The Modern Regime Volume I Part 4

"The 'Mahomet' of Voltaire is neither a prophet nor an Arab, only an impostor graduated out of the ecole Polytechnique."--"Madame de Genlis tries to define virtue as if she were the discoverer of it."--(On Madame de Stael): "This woman teaches people to think who never took to it, or have forgotten how."--(On Chateaubriand, one of whose relations had just been shot): "He will write a few pathetic pages and read them aloud in the faubourg Saint-Germain; pretty women will shed tears, and that will console him."--(On Abbe Delille): "He is wit in its dotage."--(On Pasquier and Mole): "I make the most of one, and made the other."--Madame de Remusat, II., 389, 391, 394, 399, 402; III., 67.]

[Footnote 1165: Bourrienne, II., 281, 342: "It pained me to write official statements under his dictation, of which each was an imposture." He always answered: "My dear sir, you are a simpleton--you understand nothing!"--Madame de Remusat, II., 205, 209.]

[Footnote 1166: See especially the campaign bulletins for 1807, so insulting to the king and queen of Prussia, but, owing to that fact, so well calculated to excite the contemptuous laughter and jeers of the soldiers.]

[Footnote 1167: In "La Correspondance de Napoleon," published in thirty-two volumes, the letters are arranged under dates.--In his '"Correspondance avec Eugene, vice-roi d'Italie," they are arranged under chapters; also with Joseph, King of Naples and afterwards King of Spain. It is easy to select other chapters not less instructive: one on foreign affairs (letters to M. de Champagny, M de Talleyrand, and M.

de Ba.s.sano); another on the finances (letters to M. Gaudin and to M.

Mollien); another on the navy (letters to Admiral Decres); another on military administration (letters to General Clarke); another on the affairs of the Church (letters to M. Portalis and to M. Bigot de Preameneu); another on the Police (letters to Fouche), etc.--Finally, by dividing and distributing his letters according as they relate to this or that grand enterprise, especially to this or that military campaign, a third cla.s.sification could be made.--In this way we can form a concept of the vastness of his positive knowledge, also of the scope of his intellect and talents. Cf. especially the following letters to Prince Eugene, June II, 1806 (on the supplies and expenses of the Italian army); June 1st and 18th, 1806 (on the occupation of Dalmatia, and on the military situation, offensive and defensive). To Gen. Dejean, April 28, 1806 (on the war supplies); June 27, 1806 (on the fortifications of Peschiera) July 20, 1806 (on the fortifications of Wesel and of Juliers).--"Mes souvenirs sur Napoleon", p. 353 by the Count Chaptal: "One day, the Emperor said to me that he would like to organize a military school at Fontainebleau; he then explained to me the princ.i.p.al features of the establishment, and ordered me to draw up the necessary articles and bring them to him the next day. I worked all night and they were ready at the appointed hour. He read them over and p.r.o.nounced them correct, but not complete. He bade me take a seat and then dictated to me for two or three hours a plan which consisted of five hundred and seventeen articles. Nothing more perfect, in my opinion, ever issued from a man's brain.--At another time, the Empress Josephine was to take the waters at Aix-la-Chapelle, and the Emperor summoned me.

'The Empress,' said he, 'is to leave to-morrow morning. She is a good-natured, easy-going woman and must have her route and behavior marked out for her. Write it down.' He then dictated instructions to me on twenty-one large sheets of paper, in which everything she was to say and to do was designated, even the questions and replies she was to make to the authorities on the way."]

[Footnote 1168: One French league equals approximately 4 km. 70,000 square leagues then equal 1,120,000 km.2, or 400,000 square miles or 11% of the United States but 5 times the size of Great Britain. (SR.)]

[Footnote 1169: Cf. in the "Correspondance" the letters dated at Schoenbrunn near Vienna, during August and September, 1809, and especially: the great number of letters and orders relating to the English expeditions to Walcheren; the letters to chief-judge Regnier and to the arch-chancellor Cambaceres on expropriations for public benefit (Aug. 21, Sept. 7 and 29); the letters and orders to M. de Champagny to treat with Austria (Aug. 19, and Sept. 10, 15, 18, 22, and 23); the letters to Admirable Decres, to despatch naval expeditions to the colonies (Aug.17 and Sept. 26); the letter to Mollien on the budget of expenditure (Aug. 8); the letter to Clarke on the statement of guns in store throughout the empire (Sept. 14). Other letters, ordering the preparation of two treatises on military art (Oct. 1), two works on the history and encroachments of the Holy See (Oct. 3), prohibiting conferences at Saint-Sulpice (Sept. 15), and forbidding priests to preach outside the churches (Sept. 24).--From Schoenbrunn, he watches the details of public works in France and Italy; for instance, the letters to M. le Montalivet (Sept.30), to send an auditor post to Parma, to have a d.y.k.e repaired at once, and (Oct. 8) to hasten the building of several bridges and quays at Lyons.]

[Footnote 1170: He says himself; "I always transpose my theme in many ways."]

[Footnote 1171: Madame de Remusat, I., 117, 120. "1 heard M. de Talleyrand exclaim one day, some what out of humor, 'This devil of a man misleads you in all directions. Even his pa.s.sions escape you, for he finds some way to counterfeit them, although they really exist.'"--For example, immediately prior to the violent confrontation with Lord Whitworth, which was to put an end to the treaty of Amiens, he was chatting and amusing himself with the women and the infant Napoleon, his nephew, in the gayest and most unconcerned manner: "He is suddenly told that the company had a.s.sembled. His countenance changes like that of an actor when the scene s.h.i.+fts. He seems to turn pale at will and his features contract"; he rises, steps up precipitately to the English amba.s.sador, and fulminates for two hours before two hundred persons.

(Hansard's Parliamentary History, vol. XXVI, dispatches of Lord Whitworth, pp. 1798, 1302, 1310.)--"He often observes that the politician should calculate every advantage that could be gained by his defects." One day, after an explosion he says to Abbe de Pradt: "You thought me angry! you are mistaken. Anger with me never mounts higher than here (pointing to his neck)."]

[Footnote 1172: Roederer, III. (The first days of Brumaire, year VIII.)]

[Footnote 1173: Bourrienne, III., 114.]

[Footnote 1174: Bourrienne, II., 228. (Conversation with Bourrienne in the park at Pa.s.seriano.)]

[Footnote 1175: Ibid., II., 331. (Written down by Bourrienne the same evening.)]

[Footnote 1176: Madame de Remusat, I., 274.--De Segur, II., 459.

(Napoleon's own words on the eve of the battle of Austerlitz): "Yes, if I had taken Acre, I would have a.s.sumed the turban, I would have put the army in loose breeches; I would no longer have exposed it, except at the last extremity; I would have made it my sacred battalion, my immortals.

It is with Arabs, Greeks, and Armenians that I would have ended the war against the Turks. Instead of one battle in Moravia I would have gained a battle of Issus; I would have made myself emperor of the East, and returned to Paris by the way of Constantinople."--De Pradt, p.19 (Napoleon's own words at Mayence, September, 1804): "Since two hundred years there is nothing more to do in Europe; it is only in the East that things can be carried out on a grand scale."]

[Footnote 1177: Madame de Remusat, I., 407.--Miot de Melito, II., 214 (a few weeks after his coronation): "There will be no repose in Europe until it is under one head, under an Emperor, whose officers would be kings, who would distribute kingdoms to his lieutenants, who would make one of them King of Italy, another King of Bavaria, here a landmann of Switzerland, and here a stadtholder of Holland, etc."]

[Footnote 1178: "Correspondance de Napoleon I.," vol. x.x.x., 550, 558.

(Memoirs dictated by Napoleon at Saint Helene.)--Miot de Melito, II., 290.--D'Hausonvillc, "l'eglise Romaine et le Premier Empire, pa.s.sim.-- Memorial." "Paris would become the capital of the Christian world, and I would have governed the religious world as well as the political world."]

[Footnote 1179: De Pradt, 23.]

[Footnote 1180: "Memoires et Memorial." "It was essential that Paris should become the unique capital, not to be compared with other capitals. The masterpieces of science and of art, the museums, all that had ill.u.s.trated past centuries, were to be collected there. Napoleon regretted that he could not transport St. Peter's to Paris; the meanness of Notre Dame dissatisfied him."]

[Footnote 1181: Villemain, "Souvenir contemporaines," I., 175.

Napoleon's statement to M. de Narbonne early in March, 1812, and repeated by him to Villemain an hour afterwards. The wording is at second hand and merely a very good imitation, while the ideas are substantially Napoleon's. Cf. his fantasies about Italy and the Mediterranean, equally exaggerated ("Correspondence," x.x.x., 548), and an admirable improvisation on Spain and the colonies at Bayonne.--De Pradt.

"Memoires sur les revolutions d'Espagne," p.130: "Therefore Napoleon talked, or rather poetised; he Ossianized for a long time... like a man full of a sentiment which oppressed him, in an animated, picturesque style, and with the impetuosity, imagery, and originality which were familiar to him,... on the vast throne of Mexico and Peru, on the greatness of the sovereigns who should possess them.. .. and on the results which these great foundations would have on the universe. I had often heard him, but under no circ.u.mstances had I ever heard him develop such a wealth and compa.s.s of imagination. Whether it was the richness of his subject, or whether his faculties had become excited by the scene he conjured up, and all the chords of the instrument vibrated at once, he was sublime."]

[Footnote 1182: Roederer, III., 541 (February 2, 1809): "I love power.

But I love it as an artist.... I love it as a musician loves his violin, for the tones, chords, and harmonies he can get out of it."]

CHAPTER II. HIS IDEAS, Pa.s.sIONS AND INTELLIGENCE.

I. Intense Pa.s.sions.

Personality and character during the Italian Renaissance and during the present time.--Intensity of the pa.s.sions in Bonaparte.--His excessive touchiness.--His immediate violence.--His impatience, rapidity, and need of talking.

--His temperament, tension, and faults.

On taking a near view of the contemporaries of Dante and Michael Angelo, we find that they differ from us more in character than in intellect.[1201] With us, three hundred years of police and of courts of justice, of social discipline and peaceful habits, of hereditary civilization, have diminished the force and violence of the pa.s.sions natural to Man. In Italy, in the Renaissance epoch, they were still intact; human emotions at that time were keener and more profound than at the present day; the appet.i.tes were ardent and more unbridled; man's will was more impetuous and more tenacious; whatever motive inspired, whether pride, ambition, jealousy, hatred, love, envy, or sensuality, the inward spring strained with an energy and relaxed with a violence that has now disappeared. All these energies reappear in this great survivor of the fifteenth century; in him the play of the nervous machine is the same as with his Italian ancestors; never was there, even with the Malatestas and the Borgias, a more sensitive and more impulsive intellect, one capable of such electric shocks and explosions, in which the roar and flashes of tempest lasted longer and of which the effects were more irresistible. In his mind no idea remains speculative and pure; none is a simple transcript of the real, or a simple picture of the possible; each is an internal eruption, which suddenly and spontaneously spends itself in action; each darts forth to its goal and would reach it without stopping were it not kept back and restrained by force[1202] Sometimes, the eruption is so sudden, that the restraint does not come soon enough. One day, in Egypt,[1203] on entertaining a number of French ladies at dinner, he has one of them, who was very pretty and whose husband he had just sent off to France, placed alongside of him; suddenly, as if accidentally, he overturns a pitcher of water on her, and, under the pretence of enabling her to rearrange her wet dress, he leads her into another room where he remains with her a long time, too long, while the other guests seated at the table wait quietly and exchange glances. Another day, at Paris, toward the epoch of the Concordat,[1204] he says to Senator Volney: "France wants a religion." Volney replies in a frank, sententious way, "France wants the Bourbons." Whereupon he gives Volney a kick in the stomach and he falls unconscious; on being moved to a friend's house, he remains there ill in bed for several days.--No man is more irritable, so soon in a pa.s.sion; and all the more because he purposely gives way to his irritation; for, doing this just at the right moment, and especially before witnesses, it strikes terror; it enables him to extort concessions and maintain obedience. His explosions of anger, half-calculated, half-involuntary, serve him quite as much as they relieve him, in public as well as in private, with strangers as with intimates, before const.i.tuted bodies, with the Pope, with cardinals, with amba.s.sadors, with Talleyrand, with Beugnot, with anybody that comes along,[1205] whenever he wishes to set an example or "keep the people around him on the alert." The public and the army regard him as impa.s.sible; but, apart from the battles in which he wears a mask of bronze, apart from the official ceremonies in which he a.s.sumes a necessarily dignified air, impression and expression with him are almost always confounded, the inward overflowing in the outward, the action, like a blow, getting the better of him. At Saint Cloud, caught by Josephine in the arms of another woman, he runs after the unlucky interrupter in such a way that "she barely has time to escape";[1206] and again, that evening, keeping up his fury so as to put her down completely, "he treats her in the most outrageous manner, smas.h.i.+ng every piece of furniture that comes in his way." A little before the Empire, Talleyrand, a great mystifier, tells Berthier that the First Consul wanted to a.s.sume the t.i.tle of king. Berthier, in eager haste, crosses the drawing-room full of company, accosts the master of the house and, with a beaming smile, "congratulates him."[1207] At the word king, Bonaparte's eyes flash. Grasping Berthier by the throat, he pushes him back against the wall, exclaiming, "You fool! who told you to come here and stir up my bile in this way? Another time don't come on such errands."--Such is the first impulse, the instinctive action, to pounce on people and seize them by the throat; we divine under each sentence, and on every page he writes, out-bursts and a.s.saults of this description, the physiognomy and intonation of a man who rushes forward and knocks people down. Accordingly, when dictating in his cabinet, "he strides up and down the room," and, "if excited," which is often the case, "his language consists of violent imprecations, and even of oaths, which are suppressed in what is written."[1208] But these are not always suppressed, for those who have seen the original minutes of his correspondence on ecclesiastical affairs find dozens of them, the b..., the p... and the swearwords of the coa.r.s.est kind.[1209]

Never was there such impatient touchiness. "When dressing himself,[1210]

he throws on the floor or into the fire any part of his attire which does not suit him.... On gala-days and on grand ceremonial occasions his valets are obliged to agree together when they shall seize the right moment to put some thing on him... He tears off or breaks whatever causes him the slightest discomfort, while the poor valet who has been the means of it meets with a violent and positive proof of his anger. No thought was ever more carried away by its own speed. "His handwriting, when he tries to write, "is a ma.s.s of disconnected and undecipherable signs;[1211] the words lack one-half of their letters." On reading it over himself, he cannot tell what it means. At last, he becomes almost incapable of producing a handwritten letter, while his signature is a mere scrawl. He accordingly dictates, but so fast that his secretaries can scarcely keep pace with him: on their first attempt the perspiration flows freely and they succeed in noting down only the half of what he says. Bourrienne, de Meneval, and Maret invent a stenography of their own, for he never repeats any of his phrases; so much the worse for the pen if it lags behind, and so much the better if a volley of exclamations or of oaths gives it a chance to catch up.--Never did speech flow and overflow in such torrents, often without either discretion or prudence, even when the outburst is neither useful nor creditable the reason is that both spirit and intellect are charged to excess subject to this inward pressure the improvisator and polemic, under full headway,[1212] take the place of the man of business and the statesman.

"With him," says a good observer,[1213] "talking is a prime necessity, and, a.s.suredly, among the prerogatives of high rank, he ranks first that of speaking without interruption."

Even at the Council of State he allows himself to run on, forgetting the business on hand; he starts off right and left with some digression or demonstration, some invective or other, for two or three hours at a stretch,[1214] insisting over and over again, bent on convincing or prevailing, and ending in demanding of the others if he is not right, "and, in this case, never failing to find that all have yielded to the force of his arguments." On reflection, he knows the value of an a.s.sent thus obtained, and, pointing to his chair, he observes:

"It must be admitted that it is easy to be brilliant when one is in that seat!"

Nevertheless he has enjoyed his intellectual exercise and given way to his pa.s.sion, which controls him far more than he controls it.

"My nerves are very irritable," he said of himself, "and when in this state were my pulse not always regular I should risk going crazy."[1215]

The tension of acc.u.mulated impressions is often too great, and it ends in a physical break-down. Strangely enough in so great a warrior and with such a statesman, "it is not infrequent, when excited, to see him shed tears." He who has looked upon thousands of dying men, and who has had thousands of men slaughtered, "sobs," after Wagram and after Bautzen,[1216] at the couch of a dying comrade. "I saw him," says his valet, "weep while eating his breakfast, after coming from Marshal Lannes's bedside; big tears rolled down his cheeks and fell on his plate." It is not alone the physical sensation, the sight of a bleeding, mangled body, which thus moves him acutely and deeply; for a word, a simple idea, stings and penetrates almost as far. Before the emotion of Dandolo, who pleads for Venice his country, which is sold to Austria, he is agitated and his eyes moisten.[1217] Speaking of the capitulation of Baylen, at a full meeting of the Council of State,[1218] his voice trembles, and "he gives way to his grief, his eyes even filling with tears." In 1806, setting out for the army and on taking leave of Josephine, he has a nervous attack which is so severe as to bring on vomiting.[1219] "We had to make him sit down," says an eye-witness, "and swallow some orange water; he shed tears, and this lasted a quarter of an hour." The same nervous and stomachic crisis came on in 1808, on deciding on the divorce; he tosses about a whole night, and laments like a woman; he melts, and embraces Josephine; he is weaker than she is: "My poor Josephine, I can never leave you!" Folding her in his arms, he declares that she shall not quit him; he abandons himself wholly to the sensation of the moment; she must undress at once, sleep alongside of him, and he weeps over her; "literally," she says, "he soaked the bed with his tears."--Evidently, in such an organism, however powerful the superimposed regulator, there is a risk of the equilibrium being destroyed. He is aware of this, for he knows himself well; he is afraid of his own nervous sensibility, the same as of an easily frightened horse; at critical moments, at Berezina, he refuses to receive the bad news which might excite this, and, on the informer's insisting on it, he asks him again,[1220] "Why, sir, do you want to disturb me?"--Nevertheless, in spite of his precautions, he is twice taken unawares, at times when the peril was alarming and of a new kind; he, so clear headed and so cool under fire, the boldest of military heroes and the most audacious of political adventurers, quails twice in a parliamentary storm and again in a popular crisis. On the 18th of Brumaire, in the Corps Legislatif, "he turned pale, trembled, and seemed to lose his head at the shouts of outlawry.... they had to drag him out.... they even thought for a moment that he was going to faint."[1221] After the abdication at Fontainebleau, on encountering the rage and imprecations which greeted him in Provence, he seemed for some days to be morally shattered; the animal instincts a.s.sert their supremacy; he is afraid and makes no attempt at concealment.[1222] After borrowing the uniform of an Austrian colonel, the helmet of a Prussian quartermaster, and the cloak of the Russian quartermaster, he still considers that he is not sufficiently disguised. In the inn at Calade, "he starts and changes color at the slightest noise"; the commissaries, who repeatedly enter his room, "find him always in tears." "He wearies them with his anxieties and irresolution"; he says that the French government would like to have him a.s.sa.s.sinated on the road, refuses to eat for fear of poison, and thinks that he might escape by jumping out of the window. And yet he gives vent to his feelings and lets his tongue run on about himself without stopping, concerning his past, his character, unreservedly, indelicately, trivially; like a cynic and one who is half-crazy; his ideas run loose and crowd each other like the anarchical gatherings of a tumultuous mob; he does not recover his mastery of them until he reaches Frejus, the end of his journey, where he feels himself safe and protected from any highway a.s.sault; then only do they return within ordinary limits and fall back in regular line under the control of the sovereign intellect which, after sinking for a time, revives and resumes its ascendancy.--There is nothing in him so extraordinary as this almost perpetual domination of the lucid, calculating reason; his willpower is still more formidable than his intelligence; before it can obtain the mastery of others it must be master at home. To measure its power, it does not suffice to note its fascinations; to enumerate the millions of souls it captivates, to estimate the vastness of the obstacles it overcomes: we must again, and especially, represent to ourselves the energy and depth of the pa.s.sions it keeps in check and urges on like a team of prancing, rearing horses--it is the driver who, bracing his arms, constantly restrains the almost ungovernable steeds, who controls their excitement, who regulates their bounds, who takes advantage even of their viciousness to guide his noisy vehicle over precipices as it rushes on with thundering speed.

If the pure ideas of the reasoning brain thus maintain their daily supremacy it is due to the vital flow which nourishes them; their roots are deep in his heart and temperament, and those roots which give them their vigorous sap const.i.tute a primordial instinct more powerful than intellect, more powerful even than his will, the instinct which leads him to center everything on himself, in other words egoism.[1223]

II. Will and Egoism.

Bonaparte's dominant pa.s.sion.--His lucid, calculating mind.

--Source and power of the Will.--Early evidences of an active, absorbing egoism.--His education derived from the lessons of things.--In Corsica.--In France during the Revolution.--In Italy.--In Egypt.--His idea of Society and of Right.--Maturing after the 18th of Brumaire.--His idea of Man.--It conforms to his character

It is egoism, not a pa.s.sive, but an active and intrusive egoism, proportional to the energy and extension of his faculties developed by his education and circ.u.mstances, exaggerated by his success and his omnipotence to such a degree that a monstrous colossal I has been erected in society. It expands unceasingly the circle of a tenacious and rapacious grasp, which regards all resistance as offensive, which all independence annoys, and which, on the boundless domain it a.s.signs to itself, is intolerant of anybody that does not become either an appendix or a tool.--The germ of this absorbing personality is already apparent in the youth and even in the infant.

"Character: dominating, imperious, and stubborn,"

says the record at Brienne.[1224] And the notes of the Military Academy add;[1225]

"Extremely inclined to egoism,"--"proud, ambitious, aspiring in all directions, fond of solitude,"

undoubtedly because he is not master in a group of equals and is ill at ease when he cannot rule.

"I lived apart from my comrades," he says at a later date.[1226]--"I had selected a little corner in the playgrounds, where I used to go and sit down and indulge my fancies. When my comrades were disposed to drive me out of this corner I defended it with all my might. My instinct already told me that my will should prevail against other wills, and that whatever pleased me ought to belong to me."

Referring to his early years under the paternal roof at Corsica, he depicts himself as a little mischievous savage, rebelling against every sort of restraint, and without any conscience.[1227] "I respected nothing and feared n.o.body; I beat one and scratched another; I made everybody afraid of me. I beat my brother Joseph; I bit him and complained of him almost before he knew what he was about." A clever trick, and one which he was not slow to repeat. His talent for improvising useful falsehoods is innate; later on, at maturity, he is proud of this; he makes it the index and measure of "political superiority," and "delights in calling to mind one of his uncles who, in his infancy, prognosticated to him that he would govern the world because he was fond of lying."[1228]