they reached the Nile gastric troubles caused 
 
IN THE EAST 151 
 
 by muddy water and bad or scanty food. So there 
 was a sense of relief when at last the troops came 
 in sight of the enemy, and the Mamelukes dashed in 
 reckless onset against their squares. The serious 
 fighting began on the 13th of July ; the decisive action 
 took place on the 21st at Embabeh (near Cairo), where 
 the whole force of the Mamelukes had formed an 
 entrenched camp. The wild charges of the horsemen 
 were shattered by the volley-firing of the French ; 
 they escaped in headlong flight, and their camp fell 
 easily into the hands of the victors. The prize 
 of victory was the occupation of Cairo, a populous 
 city, but without the eastern splendour that the 
 French soldiers had expected to see there. Amongst 
 the squalid houses there were only two handsome 
 palaces of the Mamelukes. But these warriors, under 
 their two Beys, Murad and Ibrahim, found means to 
 keep the conquerors busy enough. Murad Bey was 
 retiring through Upper Egypt, whither Desaix was 
 sent after him. Ibrahim Bey had taken refuge in the 
 desert in the direction of Syria, whence he soon again 
 made raids close up to Cairo with his horsemen. It 
 was in vain that Napoleon himself tried to get a hold 
 of him ; he disappeared again into the wilderness of 
 sand. And when on the 13th of August Napoleon 
 came back to Cairo, one of Kleber's staff officers was 
 waiting for him with the news that the fleet had been 
 destroyed. 
 
 It was Nelson's work. On his voyage westwards 
 he had gone as far as Syracuse, then turned again, 
 and when off the Morea he had at last obtained 
 certain intelligence that four weeks earlier the enemy 
 had sailed south-east from Crete ; that is, on the 
 course for Egypt. Now, he had only one idea— to 
 
152 NAPOLEON 
 
 fight, and, as he wrote to Lady Hamilton, "be 
 covered with laurels or with cypress." Late in the after- 
 noon of the ist of August he came upon the enemy's 
 fleet in the roadstead of Aboukir. Without losing 
 a moment he attacked, pushing through the narrow 
 channel between the left of the French line and the 
 land, which Brueys had hoped to bar by means of 
 batteries on the shore. With the wind in their 
 favour the English ships came down the French line, 
 attacking on both sides, destroying one wing in detail 
 before its consorts could beat up to its aid. The 
 battle lasted through the night and into the following 
 morning. Rear -Admiral Villeneuve succeeded in 
 getting away with only two ships. All the rest were 
 riddled, burned, or captured. Half the crews, and 
 with them the Admiral, were at the bottom of the sea. 
 This, then, was the news the all-conquering general 
 heard when he came back from the desert. His bear- 
 ing at this moment was magnificent. " The loss of 
 our fleet," he said to his friend and comrade Mar- 
 mont, " will probably compel us to do greater things 
 in this country than we anticipated." " One must 
 keep one's head above the waves, and the waves will 
 calm down." Then and later he laid the blam^ for 
 the disaster on Brueys, and at any rate we may say 
 this much, that he himself in the place of Brueys 
 would have been quicker about making up his mind 
 to some better course of action. In so far he reasoned 
 rightly when in his report to the Directory he even 
 took up the defence of the fickle Goddess of Fortune, 
 and justified her by pointing out how she had made 
 the voyage possible ; how in the roar of storm the 
 troops had landed ; how Alexandria had been taken 
 by three thousand tired-out soldiers, without artillery 
 
IN THE EAST 153 
 
 and almost without cartridges ; and how in five days 
 he had the whole coast in his possession. These five 
 days ought to have been time enough to put the fleet 
 in a place of safety, " once Fortune sees that all her 
 favours are offered in vain, then only she leaves our 
 fleet to its fate." All communications, reinforce- 
 ments, almost all information from outside, was hence- 
 forth impossible for the army, cut off as it was from 
 Europe. Like Corfu and Malta, the Egyptian colony 
 found itself in the position of a fortress for which all 
 relief is impossible. 
 
 But the importance of the "Battle of the Nile" did 
 not consist only in the destruction of the hopes built 
 upon the Egyptian expedition. It set Europe again 
 in movement. At once the Turks joined the 
 enemies of France. If the plans upon which Napo- 
 leon had counted had been successfully executed, the 
 fleet taken back to Corfu or Malta, and Talleyrand at 
 Constantinople with an offer of alliance, probably the 
 Sultan would have entered into a compact which 
 promised him protection against Russia, the tradi- 
 tional enemy of Turkey. Then Nelson might have 
 found a difficulty in maintaining his ships in the 
 eastern basin of the Mediterranean. But the Sultan 
 could weave no bonds of alliance with a power whose 
 weakness had been shown and its glory tarnished in 
 so decisive a way. Hard pressed, and at the same 
 time flattered by the diplomacy of Russia and England, 
 Selim III preferred to throw himself into the arms of 
 France's enemies. On the news that the Russian 
 Black Sea Fleet had put to sea, he published a Haati- 
 scherif, in which he proclaimed the Holy War against 
 the invaders of Egypt. On the 2nd of September the 
 French ambassador was sent to the prison of the 
 
154 NAPOLEON 
 
 Seven Towers, and on the 3rd the Russian Fleet was 
 welcomed at Constantinople. United with a Turkish 
 squadron it proceeded at once to attack Corfu, which 
 was forced to capitulate before the end of September. 
 In Italy too all the old opponents of France roused 
 themselves to action as soon as the news of the great 
 battle arrived. Foremost of all, the Neapolitan Court,' 
 which was closely menaced by the existence of a 
 Republic at Rome and by the Revolutionary propa- 
 ganda in its own territories, at once decided upon 
 beginning the war. The Queen Maria Carolina, a 
 daughter of Maria Theresa, impetuous and passionate 
 as her mother and sister, had no other thought but to 
 avenge the blood of Marie Antoinette on her mur- 
 derers. On the 22nd of September, the English fleet 
 arrived in the Bay of Naples, and now there was no more 
 hesitation. The victorious admiral was welcomed as 
 a saviour and liberator. Those days at Naples when 
 Nelson, entangled by the charms of Lady Hamilton, 
 seemed to forget voyages on the sea and the thunder 
 of battle amid an exciting round of festivities at a 
 wanton court have been spoken of as his Capua. But 
 not for a moment did he lose sight of the enemy 
 and of the interests of England. The influence that 
 his lover possessed with the Queen, the very spell 
 that she had cast over him, he used in the interest of 
 his Government. He swept away the last arguments 
 put forward by the peace party and hurried Naples on 
 to the attack. 
 
 No Power that had belonged to the old coalition 
 hesitated longer about renewing the war than Austria, 
 which had maintained the conflict the longest. Thugut 
 was very angry at little Naples taking it on herself to 
 light up a world-wide war, instead of waiting for 
 
IN THE EAST 155 
 
 orders from Vienna. He declared that his Government 
 would not support the offensive in Italy. But in 
 October, when the advance of the Neapolitans on 
 Rome had ended in lamentable failure, and the Grisons 
 threatened to break away from the French side, it 
 was considered, even in Vienna, that the time for 
 holding back was past, and the moment come for 
 giving up the peace of Campo Formio, which had 
 always been regarded there as a mere truce. At the 
 end of 1798 the second coalition against France was 
 ready. 
 
 It can be no part of our work to describe in detail 
 the changing fortunes which the new war brought for 
 France. And therefore I merely mention the grave 
 disasters which the Republic, now left without leaders, 
 suffered on the battlefields of the Upper Rhine, in the 
 Alps, and on the plains of Lombardy. Thrice were 
 her armies destroyed by the victories of the allies, 
 never was she nearer a downfall, and who knows if 
 her last hour would not then have struck were it not 
 that in the midst of their very successes the allies 
 broke away from each other, when Suvaroff, after his 
 greatest triumph at Novi, started on his madly brave, 
 but strategically inexplicable march over the St. Gothard, 
 during which his army went to ruin. It was now 
 that Massena, undoubtedly the best of the Republican 
 generals, after his victory at Zurich, succeeded in 
 making himself master of Switzerland, and thus 
 restored some equality of forces in this direction. 
 But even so there was yet no saying how it would all 
 end, and it looked as if the Republic must succumb 
 to the pressure of superior strength. Then too at 
 home the army of its enemies had been aroused once 
 more. It was the old round of events, through which 
 
156 NAPOLEON 
 
 the Revolution had passed more than once already 
 under the influence of the struggle with foreign 
 Powers. Every defeat brought new strength to the 
 forces of anarchy at home, and led the party which 
 desired to carry the Revolution onward to its full 
 accomplishment, to use sharper means of repression. 
 But only victory could really ensure its dominion. 
 The more serious the defeats, the more terrible 
 the misery of the country ; the greater the tyranny, 
 the more embittered was the resistance that the 
 Revolutionists met with among their own fellow- 
 countrymen. At the new elections in April, the Jacobins 
 had again come to the front, thanks to a coup d'etat 
 on the 30th of Prairial. But their ill fortune in the 
 field, and above all the defeat at Novi, where General 
 Joubert lost both the battle and his own life, was once 
 more a gain for the moderates and the reactionaries. 
 There were new dissensions in the Directory and in 
 the Ministry. An attempt to raise a forced loan led 
 to nothing. The depreciation of the paper currency 
 was greater than ever. The Chouans were again in 
 arms, thousands strong, in La Vendee and in the 
 south. When in September Jourdan, one of the 
 Hotspurs of the Chamber, brought forward a demand 
 for the punishment of the enemies of Liberty, the 
 majority in the Chamber itself repudiated him and 
 the proposal was rejected. The result of it all was 
 the same as that of the battlefields. Official France, 
 torn by parties which counterbalanced each other, 
 could neither go backwards nor forwards. The State 
 organisation created by the Revolution was not des- 
 troyed, but its rulers were powerless to consolidate it, 
 and to find a point on which the contending parties 
 could draw together and come to an agreement. But 
 
IN THE EAST 157 
 
 the great mass of the people had only one thought ; 
 to enjoy the primary blessings of existence, a secure 
 and quiet life, order and peace in the home ; the re- 
 covery of private prosperity and national trade ; and 
 above all the restoration of peace to the Church. 
 Whoever could bring about all this would be their 
 Messiah. 
 
 No one saw more clearly than Bonaparte that the 
 very first condition for the founding of an Egyptian 
 colony must be peace on the Continent and friend- 
 ship with Turkey, and that the possibility of safe 
 communication with France by sea must at least be 
 kept in view. But at the outset, the breaking up of 
 the peace of Campo Formio, and the appearance of 
 Turkey in the ranks of his enemies, never entered 
 into his calculations. And then, he could never have 
 imagined that the Republic would so soon be hurled 
 from the height of victory to which he had raised it. 
 But, above all, he did not know such a word as 
 Despair. Even two months after the Battle of the 
 Nile, he wrote to the Directory that the colony could 
 be held, that India might be threatened from Egypt, 
 that if the Turks meant to join the enemy they must 
 be fought or compelled to make peace, and the 
 English must be drawn away from Egypt by % an 
 attack on their own island. And even the idea of 
 reaching India by sea was not altogether chimerical. 
 England had hardly any warships in the Red Sea and 
 on the Indian Ocean, and not only Napoleon and his 
 Government, but their opponents, also took serious 
 account of this view. Nelson, indeed, more than once 
 expressed the greatest anxiety on the subject. "An 
 enterprising enemy," he wrote on the 29th of June to 
 
158 NAPOLEON 
 
 Lord St. Vincent, " if he had an understanding with 
 the Pasha of Egypt and Tippoo Sahib, might easily 
 get a fleet from Suez to the Malabar Coast, and this 
 would be a most serious danger for England's Indian 
 possessions." But for this Napoleon must first have 
 secure possession of Egypt. So far as the military 
 point of view went, and as against the Mamelukes,' 
 this was quickly obtained. Before the end of the 
 autumn, General Desaix had cleared the country as 
 far as the First Cataract of its former oppressors. 
 Napoleon hoped to gain over the Arabs and Copts, 
 and even the Turks in Egypt, by respecting their 
 property and religion, and maintaining their laws. 
 A divan of native sheikhs acting as the supreme 
 council at Cairo, with others in the provinces, acting 
 of course under the control of French agents, had the 
 care of the administration of the country, the collec- 
 tion of the taxes, and the relations between the 
 population and the troops. Natives were engaged 
 for the police, and Turks, Copts, and even blacks, 
 enlisted for the army. How seriously Napoleon took 
 his plans for the colony is shown by his creation of a 
 local Institute, for which he had taken the savants 
 with him. Monge was at the head of it as president, 
 and he himself was vice-president. Everyone knows 
 how important for the rediscovery of ancient Egypt 
 the studies thus begun have been. But all the works 
 of peace must give way to the necessities entailed by 
 war. Taxation, the requisitioning of horses, and the 
 enforcement of disarmament, began to create excite- 
 ment and hostility among the people, and presently 
 reports were spread about the country that the Sultan 
 had proclaimed the Holy War, and that his ships and 
 his armies were at hand. In October there was sud- 
 
IN THE EAST 159 
 
 denly a rising of the people in Cairo. In all parts of 
 the country French posts were attacked. English 
 ships opened fire upon Alexandria and Aboukir. 
 Napoleon, in the face of these events, had no other 
 resource but the most fearful severity. At the outset 
 the grape-shot from his guns stood him in as good 
 stead against the people of Cairo as it had against the 
 Parisians in Vendemiaire ; then in the city and the 
 provinces sanguinary executions day after day gradu- 
 ally imposed peace upon the conquered people. It 
 was the method " by which," as Napoleon wrote, 
 "these people were to be made to obey, for with 
 them to obey is the same thing as to fear." He had 
 taken care not to destroy the Terrorist reputation 
 that had gone before him. But now he insisted on 
 it, as if he had been accustomed to it from the very 
 outset. " Make known to the people," he said to the 
 Mullahs of Cairo, in the style of the Koran, and with 
 the tone of the prophet, " that he who wantonly sets 
 himself against me shall find salvation neither in this 
 world nor in the next. Is anyone so blind as not to 
 see that Destiny guides all my steps ? Or so faithless 
 as to doubt that everything in the Universe is subject 
 to Destiny ? . . . I could demand a reckoning for 
 the most secret thoughts of each one, for I know 
 everything, even those things about which ye have 
 always been silent. But the day will come when it 
 will be plain to everyone that I follow the bidding of 
 the Highest, and that no human efforts can do any- 
 thing against me." 
 
 Meanwhile the danger was drawing nigh of which 
 rumour had spoken in October. Towards the end of 
 December Napoleon was at Suez, investigating the 
 traces of the ancient canal, when he was informed 
 
i6o NAPOLEON 
 
 that Turkish troops had seized the fort of El Arish 
 on the Syrian frontier. He dare not await the attack 
 in a country still simmering with revolt. He must 
 anticipate it. At the head of four divisions, in all 
 s, 13,000 men, he set out at the beginning of February 
 (1799). El Arish was quickly taken, and Gaza 
 also. After a more stubborn resistance he stormed 
 Jaffa, against which the abomination of desolation 
 was decreed. It was there that 3000 of the enemy, 
 after they had laid down their arms, were shot on 
 the seashore. It is one of the most awful deeds in 
 the history of war. It may have been because there 
 was no means of feeding the prisoners ; or because 
 they were the former garrison of El Arish, who, 
 although they had been released there, had neverthe- 
 less taken part in the fighting at Jaffa and were now 
 overtaken by vengeance for this action of theirs ; or, 
 what seems very possible, it may have been because 
 the conqueror merely wished by this bloodshed again 
 to spread the terror of his name on a grand scale. It 
 was as if he meant to contend with his next antagonist 
 Djezzar Pasha for his nickname, given to him for his 
 cruelties (Djezzar means " butcher "). All the same he 
 had made a miscalculation. On the 18th of March 
 he arrived before St. Jean d'Acre, the ancient Akkon, 
 the residence of the Pasha. But here he met with 
 a resistance that no effort of his could break down, 
 and such as he could hardly have anticipated. For 
 beside the Turks he saw the English in the fortress. 
 Sir Sidney Smith, the commodore of the English 
 squadron in Syrian waters, had come to the help of 
 the besieged and had reinforced them with heavy 
 artillery and with his officers and men. An attempt 
 to relieve the place by land was beaten off, a large 
 
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, FIRST CONSUL. 
 From a painting by F. Gerard. Photo byiLdvy et ses Fils. 
 
 p. 1 60. 
 
IN THE EAST 161 
 
 Turkish army being destroyed near Mount Thabor. 
 But the fortress itself defied every attack, thanks in no 
 small degree to the talent and self-devotion of a French 
 emigre officer, who had come with Sidney Smith. It 
 was the same De Philipeaux whose acquaintance we 
 made as one of Napoleon's competitors at the Military 
 School at Paris. When on the 16th of May a last 
 desperate attempt to storm the place failed, like many 
 that had preceded it, Napoleon saw himself compelled 
 to raise the siege and begin a retreat. Thousands of 
 his best were left behind buried in the trenches and 
 in the galleries of the mines, and probably still more 
 were carried off by fever following wounds and by 
 pestilence in the hospitals. 
 
 Later, Napoleon said that Acre had changed his 
 destiny, and he plainly meant that its capture would 
 have not only secured him the command of Syria, 
 but also opened for him the way to Constantinople. 
 These were fancies that may very well have excited 
 his imagination at the time, for in fact the Directory 
 expected something of the kind from him. While he 
 was still before Acre he had received a letter from 
 them in which the alternative of an advance upon 
 Constantinople or against India was discussed, and as 
 to the latter possibility he himself had entered into 
 some negotiations with the Shah of Persia. But he 
 was not thinking seriously of such things at the time. 
 There are letters of his dated in April, addressed 
 to the generals commanding in Egypt, which clearly 
 contemplate a return thither, after capturing Acre. 
 And now he must carry out this return march as 
 a leader who had suffered defeat, under the burning 
 sun of Syria, surrounded and harassed by the enemy's 
 horsemen, and through a country which during the 
 
1 62 NAPOLEON 
 
 advance his own army had reduced by fire and pillage 
 to the condition of a desert. And after that there 
 would be nine whole days of marching across a wilder- 
 ness of sand. It was thus the middle of June before 
 he arrived at his Egyptian capital with his troops 
 decimated by bullets and disease, ragged, and utterly 
 exhausted. He was hardly there when tidings came 
 of new enemies. They were the Turks and Mame- 
 lukes again by land and English and Turkish ships by 
 sea. On the 12th of July a strong Turkish army, con- 
 voyed by Sir Sidney Smith, appeared in the roadstead 
 of Aboukir and disembarked and entrenched itself 
 there on a peninsula, which, protected on both sides by 
 the sea, was only accessible from the land by a narrow 
 pass. On the 25th of July Napoleon, who knew 
 not what hesitation meant, directed an attack with all 
 his available forces against the line of redoubts that 
 had been thrown up to cover the hostile camp from 
 sea to sea. The Turks could not stand against the 
 furious onset of the French, who were here fighting 
 for very existence. The left and right wings were 
 stormed, and then the centre attacked by Murat with 
 a wild charge of horsemen, and the Turks were sur- 
 rounded and driven into the sea on which they had 
 counted for protection. It was one of the most 
 brilliant and also one of the most sanguinary days in 
 all our hero's campaigns. Just so, in the past, on 
 another point of the North African coast, the Penin- 
 sula of Thapsus, Caesar had destroyed his enemies and 
 driven them into the sea. Six thousand of the Turks 
 fell under the French bullets or were drowned in the 
 waves, which here for once seemed to be really 
 Napoleon's allies. Four thousand laid down their 
 arms. Not a man escaped. 
 
IN THE EAST 163 
 
 Napoleon was very imperfectly informed as to what 
 was happening in Europe. Only some scanty news 
 had reached him either by sea, or by land by way of 
 Tunis and Tripoli. He put himself in communi- 
 cation with Sidney Smith, who from his ships had 
 witnessed the terrible spectacle. The Commodore 
 said that he might tell him he had heard from Nelson 
 that the French Government had decided to recall 
 Napoleon and his army. He also handed him 
 newspapers which contained reports of the earlier 
 defeats of Jourdan in Germany and Scherer in Italy, 
 and asked him to test the information. Then he 
 sailed away from the coast for Cyprus, to obtain a 
 supply of fresh water for his ships, which Napoleon 
 would not allow him to get in Egypt. The 
 Commodore probably thought that either his oppo- 
 nent would not risk putting to sea, or that if he did 
 he could come up with him and capture him. But 
 he did not know his man. 
 
 We have seen that Napoleon even before he started 
 for Egypt, had set his mind on getting back to 
 Europe as early as the autumn of 1798, and this 
 with a view to making the direct attack on England. 
 Such plans were not to be thought of after the 
 Battle of the Nile ; he had perforce to think only 
 of holding possession of Egypt. But he had never 
 quite given up the idea of returning home, nor had 
 the Directory itself at any time thought of restricting 
 his full liberty of action in this respect. In October, 
 and again in February, immediately before his foray 
 into Syria, he had written to his Government on the 
 subject, and in each case in connection with the 
 possibility or the imminence of an outbreak of war 
 on the Continent. In the instructions dated the 26th 
 
1 64 NAPOLEON 
 
 of May, and referred to in Sidney Smith's information, 
 the project in view was indeed the return of the 
 whole expedition. Admiral Bruix, who was then on 
 the Genoese coast, was to effect a junction with the 
 Spanish fleet, seek out and defeat the English 
 squadron, which was now reduced in strength, and 
 then bring back Napoleon and his army to Europe. 
 But even in this project the Directory had left it to 
 Napoleon's discretion whether a portion of the 
 troops might remain in Egypt, provided he could 
 answer for their security, and they had expressly 
 indicated as their most earnest desire to see him at 
 the head of the Republican armies. In any case he 
 could say to himself that if he decided to come back 
 without the army, he would be acting neither against 
 nor without the orders of his Government. He did 
 not indeed yet know the whole extent of the defeats 
 which the Republic was just then suffering, — for 
 these were the days of Novi * — the complete change 
 of the whole position and its hopelessness. All this 
 he only learned after his return. 
 
 We see now clearly how little real ground there 
 was for the slander which his enemies soon enough 
 put into circulation, and which has since been repeated 
 a thousand times, and developed into the most wonder- 
 ful theories and accusations, namely the story that 
 he basely deserted his comrades, and acted against the 
 orders of the Directory, with no other inducement 
 than the hope of securing his own advantage, pro- 
 tecting his private interest, and taking advantage of 
 the defeat and disorganisation of the country to obtain 
 
 1 Translator s note. — The battle of Novi was fought on the 1 5 th of 
 August, 1 799, within three weeks of Napoleon's interview with Sidney 
 Smith. 
 
IN THE EAST 165 
 
 power and even the crown itself. He might have 
 truly said to himself that even for Egypt safety could 
 only be found by his coming to the help of the totter- 
 ing State. The moment it was clear to him that the 
 colony, like a fortress left without hope of relief from 
 outside, must sooner or later be lost, his return to 
 Europe was a necessity. For it was now only on the 
 Continent that the victory could be won which the 
 Battle of the Nile made impossible on the sea. 
 
 It is easy to see why he did not let the army know 
 of his decision until he had acted upon it. But it is 
 not so easy to explain why his successor in command, 
 General Kleber, was only informed of the task en- 
 trusted to him after his chief had already departed ; 
 and one can readily imagine the depression of spirit 
 in which he thereupon reported to the Directory that 
 the situation was a miserable one. As a matter of fact, as 
 Kleber himself soon showed by his victory at Heliopolis, 1 
 the state of affairs was not so desperate, and, as Napoleon 
 had said at an earlier date, the colony was tenable. 
 Even the dagger of the fanatic who slew Kleber did 
 not seriously affect French rule in Egypt. Napoleon 
 had actually already re-established peace on the 
 Continent when in September, 1801, the country fell 
 into the hands of England. Granted that Napoleon 
 fought for his own interests ; but just then his 
 interests were those of France. Granted that it was 
 his ambition to obtain power in France and to have 
 
 1 Translator's note. — In March, 1800, the Turkish Grand Vizier 
 entered Egypt with 60,000 men, advanced on Cairo and entrenched 
 himself at Matariya (Heliopolis), with his right on the Nile and 
 his left in the desert. Kleber attacked him on the 20th of March, 
 1800, with a much smaller force, stormed the camp, and completely 
 broke up the Turkish army. The Vizier retreated into Syria with a 
 mere remnant of it. 
 
1 66 NAPOLEON 
 
 the decisive direction of affairs in his hands ; but he 
 might say that it was his work that had been 
 destroyed, and that he was the man who could restore 
 what the incapacity of others had brought to ruin. 
 
 On the night of the 22nd of August he set sail from 
 Alexandria. With him in two frigates and a couple 
 of other vessels there were some two hundred of his 
 men, his friends Bourrienne and Lavalette, Generals 
 Lannes, Marmont, Berthier, Murat, and Andreossy, 
 and his colleagues of the Institute, Monge and Ber- 
 thollet. The voyage was long delayed by bad weather, 
 for they could not wait for the favourable autumn 
 winds. In three weeks they were only abreast of 
 Tunis. In the night with all their lights covered 
 they succeeded in slipping past the cruisers that 
 Nelson, who was lying at anchor at Syracuse with- 
 out suspicion of the daring adventure, had sent to 
 watch the passage between Cape Bon and Malta. 
 Bearing round to the west of Sicily, the little squadron, 
 now helped by fair winds, sailed into the harbour of 
 Ajaccio on the 30th of September. It was thus that 
 Napoleon saw once more his native city. He had been 
 forced to leave it six years before amid the execrations 
 of his fellow-countrymen, a fugitive and an exile. 
 Now he was surrounded by the rejoicings of his 
 fellow-citizens, whom his victories had brought back 
 to the rule of France, but who nevertheless greeted 
 him on his return as their national hero, the reviver 
 of the glory of Corsica. The sight of the home that 
 he had once so dearly loved, the meeting once more 
 with relatives and friends, moved him very deeply, as 
 an eye-witness tells us. Amongst the crowd that, 
 heedless of the quarantine ordained through fear of 
 the eastern plague, pressed into the boats and came 
 
IN THE EAST 167 
 
 off to the ships, there was a woman of the people, 
 who, waving her hand excitedly, called out to him, 
 " Caro figlio, caro figlio ! " and the answer, " Maare, 
 madre ! " came back from the deck of the frigate. It 
 was the old nurse of the hero who thus greeted him. 
 Later he loaded her and her people with benefits, and 
 even at St. Helena he spoke of the pleasure given 
 him by her fidelity. 
 
 At Ajaccio Napoleon heard of the latest disasters 
 on the battlefields of Italy, and the hopeless disorder 
 in the country itself. If, as is said, he had thought 
 during the voyage of hurrying at once to the scene 
 of his former victories, his one thought now was to 
 get to Paris, the centre of the crisis. The weather, 
 which detained him for eight days in port, had hardly 
 become fair again, when he set sail for Toulon. It 
 was a farewell for ever to his native city. First on 
 his voyage to Elba and again on his last voyage to 
 France, the emperor was able again to send a far-off 
 greeting to the hills of Corsica. And now his enter- 
 prise was within a hair's-breadth of disaster. An 
 English squadron cruising in the Gulf of Lions caught 
 sight of the French sailing ships, and at once went in 
 chase of them. The French captain lost heart, and 
 wanted to turn back to Ajaccio. But for Napoleon 
 there was no backward way. As on the African 
 coast, so now he saw only the end on which he had 
 fixed his eyes. He was ready if need be to go off in 
 a boat and try to land that way. Meanwhile, he 
 ordered the course to be set to the north-east, suc- 
 ceeded in misleading the pursuit as to the direction of 
 the voyage, and on the morning of the 9th of October 
 reached safety and the shore at St. Raphael in the 
 bay of Frejus. The delight with which he was wel- 
 
1 68 NAPOLEON 
 
 corned in Provence, which had been almost like his 
 own country to him, and whose sons had shared his 
 victories in Italy, was almost greater than that of his 
 Corsican fellow-countrymen. Here, too, no one paid 
 any heed to the quarantine. All crowded to see the 
 returning soldier, to greet the chief who could save 
 them from invasion. In Aix, where he went on the' 
 same day, new instructions from the Directory reached 
 him. They were written under the supposition that 
 he was still in Egypt. They suggested or at least 
 gave permission for him to arrange a capitulation, 
 but at the same time they conferred on him full 
 powers for any military or political measures that his 
 genius and the circumstances of the case might sug- 
 gest to him, with a view to expediting and securing 
 his return. In his reply he was able to tell them 
 of the triumph of Aboukir, and assure them that 
 Egypt was actually for the moment freed from all 
 hostile pressure, a name of disaster changed into a 
 name of victory, and the cypress wreath covered with 
 laurels. 1 And now all along the road he travelled 
 there was the same spectacle ; a wild outburst of 
 excitement wherever he came. No one asked why 
 he had forsaken Egypt and abandoned his com- 
 rades to their fate, not even those who feared 
 him, or envious rivals like the Directors and the 
 Ministers. All opposition, all party spirit, dis- 
 appeared in the one feeling : the Victor, the Peace- 
 bringer, the Messiah had come. 
 
 1 Translator's note. — To understand the allusion it must be remem- 
 bered that in France what we call the " Battle of the Nile " is known 
 as the " Battle of Aboukir." Napoleon was able to report a victory- 
 won on the shores of the bay that had witnessed the destruction of the 
 French fleet. 
 
IN THE EAST 169 
 
 On the morning of the 24th of Vendemiaire (October 
 1 6th), the carriage in which Napoleon travelled to 
 Paris stopped before the house in the Rue de la 
 Victoire, in which Josephine had so long been 
 patiently waiting for him. As Napoleon already 
 knew from the letters of his brother Joseph, and 
 communications which he and Lucien had made to 
 him during the journey to Paris (for they had 
 hurried to meet him on the way), Josephine during 
 his absence had not improved on the reputation of 
 her earlier days. He did not find her at home, for 
 she too had gone to meet him, but had missed him, 
 as he took a different road from what she expected. 
 When she returned, she found the door closed, and 
 had to wait a long time till her angry husband opened 
 it. But the time was not one for tragic scenes. 
 His aims in politics absolutely forbade him to make 
 his domestic troubles public property, and the tears 
 of the frail beauty, who called all her arts to her 
 aid to appease his sense of injury, finally obtained 
 what no adversary could have accomplished, the 
 submission of the hero, or at least his forgiveness. 
 Henceforth, it seems, Napoleon had never again any 
 reason for jealousy. His position became too 
 important for Josephine to venture to turn aside 
 from the path of virtue. She had rather, on her 
 own part, to overlook much in the conduct of her 
 lord and master, and with growing anxiety strove to 
 maintain her place as the first lady in France, until 
 the day when political interests forced the childless 
 woman to give place to the daughter of an emperor. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 SOLE RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 
 
 "^HE moderation and patience which Napoleon 
 had manifested towards the lady of his heart, he 
 next showed with regard to those who held political 
 power in their hands. At the same time he adopted 
 once again the line of conduct by which he had 
 surprised the Parisians and excited their curiosity, 
 after his return from Italy. As he had done then, he 
 paid his first visit to his colleagues of the Institute. 
 Accompanied by Monge and Berthollet he appeared 
 at their meeting on the ist of Brumaire, and 
 modestly took his place in the midst of his confreres. 
 On the 5th he came again and delivered an address 
 on the scientific results of his expedition and the 
 monuments of ancient Egypt, as well as on the Suez 
 Canal, the traces of the ancient waterway, and the 
 plans for restoring it. At once the savants threw all 
 their influence into the scale on the side of their 
 illustrious colleague. In civilian dress, but never- 
 theless wearing a Turkish sabre, he waited on the 
 members of the Directory and the Ministry. Every- 
 where he collected information, listened, threw out, 
 it might be, a half- significant word, but never 
 committed himself, or fully laid bare to anyone what 
 he had in mind. He deliberately sought to avoid 
 giving the impression that he wished to have any 
 
 170 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 171 
 
 influence in the Government. When at a reception 
 at the house of Madame Reinhard, the wife of the 
 Minister of Foreign Affairs, someone asked him to 
 use his good offices for him with Barras, he simply- 
 put an end to his importunities with the words : 
 " Wherever I am, either I command, or I am silent." 
 No party could claim him as its own, and he did not 
 acknowledge that he belonged to any, and who had a 
 better right than he had to act thus ? Since he had 
 cast in his lot with France, he had always kept 
 himself on the side of that power sprung from the 
 bosom of the Revolution, the central force, which, 
 forming itself in the midst of contending parties, 
 recognised and accepted from each what was in 
 keeping with it, but cast forth whatever was opposed 
 to it, and bowed them all to its will. 
 
 But while he was thus stalking about in the 
 costume of Cincinnatus, it was clearer to no one than 
 to himself that the day was come on which he must 
 assume the part of Dion, and it was made easy 
 enough for him. There was no party that had not 
 counted on him, and each one of them was full of 
 eagerness to attach him to itself and push him 
 forward. He had, as he said long after at St. 
 Helena, become the hinge on which conspiracies 
 turned, with which every party was busy, and which 
 all ran upon the overthrow of the existing constitution 
 and the altering of a condition of public affairs that 
 had become intolerable. The necessity of a new 
 change in the State was obvious. Thus only, to use 
 his own expression, could the Revolution " march 
 on." Thus only could its work be advanced, its 
 power assured, and peace won with victories that 
 would guarantee it. But, as has been already 
 
172 NAPOLEON 
 
 remarked, he had from the first no other idea than 
 this, and every step he took was directed to this end. 
 Almost as if it were an amusing sport, and with all 
 the delight of an artist in his work, this master of 
 intrigue spun the threads, laid out the lures, by 
 which he hoped to draw into his toils enemies and 
 friends, rivals and comrades, but above all the 
 masses, the millions. Thus for instance he used 
 Josephine's talents, which he knew all too well, in 
 order to entrap Gohier, the President of the Directory, 
 perhaps the most stubborn of his adversaries. With 
 a view to luring him away from his house on the 
 decisive day, she was to invite him to dejeuner that 
 morning, and he was one of her most devoted 
 admirers. However, the scheme was wrecked by the 
 suspicions of the zealous Jacobin, and the invitation 
 brought, not Gohier, but his wife, to the house in the 
 Rue de la Victoire. That Josephine herself was not 
 initiated into the plot did no harm ; on the contrary, 
 she was able to play her part all the more freely. 
 
 As to the party which he was to choose, Napoleon 
 was hardly long in doubt. The Thermidorians, 
 whose political tendencies survived in the Jacobins of 
 the day, had always been hostile to him, even if he 
 could now have joined them. The men for him 
 were those who were striving for the establishment of 
 order without renouncing the principles of the Revo- 
 lution. These were at the moment the party of 
 Sieves, the patriarch of the Revolution, who was all 
 but supreme in the Council of the Elders, and could 
 hope for a majority in the Lower Chamber, to such 
 an extent was the opinion of the nation and the army 
 overwhelmingly on his side. A striking proof of this 
 was given a few days after Napoleon's return, on the 
 
SIEYES. 
 
 From an engraving. 
 
 P- 172. 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 173 
 
 occasion of the re-election of the presidents and 
 officials of both chambers, who were all selected in 
 accordance with the views of Sieves. It was especially 
 an advantage that Lucien, Napoleon's brother, was 
 chosen President of the Five Hundred (the lower 
 or " younger " Chamber). He had been gradually 
 drawn from the fiery Jacobinism of his earlier years 
 into more moderate courses, and was one of the 
 trusted adherents of Sieyes. Thus he was the ready- 
 made intermediary between his brother and the leader 
 of his party. Sieyes had had the prospect of a change 
 in the Constitution in his mind for months, and had 
 already sketched out his plan in all its details. His 
 leading idea was to strengthen the executive. One 
 cannot be quite sure what position he intended for 
 the Legislature, and what precisely was to be its 
 standing between the nation and the Government in 
 the new order of things, or whether he had already 
 made a forecast of the principles carried out in the 
 Constitution of Brumaire, which was in great part 
 his work. However, it would seem that as early as 
 the summer he had planned the procedure in the 
 general form that was carried out on the 18th and 
 19th of Brumaire. According to this plan, as the 
 latest historian of the great crisis strikingly remarks, 
 the men actually in power were to be made to carry 
 out their self-annihilation with their own hands, and 
 to offer up a sacrifice of the Constitution of the Year 
 III by almost constitutional methods. Acting on the 
 terms of three articles of the Constitution, that gave 
 the Council of the Elders the power of removing the 
 meeting-place of the Legislature from the capital in 
 times of serious danger, this Chamber, which could 
 be relied on, was to pass a resolution to this effect, 
 
174 NAPOLEON 
 
 and thus deprive the Jacobins of the support of the 
 men of the Parisian Faubourgs. It was hoped thus 
 to force the Five Hundred also to accept the pro- 
 posals which Sieves and his partisans would bring 
 forward. 
 
 It was a plan that showed how completely France 
 had changed. Till now all the critical days of the 
 Revolution had been decided in the capital itself ; 
 in the days of the full tide of the Revolution by 
 revolt, and since the day of Prairial by armed forces 
 acting against the mob — but always on the pavements 
 of Paris. Every attempt made by the King's 
 government and by all those who had tried to stop 
 the destructive course of the Revolution, to remove 
 the executive and the National Assembly outside the 
 barriers of the Capital, had utterly failed. It was a 
 proof of the strength which the new order of things 
 had gained in France, that now one of the patriarchs 
 of the Revolution, nay he who had almost begun it, 
 should take this risk and hope thus to gain his ends by 
 almost legal methods and without having recourse to 
 violence. All the same, it could not be carried 
 through without a show of force. The power on 
 which Sieves and his party could rely must at least 
 be in evidence. For success they could not dispense 
 with the support of some general who had the army 
 behind him. In the summer, Sieves had thought of 
 Joubert for this part, and it was with this view he 
 was sent against Suvaroff; victory over the enemies 
 of France was to give the young and brilliant general 
 the prestige he was to use against opponents at home. 
 After Novi, Sieyes counted on Macdonald, but he 
 despised the part or would not take the risks. 
 Finally, as late as October, Sieyes was thinking of 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 175 
 
 making the attempt with Moreau, who had come 
 back from the Army of the Rhine, and was now 
 very friendly to him. But then came tidings of 
 Napoleon's return, and once he was in France all 
 thought of employing any other sword must be 
 abandoned. The expression " II est trop tard," used 
 by Sieves with reference to Moreau, when he heard 
 of Napoleon's landing near Frejus (by the way, the 
 Abbe's own birthplace), showed how clear was his 
 view of the situation, and that henceforth he would 
 count only on Napoleon, though probably not with- 
 out a certain amount of anxiety. Yet it was some 
 time before they both came to an understanding. It 
 is true Napoleon heard of Sieyes's views from his 
 brother almost immediately, expressed his general 
 approval of them, and told Lucien to express 
 his thanks for the confidence reposed in him. 
 He thought Sieyes was right ; France needed a 
 government of concentrated strength ; three Consuls 
 would be better than five Directors ; thus he himself 
 had set up three Consuls at Genoa, and wanted to 
 have only three as the number of the Directors at 
 Milan. He expressed himself also as opposed to the 
 Law of Hostages and the forced loan. "I side," he 
 said, "with the Council of the Elders. I am ready 
 to serve as a shield for the wise men of the Republic 
 against the revolt of the Faubourgs, just as I served 
 as a shield for the Convention against the revolt of 
 the Royalist Sections in Vendemiaire." But then he 
 declined to make any nearer approach, and would 
 pledge himself to nothing definite until he had 
 explored the ground. So he paid his formal visit to 
 Sieyes, as well as to the other Directors, but in public 
 he held aloof from him, and even arranged that at a 
 
176 NAPOLEON 
 
 dinner given by the Director Gohier, Josephine, in 
 friendly conversation with the lady of the house, 
 should complain that Sieves also had been invited, for 
 she knew that her husband could not bear him. 
 Napoleon said to himself that he could always have 
 the Abbe on his side, merely by acting himself with 
 a certain reserve, and being content for a while to be 
 overshadowed by the other's dignity as a Director 
 and the leader of a party. He even thought it well 
 to keep up relations with the opponents of Sieyes, 
 especially with Barras, his old friend and protector. 
 It is possible that, as Barras himself relates, in order 
 to gain his confidence, Napoleon, amongst other 
 matters, complained to him of his disillusions regard- 
 ing Josephine. He had no difficulty in coming to an 
 understanding with Moreau, possibly because he 
 allowed him to suppose that he would have some 
 prospect of commanding the army, in case he himself 
 came into power. But he also found means to 
 arrive at an agreement to some extent with the 
 Jacobin generals, Jourdan, Augereau and Bernadotte. 
 Shortly before the coup d'etat^ he obtained from 
 Jourdan a promise of neutrality. Augereau, who 
 was always a mere loud talker, was secured without 
 trouble. The most doubtful was Bernadotte, who 
 had shortly before been Minister of War, and had 
 for some time regarded himself as a rival of Napoleon. 
 But he too was not a man of initiative ; and above 
 all, these generals, though having their groups of 
 supporters, had not any of the troops at their 
 back. They were little more than leaders of parties 
 in the Chambers. A pronunciamento, a split in the 
 army, or even in the Paris garrison, was not to be 
 thought of. Not only the troops, but their officers 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 177 
 
 also, were at Napoleon's beck, and above all Lefebvre, 
 who commanded the military division of Paris, 
 Admiral Bruix, the Minister of Marine, Colonel 
 Sebastiani, a Corsican in command of the 9th 
 Dragoons, who had fought in Italy ; and his 
 comrades in arms Lannes, Berthier, Macdonald, 
 Serrurier, who since the campaigns of Italy and 
 Egypt had linked their fortune with Napoleon's. In 
 the Ministry and in the Chambers too he found 
 friends and helpers. Above all there were Talleyrand, 
 on whom he at once counted in the highest degree, 
 and who came to his aid more thoroughly than any- 
 one else ; and Fouche, whose influence as Minister 
 of Police and whose talents as a conspirator, made 
 him at once indispensable and dangerous. Napoleon 
 therefore at the outset initiated him gradually into 
 his secrets, but to the last did not take him fully 
 into his confidence, while Fouche on his side, through 
 old inclinations and habits, took care to keep a little 
 back door open for retreat. Then there were 
 Roederer, Boulay de la Meurthe, Cambaceres, the 
 Minister of Justice, and other members of the centre 
 party. The less fully he showed his hand, the more 
 plain were others with him. The nearer the crisis 
 came, the greater were the numbers of partisans on 
 his side, deserters to his cause, or at least neutrals. 
 When he stepped to the front, power would be 
 beckoning at his side, and whoever hoped to secure 
 his own interests must make haste to fall into the 
 ranks behind him. Napoleon alone could afford to 
 wait. 
 
 A first indication of the direction in which the 
 General would shape his course was contained in an 
 inspired note in the newspapers of the 2nd of Bru- 
 
178 NAPOLEON 
 
 maire, on a visit he had paid to the Director Sieves 
 and his adherent the Director Ducos. After this, 
 Napoleon again took refuge in silence, so far as 
 Sieves was concerned, and it was not until the 
 evening of the ioth of Brumaire, fourteen days 
 after his return, that they both met for a con- 
 ference at Lucien's house. It lasted only an hour, ■ 
 but it was decisive for the business in hand. 
 Napoleon did almost all the talking. Sieves had 
 begun to explain his plan for the new Constitution. 
 The General at once interrupted him ; he knew all 
 that through his brother ; clearly Sieyes could not 
 think of giving France a ready-made Constitution, 
 without its being discussed in detail, article by article ; 
 now this could not be the work of a moment, and 
 they had no time to waste. It would be necessary to 
 have a provisional government, which would itself 
 assume power on the day of the change, and a Legis- 
 lative Commission, which would draw up the future 
 Constitution and submit it to a popular vote. He 
 approved of the transfer of the Chambers to St. 
 Cloud, declared himself ready to become a member of 
 the provisional government, but gave no pledge for 
 the future. Indeed, if we may rely on Lucien's 
 account of the conference, he further left Sieyes in 
 doubt whether, on the whole, he would like to be a 
 member of the definite government, or be content 
 with the command of one of the armies. We may 
 take it that he acted as he had done in his negotia- 
 tions with the Italians and the Austrians. These at 
 first had also been merely "provisional," — but secured 
 the advantages won by his sword. The main point 
 was to obtain the control of the Government ; Sieyes 
 himself must grant this ; and the Abbe's reforms and 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 179 
 
 the strengthening of the executive would be a later 
 result. So long as the executive was in the hands of 
 parties and the object of debates in the Chambers, 
 Bonaparte himself, with all his power, had nothing 
 solid to rely on, and ran the risk of failure, or of 
 being subjected to a government over which he would 
 have no influence. He provided against all this by- 
 putting forward the alternative that either his proposal 
 of a provisional government should be accepted, or 
 they were no longer to count on him. As in his 
 battles, he directed all his energy to the winning of 
 the commanding point. Once he had the plenary 
 powers of the legislature in his hands, and its mem- 
 bers had, at the same time, compromised themselves, 
 he could reckon upon being sure of a decisive in- 
 fluence in the shaping of the new Constitution, and a 
 commission formed of members of both chambers, 
 and full of his own adherents, would not be danger- 
 ous. In a word, he had the logic of facts and power 
 on his side. Sieves was too acute to misunderstand 
 the situation. "The General," he said to Lucien after 
 Napoleon had left them, " seems to be just as much 
 at home here as on the battlefield. We must act on 
 his opinion. If he were to draw back, all would be 
 lost. Only his acceptance of the provisional consulate 
 will secure success." 
 
 The next days were devoted to preparations, 
 which took longer than had been anticipated. There 
 was not another meeting till after the state banquet 
 which both Chambers gave to Napoleon and Moreau 
 together on the 15th of Brumaire. The second 
 conference took place at night, and again at Lucien's 
 house. Sieves had already prepared everything with 
 his friends, and brought with him the draft of the 
 
i8o NAPOLEON 
 
 decrees of the Council of Elders, removing the legis- 
 lative body to St. Cloud, transferring the command of 
 the troops to Napoleon, and establishing the Consul- 
 ate in a provisional form. Napoleon agreed to every- 
 thing, and also to a proposal that instead of there being a 
 single Commission, the drawing up of the Constitu- 
 tion should be entrusted to two Commissions of 
 twenty-five members from each Chamber. He only 
 showed opposition on one point, namely a suggestion 
 that at St. Cloud a number of the more dangerous 
 Jacobins should be excluded from the sitting. That 
 he would not hear of this being done was not 
 merely a sign of his consciousness of his own power, 
 but it also showed the idea he had formed of his 
 mission and of the inner tendency of his policy. 
 He did not want to be merely a man of a party, but 
 the man for France. He counted on bringing even 
 the Jacobins, as well as their opponents, to serve the 
 State, as soon as he had it under his control. 
 
 And so the tragi-comedy of the 1 8th of Brumaire 
 (November 9th) was played out nearly as the stage 
 managers had arranged it. Everything went like 
 clockwork. At seven in the morning the Council 
 of the Elders met in its assembly hall in the 
 Tuileries. The decree for the removal to St. Cloud 
 was accepted unanimously and without a debate, and 
 to Bonaparte was entrusted the carrying out of the 
 resolution. As a justification for it, it was alleged 
 that there was a conspiracy of the Revolutionary 
 party, against which the Republic must be safe- 
 guarded. Meanwhile, Napoleon was waiting at his 
 house with his generals and staff-officers, and 
 there the two Inspectors of the Chamber brought 
 him the news. Surrounded by a brilliant staff, and 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 181 
 
 with the commandant of Paris at his side, he rode 
 across the Place de la Concorde to the Tuileries, 
 greeted enthusiastically by the troops, and in a 
 friendly way by the crowd, who saluted him as the 
 " Liberator." It would be about half-past nine when 
 he entered the old palace of the kings. With his 
 officers he appeared before the representatives of the 
 nation to make the declaration which the resolution 
 of the Chamber required of him. The oath he took 
 was not to the existing Constitution. "You have 
 given the orders," he said, " which the welfare of the 
 State demands. Our arms will secure their execution. 
 We desire a Republic based upon true liberty, the 
 freedom of the citizen, and upon the sacred principles 
 of national representation. I swear it, in my own 
 name and in that of my comrades." Civil freedom, 
 prosperity at home, victory and peace, these were the 
 words with which he harangued the troops when he 
 reviewed them in the Tuileries gardens. Sieves and 
 Ducos had meanwhile come over from the Luxem- 
 bourg, the palace of the Directory. Barras, com- 
 pletely taken by surprise and neither capable of nor 
 inclined to make any resistance, had remained behind 
 there, and had merely sent his secretary, Bottot, with 
 a letter to the General. Bottot arrived during the 
 review. Napoleon took advantage of the occasion 
 to make his famous speech, which was addressed in 
 words of thunder partly to Bottot, partly to his 
 soldiers. He laid at the door of Barras and his 
 accomplices the defeats and internal troubles of their 
 native land and the deaths of a hundred thousand of 
 the comrades of his glory. Barras now saw that he 
 had lost the game ; and when about noon Talleyrand 
 and Bruix came and spread out before him a draft 
 
1 82 NAPOLEON 
 
 form of resignation, which they had drawn up during 
 the night, he signed it without a word of protest. 
 Gohier and Moulin were more difficult to deal with. 
 They took refuge in passive resistance, but had to 
 submit to be kept prisoners in their own palace. 
 Moreau did not disdain to make himself their prison- 
 warder. After all this, Bonaparte, when he returned 
 home in the evening, had good reason for the 
 expression which Bourrienne says he heard him use ; 
 " It did not go badly to-day ; we shall see something 
 more to-morrow." 
 
 Nevertheless, next day there came a moment that 
 threatened to unsettle everything. According to the 
 programme the Chambers had met at noon at St. 
 Cloud, the Elders in the Hall of Apollo, at the top 
 of a staircase in the right wing of the palace, the Five 
 Hundred in the Orangerie on the ground floor. 
 Their own guard surrounded the palace, but were in 
 their turn surrounded by the most reliable of the 
 troops of the line, under Sebastiani's command. 
 And now in both assemblies there arose very serious 
 complications. In the Council of the Elders a 
 number of members complained that on the day 
 before they had received no summons to attend. 
 Among the Five Hundred the Jacobins threw them- 
 selves at once into the conflict. They moved and 
 forced through a resolution that before the debates 
 began each of the members should take the oath to 
 the Constitution. There were cries of u Down with 
 the Dictators ! We are freemen here ! Bayonets do 
 not frighten us ! " Napoleon, who with his staff had 
 taken up his quarters in a room on the first floor, not 
 far from the hall where the Elders were assembled, 
 waited for a couple of hours. But as the uproar did 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 183 
 
 not cease and more and more alarming reports 
 reached him, he said, " There must be an end of this !" 
 and, accompanied by some officers, went into the 
 Chamber of the Elders. He evidently hoped to 
 produce an effect there by his appearance and his 
 words. Agitated, halting in his speech, suffering as 
 he was from nervous irritation, he protested against 
 the accusation that he wanted to play the part of a 
 Caesar or a Cromwell. He spoke of the dangers that 
 menaced all, of the Republic left without guidance, 
 and with only the Council of the Elders standing fast. 
 They must act. Let them speak ; he was there to 
 carry out their orders. " Let us save Liberty ! let us 
 save Equality ! " It was almost the same thing that 
 he had said to the Assembly the day before, and it 
 was in accord with his own designs. Again the word 
 that everyone had on his tongue was left out. But 
 a voice from among the assembled members supplied 
 it — " And the Constitution ! " someone called out to 
 the General. It was the watchword of conflict. It 
 was not possible to pretend not to have heard it, and 
 Napoleon had no idea of such a subterfuge. A 
 moment he paused and then broke out again : 
 "The Constitution? You yourselves have brought it 
 to naught. You violated it on the 18 th of 
 Fructidor, you violated it on the 22nd of Floreal and 
 on the 30th of Prairial ! No one regards it any 
 longer. I will speak out," and so he went on with his 
 invective ; he told how factious men had knocked 
 at his door, told him their terrible secrets, — those 
 accomplices in murder and pillage who longed to put 
 an end to all liberal ideas. Once more he urged the 
 Council of the Elders to action. Once more he 
 protested against his calumniators. " If I am a 
 
1 84 NAPOLEON 
 
 traitor, be ye all Brutuses. ... I declare that as soon 
 as this is ended, 1 will be no more in the Republic 
 than the arm that will keep standing what you have 
 set up." But now his opponents were no longer 
 silent. They called for names, and when Bonaparte 
 named Barras and Moulin, they demanded a commis- 
 sion of inquiry. In vain his friends tried to come to 
 the aid of the General, who felt that he was being 
 driven into a corner. He further entangled himself 
 in high-sounding phrases and generalities and finally 
 withdrew from the discussion, which was becoming 
 more and more angry, and left the hall. Without 
 much delay he now proceeded to the Orangerie 
 where the Five Hundred were debating, and this time, 
 there can hardly be a doubt, with the intention of 
 provoking a conflict, or with the feeling that it was 
 impending. There is an indication of this in the 
 escort he took with him, which included besides 
 Lefebvre, Murat and other officers, four grenadiers of 
 the Legislative Guard. In any case this was the 
 result of his action. What the Radicals had foreseen, 
 what they had so loudly protested against, they now 
 saw before their eyes, — the Dictatorship, the bayonets. 
 There was no choice for them ; they must submit or 
 make a struggle. They still had the advantage of 
 numbers. The grenadiers had halted at the door, 
 and the General, breaking away from his escort — as 
 if he were on the bridge of Areola — had advanced 
 towards the tribune. Suddenly he found himself 
 surrounded by his opponents. An indescribable scene 
 followed. With wild cries of "A has le dictateur / 
 A has le tyran ! Hors la lot ! " they rushed upon him. 
 Hustled, pressed upon, struck, beside himself and 
 almost fainting, he retreated towards the door, 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 185 
 
 where his comrades received him and escorted him 
 out. 
 
 " Hors la loi ! " 1 That death-bringing outcry of 
 the Revolution, which had like lightning hurled 
 Robespierre from the height of his power, rang 
 in the ears of the soldier, the victor of Vende- 
 miaire, the hero "whom the god of victory and 
 fortune accompanied," he in whom the nation had 
 hailed its deliverer. No words could more fully 
 show the utter hopelessness of the attack upon him. 
 The Jacobins might kill Napoleon if they meant 
 to make him harmless to them. But how would 
 that have helped them ? They would have cut off 
 the head of the hydra, and a hundred others would 
 have grown up in its stead. They had in fact 
 nothing to oppose to him, but their words and a 
 Constitution that was a worthless piece of paper, 
 which they themselves (nothing could be truer) had 
 so often torn to shreds. And the results of such a 
 victory ? Anarchy, the helplessness and disorgani- 
 sation of the State, to which the great conqueror 
 alone could guarantee order, unity, and peace. As 
 some of the resolutions proposed after Napoleon's 
 exit show, they still hoped to withdraw their guard, 
 the grenadiers, from the command of the Usurper, 
 and so to bring about a rupture between the two 
 bodies of troops surrounding them. As a matter of 
 fact the grenadiers did show some hesitation when 
 Napoleon came out into the courtyard, mounted a 
 horse, and riding through their ranks tried to excite 
 them and the soldiers of the line, by telling them of 
 the attack on him, of the daggers with which he had 
 been threatened. The account of the affair which 
 
 1 i.e. " Outlawry." 
 
1 86 NAPOLEON 
 
 Lucien gives in his Memoirs is however an exagger- 
 ation. Assailed by the same turbulent crowd, he had 
 meanwhile abandoned his post as President of the 
 Chamber, and appeared beside his brother, and he 
 says that it was his appearance on the scene and his 
 words that brought the waverers into line. His 
 authority as President may indeed have influenced the 
 Legislative Guard, and perhaps too the theatrical 
 conduct so often attributed to him later, his placing 
 a sword at his brother's breast and swearing like 
 Brutus to strike him down at once if he proved to be 
 a betrayer of Liberty. But assuredly what produced 
 more effect on the grenadiers than all the tirades of 
 the two brothers, or any other consideration, was the 
 pressure exercised on them by the troops of the line, 
 by whom they were surrounded, and who, urged on 
 by their officers, had no other thought but to avenge 
 the chief they loved and admired on those prating 
 fellows, the civilians. So now it was the appointed 
 guardians of the National Assembly themselves, who 
 with drums beating and in a closely formed column, 
 forced their way into the hall where it was in session. 
 Then there was soon an end of the debate. Protest- 
 ing and shouting, but without making the slightest 
 attempt at resistance, the representatives of the 
 nation, mingled with the public from the galleries, 
 went jumping out of the low windows into the 
 garden, which was already darkening with the 
 twilight of the November evening. 
 
 The play was over. The second act had not gone 
 exactly according to the plans of the stage managers, 
 but after all the result was not different from what 
 they had anticipated. After nightfall the Council 
 of the Elders, and a couple of dozen members of 
 
LUCIEN BONAPARTE. 
 From a painting bj- R. Lefevre at Versailles 
 
 
 
"" 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 187 
 
 the Five Hundred (who had remained behind or were 
 brought back, and who met under Lucien's presidency 
 on the very scene of their disaster), voted the decrees 
 according to the programme. The appointment of 
 Bonaparte and the two Directors, Sieves and Ducos, 
 as provisional Consuls, the nomination of the two 
 Commissions to draw up the Constitution, the 
 adjournment of the Chambers, the expulsion of sixty- 
 two members who had more openly compromised 
 themselves, the swearing in of Bonaparte and his two 
 colleagues — all was carried out without a hitch. And 
 while the troops marched back to the Paris which 
 had remained perfectly quiet — the grenadiers singing 
 the Revolutionary song Ca ira ! — Napoleon drew up a 
 proclamation to the nation, in which he described 
 the coup cC&tat as a victory of Liberal ideals, ensur- 
 ing their safety and preservation. Towards morning 
 he too went back to Paris with Sieves, Lucien, and 
 one of the generals in the carriage with him. As 
 he bade good-bye to his companions he said to them — 
 " Good morning ! We have been pulling down — we 
 must now build, and build solidly." 
 
 But things did not move so quickly as he perhaps 
 expected. It took five weeks before the main lines of 
 the Constitution were drafted, and carefully as the 
 Commissioners had been chosen, Napoleon had 
 enough to do to bring their opinions into agreement 
 with his own, or, when he could not succeed in this, 
 to thrust them aside. But at last he reached a result 
 that fitted in well enough with his own ideas and the 
 situation of affairs. He took much from the draft 
 
1 88 NAPOLEON 
 
 Constitution prepared by Sieyes, which served as the 
 basis of the discussions in both Commissions, as well 
 as from suggestions made either during the sittings, 
 or in more private meetings of his friends, by men 
 like Daunou, Boulay de la Meurthe, Roederer and 
 others. But all the same he would often completely 
 alter the sense of a proposed draft, and he stamped on 
 every article of the new Constitution the mark of his 
 own individuality. When complex debates arose, 
 and the Commissioners took too independent a view, 
 and seemed likely to drift away from the lines he had 
 marked out, he brusquely intervened and convened a 
 united meeting of both Commissions under his own 
 presidency in his salon at the Luxembourg Palace, 
 where he had gone to reside with his colleagues after 
 the coup d'itat. At once everything went as he wished. 
 All was finished in ten or twelve days, or nights — for 
 Napoleon would not rest, and kept hard at work while 
 the Commissioners were overcome with weariness, and 
 even when he himself became ill. At the close he 
 worked all alone with three or four of his most trusted 
 adherents. In a few hours he dictated the final draft 
 to Roederer, and laid it before the Commission in 
 such a way that they had now nothing to do but 
 submissively accept whatever was prescribed to them. 
 As we have seen, Napoleon had found himself in 
 agreement with Sieyes as to the idea of strengthening 
 the Executive, and bringing it into closer touch with 
 the national will. In fact, so far as ideals went, 
 everything was made to depend on the sovereignty 
 of the people, not merely through the Appel au peuple, 
 the Plebiscite, that was at the outset to give its 
 sanction to the Constitution, but also by the whole 
 organisation of the executive being penetrated with 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 189 
 
 the principles of democracy. The basis of Sieves' 
 proposal, which Napoleon adopted, was the drawing 
 up of a register of citizens that would almost extend 
 to universal suffrage. By the votes of these a 
 second list of so-called " Notables " was to be drawn 
 up, on which also the names of all local authorities 
 would find a place. These Notables would then 
 elect the departmental councils, and these would 
 choose five thousand so-called " Notables of the 
 Nation," the procedure being that they would come 
 together in groups of ten, and each group would 
 choose one as its elected representative. The Five 
 Thousand thus chosen formed the body, from amongst 
 whose members the representative assembly and the 
 central administration were to be selected. But they 
 themselves were to have no voice in the selection ; 
 a board with sovereign power over them, an irre- 
 movable highly salaried commission of eighty officials 
 was to have the right of choosing the national repre- 
 sentative assembly, without however, be it noted, 
 having power to go outside the circle of the five 
 thousand candidates. This board was the Consti- 
 tutional "Jury," the central organisation of the 
 whole scheme, the special embodiment of Sieyes' idea 
 that confidence must come from below, but power 
 from those in higher station. In the hands of the 
 Jury was thus placed the formation (one can hardly 
 call it the election) of both the Chambers, which 
 Sieyes had made a part of his system — the Tribunate 
 which was to draft and discuss proposed laws, and 
 the Corps Legislatif which was to pass or reject them 
 without debate. But the Jury did not form the 
 top of the pyramid. At its summit was a single 
 person, the Grand Elector, who was to have a salary 
 
i90 NAPOLEON 
 
 of six million francs, to be protected by his own 
 guards, to reside in the old palace of the kings at 
 Versailles, and to enjoy almost royal honours. It 
 was to be his business to elect two consuls, of whom 
 one would have in his department diplomatic relations, 
 the army and the navy, and the other the whole 
 internal administration of the country. Both were - 
 to have the right of choosing all their chief assistants 
 for their work from the list of Notables. There 
 were, therefore, as it was strikingly remarked, two 
 smaller pyramids inside the main pyramid, and 
 resting on the same base, but each self-contained and 
 having no direct connection with the other. Finally, 
 to take away from the Grand Elector, the consuls, 
 and all other prominent officials, any possibility of 
 abusing their powers, Sieves had also given his Jury 
 the right of "absorption," that is, they could as it 
 were " swallow up " any one of them by simply 
 transferring him to membership of their own body, 
 without being in any way called to account for such 
 action. 
 
 Taken altogether it was a work worthy of this 
 great artist in Constitutions and of his logical 
 powers. The pity was only that it could not come 
 to life, for it had no life in it, and seemed to have 
 been expressly constructed to keep in suspense any 
 power it could develop, and condemn it to inactivity 
 by a system of counterpoises fixed all round it. The 
 whole was a huge feat of juggling. And it was a 
 piece of stupidity, for this Constitution proposed to 
 fetter with the cobwebs of its paragraphs the strong 
 man to whom it owed its very existence. Its pur- 
 pose must be the same as his, to give scope for the 
 unimpeded development of his powers. Strong as 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 191 
 
 he was, he could not content himself either with the 
 Consulate for foreign or that for internal affairs, or 
 even with the post of Grand Elector, but only with 
 some arrangement that would place in his hands the 
 whole might of the State. He poured his open con- 
 tempt upon these "political metaphysics," on that 
 "royal lounger," that "fatted pig" (cochon d 'engrais) of 
 a Grand Elector. He substituted for this functionary 
 the exact opposite, a First Consul, in whom all was to 
 be energy and force, instead of a Grand Elector, who 
 would be a dull heavy mass that could create nothing 
 and only act as a check on others. The First Consul 
 — and that Napoleon himself would have the position 
 was so obvious that it was hardly open to discussion 
 — holding office for ten years, was to promulgate the 
 laws, appoint and dismiss at his pleasure the members 
 of the Council of State, the ministers, the ambassa- 
 dors, and other important agents abroad, the officers 
 of the army and navy, the members of local adminis- 
 trations. He was to appoint, without right of his 
 decision being revised, all the judges of the civil and 
 criminal courts, except the judges of the Court of 
 Appeal and the local magistracy. In other acts of the 
 Government the Second and Third Consuls were to 
 have a consultative voice, but the final decision rested 
 with the First Consul. A financial Budget was pro- 
 vided for, but the Government was to prepare and 
 propose it, and the legislative body was simply to 
 accept or reject it en bloc. It was settled that the 
 ministers were to countersign the official acts of their 
 departments, and be responsible for them ; but for 
 the senators, legislators, tribunes, consuls, and state- 
 councillors there was no such responsibility, and the 
 members of the Government could be brought before 
 
1 9 2 NAPOLEON 
 
 a court only in virtue of a resolution of the Council 
 of State. In a word, it was a Dictatorship, hardly- 
 masked by a few forms and formulas. The full 
 powers which the Convention had temporarily dele- 
 gated to the Committee of Public Safety were now 
 concentrated in the hands of the one man. 
 
 The instrument through which Napoleon hoped to 
 set this colossal power in action was the Council of 
 State, a group of experts depending immediately on 
 the First Consul, who were to prepare the drafts of the 
 laws, act as the advocates of these proposals in the 
 legislative assemblies, and arrange for their being put 
 in force. Its functions thus made it a kind of revival 
 of the Committee of Public Safety, and, like it, it 
 was divided into a number of sub-committees, but 
 always under the condition that every one of its acts 
 was subject to the dictation and the absolute authority 
 of the supreme magistrate. This was the central 
 organ in Napoleon's Constitutional scheme, as dia- 
 metrically opposed to what had held the same place 
 in the project of Sieves, as the First Consul was to his 
 Grand Elector. As for the rest, Napoleon kept close 
 enough to Sieves' proposals, at least as to their form, 
 and, to some extent, as to their essentials. Instead of 
 the Jury there was a Senate, like it in scope of action, 
 emoluments, and other external matters. There were 
 the Tribunate and the Corps Legislatif. But through- 
 out the bolts and cross-bars had been removed that 
 would have hindered the movement of the machine, 
 and prevented its being controlled by the lever that 
 was in the grasp of Napoleon's hand. With this view, 
 while the powers of the two last-named bodies were 
 modelled on the project of Sieves, the Senate was de- 
 prived of some of the essential functions of the Jury. 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 193 
 
 It was especially in the methods followed in bring- 
 ing the new order of things into active existence 
 that Napoleon followed the plans proposed by his 
 colleague. For Sieves too had never had any inten- 
 tion of letting the lists of the Notables be the 
 immediate work of the electorate, and so placing in 
 the hands of the people the nomination of the whole 
 official hierarchy. This was no more intended than 
 it had been in the case of every former coup cTttat 
 of the Revolution. On the contrary — and in this the 
 old theorist had shown that he was an experienced 
 practitioner — he had laid special stress on the idea 
 that the first building up of the new constitutional 
 order and its organisation must be carried out by 
 himself and his friends, so that thus the new spirit 
 might be gradually infused from above into the 
 French people. Then the danger of agitations 
 arising, enemies becoming active, unfriendly elements 
 finding their way into the new organisation of the 
 State, must be avoided, and the creators of the Con- 
 stitution and their friends assured of power. This 
 also expressed Napoleon's wishes, with the difference 
 that here again he thought less than Sieves of the 
 members of the latter's party. This was because 
 he himself belonged to no party, and his friends were 
 all those who were willing to work under him for the 
 welfare and the advancement of France, let them come 
 from whatever quarter they pleased. They were all 
 welcome — Royalists, who had borne arms against 
 their native country ; priests, who had roused the 
 peasants of La Vendee against the Republic, and who 
 even yet refused to take the oath to the church of 
 the Revolution ; the Girondists and the like, whose 
 ideals were the unfettering of individual and political 
 
194 NAPOLEON 
 
 freedom ; as well as the adherents of the first Consti- 
 tution down to Lafayette and Lameth themselves ; 
 all whom the Revolution in its destructive course had 
 thrust aside, whose property had been ruined or 
 confiscated, whose names had been dishonoured ; 
 whose brothers and fathers had fallen under the 
 guillotine. " I am opening," said Napoleon in his. 
 proclamation, "a broad road, in which there will be 
 room for all " — only they must be friends of peace 
 and order, and accept the system under which the will 
 of the one man counted. 
 
 It was to be taken for granted too that the funda- 
 mental changes produced by the Revolution, changes 
 on which Napoleon's system itself rested, must be 
 recognised by them all. There was an end for ever 
 of privileges and privileged bodies. The door was 
 open for those who had belonged to the old feudal 
 caste, but at the cost of feudalism itself. They must 
 cast away from them the ideas for which they had 
 gone into exile. Equality before the nation was to be 
 a principle for them also. If Liberty means self- 
 government, this was henceforth altogether banished 
 from France. But freedom of action within certain 
 limits, and equality under the rule of one, was 
 assured to all. And this was the truth set forth in a 
 sentence of the proclamation which Napoleon addressed 
 to the nation on the 15th of December, 1799, on the 
 eve of a new century : " Citizens ! The Revolution 
 has gone back to its first principles, from which it 
 started. It has reached its end." 
 
 So on the 7th of February, 1800, the nation 
 confirmed the authority of the First Consul by the 
 plebiscite, in which by three million votes against 
 fifteen hundred it gave its sanction to the new 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 195 
 
 Constitution, and at the same time to the whole 
 organisation it had created. Granted that further 
 precautions and an anxiety about their own position 
 on the part of those in power are to be traced in the 
 drawing up of the regulations for taking the Vote, 
 which was to be given merely by writing down Tes 
 or No, without any previous discussion, or any 
 meetings of the electors being convened ; none the 
 less the will of the overwhelming majority of the 
 French people found expression in the Vote. For 
 the moment the new Government was what it claimed 
 to be, the will of France concentrated at its centre. 
 That impirieuse unite des pouvoirs which Mirabeau, in 
 December, 1790, had pointed out to King Louis XVI 
 as what the nation most ardently longed for, had 
 been obtained and firmly established. The essential 
 change that the Revolution had made in French 
 Society found its expression in the plebiscite. 
 
 We have seen that Napoleon on his return from 
 the East was received by the nation as the bringer of 
 peace, and so far as France itself was concerned he 
 had justified this faith in him. Factious parties had 
 been broken up. The peasants of La Vendee and 
 Brittany, too, had made peace in presence of the 
 alternative put before them of, on the one hand, 
 destruction, on the other submission and permission 
 for their priests to return. The Bourse had greeted 
 the coup d'itat with a general rise of prices on the 
 19th of Brumaire itself. Capital, kept anxiously shut 
 up for years, began to be again available. Pro- 
 visional, and to some extent arbitrary, but on the 
 
196 NAPOLEON 
 
 whole well-directed measures of financial adminis- 
 tration provided some millions for the State treasury, 
 and obviated the bankruptcy that had threatened it. 
 But all this had not brought about what must be the 
 basis of order and repose and of the advancement of 
 the country's prosperity, namely, peace with foreign 
 Powers. France was no more alone in the world than- 
 she had been in 1793. Europe was in conflict with 
 her, and had been victorious over her. Italy was 
 almost lost. The English were in possession of its 
 coasts. Only in the Alps and south of the Genoese 
 Apennines could the French armies still maintain 
 themselves. General Brune's victory in the late 
 autumn had somewhat relieved the pressure on 
 Holland, but Corfu was actually, and Malta and Egypt 
 as good as, lost. Could it be expected that the 
 Powers which after suffering so many defeats had at 
 last obtained important advantages would agree to a 
 peace, that is to say, to such terms of peace as would 
 be consonant with feeling in France, and adequate to 
 the as yet hardly diminished strength of her arms ? 
 For it was only such a peace as this that Napoleon 
 could venture to conclude, one that would afford the 
 prospect of safeguarding his work at home, and would 
 accord with his own past, his consciousness of power, 
 his pride, and his genius. In other words, we may 
 ask if he was in earnest with the peace proposals 
 which he had made to England and Austria before 
 the close of 1799 ? This has been as often asserted as 
 denied, and quite recently in a special study of the 
 question it has been argued that this step on the part 
 of the First Consul was taken in all sincerity. Now 
 it is plain that both the letters which he wrote to 
 these hostile Powers, letters adorned with a full 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 197 
 
 display of Napoleonic phraseology, had also in view 
 the parties in France, and were intended to give them 
 some proof that it was not his fault if the enemy 
 refused his proffered hand. And further, he had too 
 correct an eye for the realities of the situation to 
 believe at this moment in the possibility of a peace 
 of the kind that was necessary for him. For this 
 very reason he had omitted to make any precise 
 statement whatever as to the conditions of peace. 
 But all this need not hinder us from believing that 
 his policy included a readiness for peace. He 
 wished to have it because it most closely concerned 
 his own interests ; but he knew that he would not 
 now obtain it. In fact, the answer of the two 
 cabinets was exactly what he must have foreseen. 
 Pitt directly refused ; Thugut used ambiguous 
 phrases that came to the same thing. There was no 
 other way ; Napoleon must conquer peace for his 
 people. 
 
 And so came about the campaign of Marengo. 
 
 Its whole course depended on the fact that through 
 the victory of Zurich, and the disasters to Suvaroff's 
 army, Switzerland had remained in the hands of the 
 French. Thus the Alpine roads from the Rhine to 
 Italy were in their possession. Napoleon's plan now 
 was that the Army of the Rhine under Moreau 
 should push forward through the Black Forest, and 
 secure also the passes of the Tyrol. Then a Reserve 
 Army, the formation of which had been begun at 
 Lyons, reinforced by a corps detached from Moreau's 
 army, was to be sent to Northern Italy, and there co- 
 operate with Massena, who still held the Genoese 
 Apennines against the Austrians. Napoleon himself 
 had remained in Paris, and Berthier had taken 
 
i 9 8 NAPOLEON 
 
 command of the Reserve Army. But in the 
 beginning of May bad news from Italy led Napoleon 
 to decide to take the field himself, and immediately 
 to begin operations in the direction of Italy. The 
 Austrians had broken through the line of the 
 Apennines, and were in possession of the Riviera as 
 far as Nice, a French corps had been driven back to' 
 the Var, and Massena had been forced back upon 
 Genoa, where he was completely invested by an 
 Austrian army and an English fleet. What had been a 
 danger in 1796, and what Napoleon's victories in that 
 year had saved France from, namely, the co-operation 
 of the Austrians and English on the Italian coast, and 
 an invasion through the Alps, was now becoming an 
 actual fact. He resolved to push forward from Dijon 
 with the Reserve Army without waiting to complete 
 its organisation (for there was no time for delay), and 
 reach Lombardy by the shortest possible way. It 
 was the Pass over the Great St. Bernard that he 
 chose. It would hardly be barred by the enemy, 
 for nothing was further from their expectations than 
 that Napoleon would break through at this point. 
 In seven days, with favourable weather, and with 
 hardly any accidents, the infantry, part of the artillery, 
 the horses, and baggage, were got over the difficult 
 mountain paths and down into the valley of Aosta. 
 The rest of the army completed the passage a couple 
 of days later, after the capitulation of the little fort of 
 Bard, the only defence of the valley. On the 2nd of 
 June, the First Consul entered Milan. Here he was 
 joined by the corps sent to him over the St. Gothard 
 Pass by Moreau, who had already won his first 
 victories on the southern slopes of the Black Forest. 
 Massena, however, could no longer be succoured. He 
 
NAPOLEON CROSSING THE ALPS. 
 From an engraving by Prevost after the painting by David. 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 199 
 
 was forced to capitulate on the 4th of June, when 
 Napoleon's advanced troops had already reached the 
 Po. But at the head of sixty thousand men, and 
 interposing between the divided forces of the 
 Austrians, Napoleon might well believe that he had 
 victory already in his hands. His idea was to cut 
 off the enemy's retreat, crush him wherever en- 
 countered, and force him to enter into a capitula- 
 tion. The plan proved a complete success. The 
 Po was easily crossed on the 9th of June, a hostile 
 force was broken up near Montebello and driven 
 back to the river Scrivia. On the 12th, the corps of 
 Lannes, Victor, and Desaix (who had just returned 
 from Egypt) had reached Tortona. When, on the 
 13th, they came into contact with a detachment of the 
 enemy near Marengo, the latter after a slight engage- 
 ment retired across the Scrivia. Napoleon did not in 
 the least believe that the enemy meant to make a stand 
 here. Already, on the 13th, he had divided his forces 
 to feel for the enemy in various directions, when 
 suddenly, on the morning of the 14th, Lannes and 
 Victor were attacked by the Austrians in strong force 
 and soon were being everywhere driven back. In 
 vain Napoleon threw into the fight whatever troops 
 he had at hand. The retirement could not be checked, 
 and the Austrians were completely victorious, when 
 Desaix, recalled by messengers sent in haste, arrived 
 with his division intact, and, supported by a charge of 
 Kellerman's cavalry, won back to his chief the fleet- 
 ing fortune of the day. Such was the great battle of 
 Marengo which changed the whole situation. The 
 Austrians, dispersed and divided, threw up the game. 
 They agreed to a capitulation, which secured them a 
 free retreat, but made the French masters of all the 
 
2oo NAPOLEON 
 
 country from the Mincio to Nice, with all its fortresses. 
 It was not Napoleon who had led the troops to 
 victory, but his subordinate general, Desaix, who was 
 killed in the fight. It was difficult for Napoleon to 
 accept such a situation, and for long after the official 
 accounts of the battle completely misrepresented what 
 had occurred. There is no doubt that but for Desaix 
 he would have been a beaten man, and most likely 
 ruined. Nevertheless, one can no more challenge 
 his right to the laurels of Marengo than Moltke's to 
 the laurels of Gravelotte, though there too the right 
 wing behind which he and the king were posted was 
 driven back. For after all it was Napoleon whose 
 orders Desaix obeyed when he came back to the 
 battlefield and fell upon the enemy. And above all 
 his was the decisive idea, that plan inspired by genius, 
 of leading the army over the wild mountains and 
 bringing it right into the middle of the dispersed 
 enemy's positions. 
 
 The First Consul spent only a short time at Milan, 
 reorganising the government of the Cisalpine Re- 
 public and settling the affairs of Italy. He was in a 
 hurry to get back to France, where matters were still 
 somewhat unsettled. By the beginning of June he 
 returned to Paris. 
 
 At the theatre of war there was an armistice. Like 
 Napoleon in Italy, so Moreau in Germany, after 
 having driven the enemy back beyond Ulm, had 
 granted them an armistice on the 1 8th of July at 
 Parsdorf. It was later prolonged to November. 
 Napoleon had conceded this truce to the conquered 
 enemy, with a view to the conclusion of peace. He 
 had already sent from Milan to the Emperor Francis 
 a second letter, in which he offered him the conditions 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 201 
 
 of Campo Formio. The result was the actual draw- 
 ing up of preliminaries of peace, and when these were 
 not ratified at Vienna there were further negotiations 
 which Cobenzl in person carried on with the First 
 Consul and Talleyrand at Paris. But once more the 
 Court of Vienna could not make up its mind to leave 
 Italy in the hands of France. So hostilities began 
 again in November. Moreau, who had already occu- 
 pied Bavaria as far as the River Isar, and had pushed 
 columns of his troops far into the Alpine valleys of 
 the Tyrol, inflicted a crushing defeat on the last 
 Austrian army that had crossed the Isar to oppose 
 him, at Hohenlinden on the 3rd of December, 1800 ; 
 while in Italy the lines of the Mincio and the Adige 
 were forced by Napoleon's generals. It was the end. 
 Austria's power was broken, and so on the 9th of 
 February, 1801, peace was signed at Luneville, 
 whither the negotiations had been transferred from 
 Paris. The treaty was that of Campo Formio, with 
 some additions. Austria retained what she had occu- 
 pied in Venetia, but abandoned the rest of Italy. The 
 Cisalpine territory was enlarged by the annexation of 
 Modena and the Legations. The Grand Duke of 
 Tuscany, too, lost his dominions, and, like the Duke 
 of Modena, was to receive compensation in Ger- 
 many. The Rhine throughout its whole course 
 became once more the frontier of France on the side 
 of Germany, and the principle was accepted of com- 
 pensating the states that thus lost their possessions on 
 the left bank of the Rhine by secularising and hand- 
 ing over to them the territories of the Prince 
 Bishoprics on the right bank, which also increased 
 French influence in Germany. Napoleon's demands 
 also secured another result, the removal from the 
 
2o2 NAPOLEON 
 
 Austrian Ministry of Baron von Thugut, who had 
 been the soul of the Coalition. It was characteristic 
 of his policy, and a proceeding that was repeated on 
 the occasion of other treaties of peace. On the 6th 
 of March the German Emperor ratified the treaty. 
 Three weeks later Ferdinand of Naples also made his 
 peace with the master of Italy. He had to resign to' 
 France his claims to the island of Elba and the Prin- 
 cipality of Piombino ; close his harbours against 
 English ships ; and agree to receive at Taranto, and 
 furnish supplies for, a French army corps that was to 
 be sent on to Egypt, where the French were still 
 holding out. The negotiations that were brought 
 to a successful result with Spain had a close connec- 
 tion with this rearrangement of the affairs of Italy. 
 Already, on the ist of October, by the Convention 
 of San Ildefonso, Napoleon had once more attached 
 to France the Court of Madrid, where, under the 
 influence of his victories, the French party, led by 
 Godoy, had again come into power. It was intended 
 to provide an Italian kingdom for the Infanta, who 
 had married the Prince of Parma, even though the 
 latter had been among the opponents of France. At 
 Luneville the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was selected 
 for this purpose. In return Spain resigned to France 
 her claims on Elba as well as Parma, and ceded to her 
 her colony on the Mississippi, Louisiana. And fur- 
 ther, Portugal, though it lay under the guns of the 
 English ships, and besides was out of Napoleon's 
 reach, bound itself to proclaim a breach with England 
 and close its harbours too against the English flag. 
 
 England was isolated. Unassailable on the waves, 
 mistress of the Mediterranean, and since September 
 also in possession of Malta, the nation that held com- 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 203 
 
 mand of the sea nevertheless saw every port from 
 Ancona to the Texel in the power of her formidable 
 rival. And the moment seemed to have arrived when 
 the whole Continent would turn against the Mistress 
 of the Seas. For the most embittered opponent of 
 the Revolution — Russia — seemed about to ally her- 
 self with her conqueror. It was the Czar Paul I, the 
 son of Catherine, and the Protector of the Order of 
 Malta, who was preparing, in concert with the ruler 
 of Western Europe, to make an eifort to wrest the 
 Trident from the island nation. Even before his 
 recent expedition to Italy, Napoleon had offered to 
 cede to the Russian Autocrat, as soon as peace was 
 concluded, Malta, the stronghold of the Mediter- 
 ranean, which since the Battle of the Nile had been 
 blockaded by the English, and was thus completely 
 out of his own power. It was a master-stroke of his 
 diplomacy, and a political combination that opened a 
 very wide prospect to him, for it brought in sight the 
 possibility of striking a death-blow at the hereditary 
 enemy of France without having to cross the sea. 
 One may indeed say that never in Napoleon's career 
 was there another moment that brought him nearer to 
 the final goal of his ambition. For not only Russia, 
 but all the neutral Powers, were preparing to follow 
 the course of his policy. It was their very neutrality 
 that he claimed to defend against England ; the 
 freedom of their flags which England, he asserted, 
 would not allow. In December, Denmark and Sweden 
 concluded a treaty of Armed Neutrality with Russia, 
 and at Copenhagen warlike preparations were in pro- 
 gress for the closing of the Sound against England. 
 Even Prussia, more than ever drawn to French policy 
 by the cession of the secularised territories, almost 
 
2o 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 abandoned the neutral attitude she had so far scrupu- 
 lously observed, when in the last days of March she 
 occupied Hanover, and thus threatened to bring the 
 mouths of the German rivers flowing into the North 
 Sea under the same system. And meanwhile views 
 were being exchanged between Paris and St. Peters- 
 burg as to fantastic schemes for marching on India ' 
 and thus obtaining the dominion of the East — 
 schemes which, however, in the existing situation of 
 affairs, did not seem quite impossible. 
 
 Then a terrible event destroyed these far-reaching 
 combinations. On the 24th of March, Cobenzl 
 wrote to his court : " Bonaparte wants to secure for 
 himself the friendship of Paul at any price ; he is 
 ready to make any sacrifice to bring this about." A 
 few hours before, in the night, the Czar had been 
 murdered by his courtiers, by the officers entrusted 
 with the guardianship of his life. This blow ended, 
 not only his existence, but also his system of policy. 
 Without going back to the ways of Catherine, his 
 successor, Alexander I, nevertheless directed the policy 
 of Russia into a course that diverged from the aggres- 
 sive and extravagant projects of his father. 
 
 Eight days later Nelson's ships appeared before 
 Copenhagen, opened fire on the Danish fleet, and 
 destroyed or captured it. Whilst the Prussian 
 battalions crossed the frontiers of Hanover, the 
 English Admiral prepared to enter the Baltic and 
 wreak the same destruction on the Russian and 
 Swedish fleets. But his own Government checked 
 the fiery zeal of the British hero of the sea. On the 
 14th of March, Pitt had been forced from the helm 
 of the state. The change of government, which was 
 not the result of foreign but of home affairs, and 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 205 
 
 especially the conflict in Parliament over the Irish 
 question, had, as usually happens with England, an 
 immediate effect on foreign relations. There was a 
 final success for her in the conquest of Egypt, 
 balanced to some extent by the repulse of Nelson in 
 an attack on the flotilla assembled at Boulogne for the 
 invasion of the country. So the cabinet of St. James's 
 decided on entering into peace negotiations, for which 
 Napoleon had been prepared ever since Marengo. 
 While he drew still closer his understanding with 
 Spain and Portugal, he applied himself to the nego- 
 tiation with England. Preliminaries of peace were 
 signed at London on the ist of October, 1801, and 
 the final treaty was concluded at Amiens on the 27th 
 of March, 1802. England agreed to restore the 
 French colonies and even to evacuate her conquests 
 in the Mediterranean. Egypt was to be given back 
 to Turkey, Malta to the Knights of St. John, Minorca 
 to Spain. The allies of France were also to regain 
 their colonies with the exception of Trinidad, which 
 was lost by Spain, and Ceylon by Holland. Napoleon 
 on the other hand engaged only to guarantee the 
 integrity of Portugal, and to recall his troops from 
 Naples. France thus resigned all claim to the 
 dominion of the Mediterranean, but her command of 
 its coasts gave her a greater influence there than 
 England, which henceforth was to hold only its gate- 
 way at Gibraltar. But so serious had the effect of 
 the war been on English industry that the free access 
 to the markets of Europe seemed to be a sufficient 
 compensation for the abandonment of conquests that 
 commanded the ways to India. 
 
2o6 NAPOLEON 
 
 Napoleon had indeed accomplished what his fellow- 
 countrymen expected of him. With one mighty 
 stroke he had brought them peace, and not to them 
 only but to all the nations of Europe. So not France 
 alone, but Europe, celebrated him as the hero of the 
 century, whose ideal was peace for the world, and 
 Humanity, that had had such disappointments during 
 ten years of bloodshed, seemed to find in him its 
 restorer. So thought Beethoven, as he gave the name 
 of " Bonaparte " to his Third Symphony, composed at 
 this time, with its heroic music re-echoing his mighty 
 deeds. 
 
 From all parts of Europe foreigners poured into 
 Paris, eager to see the man who had bidden the angry 
 waves be still. A young German — Solger — well 
 known for his writings on aesthetics, and later on 
 Professor at the University of Berlin, and who had 
 already seen him before Marengo at a review in the 
 Place du Carrousel, describes the personal impression 
 made at this time by the First Consul on those who 
 saw him. In the midst of his generals, whose uni- 
 forms were all covered with gold, he himself was 
 simply dressed — a plain blue uniform with white 
 facings, and without any embroidery ; not even gold 
 lace on the hat, which was decorated only with the 
 national cockade. Further, Solger notes the small- 
 ness and insignificance of his figure, his energetic 
 bearing, his pale or rather yellowish face, without a 
 sign of life in it. " But," he writes, " he has strong 
 and extremely interesting features ; the portraits one 
 generally sees flatter him, but they are suggestive of 
 his great character. Since he has been in Egypt he 
 wears his dark brown hair short, and its colour makes 
 the paleness of his face more terrible. Small as he is, 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 207 
 
 he sits his horse with a certain air of majesty, and 
 this is seen especially in his face. When he rides 
 past a standard, he raises his hat with a noble gesture. 
 Whenever he comes by, one hears on all sides, £ It is 
 he ! it is he ! ' and women hold up their children to 
 show them this marvellous man." The German heard 
 a woman in the crowd call out, " Voyez-vous ? Cest 
 votre roi ! " for which, however, she was reproved by 
 a neighbour. 
 
 A power had been created such as Europe had 
 never seen. In comparison with the forces he could 
 command, what signified the few thousand men at 
 whose head emperors of the Middle Ages laboriously 
 asserted shadowy claims amid the eddying fortunes of 
 everlasting civil wars ? What the great rulers of 
 France, a Louis XIV, a Henri IV, a Philippe le Bel 
 had dreamed of in fantastic schemes, or projects that 
 had ended only in failure, was now realised before the 
 eyes of the world. France, surrounded by vassal 
 states, had become the chief Power of Europe. Only 
 one policy was possible on the Continent, that which 
 the Ruler of France willed. The defeats of the old 
 monarchy by nations that a century before, under 
 Louis XIV, had stood so low, had acted as one of 
 the chief impulses to the Revolution, but this was 
 now a thing of the past, the shame of these defeats 
 was blotted out, and the thirst for power — perhaps 
 the deepest feeling of the nation during the Revolu- 
 tion — completely satisfied. The State had entered 
 upon a career that accorded with the genius of 
 France. It was thought that the storms were over, 
 and in what had seemed to many to be shipwreck and 
 utter ruin the world now recognised the new birth 
 of the nation. 
 
2o8 NAPOLEON 
 
 But endless was the work that had yet to be done 
 if the new building on the foundations laid by the 
 Constitution of December, 1799, was to be as solidly 
 erected as Napoleon had promised to his friends on 
 the evening of the 19th Brumaire. This was why he 
 had so long delayed before going to the army and 
 taking over its supreme command, and this was what 
 brought him back so soon to Paris after Marengo. 
 He now gave almost more thought to his civil than 
 to his military duties. To none of those who worked 
 with him in the Council of State and the Ministry 
 was he inferior in insight and mastery of details, and 
 he excelled them all in his indefatigable energy and 
 that eagle glance under which each particular appeared 
 as a part in the general design that lay spread out in 
 its completeness before his all-embracing mind. The 
 foundations remained throughout those that the Revo- 
 lution had laid down, but the energy working from 
 below, bent only on self-assertion, the disorderly and 
 typically Revolutionary element, was eliminated, and 
 unity that dominated everything was established, a 
 close-knit organisation penetrating to all parts, even 
 to the most remote villages ; a single will concentrated 
 at the central point, and embodied in the person of 
 the one ruler. The departments were maintained as 
 the essential units of the administration. Napoleon 
 moreover established in this connection the triple 
 progression originally decreed by the Constituent 
 Assembly, but abolished in the tumult of the 
 Revolution, for he introduced again, under the name 
 of Arrondissements, an intermediate division between 
 the Department and the Commune, the District, which 
 the Constitution of the Year VII had expressly 
 eliminated. But the choice by the people of the 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 209 
 
 officials in charge of all these districts and their 
 administration by elected committees was set aside, 
 and at the head of each of three divisions were placed 
 Prefects, Sub-Prefects, and Mayors, all chosen by the 
 central government from the list of Notables and all 
 in receipt of State pay. True there were beside them 
 local committees, but these were again selected from 
 the list of Notables by the Prefects of Departments, 
 and had only an advisory voice. They only met 
 once a year, and sat for fourteen days, the District 
 Council under the presidency of the Sub-Prefect, and 
 the Council General under the Prefect. Their 
 position corresponded to that of the Representative 
 Bodies in the central government. They discussed 
 the incidence of direct taxes, and the expenditure for 
 their district, and it was theirs to make known to the 
 Government local needs and interests. Compared to 
 the bureaucracy of continental countries, such as 
 Prussia for instance, there was here a certain amount 
 of self-government, but compared to the licence of 
 the days of the Revolution their position was one of 
 obedient subjection. The Prefects themselves were, 
 to use Napoleon's well-known words, only First 
 Consuls on a small scale, politically and socially as 
 powerful in regard to all below them, but dependent 
 on the power above them. They had no right to a 
 pension, no protection against disciplinary measures, 
 and they were removable at a moment's notice. How 
 could any one of them dare to oppose the expression 
 of the supreme will ? 
 
 The great codification of law and procedure, which 
 was carried out and promulgated during these years 
 under Napoleon's immediate inspiration, was like the 
 system of local government in its dependence on and 
 
2io NAPOLEON 
 
 development from the Revolution, and in the same 
 way it has become one of the foundations of modern 
 France. For a full hundred years this new Code civil 
 has been the law in force, not only in France, but 
 from Rotterdam to Freiburg, and in Italy also. 
 Wherever the Great Man once was in power it 
 remains like a rock past which the floods flow 
 without harming it. Incomparable is the logic, the 
 unity, the practical efficiency of this work, which 
 the Revolution had been always promising and never 
 producing, and which now, begun in August, 1800, 
 was completed in four months. It was elaborated by 
 five lawyers on the basis of a draft prepared by 
 Cambaceres, and was put into its final form and 
 revised by the Council of State under the presidency 
 of the First Consul. We know that it was Napoleon 
 himself who gave its definitive form to more than one 
 paragraph. In nothing that he created is that great 
 ideal of the Revolution — the equality of rights for all, 
 without distinction of class or creed — given clearer 
 and more energetic expression than in the Code 
 Napoleon, as this book of the law was so rightly 
 named. 
 
 There were other measures of his bearing on the 
 welfare of the nation, and directed to ensuring that 
 peace and order which we know were its greatest 
 need — a resettlement of the administration, the taxes 
 and customs, the forests that had been allowed to run 
 wild, the national property, that had been for the most 
 part squandered in the paper money issues of the 
 Revolution, the removal of the general insecurity 
 that had prevailed to an unheard-of extent in the 
 Provinces, and which was now kept in check by a 
 police organisation which acted in the sternest way. 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 211 
 
 Everywhere the ability, the knowledge, and the 
 energy of the officials and of men of business were 
 untiringly and cheerfully at work under the en- 
 couragement of the active iron will at the centre of 
 affairs. The results were soon seen. The fertility 
 of the soil, the diligence and industrial activity of the 
 people, contributed to the same end ; in a surprisingly 
 short time there was a great increase of business of 
 all kinds. 
 
 But the Government paid attention to the in- 
 tellectual as well as the material needs of the nation, 
 always on the principles already accepted, which 
 inspired its whole activity. The Education Law of 
 the year 1802 organised the schools in the three 
 grades that have become familiar to us — primary 
 schools in each Commune, established by the mayors 
 under the superintendence of the Sub-Prefects ; 
 secondary schools in the chief towns of the Depart- 
 ments, under the superintendence of the Prefects ; 
 thirty-two Lycees or high-schools, giving a classical 
 and modern education, from which a fifth of their 
 pupils after completing their course would pass on to 
 the new special high schools of law, medicine, science, 
 etc. The whole was under control of inspectors, 
 and there were thousands of free places for the 
 children of soldiers and officials. This department 
 bore the same characteristic mark — the aim at in- 
 creasing the nation's strength by a fixed method of 
 action. The intellectual life was not to be considered 
 as something apart from the concerns of the State, 
 and it might develop itself freely in its own sphere, 
 with the understanding always that this must be so 
 long only as it was willing to serve the centrally 
 organised power. But everything was not brought 
 
2i2 NAPOLEON 
 
 to this point at once. The Press had at first more 
 freedom than under the Revolution. Even in the 
 Moniteur, which was henceforth recognised as the 
 official organ of the Government, the opinions of the 
 opposition could still be put forward. But here too 
 the reins were gradually drawn tighter and tighter ; 
 and soon in France, and wherever else the power of 
 the One Man extended, nothing could be written or 
 printed that diverged from the prescribed line. 
 
 But were there not in the French nation men 
 whose feelings in their very inmost nature were 
 reluctant to admit this claim to place the individual 
 life of each and every one at the service of one central 
 will ? In this connection it is interesting to see how 
 Napoleon came to a settlement with the Catholic 
 Church. 
 
 The Revolutionary state had had no sterner foe 
 than the Church, which for twelve hundred years had 
 developed in most intimate union with the life of the 
 nation. While the Crown and the privileged classes, 
 the old army and all the institutions of the Ancien 
 Regime had been swept away, the Church had remained 
 standing, a rock against which all the raging storm of 
 the Revolution had dashed itself in vain. It had be- 
 come the strongest refuge of all the reactionary parties, 
 for it had drawn, not only men of high station, but 
 the masses too, into its service, uniting once more 
 rulers and subjects on the same side. Nowhere had 
 there been a fiercer struggle than in La Vendee. The 
 King himself had given the faithful an example of 
 fidelity. The Church had been for him too what he 
 clung to most strongly at the last ; and it was even 
 more for her than for the Crown that he had gone to 
 martyrdom. 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 213 
 
 And yet at first the Revolution had no intention of 
 touching dogma itself. It took indeed the nomina- 
 tion of the Bishops from the Pope and transferred it 
 to the Archbishops, but it did not purpose to tear 
 asunder the spiritual connection of the French Church 
 with the Papacy. It had even expressly prescribed to 
 the bishops that immediately after their election they 
 were to send to Rome a written declaration of their 
 union with " the visible head of the universal Church." 
 It placed the clergy of each diocese in much closer 
 dependence on their bishops than the old State had 
 ever done or even purposed to do. It left these ser- 
 vants of the Church no possibility of departing from 
 the directions of their superiors in doctrine and disci- 
 pline. But at the same time the closest resemblance 
 was to be established between the constitution of 
 Church and State. The boundaries of the dioceses 
 were to be made to correspond with those of the 
 Departments. The chief city of each Department 
 was to be the residence of its bishop. The choice of 
 those who were to fill ecclesiastical benefices was to be 
 made in the same way as for civil employments, 
 namely, by popular election. All connection with the 
 old Church of the days of privilege was to be severed, 
 and the new Church made as democratic as the State 
 itself. The promoters of the new order had left the 
 Church of France its dogma, full of the spirit of the 
 Roman Church that claimed the name of universal, 
 and yet they hoped to nationalise it. They thought 
 they could link it closer than ever to its spiritual 
 chiefs and their head at Rome in all that belonged to 
 its special life, and yet they wanted at the same time 
 to make it serve the ends of the Revolution. 
 
 Now the Revolution so far succeeded that it created 
 
214 NAPOLEON 
 
 a schism in the ranks of the clergy, and by means of 
 the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, accepted by the 
 King in July, 1790, it had founded a Church accord- 
 ing to its own ideals. But the opposing party were 
 not to be thereby brought to submission ; they only 
 acted all the more fanatically against those who had 
 left them, and who were hated by all the enemies 
 of France. But this Revolutionary church itself was 
 involved in the storm that raged more and more 
 fiercely against the State, whose creature it was. It 
 had consequently to endure fiery tribulation and 
 persecution at the hands of its masters, and its bishops 
 and priests became martyrs of a faith that their 
 former brethren regarded as an apostasy from the 
 Church. Meanwhile the Revolution, in its efforts to 
 retain its hold on the already diminishing sympathies 
 of the people, was providing itself with new forms of 
 public worship, strange imitations of the former 
 ritual ; but all this fell down in ruin at the moment 
 when its prophets in their turn had to ascend the 
 scaffold. At length, under the Directory, and indeed 
 under the influence of Vendemiaire and Napoleon's 
 triumph, the Government proclaimed toleration for 
 all religious denominations, and the neutrality of the 
 State with regard to them. But the result of 
 this free competition was the almost immediate 
 victory of the old Church over all its rivals. It was 
 no help to the Constitutional Church that it remained 
 subject to the government of the Directory (by which 
 it was all the same harshly treated), that it hailed 
 with delight the coup d'etat of Brumaire which brought 
 it relief; and that it willingly supported the new 
 ruler of France. In spite of all this, the deser- 
 tions from its ranks grew more numerous every 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 215 
 
 day. While in the reopened churches of their 
 opponents the faithful crowded round their old 
 pastors, now returned from exile or from prison, the 
 bishops and priests of the Constitutional Church, 
 however correct might be their conduct or however 
 Catholic in other respects their teaching, had to face 
 empty benches. The day could be foreseen when, 
 under the new system of toleration, all France would, 
 without the least compulsion, return to obedience to 
 Rome. 
 
 It was not as if, amongst the masses thus brought 
 under the influence of the clergy, there was any 
 yearning for the land of Egypt out of which they had 
 been brought forth through a sea of blood. The 
 very priests who had led their peasants against the 
 Revolutionists in the war of La Vendee, had in the 
 spring of 1789 been the first to throw in their lot 
 with the Tiers Etat. For them the fleshpots of the 
 Church under the old order had been scanty enough, 
 and the Civil Constitution offered them a better and 
 fairer provision than their old rulers. Thus it gave 
 them the prospect of rising in the ecclesiastical 
 hierarchy as well as their nobly born brethren, in 
 whose monopoly had been all the higher and more 
 richly endowed posts in the church of the old regime. 
 They were accordingly, like the mass of the faithful, 
 in favour of having a Church in which the old con- 
 ditions, the former division of goods, would cease, and 
 the same democratic order as in the State would be 
 established ; but only on condition that the State 
 itself was willing to come back to the old altars, and 
 that the Holy Father would receive it back into the 
 bosom of the Church in which salvation was alone 
 to be found. 
 
2i6 NAPOLEON 
 
 Napoleon merely argued from these tendencies of 
 opinion to their consequences. His own mind kept 
 the bent that had been given to it in his youth. 
 Like Voltaire, he held religion to be good enough 
 " for cobblers and servant girls," but like the patri- 
 arch of enlightenment himself he recognised that it was 
 necessary for such as these. He saw, as he said, in 
 the Christian religion, not so much the mystery of 
 the Incarnation as the mystery of social order. It 
 connected with heaven an idea of equality which 
 might hinder the rich from being massacred by the 
 poor. " Society," he once remarked to Roederer, to 
 whom we owe our knowledge of so many of his 
 master's familiar sayings, " cannot exist without 
 inequality of material wealth, and this inequality 
 cannot exist without religion. When a man is dying 
 of hunger beside another who is surfeited with super- 
 fluities, it is impossible for him to patiently bear this 
 difference, if there is not an authority to say to him : 
 * God wills it so. There must be poor and rich in 
 this world, but later in eternity things will be arranged 
 otherwise.' " He had expressed himself in much the 
 same way in the Discours de Lyon, but there was a 
 difference in the way he now regarded the thoughts 
 and work of the prophets who had been the teachers 
 of his youth. They had become irksome to him, as 
 mere idealists who with their fantastic dreams be- 
 fogged themselves and the world, and who deserved, 
 if not persecution, at least contemptuous neglect. 
 How often did he thus refer to Rousseau ! 
 "Religion," he said, "is just as valuable as vaccin- 
 ation, which satisfies our sense of the marvellous, and 
 saves us from charlatans and spellmongers. The 
 priests are worth more than Cagliostro, Kant, and all 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 217 
 
 the German dreamers." He himself neither went to 
 Confession nor received Communion, and if at times 
 he had to be present at Mass, he paid no attention to 
 the service. He was with difficulty persuaded to 
 have a High Mass celebrated on the conclusion of the 
 Concordat, instead of simply a Te Deum as he him- 
 self suggested, but he would not take part in the 
 ceremony of the kiss of peace. He was however 
 quite prepared for recognition of the Church, com- 
 promise with her, because he acknowledged her to be 
 what she was, a power. 
 
 We have seen how already in the summer of 1796 
 this instinctive recognition of power drew him to- 
 wards the Church and gave a different colour to his 
 policy from that of the Directory, and how in so 
 doing he only took up again a line of policy that 
 already had been followed by Augustin Robespierre 
 towards the Catholics of Italy in the spring of 1794, 
 and to which his elder brother was not entirely 
 averse. In no other matter is the relationship 
 between the two tyrants plainer than in this. 
 
 If since 1795 the Royalist party in France had 
 again a prospect of coming into power it was because 
 the clerical tendency had so greatly increased. 
 Napoleon triumphed over this party most effectually 
 because he re-established relations with Rome. That 
 Pius VII adopted this course was the greatest act of 
 his life. He had been elected Pope on the 13th of 
 March, 1800, in the neighbourhood of Venice, under 
 the protection of the Austrian arms. The fortune 
 of war was still in the balance ; the allies had at 
 last been victorious ; and the new Pope recognised 
 Louis XVIII as king. But the situation was altered 
 by Marengo. Italy had fallen into the hands of the 
 
2i 8 NAPOLEON 
 
 victor, who wished to have peace with the Church as 
 well as with the Courts of Europe, but a peace such 
 as he could seek as the heir and representative of the 
 Revolution. Immediately after Marengo, and while 
 he was still at Milan, Napoleon sent a letter to the 
 Pope as well as to the Emperor, and proposed condi- 
 tions to him through the Bishop of Vercelli. The* 
 Curia had sided with the French Royalists, but they 
 had no close connections with the Coalition ; the 
 English were heretics ; Austria, as was well known at 
 Rome, always had an eye on the legations ; and 
 Russia, too, with her claims on Malta, and her ap- 
 proaches to the Slav races of the Balkan Peninsula, 
 could not be much in sympathy with Rome ; there 
 was no hope of deliverance from any of them. 
 Napoleon was strong enough to repeat the attack the 
 Directory had made on the Pope's predecessor and on 
 his States ; one blow from him would be enough to 
 put an end at least for a while to the temporal power 
 of the Papacy. Instead of this the French troops 
 were halted at the frontier of the Papal States, and no 
 further demand was made beyond the withdrawal of 
 the Neapolitan troops, thus freeing the territories 
 of the Church from allies that had become useless. 
 He did not expressly ask for peace, but he recognised 
 the power of Rome. And so Pius VII took the step 
 from which a new era for the Church was to date. 
 
 But when he took the hand of the First Consul, he 
 thereby passed into the sphere of influence of the 
 Revolution. He had to accept its ecclesiastical legisla- 
 tion in essential points ; the confiscation of Church 
 property which, according to the old theory, still 
 belonged to the universal Church and not to the 
 nation, but now had been appropriated to national 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 219 
 
 objects ; the payment of the clergy by the Govern- 
 ment, and the whole of the new organisation that 
 the Revolutionary State had given to the Church. 
 Napoleon, too, wished to include the Gallican articles 
 as something won by his predecessors in the Govern- 
 ment of France. The nomination of archbishops 
 and bishops, which the Revolution had placed in the 
 hands of the people, was henceforth to be done 
 by the First Consul. The election of cures was 
 abolished ; they were to be named by the bishops, 
 but the choice was to be restricted to priests who 
 were acceptable to the Government, and the whole 
 clergy was closely attached to the State and its chief 
 by the oath of allegiance and by the acceptance of 
 salaries. The Pope retained the right, which the 
 Revolutionary State had denied him, of inducting 
 the prelates in canonical form ; but he was to agree 
 to obtain the resignation of the bishops displaced by 
 the Revolution and to accept the bishops of the 
 Revolutionary period, that is, to give up the eccle- 
 siastical system of the Emigration and acknowledge 
 that of Napoleonic France. 
 
 At the same time, there were advantages for the 
 Church that might well content the Pope. Secured 
 in his temporal power, in peace and friendship with 
 the most powerful man in Europe, he could be certain 
 of exercising the deepest influence on French society 
 through the renewal of the Church's life in France. 
 The head of the State thus reconciled to him had 
 succeeded to the position of the " Most Christian 
 Kings." 
 
 And in fact Napoleon acted already like a king. 
 Since February, 1800, he had transferred his resi- 
 dence to the Tuileries. Both of his colleagues in the 
 
22o NAPOLEON 
 
 Consulate, accepting the situation, retired into the 
 background, leaving him alone in his dignity — 
 Cambaceres at once, Lebrun a little later. Before 
 long a new Court etiquette arose, with a peculiar 
 mingling of old and new forms, and the spacious 
 rooms began to be filled with a brilliant court of 
 ladies and gentlemen. It was a field in which the< 
 wife of Napoleon could well display her social talents 
 and her liking for luxury and display. Beside her 
 was to be seen the mother of Napoleon — Laetitia — 
 still beautiful, and with a proud bearing, despite her 
 Corsican dialect, smiling with delight at her son, 
 though always anxious as to how long this good 
 fortune would last (Pouruou que cela doure i as she 
 used to say), and therefore careful to set aside out 
 of the millions that now flowed in as the revenue of 
 her family some small savings for the poorer days to 
 come. Then there were the brothers and sisters of 
 the First Consul, with their wives and husbands, and 
 an ever-growing circle of courtiers, ministers, and 
 generals. Some of them had been not so long ago 
 obscure lawyers or mere sergeants, and their wives 
 hardly knew how to manage their trains or to move 
 about on the floor. Some were bearers of the oldest 
 names in France, who for long years had eaten the 
 bread of banishment, and whose fathers and brothers 
 had been sent to the scaffold by those others. Now 
 they were all serving the One Man. 
 
 As the centre of this new State the First Consul 
 was also the object of the attention of those who still 
 clung to the old order, and would neither abandon 
 hope nor cease from the struggle. There was evidence 
 of this in the attempt made against him on the 
 Christmas Eve of 1800 by certain fanatics. In the 
 
THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE. 
 
 an engraving after the picture by Francois Gerard. 
 
RULER AND RESTORER OF PEACE 221 
 
 narrow Rue St. Nicaise, which his carriage had to 
 pass through on the way to the Opera, where Haydn's 
 Creation was to be produced, a barrel, filled with gun- 
 powder, bullets, and other substances, was exploded 
 as he went by. Only the speed at which his coach- 
 man drove saved him ; many of the passers-by were 
 killed. The deed was attributed to England, as its 
 author was George Cadoudal, a protege of the 
 English Ministry. Napoleon at first thought it was 
 the work of the Jacobins, and he seized on the oppor- 
 tunity to visit the remnant of the party with severe 
 penalties, and persisted in this even after it had been 
 discovered who the real author of the attempt was. 
 More than a hundred of the Jacobin party were 
 arrested by Fouche, who knew his men, and after a 
 brief investigation transported to the swamps of 
 Cayenne. 
 
 Public opinion was now satisfied. Wherever he 
 showed himself rejoicings and honours surrounded 
 the youthful ruler, " the immortal Bonaparte," as 
 one of the Papal envoys had already called him. 
 There was no protest when, in January, 1802, he 
 suppressed an opposition movement in the Tribunate 
 by expelling from it Benjamin Constant, Andre 
 Chenier, and other Liberals. So, too, when after the 
 Peace of Amiens he once more appealed to the nation 
 as to whether they would prolong his office for life 
 and give him the right of naming his successor, over 
 three and a half millions voted " Tes" and only a few 
 thousands " No" It was the Clericals who brought 
 in the half-million votes more than at the first 
 plebiscite. They thus expressed their gratitude for 
 the Concordat. Then appeared two decrees of the 
 Senate, expressing the gratitude of the nation, and 
 
222 NAPOLEON 
 
 enlarging the powers of the Chief Consul. First he 
 was given the right of proposing his successor to the 
 Senate, and further authority to ratify and promul- 
 gate treaties of alliance and peace without consulting 
 the national representatives ; finally the old royal 
 privilege of mercy. The powers of the Senate were 
 also increased. It was given the right to interpret« 
 the Constitution, to dissolve the Corps Legislatif and 
 the Tribunate, which was now reduced to fifty mem- 
 bers, and to revise the judgments of the courts of law 
 if they were injurious to the safety of the State. But 
 all this was in fact only a further strengthening of 
 the power of Napoleon, for he had a decisive in- 
 fluence on the numbers and choice of the senators. 
 Henceforth Bonaparte lacked only the name of King. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 
 
 "VT APOLEON was now the over-lord not of France 
 "*" ^ alone, but of its vassal-lands as well. And 
 nothing was more natural, more inevitable than that 
 the exercise of his authority in them should result in 
 transformations similar to those that had taken place 
 in the Republic. The same thing came about in 
 Holland as in Italy and in Switzerland. In the place 
 of a Directory, a Grand Pensionary was elected at 
 the Hague (October, 1801) and a President at 
 Milan, Napoleon ensuring his own appointment to 
 the latter post (January, 1802), his brother Joseph 
 being unwilling to accept it. Maret, Napoleon's 
 Secretary of State, and the most trustworthy and 
 zealous of all his associates, had drawn up the Con- 
 stitution which was granted to Lombardy, and Napo- 
 leon influenced the elections in the way he desired. 
 Neither in Holland nor in Italy were these changes 
 unwelcome, at least with the ruling classes ; indeed, 
 the majority of the Italian patriots rejoiced in the 
 innovation, inasmuch as Napoleon by designating 
 the new State the " Italian Republic " seemed to point 
 to the realisation of their greatest ambition, the 
 unity of the Italian nation. Napoleon, however, 
 made sure of Piedmont, the Alpine district with 
 which he had become familiar during his advance 
 
 223 
 
22 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 upon Marengo, by constituting it one of the 
 French military divisions — a foreshadowing of the 
 annexation which was to follow in the autumn of 
 1802. In the same way, new systems of government 
 were introduced in Lucca and in Genoa, which resulted 
 in placing these small Republics in the hands of 
 France. Napoleon's power continued to assert itself 
 unchecked. The foreign Powers were unable to stay 
 its advance, Austria least of all, though she had 
 thus to witness the baffling of all her Italian hopes. 
 
 In Switzerland, the old Constitution had fallen 
 a victim to the combined influences of the French 
 invasion and the local party of Reform ; unity of the 
 State, destruction of the power of the aristocracy, 
 the placing of the Cantons and Estates upon a footing 
 of equality, and the establishment of religious tolera- 
 tion had been the aims of the reformers, and, German 
 and French alike, they were aware that these objects 
 were to be attained by the intervention of France. 
 Switzerland had been drawn into the great conflict, 
 and had become one of the chief theatres of war. 
 Peace had no sooner been declared than a civil strife 
 was set on foot by the reactionary Forest Cantons 
 in league with Berne, and the well-wishers of France 
 were in a serious plight until Ney appeared on the 
 scene. This was Napoleon's cue to intervene and 
 take up the work of reform. At Lyons, similarly, 
 whither the representatives of the Swiss cantons were 
 summoned in December, 1802, Napoleon appeared 
 again in the role of peacemaker. His will imposed 
 itself upon all parties. He was able to act as 
 mediator between them, simply because he stood 
 above them and had them in his power. What he 
 then sketched out and later, in February, 1803, 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 225 
 
 decreed, was not merely to remain the Swiss Constitu- 
 tion, so long as Switzerland held its ground, but 
 also the foundation upon which the Confederacy was 
 to base all its future developments — a striking proof 
 of the statesmanlike faculties of the Emperor. The 
 Francophils, the advocates of unity, did not have it 
 all their own way. They saw the establishment of 
 equality in the eyes of the law, and the abolition 
 of the privileges of the aristocrats, but the subordi- 
 nation of the cantons to the central legislature 
 was clearly limited. "The Confederacy," declared 
 Napoleon in the course of his address to the Swiss 
 representatives, " must be made up of a league of 
 small states, whose methods of administration are as 
 diverse as the peculiarities of their soil, but which are 
 bound together by a simple Constitution, which 
 should be neither oppressive nor expensive." The 
 barbarous survivals from the Middle Ages must cease 
 to be, France could not suffer them. " But centrali- 
 sation such as we have in France would not do 
 for you. The mountaineers, who look on William 
 Tell as their exemplar, could not be subjected to the 
 same laws as the rich citizens of Zurich or Berne. . . . 
 A Confederacy which shall secure to each separate 
 State its natural independence, leaving it in possession 
 of its own territories and free to preserve its own 
 customs and idiosyncrasies — a Confederacy that shall 
 be invincible within the girdle of its mountains — 
 that will be your true strength." And Napoleon 
 proceeded to give a solemn warning to England, 
 whose agents had been long busying themselves in the 
 country : he would incorporate Switzerland in France, 
 he declared, on the first signs of the English Govern- 
 ment venturing to tamper with its Constitution. 
 
 G 
 
226 NAPOLEON 
 
 Napoleon did not give his mediation for nothing. 
 The looser the union with Switzerland, the stronger 
 must be the bonds between France and Italy. To 
 this end the Alpine passes were essential ; and no 
 roads were more convenient than those which tra- 
 versed the Valais district. Therefore in August, 1 802, 
 this region was constituted, with the full consent of. 
 its inhabitants, a separate Republic, whose roadways 
 were at the disposal of the protecting power. 
 
 Napoleon had become the mediator also in Germany, 
 as a result of the peace of Luneville, which, as we 
 have seen, had sanctioned the principle of secular- 
 isation. He had achieved there the same unique 
 position that he had made for himself at Campo 
 Formio ; in his capacity as specially invoked umpire 
 he was able to carry out decisions that reversed the 
 whole character of forms of government, dating 
 from a thousand years before ; and that were to be 
 the basis of a new Germany. But it was his policy 
 now to win over Prussia instead of Austria ; he was 
 bent upon securing the alliance of the great Northern 
 Power. He lavished on the Hohenzollerns the 
 spoils accruing from the exactions of Prince-Bishops 
 in Northern Germany — half a million new subjects, a 
 number far exceeding what they had lost on the left 
 bank of the Rhine. These were for the most part 
 thoroughly German districts, won back to Catholi- 
 cism since the Reformation, and they now served to 
 connect the Brandenburg dominions of Prussia with 
 its possessions on the Rhine. In their vicinity, in 
 Fulda, Cosvey, and what else remained of clerical and 
 civil, the free states of the old Empire, the Prince 
 of Orange, the Hohenzollerns' cousin who had lost 
 Holland, was also provided for. Catholic Sees in the 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 227 
 
 valley of the Main and Swabia, as well as Protestant 
 free towns, such as Ulm and Memmingen, were handed 
 over to Bavaria, embracing a population of nearly 
 a million souls, a figure far outnumbering what 
 Bavaria had been deprived of. It was the rich and 
 powerful who reaped all the benefits from the new 
 changes, the feeble and insignificant had to pay the 
 penalty ; for it was only those already in power who 
 could serve the interests of France. All this was 
 done without regard for the feelings of Austria. 
 The Austrian Emperor saw his dominions parcelled 
 out thus before his eyes. He first got news 
 of it in Vienna from the Paris Moniteur. It was 
 maddening, but what was to be done in the face 
 of the unanimous will of half a continent ? As a 
 matter of fact, however, the Hapsburgs did not 
 themselves go empty-handed. The Grand Duke of 
 Tuscany was accorded Salzburg and sundry adjoining 
 Sees, while, in lieu of Breisgau and Ortenau the 
 Emperor received episcopal territories in the Tyrol ; 
 it being understood that he acquiesced in all the 
 changes in progress in Italy. Meanwhile these 
 arrangements were accepted by the Reichstag at Ratis- 
 bon on February 25, 1803. This meant the absolute 
 defeat of Austria ; a diplomatic defeat more serious 
 than that on the field of battle. Her dominion was 
 bounded by the banks of the Inn and the mountains 
 of Bohemia. 
 
 England also was hard hit. Every step forward 
 that Napoleon took on the Continent involved some 
 detriment to the insular Power. And Napoleon was 
 not minded to spare his enemy. The hopes that 
 England had cherished in regard to her industrial 
 exports had been disappointed, and the protective 
 
228 NAPOLEON 
 
 tariffs of France and her allies had been increased. 
 Napoleon, in fact, was putting out all his efforts to 
 extend the influence of France beyond the seas. One 
 of his first and strongest desires was to win back 
 Domingo, the former colony of France, which the 
 Revolutionaries had allowed to fall into the hands of 
 the blacks. He despatched thither his brother-in-law- 
 Leclerc with a powerful army to overthrow Toussaint 
 l'Ouverture, the native leader. He sought too to 
 draw into the sphere of his untiring energy those 
 other French colonies which still remained — Pondi- 
 cherrv and the rest of the French possessions in 
 India, Isle de France and Reunion in the Indian 
 Ocean ; he was anxious to colonise Madagascar and 
 to develop the newly-won colony on the Mississippi ; 
 nor had he yet abandoned all hopes of Egypt, while 
 he aspired to renewing the old bond of friendship 
 with the Sultan. This had been the path upon which 
 France had run counter to English ambitions, and 
 from which England had ousted her. Napoleon 
 relied on his own ability to move forward on it 
 again, and spread the might of France beyond the 
 seas. 
 
 Was Napoleon bent at this period upon renewed 
 war with England ? The answer to this question 
 must affect our whole judgment of his policy and of 
 the triumphs and catastrophes to which it led. Did 
 he propose so soon to violate the pledge which he 
 had given his nation in Brumaire, and which he had 
 redeemed at Marengo ? Was the lust of strife and 
 conquest so strong in him as to make him heedless of 
 the wishes of his people, expressed a thousand times 
 over, and to blind him to the manifest interests of 
 France ? Was there in fact nothing left in him — 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 229 
 
 as his enemies were then already declaring, and as 
 historians have so often since maintained — but an 
 insatiable craving for aggrandisement and destruction, 
 nothing but that ruthless greed of power which in 
 his youth he had condemned as the most harmful of 
 all obsessions ? He himself has denied this accusa- 
 tion. " It was my desire," he said once at St. 
 Helena, " to give the world peace, but they persisted 
 in making me into a god of war." But for an 
 answer to the question, we must not go to the state- 
 ments of either accuser or accused : we must examine 
 the facts for ourselves, and try to discover the guid- 
 ing spirit of his entire policy. 
 
 It seems obvious that a policy of colonial extension 
 could only flourish in times of peace. It is certain, 
 moreover, that Napoleon was in earnest about reviv- 
 ing the old French colonies. His brother-in-law had 
 to take twenty thousand men to Domingo, and after 
 he had fallen a victim to yellow fever, his successor 
 had to be reinforced by thousands more, to fill up the 
 gaps caused by the deadly climate and the enemy's 
 bullets. The wording of the orders given to the 
 leaders of the squadron told off for service in the 
 West Indies, point to the imminence of war with 
 England it is true (these orders were issued in March, 
 1803, on the eve of the war), but we find that the 
 utmost circumspection is enjoined upon them in regard 
 to the English. In all the enterprises set on foot by 
 Napoleon in France itself there is the same suggestion 
 of peaceful intentions : the making of new roads and 
 canals and the repairing of old ones, the stimulating 
 of trades and industries, the active support given to 
 agriculture and forestry, all such undertakings in- 
 volving an outlay of millions, and demanding peaceful 
 
2 3 o NAPOLEON 
 
 conditions for their fruitful development. That cer- 
 tainly was the view of the Council by which Napoleon 
 was supported, of the Prefects who were in close 
 touch with the interests and wishes of the people, of 
 the Ministers who felt responsible for what was being 
 done, and of Napoleon's own brothers, who hoped to 
 enjoy the good things that he had placed in their 
 hands. So it was too with the immense majority of 
 the people themselves, who now for the first time for 
 ten years were able to breathe in safety and to expe- 
 rience all the blessings of peace. Only a small frac- 
 tion of the irreconcilables based their hopes upon 
 war : among them no longer the Jacobins, who were 
 concentrating themselves now upon internal questions. 
 It was the Royalists most of all who hoped for an 
 outbreak of strife, and more and more ardently as 
 the crash came near. 
 
 Very different was the condition of things in Eng- 
 land. Here the Ministry represented the most 
 peaceful element of the nation, for it constituted the 
 Peace Party as opposed to the warlike tendencies of 
 Pitt and his friends, who hoped to come into office 
 by means of the war. These pointed to Napoleon's en- 
 croachments in Holland, Italy, and Switzerland, to 
 the hostile tariff raised by France against English 
 industries, and to the aggressive colonial policy of the 
 conqueror. The great shipowners and manufacturers 
 joined hands with the aristocracy in this matter, and 
 with these two classes went those dependent upon 
 them, and even the working-men, all of whom would 
 suffer from any check to the national welfare. The 
 war- feeling made swift headway throughout the 
 country. The press, almost without distinction of 
 party, indulged in the most violent diatribes against 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 231 
 
 the French usurper. England meanwhile remained 
 the chief refuge for the emigres, whose old leaders, the 
 Comte d'Artois and Cadoudal, no less than renegades 
 and traitors to the Republic, such as Dumouriez and 
 Pichegru, still found safety and welcome on its soil. 
 English journalists unblushingly incited them to new 
 attempts upon Napoleon's life, and the network of 
 their conspiracies spread even into the Ministry. 
 
 Now it may be said that Napoleon ought to have 
 abstained from his policy of aggression and encroach- 
 ment. But the annexation of Piedmont and the 
 establishment of the Italian Republic, as well as the 
 other changes in Italy, dated from before the peace of 
 Amiens. This was the case, too, with the creation 
 of the new state of things in Holland, while the in- 
 novations in Germany were provided for at Luneville. 
 The intervention in Switzerland was the only action 
 with which England was perhaps warranted in re- 
 proaching Napoleon. But his intervention had been 
 invited and had been welcome. 
 
 The time had not yet come when the small States 
 followed him unwillingly. They were still drawn 
 towards him by motives of self-interest. They sought 
 his protection against their adversaries, and intimated 
 that if he did not concede it to them they must apply 
 for help elsewhere. 
 
 For Napoleon's every move was bound now to affect 
 in some way his enemies. England's influences were 
 at work in Switzerland as everywhere else, even in 
 St. Petersburg and Constantinople, wherever enemies 
 of France were to be found. To give back Tuscany 
 to its original rulers would have meant, as Napoleon 
 had pointed out in May, 1801, to the Austrian 
 Ambassador, handing over Leghorn to England. 
 
2 3 2 NAPOLEON 
 
 Hatred still burned in the hearts of the Bourbons of 
 Naples, and there were groups of Reactionaries every- 
 where awaiting the moment when they could fall on 
 the great victor from behind. The English them- 
 selves were not content to play a waiting game ; 
 they had never, indeed, been so eager to develop 
 their own possessions, notably in India, where they 
 were soon to become so powerful. Austria, above all, 
 could not look on unmoved at the whittling away of 
 her dominions, while Prussia resented the incursions 
 upon her territory made by this masterful invader. 
 With satisfaction, if without much gratitude, she had 
 accepted her portion of the booty Napoleon had ac- 
 corded her, but it was a mournful reflection to the 
 Hohenzollerns that he should be dominant in the 
 sphere in which Prussia had been pre-eminent. 
 
 In brief, the balance of European power had been 
 upset, and the various great nations saw their very 
 existence endangered unless they exerted themselves 
 to restore it. The upsetting of it, if the immediate 
 outcome of Napoleon's victories, cannot be ascribed 
 exclusively to his policy ; it was the policy of the 
 Directory that had brought France to this position. 
 Napoleon, as we have seen, had had a good deal to 
 say to this policy, but he had inherited rather than 
 initiated it. 
 
 And now that Napoleon had secured peace through 
 his triumphs, he sought to extend the power of 
 France beyond Europe. Every ship that set out 
 from the French ports, every cargo that came 
 back to them from India or the West Indies, meant 
 a loss to the merchants of the Thames and the manu- 
 facturers of Leeds and Birmingham. England had 
 won dominion over the seas by conquest. Was 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 233 
 
 she to see herself beaten, or, at least, her might 
 diminished, in times of peace, by the rivals she had 
 always vanquished in times of war ? Was she to wait 
 and see the trade of the French become predominant 
 all over Europe, even to the Ionian Islands and the 
 Bosphorus, and its operations extended to Egypt and 
 India ? It was not the execution of the King, but 
 the annexation of Belgium that had drawn England 
 into the war. She had attacked the French Republic, 
 not because it had become a hot-bed of anarchy and 
 revolution, but because it was making France into 
 a great Power, before whose advance proud Albion 
 herself began to feel alarm. 
 
 England was still in possession of Malta. With 
 this pledge in her hands she could regard without 
 anxiety the hopes of her neighbour for any new 
 expedition across the Mediterranean. The date by 
 which she was to have evacuated it had long since 
 passed ; Napoleon's troops had been withdrawn from 
 Taranto at the appointed time ; yet the English 
 showed no disposition to remove their garrison from 
 the island. To all Napoleon's remonstrances and 
 threats they offered only the answer that it was for 
 him first to reconstitute the condition of things 
 upon the Continent that had preceded the peace of 
 Amiens. It was in vain, too, that Napoleon pro- 
 tested against the unbridled vituperations of the 
 London press. Addington only shrugged his shoulders 
 with the reply that in England the press was free, 
 and that he had no control over it. Assuredly if we 
 inquire into the question which of the two was 
 making for war, France or England, there can be no 
 difficulty in coming to a decision. 
 
 But this is not the whole extent of the opposition 
 
234 NAPOLEON 
 
 between the two Powers with which we are dealing. 
 If we must admit that England and her allies acted 
 on the offensive, there is little reason for deny- 
 ing that France also took this course. For where 
 in the whole world do we ever see a political power 
 adopting a persistently unchanging attitude, and 
 where is the line to be drawn between pressing for- 
 ward and refusing to give way ? To use a saying 
 of Ranke, " every power has a tendency to push on 
 until a barrier is raised from without against its 
 advance." It is true that the enjoyment of peace was 
 the chief concern of the French people, and therefore 
 the special interest of Napoleon ; but it must be a 
 peace that would give the exhausted country the 
 means of restoring and developing the economic 
 prosperity of which revolution and war had so long 
 deprived it. This was what the French people in 
 their desire for peace demanded of their new ruler. 
 They had hailed Napoleon as their deliverer, and 
 made him their master, just because they saw a pro- 
 mise of all this in the peace which his sword had 
 won and his genius secured for them. Neither 
 on sea nor on land could he afford to give up the 
 advantages he had gained. But the policy of pro- 
 moting the welfare of the nation, to which he had 
 devoted himself since the 18th of Brumaire, already 
 implied an extension of its power. The restoration 
 and development of the colonies, the reconstruction 
 of the navy, the protection of the markets of France 
 and her dependencies, the stimulation by his govern- 
 ment of the industrial energies of this intelligent, 
 hard-working, and powerful nation — all this implied 
 the strongest attack upon the sphere of English 
 interests. Just as the territorial extension of France 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 235 
 
 had destroyed the balance of power on the Continent, 
 this new economic policy threatened the supremacy 
 of English trade, to which the ruin of French industry 
 had been of the greatest advantage. This was the 
 rivalry which the conflicts of a hundred years had not 
 ended, for each treaty of peace had been only a truce, 
 a pause for the two wrestlers to take breath. It was 
 the same with the Peace of Amiens. In this respect, 
 too, the First Consul was only the heir of the France 
 of the old regime, and inherited the task that fate 
 had laid upon it. 
 
 Now let us grant that, as a thoughtful French 
 writer lately put it, Napoleon was not so constituted 
 that he would wait for the development of a menacing 
 situation ; but it was rather his way to go to meet 
 the danger, just as in his strategy and tactics he 
 always sought to act on the offensive against his 
 enemy. His spirit urged him on to strive with fate 
 by meeting it face to face. He believed in his own 
 strength. His pride was unbounded ; but never had 
 man a better right to trust in his own force and strength 
 of will. And, on the other hand, can we suggest any 
 reason why he should hesitate ? He knew the number 
 of his enemies, and the hatred they bore against him 
 and his work. Was he to wait, as he himself once 
 said, until they could satisfy their desire to invite 
 each other to his funeral ? And more than any other 
 man, he had an eye for what was practicable and 
 within his power, a knowledge of the situation, and a 
 foresight of what was inevitable. He saw quite 
 clearly the weakness of his position, the incomplete- 
 ness of all that he had created, the necessity of being 
 continually formidable to his opponents in order 
 to keep them in check. To his restlessly active 
 
236 NAPOLEON 
 
 imagination were revealed all the possibilities that 
 lay in the bosom of the future. His brain was ever 
 busy with the mass of combinations that the politics 
 of Europe made possible. No one foresaw more 
 clearly that the struggle with England would tempt 
 his old opponents on the Continent to take advantage 
 of the situation. What remained for him, then, but 
 at once to set to work to strengthen his position 
 everywhere, and to so increase his power that his 
 enemies would give up any inclination for new coali- 
 tions ? to hurl against them — as he did now — the 
 menace that the time might perhaps be at hand, when, 
 forced by circumstances, he would change the face of 
 Europe and restore the Empire of the West ? 
 
 But much still remained unknown to him. He 
 did not see that hidden away under old decaying 
 forms of government there were in the nations slum- 
 bering forces, which once they were awakened, and 
 awakened even under the iron tread of the conqueror, 
 would rouse the oppressed to a life-and-death struggle. 
 That he should have been blind to such possibilities 
 is easily understood, when we consider his life and 
 experiences. There was a time when he had believed 
 in such forces ; it was when he still loved Corsica 
 and hated France. Then came a brief period of 
 excitement, when he pictured to himself a possible 
 union of hearts between the lands that were his new 
 and his old home, a reconciliation on the basis of 
 ancient ideals of liberty. But when he was utterly 
 disappointed in France, and still more in Corsica, he 
 had cast such beliefs aside. And wherever his fate 
 had taken him since then, the impressions made upon 
 him had always been the same — intrigues and self- 
 seeking on the part of those in power, and the 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 237 
 
 wretched lack of spirit in the weak, who, trembling, 
 watched the war-god striding over their lands, and 
 then eagerly hastened to grasp at and snatch away 
 from their neighbours whatever advantages the victor 
 might be able to give them. So far on the Continent 
 he had contended only with the Cabinets and the 
 aristocracy that shared with the various dynasties the 
 possession of their states. And he thought that in 
 England, too, he would be able to take advantage of 
 the disunion that actually existed between the ruling 
 classes and the masses, and to separate the one from 
 the other. 
 
 But it was precisely here that he was to meet with 
 his first great disillusionment. Brought face to face 
 with his power, and the growing danger that threatened 
 them, the English parties forgot their deep-rooted 
 strife, and thought only of the national interests that 
 bound them together. Under the pressure of public 
 opinion, the Whig Ministry itself was drifting towards 
 a rupture with France, even though it was thereby 
 preparing the way to power for the Tories. 
 
 In February, 1803, on the day after he had given 
 its new constitution, known as the "Act of Media- 
 tion," to Switzerland, the First Consul made a state- 
 ment to the Senate and the Legislative Assembly on 
 the situation of the French Republic. He alluded to 
 the works of peace, which were bringing a new period 
 of prosperity to the long-crippled economic resources 
 of the nation. Then he touched upon the attitude 
 of England, which still maintained garrisons at Alex- 
 andria and Malta. The Government, he said, was 
 justified in complaining of this, but was informed 
 that the ships for the withdrawal of these garrisons 
 were already in the Mediterranean. While insisting 
 
2 3 8 NAPOLEON 
 
 on his own love of peace, which would lead him to 
 do all that was consistent with the national honour 
 to preserve it, he remarked that in England there 
 were two parties, contending with each other, for and 
 against war. It was therefore necessary to take pre- 
 cautions, and so he had 500,000 men under arms. 
 But England, relying only on her own resources, could 
 not now engage in a struggle with France ; and thus 
 one might hope that the Cabinet of St. James's would 
 give ear to the counsels of wisdom and the voice of 
 humanity, and by the maintenance of peace secure 
 for both nations their own happiness and the grati- 
 tude of the whole world. 
 
 The English Government gave its answer in the 
 King's Speech on the 8th of March. It contained 
 not a word about Malta, but announced new arma- 
 ments, and then two days later the Militia was called 
 out. Napoleon could now no longer hesitate. The 
 gunboat flotillas at Dunkirk and Cherbourg were at 
 once commissioned. On the same day despatches 
 denouncing the English breach of faith were sent to 
 Berlin and St. Petersburg. The despatch to Berlin 
 was conveyed by General Duroc, who also took a 
 notification that France considered that she was com- 
 pelled to occupy Hanover. The Court of London 
 was no less active. The sending of the English 
 Ambassador, Whitworth, to Paris, was plainly meant 
 only to veil the breach of the peace on England's 
 part, and supply an excuse for her policy before the 
 world. But Napoleon tore the mask from the face 
 of his adversary. " One may slay the French people, 
 but one cannot intimidate it," were the haughty 
 words with which he received the envoy in the midst 
 of his Court. " Woe to those who break treaties ! 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 239 
 
 They must bear the responsibility before all Europe ! " 
 In the middle of May, Whitworth was recalled. 
 Hostilities at once began. French merchantmen were 
 captured by English warships on the seas. The 
 French ports were blockaded. All English people 
 who happened to be in France were declared to be 
 prisoners of war. 
 
 For Prussia, too, with all this, there had come 
 the first moment when she must choose a decisive 
 course since the Peace of Basel. Napoleon offered 
 her his alliance if she would guarantee the Treaty of 
 Amiens, to which she had already pledged herself. 
 He was anxious to be able to use the military power 
 of North Germany to give check to his enemies on 
 the Continent. Thus he might hope to be able to 
 carry on the frontal attack against England without 
 being harassed in the rear. The decision that was 
 arrived at in Berlin was about the worst that could 
 have been taken. There was an idea of strengthening 
 the position of Prussia without risking anything, 
 gaining an advantage without putting down any stake ; 
 such were the hopes of Haugwitz and the thoughts 
 of Hardenberg and Frederick William III. If we 
 are to form a sound judgment as to this King, we 
 must keep in sight his action on this occasion. The 
 later position of Prussia up to 18 13 was such as to 
 afford more than one plea for excusing his continually 
 fluctuating policy. There were times when even 
 Bismarck took the line of neutrality for Prussia in 
 a European crisis, but he certainly never did so 
 unless the taking up of this neutral position had an 
 influence upon events beyond the frontiers of Prussia, 
 and tended to narrow the theatre of war. This was 
 what Napoleon had in view when he gave the Berlin 
 
2 4 o NAPOLEON 
 
 Court hopes of acquiring Hanover for Prussia. But 
 the course chosen by the King made this impossible. 
 He thought that with the support of Russia he could 
 yet maintain peace, or at least secure his own 
 neutrality. Vain hopes ! His action tended rather 
 to make a general outbreak of war inevitable. 
 
 At the end of May the French broke through the 
 neutral zone of North Germany. Without difficulty 
 Mortier drove the Hanoverian army back behind 
 the Weser, and forced it to capitulate. It was a 
 severe blow to England, but it was equally a blow 
 to Germany and to Prussia. In North Germany now 
 the will of the foreigner was in command. Prussia 
 had thrown the game out of her hands. 
 
 As in the North, so also in Italy, Napoleon 
 hastened to close the coasts against the English. 
 Naples was occupied. This was for him an absolute 
 necessity, for otherwise there would certainly have 
 been a defection of the Bourbons and a landing of 
 the English, but at the same time it tended to in- 
 crease the number of his opponents. For by this 
 step he not only touched Austria again, but he also 
 made an incursion into the sphere of Russian in- 
 terests. For Russia had already taken umbrage at 
 the First Consul's new eastern policy, and could not 
 now fail to be alarmed at the increase of French 
 influence on the east coast of the Adriatic and in the 
 Balkan Peninsula, which might follow the reoccupa- 
 tion of Southern Italy. Napoleon, however, did not 
 want to break with Russia any more than with 
 Austria ; the object he kept most in view was to 
 convince the Czar of the value of his friendship ; 
 nay, he even proposed Alexander as the arbitrator in 
 the quarrel with England. The Czar did, in fact, 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 241 
 
 undertake to make an attempt at mediation. In 
 August he proposed conditions of a settlement at 
 London and Paris. According to this scheme England 
 was to evacuate Malta, but in return was to be 
 allowed to retain the neighbouring island of Lampe- 
 dusa. But Napoleon was not merely to give up 
 Hanover, but also Holland, Switzerland, and Italy ; 
 if the Czar gracefully permitted Napoleon perhaps to 
 retain Piedmont, he required a corresponding com- 
 pensation for the House of Savoy. This amounted 
 to putting France back to the days before Marengo 
 and Hohenlinden, nay, even to those before the 
 Treaty of Campo Formio. It would have been im- 
 possible for any Government, much less for Napoleon, 
 to consent to this. He must already have perceived 
 that Russia would stand on the side of the enemies 
 of France. And the Czar had no other idea. In 
 October he suggested to Austria a new coalition. 
 Ludwig Cobenzl, the Austrian Minister, did not con- 
 ceal the fact that his own inclinations were in this 
 direction, but he also did not hide his fear of the 
 formidable enemy. "We are standing in front of 
 the cannon's mouth," he said to the Russian envoy in 
 March, 1804, " and we shall be blown to pieces before 
 your help can reach us." 
 
 And meanwhile, Napoleon might still continue to 
 hope that he could fight out his quarrel with England 
 alone, and drive home that blow at the heart, the 
 attack across the Channel, from which he had recoiled 
 in the spring of 1798. While the Powers that were 
 unfriendly to him on the Continent continued to hesi- 
 tate, he went on strengthening his political system. 
 He bound the Batavian Republic to supply ships and 
 troops, and in return gave the Dutch a prospect of 
 
242 NAPOLEON 
 
 having their colonies restored to them. So, too, in 
 September, 1803, Switzerland entered into an offen- 
 sive and defensive alliance with him. It was more 
 difficult to make sure of Spain and Portugal, especially 
 the former, for Napoleon had hurt Spanish feeling by- 
 selling Louisiana to the United States, when in his 
 anxiety to secure the goodwill of America he had dis-< 
 regarded the right of repurchase of that territory 
 which Spain had reserved when it was originally 
 ceded to France. But at Madrid they were not in 
 a position for resistance, and so, half by compulsion, 
 they remained faithful to the alliance, and in October, 
 1803, agreed to supply ships, troops, and subsidies. 
 Portugal went so far as to pay for her neutrality. 
 Thus when, in February, 1804, Genoa also entered 
 into the alliance, the whole of the Latin countries of 
 Western Europe, with the Dutch and Swiss dependen- 
 cies of France, stood ready for the struggle against 
 the Island Kingdom. 
 
 And this was the moment when Napoleon grasped 
 at the Imperial crown. It came to pass in connection 
 with a fresh attempt of the Royalists against his 
 person. They set to work again from their head- 
 quarters in England, and it was said that some of 
 the English ministers were in the secret. The daring 
 men who were in the plot meant to carry off the 
 First Consul while he was on his way to Malmaison, 
 and take him on board an English ship lying some- 
 where off the coast. But it is more than probable 
 that the attack upon him would have ended like that 
 upon the French envoys before Rastatt, or like the 
 attempt against Paul I, and this must have been 
 foreseen. The leaders of the party, George Cadou- 
 dal and Pichegru, themselves came over to Paris. 
 

 NAPOLEON BONAPARTE (FIRST CONSUL) AT MALMAISON. 
 
 Photo by AV. A. Mansell & Co., after a picture by Isabey. 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 243 
 
 They reckoned on discontent among the troops and 
 on the defection of several of the generals, above all, 
 on that of Moreau. The Comte d'Artois, too, knew 
 what was going on. He promised to send over his 
 own son. But Napoleon was well served by his 
 agents. The conspirators were waylaid and made 
 prisoners, and confessed to everything. Even the 
 complicity of Moreau with them was admitted. 
 Cadoudal and others were shot ; Pichegru was found 
 one morning strangled in his prison, unquestionably 
 by his own hand. The actor that he had always been 
 had played his part, and so departed from life. 
 There is no reason to suppose that his fate was 
 the result of Napoleon's orders, a report which the 
 enemies of the latter at once started. It was much 
 more his interest to keep his old enemy alive, 
 and he was ruthless only when he had an end to 
 gain. He probably would have let Pichegru go 
 just as he did Moreau, who was simply sentenced 
 to two years' imprisonment, and then had the 
 sentence commuted to banishment, when he went 
 to America. 
 
 But Napoleon took the opportunity to hurl his 
 lightning at a higher mark. In the course of his 
 judicial interrogation, George Cadoudal had spoken 
 of a prince, who was expected, but had not come. 
 Napoleon may have believed that this meant the 
 Due d'Enghien, who after having been expelled from 
 Austria at the demand of France, had ventured to 
 take up his residence just beyond the Rhine at 
 Ettersheim, almost under the guns of Strasburg. 
 He was led to choose the place partly by the desire 
 to be near his cousin Charlotte de Rohan, whom 
 he loved, but quite as much by an intention of wait- 
 
2 4 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 ing there for the war in which he hoped to take 
 part. It was known in Paris that English agents 
 were busy in South Germany ; and it was reported 
 that D'Enghien was in touch with them and also with 
 the emigres, and amongst others with Dumouriez. 
 It was not a long step from this to the assumption 
 that he was involved in the plot. In any case - 
 Napoleon resolved to make him a prisoner. In the 
 month of March he was carried off to Strasburg by 
 a raid of French dragoons, and thence taken to Paris, 
 where he was immediately brought before a court- 
 martial. Under examination he admitted that he 
 had been willing to take part in a war against France, 
 but all connection with the conspiracy he denied, and 
 certainly with truth. Nevertheless his judges, sub- 
 missive to their master's will, condemned him to 
 death. The law that fixed this penalty for French- 
 men bearing arms against France, served as a 
 pretext. Nothing has weighed more heavily on 
 Napoleon's reputation than this deed. All the 
 torrents of blood that he poured out have counted 
 for less in this respect than the few drops of princely 
 blood shed on the night of the 20th of March in 
 the ditch of the chateau of Vincennes. And indeed 
 the act can never be justified. No more than the 
 outrageous treatment of Kalckstein at the hands of 
 the Great Elector, who had him seized in the capital 
 of a neighbouring State and dragged to the scaffold 
 at Königsberg ; or the murder of the French envoys 
 by Austrian hussars before Rastatt ; or that greatest 
 of all the brutal acts of this period, the bombardment 
 of neutral and defenceless Copenhagen by the English 
 fleet in 1807. At the same time one must take into 
 account as some explanation that for the Bourbons 
 
NAPOLEON IN THE IMPERIAL ROBES. 
 From an engraving after the picture by F. Gerard. 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 245 
 
 Napoleon himself was outside the pale of the law, 
 and that twice already they had plotted against his 
 life and freedom. " I will send back to the Bourbons 
 the terror they hope to strike into us," he exclaimed. 
 " Am I a dog that they think they can kill me on the 
 highway ? Are my assassins beings too sacred to 
 touch ? " It was the old method that he had so 
 often adopted since Binasco ; he meant to use terror 
 as a means of action. The Jacobins were pleased ; 
 now, they thought, he belongs to us. But he went 
 his own way. It was easy enough for him to declare 
 his adherence to the Revolution : " I am the Revolu- 
 tion and I shall uphold it." But after, as before 
 this event, he placed himself above all parties. He 
 was the " man of the State," the master. Woe to 
 those who set themselves against his power. 
 
 Two months later Napoleon was Emperor of the 
 French. This new development had been already 
 for some time under discussion in the Council of 
 State and the Representative Assemblies. The at- 
 tempt on his life had once more shown how much 
 depended upon this one man. His work still lacked 
 that guarantee of permanence which only the posses- 
 sion of hereditary right and legally recognised succes- 
 sion could ensure. And so only seven days after the 
 execution of the Due d'Enghien there came a pro- 
 posal from the Senate to the First Consul that he 
 should complete his work by making it as immortal 
 as his fame ; that is, that he should accept hereditary 
 rulership. The word " Empire " was not yet spoken, 
 and the Senate showed a little hesitation in adopting 
 the resolution. But the end was that the representa- 
 tives of the nation decreed what Napoleon desired, 
 and what in the actual position of affairs the nation 
 
246 NAPOLEON 
 
 in general felt to be a necessity. As the Decree 
 of the Senate of the 28th Floreal of the Year XII 
 (May 1 8th, 1805) expressed it, the government of 
 the Republic was to be entrusted to an Emperor, 
 under the title of " Emperor of the French," and 
 Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Republic, 
 was to become Emperor of the French. The decree ■ 
 conferred upon the ruler an hereditary crown, and 
 gave him the right of naming his successor, at the 
 same time recognising the rights of the descendants 
 of his brothers Joseph and Louis " in direct, natural 
 and legitimate succession." The plebiscite to which 
 this proposal was submitted for approval, once more 
 by an overwhelming majority gave expression to the 
 assent of France to Napoleon's policy. The authority 
 which he possessed was hardly altered, but only 
 slightly strengthened. It was already great enough 
 for him to wear even the imperial crown. The only 
 question was whether this new dignity would have 
 the significant importance for France which the ruler 
 and his people anticipated, anticipations shown in the 
 splendours lavished on its possessor in a civil list of a 
 million sterling (exactly the same sum that theConstitu- 
 ent Assembly had fixed for the reformed monarchy), 
 and in the creation of new dignities and offices of 
 state, and of an imposing court. The new title was 
 restricted by close association with the nation and its 
 new organisation, so that it implied no claim to over- 
 lordship beyond the frontiers. Napoleon conceded 
 that among the sovereigns of Europe Francis II, as 
 German Emperor, held precedence of him, and even 
 recognised the same honorary rank for the new 
 Austrian imperial crown which the Emperor Francis 
 assumed on the nth of August of this year. But 
 
POPE PIUS VII. 
 From a painting by David at the Louvre. 
 
 p. 246. 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 247 
 
 the boundaries of the French empire already extended 
 far beyond those of the old monarchy. It even 
 included cities of the old German Empire ; and 
 Napoleon purposely recalled the memories of the first 
 and greatest of the emperors of the Middle Ages, 
 when on Charlemagne's day, in September, he went to 
 Aix-la-Chapelle and visited the cathedral that is the 
 hero's mausoleum. Like one of the old Kaisers he 
 made his state progress through the Rhineland, in 
 the midst of tumultuous demonstrations of popular 
 welcome, just as if he were in Paris. At Cologne 
 the citizens unharnessed his horses and drew his 
 carriage to his lodgings. When eight days later he 
 held his court at Mayence, ambassadors, and even the 
 princes of Germany themselves, came from all sides 
 with addresses, presents, and petitions. Once more, 
 as elsewhere on a former occasion, he saw standing 
 at his side as the first of the nobles of Germany, one 
 of the Dalberg family, Karl Theodor, Archbishop of 
 Mayence and Arch-chancellor of the German Empire. 
 From Vienna itself there came to the Rhine an em- 
 bassy bringing letters of formal recognition from the 
 German Emperor. 
 
 Only the coronation was still wanting to complete 
 the work. Its solemn celebration too was impressed 
 with a national character. It was performed not at 
 Rome, but at Paris. But here too a harmony with 
 the traditions of Carlovingian times was preserved, 
 by the invitation which Napoleon sent to the Pope, 
 asking him to come across the Alps and give him 
 consecration with the holy oil. Pius VII came. Like 
 Pope Stephen of old, his successor crossed the Alps 
 to consecrate this new Frankish dynasty with the 
 solemn words of the Church. He too had before his 
 
2 4 8 NAPOLEON 
 
 eyes the example of these far-off times. He hoped 
 to win back the territories of the Church still occupied 
 by the French, and to free the Concordat from the 
 Gallican articles. But this was not Napoleon's idea. 
 He wished, like Charlemagne, to have the help of the 
 Church, but like him he was anxiously on the watch 
 to preserve his own independence. According to 
 tradition Pope Leo had come behind the King of the 
 Franks as he knelt in prayer before the altar of 
 St. Peter's and placed the crown on his head ; but 
 Napoleon did not mean that things should be done in 
 such fashion. On the 2nd of December the Pope, 
 as head of the spiritual order, had to wait with the 
 Court and the clergy in the choir of Notre Dame until 
 the imperial pair came up to the altar, from which 
 Napoleon himself took the crown of golden laurel 
 leaves, the fitting symbol of his power based upon 
 victory, and with his own hands placed it on his head, 
 and then put her crown on that of his consort. He 
 took only the anointing from the Pope. The bless- 
 ing of his marriage, performed by his uncle Fesch, 
 now a cardinal of Holy Church, on the day before the 
 coronation ; the submission of the constitutional 
 clergy ; the abolition of the Republican calendar, were 
 concessions arising from the new order of things. 
 But if the old German emperors had at times op- 
 pressed the Church, Napoleon went beyond them all. 
 He would not endure that the Pope should have 
 any association with heretics and schisms ; the Papal 
 States were a gift of Charlemagne, and the Pope must 
 not now, any more than then, dissociate himself 
 from the imperial policy. In vain the Pope objected 
 that he was the father of all believers and must be 
 the friend of peace. Napoleon left no room for mis- 
 
o a 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 249 
 
 takes as to his meaning. No one but himself must 
 command in Italy. 
 
 Already in May at Milan he had let it be under- 
 stood that he could not be at the same time Emperor 
 and President of the Cisalpine State. Now he was 
 busy with plans for erecting a throne also in Italy. 
 His brothers Joseph and Louis declined the proffered 
 crown. Then he thought of giving it to his stepson, 
 Eugene Beauharnais, but finally decided to assume the 
 title himself, and make Eugene his Viceroy. On the 
 26th of May, 1805, in the cathedral of Milan, ac- 
 cording to the ancient rite, he placed with his own 
 hands the iron crown of Lombardy on his head. 
 " God gave it to me, woe to him who touches it 1 " so 
 ran the old formula, which he repeated in threatening 
 tones. A few weeks later Piombino and Lucca were 
 bestowed on the Emperor's sisters, and Genoa was 
 annexed to France. At Vienna it was reported that 
 the Emperor was also thinking of Venice. Two 
 strong French corps were stationed at Alessandria and 
 Verona. 
 
 But there was already a reply to all this, for in 
 May, 1805, Austria was at last allied with Russia. 
 The treaty had already been concluded on the 6th of 
 November, 1804, and it promised to Austria the re- 
 covery of her Italian possessions up to the Adda, and 
 the restoration of Tuscany, Modena, and Piedmont. 
 Nay, more, the Austrian imperial armies stood ready 
 on the borders of Venetia. It was this that had 
 called forth the scene at Milan. But there were still 
 many steps to be taken before Austria finally decided 
 upon war. England and Russia were the Powers that 
 were urging her on. 
 
 In May, 1 804, Pitt had again come to the helm, and 
 
2 so NAPOLEON 
 
 with him a fresh impetus was given to their activity« 
 However, almost a whole year passed, but at last on 
 the nth of April, 1805, the treaty was concluded 
 between England and Russia for the restoration of the 
 balance of power in Europe. The points on which 
 the contracting powers had come to an agreement as 
 objects to be held in view were the liberation of 
 Hanover, the independence of Holland and Switzer- 
 land, the restoration of the kingdom of Sardinia, the 
 preservation of Naples, and the evacuation of Italy by 
 the French. But these were only the least of the 
 demands, or rather the professed demands, which the 
 Allies put forth in a joint note presented in Paris. 
 That Napoleon would make such concessions they did 
 not for one moment believe. They were only intended 
 to be the means of making the Revolutionary 
 Emperor appear before the world as the great disturber 
 of the peace of Europe, and to conceal their own 
 ultimate aims. These included nothing less than the 
 reduction of France to its old limits, securing to 
 England the possession of Malta, and giving her the 
 dominion of the seas and complete supremacy in the 
 world's trade, while at the same time Russia was to 
 become the dominant power in the North. Poland 
 was above all the object of the ambition of the Czar, 
 now under the influence of his Polish Minister, 
 Count Adam Czartoryski. Both Powers had already 
 fixed their eyes on the programme of the future 
 Congress of Vienna, the conditions of the Peace of 
 Paris. Prussia too was taken into account. If she 
 would not side with the two Powers, she was to be 
 dealt with as an enemy. Czartoryski's thoughts were 
 especially turned in this direction. It might afford 
 an occasion for once more uniting all Poland, even 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 251 
 
 though it might only be through a personal union 
 with the power of the Czar. There was no 
 immediate result from the joint note. But Austria 
 at last yielded to the pressure of the two Courts. 
 The peace party, led by the Archduke Charles, and 
 especially strong in the army, had to give way when 
 Pitt granted the subsidies that were required, and 
 General Mack pledged himself to get the still incom- 
 pletely equipped army ready for action. The Third 
 Coalition had now been formed (July, 1805). 
 
 Two years and more had passed since war had been 
 declared between England and France, and yet they 
 had not come to blows. For the first time Napoleon 
 had hesitated to tread the path of victory on which 
 so far he had rushed onward with irresistible strength. 
 What was the reason for his turning from a Scipio 
 into a Fabius Cunctator ? Was he not in earnest in 
 assembling huge armaments in the harbour of Boulogne 
 and along all the coast from Cherbourg to the Texel, 
 and in carrying out manoeuvres with these hundreds 
 of flat -bottomed boats that he had gathered at 
 Boulogne ? And in those glittering parades and 
 threatening demonstrations at Boulogne when he 
 founded the Legion of Honour ? Was all this 
 meant only to serve to conceal another object ? Was 
 he keeping the English fleet tied to the Channel, and 
 thereby barring his own way to the British coasts, only 
 in order to prepare for the destruction of Austria and 
 the conquest of the Continent ? Such were the 
 statements which his opponents at the very time made 
 against him, and which even to our own day have 
 found a thousand-fold echo in history. But if this 
 was the secret of his policy, why did Napoleon so long 
 defer the attack ? Why did he not as early as the 
 
252 NAPOLEON 
 
 summer of 1803, or even of 1804, strike down 
 Austria when she was still disarmed ? Why did he 
 wait so long, until the Austrian armies were in 
 position on the Adige and the Inn, until the Russians 
 were on the march, until England had paid over her 
 subsidies, until Sweden had already entered the Coal- 
 ition, and Prussia could hardly be turned away from 
 it ? He had threatened enough and had drawn to his 
 side all the States that lay between. But this can be 
 sufficiently explained through a purpose to inspire 
 fear of his power, and to erect a bulwark against 
 possible attacks in the rear. The only inexplicable 
 policy would be one that might seem to have been 
 specially devised to weld together once more a ring 
 of the enemies of France. Such a theory indeed 
 deserves the incisive phrase with which it is char- 
 acterised by the Emperor's nephew, Prince Jerome 
 Napoleon (who by the way was one of those best 
 acquainted with the whole history of his uncle), and 
 he says that it would have been " mere childishness." 
 But it is easy to understand Napoleon's conduct at 
 this time, if we consider it in relation to the course 
 of European politics that we have outlined. England 
 was Napoleon's greatest enemy, and in the spring of 
 1803, his only declared enemy. He must therefore 
 keep her isolated, and strive with all his might to 
 reduce her to a state of exhaustion before new 
 enemies showed themselves. This alone was a policy 
 befitting his genius and the traditions of his career. 
 As a matter of fact, amongst those who are fitted to 
 give an expert judgment on the point, there is no 
 longer any dispute that at least up to the spring of 
 1804 he was seriously engaged in planning the attack. 
 The difference of opinion only arises as to whether 
 
JEROME. 
 From an engraving by J. G. Müller, after a picture by M. de Kinson. 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 253 
 
 after that date he was not more and more directing his 
 armaments to objects on the Continent, until at last 
 they were exclusively diverted to this purpose. 
 
 And here it is an easy matter to come to closer 
 quarters with adversaries who are always talking 
 of Napoleon's lust for conquest. For the more 
 threateningly the storm gathered to the eastwards, the 
 more anxiously must the Emperor have bent his 
 mind to the enterprise against England. He might 
 well hope to bring this terrible enemy to its knees 
 once he had sent across a hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand men, got command of the harbour of Ports- 
 mouth, and the river approach to London by a land 
 attack, and taken possession of the Bank of England 
 and all the sources of Britain's prosperity and power, 
 while the ruin and despair of the people, disturbances 
 in such industrial centres as Leeds and Manchester, 
 and a rising of the Irish, might also be factors 
 in his favour. But how was he to strike the blow ? 
 What chance would there be if the Channel was not 
 clear, or if his own fleet were beaten, and the enemy's 
 warships fell upon his flotilla of small craft, crowded 
 with men and guns, in the midst of their voyage ? 
 The landing would be in itself a difficult enough 
 operation. This would be the case even if he was 
 fortunate in making the passage. And had he not 
 reason to fear, especially if the Continental Powers 
 again took the field, that England might prove to 
 be a new Egypt for him ? His power in France was 
 not so firmly rooted that he could venture to leave 
 matters to a Regency under one or other of his 
 brothers. And a return through the midst of hostile 
 fleets across the Channel would not be so easy as his 
 voyage back from Egypt over the wide waters of the 
 
254 NAPOLEON 
 
 Mediterranean. We need only consider the difficul- 
 ties of an invasion of England in our own time to fully 
 understand Napoleon's embarrassment. 
 
 Nevertheless, I agree with those who believe that 
 the Emperor was thoroughly in earnest about his 
 plan till the end of August, 1805, that is up to the 
 eve of the war with Austria. Indeed, I am rather in-< 
 clined to say that his energy and his enterprising 
 spirit made him cling far too long to his plan of in- 
 vasion. His idea was that the combined fleet of 
 Spanish and French ships that had been assembled at 
 Cadiz under Admiral Villeneuve, should lure away 
 part of the English fleet to the West Indies. 
 Villeneuve was then to double back, evading the 
 English, and return across the Atlantic to French 
 waters, set free the squadrons blockaded at Brest and 
 Cherbourg, and combining with them, appear before 
 Boulogne in superior force. The Emperor calculated 
 that if he could get command of the Channel even for 
 only three or four days, this would suffice to enable 
 him to throw his army upon the English coast. The 
 first part of this plan, the voyage to the West Indies, 
 proved successful. On the voyage back, however, an 
 English cruiser overtook Villeneuve's slow sailing 
 ships. His object was thus revealed, and when 
 he arrived off Corunna, he found that he was 
 threatened by a hastily assembled English squadron. 
 He made his way through them, but not without loss 
 to his effective strength. Putting into Corunna to 
 repair damages, he did not venture to go to the 
 northward from that port, but took his fleet back to 
 Cadiz (middle of August). We can see day by day 
 in Napoleon's correspondence how despatches con- 
 taining information or orders came one after another, 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 255 
 
 pressing close on each other, and we can almost feel 
 the feverish excitement that breathes in every line of 
 his letters, and we can realise his disappointment 
 when Villeneuve, in whom there was not a spark 
 of his master's fire, deceived all his hopes. 
 
 His consolation was that he himself had everything 
 in readiness for turning the destructive onset of 
 his might towards the Danube, now that fate so 
 willed it. The preparations for both objectives had 
 been carried on side by side. The placing of the 
 troops, so that by concentric marches they could 
 simultaneously appear upon the battlefields of Ger- 
 many, the works of peace themselves, the roads 
 that had been constructed, the canals that had been 
 dug, the ships that had been built, the wealth that 
 had been amassed in the last few years, all became 
 ways and means for concentrating the war strength of 
 France against the Powers of Eastern Europe. On 
 the diplomatic side all the preliminaries of the con- 
 flict were carried out with the utmost precision. The 
 Emperor had three notes sent to Vienna by Talley- 
 rand. The first was on the 3rd of August. It 
 demanded that Austria should recall her armies from 
 Venetia and the Tyrol. In the next ten days the 
 same demand was twice repeated, and each time 
 in stronger terms. " You know," wrote Napoleon 
 to his minister with reference to the last of these 
 notes, " that I like to follow the method of the poets 
 and lead up to a dramatic denouement. Impetuosity 
 is not the way to gain one's ends." Even as late as 
 the 23rd of August, he still hoped that the Admiral 
 would make his appearance in the Channel. But his 
 thoughts were turning more and more to Germany. 
 On the 25th of August came the moment when 
 
256 NAPOLEON 
 
 a decisive resolution must be taken. " My choice is 
 made," wrote the Emperor to Talleyrand. " We 
 must now appear to be irresolute just to gain time. 
 Once I have the Rhine behind me, I shall need only 
 twenty days to prevent Austria from crossing the 
 Inn." 
 
 In the summer of 1756, Frederick the Great had. 
 acted in just the same way when he attacked Austria, 
 in order to hew to pieces with the sword, before it 
 was ready, the hostile coalition formed against him. 
 Three times too Napoleon had made known his claims 
 to the Vienna Cabinet. He too was a man whose way 
 it was to challenge fate instead of waiting idly till he 
 was overwhelmed by it. It was as if the example of 
 the great king, in whom Napoleon saw a prototype 
 of himself in war and policy, was actually before his 
 mind. Both were accustomed at times merely to 
 show their adversaries the awful image of war, " like 
 Medusa's head," but both too were ready to grasp 
 the aegis shield and to hurl the thunderbolt. 
 
 On the 3rd of September the Austrian Minister, 
 Ludwig Cobenzl, declared to the French Ambassador 
 that Austria was concentrating her armies in order to 
 rectify the situation in Europe as demanded by French 
 violations of treaty rights. On the 8 th of September 
 the troops of the Emperor Francis crossed the Inn. 
 The regiments had been raised to only half their war 
 strength, and the Russians were not expected till the 
 1 6th of October, but the Austrians were in a hurry, for 
 it was a question of cutting off the Bavarians, who 
 had sided with France, and of pushing as far forward 
 as possible towards the Rhine. By the end of the 
 month the army, 60,000 strong, under the command 
 of Mack, was upon the Hier. The Bavarians had 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 257 
 
 escaped, the Russians were still far away, and where 
 the French were neither the commander in the field 
 nor the general staff had any idea. Yet Mack was 
 not particularly anxious, for he never was wanting 
 in self-confidence. Presently he had reports of hostile 
 movements to the eastward on his right flank. But 
 he remained fixed to the place where he stood " in 
 a complete dream," as he himself afterwards said, 
 until suddenly the veil was torn away and he saw 
 that he was surrounded on all sides. From west and 
 north in superior strength the forces of the French 
 Emperor came pressing in upon him, and while he 
 suspected nothing they had cut off every line of 
 retreat. On the 17th of October Mack surrendered 
 at Ulm. As Napoleon briefly and proudly wrote to 
 his wife, he had destroyed Austria's first army by 
 mere marching. 
 
 Meanwhile, the Russians had reached the Inn. 
 Nothing was left for them now but to gather up 
 some remnants of the lost army and to retire upon 
 the second Austrian army, pursued by Murat. They 
 evaded him, for, to the great annoyance of his master, 
 he had pushed on towards Vienna, instead of cutting 
 them off from their lateral retreat towards Moravia. 
 At Hollabrunn he dispersed a detachment under 
 Bagration, but there was now no possibility of pre- 
 venting the Russians from joining the Austrian corps 
 that had been rapidly withdrawn from the Tyrol and 
 Italy. So Napoleon had to follow the enemy into 
 Moravia. His position was not very brilliant. He 
 had to leave large detachments behind him, and had 
 only three army corps with him. If the enemy could 
 succeed in avoiding a battle, and meanwhile bring 
 Prussia into the field (and of this there was at last 
 
258 NAPOLEON 
 
 some prospect), they might still hope for everything. 
 But at this moment the Czar Alexander did just what 
 Napoleon wanted, and himself presented him with 
 the laurels of victory. He assumed the offensive in 
 the hope of turning the right flank of the French 
 and cutting them off from the Danube. It was the 
 best thing that Napoleon could wish for, and seeing 
 at once through the enemy's plan he did everything 
 to lure them blindly on. Leaving his right wing 
 more and more exposed so as to draw the Russians 
 into an attack upon it, he gathered his forces together 
 and threw them upon the centre of the enemy, which 
 had no cavalry with it. Broken through by the 
 French columns it gave way, carrying with it in wild 
 confusion first the enemy's left and then the right. 
 Such was the victorious day of Austerlitz, a worthy 
 celebration of the anniversary of his coronation, 
 for the battle was fought on the 2nd of December, 
 1805. 
 
 We must now turn our thoughts again to Prussia, 
 which had for months seen the storm raging around 
 its borders, and yet had all the while stood idly by. 
 This time she had not been left without tempters. 
 Hardly had Napoleon decided on the war with 
 Austria when Duroc, now High Chamberlain of the 
 Empire and one of his inner circle, arrived at Berlin. 
 For weeks Prussian diplomacy wavered to this side 
 and to that between the proposals made by Duroc, 
 and those put forward, half as a suppliant, half with 
 an air of menace, by the Russian envoy Alopäus. The 
 army was well equipped, the finances were in order. 
 Into whichever scale the Prussian sword was thrown 
 the balance must incline to that side. But all the 
 while the King, whose power was as absolute as that 
 

 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 259 
 
 of the French Emperor, and whose people were true 
 to him and obedient to the death, could not choose 
 his course between Yes and No, and this less from fear 
 than from a feeling of mistrust towards both the 
 candidates for his friendship, mingled with the inborn 
 irresolution of his character. When, in September, 
 he made up his mind to mobilise his army, it so 
 happened that it was against Russia, whose forces had 
 penetrated into Prussian Poland, without so much as 
 waiting for permission. And then when Bernadotte 
 acted in the same way on his southern borders, and 
 violated the frontier of Anspach in order to force 
 a way through to the Danube, the King at once 
 changed his policy. It was in vain that Napoleon 
 had military necessity put forward as an excuse for 
 this march made by his general. For Frederick 
 William it was a welcome occasion for turning to 
 his friend of Memel, and taking the line that his 
 heart had long suggested to him. At the end of 
 October the Czar came to the Prussian court. At 
 Potsdam, with embraces and friendly grasps of the 
 hand, the sovereigns confirmed a treaty which pledged 
 Prussia to armed mediation. But there remained a 
 shadow over the King's mind. " I have signed," he 
 said, " but my feelings are in the greatest agitation, 
 and I tremble for the consequences." And yet the 
 intermediary chosen to carry the matter through was 
 the peacefully inclined Minister, Haugwitz. Pur- 
 posely delaying his journey, he did not meet the 
 Emperor of the French at Brunn till the end of 
 November. The dice had not yet been thrown, and 
 the news of Trafalgar, where on the 21st of October 
 the dying Nelson had won for his country the com- 
 mand of the sea, seemed even to suggest an adjourn- 
 
26o NAPOLEON 
 
 ment of the proceedings. But on the 2nd of De- 
 cember the decisive blow was struck at Austerlitz, 
 that once more made the Continent subject to the 
 conqueror. It was decisive, too, for Prussia. Napo- 
 leon had now his hands free, and could play the game 
 as he pleased. Acting as it were from an inner posi- 
 tion, he pressed in between the parties to this weakly- 
 linked alliance. Alternately threatening and flattering 
 them, revealing to each the secrets of the other, he 
 scared them asunder. He was ready to leave Austria 
 intact, and to vouchsafe peace to Russia, if only both 
 these Powers would consent to close their ports 
 against England. But Alexander would have neither 
 war nor peace ; he was already in full retreat for the 
 Vistula. And now the Prussian envoy, too, left 
 Austria in the lurch. On the 15th of December at 
 Schönbrunn, Haugwitz consented to the signing of 
 a treaty with France, which put her in possession of 
 Cleves and Wesel, Neufchätel and Anspach, and 
 handed over Hanover to Prussia on condition that 
 she should close her harbours against England. 
 Austria was thus left to the mercy of the conqueror. 
 By the Peace of Pressburg (January ist, 1806) 
 she had to cede to the kingdom of Italy the plunder 
 she had acquired at Campo Formio, namely Venice 
 and the east coast of the Adriatic as far as Cattaro. 
 Trent, with the Tyrol and Brixen, was to be trans- 
 ferred to Bavaria, which was thus over-abundantly 
 endowed with fragments from the old German 
 Empire, as had been the case with other German 
 vassals of Napoleon, for he was always ready to 
 reward those who served him. The Emperor had 
 accomplished what the old French monarchy had 
 thrice in vain attempted. The Hapsburgs were 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 261 
 
 driven out of the old territories of the Empire and 
 out of Italy. 
 
 Austria lay in the dust. Prussia still stood erect. 
 Since the Peace of Luneville she had obtained an 
 increase of territory such as so far long years of war 
 had not brought to her. In possession of nearly the 
 whole extent of the German coasts both on the Baltic 
 and the North Sea, she ruled from Emden to Thurin- 
 gia, and from Memel almost up to the gates of 
 Cracow. Last of all she had ventured on a decisive 
 course, and had lost by it what her great king had 
 won for her, independence, and more than that, her 
 political honour. Such were the ideas of patriots 
 of the stamp of Stein and Louis Ferdinand ; so spoke 
 Haugwitz's rivals, Hardenberg and his friends ; so 
 felt in the depth of his soul even the negotiator 
 himself, and so felt most certainly the King as he 
 confirmed the treaty. They had allowed themselves 
 to be cast into fetters without moving a hand. 
 
 And if now Napoleon were to make peace with 
 England, would Prussia be allowed to retain Han- 
 over ? Was not there reason to fear that Napoleon 
 would hand back to its owner this territory which all 
 the while he held only as a pledge ? That very 
 winter this danger was in sight. Notwithstanding 
 Trafalgar, Pitt was stricken even unto death by 
 Austerlitz and Pressburg. He was already ill ; the 
 news from Moravia brought him to the grave. He 
 had for some time been barely able to keep his party 
 together. And now under the influence of the Prince 
 of Wales a new Cabinet, the Addington-Fox Ministry, 
 took the helm of the State. Immediately Fox made 
 friendly advances towards France. He gave the 
 
262 NAPOLEON 
 
 Emperor information of an alleged conspiracy against 
 him. Napoleon received this friendly act with thanks. 
 A correspondence followed and out of it arose negotia- 
 tions for peace. 
 
 But the state of war still continued, and Napoleon 
 therefore sought, as was his custom and as was natural, 
 to strengthen the position he had already won: 
 Above all it was necessary to secure quiet in Italy. 
 There, as soon as the news of Trafalgar arrived, 
 Naples had at once broken away from him again. 
 While he was still at Pressburg, on the day after the 
 peace was signed, Napoleon pronounced sentence of 
 death on the doubly faithless Bourbon dynasty. 
 Queen Maria Carolina and her consort had speculated 
 on the downfall of Napoleon. Their country must 
 be a sacrifice to the victor of Austerlitz. In vain the 
 Queen implored the Emperor for mercy. She received 
 no answer. Nothing was left for her but to take 
 refuge in Sicily under the protection of the English 
 ships. And on the 30th of March Napoleon in- 
 formed the Senate that he had made his brother 
 Joseph King of Naples and Sicily. At the same time 
 Venetia was incorporated with the kingdom of Italy, 
 Guastalla was given to the Emperor's sister, Pauline, 
 now Princess Borghese ; and a whole series of titular 
 duchies with rich revenues were marked out in the 
 conquered territories for men who had rendered 
 special service to the Empire. For the Pope, too, 
 Austerlitz brought a new arrangement. Napoleon 
 did not yet interfere with the integrity of the Papal 
 States, but Pius must hand over the outlying posses- 
 sions of the Church, Ponte Corvo and Benevento, as 
 fiefs to Bernadotte and Talleyrand, and must permit 
 Ancona to remain occupied by French troops and 
 
MARIE PAULINE, PRINCESS BORGHESE. 
 From a picture by Madame Benoit. Photo by Neurdin Freres. 
 
 p. 262. 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 263 
 
 close his harbours against the Russians and the 
 English. All freedom of action in politics was with- 
 held from the Holy Father. Holland was still a 
 Republic ; indeed, the aristocratic-Republican party 
 there was the same that from old times had been 
 on the side of France. Now they had to agree 
 to Napoleon's setting up a throne in Holland too, 
 which he gave to his brother Louis. With much 
 more pleasure the Elector of Bavaria and Frederick 
 of Wurtemberg grasped the golden diadems and the 
 rank of kings vouchsafed to them by the Emperor ; 
 Charles Frederick of Baden also, as well as the Land- 
 grave of Hesse and the Count of Nassau, gladly 
 received at the same time higher titles as fresh gifts 
 from his hands ; and the High Chancellor of Ger- 
 many, Archbishop von Dalberg himself, exchanged 
 the now obsolete splendours of his mediaeval dignity 
 for the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt, which was created 
 specially for him by the ever generous Emperor. It 
 was by these steps that the victory over Austria was 
 finally made complete. Without his having foreseen 
 the results thus accomplished, the dissolution of the 
 old Empire, whose crown Kaiser Francis still wore, 
 was consummated. When Napoleon required him to 
 renounce his old dignity, there was nothing left for 
 him but to fully recognise the newly formed Con- 
 federation of the Rhine. On the 6th of August, 
 1806, at Ratisbon he handed over the official note by 
 which he resigned the crown of Charlemagne, and 
 became Emperor of Austria. 
 
 In truth the realm that stretched from the Straits 
 of Gibraltar to the pine-clad hills of central Germany 
 was wide enough to suffice for the ruler of France, if 
 only the two great Powers that still kept the field 
 
264 NAPOLEON 
 
 would agree to peace and so secure it to him. Since 
 Pressburg Napoleon had sought to open negotiations 
 on the subject ; and that he seriously wished for peace 
 there can be no doubt. There actually was a day in 
 July, 1806, when he might well believe that he had 
 reached the end he had in view. It was when Count 
 Orloff, Alexander's ambassador, concluded a pre- 
 liminary treaty with him, which was to give Sicily to 
 Joseph and leave Malta in the possession of England. 
 But to come back to the point : what was to be the 
 fate of Hanover in this case ? There was just as 
 little reason to expect that King George would give 
 up the hereditary dominions of his race, as that 
 Napoleon would prolong the war merely to keep the 
 Electorate for Prussia. He had indeed strengthened 
 the alliance with the Hohenzollerns in February, at 
 the very moment when overtures of peace came from 
 England. Instead of merely ratifying the Treaty of 
 Schönbrunn, he had urged on the submissive Govern- 
 ment of Berlin to a new treaty of alliance, which 
 pledged it to the closest connection with France. But 
 first of all to separate Prussia and England, then to 
 urge England towards peace through fear of this new 
 adversary, and finally to hand back Hanover to King 
 George as the price of peace, would all have been a 
 characteristic piece of Napoleonic tactics. 
 
 But Prussia was after all spared this humiliation. 
 The Czar refused to ratify Orloff's treaty, and in 
 England the wind changed again. The Coalition re- 
 mained in active existence, and if Napoleon wanted a 
 peace that would secure the position he had won for 
 himself in the world he must fight once more. 
 
 We can now understand that the Emperor could 
 have no interest in a war with Prussia, so much so 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 265 
 
 that he found it difficult to believe that, as he himself 
 wrote, the King would commit such a folly. For 
 he himself was completely prepared for such an 
 eventuality, while Prussia was practically isolated. 
 She could expect no help from England, which in the 
 spring had declared a blockade of her coasts ; nor from 
 the Czar Alexander, with whom negotiations had been 
 a failure ; nor from Austria, which stood by, not 
 altogether displeased to see her neighbour's troubles ; 
 nor finally from that Power which the Prussian King 
 was able to make his ally in 18 13 — German love for 
 the Fatherland and the hatred of a down-trodden 
 people for its oppressors. It was merely the Prussian 
 territorial State, built up out of the wreckage of the 
 old German Empire, that was now to fight for its 
 existence. 
 
 Yet it was still on the whole the State of Frederick 
 the Great. The army was completely in the hands of 
 its leaders, brought up in the traditions of its old 
 renown, full of confidence in itself, as befitted soldiers 
 whose standards were adorned with the laurels of 
 Rossbach. It must be granted that, like the State, 
 the army had become somewhat old-fashioned, not- 
 withstanding many reforms, and although men like 
 Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were amongst its officers, 
 though few such held high rank. It was practically 
 the army of Frederick the Great in respect of the 
 organisation of the corps of officers and of the troops, 
 two-fifths of whom were now Poles ; in its methods 
 of recruiting, and in its discipline, in which flogging 
 and running the gauntlet still held a place. It was the 
 mirror of the State which it had to defend, and it was 
 just as incapable of reform. It was without a trace 
 of the spirit which the Revolution had aroused in the 
 
266 NAPOLEON 
 
 armies of France, and which, now trained and dis- 
 ciplined, lived on in the army of the Emperor. 
 
 Napoleon was already on his way to the scene of 
 the coming operations when the Prussian Ambassador 
 at Paris presented a memorandum which practically 
 amounted to an ultimatum from his King, though it 
 implied an expectation of further negotations. It 
 demanded the withdrawal of the French troops from 
 Germany, and the recognition of a North German 
 Confederation under the protectorate of Prussia. It 
 was not till the 12 th of October that Napoleon gave 
 his answer. He despatched it to his " Brother of 
 Prussia," from his head-quarters at Gera, in the heart 
 of Thuringia, where he was already on the right flank 
 of his opponents and almost outflanking them. " I 
 have," he wrote, " at my command forces such that 
 those of your Majesty cannot long stand against them. 
 . . . Your Majesty will be defeated. You will have 
 staked the peace of your times, the existence of your 
 subjects, without having the shadow of a pretext. 
 Europe knows that the people of France outnumber 
 threefold those of your Majesty's States, and the 
 quality of its army is equal to yours." The King 
 had asked for an answer by the 8th of October. Like 
 a good knight Napoleon declared his intention of 
 bringing it in person. Proud words, but they ex- 
 pressed only the actual facts. On the ioth of October 
 the Achilles of the Prussian army, Prince Louis 
 Ferdinand, was defeated and killed at Saalfeld. Only 
 the most rapid retreat could save the situation, but 
 even to carry out this retreat the necessary clearness 
 of view and strength of will was lacking. And so 
 came the battle of Jena (October 14th, 1806), 
 where the largest army that Prussia had ever put into 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 267 
 
 the field was destroyed, and Frederick's State fell down 
 in ruins. " It was something awful," wrote Gneisenau, 
 who had taken part in the battle and was swept away 
 in the terrible retreat, "a thousand times better to 
 die than to live through such experiences again ! It 
 will add some wonderful pages to history." Well 
 might Archenholtz, the historian of the Seven Years 
 War, write, " Fuimus Troes, fuit I lion ! " Built up as 
 with a stroke of a magician's wand, the glory of this 
 warlike monarchy had all at once passed away. 
 Napoleon, in fact, wished to give effect to what had 
 been the object of the Coalition of 1756, and to re- 
 duce Prussia to the limits of the old Electorate. As 
 early as the 23rd of October, he issued a decree which 
 announced the annexation of all the territory of 
 Prussia up to the Elbe. He meant to leave only the 
 old March of Brandenburg to the King. In vain 
 Frederick William strove to modify the Emperor's 
 resolve, to call forth the magnanimity of the con- 
 queror. Appeals of this kind had no effect on 
 Napoleon. The Prussian Envoy, General Zastrow, 
 who was sent to ask for peace, met Napoleon at 
 Charlottenburg, when he was on the point of making 
 his entry into Berlin. Napoleon was actually ha- 
 ranguing the delegates of the estates of Brandenburg, 
 and hinting that he thought of instituting a National 
 Representative Assembly to defend Liberal ideas 
 against the old Prussian monarchy, and the Envoy 
 realised that there was no possibility of saving any- 
 thing. On the 30th of October he signed what the 
 Emperor dictated to him. For by this time the civil 
 organisation of the State had been overthrown and 
 the army broke up as far as the Oder ; Magdeburg, 
 Stettin, and Küstrin had fallen ; Blucher had been 
 
268 NAPOLEON 
 
 forced to capitulate at Lübeck, and Hohenlohe at 
 Prenzlau, and four French army corps were on the 
 march to the Vistula. And the further Napoleon's 
 armies advanced, and the nearer they were to the 
 Russians, the heavier his demands became. He 
 required possession of the line of the Thorn and 
 Graudenz, and the fortified bridge-head at Warsaw ;' 
 then he asked for Dantzic and Colberg, and even 
 Breslau. The Prussian troops were to be withdrawn 
 to Königsberg. And meanwhile he once more ap- 
 proached the Prussians as a tempter. If they would 
 march with him against the Russians, he gave them a 
 prospect of getting back some part of their lost terri- 
 tories. There was a first glimmer of the old Prussian 
 pride and sense of honour, when the King, after much 
 hesitation, made up his mind to reject such proposals, 
 and to place the hope of safety for Prussia under the 
 banners of Russia. 
 
 For Napoleon there was still a difficult piece of 
 work to be done, and he applied himself to do it with 
 his accustomed energy and thoroughness. If the 
 Prussians had broken away, the Poles were ready to 
 help him. So at once he called upon that nation to 
 rise against their oppressors. From Berlin he wrote 
 to the Sultan that he had subdued Prussia and was 
 following up the advantage he had gained. In the 
 style of his Egyptian proclamations he declared 
 himself to be chosen by destiny to save the Turkish 
 Empire, and he called upon the Sultan to advance to 
 the Dniester. The Government at London had just 
 published a proclamation which justified the breaking 
 off of the recent negotiations, and declared it must 
 defend the freedom of Europe against the Usurper. 
 In reply to it Napoleon issued the Berlin Decree, the 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 269 
 
 purpose of which was to close the Continent against 
 the trade of England. 
 
 Four days later, on the 25th of November, the 
 Emperor was at Posen. On the 27th, Murat with his 
 advance guard came in contact with the enemy. But 
 now the winter of north-eastern Europe began to 
 display its treacherous rigours. It was not so much 
 the cold, which rather tended to make the military 
 operations easier, as the thaws that were a source of 
 endless difficulty, for they turned the neglected roads 
 into swamps and limited the supplies that could be 
 brought up into this impoverished region. At 
 Pultusk the Russians succeeded in withdrawing in 
 time to escape from a perilous position, and thus the 
 scene of the decisive action was transferred to East 
 Prussia. Here too there was a moment when the 
 result seemed to waver in the balance, when the 
 Emperor on the snow-covered plains of Eylau was 
 not indeed defeated, but for the first time in his 
 career did not succeed in wresting victory from his 
 opponents. In order to make good his terrible losses, 
 and to secure his line of retreat, he fell back upon the 
 rich district of the Lower Vistula. The chances of 
 the struggle had now become almost equal. On the 
 Danube the Russians were fighting successfully against 
 the Turks. Austria began to arm. The Swedes 
 pushed forward from Stralsund to beyond Anklam. 
 Tidings came of menacing indications of widespread 
 excitement throughout North Germany. England 
 gave hopes of supplying new subsidies, and was 
 working to form a coalition of the four Northern 
 Powers. Even Spain was becoming a source of 
 difficulty. So Napoleon took a backward step. He 
 sent General Bertrand to Memel, and once more 
 
270 NAPOLEON 
 
 offered peace to the King of Prussia. That Frederick 
 William, under the influence of Hardenberg, kept 
 true to Russia was one more glimpse of light in 
 these the darkest days that Prussia had seen. He 
 had already lost everything except one division of his 
 troops, half a province and two blockaded fortresses. 
 But with the fidelity and conscientiousness that 
 marked every step of his career, he held fast to the 
 word he had pledged to his friend ; while Harden- 
 berg^ active spirit consoled itself with hopes that 
 foreshadowed for him in daring combinations the 
 restoration of Prussia's pre-eminence over all North 
 Germany. 
 
 For the moment, however, all was in vain. The 
 French Emperor did not waste one minute, and took 
 no more backward steps. He made safe the roads 
 and passes between the Vistula and the Rhine, 
 reduced Dantzic to surrender, and concentrated all his 
 forces at the decisive point. At Friedland, on the 
 14th of June, 1807, he overwhelmed the Russo- 
 Prussian army. On the same day the corps of 
 Marshal Soult marched into Königsberg, which had 
 already been abandoned by the Prussians. On the 
 1 9th of June the French advanced troops reached the 
 frontier stream, behind which the Prussian division 
 and the utterly disorganised Russian army had taken 
 refuge. 
 
 We have reached the zenith of our hero's career. 
 Henceforth begins the ebbing of his power, at first 
 so slowly and attracting the attention of the world 
 so little, that even to-day for the most part men 
 overlook the fact that it began at this time. It is 
 true that there was still apparently a strengthening 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 271 
 
 of the mighty ruler's power by fresh victories and 
 treaties, and by the extension and intensification of 
 his personal authority, which became from day to day 
 more despotic, till the moment when, just as he 
 dreamed that he had reached the summit, the aven- 
 ging lightning struck the giant down. 
 
 In connection with the Treaty of Tilsit, Ranke 
 says, in a passage in his works that has not attracted 
 much attention, that one feels tempted to criticise 
 the attitude assumed by Napoleon at this crisis. One 
 may indeed ask why it was that the Emperor so 
 suddenly came to a halt in the full tide of victory. 
 The alliance with the Poles and Turks, to which he 
 had gone back, belonged to the oldest traditions of 
 French policy. Russia was for the moment disarmed ; 
 for what was left on the far side of the Memel, a 
 river about as wide as the Seine at Paris, was a dis- 
 ordered crowd that could no longer be called an 
 army, and the reserve army was still far away. The 
 officers of the Czar, angered by the alliance with 
 Prussia, were only occupied with one idea, to con- 
 clude peace. Through his own brother Constantine 
 they had threatened the Czar with deposition, and 
 indeed almost openly with his father's fate. And 
 against all expectation, in the midst of this abyss of 
 despair, the victor held out his hand to him. And 
 he offered him not only peace, but his friendship and 
 an alliance which disappointed the hopes of the Poles 
 — hopes that Napoleon had just called forth, and to 
 which their delegates at Tilsit were still trying to 
 keep him true, while for the Turks there came a 
 prospect of partition between the allied Powers. 
 
 It is once more in his attitude towards England 
 that we can find a true explanation of this unheard 
 
272 NAPOLEON 
 
 of change in Napoleon's plans. There was the pole 
 to which his policy was directed with the steadfast 
 fidelity of the magnetic needle, no matter in what 
 direction the storms that agitated Europe might bear 
 him. The Continent must be at peace, if he meant 
 to strike down the one opponent that still stood 
 erect. For the sake of this end, therefore, he must, 
 bind Alexander to his policy, unless he meant to 
 attack him in his own territories and bring him 
 utterly to the dust. In Italy, in Germany, in Spain, 
 as in France itself — in a word wherever he had 
 obtained the mastery — he had found a way to satisfy 
 local interests, and thus to bind them to himself. 
 But these countries were all within the sphere of his 
 power ; they were within his reach ; while by the 
 decision he now took he left Russia henceforth out- 
 side the limits of his rule. The Russian interests 
 which he had to satisfy must then have been much 
 more powerful than the rest. For how else was he 
 to bind this great Power to his system, which indeed 
 in itself had nothing in common with the tendencies 
 of Russian policy ? Russia had interests in three 
 directions — in Finland, in Poland, and from the Pruth 
 to the Bosphorus. Napoleon was ready to abandon 
 Finland to Russia ; for Sweden, to which it belonged, 
 was his enemy. In Poland he confined himself to 
 the creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which 
 was formed chiefly out of the Prusso-Polish pro- 
 vinces, West Prussia being not without difficulty 
 preserved to the Hohenzollerns. At the same time 
 the Kingdom of Saxony joined the Confederation of 
 the Rhine. By these arrangements, as to Poland, 
 Alexander was seriously disappointed in the hopes 
 which had drawn him into the war, but in the actual 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 273 
 
 position of affairs he could hardly have expected 
 more favourable conditions. But on the other hand, 
 Napoleon gave him in compensation more splendid 
 prospects in the Balkan Peninsula, where the Czar's 
 share in the plunder of Turkey was to include the 
 countries along the Black Sea Coast, and, at least in 
 so far as Alexander understood his intentions, besides 
 these the Straits and Constantinople, the greatest and 
 oldest goal of Russian ambition. However, the pro- 
 posed changes in the North and East were only con- 
 ditional arrangements in view of the eventuality of 
 Sweden continuing the war, and England refusing 
 the peace that it was intended to offer to her. For 
 this was the immediate, and in any case the ostensible 
 object with a view to which the official peace negotia- 
 tions were regulated. It was agreed that a demand 
 should be made upon all the Courts of the Continent 
 for their adhesion — not only on the neutrals, Den- 
 mark, Austria, and Portugal, but also on those who 
 were still in conflict with the two advocates of peace, 
 namely, on Sweden and the Porte. With the latter 
 Napoleon was prepared to intervene on behalf of 
 Russia, while the Czar declared himself ready to act 
 as mediator with England. Such was the first act, 
 setting forth the main lines of the drama, which the 
 Emperor had thought out (for there can be no ques- 
 tion that it was all his own), and which he expounded 
 to the Czar in many confidential conversations on the 
 famous raft in the River Memel where they first met, 
 and after that at Tilsit. The conditions to be offered 
 at London are worth noting ; England was to restore 
 to their original possessors the French, Spanish, and 
 Dutch colonies that she had occupied since 1805 ; in 
 return Napoleon promised to restore Hanover ; and 
 
2 7 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 England was also to retain Malta, the point on which 
 the great war had broken out afresh. These con- 
 ditions were incorporated in the secret convention 
 which formed the real key to the officially avowed 
 treaty, and they were not to be immediately men- 
 tioned in London. But what if England declined the 
 proffered peace ? In that case the secret articles of 
 the treaty already noted were to come into force ; 
 Finland was to be wrested from Sweden, and there 
 was to be a partition of Turkey. Austria was to be 
 invited to take part in this last operation ; but 
 England was not only to be excluded from it, but 
 also dragged down into the catastrophe by an attack 
 on her Indian possessions. The armies of the allies 
 were to march on the Indus from the Caucasus (where 
 the Russians had prepared the way in a struggle pro- 
 longed over many years), and by the route that led 
 across the Bosphorus. I do not know if Napoleon 
 would have so readily entered into these world-wide 
 plans at Tilsit if he had been able to feel sure of the 
 friendship of Turkey. However this may be, on the 
 24th of June, at the very beginning of the negotia- 
 tions, he had received news which must have sug- 
 gested to him some doubts on the subject ; for on 
 the 28th of May a palace revolution had broken out 
 at Constantinople, which had overthrown Selim III 
 and driven the French party from power at Court. 
 
 Such was the Treaty of Tilsit, of which the secret 
 articles were not accessible to us in an authentic text 
 till a short time ago. It was of enormous import- 
 ance ; it was the basis of Napoleon's policy till 
 February, 18 10. 
 
 Compared with the treaty all other arrangements 
 fall into a secondary place, and can only be under- 
 
FREDERICK WILLIAM III., KING OF PRUSSIA. 
 From an engraving by J. F. Tielker. 
 
FROM BOULOGNE TO TILSIT 275 
 
 stood in connection with it. Each one had to accept 
 from the two masters of the Continent whatever they 
 might give or leave to him. Jerome obtained the 
 Kingdom of Westphalia ; the Poles, their Grand 
 Duchy ; Frederick William, the small portion of his 
 territory that Napoleon gave back to him. And these 
 new arrangements of frontiers were made to accord 
 with the interests that concerned the two allies and 
 the respective claims that their power gave them. It 
 would have been to the personal interest of Alexander 
 that Frederick William should remain in possession 
 of Magdeburg ; for this would have the effect of 
 keeping the French power farther back from the 
 frontiers of Russia, and would make the friendship 
 of Prussia, on which he believed he could in any case 
 count, all the more valuable to him. At the same 
 time he himself made no difficulty about accepting 
 from Napoleon's hands a piece of Prussian Poland, 
 the district of Bialystok, and was in no way em- 
 barrassed about taking his old friend into his confi- 
 dence on the subject. But, on the other hand, he felt 
 disappointed when the Emperor denied him his wish 
 to push the Russian frontier still further into Poland, 
 for at the conferences on the Memel he had flattered 
 himself with hopes in this direction. But Napoleon, 
 on the other hand, could not venture to cut the 
 territory of the new Archduchy too finely, for he 
 did not want to lose the good will of the Poles, 
 which might be more necessary to him in the future 
 than at present. By connecting the new State with 
 Saxony, whose Elector as a reward for his defection 
 from Prussia received a kingly crown, he made it 
 at the same time an outwork of the Confederation of 
 the Rhine, a bastion interposed between Prussia and 
 
276 NAPOLEON 
 
 Russia, which would always be at his disposal, all the 
 more if he kept alive the national aspirations of the 
 Poles. Henceforth he must keep Prussia down. He 
 had, as he himself admitted, done her too much harm 
 to be able to expect anything but hatred from that 
 quarter. But, nevertheless, he had no idea of utterly 
 destroying the Hohenzollern State. For he had no 
 interest in bestowing the remnants of it on any 
 of its neighbours, whether it might be the Poles, or 
 Saxony, or even his own brother Jerome. After the 
 great German Power had scorned his friendship, and 
 thereupon suffered defeat at his hands, he saw that 
 his own interests were best safeguarded by having 
 three medium-sized States in the north of Germany 
 instead of a single powerful one. 
 
 A patriotic German can think only with sorrow, 
 and even with reluctance, of the humiliations then 
 inflicted on his country and its King, and the greatest 
 of these was the meeting between Queen Louisa and 
 the Conqueror. For the worst of it was not that the 
 State should have all but gone to destruction, but 
 that the vanquished should have hoped through the 
 graceful influence of this beautiful woman to be able 
 to work upon the heart of the man who recognised 
 no mistress over his actions but mere policy. And 
 we cannot say that Napoleon, as might so easily 
 happen, disregarded the dictates of good manners in 
 his dealings with the Queen. If Louisa on the even- 
 ing of the day of her first interview came back to her 
 friends with a happy feeling that her sacrifice had not 
 been in vain, this was a self-deception, but Napoleon 
 can hardly be blamed for it. The blame falls upon 
 those who had placed the noble woman in such a 
 position. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE TREATY OF TILSIT 
 
 BAYONNE. ERFURT. SCHÖNBRUNN 
 
 /^\N the 9th of July, 1807, Napoleon left Tilsit, and 
 ^^^ after a short stay at Königsberg he travelled 
 rapidly by way of Dresden and Mayence to Paris, 
 where he arrived before the end of the month. He 
 was called there by the changes in his system of 
 policy with which he had been occupied even during 
 the campaign, and which probably had been among 
 the inducements to the conclusion of peace. The 
 composition of the Ministry was to some extent 
 altered, and a number of officials cleared out. In 
 this process Talleyrand lost his post at the Ministry 
 of Foreign Affairs. The Tribunate was abolished ; 
 the department of Finance reorganised ; and the 
 French legal Code introduced into the dependent 
 States. Public works were pushed forward with re- 
 newed energy — the construction of the roads over 
 the Alps, the bridges over the great rivers, the canals 
 that were to give a waterway from the Atlantic to the 
 Mediterranean and the Rhine, and, above all, the 
 adornment of Paris with splendid buildings. 
 
 For the third time Napoleon had given peace to 
 France, and once more millions of hands set to work 
 to increase the wealth of the country. On the 16th 
 
 277 
 
278 NAPOLEON 
 
 of August, with proud words, the Emperor officially 
 informed the Corps Legislatif of the conclusion of 
 the peace that had changed the face of Europe, and 
 we can well understand the enthusiasm for him that 
 found tumultuous expression on the part of his sub- 
 jects. He referred to England, too, in terms that 
 did not disclose whether there was to be peace or war,' 
 but all the more for this uncertainty conveyed a 
 strong assurance that the Emperor was and would 
 remain one with his people. 
 
 In August the Emperor Alexander sent to the 
 English Cabinet the note agreed upon at Tilsit, in 
 which he offered his mediation to arrange peace. In 
 accordance with the secret treaty, he spoke therein of 
 the "just and equitable" conditions put forward by 
 France, without going into further details about them. 
 The English sent an evasive reply : " They would 
 like to know exactly what these conditions were." 
 But they had for some time been preparing an 
 answer that would speak very plainly. Since the 
 beginning of August one of their squadrons, with a 
 fleet of transports, had been lying off Stralsund in the 
 waters of the isle of Rügen. Any action taken now 
 would come far too late for the hopes of Sweden and 
 of the German patriots. All the gunpowder that had 
 been used from Emden to Fulda, and from Stral- 
 sund to Silesia, the Britons had allowed to be blazed 
 away wastefully and in vain, while they were busy 
 securing possession of the Spanish and Dutch colonies. 
 And all the while they had been sparing of their own 
 powder in the Baltic. At the end of August, eight 
 days after they had given their answer to Alexander, 
 the fleet from Stralsund appeared before the neutral 
 city of Copenhagen, and was joined by another squad- 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 279 
 
 ron arriving from the Channel, for which it had been 
 waiting. The landing force disembarked without op- 
 position, and the Danish capital was invested by sea 
 and land, and found itself almost defenceless against 
 such a superior force. Behind the inundations that 
 surrounded Copenhagen on the land side, the attack- 
 ing force was itself protected, and could without 
 incurring any danger hurl destruction on the hapless 
 city. More than two thousand men, mostly unarmed 
 and defenceless, were killed and wounded by the bom- 
 bardment ; churches, public buildings, indeed half the 
 city lay in ruins ; whatever was left in the dockyards 
 was taken away or destroyed, and for the second 
 time the victors of this inglorious strife carried away 
 the Danish fleet with them. This was England's 
 answer. It showed such a disregard of all the rules 
 of international probity that even to-day few voices 
 are raised in its defence in England. 1 The one chief 
 object of the Tilsit alliance had been the closing of 
 the Sound. Napoleon had eagerly vied with the 
 English diplomats in pressing his views upon Den- 
 mark, and for a long time his troops had been waiting 
 on the Elbe ready to give emphasis to his proposals. 
 Now the English had been beforehand with him, and 
 had secured for themselves the freedom of the Sound, 
 the entrance into the Baltic. They had paralysed the 
 
 1 Translator's Note. — The British justification for the action taken 
 at Copenhagen in 1807 was that the Cabinet had obtained full informa- 
 tion of the terms of the secret treaty of Tilsit, through its own secret 
 service, and was only anticipating similar action on Napoleon's part. 
 At the same time there was a serious disregard of the proper procedure, 
 as has unfortunately often been the case when weak neutral States are 
 involved in the quarrels of powerful neighbours. In this case England, 
 with the command of the sea, was quite strong enough to have secured 
 her end by less violent action. 
 
28o NAPOLEON 
 
 right arm of their opponent, just as he drew it back 
 to strike the blow. 
 
 Napoleon now knew how he stood. Not a moment 
 was to be lost in at least securing the coasts of the 
 Atlantic and the Mediterranean, seeing that he could 
 no longer erect a barrier to England in the North. 
 In the Adriatic, according to a provision of the Treaty 
 of Tilsit, the Russians evacuated and once more 
 handed over to him the Ionian Islands. Troops, 
 which his Italians vassals were forced to provide, were 
 concentrated in Illyria to ensure the strictest obser- 
 vance of the closing of its harbours. Warships were 
 being built in all the dockyards. In vain Pius VII 
 demanded that the States of the Church should be 
 allowed to stand neutral. Napoleon saw in this, not 
 the love of peace that was put forward as its motive, 
 but only sympathy with the enemies of France, and 
 would not let the Pope out of his grasp. He at 
 once required from him the cession of the Legations, 
 the abolition of the Italian monasteries, the creation 
 of more French Cardinals, and the extension of the 
 Concordat to Venetia. In December the Papal 
 Legates at Paris were forced to come to terms, but as 
 Pius hesitated to ratify the treaty, the French entered 
 Rome, and in March, 1808, the Papal States were 
 made a province of the French Empire. 
 
 Although Italy remained always the strongest 
 position in the whole system of French alliances, 
 Napoleon had a very weak hold on the peninsula 
 beyond the Pyrenees. The English had much the 
 same views about Portugal as about Copenhagen. 
 Admiral Sidney Smith blockaded the mouth of the 
 Tagus with his squadron, and Lisbon would hardly 
 have escaped the fate of the Danish capital if the 
 
SIR W. SIDNEY SMITH. 
 From an engraving. 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 281 
 
 King and his people had not from the outset been 
 on the side of England. But they were not strong 
 enough to resist France, and so the royal family de- 
 cided upon using the English fleet to convey them 
 to a place of safety, and thus save their capital from 
 its guns. For already a French corps, under Marshal 
 Junot, was hurrying forward by forced marches 
 towards Portuguese territory. On the 27th of 
 November, the royal family and hundreds of 
 their people had embarked for Brazil, immediately 
 after an English courier had brought to Lisbon the 
 Aloniteur of the 13th of November, containing 
 Napoleon's decree that the House of Braganza had 
 ceased to reign. Immediately the Portuguese army 
 was disbanded, money and valuables to the amount of 
 millions were removed for safety by sea, and the 
 imperial eagles were soon everywhere displayed. 
 
 These events had also a most profound influence on 
 the Court of Madrid, France's oldest ally against 
 England. And thus we approach the beginning of 
 the catastrophe that was to be the end of all the 
 triumphs of the conqueror of the world, — the defec- 
 tion of Spain, which was to be for him not indeed a 
 blow at the heart, but a running wound in the heel of 
 the Titan, that would not be cured, and that at once 
 crippled his freedom of movement. After the shoot- 
 ing of the Due d' Enghien, nothing brought a heavier 
 load of guilt on Napoleon's name than the treachery 
 he employed against the royal family of Spain at 
 Bayonne, the demon-like cunning with which he lured 
 father and son into his toils, and inflaming them 
 against each other, forced them to abdicate their 
 rights, in order to make their land his own. It must 
 always be regarded as a most just Nemesis that he 
 
282 NAPOLEON 
 
 who thus disregarded moral force, should come to 
 experience its power precisely at the hands of the 
 people who seemed to him to be almost the most 
 pitifully helpless of all (" they were as cowardly as the 
 Arabs had found them," he said). But again we may 
 ask, could the breach between the King and his son, 
 and their removal, be avoided ? These two in any ' 
 case amply merited the opinion Napoleon had formed 
 of the Spaniards. How else was a solution to be 
 arrived at that would keep Spain firmly attached to 
 his system ? For we must not forget that the defec- 
 tion of Spain from France had long been planned at 
 the Court of Madrid, the ruling classes, like the royal 
 family itself, were in a state of complete disintegration, 
 and the nation itself inspired only with a longing to 
 be freed from the burdens of the war. And we need 
 not say what dangers would have threatened Napoleon, 
 if all the coasts of the Peninsula up to the Pyrenees 
 had been thus opened to the English. At Corunna, 
 Barcelona, and San Sebastian, they would soon enough 
 have been the welcome or unwelcome guests of the 
 Spaniards and the neighbours of the French. For 
 Napoleon there was only with him or against him. 
 He could indeed say with truth as Gustavus Adolphus 
 had once said of himself, " What kind of thing is 
 this neutrality ? I don't understand it. Friend or 
 foe, there is no third course — tertium non dabitur? 
 Had either of the two parties, whether the father or 
 the son did not matter, thoroughly taken his side, he 
 might very well have found some other solution. 
 But he could rely on neither of them ; for they were 
 both counting upon the desire of their people for 
 peace. 
 
 The French alliance threatened to perpetuate the 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 283 
 
 conflict that had brought Spain only defeats and the 
 loss of her fleet and colonies, and seemed likely to 
 destroy all her independence. Clerical circles had 
 never been in favour of the alliance, and in Spain 
 who is there that has not clerical views ? Even the 
 Government had no wish to withdraw itself from 
 clerical influence, but it wanted to cut the ground 
 from under the feet of the Crown Prince, on whose 
 side were the mass both of the clergy and of the 
 people. How little Napoleon could count upon 
 Godoy, the " Prince of the Peace," who controlled 
 the ideas and the power of the King and his son, 
 had been shown already in the days of Jena, by a 
 manifesto in which Godoy called upon the Spanish 
 people to be prepared for a struggle, without naming 
 the enemy. There was no doubt that he had the 
 French in his mind, and that the whole affair had 
 been set on foot in connection with England. Napo- 
 leon, however, after his victory over Prussia, acted 
 as if he had not noticed these proceedings ; while 
 Godoy, for obvious reasons, denied everything, and 
 tried to make his position once more good with the 
 Emperor by redoubled servility. Napoleon now 
 caused the best of the Spanish troops to be taken out 
 of their country and sent away to the Lower Elbe, and 
 what was left of the Spanish fleet he had removed to 
 Toulon. In the autumn of 1807 he tried to stimu- 
 late the ambition of the Spaniards by arranging in 
 the Treaty of Fontainebleau, on the 27th of October, 
 for a partition of Portugal between France and Spain. 
 In order to have a personal hold upon Godoy, he was 
 promised the rule of part of the divided territory. 
 The Portuguese colonies were also to be partitioned, 
 and the King of Spain was to take the title of 
 
284 NAPOLEON 
 
 Emperor of America. A few weeks after this the 
 Princes of the House of Braganza took to flight, and 
 the Portuguese colonies as well as his own were at 
 the mercy of the English, but the French troops were 
 masters of the Peninsula. And so one thing led 
 to another. The more the French regiments turned 
 off into the Spanish provinces, leaving the direct road ' 
 to Lisbon, the greater became the anxiety and excite- 
 ment of the people and the general unrest. Napoleon 
 could on his side do nothing else than continually 
 push forward fresh troops into the country, and 
 this was in effect to inflame more and more strongly 
 the anger of the people against the French policy 
 of their Government. Already in the autumn, at 
 the time of the Fontainebleau negotiations, a con- 
 spiracy, in which the Prince was compromised, had 
 been discovered at Madrid. The King had his son 
 arrested, and informed the people by a manifesto of 
 his treason, but immediately gave way before the 
 popular excitement, and took back Prince Ferdinand 
 into favour, the son making this easier by asking his 
 father's pardon. But this could only defer the catas- 
 trophe for a few months. In March, Spain from 
 north to south was full of French troops. The capital 
 was still clear of them, but a ring of iron was being 
 continually drawn closer and closer round it. It was 
 generally reported in Spain that the King and his 
 family intended to take refuge in their American 
 possessions, and this step was certainly contemplated. 
 It is, moreover, quite possible that Napoleon on his 
 part wished to drive the King to an attempt at flight, 
 and then stop him at Cadiz, and so bring matters to 
 a crisis, the decision on which would be in his hands. 
 In the middle of March the departure had been 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 285 
 
 decided upon ; but the secret was betrayed, and the 
 people, beside themselves at the thought of being 
 deserted by their royal family, and determined not 
 to allow it, broke out into a riot. The palace of the 
 "Prince of the Peace" was destroyed. The Queen who 
 happened to be there with Godoy, her reputed lover, 
 was conducted back to the royal palace, and he him- 
 self was tracked down and almost torn to pieces by 
 the mob. The end of it was that King Charles in 
 the midst of the disturbance declared his abdication, 
 and Prince Ferdinand was proclaimed King amid ex- 
 citement that knew no bounds. 
 
 Napoleon could not leave things so. But how was 
 he to alter them ? First of all the two kings, and 
 their worthy friend Godoy, were liberated from the 
 power of the insurgent populace by Murat, who com- 
 manded in Spain. But this could be only a temporary 
 measure. Some decisive steps must be taken, and 
 Ferdinand and his friends themselves gave a handle 
 for them. Finding themselves actually in the power 
 of the French, they acted as if they were friendly to 
 them. Ferdinand asked the Emperor for his support, 
 and complained to him of his father, just as the latter 
 was complaining of his son. And so it came to pass 
 that invited by Napoleon — and enticed by promises 
 and much show of friendship, which, however, changed 
 gradually into compulsion the nearer they came to 
 the frontier — the Prince, and after him the old King 
 with his wife and her paramour, seemed as if they 
 were racing each other towards the downfall that had 
 been prepared for them on the other side of the 
 Pyrenees. 
 
 To understand the fateful decision that the Em- 
 peror had already arrived at, we must again call to 
 
286 NAPOLEON 
 
 mind the phases of these questions that dominated all 
 else — the relations between Napoleon and Alexander, 
 and the conflict with England. 
 
 As arranged at Tilsit, Napoleon had at once taken 
 in hand the task of acting as a meditator between 
 Russia and Turkey. On the 24th of August, 1807, 
 a treaty was concluded, by which the Russians pro-' 
 mised to evacuate the Danubian Principalities. But 
 they were in no hurry to take their departure. Under 
 the pretext of Turkish hostilities they found means to 
 evade the operation of the treaty and to drag on the 
 war still longer. At the same time Alexander kept 
 on reminding his exalted friend of their great plans 
 for the East, especially an alleged promise as to Con- 
 stantinople, and to launch out into the wide prospects 
 afforded by a campaign against India. Napoleon for a 
 long time maintained an attitude of great reserve in 
 presence of these impetuous proposals. The partition 
 of Turkey had been the chief bait he had used in 
 drawing the Czar to his side. For himself it was a 
 matter of much less consequence, and only in case of 
 necessity would he care to come back to it. It was 
 plain that he wanted the Turkish question to be hung 
 up for a while. How embarrassed he felt is shown by 
 a conversation he had on the 22nd of January with 
 Metternich, which the latter reported to his Court. 
 It would appear that after a few introductory words 
 the Emperor plunged directly into the Turkish ques- 
 tion. Only the force of circumstances could lead 
 him, he said, to move against Turkey, that is he would 
 only so act if driven to it by the policy of England. 
 He did not want anything from the Turks. It might 
 indeed be pleasant to have Egypt and a few colonies, 
 but this would not be compensation for the aggrandise- 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 287 
 
 ment of Russia. Then came a reference to Russia's 
 views on Constantinople. Against these Austria 
 would find herself in need of the help of France, and 
 France in turn would need Austria. And now the 
 Emperor set before the Ambassador the danger from 
 Russia, and on the other hand expressed his approval 
 of the counter-claims of Austria to the Lower Danube 
 valley, which he quite rightly described as " based on 
 geographical facts." He closed the conversation by 
 saying that for him there could not yet be any question 
 of the partition of Turkey ; but if there were he 
 would not merely leave the door open to Austria, but 
 would call her in, so that the two Powers might take 
 common action to protect their common interests. 
 
 If at this time he still hoped that the tendency 
 towards peace would gain the upper hand in England, 
 and that his system of closing the ports of the Conti- 
 nent against her would break down her commerce and 
 industry, he was soon to be better informed. At 
 the end of January, a new session of the British Par- 
 liament opened with a speech from the Throne that 
 was as warlike as ever. Immediately after the receipt 
 of this news, and on the very day on which the 
 Moniteur published its report of the speech, the Em- 
 peror wrote to the Czar a very remarkable letter, in 
 which, to take Alexander's own account of it, he 
 repeated all that had been said at Tilsit. In this 
 letter he put forward the expedition against India as a 
 necessity, for only great and decisive measures would 
 compel England to make peace. As a preliminary he 
 proposed an interview, such as had already been agreed 
 upon at Tilsit, in view of the situation that had now 
 arisen. All must be ready by the 15th of March, and 
 on the ist of May the allied armies must be in Asia, 
 
288 NAPOLEON 
 
 and at the same time a Russian force at Stockholm. 
 This would bring England to her knees, and then the 
 two Emperors would live peacefully in the midst of 
 their vast dominions, devoting themselves entirely to 
 the object of spreading life and happiness through 
 them by fostering the useful arts and by a beneficent 
 rule. 
 
 There is no doubt that Napoleon was now seriously 
 approaching the great plan thus suggested. Three 
 large fleets lay at L'Orient, Brest, and Toulon ready 
 to sail. Two of them were to make the voyage to 
 India round the Cape of Good Hope. The third 
 was to convey twenty thousand men from Toulon to 
 Egypt. By threatening Sweden, making demonstra- 
 tions against the English coasts, and perhaps landing 
 in Ireland, the Emperor hoped to draw the English 
 fleet away from the Mediterranean. Then there was 
 to be the march of the land army by Constantinople 
 and through Persia, with which State he had con- 
 cluded a treaty of alliance after Tilsit. He thought 
 of himself leading the enterprise from Italy. " The 
 more I think of it," he wrote on the 17th of February 
 to his Minister of Marine, Admiral Decres, " the 
 fewer difficulties can I see in it." 
 
 Now these were the weeks in which the affairs of 
 Spain ripened to a decisive crisis. If Napoleon meant 
 to win the East he must have completely at his dis- 
 posal the country that seemed made to guard the 
 entrance to the Mediterranean. 
 
 There is still to be found in history-books the 
 assertion, based on the authority of a writer of un- 
 reliable memoirs, that the Emperor had already at 
 Tilsit resolved on dethroning the Spanish Bourbons. 
 That such an idea may at that time, and even earlier, 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 289 
 
 have presented itself to his mind among other pos- 
 sibilities of the future, need not be called in question, 
 and is indeed very likely ; and he may have hinted at 
 it in familiar conversation ; but he would have been 
 the madman that popular imagination often took him 
 for, if precisely at the moment when he was conclud- 
 ing the alliance that was to guarantee the peace of the 
 Continent, he could have had irrevocably fixed in his 
 mind this plan and no other. Only the extreme pres- 
 sure of circumstances could bring him to it. The 
 moment came in February, 1808, and, in my opinion, 
 this was mainly the result of the English King's 
 speech and the sharp change which it called forth in 
 his own policy. I cannot venture to attempt to 
 describe in detail how everything now developed and 
 was carried to a conclusion. No one besides Napoleon 
 was fully initiated into the intrigue, that is to say, 
 made cognisant of its whole uninterrupted course. 
 All his assistants were invariably employed in execut- 
 ing only a part of his design. Suffice it to say that 
 the Spaniards made it easy enough for him, as they 
 ran into the net he had spread out before them ; and 
 as soon as he had them in it he pulled the string and 
 closed it on them. There can never be an excuse for 
 the deed that was done at Bayonne, but also there need 
 never be any pity for the misfortune of those who 
 were its victims — this stupid King, who had his wife's 
 paramour for his Minister ; this Queen, who betrayed 
 both her husband and her son ; and this son, whose 
 brutality was only exceeded by his cowardice. There 
 were scenes of a kind to stifle any sympathy for them. 
 In the presence of the Emperor these wretched people 
 poured out insulting abuse on each other, and nearly 
 came to blows, so that Napoleon, who might indeed 
 
2 9 o NAPOLEON 
 
 forget his native place but not his duty as a son, 
 turned away in disgust. " What a mother ! " he 
 exclaimed, " and what a son ! " And now he wrested 
 the crown of Spain from their unworthy hands. 
 After a prolonged struggle Ferdinand was brought to 
 agree to give it back to his father, and the latter, as its 
 legitimate possessor, then resigned it to the Emperor.. 
 Napoleon provided the King and his wife with a couple 
 of chateaux and some millions of francs, and assigned 
 Compiegne to them as their residence. Ferdinand 
 was sent to Valen9ay, and placed under the guardian- 
 ship of Talleyrand, and a small theatrical company 
 was brought from Paris to amuse the Prince, who, as 
 Napoleon suspected, would be especially pleased with 
 the ladies of the troupe. 
 
 The Emperor imagined that he had gained his end. 
 On the 6th of June he transferred the crown of Spain 
 to his brother Joseph. Murat at the same time took 
 his place as King of Naples. Etruria was annexed to 
 France. Its Queen had long fallen under suspicion, 
 and must now share the fate of the Spanish royal 
 family, of which she was a princess. 
 
 Napoleon wished not only to bring Spain into line 
 with the trend of his foreign policy, but also to bring 
 her under his political system, and the influence of 
 those Liberal ideas that the Revolution had developed 
 in France. These ideas were more or less favoured 
 by the administration of Godoy, but always opposed 
 by the party of Prince Ferdinand. A Junta of " en- 
 lightened " Spaniards drew up at Bayonne, under the 
 Emperor's eyes, a Constitution which was to confer 
 upon their country national representation, freedom 
 of the press, modernisation of legal procedure, aboli- 
 tion of the Inquisition, and a whole series of social 
 
rOSEPH BUONAPARTE, AFTERWARDS KING 
 From a picture by J. B. J. Wicar. Photo by Neurdi 
 
 p. 290. 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 291 
 
 reforms that were to bring all manner of blessings in 
 their train. But then, when Joseph arrived in 
 Madrid with a Ministry of patriotically minded and 
 highly educated men, they found themselves in the 
 midst of a storm of revolt. The people had already 
 begun the rising in May, before the final scene at 
 Bayonne. Townsfolk and peasants, urged on by their 
 priests, assembled in every valley of the Sierras, all 
 with only one thought in their minds — to carry on 
 war to the knife against the enemy of Spain and of 
 the Church, who had ruined and betrayed their King, 
 Ferdinand ; for no one would believe in his abdication, 
 and he passed for an imprisoned martyr. Agents 
 were at once despatched to England to ask for help 
 in ships, arms, and men. The Spanish soldiers de- 
 serted in battalions. Even the corps sent to the 
 north of Europe succeeded in the autumn in making 
 their way home from the Danish island of Fiinen in 
 English ships. The whole organisation of the State 
 was falling into the most utter confusion. 
 
 Now the great conqueror could see with his own 
 eyes the power of that enthusiasm, in which he had 
 ceased to believe since it had died out in his own 
 soul. This " ideology " did not oppose him in the 
 forms of revolutionary France, but, on the contrary, in 
 ways that had been characteristic of the struggle of 
 La Vendee against the Revolution. The Spanish 
 nation wanted no freedom that was synonymous with 
 the yoke of foreign rule ; they recognised no other 
 ideals but those for which their fathers had faced 
 death. Philip II and Ferdinand of Aragon were their 
 great kings, the Cid their legendary hero, Dominic 
 and Ignatius, the saints they honoured. Napoleon's 
 reforms marked out the way on which lay the future 
 
292 NAPOLEON 
 
 of Spain. All that has brought the nation nearer 
 to modern Europe, and given it new energy, has 
 been developed on the lines of the Bayonne Constitu- 
 tion. But at that moment the Spaniards did not care 
 anything about the future, and all the proposals made 
 by the conqueror fell flat to the ground. King 
 Joseph could rely only upon his French troops. 
 Everywhere committees, known as Juntas, were being 
 formed, and taking the government of their districts in 
 hand in the name of King Ferdinand. In Portugal, 
 too, the insurrection broke out, and Marshal Junot, 
 with his few thousand men, found himself in sore 
 straits. On the 22nd of July, General Dupont, with 
 seventeen thousand men, was forced to surrender at 
 Baylen in Andalusia. Six weeks later, as the result 
 of British armed intervention, Junot signed the Con- 
 vention of Cintra, under which he had to evacuate 
 Portugal. Joseph had to abandon his capital. His 
 rule was limited to the country between the Ebro and 
 the Pyrenees. 
 
 Napoleon was hard hit. As he had written to 
 Talleyrand on the 2nd of May, he had thought that 
 the Spanish tragedy had reached its fifth act, and that 
 the denouement would at once be seen. Now he 
 could not help being aware that a new tragedy had 
 begun, which was yet to be followed by a whole cycle 
 of catastrophes. He had dreamed of besieging Gib- 
 raltar, and passing over into Africa ; he had believed 
 his chariot of victory was in full career, and woe to 
 those who stood in his way ! Now all these proud 
 schemes had been brought down in a heap of ruins. 
 With every week there came bad news — a rising in 
 Naples ; English descents on the coasts of Portugal 
 and Italy ; at Constantinople a new Sultan on the 
 
LOUIS BUONAPARTE, KING OF HOLLAND. 
 From an engraving by Routte, after a picture by Gregoriou and'Cartellier. 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 293 
 
 throne, and what was left of French influence 
 destroyed ; the barrier raised against England's com- 
 merce everywhere breaking down, so that even his 
 brother, King Louis of Holland, was joining in the 
 protest against the closing of the continental ports to 
 her trade ; and in North Germany, in Westphalia as 
 well as in Prussia, a fermentation beginning among 
 the people. Even in France itself public feeling was 
 taking an unfavourable turn. A plot, in which some 
 of his officers were involved, and of which Talleyrand 
 and Fouche, the Minister of Police, became aware 
 without at once informing their master, showed how 
 unsteady after all was the foundation on which the 
 Emperor's throne rested. There was agitation even 
 among the masses of the people. And above all, the 
 menacing attitude of Austria could not fail to attract 
 the Emperor's attention. Since May she had begun 
 to arm more actively than ever before, reservists and 
 landwehr-men were being called up to the colours, 
 and under the sceptre of the Hapsburgs there flamed 
 forth something like national enthusiasm. 
 
 These were the circumstances that led Napoleon to 
 invite the Czar Alexander to meet him for a confer- 
 ence at Erfurt. The invitation was sent in the 
 middle of August, immediately after he arrived at 
 Paris from the Spanish frontier and heard of the 
 flight of Joseph from Madrid. It was the meeting 
 that had been provided for at Tilsit in the eventuality 
 of the plans for an Eastern campaign being brought 
 to the verge of realisation. The Czar, so far as he was 
 concerned, had his attention closely fixed upon the East, 
 only that he was not now thinking of partitioning 
 it with Napoleon, or of the proposed expedition 
 to India, but of the Danubian Provinces, the share of 
 
2 9 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 the plunder of Turkey that he had in advance 
 selected for himself. For months he had been press- 
 ing the Emperor to guarantee these territories to him. 
 This fresh interview offered him the best opportunity 
 for urging the matter with his friend and ally, and so 
 he accepted the invitation. 
 
 The days of Erfurt are generally regarded as mark- 
 ing the culminating point of Napoleon's grandeur. 
 And certainly the surroundings, which the Emperor 
 arranged as a setting for the interview, presented 
 a scene of power and splendour such as was perhaps 
 afforded by no other epoch in his career. What 
 a sight it was when Talma and his company pro- 
 duced before an " audience of kings " on a German 
 stage those French tragedies, against whose stiff 
 formality German genius has been in successful 
 revolt since Lessing's days ! Immediately in front of 
 the footlights were the two Emperors, their chairs 
 placed side by side ; behind them the glittering crowd 
 of vassal princes with their courtiers and the ministers, 
 diplomats, and generals. At the words of GEdipus, 
 " L'amitie d'un grand homme est un bienfait des 
 dieux," 1 the Czar, himself a better actor than Talma, 
 arose and with an affectionate gesture extended his 
 hand to his friend ; an embrace followed, and all around 
 there was clapping of hands and rejoicing. Then there 
 were the meetings with Goethe and Wieland ; the ex- 
 cursion to Weimar ; the hunting party on the plains 
 of Jena. On the " Napoleonsberg," as a hill there 
 had been named, German hands had erected a 
 "Temple of Peace," and some minor German poet 
 had adorned it with a couplet of verses. In front of 
 it we see the Emperor, map in hand, describing to 
 
 1 " The friendship of a great man is a good gift from the Gods." 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 295 
 
 the Czar and the rest of his princely audience, the 
 course of the battle that destroyed the army formed 
 by Frederick the Great. In the villages and along 
 the roadsides the people of the country and of the 
 neighbouring towns waited to see and pay homage to 
 the great man. From Jena itself there was a deputa- 
 tion of the magistracy and the university. Nowhere 
 was there any sign of a feeling of mortification or 
 discontent. Throughout all Napoleon was the central 
 figure in the uninterrupted series of festivities, balls, 
 reviews, and theatrical performances. 
 
 So much for outward show and the opinion of the 
 world ! 
 
 In reality these weeks at Erfurt meant for Napoleon 
 one more downward step. It was no longer he, but 
 Alexander, who laid down the law. He forced 
 the Emperor to guarantee to him Finland, which was 
 already almost in his hands, and the Danubian 
 Provinces, where fighting was still going on. It 
 signified very little that in return the Czar recognised 
 the changes made in Spain and Italy, renewed the 
 alliance of Tilsit, and at the same time put his signa- 
 ture to a joint letter addressed to King George of 
 England. It was already well understood at London 
 and Vienna that the hostility of Russia was no 
 implacable enmity, and Alexander did not neglect to 
 let both these Courts have some idea of his own pri- 
 vate feelings on the subject. He promised not to 
 pass the Danube, and renounced all idea of partition- 
 ing Turkey, but neither he nor Napoleon had really 
 seriously believed in this last project. But the 
 guarantee of his possession of the Danubian Pro- 
 vinces, which he had extorted from Napoleon, neces- 
 sarily implied a rupture between the latter and 
 
296 NAPOLEON 
 
 Turkey. And at the same time, it was for Austria an 
 additional inducement to turn against the French 
 emperor. Napoleon had actually hoped to be 
 able to welcome the Emperor Francis also to 
 the Congress of Erfurt, and was in a very bad 
 humour when, immediately after his arrival there, 
 he heard from his Ambassador at Vienna that the 
 Emperor, instead of coming himself, was merely send-' 
 ing Herr von Vincent to represent him, and that the 
 Austrian diplomats were in every way urging him on 
 towards a rupture. " I now understand," said Napo- 
 leon, "why the Emperor has not come. It is hard 
 for a Sovereign to lie to one's face. He has handed 
 over this task to his envoy." Then when he re- 
 ceived the Austrian, he spoke quite menacingly of 
 war, and said that he could make it terrible for 
 Austria, for he had enormous resources, and the Czar 
 was, and would continue to be, his ally ; but he added 
 that he did not desire war, any more than he feared it, 
 and that he was ready to withdraw his troops, and 
 even hand over the fortresses on the Oder, as soon as 
 a peaceful attitude was adopted at Vienna. " I want 
 peace and security," he wrote to the Emperor Francis. 
 But Alexander left him alone in these negotiations 
 with Austria ; and even secretly let Von Vincent 
 know that Austria had no better friend than himself. 
 Alexander also acted as a friend to the King of 
 Prussia, " his unfortunate ally," as he seemed to take 
 pleasure in calling him in Napoleon's hearing ; and he 
 actually succeeded in persuading the latter to remit 
 20 millions of the 140 million thalers at which the 
 war indemnity had been finally fixed. But after all, the 
 Prussian Court at Königsberg owed the relief vouch- 
 safed to it by Napoleon in the autumn much more to 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 297 
 
 the turn things were taking in Spain, than to the 
 intercession of its Russian friend. How often had 
 the Prussians, since the summer of 1807, begged and 
 prayed their conqueror to lighten the unbearable bur- 
 den of the contributions levied upon them ! Napo- 
 leon had only made their yoke still more oppressive, 
 screwed out further payments, insisted on the making 
 of new military roads, the erection of new fortresses 
 besides those he already held, and confiscated Crown 
 domains and land revenues. It was in vain that the 
 King had sent his brother, Prince William, to Paris, 
 with the offer of a close alliance and the provision of 
 an auxiliary corps for his continental wars, if in 
 return the Emperor would only give back the occu- 
 pied provinces, and abandon any idea of further 
 annexations. Napoleon replied that the Prussian 
 Government could not rely even upon its own sub- 
 jects, and he declined the proffered alliance. Even 
 men like Stein and Scharnhorst had advised the King 
 to come to an agreement with France, and Stein, 
 in his sanguine way, had indeed built all his hopes 
 upon it, trusting that through the re-establishment of 
 the financial credit of the State, a foundation would 
 be secured for the reforms he had planned. All the 
 greater was his indignation, when the merciless victor 
 thus rejected the complete submission offered to him. 
 Not unnaturally he and all the patriots henceforth 
 could only believe that Napoleon desired and was 
 working for the complete annihilation of Prussia as a 
 Power, a theory that henceforward inspired their 
 policy, and thanks to this, has made itself part of the 
 tradition of those times, so that it still prevails. But 
 the truth was that, as has already been pointed out, 
 Napoleon was not aiming at the destruction of 
 
298 NAPOLEON 
 
 Prussia, and he precisely hit off the position in 
 the words with which he received Prince William 
 at Paris : " The arrangement of your affairs is sub- 
 ject to the general political combinations that are now 
 in process of development. . . . Probably in the 
 summer the important affairs will be settled." When 
 he spoke thus, he still believed that he was master of 
 the situation ; it was in the days immediately before the 
 crisis, that has just been described. In the summer 
 the important affairs were settled, but, as it turned 
 out, in a different way from what he had still hoped 
 in the spring. Immediately after his return from 
 Spain, he resumed the negotiations with the Prince, 
 who had remained all the time in Paris. It was then 
 that he got into his hands a letter of Stein to Prince 
 Wittgenstein, that gave him evidence of the real 
 feelings of the Prussian Ministry. The possession 
 of this information came most opportunely to enable 
 him to make the Prussians uneasy and to raise his 
 own demands. Besides paying over the millions of 
 the indemnity, they must give him possession of 
 Stettin, Küstrin and Glogau, and their army must 
 not exceed the strength of forty-two thousand men. 
 How, he asked, could he trust them any longer, and 
 what other means could he find of preventing them 
 from rushing to their own destruction ? But not- 
 withstanding this letter, he abstained from hurling 
 a thunderbolt at Stein ; he evacuated the Prussian 
 provinces and even signed, on the 8 th of November, 
 the treaty with Prussia. His moderation in all this 
 shows how embarrassing the general situation had 
 become to him. 
 
 On the 14th of October, the Czar Alexander bade 
 farewell to his great ally, who travelled with him part 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 299 
 
 of the way to Weimar. As Napoleon rode slowly back 
 to Erfurt, it was remarked that he was lost in deep 
 thought, with a touch of sadness in his face. Savary 
 noticed it, as he tells us in his Memoirs. And one can 
 easily imagine that at this moment as the Emperor 
 rode back, his mind brooded on his anxiety as to which 
 way he must turn, and how all this was to end. 
 
 Only a short respite was given to him in which to 
 reduce Spain to submission, if he was to meet the 
 Austrians once more in the Danube valley in the 
 coming spring. Hitherto the troops that had fought 
 in the Spanish peninsula were mostly only newly 
 raised conscripts. Now the Emperor sent there the 
 veterans who had been stationed on his eastern 
 frontiers, and they went under his best marshals, men 
 like Soult, Lannes, Bessieres, Ney, and Victor. As 
 they marched across France they were received with 
 the acclamations of triumph, and they went to win 
 new victories. Germany, however, was not left 
 unguarded. There were still sixty thousand men 
 under Davoüt in North Germany, and thirty 
 thousand under Oudinot in the South, where the 
 princes of the Confederation of the Rhine stood 
 fast by their Protector, because it was for them, 
 too ? a question of defending their newly won 
 crowns. Without delay the Emperor hurried 
 across the Pyrenees. On the 5th of November he 
 reached Vittoria. And at once the tide of war turned 
 to his side. By the end of the month both of the 
 Spanish armies, that with the help of England had 
 tried to keep the field against him, were defeated and 
 dispersed. The remnants of them did not rally till 
 they had reached Andalusia. An engagement before 
 the gates of the capital, directed by Napoleon himself, 
 
3oo NAPOLEON 
 
 gave him possession of Madrid (December 4th), 
 and brought Joseph back to his palace there. During 
 the few weeks which the Emperor spared for rest at 
 Madrid, he issued a series of Ordinances on the lines 
 of the reforms proposed at Bayonne. Then he sallied 
 forth once more, this time against the English, who 
 had landed at Corunna and ventured on a sudden 
 advance into the interior of the country. Over the 
 snow-clad sierras he pursued them to the coast. 
 They effected their retreat with difficulty, and what 
 was left of their forces re-embarked after a rearguard 
 action at Corunna. 
 
 Portugal was still free, the south of Spain still un- 
 conquered, when, in January, 1 809, Napoleon hurried 
 back to Paris as quickly as he had come. In seven 
 days he traversed the long stretch of roads from 
 Valladolid to the Seine. At eight in the morning of 
 the 23rd of January, he arrived at the Tuileries, 
 coming before the time he had announced so that no 
 one was expecting him. He had thus hurried back 
 from Spain, not so much on account of the armaments 
 of Austria, as because of the very serious news he 
 had received from Paris itself. To the foreign 
 ambassadors he seemed to be more sullen and irritable 
 than ever. And he had good cause. For in the 
 circle nearest to his throne, and amongst the highest 
 of these, the very men with whose help he had built 
 up his Imperial State, and on whom he must still 
 depend even now, among the intimates of Talleyrand 
 and Fouche, traces of an intrigue had been discovered, 
 by Eugene apparently, or by Josephine herself. Its 
 object was to put an end to his own power, and 
 Murat was regarded as the successor that would be 
 ready to replace him. 
 
EUGENE DE BEAUHARNAIS. 
 From a lithograph by Bodmer, after a picture by Richter. 
 
 p. 300. 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 301 
 
 How often we are told of the growth of a despotic 
 temper in the Emperor, who drove a woman like 
 Madame de Stael from land to land, and trampled 
 under foot every manifestation of independence. 
 The reason of this lies above all in the fact that the 
 basis on which the Empire rested was now becoming 
 insecure, especially in its upper strata. And the 
 higher the intriguers stood, the weaker was the posi- 
 tion of their master against them. Nothing can 
 better illustrate this than the scene that Napoleon had 
 with Talleyrand, after his return from Spain. It was 
 on the 28 th of January, and in the presence of 
 Cambaceres and Decres. He overwhelmed Talleyrand 
 with reproaches and insults, called him a thief, a 
 traitor, a base villain — but without doing him any 
 further harm than removing him from the office of 
 Grand Chamberlain, which had been conferred on him 
 a year before, when he left the Ministry of Foreign 
 Affairs. " I could shatter you like glass," he said to 
 him ; " I have the power to do it, but I despise you 
 too utterly to give myself the trouble." The truth 
 was that he dared not go so far. Talleyrand took the 
 shower-bath quietly, and let it run off him like 
 water off a duck's back. But all the same he did not 
 refrain for a moment from his insidious work of 
 sapping and mining. We now know that since the 
 Congress of Erfurt he had already been inflaming the 
 Austrians against Napoleon, and that he had not been 
 ashamed to accept pay from the enemies of France. 
 Metternich, the Austrian ambassador at Paris, was 
 already writing to his Court of a conspiracy against 
 the Emperor, and was advocating war with all his 
 might. Napoleon, he argued, had now for the first 
 time inadequate forces at his command, and even if 
 
302 NAPOLEON 
 
 war was not part of his plans, Austria ought therefore 
 to make it her policy. 
 
 It would indeed have now been a serious matter 
 for Napoleon to avoid war. For if he did so, it 
 would, in the existing circumstances, be an admission 
 that he was beaten. And it must be noted that every 
 s,tep he took backwards was not only a step forwards 
 for the enemies of France, but also gave new en- 
 couragement to adverse factions at home, who, though 
 they had been subdued, had not been annihilated. 
 The Emperor was the heir of the Revolution in this 
 respect also, that his enemies were without end, and 
 he must conquer or fall. 
 
 But as yet he stood forth as the unconquered, the 
 man who knew not weariness or discouragement, 
 inspired with the feeling of his own sense of power, 
 and in the full blaze of splendid triumphs. Thus 
 it was that he went forth to battle with the enemy, 
 whom he had already three times struck to the 
 ground. 
 
 All the preparations for the Austrian war were 
 made with the greatest forethought and energy. New 
 conscript levies reinforced the corps stationed in 
 Germany, and a portion of the troops that had been 
 employed in Spain, among them notably the Imperial 
 Guard, were moved in the same direction. An army 
 was also assembled in Italy. Napoleon could hope 
 to have by the middle of April two hundred thou- 
 sand men concentrated on the Danube, though this 
 could only be done by straining the national resources 
 to the utmost, and leaving the countries north of 
 the Main unoccupied. 
 
 The Austrians had taken up a central position in 
 Bohemia, whence it was easy for them to push for- 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 303 
 
 ward in any direction. And they intended to take 
 the offensive, and were indeed obliged to do so, for 
 only thus could they hope to make the sympathy of 
 the German people and the mountaineers of the 
 Tyrol blaze forth on their side. This was the mean- 
 ing of the proclamation issued by the Archduke 
 Charles on the 9th of April, as he crossed the river 
 Inn and entered Bavarian territory ; it was not merely 
 for her own independence, but for the freedom and 
 national tradition of Germany that Austria had drawn 
 the sword. On the 17th of April, when the Arch- 
 duke was advancing from Landshut on Ratisbon to 
 fall upon Davout, who had reached the Danube at 
 that place, Napoleon arrived at Donauwörth. The 
 situation which he had to face was much the same as 
 that of the German Protestants, when in the year 1546 
 they took the field against their Emperor from the 
 same point. Then, too, the Emperor Charles V, the 
 ancestor of the Archduke Charles, had begun his 
 march from Landshut on Ratisbon to win back from 
 his opponents the Danube and its left bank. That 
 the Protestants neglected to push forward towards 
 the river Isar decided the campaign against them. 
 But this was the very manoeuvre that Napoleon now 
 carried out. When he arrived, his own army was 
 badly placed (not through his fault, for Berthier had 
 not properly executed his orders). The various corps 
 were widely separated from each other. But in a 
 few days he had made good all deficiencies. He first 
 drew back Davoüt's corps to Ingolstadt, and brought 
 up his own right from the Lech into line with him. 
 Then he pushed forward to interpose between the 
 Archduke and the corps he had left on the Isar at 
 Landshut. And now he fixed his iron grip on 
 
3 o 4 NAPOLEON 
 
 Charles's army. In five days he had gained his 
 object. In three hard-fought battles the Archduke was 
 forced back towards Bohemia, and the valley of the 
 Danube right up to Vienna was in the hands of 
 Napoleon. On the nth of May he was in the 
 imperial palace of Schönbrunn. 
 
 But the struggle was not yet decided. A few 
 leagues to the northward, beyond the Danube, but 
 close to its banks, the enemy was in position. The 
 attempt to cross the river near Aspern and break 
 through their lines had to be abandoned after a 
 sanguinary two days' battle. Their native river had 
 become the ally of the sons of Austria. For it swept 
 away the bridge that had been carried across from 
 the Isle of Lobau to the left bank, and thus prevented 
 Davout from coming to the help of Lannes, who had 
 with difficulty won some ground on the further shore. 
 And so for the first time the Emperor, if he had not 
 quite lost the battle, had at least lost, and had to 
 abandon, the battlefield. On the night after the 
 second day's fighting there were terrible hours on the 
 Isle of Lobau, where the army lay huddled together. 
 Amongst the victims of the day was Marshal Lannes, 
 who had served the Emperor since his first campaign 
 in Italy, and was the only one of his old comrades 
 in arms to whom he still vouchsafed to use the " tu " 
 of brotherly friendship. But even failure could not 
 depress the buoyant energy of this wonderful man, 
 for Napoleon only stood up the more firmly against 
 it. He turned all his energies to preparing for the 
 fresh blow that he must strike, if he was to hold his 
 own. In the night of the 5th of July he again 
 crossed over with his army to the north bank. Once 
 more, around Wagram, the valour of the Austrians 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 305 
 
 made his task a difficult one. It was only on the 
 second day (July 6th), and then only thanks 
 to his superiority in artillery, that he succeeded in 
 breaking their resistance, and won at the same time 
 that which he desired — peace. In vain might loyal 
 subjects of Austria, like the faithful Tyrolese, who 
 had risen against their Bavarian masters, cry out for 
 the continuance of the struggle. The rulers of the 
 State had become weary of the war, which they had 
 been left to carry on single-handed. Without allies, 
 without money, they despaired of being able to pro- 
 long the conflict, with their army defeated and with 
 its ranks thinned by disease. On the 14th of October 
 they submitted to accept the Peace of Schönbrunn, 
 after Napoleon had slightly modified the harsh con- 
 ditions he first proposed. Even so, Austria lost more 
 than 40,000 square miles. She had to give back to 
 Bavaria the territory acquired on that side by the 
 treaties of Campo Formio and Luneville ; Trieste 
 and the neighbouring Slav and Italian districts she 
 must cede to Italy, and the greater part of Galicia 
 to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, while Napoleon's 
 Russian ally was satisfied with a portion of Eastern 
 Galicia. 
 
 Austria's hopes of rousing the German people to 
 action had all ended in disappointment. Germany 
 was not Spain. The South stood by the French 
 Emperor, who was the champion of its princes against 
 the Emperor they once acknowledged as their chief. 
 A poor fanatic, the student Friedrich Staps, after the 
 peace was concluded, and when Napoleon had returned 
 to Schönbrunn, was arrested in the very act of at- 
 tempting to assassinate him. But the act was an 
 isolated one, and moreover he was a North German, 
 
3 o6 NAPOLEON 
 
 the son of a clergyman at Naumburg. And if north 
 of the river Main, Ferdinand von Schill, Dornberg, 
 and Duke William of Brunswick tried to rouse to 
 a flame the smouldering hatred of the conqueror that 
 was there more widespread than in the South, their 
 efforts ended in utter failure. This was not so much 
 on account of the power of their antagonist, or even 
 the dullness of the people, as through the opposition 
 of the Prussian Government, which was too timid 
 to venture on a national struggle, and at the same 
 time too strong to be hurried into it by these in- 
 dependent movements. For a moment, even before 
 the battle of Aspern, King Frederick William seemed 
 indeed inclined to give way to the pressure of the 
 German patriots, and take part in the war. But he 
 soon fell back again into his habitual timidity. And 
 when, after Wagram, his advisers once more brought 
 him to the point of offering Prussia's assistance to 
 Austria, even they had hardly any hopes of success. 
 It was, as they themselves recognised, all but a 
 counsel of despair, and sprang almost as much from 
 their fear of the absolutely inevitable vengeance of 
 Napoleon for the isolated attempts at resistance, as 
 from the still brightly burning zeal for honour and 
 the Fatherland that filled their brave hearts. Indeed, 
 it would not now have been difficult for Napoleon to 
 put an end to the kingdom of Frederick the Great. 
 For Alexander, who even in the spring had spared no 
 effort to hold back the King, would certainly not 
 come to his aid in the autumn. The English, instead 
 of landing in the Weser, as the Prussian patriots had 
 wished and hoped, had made an expedition to the 
 Scheldt in the summer, with the object of taking 
 Antwerp. It was a plan that in itself might have 
 
THE TREATY OF TILSIT 307 
 
 proved very dangerous to Napoleon, for it aimed 
 a blow at the very centre of his whole position, and 
 not only threatened the Netherlands, but would also 
 have reacted upon France itself. But it had already 
 ended in disaster through the ignorance and incapacity 
 of the Earl of Chatham, who had been placed in com- 
 mand of the enterprise. And Austria, once she had 
 concluded peace, had neither the power nor the will 
 to do anything whatever to save Prussia. King 
 Frederick William was left to his own resources, 
 exactly as he had been three years before. And how 
 could he venture on a struggle against an enemy who 
 held nearly all the fortresses and river crossings of 
 the land, and had half Europe at his back ! 
 
 However, nothing happened to him. It is well 
 known what kind of a reception Napoleon, as soon as 
 he returned to Paris in November, gave to General 
 Krusemarck, when he offered him the congratulations 
 of King Frederick William on the Treaty of Schön- 
 brunn. The ambassador met with a surly enough 
 welcome. Who was ruling in Prussia ? asked Napo- 
 leon. Was the Austrian Emperor master there ? or 
 was it the Silesian (meaning Count Götzen), or Schill, 
 or "Bluquaire" ? The rabble had made the Revolution 
 in France, the army was doing it in Prussia. Why 
 had not the Queen advised some other policy, for 
 she at any rate had some brains ? He threatened to 
 go himself to Berlin and enforce order. But then 
 he declared that after all he would not make war, 
 however good might be his right to take such a 
 course. He wanted to come to an understanding 
 with the King of Prussia ; but if this was to be 
 done, the King must be in his proper place, at Berlin, 
 not at Königsberg. And then Napoleon went on to 
 
3 o8 NAPOLEON 
 
 treat the helpless man as he had treated Talleyrand. 
 He poured out on the King the most outrageous 
 abuse, but left him in peace. But, as Ranke rightly 
 sums it up, his declarations were not warlike, but 
 pacific ; he did not want to destroy Prussia, but to 
 keep her in subjection. It was with this view that 
 a year later he allowed Hardenberg, whom he had 
 had removed from the King's Council at the Treaty 
 of Tilsit, to become once more the chief minister of 
 Prussia, and though he all the while worried and 
 pressed the Berlin Government on the subject of the 
 payment of the Prussian war indemnity, he neverthe- 
 less permitted it to be again and again deferred. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 
 
 HPHE alliance of Tilsit still held good. Alexander 
 also had become the enemy of Austria, and in 
 accordance with the arrangements made at Erfurt had 
 taken part in the war. However, he had not dis- 
 played much activity ; and Napoleon's Polish allies, 
 who under Poniatowski had thrown themselves with 
 fiery zeal into the struggle, had done more than the 
 Russians. The latter did not make their appearance 
 until the Austrians, who at the outset had penetrated 
 into the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, had been expelled 
 from it, and their Polish opponents had invaded 
 Galicia. When the Russians entered Cracow they 
 nearly came to blows with the Poles, while they allowed 
 the Austrians to withdraw unmolested from the place. 
 The Peace of Vienna gave to each what their efforts 
 had merited ; to the Czar the district of Tarnopol, to 
 the Poles the city, where in old days they had 
 crowned their kings. The Czar, who had hoped to 
 have the whole of Galicia, was extremely discontented. 
 However, simultaneously with the conclusion of 
 peace, Napoleon sent to St. Petersburg the reassuring 
 declaration that he had no idea of restoring Poland. 
 But, as a matter of fact, the Emperor's policy had 
 already taken a direction that made it worth his while 
 to arouse the goodwill of Poland in his favour. And 
 he was actually coming nearer to the idea of looking 
 
 3°9 
 
3io NAPOLEON 
 
 out for some other support, now that that which he 
 had expected from Russia had practically failed him. 
 And this could only be the Power which he had just 
 conquered, the only Great Power besides France and 
 Russia that still remained intact in all the Continent. 
 In Vienna, too, such views were not altogether un- 
 welcome. For while the Czar had made peace with 
 Sweden, which ceded Finland to him (September,' 
 1809), he was still carrying on the war with Turkey, 
 with a view to obtaining possession of the Danubian 
 Principalities. This was an intrusion into the Austrian 
 sphere of influence, and that Power was necessarily 
 more seriously affected by it than at any earlier time, 
 for Napoleon had now forced her to look for her 
 most important field of activity in the countries along 
 the Danube. Thus a change in the whole situation 
 was developing, which led to the rupture of the 
 Treaty of Tilsit, and to Napoleon's attack upon 
 Russia, and the first step in it was the marriage of 
 Napoleon with Marie Louise. 
 
 At the same time this step cannot be accounted 
 for merely by considering the state of affairs in 
 Europe, for it had its motives also in the internal 
 situation in France, and, above all, in its bearing on 
 Napoleon's policy considered as a whole. We have 
 seen indeed how hereditary right was made the basis 
 of the Empire, but Josephine being childless, Napo- 
 leon had found himself under the necessity of naming 
 his brothers Joseph and Louis as the hope of the new 
 dynasty. Then the development of his policy brought 
 with it the portioning out of vassal States among 
 his relatives, and this system was to be further 
 strengthened by marriages to be arranged with the 
 sons and daughters of princely families. Thus Joseph 
 
EMPRESS JOSEPHINE AT MALMAISON. 
 From the painting by Prudhon in the Louvre. Photo by I-evy et ses Fils. 
 
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 311 
 
 wedded the daughter of Frederick of Wurtemberg, 
 Eugene a Bavarian Princess, Caroline Bonaparte 
 received with the hand of Murat, first a German 
 principality, the Grand Duchy of Berg, and then the 
 Crown of Naples, and Stephanie Beauharnais married 
 into the princely house of Baden. 
 
 But, nevertheless, the taint of upstart origin that 
 clung to the Empire had not been dissipated, even 
 by all this ; and besides the question of Napoleon's 
 successor had been made all the more difficult by the 
 fact that Joseph and Louis had been given the crowns 
 of foreign countries, and it was hardly conceivable 
 that either of them could unite in his person a foreign 
 crown and that of the French Empire. The Emperor 
 had at first thought of adopting the eldest son of 
 Louis and choosing him as his successor ; but in the 
 spring of 1807 came the death of this handsome and 
 gifted youth, for whom the Emperor cherished a 
 deep affection. And the brothers of Napoleon counted 
 for less in this matter of the succession, because they 
 had disappointed the hopes he had built upon their 
 co-operation in his work. For, like Murat, they 
 were, almost against their will, compelled to assert 
 the particular interests of the countries they ruled, 
 and this too even where such interests ran counter 
 to the general tendency of the Imperial policy. Louis 
 especially had become a persistent and very incon- 
 venient advocate of the interests of Holland, which 
 indeed were seriously prejudiced by the general 
 closing of the ports of the Continent. Joseph was 
 very soon at variance with the French generals, and 
 bitterly complained that his brother would not allow 
 him to give his subjects any part in the blessings of 
 peaceful civil rule. Jerome, too, gave trouble, and 
 
312 NAPOLEON 
 
 had to submit to his brother placing a monitor by 
 his side in the person of Count Reinhard, the friend 
 of Goethe. Finally, Murat fell under well-grounded 
 suspicion of having had a hand in the intrigues of 
 January, 1809. Eugene, the Viceroy of Italy, was 
 the only one who remained always submissive to his 
 stepfather, and carried out all his commands. The 
 contrast between the relatives of Napoleon and those' 
 of his wife, which was apparent from the outset, was 
 thus made all the more striking. But there was also 
 a political influence that had its effect on Eugene's 
 attitude. From the very beginning the hopes of 
 Italy had been centred on France, and Napoleon's 
 victories over Austria had been the best means of 
 promoting the object to which these aspirations were 
 directed, namely, the unity of the nation. On the 
 other hand, in the States ruled by the Bonapartes, 
 there still survived tendencies that divided them 
 from France. Napoleon did not for one moment 
 overlook the fact that as time went on such tendencies 
 would have a deeper effect. He had indeed spoken 
 of this with that astounding frankness which he could 
 use when he liked, for instance, in his interview 
 with General Krusemarck in November, 1809. He 
 knew very well that a day might come when France 
 would have to wage war against his brothers' descen- 
 dants. He therefore felt it all the more incumbent 
 on him to place the succession to the Imperial Crown 
 on a firmer basis. He had as inducements in this 
 direction not only his own personal and dynastic 
 ambition, but also the interests of France. If the 
 State which he had founded was to last, he must 
 support it with a new pillar, that of legitimate 
 succession. 
 
CAROLINE BUONAPARTE AND MARIE MURAT. 
 
 Photo by Neurdin Freres, after the picture by Madame Lebrun. 
 
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 313 
 
 Josephine had long endeavoured to avert the wreck 
 of her happiness, which was thus drawing nigh, and 
 she had spared neither entreaties, nor reproaches, nor 
 tears. And it must be said that for Napoleon, too, 
 the decision to separate himself from his once-loved 
 wife was not an easy one to make. But at last even 
 she surrendered to what was represented as inevitable 
 necessity, and the Emperor did what he could to 
 make her lot less difficult. She was to retain the 
 title of Empress, and to have Malmaison as her 
 residence, and she was given a Court and an allow- 
 ance that enabled her to meet the expenses of her 
 widowed life without economies. 
 
 It was more difficult for Napoleon to choose a 
 wife for himself among the princesses of Europe 
 than it had been to select consorts for his relatives. 
 He would not think of choosing a wife among his 
 vassals. For him there was question only of some 
 princess from one of the reigning families of the 
 Great Powers. At first, and indeed very soon after 
 the Treaty of Tilsit, he had thought of making him- 
 self the brother-in-law of his Russian ally, who had 
 two sisters, Catherine and Anne, to dispose of. But 
 this project was now only a ball that was thrown 
 backwards and forwards in the diplomatic game 
 between Paris and St. Petersburg. But here Alex- 
 ander showed himself the more skilful juggler of the 
 two, or found better excuses than his adversary by 
 sheltering himself behind his mother, who, as he 
 regretfully stated, was continually raising new diffi- 
 culties. Nevertheless, up to the meeting at Erfurt, 
 he allowed the Emperor to hope for the hand of the 
 elder sister. But he had hardly gone back to St. 
 Petersburg, when Catherine was married to Prince 
 
3 14 NAPOLEON 
 
 George of Mecklenburg. The Grand Duchess Anne 
 was then just fourteen years old. Nevertheless, her 
 marriage became the subject of further negotiations, 
 though the Russians continually brought forward 
 objections arising from her extreme youth and the 
 difficulties of the question of religion. At last, at 
 the beginning of February, 1810, Napoleon, tired 
 of all this delay, took upon himself to inform the 
 Czar that he no longer aspired to the hand of his 
 sister. This happened in connection with an embar- 
 rassing development of the Polish question. Alex- 
 ander had required from the Emperor an authentic 
 declaration that in his official acts the very name of 
 Poland should never be mentioned. On the same 
 day that Napoleon brusquely rejected this demand 
 (which reminds one of the well-known step taken by 
 Napoleon III with King William over the Spanish 
 question), the negotiations with Austria as to his 
 marriage with Marie Louise were brought to a con- 
 clusion — so closely did the two affairs hang together. 
 These negotiations had been going on for months, 
 and had probably been begun by Count Metternich, 
 who since the peace had been the leading Minister of 
 Austria. But we may assume that he had been ap- 
 proached on the subject also on Napoleon's part. 
 The daughter of the Emperor Francis was in many 
 ways the very opposite of Josephine. She was 
 eighteen years of age, with a fresh blond com- 
 plexion, neither beautiful, nor witty, nor with the 
 coquettish graces of her predecessor ; a well-brought- 
 up princess, who, as the daughter of the most easy- 
 going Sovereign that sat upon a throne, waited to be 
 given by her fate to the husband that high policy 
 might select for her. Once her lot was decided, 
 
THE EMPRESS MARIE LOUISE. 
 From a picture by Prudhon. Photo by Neurdin Freres. 
 
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 315 
 
 everything went on as quickly as Napoleon wished. 
 On the nth of March, 18 10, the marriage was cele- 
 brated by proxy at Vienna, the Archduke Charles 
 speaking in the name of his conqueror. On the 
 27th the Emperor received his chosen bride at Com- 
 piegne, whither he had hastened to meet her, and 
 took possession of the easiest of his conquests. On 
 the ist of April the civil marriage was performed at 
 St. Cloud, and on the following day the ecclesiastical 
 ceremony was again carried out amidst the greatest 
 pomp. In contrast with what he had done with 
 Josephine, he gave the daughter of the Austrian 
 Emperor a much more public position as the sharer 
 of his throne and of his power. In this same spring 
 he took her with him on his journey to the Nether- 
 lands, and shared with her the homage he received 
 from his subjects. Later on, when there was a re- 
 newed outbreak of war, he entrusted the Regency to 
 her. And moreover it is generally agreed that he 
 not only ensured for his second wife all the splen- 
 dours that befitted her position, but also treated her 
 with chivalrous attention and real affection. Never 
 had the Empire witnessed such brilliant days of high 
 festival as in this year. They reached their climax 
 after the birth of her son, in whose cradle the happy 
 father laid the crown of Rome, thus marking him 
 out, like the son of a medieval Emperor, for the 
 inheritance of his own world-wide power. 
 
 During all this time the Emperor remained at 
 home. For the first time he left to his marshals the 
 entire conduct of the war, which was going on un- 
 interruptedly in Spain. Nevertheless, he did not 
 keep his arms folded. As before, he had everything 
 under his own control, little and great, politics and 
 
3i6 NAPOLEON 
 
 administrative matters, ecclesiastical affairs and educa- 
 tion. Only a small part of his official documents has 
 been printed, and yet we already have a good deal 
 more than twenty thousand separate papers, letters, 
 bulletins, instructions, and other original documents 
 that bear his strongly marked signature, scrawled 
 upon them with a quickly dashed off " TV," " Nap" 
 or " Napl." Every day he kept two secretaries hard 
 at work. He dictated his orders to them as he 
 stood at the window of his study, or as he walked 
 up and down the room, with his arm slightly bent 
 and his fist closed. He himself was never tired 
 when there was business to be done, and when was he 
 not busy ? We are told that in the spring of 1803 
 he once worked uninterruptedly for three days and 
 nights, one after the other ; then, still reading des- 
 patches, sat for three hours in a bath, and only after 
 that gave himself a few hours' sleep. For this strong 
 man had made sleep, too, his subject. His brain 
 was so organised, or his iron will had so trained it, 
 that he could command sleep when he wished. In 
 the midst of the thunder of Wagram, on the second 
 day of the battle, when he saw that the victory was 
 in his hands, his attendant, Roustan, was told to 
 spread a bearskin on the ground, and twenty minutes 
 of deep sleep were enough to restore to the Emperor 
 all his active energy. He was no longer the im- 
 petuous man he had been in the days before the 
 19th of Brumaire. The order, the organised strength 
 that he had secured for France, was reflected in his 
 own bearing. If as a young officer, and up to the 
 period of the Consulate, he had not held aloof from 
 cheerful companions, and had occasionally abandoned 
 himself gladly to the enjoyment of the moment, the 
 
THE KING OF ROME, DUKE OF REICHSTADT, ETC., 
 
 napoleon's SON. 
 
 From an engraving after the picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A. 
 
 P. 3i6. 
 
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 317 
 
 darker undercurrent of his character, that had always 
 been a predominant element in it, had from year to 
 year come to exert a stronger influence over him. 
 He had really become "the man who could not be 
 amused," as Talleyrand had with malicious sarcasm 
 described him. He had lost the power of laughter, 
 and if at times a smile played upon his thin, close- 
 pressed lips, there was mingled with it a trace of 
 irony and a bitter sense of ridicule, with perhaps too 
 a touch of melancholy. A flutter of anxiety went 
 before him as he strode through the ranks of his 
 courtiers, or as he passed into the circle of the ladies, 
 addressing a brief word now to one now to another, 
 as if he were giving orders, so that he was apt to 
 offend them with his brusque and mocking ways. 
 It was a manner in which, besides his consciousness 
 of power, and the seriousness that always over- 
 shadowed his features, there was still to be traced 
 something of his old awkwardness in the society of 
 women. He took more care of his exterior than in 
 the days when he visited the salons of Madame 
 Tallien and the Marquise de Beauharnais. On great 
 days of ceremony he glittered in the Imperial robes, 
 which had been designed by Isabey. But, as a rule, 
 the Emperor appeared as a soldier, and in as simple a 
 dress as of yore, wearing the uniform of his grenadiers 
 or that of the chasseurs-ä-cheval, on his breast the 
 Legion of Honour and perhaps some minor decora- 
 tions. As time went on he had grown stouter. The 
 short chestnut-brown hair was becoming grey and 
 thin about his brows. His complexion was as pale 
 as ever, and his features harder. From his blue- 
 grey eyes there shone no longer the fire of the days 
 of Areola, but all the more intense was their expres- 
 
3i8 NAPOLEON 
 
 sion of coldly watchful strength and unapproachable 
 majesty. 
 
 But all the festal days and all the labours of peace 
 could not make Napoleon forget that France was still 
 at war. At the time of the marriage the affairs in 
 Spain were going badly. Since the summer the 
 English, now under Wellington's command, had begun 
 to show themselves a match for the French. In the 
 autumn Massena was encamped before the strongly 
 fortified positions that Wellington had prepared at 
 Torres Vedras, stretching from the Tagus to the sea. 
 All through the winter he hoped to reduce them, but 
 in March, after terrible losses, he had to retire into 
 Spain, where the guerilla warfare had blazed up again 
 in every province. The English showed themselves 
 also at other points on the coasts, and everywhere 
 there was need of standing on the defensive. 
 
 Napoleon was still busying himself with plans for 
 maritime expeditions against the West and East 
 Indies, and even clung to the idea of a dash at Eng- 
 land. The work of rebuilding the fleet went on un- 
 ceasingly. He hoped to have made such progress by 
 the autumn of 1812 that he could then venture on a 
 fresh attempt at invasion. Till then the closing of the 
 ports of the Continent must be his strongest weapon 
 against his inaccesible enemy. And it was hoped that 
 this would not only serve as a defence, but also play 
 the part of a system of fiscal protection, developing 
 the industry of France and making the Continent de- 
 pendent on it. And this object was attained in a 
 marked degree. Wherever Napoleon directly ruled 
 only the advantages of the system were experienced. 
 Aix-la-Chapelle, Crefeld, and the whole Rhineland on 
 
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 319 
 
 the left bank of the great river owed to the Con- 
 tinental Blockade the rapid advance of their industries. 
 And if these districts, as well as Belgium and Italy, felt 
 the competition of the more strongly developed in- 
 dustry and organised capitalism of France, the balance 
 was set right by the mutual exchange of the products 
 of the various regions. The silk manufactories of 
 Lyons were especially prosperous. After suffering 
 serious losses from the Revolution, they had revived 
 since the Consulate. So too the woollen industry that 
 had its chief centres in Aix-la-Chapelle, Eupen, 
 Verviers, and Reims. Even the linen trade, which 
 had had a hard struggle against the competition of the 
 cotton factories, was developing at Ghent and Mul- 
 house. The iron industry, too, benefited by the closing 
 of the ports, and finally the trade in objects of art and 
 ornament, with Paris for its centre, became more 
 supreme and more profitable than ever before in the 
 markets of the Continent. The maritime towns were 
 declining, but the inland cities were all the more pros- 
 perous, and most of all Strasburg, as the frontier 
 town nearest to Germany, and to the whole region of 
 the Danube. But all the more this commercial policy 
 proved itself a burden to the countries whose indus- 
 tries were less developed, and whose products were 
 adapted for exportation over sea, especially for trade 
 with England, as well as for the great commercial 
 ports that served this trade. This was the case with 
 all the States on the North Sea and the Baltic that lay 
 outside the French customs frontier, and above all 
 with the countries of Eastern Europe, including all the 
 Austrian and Russian dominions. In all these 
 countries commercial losses and political oppression 
 combined to make the supremacy of the French 
 
32o NAPOLEON 
 
 Empire more and more hated as the years went on. 
 And now even in France itself this overstrained 
 system of protection began to break down. Since 
 May, 1810, there had been a series of bankruptcies, 
 which began in the outlying provinces, at Lübeck, 
 and at Amsterdam. These were the first signs of 
 commercial disturbance, and in the course of a year 
 it developed into a complete collapse of trade and in- 
 dustry even in France itself. The immediate cause 
 might be a crisis in the trade in colonial products ; but 
 in this, as in other symptoms of commercial weakness, 
 it was clearly seen that the ultimate cause was the 
 political system, in favour of which the one absolute 
 ruler had exerted all his power. So even in France 
 public opinion was aroused against the Continental 
 Blockade. Already the Emperor had felt himself 
 compelled to do something to alleviate the situation 
 by granting here and there more liberal licences to deal 
 with English traders. But he could not now give up 
 his system of " Blockade." He tried to promote busi- 
 ness activity by giving special privileges to manufac- 
 turers, by establishing funds from which advances could 
 be made to them, and by placing with them orders 
 for the State and the Court, and in this way, as well as 
 by the erection of customs barriers on the Continent, 
 he did at least strengthen the French industrial markets. 
 He took these steps not so much for the sake of the 
 employers as for that of the workmen, for his power 
 depended on the contentment of the masses. But in 
 the long run all this had very little effect. The stag- 
 nation of trade continued. At Paris, in 181 1, things 
 came to such a pass that relief works were established, 
 with direct payment by the Government of those em- 
 ployed on them, and it was the same in the Provinces. 
 
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 321 
 
 But in the vassal states men had already been trying 
 for some time to help themselves. Smuggling had 
 become a flourishing occupation, and at a hundred 
 points the Continental Blockade was broken, and the 
 forbidden British goods found their way by secret 
 methods into all these countries. 
 
 Only where French troops and French customs 
 officers were posted, could the Emperor to a certain 
 extent count upon the Blockade system being kept up. 
 Where people would not co-operate in enforcing it, he 
 had to see to it himself, by annexing the refractory 
 States, but this was not a course to which he was 
 really inclined. He gave some proof of this in 181 1 
 in the case of Düsseldorf, when the leading men of 
 the place, in the interests of their business, asked for 
 incorporation in the Empire, or at least a customs 
 union with it. He persistently refused to grant their 
 request. But he found that he could not afford to 
 leave the coast districts out of his control, and thus 
 as early as the summer of 18 10, Holland was reduced 
 to the position of a Province, and in the winter the 
 coast districts of Germany up to the Bay of Lübeck 
 were brought under the same regime, and Jerome 
 learned from the Moniteur that his brother had taken 
 away from him a quarter of his dominions and a third 
 part of his revenues. The Spanish territories as far 
 as the Ebro had the same fate. It was the old story ; 
 further and further he extended his rule, so long as 
 no barrier was raised against it from without. 
 
 Yet even in France the joints of the huge struc- 
 ture were beginning to give way. The relations with 
 the Church were becoming strained, and their main- 
 tenance was one of the corner-stones of the new 
 
322 NAPOLEON 
 
 State. Since 1808, when Napoleon had occupied 
 Rome and the States of the Church, the Pope had 
 declared himself hostile to him. Pius VII openly 
 showed his sympathy with the rising in Spain. It 
 had hardly broken out when he protested against the 
 violence done to his own States, and forbade the 
 bishops in the annexed Legations to take the oath of 
 allegiance to the Emperor. In reply, Napoleon, in- 
 April, 1809, immediately after his first triumph at 
 Schönbrunn, proclaimed the States of the Church a 
 province, and Rome a free city of the Empire. On 
 the 10th of July the Pope was informed of what had 
 been done, and was told that he had been placed 
 under a Law of Guarantees, an income of two 
 millions of francs assured to him, and that he would 
 be left in possession of his property and palaces. A 
 bull of excommunication had long been ready. 
 Before sunset the Pope had signed it. Napoleon 
 did not delay his reply a moment. Treating the 
 bull as a call for revolt against him, he made the 
 Pope a prisoner, and had him taken first to Savona, 
 and then to Grenoble. It was in the very hour when 
 the cannon were thundering at Wagram that the 
 French troops forced their way into the Quirinal. 
 Pius had counted upon the victory of Austria, but 
 the ordeal of battle had declared against him. The 
 Cardinals and the Monsignori, the Generals of the 
 religious orders, the Papal officials and the archives 
 were brought to Paris. In February, 18 10, the 
 Senate decreed the union of the States of the Church 
 with France. A national council of bishops was 
 directed to give effect to the Emperor's will. Oppo- 
 sition was not lacking in its ranks, but Napoleon 
 would brook no contradiction. In June, 181 1, he 
 
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 323 
 
 assembled a body of French, Belgian, and Italian pre- 
 lates. Those who opposed him were in part silenced 
 by being thrown into prison, and the rest of the 
 fathers voted the Decree which the Emperor dictated 
 to them, and which gave the archbishop of each 
 ecclesiastical province the right of instituting a bishop 
 named by the Emperor, in case the Pope should 
 withhold his approval for more than six months. 
 Pius was broken down ; under the strongest pres- 
 sure, and with bitter grief, he gave up the right that 
 had been his last weapon. He, too, was now num- 
 bered among those the Emperor had vanquished. 
 
 It was with reluctance that Napoleon allowed him- 
 self to be drawn into a course that threatened to 
 bring him back to the methods of the Jacobins. For 
 by so doing he was placing himself in more and 
 more open contradiction with the policy on which he 
 had founded his throne. But so fate would have it ; 
 he who embodied the system that was meant to be 
 the end of the Revolution, must, if he was to main- 
 tain this system in being, have recourse again to the 
 methods which the Revolution had adopted in days of 
 aimless terrorism. 
 
 But the army, too, the immediate support of the 
 imperial power, had become somewhat unsteady. 
 Most of the veterans who had conquered at Marengo 
 and Austerlitz lay under the sod, or were nursing 
 their wounds at home. The mass of the army was 
 now made up of recruits provided by the conscrip- 
 tions which the Senate obediently decreed. It was 
 with these that Napoleon had fought his latest battles 
 against Austria. Like everyone else in the country, 
 both officers and soldiers were longing for the end of 
 this everlasting warfare. As early as the days of 
 
3 2 4 
 
 NAPOLEON 
 
 Tilsit this had been one of the Emperor's motives 
 for concluding peace. Regular raids had to be organ- 
 ised to bring back the deserters to the colours. The 
 Chouans, too, made their appearance again in the 
 western provinces, and the Royalists would not stop 
 their plotting with England. It was only through 
 brutal severity that these disorders could be sup- 
 pressed, but it was not so easy to keep down the 
 feeling of disaffection from which they arose. So 
 the rift between the Government and the nation, 
 that seemed to have been closed since the 19th of 
 Brumaire, began to reopen, and the people were becom- 
 ing alienated from their ruler. It was precisely those 
 who stood nearest to him, the ministers, the marshals, 
 and the Emperor's own brothers who were the first to 
 mark the coming danger. This was natural, for they 
 had the most to lose. And so, like Wallenstein's 
 officers, some of them held themselves in readiness to 
 quickly abandon the ship the moment she ran on the 
 rocks, or even to throw the helmsman overboard. 
 Talleyrand, who of them all had the keenest eye for 
 the trend of things, thought he saw a way to extricate 
 France from this terrible dilemma. It was that which 
 he later adopted, and which, for himself at least, was 
 only practicable at the cost of treachery and dis- 
 honour to his own name. Napoleon himself was far 
 too clear-sighted not to be aware of the alienation of 
 public feeling and the weakness of his system, and 
 it is impossible that he could have believed that his 
 protectorate over half Europe could last for ever. 
 It was an organisation for defence, which he would 
 perhaps need to change if policy required it. He 
 clung all the more closely to France, and strove all 
 the more to make her strong. 
 
PRINCE TALLEYRAND. 
 
 From an engraving. 
 
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 325 
 
 We must never lose sight of the fact that Napo- 
 leon wished to give a national character to his crown. 
 As in economic questions, so in everything else, he put 
 the interests of the " grande nation" in the first place. 
 It was for this he gave the crowns of foreign lands 
 to his brothers, for the first thing that he expected 
 from them was that they would be ready to manifest 
 in all their policy "a French spirit." When after 
 the Peace of Vienna the Institute suggested that in 
 memory of it the Emperor should be given the title 
 of " Augustus " or " Germanicus," he declined the 
 honour in words that were as proud as they were 
 aptly chosen. Augustus, he said, had only won the 
 single battle of Actium ; Germanicus was interesting 
 to the Romans merely on account of his misfortunes ; 
 the only title he could care for was " Caesar," and 
 that had been dishonoured by a crowd of petty 
 princes ; let his title be simply Emperor of the 
 French. Napoleon also saw quite clearly that there 
 would be no place for him in a France conformed to 
 the old balance of power in Europe, and which did 
 not dispute England's command of the sea. It was 
 only the Bourbons who could make a peace that 
 would put France back to the position of 1792. 
 " One must be a legitimate prince," he once wrote 
 with bitter sarcasm to King Frederick of Wurtem- 
 berg, " to be able to make up one's mind to sign 
 away the half of one's subjects." And could one 
 possibly expect of this Titan, who had lifted the world 
 from its hinges, that he himself would put it back 
 again in its old position, and destroy the work that 
 his mighty strength had built up, and then withdraw 
 like an actor leaving the stage ? " I have made for 
 myself an Empire, and I will keep it," he said to an 
 
326 NAPOLEON 
 
 envoy of Luden. " Even if the skies should fall," 
 he said to his brother, " I will not change my view." 
 " I am not going to yield to you, after having con- 
 quered Europe. He who is not for me is against 
 me. If you will not be a supporter of my system, 
 you are my enemy, and Europe is too small for us 
 both." " Let my system only make way, and I care 
 not if I am considered unjust and merciless." But 
 he was not a tyrant in the sense that he could bear 
 no contradiction. He allowed himself to be carried 
 away by his irritability, which increased with years, 
 but when it had passed off he was ready to make 
 excuses for himself, even in writing, and using the 
 most courteous terms. He was ready to listen to 
 and discuss arguments calmly put before him. He 
 was also, as has been said before, not cruel by nature, 
 and he was grateful to those who attached themselves 
 to him. But he knew no mercy, and shrank from no 
 brutality once his interests and his system were at 
 stake, and the ends he had in view seemed to make 
 such a course necessary. Then he had only the 
 methods of Binasco — " II faut bruler, fusilier, faire la 
 terreur" — to burn, shoot, terrorise. At no time were 
 these sanguinary orders more multiplied than during 
 the first months of the Spanish rising, in 1808 and 
 1809 ; in the following years they were much less 
 numerous. He called this energy, and it was 
 "womanish weakness" when his generals neglected 
 to make examples at his orders. It was only thus, 
 he said, that one could earn public confidence ; " The 
 rabble love and respect only those whom they fear, 
 and it is only by making yourself feared by the rabble 
 that you can win the affection and respect of the 
 nation." It was thus he wrote to King Joseph in 
 
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 327 
 
 1809. "One must be strong in order to be good," 
 he wrote on another occasion, a phrase we already 
 know from one of our extracts from the Discours de 
 Lyon. But the result of the system was that what 
 Napoleon described as " the rabble " (" canaille ") 
 came gradually to include higher and higher classes 
 of the people, until at last no one under his rule 
 could breathe freely. This he himself once admitted, 
 when he had Chenier imprisoned for speaking too 
 freely. " The time is past for jesting," he said, " let 
 him keep quiet. That is the only right he has." But 
 whoever helped him, he helped in return ; even when 
 he knew that he could hardly rely upon him, and that 
 his favour was given to one who was unworthy 
 of it. Of Massena and his like, he said, " I will 
 make him so rich that he will steal no more." He 
 trampled under foot every force and aspiration that 
 needed freedom for its growth ; he gave free play to 
 base and brutal instincts, and himself became more 
 and more full of that contempt for mankind, which 
 had been latent in the depth of his soul even as a 
 young man. 
 
 He had acknowledged the power of destiny over 
 himself, even when he inscribed upon his banner the 
 proud device " braver la mort et le destiny Since then 
 he had felt more and more heavily the burden upon 
 him of the circumstances in which he was placed. In 
 various ways he confesses to this feeling of dependence 
 on the inevitable. " I am the greatest slave among 
 men. The master I must obey has no heart. It is 
 the force of circumstances and the nature of things." 
 Thus he wrote to Frederick of Wurtemberg, who 
 was himself a typical despot. So, too, he saw in his 
 policy " the star he wished to follow so long as he 
 
328 NAPOLEON 
 
 must follow it." He would carry on the struggle 
 with fate to the end, were it only in order to be the 
 executor of its stern commands. 
 
 In October, 1810, Napoleon called upon the Czar to 
 put into force in Russia also the Decrees, that had 
 been issued all over the Continent against the impor- 
 tation of English goods under neutral flags. There' 
 was no doubt that neutrals, namely Americans, were 
 shipping English goods into Russia, and to stop this 
 would have been a severe blow to English trade. 
 Alexander replied that in accordance with the Treaty 
 of Tilsit he would keep his ports closed against all 
 non-neutral ships ; but he could not venture to break 
 with neutral States, and his people could not do with- 
 out colonial produce. After the French annexation 
 of the North Sea coast, by which Oldenburg, whose 
 ruling house was related to the Czar, was also a 
 sufferer, Alexander followed up this step by issuing 
 in the last days of the year a Ukase imposing a high 
 customs duty on silk and wine, that is, on exclusively 
 French products. In reply to a protest from the 
 Emperor, Alexander explained that this measure was 
 necessary on financial grounds. The very ill-tempered 
 correspondence that followed led to Napoleon's openly 
 declaring in April, 181 1, that a reconciliation of 
 Russia with England would mean war with himself. 
 This attempt on the part of the Czar to make the 
 Continental Blockade unworkable for Russia and 
 thereby for the whole of the East, was nevertheless 
 in reality, however necessary it might be for Russian 
 trade, a pretext put forward by the St. Petersburg 
 Government to justify a change in its policy. Since 
 the summer of 18 10 the Czar was resolutely look- 
 
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 329 
 
 ing forward to a breach with his friend of Tilsit. 
 In the spring of 181 1, as Napoleon only found out 
 later, he was even on the very point of pushing on 
 or dragging Prussia with him into the war. The 
 key -word to Alexander's policy was an old one, in- 
 herited from the policy of his grandmother Catherine 
 the Great — Poland. He could not endure that the 
 French Emperor should erect on the Vistula a barrier 
 against Russian ambition. Although Napoleon, who 
 was not very well informed as to the course of events by 
 his Ambassador at St. Petersburg, the Due de Caulain- 
 court, could not see all the underground workings of 
 the Russians, he nevertheless perceived the danger 
 and the need of being ready to meet it. This was 
 amongst the reasons for the annexations which he 
 carried into effect at the end of 18 10. Napoleon felt 
 that he must occupy a position from which he could 
 at once come to close quarters with the ruler of 
 Eastern Europe. He could not leave any intervening 
 State in which Russia might get a footing. He hoped 
 that he had won Austria to his side by his marriage. 
 In Sweden, in the year 18 10, there had been a change 
 of rulers, which gave his relative Bernadotte the 
 prospect of wearing its crown, a change in the situa- 
 tion, from which, notwithstanding old rivalries be- 
 tween himself and the marshal, he hoped at once for 
 help for himself. But above all Prussia was im- 
 portant, because the way to the Russian frontier lay 
 through its provinces. She must be brought into 
 such a position that it would be impossible for her to 
 bar the march of the French armies. Hence arose 
 for the Berlin Government a situation which inevitably 
 compelled it to openly take sides with one or other of 
 the two great Powers. We are quite certain that 
 
330 NAPOLEON 
 
 Napoleon was bent neither on making Prussia his 
 enemy, nor, as the patriots thought, on annihilating 
 her ; though he may have already been counting upon 
 future combinations that might make the exchange of 
 one or other of her provinces appear advisable to him. 
 But he must bind her policy, and bring it completely 
 under his control, so that it could not suddenly break 
 away from him, and that he might be assured of at' 
 least free passage for his troops, and if possible direct 
 help. And he gained all this by a line of action by 
 which he now made the Court of Berlin anxious, now 
 brought pressure to bear, now sprung a surprise upon 
 it — tactics which no one understood as he did — finally 
 forcing it to side with him. On the 24th of Feb- 
 ruary, 1 8 12, a treaty was signed, which bound Prussia 
 to France offensively and defensively, and promised 
 the Emperor free passage for his troops through the 
 Prussian provinces, and an auxiliary corps of twenty 
 thousand men. 
 
 The question has often been raised whether Prussia 
 took the best course in this difficult crisis, and 
 whether she could not have drawn the sword against 
 the conqueror of the world. We cannot discuss here 
 the point as to which of the leading men of the 
 Berlin Court gave the right advice, the King, or 
 Hardenberg, or Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, and their 
 friends. We should have to make use of more "ifs" 
 and " buts " than befits the historian, whose business 
 it is to tell what happened, and not what might have 
 happened. We shall only call attention to one point. 
 If Prussia had acted otherwise, the theatre of war 
 would not have been between the Niemen and the 
 Volga, but between the Niemen and the Elbe, close to 
 the frontiers of the French Empire, in the midst of its 
 
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 331 
 
 vassal States, the rivals of Prussia, in a country that 
 was quite poor and exhausted, the roads, rivers, and 
 fortresses of which were in Napoleon's possession, 
 so that he could freely bring up supplies. And what 
 if Alexander had advanced to the Elbe and beyond 
 it ? It was not friendship for Frederick William that 
 led him to make war, and it was not as a defender 
 of German interests that later on he crossed the 
 frontiers of Russia and led his armies to the Rhine 
 and to Paris. On this occasion it would have been 
 difficult for him to go farther than the frontiers of 
 the old Polish kingdom extended. And would he 
 have given up Posen and West Prussia if he once 
 occupied them ? Enough of this discussion. Alex- 
 ander had delayed so long, that the treaty with 
 Prussia enabled the French Emperor to place his 
 base of operations on the Niemen. Napoleon thus 
 found himself at the very point from which he had 
 turned back in July, 1807. Sweden had not yet 
 definitely declared her policy. It was not till August 
 that Bernadotte concluded the Treaty of Abo with 
 Alexander, and thereby took the Russian side. For 
 Napoleon had not been able to pay him the price 
 which he demanded, the cession of Norway, because 
 the Emperor did not wish to injure Denmark, the 
 only one of his allies that was thoroughly honest 
 with him. But Alexander was ready to guarantee 
 Norway to Bernadotte, who, as heir to the Swedish 
 throne, was anxious thereby to strengthen his posi- 
 tion at Stockholm. Moreover, Napoleon could no 
 longer count on the help of Turkey, which, defeated 
 and tired of the war, had in May agreed to a peace 
 that left her the Danubian Principalities. But his 
 hope of drawing Austria to his side was fulfilled. 
 
332 NAPOLEON 
 
 On the 14th of March, at Paris, Prince Schwarzen- 
 berg signed a treaty, which pledged his master to 
 provide an auxiliary corps, on condition of being 
 promised an increase of territory. 
 
 At Dresden, in May, the Emperor assembled the 
 German princes around him ; King Frederick William 
 had come from Berlin, the Emperor Francis from 
 Vienna. Napoleon's wife was there beside her mother. 
 It was an unexampled triumph for Napoleon. It 
 quite threw Erfurt into the shade. The words he 
 addressed to the King, and which are now generally 
 given such an unfriendly meaning, " Are you a 
 widower ? " were not meant to insult Frederick 
 William, though he was not in any way in sympathy 
 with him. It was merely a touch of that curt, awk- 
 ward manner that we know was characteristic of him. 
 A letter of Prince William of Prussia, which ex- 
 presses his delight at the festivities and the general 
 jubilation of these days at Dresden, makes express 
 mention of the friendliness shown by the Emperor. 
 In this princely society there was no trace of the 
 feeling with which we now look back to these days. 
 When the time came for departure everyone was 
 regretful ; Napoleon spoke to each of the princes and 
 princesses ; and himself seemed moved. 
 
 Behind him stood forces such as no ruler had ever 
 had at his command. We must go back to the 
 earliest times with their legendary stories to find 
 mention of armies so numerous as that which here 
 actually stood ready under arms. The French them- 
 selves formed only a part of it, three divisions under 
 Davout ; but hardly one of the allies was missing. 
 The Germans mustered strongly in the corps that 
 fought under the French Emperor's eagles, making 
 
EMPRESS MARIE LOUISE AND THE KING OF ROME. 
 Photo by Neurdin Freres. From a painting by F. Gerard at Versailles. 
 
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 333 
 
 up not only the Austrian and Prussian contingents 
 that formed the right and left wings, but also help- 
 ing to fill up the cadres of the Grand Army that 
 fought under Napoleon's immediate orders. 
 
 On the 28th of May he left Dresden. Four weeks 
 later, on the 23rd of June, at eleven o'clock at night, 
 the various corps began to cross the frontier river, 
 exactly five years after he had first reached it at Tilsit. 
 But overwhelming as were the forces which, to use 
 his own expression, were pouring like a mountain 
 torrent over the Russian border, and with which he 
 meant to hurl himself upon the Russian army, it was 
 no part of his plan to bring upon the Czar the fate of 
 the Bourbons, or even that of the Hohenzollerns. 
 He wished only so far to subdue him as to have full 
 scope to make an end of his own enemy in the west. 
 He would have deprived him of his Polish posses- 
 sions, and probably of the Baltic provinces also. But 
 that even now he was not thinking of a complete 
 reunion of the Polish provinces, is shown by the 
 coldness with which he received the proposals and 
 petitions of the Polish National Assembly. Though 
 he directed his march towards Moscow, its occupation 
 was not necessarily the end that he meant to attain. 
 It would have sufficed for him to shake the power of 
 the Czar in a few battles. And the Russians, on their 
 side, had not the old Scythian tactics in their minds 
 as they retired farther and farther before the ad- 
 vancing masses of the French. They were thinking 
 rather of Wellington's example in Portugal, and 
 hoped meanwhile to make ready an entrenched camp 
 on the Dwina, against which the enemy might break off 
 his horns. The retreat they made was an involuntary 
 one, and distrust and dissensions among their leaders 
 
334 NAPOLEON 
 
 accompanied it. But the farther Napoleon pushed 
 forwards the greater were the difficulties of the cam- 
 paign, not only from the weather, which at first was 
 hot, and then rainy, and from the rude poverty of 
 the country, but quite as much from the ever-increas- 
 ing effect of the lack of organisation. At last, on 
 the 5th and 6th of September, before the gates of the 
 Russian capital, there came the great battle of Boro-> 
 dino. Both armies had longed for it, and on both 
 sides it was contested with unequalled stubbornness. 
 It was the most sanguinary battle that Napoleon had 
 so far fought. But once more he bound victory to 
 his eagles. The Russians had to give way. They 
 abandoned their capital to the victor, and took up a 
 position to the south-east of it. 
 
 At last Sisyphus saw his goal within his reach. 
 One inch, one effort more, and he would have pushed 
 the block of stone to the summit. And then, with 
 the whole Continent at his feet, he could hurl his bolt 
 where he willed, against the Indies, or towards the 
 Bosphorus and the Nile, or against the capital of that 
 formidable enemy, on whose white cliffs, gleaming in 
 the distance, he had so often looked out in vain 
 across the sea from Boulogne. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE CATASTROPHE 
 
 f)N the 14th of September the French entered 
 Moscow, just as the city had been forsaken by 
 its inhabitants. Napoleon himself arrived on the 
 following day, and took up his quarters in the 
 Kremlin. There was no lack of provisions and forage 
 at first, and it was possible to live there in comfort. 
 Presently fires began to break out, now here, now 
 there, without arousing much attention or giving 
 anxiety. Soon, however, they began to multiply, 
 blazing forth simultaneously, and combining to form 
 veritable conflagrations. Incendiaries were caught in 
 the act and shot. It became clear that what was 
 happening was not mere accident. The flames grew 
 in volume, a strong east wind helping the work of 
 the Russian patriots by carrying along the sea of fire 
 in and out of the wooden houses of the city in the 
 direction of the Kremlin. The Emperor threaded 
 his way through a maze of streets to a neighbouring 
 villa, whence he gazed upon the scene of destruction. 
 " What a terrible spectacle ! " he exclaimed. " These 
 Russians are true Scythians ! " 
 
 Napoleon had only sought to induce Alexander to 
 return to the Tilsit arrangement. So he now asserted 
 in letters which he had conveyed to the Czar and to 
 the Russian General Kutusoff, whom he requested to 
 
 335 
 
336 NAPOLEON 
 
 bring home to his Imperial master the peaceful inten- 
 tions by which he (Napoleon) was animated. Kutusoff 
 made reply that the word " peace " was not to be 
 found in his instructions, that he could but put the 
 proposal before the Czar. Alexander vouchsafed no 
 answer. Napoleon waited in vain for five weeks that 
 cost him dear, until October. The flames had been 
 extinguished by the 20th of September, but the 
 Russians meanwhile were being reinforced on all 
 sides. Kutusoff had made another attack, and had 
 inflicted severe losses upon Murat. The French 
 army, already reduced by one-third since Borodino, 
 was now utterly disheartened ; the supply of pro- 
 visions had almost given out, and communication 
 with France had been well-nigh cut off. If there was 
 to be any further delay, the situation in Egypt after 
 Aboukir would be reproduced with the added hard- 
 ships of a Russian winter. There was no help for it 
 — the moment had arrived for the retreat. There 
 were three routes available : one, leading to St. 
 Petersburg, was not to be thought of; the central 
 one, and shortest, led through provinces that had 
 been completely exhausted ; the most southerly route, 
 although the enemy was upon its flank, was the one 
 to be taken. On the 24th of October, however, 
 Eugene met with so serious a reverse, that, after 
 all, the deadly line of retreat through the devas- 
 tated and exhausted districts had to be followed. 
 The autumn had been a mild one, and the roads 
 were the worse in consequence. Since the be- 
 ginning of November there had been hard frost at 
 night, and the pangs of hunger had been intensified by 
 the exposure of the men in their scanty clothing to the 
 cold. All around were bands of Cossacks and armed 
 
THE CATASTROPHP: 337 
 
 peasants, able to move about more rapidly than their 
 exhausted foes. At Wiasma there was a battle in- 
 volving great loss of life, and Davout's corps was 
 almost annihilated. Then on the 6th of November 
 the winter began in real earnest. Snow and ice 
 rendered progress all but impossible. The horses, 
 by this time the only food of the army, died by the 
 score; the cannon remained stuck fast in the ground; 
 the men fell victims to the frost in hundreds. On 
 the 9th they reached Smolensk, where there were 
 stores of provisions, but these lasted only for a week. 
 It was out of the question to winter in the ravaged 
 city. The alliance with the Poles had become im- 
 perilled, since Victor and St. Cyr, whose task it had 
 been to support them, had been fallen upon and 
 routed. Accordingly, on the 13th of November, a 
 fresh start was made, sick and wounded being left 
 behind in thousands to the vengeance of the enemy. 
 The cold grew steadily more severe, and at every 
 difficult point on the route the Russians came on. 
 Whoever fell out of the ranks was lost. The army 
 melted away. The Dnieper was frozen over, so its 
 passage was effected satisfactorily. The weather now 
 became milder, but though the retreating army was 
 now on Polish ground, there was no sight of friends. 
 Nothing but Russians everywhere. And the knee- 
 deep mud was proving almost a greater hindrance to 
 marching than either the snow or ice. Now came 
 the grimmest incident of the campaign, the crossing 
 of the Beresina on the 27th and 28th of Novem- 
 ber. The bridges had been broken by the enemy, 
 the pontoons were far behind, and there were two 
 Russian armies on the spot. That, in spite of 
 everything, Napoleon should have managed in such 
 
3 3 8 NAPOLEON 
 
 conditions to make his way through the overwhelm- 
 ing forces arrayed against him on both banks of the 
 river, and get the bulk of his men over two trestle 
 bridges, is one of the most striking proofs of his 
 military genius. No pen, however, can depict the 
 terrible scenes that were now enacted, as the sick and 
 wounded tottered along after the main body of the 
 retreating army, under the increasing fire of the' 
 Russians — scenes more terrible than anything in 
 the canvases of Verestchagin. The cold, which now 
 became more intense than ever, combined with hunger 
 and typhus to complete the work of destruction, and 
 it was but a broken remnant of the great army that 
 at last reached the Niemen and. the Vistula. Napo- 
 leon had parted from the army eight days after the 
 crossing of the Beresina ; on the 5th of December he 
 took his seat on the sledge that was to carry him hot- 
 haste — accompanied by the Due du Caulaincourt — to 
 Germany across Polish territory ; on the 14th he was 
 at Dresden, on the 1 8th he reached Paris. This 
 move was dictated not merely by Mallet's abortive 
 revolt, news of which came to him so far back as 
 the 23rd of October, at Smolensk, but by the 
 general condition of affairs in France. The great 
 campaign was over. He had done all he could as 
 General. But he was more than a General — he was 
 an Emperor. He had now to strengthen again the 
 foundations of his dominion and prevent them from 
 giving way. 
 
 Not for a moment did he think of giving up an iota 
 of his power or of the aims that he had set before 
 him. But he saw that now more than ever he must 
 depend upon France. It was an advantage to him 
 that in the Russian campaign he had economised the 
 
THE CATASTROPHE 339 
 
 resources of the home country. There were indeed 
 only a few regiments of veteran soldiers in France, 
 but there was no lack of National Guards and 
 recruits, and once Napoleon was home again every- 
 thing was at his beck. The Senate agreed to the 
 calling out of the conscripts of the following year in 
 addition to those of 18 13, and what had been left by 
 the last four conscriptions. To these were added 
 eighty thousand National Guards, so that altogether 
 he had at his disposal more than half a million of his 
 French subjects. The untiring energy of the Emperor 
 also got together horses, guns, and above all, money, 
 even though difficulties had to be met and compulsion 
 employed. The nation still stood by its ruler, 
 although one could hardly say that it showed any 
 enthusiasm. Yet it was determined to maintain the 
 place of power that the Emperor had won for France. 
 The Decree of the Senate on the conscription was the 
 answer to the news of the defection of Prussia. 
 Napoleon declared to the Prussian ambassador that 
 the French would follow him unhesitatingly ; if need 
 be he would arm the women. The army was full of 
 young soldiers, hardly yet welded together, for the 
 recruits actually began their drills as they marched 
 into Germany, but it was soon completely at the 
 command of its great leader. Even in the first 
 encounters the young conscripts fought with the 
 vigour of old veterans. 
 
 His vassals, too, still stood by him, above all the 
 Italians, who had much more to hope for the future 
 of their country from France than from Austria. 
 At Munich there was a moment of hesitation, for 
 nearly thirty thousand Bavarians had been buried 
 under the snows of Russia, but Bavaria soon made 
 
340 NAPOLEON 
 
 up its mind to send a division to the Grand Army. 
 The Courts of Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, and 
 Wurtzburg were faithful to their protector. They 
 were almost readier than the Emperor's own brother 
 at Cassel, and indeed the ground under Jerome's 
 feet was more shaky than was the case with his 
 friends of the Confederation in South Germany. 
 Saxony too, with the enemy at its gates, and its rule 
 in Poland already overthrown, felt a slight movement 
 of national enthusiasm ; nevertheless, the first victory 
 won by Napoleon convinced it of the righteousness 
 of the French cause. 
 
 Napoleon's original idea was to assume the offen- 
 sive at the beginning of May ; he meant to push 
 forward by Stettin on Dantzic, where Marshal Rapp 
 was in position with thirty thousand men. He 
 thought he would thus transfer the theatre of war to 
 the lower Vistula on the borders of Poland and East 
 Prussia, and so be able to repeat the campaign of 
 1807. He still made no account of the power of 
 Prussia ; for how could he then imagine that this 
 ruined State would rise from the earth in such giant 
 might ? 
 
 He was forced to abandon this plan by the pro- 
 gress of events on the eastern frontiers of Germany, 
 since General York concluded with the Russians at 
 the mill at Poscherun, the convention that at once 
 withdrew the Prussian contingent from the war. 
 Schwarzenberg had acted in the same way when he 
 abandoned Warsaw to the Russians and retired south- 
 wards with the Austrians, but in his case the same 
 results did not follow that ensued from York's action. 
 For the Austrians had taken up in Bohemia a position 
 on the flank of both the opposing forces, and this 
 
THE CATASTROPHE 341 
 
 would enable them to threaten or to support either of 
 them. At the same time this was an additional 
 motive for Napoleon's aiming his blow at the centre 
 of the enemy's position, and he was drawn to this 
 course also by considerations arising out of the 
 attitude of his German allies, especially the Saxons, 
 and, above all, by the rapid progress of the German 
 rising, which was already extending beyond the Elbe, 
 and which expected powerful aid from Bernadotte's 
 entrance into the theatre of war as an ally. On the 
 whole, his system had at the outset shown itself equal 
 to the test, and Napoleon could therefore count 
 upon having Europe, from the Ebro to the Car- 
 pathians and the Elbe, at his back, and on being able 
 at once to carry the war beyond the frontiers of the 
 Confederation of the Rhine into the region of the 
 Oder and the Vistula, where he could join hands with 
 his garrisons shut up in the fortresses, and with his 
 Polish friends. If we consider the situation in this 
 light, we can imagine the anxieties that beset the 
 Prussian Court at Berlin, and even after it had been 
 transferred to Breslau, and the King's hesitation in 
 presence of a decision on which the very existence of 
 the reigning house and the State must be staked ; for 
 it was not Napoleon's way to forgive more than once. 
 It is true that the miserable wrecks that had come 
 across the border from the snowy plains of Russia 
 could soon have been swept away, and it was an easy 
 matter to raise a revolt along the Elbe ; but the 
 fortresses were still in the hands of the oppressor, 
 and the enemy's frontiers were close at hand, nearer 
 even than those of the friends of Prussia, who seemed 
 to be in no hurry to cross their own border lines. 
 So long as attention was given to weighing only the 
 
342 NAPOLEON 
 
 chances, for and against, arising out of the political 
 situation and the military forces on both sides, there 
 was every reason for apprehension ; and if we limit 
 our consideration to these points, it must still remain 
 even for us an open question whether after all the 
 King did not take a sounder view of the position 
 than those hot-headed men who thought they could 
 not urge him soon enough into the conflict. This, 
 however, is not the standpoint from which we must 
 judge the attitude of Prussia, and the decision adopted 
 by its ruler. We must rather take a point of view 
 that looks beyond the outer aspect of things, and take 
 into account factors that cannot be reduced to measure 
 and number, and which were then barely showing 
 themselves on the surface, and were hidden from the 
 King and all those who counselled prudence and, 
 indeed, were hardly consciously grasped in their full 
 scope and depth even by those whose hearts they were 
 already inspiring with enthusiasm. The time was 
 come when deeds were more helpful than prudent 
 calculation ; when the energy that men put forth 
 would create fresh energy ; when hope of victory and 
 reliance upon oneself could neither falter nor go 
 astray, if only they rested on faith in all that was most 
 precious to the nation, and on God who would not 
 abandon his people. 
 
 Hitherto Napoleon could say to himself that the 
 ideals of the century were on his side. He had 
 given scope to them in Italy and Poland, in Spain, 
 and even in Germany, and he had asserted them in 
 France against the pressure of reaction. It was rather 
 anger against the Bavarian officials and tax-gatherers, 
 opposition to their exactions and irritations, that had 
 roused the peasants and herdsmen of the Tyrol to 
 
THE CATASTROPHE 343 
 
 take up arms in their mountain passes against the 
 enlightened bureaucracy of Munich, and which in- 
 spired their stubborn resistance and their unasked for 
 fidelity to the Austrian Emperor. No singer of free- 
 dom like Schenkendorf and Körner fought in their 
 ranks ; no war-song of the Tyrol found its way into 
 German literature, which, on the other hand, ascribed 
 to the innkeeper Hofer, words and ideals to which 
 he and his people were strangers. It was only in 
 North Germany, illuminated with the full noonday 
 splendour of its classical epoch, that there could blaze 
 forth this pure flame of enthusiasm, in which the 
 national hatred for the oppressor was allied with faith 
 in all that is most precious to mankind. 
 
 And now for the first time Napoleon was to feel 
 what the " Ideologists " could accomplish. It was 
 when these " armed peasants " (for so in his pride he 
 described the rising of the youth in Germany), 
 hurriedly organised and badly armed, flung them- 
 selves upon his flank on the field of Lützen (May 2nd, 
 1 8 13). Once more victory remained on his side, but 
 it was dearly bought, and the enemy left not a gun, 
 and very few prisoners, in his hands. Within three 
 weeks they opposed his march again at Bautzen 
 (May 2 ist). This time it was only with difficulty 
 that they escaped an outflanking movement that 
 would have ended in utter disaster, and for a moment 
 there was some perplexity at the head-quarters of the 
 allies. A third victory, which could have been more 
 easily won than these two successes, might well have 
 proved a new Austerlitz for the conqueror, and would 
 have shattered the Fourth Coalition before its forma- 
 tion could be perfected. But the Emperor held back 
 from the fight, and on the 4th of June agreed to an 
 
344 NAPOLEON 
 
 armistice, which gave the allies time to complete their 
 armaments and to bring Austria over to their side. 
 Did this mean that Napoleon's energy was breaking 
 down ? Or had he made a mistake in his calcula- 
 tions — failed to see his opportunity ? One thing is 
 certain ; he held his troops back at the moment when 
 their advance must have secured for him a complete 
 victory. So it had been at Bautzen ; so it was now 
 in the days after the battle. He had reason to spare 
 his army, for it was the last card in his hand, and 
 he had hopes of dividing his opponents, which subse- 
 quent events did not justify. 
 
 But once the armistice ended (August 16th) the 
 struggle began again, and events followed quickly 
 their destined course. The Emperor now held a 
 central position, and could act on those inner lines 
 that had so often been his way to victory. But he 
 had not chosen the position ; it had been forced upon 
 him. His opponents had the initiative, and he had 
 to direct his movements by theirs, for they were as 
 active as himself, avoiding the blows he aimed now 
 at one, now at another of them, or forcing him or 
 his marshals to give battle. If only he could have 
 been in all places at once ! — but while he was driving 
 Blucher's army before him in Silesia, the Austrians, 
 advancing from the mountains of Bohemia, threatened 
 his central position at Dresden, and compelled him to 
 let the old soldier be and to come back. Macdonald, 
 left in Blucher's front, was so badly beaten by him on 
 the Katzbach (August 26th) that he gave up all idea 
 of further operations against him. The Emperor him- 
 self drove the enemy from before Dresden, but was too 
 weak to follow up his success, for northwards Oudinot 
 had been defeated at Gross Beeren (August 23rd), 
 
MARSHAL NEY. 
 From an engraving after F. Gerard 
 
THE CATASTROPHE 345 
 
 and now his broken troops, as well as those of Mac- 
 donald, came pouring back across the Saxon frontiers. 
 And then, while Napoleon now turned on Blucher, 
 now on Schwarzenberg, drawn hither and thither 
 amongst the hostile forces that were pressing upon 
 him, Vandamme lost the battle of Kulm just beyond 
 the Bohemian frontier (August 30th), and was taken 
 prisoner ; Ney was beaten at Dennewitz (September 
 6th) ; and at Wartenburg (October 3rd) York broke 
 through the barrier that had to be maintained along 
 the Elbe between Napoleon and his enemies, if his 
 position at Dresden was to be made good. Now he 
 was driven from his lair. He tried to come to close 
 quarters with his assailants, but again they eluded his 
 grasp, and meanwhile Schwarzenberg was once more 
 advancing from the Bohemian mountains. Thus came 
 the crisis ; Napoleon had to choose between retreat — 
 a retreat of which the Rhine could hardly be the end 
 — and accepting battle wherever the enemy chose to 
 offer it. 
 
 He decided on the latter alternative, for it was 
 not his custom to retire without a fight, and to 
 do so, moreover, would mean the defection of his 
 German allies. For the sake of the Confederation 
 of the Rhine, and of his suzerainty over the soil 
 of Germany, he risked another and a last battle on 
 the plains of Leipzig. The fighting of the very 
 first day went against the Emperor, thanks largely 
 to the impetuous valour of the Prussians, the 
 regulars and the new levies vieing with each other. 
 Retreat now became inevitable. Napoleon even 
 thought of beginning it early on the 18th of October, 
 when the allies attacked him first from the south, and 
 then in the afternoon from the north-east, and out- 
 
346 NAPOLEON 
 
 flanked and drove his corps back upon Leipzig. 
 And then, on the third day of this conflict of nations, 
 a battle such as Europe had not seen since the times 
 of Attila, there came the storming of the city, and 
 the retreat was turned into a disorderly rout. It 
 was only the feeble pursuit of the victors that allowed 
 the beaten army to halt for two days at Erfurt. Then 
 the stream of fugitives poured towards the Rhine,' 
 their ranks more terribly thinned by typhus and 
 dysentery than by the swords and bullets of the 
 enemy. So far the War of Liberation had been a 
 civil war, like all the wars that had ever been waged 
 on the soil of Germany ; but Leipzig laid the founda- 
 tion of German unity. And, as must inevitably have 
 been the case, it began with the rebellion of the con- 
 queror's vassals. In the midst of the battle the 
 Saxons, with their bands playing, had gone over to 
 the side of their brothers of Germany, and as the 
 beaten army retired along the road to Mayence, the 
 revolt grew as the avalanche grows in its descent. 
 Yet once more Napoleon had the opportunity of 
 fighting, and fighting victoriously, on German ground. 
 It was when General Wrede, with his Bavarians, tried 
 to win his spurs, and make his King a more welcome 
 new-comer in the camp of the allies, by barring the 
 French retreat. But Napoleon broke through his 
 army at Hanau (October 30th), and cleared the way 
 into his own dominions. 
 
 For a moment it seemed as if he might find safety 
 on the French side of the Rhine. The allied armies 
 halted on the right bank of the river, and sent from 
 Frankfurt envoys to offer the Emperor peace on 
 terms that would give France its "natural" boundaries, 
 that is, as was expressly stated in the note presented 
 
THE CATASTROPHE 347 
 
 by the negotiators, the Rhine, the Alps, and the 
 Pyrenees. The Rhine was the frontier that had been 
 won at the time of the Congress of Rastatt, and fixed 
 at Luneville. It was the frontier when the Emperor 
 took the oath, by which he promised to maintain the 
 integrity of France. One cannot say that he actually 
 declined these proposals, but why did he put terms of 
 his own in opposition to them, and give the negotia- 
 tions a turn that his diplomatic opponents at once 
 grasped at and used most cleverly to discredit him 
 with his own people, and widen the rift between him 
 and them ? Was it nothing but his pride that held 
 him back ? Great as this was, and largely as we must 
 recognise its influence on him even at this crisis, it 
 would, nevertheless, be unfair to the Emperor to say 
 that it was this alone that made it impossible for him 
 to lay the sword aside. In the first place, the offer 
 made to him was not at all precise or definite. It was 
 a note, accompanied by verbal declarations on Metter- 
 nich's part, giving a prospect of negotiations on this 
 basis. Everything else was to be left to a Peace 
 Congress, to which England was to be invited. Lord 
 Aberdeen, the English Ambassador to Austria, was 
 aware of this offer of negotiations, and had spoken in 
 general terms of the willingness of his Government 
 to treat ; but he held no powers whatever to act as a 
 plenipotentiary, and a fortnight later he did not fail 
 to expressly inform the Austrian Minister that Eng- 
 land protested against the paragraphs of the note which 
 referred to her interests, and must, on the whole, 
 consider it as a purely private document. In other 
 words, England reserved to herself full freedom of 
 future action. Hardenberg, the Prussian envoy, had 
 not been asked to take part in this deliberation, and 
 
348 NAPOLEON 
 
 in his diary he speaks of the proposed conditions as 
 " a foolish business." But the note also reserved the 
 right of the allies to continue their operations, and 
 immediately after its despatch they decided upon a 
 plan of attack on France, which included, as its first 
 steps, the occupation of Holland and Switzerland. 
 Further, the note contained nothing as to the com- 
 pensations which the Powers would claim for them-' 
 selves. Lord Aberdeen had spoken only in general 
 terms of the willingness of England to freely hand 
 back her conquests ; but she would grant nothing 
 that might prejudice her maritime rights. Above 
 all, the name of Italy was not mentioned. But it was 
 evident that Austria, whose troops were already 
 pushing forward into Venetia, would look for her 
 reward in that direction. Could Napoleon now 
 abandon the country which among all his vassals was 
 alone giving him its support, and was determined, 
 energetically, to continue the war ? And could he in 
 any way count upon the English accepting his view 
 of what were the natural boundaries of France, and 
 agreeing to the Netherlands being included within 
 them ? Must he not rather have anticipated that 
 they would announce to the Congress as their require- 
 ments the restriction of France to its old boundaries, 
 and the liberation of Belgium ? That, as a matter of 
 fact, they had no other idea we know from a note of 
 their most powerful minister, Castlereagh, dated the 
 13th of November, and addressed to Lord Aberdeen, 
 which sets forth the demand for the strict limitation 
 of France to its former boundaries, and regards the 
 overthrow of Napoleon, and the French evacuation 
 of Antwerp, as the essentials of British policy. 
 
 In a word, these offers could only mean for Napo- 
 
THE CATASTROPHE 349 
 
 leon a truce, at the end of which lay a new humilia- 
 tion for him. Had he himself ever dealt otherwise 
 with a defeated enemy ? He who has the power in 
 his hands makes the utmost use of it — no one had 
 reduced this principle to practice more remorselessly 
 than himself. It was thus he had carried through the 
 peace negotiations at Luneville, Pressburg, and 
 Schönbrunn. Now it was his opponents who hoped 
 to reduce him to this position of helpless submission 
 to ever increasing demands. If he was to preserve 
 his crown, as he had sworn to the nation, there was 
 nothing left for him but to continue the struggle. 
 
 For this he needed, above all, to be safe from 
 danger from the rear. During the last twelve months 
 the war in Spain had taken a very bad turn. Wel- 
 lington had driven the French before him, and was 
 already in the south of France. Napoleon could only 
 hope to stop the advance of the English on this side 
 by giving peace to Spain. On the 8th of December 
 he signed a convention with Ferdinand at Valencay, 
 which gave him back his crown, if the Cortes would 
 accept the arrangement. At the same time he offered 
 Pius VII, who was now detained at Fontainebleau, 
 freedom to return to Rome. But the Pope replied 
 that he could only negotiate at Rome itself, and in 
 January the Cortes declared that it could enter into 
 no compact with the usurper. 
 
 The Emperor, therefore, if he meant to uphold at 
 once the power of France and his own crown, could 
 now count only upon such resources as France 
 itself could supply. It was with this idea he appealed 
 to the National Assembly and to his people them- 
 selves. " All Europe," he declared to the Senate on 
 the 14th of November, "a year ago was with us — all 
 
35o NAPOLEON 
 
 Europe is now against us. . . . We have, there- 
 fore, everything to fear if we have not the energy 
 and force of the nation on our side." The Senate 
 voted an address that really said nothing. But in 
 the Corps L6gislatif there were open demonstrations, 
 demands for the rights of freemen. The result was, 
 that on the 31st of December, he prorogued the 
 session. The allies had already passed the frontier/ 
 and he appealed to the nation itself. " I call French- 
 men to the help of France," he said ; " peace and the 
 freedom of our territory must be our war-cry ! " But 
 the might of France did not answer his call. The 
 levee en masse proved a failure. As early as the 
 middle of November there were only thirty millions 
 of francs remaining in the treasury, " the last pears 
 left by the drought," as Napoleon wrote to his 
 treasurer Mollien, hiding his annoyance with the 
 jest. 
 
 He could rely only upon his own genuis, and the 
 military and administrative organisation on which he 
 had based his power. And never had he given such 
 brilliant proof of his own worth, as a leader, than 
 in this campaign of 18 14. His opponents had an 
 enormous superiority in numbers. From Basel, and 
 thence through Switzerland and the Jura, the Aus- 
 trians and South Germans were pressing on in order 
 to cripple the forces that might be brought up from 
 the south of France, and to cut the communications 
 with Italy. The Prussians and their allies, under 
 Blucher, were advancing across the middle course of 
 the Rhine. Bulow's army was to invade northern 
 France from Holland, and even a smaller force than 
 his would have been sufficient to dispose of all re- 
 sistance in the Netherlands. The iron ring closed 
 
THE CATASTROPHE 351 
 
 tighter and tighter on the Emperor, and on his last 
 defensive positions. Once more he was forced to 
 take up the central position in the midst of enemies, 
 the situation which he had turned to advantage to 
 wrest from them his first great victories in the days 
 of Monte Notte and Areola, and he used this posi- 
 tion better than he had done in the preceding year. 
 As in the most brilliant days of his youth he united 
 in his operations strength and swiftness, and that 
 general grasp of the situation which had so often 
 enabled him, even when his total force was less than 
 that of the enemy, nevertheless to surprise and defeat 
 them with superior numbers at the decisive point. 
 Probably now that they saw the enemy in their 
 country, which thanks to their Emperor had seen 
 no enemy on its soil for twenty years, his people 
 would have pardoned him if he had agreed to a peace 
 that would leave to France its old boundaries. How- 
 ever this may be, the masses of the people remained 
 true to him, and the army too, the common soldiers, 
 the non-commissioned officers, and the officers of 
 lower rank clung to him with ever growing enthu- 
 siasm. The strain of the invasion, the severe military 
 measures adopted by the enemy and inspired by hate, 
 incensed the peasants, and many a foreigner fell 
 under their bullets. After the defeat of La Rothiere 
 (February ist), Napoleon himself had a moment of 
 depression, in which he was ready for sacrifices that 
 at an earlier time his pride would have made in- 
 tolerable. His most faithful servant, Maret, Duke 
 of Bassano, who had lately resigned the Ministry of 
 Foreign Affairs to Caulaincourt, and taken over the 
 Secretaryship of State, though so far a partisan of 
 resistance, now himself implored Napoleon to submit. 
 
352 NAPOLEON 
 
 In his memoirs he has described the scene that passed 
 between him and the Emperor at Troyes in the be- 
 ginning of February, and we may give his account 
 of it as reliable. Napoleon had been turning over 
 the pages of Montesquieu's famous work, and ap- 
 peared to be paying no attention to Maret ; then 
 pointing to a passage, he said, " Read that, and read 
 it aloud." And Maret read : " I know of no more' 
 magnanimous act than the resolution taken by a 
 monarch of our own times to bury himself under the 
 ruins of his throne, rather than accept proposals that 
 a king should not listen to ; for he was too proud to 
 descend to a lower depth than that to which his mis- 
 fortunes had brought him." " But I know something 
 still more magnanimous," exclaimed Maret, " if you 
 would but sacrifice your fame, and with it fill up the 
 abyss in which otherwise France and you yourself 
 will be engulfed." To which the Emperor replied, 
 " Very well, let you gentlemen make peace. Caulain- 
 court will settle it, and I will bear the blame. But 
 don't ask me to dictate the terms of my own degrada- 
 tion." The Emperor then sent to Caulaincourt, who 
 represented him at the Congress of Chatillon carte 
 blanche^ but after that, in response to a protest from 
 the latter, agreed to name definite conditions : Bel- 
 gium and, if need be, the left bank of the Rhine 
 would be given up, and Italy and even the colonies 
 might be sacrificed. 
 
 But during these days the war took a surprising 
 turn. Blucher, the ablest of his opponents, with his 
 army, encountered the Emperor. Within ten days 
 Napoleon had defeated him or his subordinate 
 generals four times, sometimes routing them, and 
 then at Montereau he handled in the same way a 
 
ALEXANDER I., EMPEROR OF RUSSIA. 
 From an engraving after Wolkoft. 
 
THE CATASTROPHE 353 
 
 corps of the main Austrian army, that of Prince 
 Württemberg. Maret says that the better prospect 
 the first of these victories gave him, led the Emperor 
 to cancel the letter containing the conditions of 
 peace on the 8th of February, only a day after 
 he had written it. Now that victory was again 
 on his side, the proud man had regained con- 
 fidence in himself. Peace with only the old frontiers, 
 he wrote to Joseph on the 1 8th of February, would 
 be no peace, but only a capitulation, and would com- 
 pel him to have recourse to arms again in two years. 
 But he now hoped, he said, for a peace on the basis 
 of what had been offered from Frankfurt as a mini- 
 mum, and to this he could consent with honour. 
 But the allies had no longer any idea of coming back 
 to the Frankfurt proposals, not even those amongst 
 them who, like the Emperor Francis, and for a while 
 even the Czar Alexander, were not adverse to grant- 
 ing moderate terms. They demanded as preliminary 
 conditions of peace the acceptance of the old frontiers 
 of France, and as a guarantee the surrender of three 
 French fortresses, which were to include Belfort and 
 Besancon. " I feel so angered," wrote Napoleon, in 
 reply to his plenipotentiary, " that I consider myself 
 dishonoured, even by the mere proposal." But 
 already the fortune of war was turning to the side of 
 his enemies. Blucher's flank march northwards, and 
 his junction with the allied army of the North brought 
 on the decisive crisis. Napoleon, who had at once 
 marched against him, came too late to engage him 
 singly. Nevertheless, he ventured to attack at Laon 
 the allies, now doubly strong. He was defeated, and 
 then came the end. In vain the Emperor tried the 
 boldest of all his manoeuvres, making a dash at the 
 
354 NAPOLEON 
 
 communications in the rear of the allied advance. 
 The Prussians, and then the Austrians also, trusting 
 in their superior forces, pushed on towards Paris 
 without troubling themselves about the danger in 
 their rear. At the very outset Napoleon found his 
 march barred at Arcis-sur-Aube (March 21st), and it 
 was only after a heroic struggle against more than 
 threefold numbers that he forced his way through 
 the enemy. 
 
 Nevertheless, he adhered to his plan, and pushed 
 on through Vitry as far as St. Dizier. Once more 
 fortune gave him a ray of the sunshine of her 
 favour, when on the 27th he routed one of the 
 enemy's corps at this place. But on the same day he 
 found out for certain that the main armies of the 
 invaders had disregarded his movements, and were 
 in full march for his capital. For a moment he 
 still hesitated. The country swarmed with armed 
 peasantry ; these united with the garrisons might 
 perhaps have enabled him to continue the struggle in 
 the eastern provinces. But at last he decided to turn 
 back towards Paris. His troops began their return 
 march on the morning of the 28 th, and that same 
 evening he received a letter from which he saw that 
 he had not a moment to lose if he meant to save the 
 capital. As a rule, Napoleon's own campaigns had 
 been directed against the enemy's capital. It was 
 clear that his opponents had learned something from 
 him. But their capitals had never proved to be the 
 final support of their power. At Vienna, at Berlin 
 and, finally, at Moscow, Napoleon had had proof of 
 this from his own experience. So long as these old- 
 fashioned rulers commanded an army and held one 
 province, they had found a refuge there. But his 
 
THE CATASTROPHE 355 
 
 capital was of greater importance to the usurper. It 
 was there that plots and attempts against his throne 
 and his life had been ventured upon ; there lived all 
 his rivals, his open or secret opponents ; it was from 
 there that Joseph, who as General-Lieutenant of 
 France was at the Empress's side, daily sent more 
 and more pressing letters to his brother, the Emperor, 
 begging him to end the war and make peace. Treason 
 was lurking there. Fast as the troops marched they 
 went all too slowly for the Emperor. He heard that 
 the enemy had reached Meaux, and defeated his 
 marshals, Marmont and Mortier. From Troyes he 
 rode forward, escorted only by his bodyguard, and at 
 last hurried on in a carriage without any escort, 
 hoping to get before the advance of the enemy. He 
 was only a few leagues from the city when a courier 
 met him with the news that Paris had fallen. On 
 the 29th of March Maria Louisa had fled to Blois 
 with her little son ; on the 30th the Prussians 
 stormed Montmartre ; on the 3 1 st Alexander and 
 Frederick William made their entry into their enemy's 
 capital. The Emperor had turned back to Fontaine- 
 bleau, when Caulaincourt, whom he had sent to his 
 old ally of Tilsit with full powers to conclude peace 
 on the terms proposed at Chatillon, brought him back 
 as his answer that the Czar demanded his abdication. 
 He was not yet entirely without troops to support 
 him, and a war in the provinces still offered some 
 chance of success. He himself did not yet think of 
 surrender, and the soldiers and many of the generals 
 would have followed their Emperor to the bitter end. 
 But others, and these the nearest to him and the 
 highest, men like Marmont and Ney, Lefebvre too, 
 and Macdonald and Oudinot, had given up the game 
 
356 NAPOLEON 
 
 as lost. On the 4th of April the four last mentioned 
 approached him, and laid before him a document 
 inspired by their friends in Paris. According to its 
 terms the Emperor was to declare that he was ready 
 to resign his throne in favour of his son, and to 
 leave France, if the Powers so desired, and the good 
 of the country demanded it. And the Emperor, 
 who now saw no other resource open to him, signed 
 it. But when the marshals went back to Paris and 
 pointed out to the Czar that the army could not 
 favourably regard the restoration of the monarchy, 
 they were informed by Alexander himself that some 
 of their comrades had already abandoned them, and 
 that Marmont, the friend of Napoleon's youth, had 
 become a traitor to him. Where was the Emperor 
 to turn now that he was told this by Ney and 
 Macdonald, who, with Caulaincourt, once more came 
 back to see him ? Perhaps to the Loire ? Or to 
 Italy ? He had already thought of this, but the 
 marshals declared that the army would not follow 
 him. And so at last he decided on resigning the 
 power he had created for himself, and signed the 
 treaty which left him the title of Emperor and gave 
 him besides sovereignty over the island of Elba. 
 
 Was it a nervous shock, produced, as one can easily 
 imagine, by the excitement of these last days, that 
 prostrated him during the following night ? Or was 
 it a first attack of the malady that later undermined 
 his iron frame ? Or, as has often been asserted, had 
 he for a moment forgotten himself and taken poison ? 
 This is the account of the matter given by his trusted 
 secretary, Baron Fain, and Maret, too, tells much the 
 same story. But it is contradicted by the words the 
 Emperor had spoken the day before to another, a 
 
THE CATASTROPHE 357 
 
 messenger from his wife. A death, he said, sought 
 only by some act of despair, would be mere cowardice ; 
 suicide would befit neither his principles nor the 
 place he had taken in the world. According to the 
 same authority, he seemed as he spoke to be remark- 
 ably free from care, and full of his characteristic con- 
 fidence in destiny " which rules all, and from which 
 no one can withdraw himself." We may say, then, 
 that the thought of suicide had come to him in those 
 terrible hours, but without his seriously thinking of 
 acting upon it. He was sustained by his pride, the 
 feeling that he had won a place in history ; and even 
 this catastrophe could not break down his confidence 
 in himself. Soon after, he said to one of his companions 
 on the voyage to Elba, that " men blamed him " for 
 surviving his fall. " This is an injustice," he con- 
 tinued, " I see nothing great in a man ending his life 
 like a gambler who has lost his money at play. There 
 is much greater courage in surviving undeserved mis- 
 fortune." 
 
 And now came days of desolation for the Emperor. 
 His generals, his counsellors, his very servants aban- 
 doned him. Even Roustan left him ; and Corvisart 
 too, his doctor, with whom he had so often joked 
 during his morning visit, soon sought his fortune on 
 the other side. On the 20th of April Napoleon bade 
 farewell to the Old Guard in the courtyard of the 
 chateau of Fontainebleau. To them, too, he said that 
 he might have ended his existence, but he wished to 
 live yet awhile in order to write and let men of future 
 days know of the deeds of his warriors. He kissed 
 the general, kissed the colours, bade a last farewell to 
 his brave men, and started on his journey. 
 
 Accompanied by commissioners of the foreign 
 
3$S NAPOLEON 
 
 Powers he travelled to the place assigned to him 
 through the districts which he had first seen when 
 he was brought as a boy to Brienne, and which he 
 had so often traversed as a young officer, as First 
 Consul and as Emperor. The journey was over 
 roads that he himself had constructed, and along which 
 he had led the sons of France to victory. Again, as 
 in the days of the Revolution, he found the south in 
 a state of excitement. Now the agitators were the 
 Royalists and the Clericals, to win over whom he had 
 made every effort, who felt they were the conquerors, 
 and were ready to take vengeance on the Revolu- 
 tionists. They were quite capable of making him 
 feel their anger, and in order not to be recognised 
 he had to put on an Austrian uniform, and to wear 
 the white cockade. This was, perhaps, the deepest 
 of all the humiliations that fell to his lot. At Frejus, 
 the city where he had first trod the soil of France on 
 his return from the East, an English corvette was 
 waiting to convey him to Elba. On the 18th of 
 April he went on board, and on the 4th of May, 
 after having once more touched on the Corsican 
 coast, he landed at Porto Ferrajo, the harbour of his 
 new dominion. 
 
 ■* 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 FROM ELBA TO ST. HELENA 
 
 " 1 WAS born and bred for work ; I know no 
 bounds to work, I am working unceasingly " : 
 so said Napoleon of himself on one occasion when 
 at the height of his power. And now he was con- 
 demned to finish his life upon an island, the cir- 
 cuit of which he could make in two days on horse- 
 back. He had no sooner arrived than he was in the 
 saddle, intent on getting to know his new territory. 
 Almost his first concern was to strengthen two forti- 
 fications which he found there, to station in them two 
 batteries, and to establish an armed force of over one 
 thousand men, with the four hundred Grenadiers of 
 the Guard, conceded him at Fontainebleau, as its 
 nucleus. His fleet consisted of two or three vessels, 
 which he provided with two pieces of cannon each : 
 the man who had turned the Mediterranean into a 
 French lake had to be satisfied with that ! His 
 administrative faculties found scope at first : the 
 quarries and saline springs of the island called for 
 more efficient working, new roads were needed, and 
 many other such matters helped to call forth all his 
 energies. These enterprises required money, how- 
 ever, and he found himself obliged to keep down his 
 expenses, for the two millions which were to be paid 
 him by his successor on the throne of France were 
 
 359 
 
360 NAPOLEON 
 
 not forthcoming : the first infraction, it may be noted, 
 of the treaty which the Powers had forced upon him. 
 For his own personal wants he was adequately pro- 
 vided ; in his will he recorded that he had saved 
 200,000,000 francs from his civil list. In addition, 
 he had at his disposal the millions of Laetitia, 
 who had come to the island to be with her son in 
 misfortune, as she had been with him in the days of 
 his greatness. His sister, Pauline, had come thither 
 as well, and for a time also the beautiful Pole, the 
 Countess Walewska, whom he had first met among 
 the Polish nobles in Warsaw during the long winter 
 months of the Prusso-German campaign. Her little 
 boy, the child of the conqueror, was with her. 
 
 Marie-Louise held aloof, seeking to forget in the 
 arms of Count Neipperg, and as Duchess of Parma, 
 the brilliancy of her former station, together with the 
 man who had given it to her. Take it for all in 
 all, Napoleon's position at Elba may be said to have 
 been that of a very well-to-do private individual, but 
 it was an existence incompatible with his matchless 
 energy and limitless ambition. The work which he 
 found to his hand was soon exhausted. What was he 
 to do ; what field could he find for his restless 
 activity ? Did he think of setting to work at that 
 record of his military achievements which he had 
 promised the old veterans at Fontainebleau ? Or 
 did he ponder over the possibility of finding yet 
 another chance of exerting his influence over the 
 world's destinies ? Did he already plan out his escape 
 from his narrow bounds ? Was he preparing for such 
 an attempt ? Was he resolved to take the first chance 
 that came for outwitting his opponents ? Or was it 
 rather Destiny — a force stronger even than his own 
 
NAPOLEON. 
 
 IPhoto by W. A. Mansell & Co., after the painting by Horace Verriet in the National Gallery of British Art. 
 
 P. 360. 
 
FROM ELBA TO ST. HELENA 361 
 
 will — that was to lead him once more upon the 
 stage ? 
 
 This much is certain, that Napoleon was not com- 
 pletely master of his own fate. In France the peace 
 he had sought in vain was no more attainable under 
 the legitimist ruler ; the clash of parties was stronger 
 than ever, and the Government of Louis XVIII stirred 
 up the strife to a degree far from agreeable to the 
 easy-going king, who had been so ready to content 
 himself with the bread of banishment. The clergy 
 and nobility who had procured the return of the King, 
 were the classes that had suffered most and that had 
 most to avenge, and that now, whilst exerting this 
 new power to the detriment of their enemies, were 
 bent, above all, on carrying out their own policy and 
 furthering their own interests. The inevitable issue 
 was a still more pronounced cleavage in the ranks of 
 the nation, and a state of unrest which became daily 
 more and more intensified, with the result that, not 
 the masses alone, but also large sections of the upper 
 classes, began to think regretfully of the exiled 
 Emperor. The state of things was not more re- 
 assuring in Italy, where Murat, who had managed to 
 save Naples for himself out of his brother-in-law's 
 downfall, was now putting forth all his efforts to ex- 
 tricate himself from the precarious condition in which 
 he had been placed by the Restoration, and was in 
 treaty with all the most restless elements in the penin- 
 sula. The idea of the unity of Italy which Napoleon 
 had inspired, gathered new strength in proportion to the 
 unlikelihood of its realisation and the growing power 
 of Austrian rule. At Vienna at the Congress of the 
 Powers, assembled to bring into shape the new order 
 of things in Europe, violent conflicts had become the 
 
362 NAPOLEON 
 
 order of the day, and it looked as though the nations 
 that had combined against Napoleon were now about 
 to take up arms against each other. 
 
 Those to whose interest it was to maintain the new 
 state of affairs in France and Italy could not but 
 stand in fear of the prisoner of Elba — a prison so 
 near both coasts. He was a source of dread, above 
 all to traitors, and conspicuous among these was 
 Talleyrand, who had almost made himself master of 
 the situation at Vienna. He it was who first had the 
 idea of removing Napoleon from the island. He 
 had him surrounded by spies and, it is said, 
 endeavoured to win over a captain of one of 
 Napoleon's ships — an attempt discovered, according 
 to the story, and frustrated. Certain it is, that 
 Talleyrand, so early as October, 1814, submitted to 
 the Congress the harsh proposal that Napoleon 
 should be carried off to some island in the Atlantic 
 Ocean, five hundred leagues from Europe — he thought 
 of the Azores. He was supported in this by Pozzo 
 di Borgo, Napoleon's rival in Corsica in former days, 
 now a trusted adviser of the Czar. Castlereagh also 
 was anxious to dispose thus of Napoleon and of 
 Murat with him, as Talleyrand wrote in December to 
 his royal master. 
 
 Was Napoleon to await quietly the fate which his 
 enemies were planning for him ? Or was he, as 
 always, to advance to meet his fate, and strive once 
 more to fashion it in accordance with his own will ? 
 There was no lack of tempters from Italy, both from 
 the Austrian and Papal States and from Naples, where 
 Murat was now once again playing into the hands of 
 the Emperor ; but to these Napoleon paid no heed : 
 he could throw in his lot only with France, where, 
 
FROM ELBA TO ST. HELENA 363 
 
 moreover, he had friends in plenty, and whither he 
 was being called not only by the mass of his adherents, 
 but also by the force of old associations. Thus it 
 was that he arrived at a decision worthy of him, and 
 made up his mind to tear asunder the net woven for 
 him by his foes before they could enmesh him in it. 
 
 His preparations were carried out in deepest 
 secrecy, and on the 26th of February he found him- 
 self under sail with his small fleet. Madame Lsetitia 
 and his sisters remained behind. His mother ap- 
 proved of the enterprise. They had not got far 
 when they came in sight of a French man-of-war, 
 which had been told off to guard the island, but 
 which now arrived too late. On the ist of March 
 the Emperor arrived at Antibes, the spot from which 
 he had set forth to his first victories. Then came 
 that unparalleled march to Paris, and the scene at 
 Grenoble, where he advanced alone, his grey over- 
 coat open to the wind, to greet the first battalion that 
 he encountered, by calling out to them, " Which of 
 you will fire upon his Emperor ? " and receiving for 
 answer a deafening shout of " Vive VEmpereur I " 
 their officers, their colonel at their head, making a 
 guard of honour for him as they led him in triumph 
 into the city. The Royalists, who menaced him a 
 year ago, have vanished ; the Jacobins urge him on 
 to vengeance ; but as in the days when he was on his 
 way back from Egypt, he has but one aim in view — 
 the capital and a sovereignty above all parties. The 
 situation is the same now as then ; the soldiers to a 
 man animated with the sole feeling of enthusiasm for 
 their Emperor, and the officers with them, save only 
 for the generals, who hesitate whether to remain true 
 to their new oath or to break it like the old. Marmont 
 
364 NAPOLEON 
 
 and his kind follow the King into exile ; but Ney, 
 setting out to Lyons to meet his old master, allows 
 himself to be carried away by the stream. Every- 
 thing falls out as foretold in the proclamation given 
 forth at Grenoble by the Emperor : his eagles fly in 
 triumph from steeple to steeple on to the towers 
 of Notre-Dame. On the evening of the 20th of 
 March he makes his entry into Paris, and betakes 
 himself to his old quarters in the Tuileries. 
 
 With what projects and aspirations did Napoleon 
 deceive himself when for the second time he took his 
 seat upon the throne of France ? Are we to believe 
 that when he quitted Elba he had it in his mind to 
 hurl the torch of war again into the midst of the 
 European nations, not yet arrived finally at peace ? 
 That his lust of conquest was once more at work ? 
 That he had no other thought than to resume the 
 road from which the combined armies of Europe had 
 forced him to turn aside ? Whatever may be urged 
 against him in regard to war at earlier periods of his 
 career, his intentions at this moment, at least, should 
 not be called in question. His most urgent need was 
 the passivity of Europe in the face of his return. 
 And it really looked as if he might count upon it. 
 That condition of peace, at which he had aimed ever 
 in vain, and which had ever eluded him like a phantom, 
 as he grasped it, now existed, for England had 
 granted it to the Bourbons. It was no longer his 
 task to make himself master of the power created by 
 the Revolution, and to obtain recognition for it, but 
 to keep under his own rule the France of the Peace of 
 Paris, as Europe had agreed to define it. It was, 
 therefore, not only possible, but necessary for him 
 
FROM ELBA TO ST. HELENA 365 
 
 to call upon the nation itself to take a share in the 
 government. It was only thus that he could offer 
 the Powers a certain guarantee for peace. For under 
 his former rule, just as when the Jacobins were in 
 power, the tendency towards conquest had gone 
 hand-in-hand with the strengthening of his own 
 position in the country, and the repression of every 
 free aspiration of its people. The longing of France 
 for rest, which in recent years had manifested itself 
 with such overwhelming force as even to do away 
 with national pride, and the freedom of the people 
 to express their views to their ruler, offered Europe 
 a stronger guarantee for the maintenance of peace. 
 The conquerors themselves had already counted 
 upon this, when they surrounded the throne of 
 Louis XVIII with Liberal institutions, which they 
 had hardly a thought of giving to their own sub- 
 jects. Therefore, by limiting his own power with con- 
 stitutional forms, Napoleon had at any rate a better 
 prospect than absolute rule would have given him, 
 of obtaining that recognition by Europe which he 
 had not been able to secure either by making peace 
 with the clerical interest, or by his marriage with 
 a daughter of one of the legitimately reigning 
 families. He was himself deeply impressed with the 
 necessity of taking this course. It was precisely 
 foreign opinion that he took into account when he 
 planned the Constitution, of which Benjamin Constant 
 elaborated the details for him. Above all he thought 
 of Austria, which of all the Powers had dealt most 
 gently with him in the days of Elba. On this ac- 
 count he must, therefore, naturally loosen his con- 
 nection with Italy, for in that direction lay the special 
 interests of the Hapsburgs. He must also give more 
 
366 NAPOLEON 
 
 scope to the influence of the Court of Vienna in 
 Germany, and at once try to widen the division be- 
 tween the two leading German Powers. He might 
 thus hope to be able to drive a wedge into the 
 Coalition, which pressed upon him. I have no doubt 
 that he counted upon this when he communicated to 
 the Emperor Francis his hope of a friendly arrange- 
 ment, and expressed his wish to see his wife and son 
 again at his side. 
 
 The new Constitution, which on the ist of May 
 was proclaimed to the nation as a complement of the 
 imperial system, was an attempt to unite Caesarism 
 with Liberal forms of government, such as were con- 
 sonant with the tendencies of the Revolution at its 
 beginning — the Plebiscite and the Electoral Colleges 
 remained, but instead of the Corps Legislatif, a 
 Chamber of Representatives, instead of the Senate, 
 an hereditary Chamber of Peers, with public debates, 
 a budget, ministerial responsibility, and other Con- 
 stitutional rights were called into existence. But if 
 in the days of his absolute power the Emperor had 
 stood above parties, holding them all in equal sub- 
 jection, this was no longer possible for him as a 
 Constitutional ruler. Those who had come back to 
 the country with King Louis and emigrated again 
 with him, and besides these, the leading traitors, the 
 Augereaus, Marmonts, Talleyrands, were henceforth 
 outside the pale of the law. Thus the men who had 
 governed France during the interregnum, who had 
 made peace with the Foreign Powers, and who were 
 especially influential at Vienna, were now excluded, 
 and the Emperor found himself to a greater extent 
 than he can have liked, driven into the arms of the 
 men of the Revolution. But if these had helped him 
 
FROM ELBA TO ST. HELENA 367 
 
 once more to display his eagle, they naturally wished 
 to keep their hands with his on the flagstaff, and so 
 from the first moment dissension and mistrust mingled 
 in the work of pacification. To this was added appre- 
 hension as to the course the Powers would take, and 
 the desire for repose felt by the nation, which would 
 not at any price embark in new adventures. There 
 was striking evidence of this on the occasion of the 
 Plebiscite to which the new Constitution, like its 
 predecessors, was submitted. Hardly one half the 
 number of votes that had been given in earlier appeals 
 to the people were registered for the new regime. 
 
 For it had already become clear that Europe would 
 not endure the re-establishment of the Empire even on 
 its new basis, and that Napoleon could only maintain 
 his new power, like the old, by conflict. The news of 
 his escape from Elba had drawn the Powers together 
 again. On various grounds they were all agreed that 
 with Napoleon no peace was possible. Even the 
 Emperor Francis at once gave this as his opinion. On 
 the 13th of March there followed the act of proscrip- 
 tion by the Powers. Nine hundred thousand com- 
 batants were to be put into the field to capture once 
 more the lion that had broken out of its cage. 
 
 If Napoleon still meant to bring about a division 
 amongst his enemies it could now be accomplished 
 only by the sword. He must grapple with those of 
 his antagonists who were the fiercest in their hatred of 
 his power, those who had forced on the hostile 
 decision against him at the Congress of Vienna, those 
 who were the first to act on the plan there adopted, 
 and who already had their troops mustered in Belgium, 
 whence they hoped to lead them by the shortest route 
 to Paris. These were England and Prussia. And 
 
368 NAPOLEON 
 
 he had to make haste. The only hope of safety 
 lay in taking the offensive. It was the course to 
 which his daring spirit had always impelled the 
 great leader. 
 
 However, even his preparations for the struggle 
 were impeded by the nation's longing for peace. Of 
 his old soldiers only sixty thousand answered to the 
 call to arms. At the outset the Emperor did not ' 
 venture to enforce the conscription of 1 8 1 5, and 
 when it came it was too late. The Royalists rose in 
 the west, and twenty thousand men had to be sent 
 against them. Then the protection of the eastern 
 provinces and the garrisons of the fortresses absorbed 
 a considerable part of the available military forces. 
 The result was that the Emperor had not more than 
 one hundred and twenty-eight thousand men under 
 his command when, in June, he made his advance 
 against Belgium. His plan was to fall first on one 
 then on the other of the two most formidable of all 
 his enemies, Blucher and Wellington. He calculated 
 that if they were beaten, the Coalition would fall to 
 pieces. Austria, he thought, would abandon the 
 defeated side, and perhaps Russia too, for she need 
 then take no account of Prussia in the Polish ques- 
 tion. He followed the same line of thought that 
 Dumouriez had adopted when he was at the head of 
 affairs, and when in the spring of 1792 he delivered 
 his blow against Belgium ; only he was striking at the 
 Austrians, Napoleon at the Prussians. 
 
 And, indeed, it seemed as if fate was once more to 
 obey the will of the great soldier. If only the god 
 of victory and fortune whom he had called to his aid 
 on the 19th of Brumaire, and who had for years been 
 his companion, would now be with him for a few 
 
THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON. 
 From '■<■ mezzotint after the picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A. 
 
 p. 3 63. 
 
FROM ELBA TO ST. HELENA 369 
 
 hours ! Even these, the readiest of his opponents for 
 the struggle, had not expected his impetuous onset so 
 soon. On the 15th of June he fell on their outposts 
 and drove them in. On the 16th of June, at midday, 
 he attacked the Prussians at Ligny and put them to 
 flight, for Wellington, himself attacked at Quatre Bras, 
 could not come to their aid. On the 18th, again at 
 midday, he began the battle with this the most 
 stubborn of his opponents at Waterloo. The greatest 
 strategist of the time was opposed to its greatest 
 tactician. But here was an occasion when everything 
 depended on tactics. Wellington's was the skill to 
 take advantage of that long fold of the ground, the 
 watchfulness to close every gap in his line, the im- 
 perturbable calm that met the surging charges of 
 the French masses of cavalry and the onset of the 
 Emperor's grenadiers. It was thus that Wellington 
 could wait till the Prussians, corps after corps, 
 marched into the battle, pressing more and more 
 strongly on the enemy's right, till at last the 
 French gave way and then broke into wild rout. 
 " What would have become of the Coalition," wrote 
 Gneisenau after the victory, " and of all the story of 
 the Congress, if the battle had been lost ? " And 
 this was the fact ; it was the blood of Ligny and 
 Waterloo that once more cemented the alliance 
 together, and gave victory to the forces of reaction. 
 The Revolutionary Empire was at an end. It was not 
 only the army of Napoleon that was shattered. His 
 throne, of which it had once more been the only 
 support, went to pieces. 
 
 He himself would not yet give up hope. If only 
 full power, a dictatorship, would again be entrusted 
 to him ! This was what he asked of the Representa- 
 
 2 B 
 
37o NAPOLEON 
 
 tive Assembly, when he had reached the Elysee early 
 on the 2 1 st of June, after a hurried flight to Paris. 
 But the reply which both Chambers gave him left 
 him no doubt that his star had set. The veterans of 
 the Revolution, who were with him at this moment, 
 Carnot and his brother Lucien, tried to persuade 
 him to put himself at the head of his adherents and 
 hurl himself upon his enemies, whether they came 
 from within or from without. But what party leaders 
 could do, he could not venture on. He could not 
 abandon the position that he had taken up since he 
 had thrown in his lot with the Revolution. It was 
 only to the Conqueror that the nation had given 
 itself. The Chambers could rebel against him now 
 that he was conquered, and could do so without any 
 fear of being disavowed by the army and the people. 
 The members of the Lower Chamber had at once 
 protested against any attempt the Emperor might 
 make to interfere with their powers, and declared 
 themselves in permanent session, as if they thought of 
 re-establishing the National Convention. They would 
 not have any further negotiations with him, and when 
 Napoleon seemed to be raising new objections, they 
 threatened him with the decree of outlawry, which 
 had so completely missed its mark when it was used 
 as a menace on the 19th of Brumaire. They were 
 not Jacobins, as he called them in his helpless rage ; 
 they were bourgeois, with a few nobles and acade- 
 micians who, after a revolutionary past, were ad- 
 herents of the Liberal Party, men like Lafayette, 
 Broglie, Constant, and their friends ; the " men of 
 ideas " who, after the days of Brumaire, had sided 
 with him, and whom he afterwards thrust aside. 
 Now he was helpless in opposition to these very men 
 
JOSEPH FOUCHE, DUC ü'OTRANTO. 
 
 From a lithograph by Delpeche. 
 
FROM ELBA TO ST. HELENA 371 
 
 whom he had despised, and he had to resign himself 
 without a struggle to his fate. On the 22nd of June 
 he again signed his abdication, once more, as at 
 Fontainebleau, in favour of his son. He could not 
 afford to wait longer, if only on account of the 
 menacing advance of the Prussians, who were likely 
 to show him even less mercy than his subjects had 
 done. Once more from Malmaison, whither he had 
 retired on the 25th of June, he offered his services as 
 a leader. He would come as a simple general, only 
 to save the capital by striking at the enemy while they 
 were still divided. Fouche, who was at the head of 
 the Provisional Government established by the 
 Chambers, sent him word in reply that he had better 
 not delay his departure for a moment, for other- 
 wise they could not answer for his personal safety. 
 And so the Emperor started on another journey to 
 the coast, this time westward, and accompanied by 
 French officers. He travelled more slowly than on 
 the way to Frejus, ever casting his glance backwards, 
 and dallying with the thought of being perhaps able 
 to turn back. On the 3rd of July he arrived at 
 Rochefort. But it seemed as if his energy itself had 
 gone with his power. English warships were cruising 
 off the port, and there was danger that if the Emperor 
 tried to escape he would fall into the hands of these 
 enemies. From Paris he was urged to leave the soil 
 of France. But he did not dare to go. What had 
 been an easy matter for him when he was in Egypt 
 and in Elba, when he was going forth to do ddeds 
 that led to power, seemed now to fill him with fear. 
 For he did not like the idea of running the risk of 
 being captured like a thief. So he chose a middle 
 course, a compromise such as generally his resolute 
 
372 NAPOLEON 
 
 nature recoiled from, but one that now seemed to 
 him to be alone worthy of him, and which in fact 
 bore the full impress of his character. There re- 
 curred to him the memory of one of Plutarch's heroes, 
 whose fate had impresed his mind as a boy. He 
 decided to give himself up to the enemies with whom 
 he had struggled all his life long, and to ask them 
 to receive the vanquished amongst them as a free 
 man. He wrote to the Prince Regent that he had 
 ended his political career, and was coming, like 
 another Themistocles, to sit down beside the hearth 
 of the British people, and place himself under the 
 protection of their laws. On the 15th of July he 
 surrendered to the captain of the British ship of the 
 line, Bellerophon. For eight days longer the ship lay 
 off the French coast. It was not till the 26th of July 
 that it arrived at Plymouth. There at last he saw 
 the shore of England lying close before his eyes, but 
 he did not land upon it. On the 30th he was in- 
 formed of the answer to his request which the English 
 Ministry had decided upon, after consultation with the 
 representatives of the Powers at Paris. In order to 
 deprive " General Bonaparte " (such was the title now 
 given to the outlawed man) of the opportunity of 
 ever again disturbing the peace of Europe, the island 
 of St. Helena had been selected as his place of abode 
 for the future. Napoleon protested against this 
 decision as an act of tyranny, a breach of the law of 
 nations, pointing out that he had given himself up 
 voluntarily and without compulsion, though he might 
 have prolonged the war with the army on the Loire. 
 Notwithstanding this, he had chosen to surrender in 
 order to put an end to the sufferings of humanity. 
 He urged upon his conquerors that by this unworthy 
 
FROM ELBA TO ST. HELENA 373 
 
 treatment of him they would bring a stain upon their 
 own fame, and warned them that they would be con- 
 demned by posterity. But these were words that 
 made no more impression on the English than his 
 earlier appeal to their magnanimity. On the 7th of 
 August the fallen Emperor had to embark, with the 
 companions his stern conquerors allowed him to take 
 with him, on board the warship, which was to convey 
 him after a voyage of more than two months to the 
 remote island. 
 
 " Sainte Helene, petite tie" so ran a line in an extract 
 which Bonaparte as a sub-lieutenant had copied out 
 of some geographical work. It is, indeed, a small 
 place. Only forty-seven square miles is the whole 
 extent of this bit of English ground, to which fate 
 had at last brought him. Yet small as it was, it was 
 not all free to him. At first he had to spend some 
 weeks in the house of an English trader, near the little 
 town in which the few English colonists and their 
 black servants were crowded together. There, not 
 far from the coast, which with its glens overgrown 
 with myrtle and laurel might remind him of his native 
 Corsica, he found a friendly welcome, and spent a 
 short time pleasantly. But at the end of the year he 
 moved into the residence appointed for him. It was 
 the long, low and damp house of a dairy-farm, known 
 as Longwood, on the upper part of the island, over 
 whose bleak summits the storm winds raged, while 
 the sight of the waste of waters around made the 
 sense of lonely isolation all the stronger. Yet the 
 Emperor was less alone here than he would have 
 wished. At no great distance the house was sur- 
 rounded by a line of sentry-posts. Within this 
 
374 NAPOLEON 
 
 cordon he might move about freely, but if he wished 
 to pass outside of it he had to be accompanied by an 
 English officer. For his conquerors still feared that 
 he might yet escape. All their care was anxiously 
 directed to making this impossible for him. Much 
 has been written of the littleness Napoleon showed, 
 the devious and even deceitful methods he used in 
 carrying on a kind of guerilla warfare with his * 
 keepers over the remnants of freedom that were left 
 to him ; how he worried and almost wore out the 
 good Sir Hudson Lowe, the governor of the island, 
 who only did his duty, and gave in to Napoleon 
 whenever he could see his way to do so. We do not 
 mean to make excuses for our hero in this as in other 
 things ; but even those who blame might judge him 
 more gently if they would remember how, as we have 
 seen in the case of the founder of the new German 
 Empire, the fall from the height of power influences 
 the character of men who have found their only 
 happiness in active rule. 
 
 As Bismarck, at Friedrichsruh, turned his mind to 
 handing on to future times his recollections and his 
 thoughts on his policy and on the work he had 
 accomplished, so Napoleon at St. Helena — but with 
 more restless energy and a wider view than the 
 German statesman — wrote of what he had done, gave 
 expression to his thoughts on men and politics, and 
 made the whole history of the century the subject of 
 his studies. He turned back to the schemes and 
 plans with which he had been busy in his youth. 
 But just as all he then wrote showed that he had a 
 practical end in view, and the desire to be working at 
 it, so even now he could not abandon entirely the 
 hope and the longing for action. It was not that he 
 
EUROPE IN 1812 
 
EUROPE IN 1812-FRENCH BOUNDARIES 
 
FROM ELBA TO ST. HELENA 375 
 
 thought of making his escape. He always declined 
 the proposals made to him in this direction. As he 
 had voluntarily given himself up to the English, he 
 hoped for freedom only from some general change of 
 policy. He was incessantly thinking out combina- 
 tions that might lead to this result ; and almost all 
 the political and historical writings that he dictated 
 had some kind of connection with this object. It 
 seemed to him impossible that the rule of the Bour- 
 bons would last ; and in this, at least, he was a true 
 prophet. He foresaw a future Europe in which 
 Liberal ideas would again force their way to triumph, 
 and at the same time be reconciled with the religious 
 spirit. These thoughts he connected with his own 
 policy, and gave a forecast of that tendency, which 
 further developed in the "Napoleonic Ideas" of his 
 nephew, led to the programme of the Second Empire. 
 Even in captivity his self-confidence was unbroken. 
 " I have," he once said, alluding to Cherbourg, 
 " erected my pyramids in the sea." He never 
 expressed regret for what he had done to the Due 
 d'Enghien. In his last testament he declared, " I 
 would act in the same way under similar circum- 
 stances." He persisted in asserting that he had 
 desired peace, and that it was Europe that had forced 
 him into war. And even in exile nothing was plainer 
 to him than that he had been the creature of circum- 
 stances, the slave of policy. He called upon posterity 
 to bear witness to his deeds, and as for his adversaries, 
 he said they would be biting at granite if they dared 
 to belittle his fame. In his political " testament " he 
 himself indicates the two historians who should set 
 forth to the world the course of his policy and his 
 exploits as a leader in war, and he bade his son, with 
 
376 NAPOLEON 
 
 whose future all these thoughts were connected, always 
 to read and re-read history, for it was the only true 
 philosophy. 
 
 He was already ill when he arrived in the island. 
 Before long the symptoms became more serious, and 
 at last they plainly showed that he was suffering from 
 the same malady that had killed his father. The 
 pains and sufferings that it brought with it he en- 
 dured as a part of the inevitable, to which he had 
 always bowed. He now looked on death as calmly 
 as when he stood before the muzzles of the guns 
 at Grenoble, or took his place in a square of the 
 Grenadiers of the Guard at Waterloo. In his will, 
 which he dictated only a few weeks before the end, 
 he remembered all his friends, the generals who had 
 been faithful to him, the grenadiers of Elba, and the 
 wounded of Waterloo, his companions at St. Helena, 
 and his first chamberlain, Marchand, whose service to 
 him had always been that of a friend. But above 
 all he thought of France, whence he had twice been 
 exiled, and to which, thinking of the future of his 
 family and the memory of his deeds, he still clung 
 closely, closer one might almost say than in the days 
 of his greatness. On the 5th of May, 1821, he 
 succumbed to his illness. As a last favour from 
 destiny he had asked for a grave in French earth on 
 the banks of the Seine. But this, too, his enemies 
 refused him. His body was buried on the heights 
 of the rocky island, not far from Longwood. Only 
 after long years was his last wish fulfilled, and his 
 mortal remains borne to the place where they now 
 rest, in the midst of the trophies that he had won 
 for France during an unparalleled career of glory. 
 
From a drawing by F. Clementson, after a sketch by Lieut. F. R. Stack. 
 
 LONGWOOD. 
 The house in which Napoleon lived and died at St. Helena. 
 
 NAPOLEON S TOMB AT ST. HELENA. 
 From a contemporary woodcut 
 
 P- 376. 
 
FROM ELBA TO ST. HELENA 377 
 
 In the Discours de Lyon, as we have seen, Napoleon 
 had described Alexander the Great as the victim of 
 a self-devouring ambition. Later, he saw in him the 
 hero whose good fortune had been the greatest that 
 the world had ever witnessed. Once he said, half in 
 jest, " There is no longer anything great to be done. 
 If I were, like Alexander, to have myself proclaimed 
 the son of Jupiter Ammon, every fish-wife would 
 laugh in my face." Perhaps it was just on the point 
 he here touched upon that he had least reason to fear 
 comparison with the Macedonian king. For the gain 
 to his power which his Church policy secured him, 
 can hardly be said to have been less than the influ- 
 ence which Alexander tried to secure by associating 
 himself with the priesthood of the land of the 
 Pharaohs. And we can on the whole say that the 
 power which Napoleon held in his hands, when it 
 was at its greatest, was not inferior to that of any 
 empire known to history. The end of both these 
 heroes, and the fate of their empires, also afford a 
 parallel, though Alexander's lot was more fortunate, 
 for he followed the call of the gods to Hades in the 
 fullness of his strength and at the height of his 
 power, and had not to survive the inevitable break- 
 ing up of his dominions. Alexander stands above 
 Napoleon, moreover, when we consider the results 
 of their careers. With a few strong blows the 
 Greek king broke open the gates of the East, which 
 had remained closed against Greece in days of her 
 freedom, but at the same time he laid the foundations 
 for the meeting of East and West, and thence arose 
 new forms of life for the world. The empire of 
 Rome, the spread of Christendom, had their prelude 
 in his victories. By comparison, the life-work of 
 
37§ NAPOLEON 
 
 Napoleon is but an episode in the world's history. 
 The Revolutionary State, which he believed he had 
 perfected as First Consul, was not created by him nor 
 was it to be a permanent result to remain after him. 
 He was no more able than the Jacobins to bridle the 
 reactionary forces that had held France in fetters 
 since the fall of the Huguenots. And in the end the 
 Powers of old Europe triumphed over him after all 
 his victories. It counted nothing for him that he had 
 closed the abyss of anarchy, raised the French to the 
 position of " the great nation " of Europe, and won 
 for himself and his family recognition, alliance, and 
 even relationship with the great ruling houses of the 
 Continent. He remained an alien in France, and 
 illegitimate among the legitimate monarchs. 
 
 Once, and in the days when they were still allies, 
 the Czar had compared him to a torrent — "you 
 had only to wait till the flood subsided." Napoleon 
 had in truth burst upon Europe like a mountain 
 stream, whose waters subside as quickly as they rise 
 in their destructive force. But we should do in- 
 justice to our hero if we saw in him only the 
 power of destruction. He did not merely pile up 
 wreck and ruin around him ; wherever he came he 
 broke up the ground and prepared it for a rich 
 harvest. The national ideals of Italy must recog- 
 nise in him, rather than in Alfieri, their creator. 
 All the energetic life of Spain dates from the days 
 of Bayonne. The States that now form, beside 
 Prussia, the pillars of the German Empire, rest on 
 foundations that he laid. It was no discredit to him 
 to have destroyed, north and south of the Alps, such 
 historic wrecks as the republics of Genoa and Venice, 
 and the prince-bishoprics of the old German Empire. 
 
-♦r" 7 " " t " I 
 
 • 
 
 THE TOMB OF NAPOLEON IN THE HOTEL DES INVALIDES. 
 Photo by Neurdin Frferes. 
 
 p. 378- 
 
FROM ELBA TO ST. HELENA 379 
 
 The new light of freedom in the Tyrol comes from 
 ideals that sought in vain to penetrate into its valleys 
 in the days of Hofer and Speckbacher. It was their 
 failings that brought the army and the State, formed 
 by the Great Frederick, to ruin at Jena. And how 
 much of the new spirit that arose in Prussia, under 
 the very oppression of the conqueror, seems to us now 
 to be a reflection of the forces that the Revolution 
 aroused and Napoleon organised in France ! But 
 above all, in France itself, even to this day, not only 
 the basis of administration, the law, the army, whose 
 foundations he laid, or strengthened in the spirit of 
 the Revolution, but every department of intellectual 
 and national life bears still the traces of his work. 
 
 And so there arises in the mind of the onlooker 
 that deepest sense of tragedy which we only derive 
 from the sight of real beings shaping out their life. 
 And we may well apply to him the words in which as 
 a young man of twenty-two he himself pointed to 
 the twofold fate of Genius : " Les hommes de genie 
 sont des meteores distines h bruler pour klairer leur 
 siecleT " Men of genius are meteors, destined to burn 
 in order to give light to their era." 
 
3 8o 
 
 NAPOLEON 
 
 
 1785. 
 
 1793. 
 
 From a letter dated 1793 addressed to the "Directory." 
 
 From a document dated 13th Fructidor, year IV, written at the head-quarters 
 of the French army in Italy. 
 
 1796. 
 
 To the proclamation at Milan, 1796. 
 
AUTOGRAPHS OF NAPOLEON 381 
 
 While First Consul, 1S03. 
 
 As Emperor, 1804. 
 
 As Emperor, 1S04. 
 
 From a proclamation after the 
 battle of Austerlitz, 1805. 
 
 After the campaign of 1S06. 
 
 At Tilsit, 1S07. 
 
 INITIALS. 
 
 In Madrid, 1S0S. 
 
 At Schönbrunn, 1809. 
 
3 82 
 
 NAPOLEON 
 
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INDEX 
 
 Aberdeen, Lord, 347-8 
 
 Abo, Treaty of, 331 
 
 Aboukir, 159, 336 
 
 Acre, 12, 161 
 
 Addington, Mr. (Lord Sidmouth), 
 233, 261 
 
 Adige, 112-13, 128, 131, 201, 252 
 
 Adria, 122 
 
 Aiguillettes, Fort, 67 
 
 Aix, 6, 168 
 
 Aix-la-Chapelle, 247 
 
 Ajaccio, s, 11, 25, 27, 38, 40, 43, 
 45-6, 48, SI et sqq., 96, 166-7 
 
 Alessandria, 81 , 100, 249 
 
 Alexander I of Russia, 204, 240 et 
 sqq., 250-1, 258, 260, 264, 271 et 
 sqq., 275, 278, 286 et sqq., 293 
 et sqq., 298, 306, 309, 313-14, 328, 
 331, 333, 33S- 6 . 353. 355-6, 362, 
 377-8 
 
 Alexander the Great, 34, 150 [240 
 
 Alexandria, 149, 150, 159, 166, 237, 
 
 Alopäus, 258 
 
 Alps, 70, 72-3, 82, 99, 113, 155, 196, 
 247 
 
 Alsace-Lorraine, 7 
 
 Amadeus, Victor, 101, 105 
 
 America, 284 
 
 Amiens, 205, 231, 233, 235, 239 
 
 Amsterdam, 70 
 
 Ancona, 109, 116, 134, 142, 203,262 
 
 Anne of Russia, 313-14 
 
 Anspach, 259, 260 
 
 Antibes, 75, 363 
 
 Aosta, 198 
 
 Apennines, 71, 75, 81, 122, 196 et sqq. 
 
 D Acre, St. Jean, 12, 161 
 
 Areola, 114, 317, 351 
 
 Arena, 52, 57 
 
 Argenteau, 100 
 
 d'Artois, 231, 243 
 
 Aubry, 78, 82 
 
 Augereau, General, 99, 112, 125, 
 127, 176 
 
 Austerlitz, 258 et sqq., 323 
 
 Austria, 302 et sqq. 
 
 — Emperor Francis II of, 218, 246, 
 256, 296, 307, 314, 332, 353, 366 
 
 Autun, 9 
 
 — Bishop of, 9 
 Avignon, 64, 116 
 Auxonne, 14, 18, 25 
 Azores, The, 362 
 
 B 
 
 Baden, Charles Frederick of, 263 
 
 Bagration, 257 
 
 Bard, 198 
 
 Barras, 80, 89, 91, 93 et sqq., 97 et 
 
 sqq., 103, 123, 127, 129, 135, 137, 
 
 171, 176, 181, 184 
 Barthelemy, M. de, 123 
 Bartolomeo, 57 
 Bastia, 20, 59 et sqq., 73 
 Bautzen, 343-4 
 Bavaria, 201, 263, 346 
 Bayonne, 289 et sqq. , 300 
 Beaucaire, 65 
 Beauharnais, Stephanie, 311 
 
 — Marquis Alexandre de, 93 
 
 — Mme. de. See Empress Josephine 
 
 — Eugene, 94, 249, 300, 311-12, 336 
 Beaulieu, 100-1, 105, 112 
 Beethoven, 206 
 
 Beifort, 353 
 
 Belgium, 107, 233, 367-8 
 
 Bellerophoit, 372 
 
 Benedetti, 130 
 
 Benevento, 263 
 
 Berg, Grand Duchy of, 311 
 
 Berlin, 238-9, 268, 307 
 
 Bernadotte, Marshai, 92, 127, 147, 
 
 176, 259, 262, 329, 331, 341 
 Berthier, General, 99, 125, 166, 197, 
 
 3°3 
 Berthollet, 148, 166, 170 
 Bertrand, General, 269 
 Besanco, 353 
 Bessieres, Marshai, 299 
 Binasco, 110, 245, 326 
 Biron, 59 
 
 383 
 
3«4 
 
 NAPOLEON 
 
 Bismarck, Prince, 104, 130, 239, 374 
 Blucher, 267, 344-5, 350, 352-3, 36S 
 Bologna, 106, 1 15-16 
 Bonaparte. See Buonaparte. 
 Bordeaux, 77 
 Borghetto, 106 
 
 Borgo, Pozzo di, 38, 44-5, 52, 362 
 Borodino, 334, 336 
 Bosphorus, 233 
 Bottot, 129, 181 
 Boulogne, 146, 205, 251, 254 
 Bourrienne, F. de, 166 
 Breisgau, 227 
 Brenner Pass, 113, 117 
 Brenta Valley, 113 
 Brest, 288 
 
 Brienne, 6, 10, 17, 18, 29, 95, 358 
 Brittany, 195 
 Broglie, 370 
 
 Brueys, Admiral, 134, 147-8, 152 
 Bruix, Admiral, 164, 177, 181 
 Brune, General, 196 
 Brunn, 259 
 
 Brunswick, Duke William of, 306 
 Brussels, 70 
 Bulow, 350 
 
 Buonaparte,Carlo(Napoleon'sfather), 
 5,9, io, 11,95 
 
 — Lcetitia (Napoleon's mother), 1, 5, 
 10, 125, 220, 360, 363 
 
 — Louis (King of Holland), 6, 24, 
 92, 114, 246, 249, 262, 293, 310, 
 
 3" . 
 
 — Lucien (Prince of Canino), 9, 45, 
 
 48, 52, 59, 60, 169, 173, 175, 178-9, 
 1S6, 187, 326, 370 
 
 — Joseph (King of Naples, after- 
 wards King of Spain), 6, 9, 10, 13, 
 22, 24, 38, 45, 52 et sqq., 78, 82-3, 
 85» 91-2, 94» »I, 169, 233, 246, 
 249, 262, 264, 290 et sqq., 300, 
 310, 3", 355 
 
 — Marianne (Princess of Lucca), 9, 
 46, 55 
 
 — Napoleon. See Napoleon 
 
 — Jerome, (King of Westphalia), 92, 
 252, 275-6 
 
 — Pauline (Princess Borghese), 262, 
 360 
 
 Buttafuoco, Count, 19, 27 
 
 Cabarus, 94 
 
 Cadiz, 254 
 
 Cadoudal, 22 r, 231, 242-3 
 
 Ccesar, 34, 139, 162, 183 
 
 Cagliostro, 216 
 
 Cairo, 159 
 
 Calvi, 60-I, 74 
 
 Cambaceres, 84, 177, 220, 301 
 
 Campo Formo, 130, 134, 201, 241, 
 
 260, 305 
 Campt, 97, 103, 105, 123, 370 
 Carre, Fort, 75 
 Carrinthia, 11S 
 Carrousel, Place de, 206 
 Carteaux, General, 65, 67, 68 
 Casabianca, Captain, 8 
 Castiglione, 113 
 Castlereagh, Lord, 348, 362 
 Catherine, of Russia, 129, 203-4, 329 
 Catinat, 35 
 Cattaro, 260 
 
 Caulaincourt, 329, 338, 351-2, 355-6 
 Cayenne, 136, 221 
 Ceva, 100 
 Ceylon, 205 
 Chalons, 92 
 Champagne, 7 
 Charlemagne, 247-8, 263 
 Charles, Archduke, 113, 1 17-18, 
 
 120, 251, 303-4, 315 
 — King, 2S5 
 Charles V, 34, 303 
 Charlottenburg, 267 
 Chatham, Earl of, 307 
 Chatillon, 352, 355 
 Chenier, 221 
 
 Cherbourg, 238, 251, 254, 375 
 Chiese, 112 
 Choiseul, Due de, 142 
 Cincinnatus, 34-5, 171 
 Cintra, 292 
 Clary, Desiree, 94 
 Cleves, 260 
 Cobenzl, Ludwig, 128 et sqq., 134, 
 
 147, 201, 204, 241, 256 
 Colberg, 268 
 Colmars, 72 
 Cologne, 121, 247 
 Compiegne, 290, 315 
 Constant, Benjamin, 22 r, 365, 370 
 Constantine, 271 
 Constantinople, 84, 116, 154, 161, 
 
 231, 274, 2S7 et sqq., 292 
 Copenhagen, 203-4, 2 44» 2 7& 
 Corfu, 139, 153-4, 196 
 Corsica, I et sqq., 13, 17 et sqq., 36-7, 
 
 39» 43» 45» 53» 55 et sqq., 61, 73 
 
 et sqq., in, 116, 142-3, 166-7, 
 
 236, 362 
 Corunna, 254, 300 
 Corvisart, Dr., 357 
 Cracow, 261 
 Crete, 151 
 Cromwell, 34, 183 
 Czartoryski, Count Adam, 250 
 
INDEX 
 
 385 
 
 D 
 
 Dalberg, Archbishop von, 263 
 
 Danton, 46, 110 
 
 Dantzic, 268, 340 
 
 Daunou, 188 
 
 Davidovitch, General, 113 
 
 Davoüt, 299, 303-4, 332, 337 
 
 Debry, Jean, 82-3 
 
 Decres, Admiral, 288, 301 
 
 Dego, 100 
 
 Demairon, M., 12 
 
 Dennewitz, 345 
 
 Depuys, M., 18 
 
 Desaix, General, 151, 158, 199, 200 
 
 Desmazis, 12, 95-6 
 
 Dijon, 198 
 
 Dion, 34, 171 
 
 Domingo, 228-9 
 
 Dommartin, Major, 67, 99 
 
 Donauwörth, 303 
 
 Dornberg, 306 
 
 Douai, 14 
 
 Dresden, 332 
 
 Ducos, Roger, 178, 181, 187 
 
 Dugommier, 68-9 
 
 Dumerbion, General, 71 
 
 Dumouriez, 59, 231, 244, 368 
 
 Dunkirk, 146, 238 
 
 Duroc, General, 238, 258 
 
 E 
 
 Egypt, 161 et sqq., 168, 177, 196, 
 
 199, 205, 207, 253, 336, 371 
 El Arish, 160 
 Elba, 139, 167, 202, 356 et sqq., 362, 
 
 364-5» 371, 376 
 Elbe, 140, 279, 341 
 Emden, 261 
 Ems, 140 
 
 d'Enghien, Due, 243 et sqq., 281, 375 
 England, 228 et sqq., 264, 273, 280, 
 
 286 et sqq., 328, 367, 372 
 Erfurt, 293 et sqq., 299, 301, 313, 
 
 332, 346 
 Etruria, 290 
 Ettersheim, 248 
 
 Fabricius, 34-5 
 Fain, Baron, 356 
 Ferdinand of Aragon, 291 
 Ferdinand, Prince, 284, 290 et sqq., 
 
 349 
 Fesch, 6, 9, 39, 78, 92, 248 
 Finland, 295 
 Florence, 106 
 Fouche, 177, 221, 293, 300, 371 
 
 2 C 
 
 Fontainebleau, 283, 349, 355, 357, 
 
 359, 371 
 Fox, C. J., 261 
 Frankfurt, 340 
 Franks, King of the, 248 
 Frederick the Great, 256, 265, 379 
 — William III, King of Prussia, 239, 
 
 259» 263 et sqq., 275, 306 et sqq., 
 
 330 et sqq., 341-2, 355 
 Freiburg, 210 
 Frejus, 167, 175, 358, 371 
 Friedrichsruh, 374 
 Friuli, 114, 117 
 
 Galicia, 305, 309 
 
 Gaza, 160 
 
 Geneva, 30-1 
 
 Genoa, 74 et sqq., 81, 142, 175, 198, 
 
 224, 242, 249 
 George III, 74, 289, 295 
 George, Prince of Mecklenburg, 314, 
 
 372 
 — Prince of Wales (Prince Regent), 
 
 261 
 Gibraltar, 205, 292 
 Glogau, 298 
 
 Gneisenau, 265, 267, 330, 369 
 Godoy, 202, 283, 285, 290 
 Goethe, 312 
 
 Gohier, M., 172, 176, 182 
 Götzen, Count, 307 
 Graudenz, 268 
 Gravelotte, 200 
 Grenoble, 322, 363-4, 376 
 Gross Beeren, 344 
 Gustavus Adolphus, 282 
 
 H 
 
 Hamilton, Lady, 152, 154 
 
 Hanau, 346 
 
 Hanover, 204 
 
 Hardenberg, M., 261, 270, 308, 330, 
 
 347 
 Harpe, La, IOO 
 Haugwitz, 239, 260-I 
 Hebert, HO 
 Heliopolis, 165 
 Henri IV, 207 
 Hesse, Landgrave of, 263 
 Hoche, General, 126-7, 136, *4° 
 Hofer, 343 
 
 Hohenlinden, 201, 241 
 Hohenlohe, 268 
 Hollabrunn, 257 
 Holland, 107, 121, 124, 137, 140, 
 
 196, 205, 223, 230, 241, 250, 263 
 Hompesch, Count, 149 
 
3 86 
 
 NAPOLEON 
 
 Ibrahim Bey, 151 
 
 India, 16, 204-5, 2 32, 293 
 
 Infanta of Spain, 202 
 
 Ingolstadt, 363 
 
 Innsbruck, 112 
 
 Ionian Islands, 143, 233 
 
 Isabey, 317 
 
 Jaffa, 160 
 
 Jena, 266, 295 
 
 Josephine, Empress, 93 et sqq., 125, 
 
 169, 172, 176, 220, 300, 310, 313, 
 
 31S. 317 
 Joubert, General, 156, 174 
 Jourdan, Marshal, 70, 1 12-13, I 56» 
 
 163, 176 
 Junot, Marshal, 84, 95, 281, 292 
 
 K 
 Kalckstein, 244 
 Kant, Emmanuel, 216 
 Karlsruhe, 340 
 Kartzbach, 344 
 
 Kellerman, General, 102-3, I0 S» 199 
 Klagenfurt, 118 
 Kleber, General, 151, 165 
 Königsberg, 244, 268, 296, 367 
 Korner, 343 
 
 Krusemarck, General, 307, 312 
 Kulm, 345 
 Kustrin, 267, 298 
 Kutusoff, 335-6 
 
 Laclos, 142 
 
 Lafayette, General, 47, 194, 370 
 
 Lameth, 194 
 
 Lannes, General, 125, 177, 199,299, 
 
 304 
 Lanoshut, 363 
 Laon, 353 
 La Rothiere, 351 
 Lavalette, 127, 166 
 La Vendee, 70, 77-8, 82-3, 85, 87, 
 
 92» 193. 195, 212, 215, 291 
 Lebruno, 220 
 Lech, 113 
 
 Leclerc, General, 125, 228 
 Lefebvre, Marshal, 177, 184, 355 
 Legations, 201 
 Leghorn, 106, 139, 231 
 Leibnitz, 141 
 Leipzic, 343, 345-6 
 Leoben, 120 et sqq., 133 
 Le Sablon, 89, 90 
 Levant, 82, 142 
 Ligny, 369 
 
 Lille, 139 
 
 Limburg, 121 
 
 Lions, Gulf of, 148, 167 
 
 Lobau, Isle of, 304 
 
 Lodi, IOI et sqq., in 
 
 Lombardy, 71, 81, 97, 155, 198 
 
 London, 205, 241, 253, 268, 273, 295 
 
 Longwood, 373 
 
 L'Orient, 288 
 
 Louis, Prince Ferdinand, 26, 266 
 
 — XIV, 34, 141, 207 
 
 — XV, 6, 11 
 
 — XVI, 2 et sqq., 8, 12, 18, 25, 36, 
 47» 54» 63, 101, 174, 212, 214 
 
 —XVIII, 217, 361, 365 
 
 Louisa, Queen, 276 
 
 Louisiana, 202 
 
 Lowe, Sir Hudson, 374 
 
 Lübeck, 288, 320 
 
 Lucca, 224, 249 
 
 Luneville, Peace of, 201-2, 226, 231, 
 
 261, 305, 346-7, 349 
 Lutzen, 343 
 Luxembourg, 121 
 Lycurgus, 34 
 Lyons, 27, 65, 197, 224 
 
 M 
 Macdonald, Marshal, 174, 177, 344- 
 
 5, 355-6 
 Macedonia, 116 
 Mack, General, 251, 256-7 
 Madagascar, 228 
 Maddelena Islands, 142 
 Madrid, 73, 202, 242, 281, 291, 300 
 Magallon, Charles, 142 
 Magdeburg, 267 
 Malabar, 158 
 Mallet, 338 
 
 Malmaison, 242, 313, 371 
 Malta, 134, 139, 143, 148 et sqq., 
 
 153, 196, 202-3, 205, 233, 237, 
 
 241, 250, 264 
 Mantua, 81, 105, 112-13, 115 
 Marat, 46 
 
 Marbeuf, M. de, 5, 6 
 Marengo, 197, 199, 200, 205-6, 208, 
 
 217-18, 224, 228, 241, 323 
 Maret, Duke of Bassano, 223, 351 et 
 
 •^•»356 
 Maria Carolina, Queen, 154, 262 
 
 — Antoinette, 154 
 
 — Louise, Queen, 310, 314, 332, 
 
 355» 36o 
 
 — Theresa, 154 
 
 Marmont, Marshal, 84, 95, 99, 114, 
 
 "5, 152, 355-6 
 Marseilles, 21, 57, 65, 96, 116, 228 
 
INDEX 
 
 387 
 
 Martinique, 93 
 
 Mass&ia, Marshai, 99, 197-8, 318, 
 
 327 
 Mayard, M. de, 42 et sqq. 
 Mayence, 128 et sqq., 134, 247, 346 
 
 — Archbishop of, Karl Theodor, 247 
 Memel, 261 
 
 Memmingen, 227 
 Menou, General, 89 
 Metternich, Count, 301, 314, 347 
 Meurthe, Boulay de la, 177, 188 
 Milan, 102, 105, 121, 125, 175, 198, 
 
 200, 218, 223, 249 
 Millesimo, Battle, 100 
 Mincio, 112, 200- 1 
 Minorca, 205 
 Mirabeau, 195 
 Mississippi, 202 
 Modenä, 121, 128, 201, 249 
 
 — Duke of, 201 
 Mollien, 350 
 
 Moltke, General von, 200 
 
 Mondovi, 100 
 
 Monge, 148, 158, 166, 170 
 
 Montebello, 199 
 
 Montenotte, 125, 351 
 
 Montesquieu, 352 
 
 Montmartre, 355 
 
 Montpellier, 65 
 
 Moravia, 130, 257, 361 
 
 Moreau, 1 12-13, 136, 175-6» I79i 
 
 182, 197, 198, 200-1, 243 
 Mortier, General, 240, 355 
 Moscow, 335, 354 
 Moulin, 182, 184 
 Murad Bey, 151 
 
 Murat, 90, 125, 162, 166, 184, 257, 
 269, 290, 300, 311-12, 336, 361-2 
 
 N 
 
 Naples, 1, 70, 81, 149, 205, 232, 
 240, 262, 292, 311 
 
 — Bay of, 154 
 
 — Ferdinand of, 202 
 
 Napoleon I (Napoleon Buonaparte) 
 his birth, 1 
 his patriotism, 2 
 his early enmity for France, 3 
 goes to France, 6 
 his life at school, 7, 8 
 sees his father, 9 
 his views on Joseph's career, 9 
 his father's death, 11 
 enters military school at Paris, 1 1 
 his youthful independence, 12 
 becomes an artillery officer and 
 
 goes to Valois, 12 
 receives his epaulettes, 13 
 
 Napoleon I (Napoleon Buonaparte) 
 early struggles, 13 
 progress as a soldier, 14 
 early characteristics, 14 et sqq. 
 ambition to become a writer, 17 
 intended petition to the King, 18 
 revisits Corsica, 19 
 takes part in an outbreak, 20 
 his letters on the state of Corsica, 
 
 20 et sqq. 
 meets Paoli, 22 
 returns to his garrison, 24 
 his love for his family, 24 
 appointed first lieutenant, 25 
 joins the revolutionists, 25 
 his studies, 26 et sqq. ; his opinions, 
 
 26 et sqq. 
 seeks Paoli's patronage, 38 
 his promotion, 40 
 his first coup tfe'tat, 40 et sqq. 
 goes to Paris, 46 
 his scorn for the populace, 48 
 studies astronomy, 49 
 his views on discipline, 51-2 
 his advice and letters to Joseph, 
 
 52 et sqq. 
 views the storming of the Tuileries, 
 
 54 
 sides with the Revolution, 58 
 his expedition to Sardinia, 58 
 his attitude towards Paoli, 59 
 denounced by Paoli, 61 
 his farewell to his Corsican home, 
 
 62 
 expedition to Avignon, 64 
 writes Souper de ßeaucaire, 65-6 
 at the siege of Toulon, 67-8 
 his success and promotion, 69 
 becomes friendly with the Robe- 
 
 spierres, 71 
 goes on a mission to Genoa, 74 
 is placed under arrest and released, 
 
 .75 
 
 in charge of an expedition against 
 Corsica, 76 
 
 ordered to command of the west, 77 
 
 given a commission by Barras, 80 
 
 proposed mission to Turkey, 82 et 
 sqq. 
 
 his rapid promotion to commander- 
 in-chief", 91 
 
 his meeting and marriage with 
 Josephine, 94 et sqq. 
 
 his personal appearance, 95, 206-7 
 
 leaves Paris for Italy, 98 
 
 alters Italian spelling of his name, 
 
 98-9 
 his career in Italy, 99 et sqq. 
 returns to Paris, 135 
 
388 
 
 NAPOLEON 
 
 Napoleon I (Napoleon Buonaparte) 
 
 his brilliant receptions, 136 
 
 his speech at the Luxembourg 
 Palace, 1 37 
 
 his wish and plans to attack Eng- 
 land, 139 et sqq. 
 
 decides to attack Egypt, 146 
 
 sails from Toulon, 147 
 
 his engagements, 148 et sqq. 
 
 fleet defeated by Nelson at Aboukir, 
 151-2 
 
 writes to the Directory, 157 
 
 expedition to Syria, 159 
 
 returns to Cairo, 162 
 
 leaves Alexandria and arrives at 
 Ajaccio, 166 
 
 leaves Ajaccio and sails for France, 
 167 
 
 his welcome, 168 
 
 his jealousy of Josephine, 169 
 
 and the coup d'tiat of the 1 8th 
 Brumaire, 170 et sqq. 
 
 draws up Constitution, 187 et sqq. 
 
 becomes First Consul, 191 et sqq. 
 
 and the campaign of Marengo, 197 
 et sqq. 
 
 crosses the Alps, 198 
 
 returns to Paris, 200 
 
 and the Treaty of Luneville, 201 
 
 and the Peace of Amiens, 205 
 
 his civil reforms, 208 
 
 the Code Napoleon, 209 et sqq. 
 
 and Education Law, 211 
 
 Re-establishment of the Church, 
 212 et sqq. 
 
 and Pius VII, 217 
 
 resident at the Tuileries, 219 
 
 and his family, 220 
 
 his attempted assassination, 220 
 
 expulsion of his opponents, 221 
 
 his increased power as Chief Con- 
 sul, 222 
 
 his reforms in Italy and Switzer- 
 land, 223 et sqq. 
 
 becomes President at Milan, 223 
 
 his desire for extending France's 
 possessions, 228 et sqq. 
 
 his unfriendliness to England, 233 
 
 and the outbreak of war with Eng- 
 land, 239 
 
 and the execution of the Due 
 d'Enghien, 243 
 
 becomes Emperor of the French, 
 
 245 
 is crowned by the Pope at Paris, 
 
 248 
 crowned King of Italy at Milan, 249 
 his plans to conquer England, 251 
 
 et sqq. 
 
 Napoleon I (Napoleon Buonaparte) 
 turns his attention to Austria, 255 
 
 et sqq. 
 victory of Austerlitz, 258 
 and Trafalgar, 259 
 and the Peace of Pressburg, 260 
 makes his brother Joseph King of 
 
 Naples and Sicily, 262 
 the Confederation of the Rhine, 
 
 263 
 creates his brother Louis King of 
 
 Holland, 263 
 battle of Jena, 266 
 enters Berlin, 267 
 marches against the Russians, 269 
 Peace of Tilsit, 271 et sqq. 
 Legal Code extended, 277 
 battle of Copenhagen, 279 
 dethrones the King of Spain, 281 
 
 et sqq. 
 makes Joseph Bonaparte King of 
 
 Spain, 290 
 and Murat King of Naples, 290 
 the Peninsular War, 292 et sqq., 318 
 meets the Czar Alexander at Er- 
 furt, 293 
 goes to Spain, 299 
 at war with Austria, 301 et sqq. 
 and Josephine, 310 
 divorces her, 313 
 marries Archduchess Marie Louise 
 
 of Austria, 314 
 King of Rome born, 315 
 his endurance and capacity for 
 
 work, 316 
 his appearance, 317 
 and the trade of France, 319 
 his relations with the Church, 321 
 at war with Russia, 328 
 enters Moscow, 335 
 uprising of Germany, 339 
 battle of Lützen, 343 
 battle of Leipzig, 345 
 recrosses the Rhine, 346 
 France invaded by the Allies, 349 
 and Blucher, 352 
 signs his abdication and is exiled to 
 
 Elba, 356 et sqq. 
 leaves Elba, 363 
 the Hundred Days, 364 et sqq. 
 the battle of Waterloo, 368 et sqq. 
 surrenders himself on the Bellero- 
 
 phon, 372 
 sails for St. Helena, 373 
 his death, 376 
 conclusion, 377-9 
 Nassau, 263 
 
 National Assembly, 5, 25, 36, 38-9, 
 43, 47, 186 
 
INDEX 
 
 389 
 
 Necker, Minister, 18, 20 
 
 Neipperg, Count, 360 
 
 Nelson, Lord, 73, 148-9, 153-4, 157, 
 
 163, 204-5, 2 59 
 Neufchäteau, Francois de, 147 
 Neufchätel, 260 
 Ney, Marshai, 224, 299, 345, 355~6» 
 
 364 
 Nice, 64, 74, 82, 96, 98, 198, 200 
 Niemen, 331 
 Nile, battle of the, 9, 153, 157, 163, 
 
 165, 203 
 NJmes, 65 
 Novi, 155-6, 164, 174 
 
 O 
 
 Orange, Prince of, 226 
 
 Orezza, 22 
 
 Orloff, Count, 264 
 
 Ortenan, 237 
 
 Ottoman Porte, 116 
 
 Oudinot, Marshal, 299, 344, 355 
 
 Paoli, Hyacinth, 15 
 
 — General Pasquale, I, 5, 9, 1 5, 1 7, 
 22, 23, 26-7, 38, 44 et sqq., 52, 56, 
 58 et sqq. , 66 
 
 Paris, 11, 17, 30, 59, 71, 73, 76 et 
 sqq., 85, 88, 92, 95, 126 et sqq., 
 »35, J39» 161, 189, 197, 200-1, 
 204, 207, 241, 246-7, 250, 293, 
 300, 320, 338, 353 et sqq., 363 et 
 
 W-* 371 
 Parma, 81, 105, 107-8, 202 
 
 — Duchess of. See Marie Louise 
 Parsdorff, 200 
 
 Pasha of Egypt, 158, 160 
 
 — Djezzar, 160 
 Paul I, Czar, 203-4 
 Peraldi, Abbe, 42 
 
 — Marie, 38, 44, 52-3 
 Permon, Madame, 77, 94 
 Philip II, 34, 291 
 Philipeaux, M. de, 12 
 
 Pichegru, General, 70, 124, 136, 231, 
 
 242-3 
 Piedmont, 71-2, 81, 97, 109, 223, 
 
 231, 241, 249 
 Piombino, 202, 249 
 Pisa, 5 
 Pitt, William, 197, 204, 230, 249, 
 
 251-2 
 Pius VI, Pope, 115 et sqq. 
 
 — VII, 217-18, 247-8, 262, 280 
 Plutarch, 9, 29, 34 
 Plymouth, 372 
 
 Po, 128, 131, 199 
 Poitou, 12 
 
 Poland, 275, 309, 329 
 Poniatowski, Prince, 309 
 Ponte Corvo, 262 
 Pontecoulant, Doulcet de, 82 
 Ponte Nuovo, 22 
 Pope Alexander, 50 
 
 — Leo, 248, 322, 349 
 
 — Stephen, 247 
 Porto Ferrajo, 358 
 Portsmouth, 253 
 
 Portugal, 202, 205, 242, 281, 292 
 
 Poscherun, 340 
 
 Prenzlau, 268 
 
 Pressburg, 260 et sqq, 349 
 
 Provence, 28, 168 
 
 Prussia, 81, 123 
 
 Pyrenees, 70 
 
 Quenza Giovanni Battisto, 40, 43 
 Quiberon, 81, 87 
 
 R 
 
 Ramolino, Lsetitia. See Buonaparte 
 Ranke, 135, 234, 271, 308 
 Rapp, Marshai, 340 
 Rastatt, 134, 242, 244, 347 
 Ratisbon, 227, 263, 303 
 Raynal, Abbe, 20, 27, 142 
 Reichstag, 237 
 Reinhard, Count, 312 
 
 — Madame, 171 
 Reubell, Director, 123 
 Reveilliere, Director, 123 
 
 Rhine, the, 112 ei sqq., 117 et sqq., 
 \26etsqq., 135, 140, 155, 175, 197, 
 201, 226, 243, 256, 345 et sqq. 
 
 Richelieu, 34 
 
 Ricord, 72, 74, 76 
 
 Rivoli, 115 
 
 Robespierres, the, 46, 71 et sqq., 86, 
 92, 103, HO, 185, 217 
 
 Rocca, Abbe Perretti Jella, 19 
 
 — Count Colonna da Cesario, 19 
 Rochefort, 37 1 
 
 Roederer, 177, 188, 216 
 Rohan, Charlotte de, 243 
 Rome, king of, 315, 37 1 
 
 — in, 115, 116, 213, 218, 247, 280, 
 315» 322, 349 
 
 Rossi, General, 39, 40 
 Rotterdam, 210 
 
 Rousseau, J. J., 28 et sqq., 36, 216 
 Roustan, 316, 357 
 
390 
 
 NAPOLEON 
 
 St. Bernard, Great, 198 
 
 — Cloud, 178, 180, 182, 315 
 
 — Cyr, 46, 55, 337 
 
 — Helena, 54, 69, 80, 127, 129, 167, 
 171, 229, 372 
 
 — Gothard, 155, 198 
 
 — Petersburg, 204, 231, 238 
 
 — Raphael, 163 
 
 — Remy, 28 
 
 Salicetti, 19, 40, 56 et sqq., 57, 71, 75, 
 
 77-8 
 Salzburg, 227 
 San Fiorenzo, 61, 73, 142 
 
 — Ildefonso, 202 
 Sardinia, 58, 81, 139, 148 
 Savary, General Due de Riego, 299 
 Savona, 323 
 
 Savoy, 134 
 
 Scharnhorst, 265, 297, 330 
 
 Schenkendorf, 343 
 
 Scherer, General, 97, 126, 163 
 
 Schill, Ferdinand von, 306 
 
 Schönbrunn, 304, 305 
 
 — Treaty of, 264, 305, 307, 322, 349 
 Schwarzenberg, 332, 345 
 
 Scrivia, River, 199 
 Sebastiani, Colonel, 177, 182 
 Selim, Sultan, 82, 145, 153, 238, 268, 
 
 274 
 Senio, the, 115 
 
 Serra, Lieutenant Rocca della, 41 
 Serrurier, 99, 177 
 Sieyes, Abbe, 2, 172 et sqq., 178-9, 
 
 181, 187 et sqq., 192-3 
 Smith, Sir Sidney, 160 et sqq., 280 
 Solger, 206 
 Soult, 270, 299 
 Spain, 81, 106, 123, 202, 205, 242, 
 
 281 et sqq. t 289, 299 et sqq., 318, 
 
 349 
 Stael, Madame de, 301 
 Staps, Friedrich, 305 
 Stein, Baron, 267, 298, 340 
 Stettin, 267, 298, 340 
 Strasburg, 244 
 Stuttgart, 340 
 Suez, 144, 158-9 
 Suvaroft, 155, 174, 197 
 Switzerland, 134, 197, 223-4, 231, 
 
 241-2, 250 
 Syracuse, 151, 166 
 Syria, 161, 163 
 
 T 
 
 Talleyrand, Prince, 126, 131, 136, 
 144-5» 153, 177, 181, 255, 262, 
 277, 290, 292-3, 300, 309, 317, 
 324, 362 
 
 Tallien, Madame, 317 
 
 — M.,94, 98 
 Talma, 294 
 Taranto, 202, 233 
 Tarnopol, 309 
 
 Teil, General Jean de, 64 
 
 Tell, William, 225-6 
 
 Thugut, Baron von, 119, 128-9, 197, 
 
 202 
 Thüringen, 26 
 Tilsit, Treaty of, 271 et sqq., 277 et 
 
 sqq., 286 et sqq., 293, 295, 308 et 
 
 *?<!•■, 313» 324, 328-9, 335, 355 
 Tippoo Sahib, 158 
 Torre Capitello, 61 
 Torres Vedras, 318 
 Tortona, 199 
 Toulon, 57 et sqq., 62, 67, 69 et sqq., 
 
 74, 84, 89, 96, 138, 147, 167, 283, 
 
 288 
 Tourneur, Le, 123 
 Trafalgar, 262 
 Trent, 113, 260 
 Trentino, 81 
 Trieste, 305 
 Trinidad, 205 
 Troyes, 352, 355 
 Tuileries, The, 47, 54, 90, 180-1, 
 
 221, 300, 364 
 Tunis, 166 
 Turkey, 134, 205, 294 et sqq., 310, 
 
 331 
 Tuscany, 231, 249 
 
 — Grand Duke of, 201-2, 227 
 Tyrol, The, 112 et sqq., 197, 202, 
 
 255, 257, 260, 342-3 
 
 U 
 
 Udine, 128, 133, 14: 
 Ulm, 200, 227, 257 
 
 Vado, 81 
 
 Valencay, 290, 349 
 
 Valence, 25 
 
 Valois, 12, 14 
 
 Vandamme, General, 345 
 
 Venetia, 108, 128-9, 201, 249, 280 
 
 Venice, 116, 122, 124-5, I33~4, 249, 
 
 260 
 Vercelli, Bishop of, 218 
 Verestchagin, 338 
 Verona, 112, 114, 249 
 Versailles, 2, 18, 77, 190 
 Victor, Marshai, 199, 299, 337 
 Vienna, 119, 147, 155, 201, 250, 255 
 
 et sqq. 
 
INDEX 
 
 391 
 
 Villeneuve, Rear- Admiral, 152,254-5 
 Vincennes, 244 
 Vincent, Lord St., 158 
 — Herr von, 296 
 Visconti, Archbishop, 109 
 Vittoria, 299 
 Volney, 57, 142 
 Voltaire, 36 
 
 W 
 Wagram, 316 
 Walewska, Countess, 360 
 Warsaw, 268, 360 
 Wartenburg, 345 
 Waterloo, 369, 376 
 Wellington, Duke of, 318, 333, 368-9 
 Wesel, 260 
 Weser, 140 
 
 Whitworth, Lord, 238-9 
 Wiasma, 337 
 
 William I of England, 139 
 — Prince of Prussia, 297, 332 
 Wittgenstein, Prince, 298 
 Wrede, General, 346 
 Wurmser, Count, 1 12-13 
 Wurtemberg, Frederick of, 263, 311, 
 
 325» 327» 353 
 Wurtzburg, 113, 320 
 
 York, General, 340, 345 
 
 Zastrow, General, 267 
 Zurich, 155, 197 
 
 WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. 
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