A week after the court-martialling of the duke of Enghien a committee of the Senate comes to see the Consul, with a very remarkable twofold request: for the establishment of a State tribunal and the foundation of a monarchy. This is a cautious improvisation, to test the current of popular opinion. Can anything be more logical, or simpler? To scare the terrorists, to safeguard the head of the State, two things are requisite, a State tribunal and an heir!

As with all the decisions of his life, so also this premature resolve to become an emperor is an outgrowth of circumstances. In none of the decisive moments of his career, do we find evidence that he had a definite scheme of life, which he systematically endeavoured to realise. When he first invaded Italy, it was not in search of the crown of Milan, and still less in search of the crown of France. But, as he winged his soaring flight, the natural sequence was that wider and ever wider vistas of land and sea should unfold themselves before his eyes. What happened, was a fulfilment of his own guiding principle: “He will not go far who knows from the first whither he is going.” Improvisation, which, in amazing fashion, characterises so much of his activity, merely deprives him of the nebular glory of the mystical hero. As far as details are concerned, it leaves him free to make exact preparations, while restoring to him, as a whole, a liberty and a guilelessness which strengthen his genius.

Was the desire to become emperor a mistake? What urged him towards the adoption of such a role?

First of all, the imaginative side of his nature, which for the second time is blinding the cold reason of the calculator. Thus was it in Egypt, and thus was it to be for a third time in Russia. His ideal drives him to take this step. He had grown to manhood amid dreams of the antique world; classical imagery had filled his mind; his dictatorial nature necessarily craved for the forms of Roman imperialism. A poetical temperament which makes him look upon the successive occurrences in his life as phases in the unrolling of a saga, and makes him feel, on the very evening after a battle has been won, that the battle has already passed into the realm of history; this engine, driven by the power of fantasy; this eye that looks upward and beyond to see how posterity will crown his deeds with fame—they need a symbol which no one has to-day, but which shone over Europe two thousand years ago.

Yet the mathematician in him also needs this symbol; the statesman needs it, that he may safeguard his country without perpetual wars. Lastly, and perhaps most passionately of all, the man with strong family attachments needs it; the man who feels he has won nothing, if what he has won be no more than an adventurer’s prize that will perish with the winner.

“The name of king is outworn. It carries with it a trail of obsolete ideas, and would make me nothing more than the heir of dead men’s glories. I do not wish to be dependent upon any predecessor. The title of emperor is greater than that of king. Its significance is not wholly explicable, and therefore it stimulates the imagination.” Here, in two or three sentences, are compendiously disclosed the impetuous and the hot, the cunning and the cold, motives of his soul.

Does he see the dangers, or does he overlook them? What are his antitoxins? “What is a throne? A piece of wood covered with satin!” When he has become emperor he will ask the question and answer it thus, more than once. But with this satin-covered piece of wood, as he knows, he can influence grown men, just as he could influence them with the toys of the Legion of Honour. Indeed, the glamour of the throne is stronger, and therefore he will take the establishment of his throne more seriously than he took the foundation of the Legion of Honour. It is an instrument of policy, a means for the management of men. In the real world, where no one can call familiar spirits to his aid, the private person, the poet or the philosopher, can raise his head heavenward without bearing the burden of a crown; but the statesman needs the insignia of power, for the dull populace cannot believe in the reality of power unless he who wields power wears the insignia.

Are we to suppose that he, who can calculate all eventualities, does not see the danger that lurks in the symbol of the crown? Does he not know that for thousands of years people have regarded the monarch as akin to God? If he is aware of this, how without disaster will he be able to harmonise the illusion with his political cynicism? If the crown is the gift of his genius, how can he bequeath it without bequeathing the genius?

Nevertheless, all his endeavours, like those of the emperors of ancient Rome, are now concentrated upon the bequest of power. He, whose own genius has taught him that genius is always aboriginal and primary; he who with his own eyes has seen hereditary power perish amid blood and grime, and whose inmost heart said aye to the act of regicide; he, who to-day reproaches the Bourbons, not with their origin, but with the cowardice that keeps them trembling in their mouseholes; he, Napoleon Bonaparte, who feels himself to be the one man of a millennium; he, a principle of whose rule it is to grant honour and wealth only to merit and courage and talent; he, who is the symbol of revolt incorporated in human flesh—believes that in the place he has fought and won for himself through the storms of eight years, he will be able to perpetuate his blood for the sole reason that it is his own!

He knows Plutarch and the story of the Cæsars. He has studied the history of the great kings of France and England and Prussia, and has learned to look with contempt upon their decadence. And yet he is ready and eager to restore the hereditary principle for the succession to this, the highest office in the State! Here, and here only, he wishes to combine the newest of the new with the old, so that, as he says later in a phrase both profound and tragical: “I might achieve that harmony which I regarded as essential for the tranquillity of the world, a solitary man, driven forward by the impetus of my own personality. That is why I dropped sheet-anchors everywhere.”

But side by side with these heroic words, which sufficed to class him with the heroes of Plutarch, were housed the simplest feelings of domestic life. For, when his confidant Roederer urged him to seek a new wife, who would bear him a son, Napoleon answered in great excitement:

“Hitherto I have always ruled justly. It might be to my interest to seek a divorce. But what right have I to put away a good wife merely because I have become a greater man than I was when we married? She would have followed me into exile or imprisonment. Now I am to divorce her? I am not strong enough to do that. A human heart beats in my bosom; my mother was not a tigress.” After Josephine’s death, he would be free to choose a new partner. But, as things are, what will be the best way of solving this problem of the succession? “My brothers, like myself, were born in petty circumstances, but they did not force themselves upwards unaided as I did. The man who is to rule France must either be born to greatness, or he must be one of those whose inborn strength enables them to distinguish themselves from the herd.”

In this last idea is implicit the disastrous error which in due time is to lead him to inevitable destruction.

For the nonce, however, all is done quietly and soberly, just as on two previous occasions. Wishing to be independent of the parties and to stand above them, he again demands a popular vote; and the very Frenchmen who twelve years earlier had destroyed, not only the king, but kingship, now re-establish both, doing this with even more enthusiasm than when, two years before, they had made Napoleon Consul for life. In a few days, everything is settled. First of all there are votes in the Chambers. In the Senate, only three adverse votes, those of personal enemies. In the Tribunate, Carnot is alone in recording his dissent, Carnot who admires Napoleon, but is a far-sighted devotee of the principle of freedom. The result of a plebiscite is overwhelmingly in favour of the adoption of the imperial title with hereditary succession. In May 1804, the new constitution is promulgated. It is short and businesslike, as if it were a mere paragraph modifying an old constitution.

He never affects to believe that his power has a mystical origin, or even that it really springs from the people. See him, a few days after he has been proclaimed Emperor, seated in a bow window one evening after dinner. He is astraddle on a chair, with his chin resting on the back. For a long time he is silent while Josephine and Madame de Rémusat are talking (the latter records the incident). Then he stands up, turns to Madame de Rémusat, and, after posing for a while as an easy-going and cheerful man of the world, of a sudden, with that free gesture which always amazed his associates and still amazes posterity, he tore off the veil, disclosed his motives, expounded his thoughts as if he had been writing a predecessor’s history:

“You were all very angry with me about the execution of the duke of Enghien. You seem still to be fond of traditional memories. My own memory goes back only to the time when I began to be something. What is a duke of Enghien to me? An émigré, more important than the others, and therefore one whom it is all the better to destroy.... Two years ago, power dropped into my hands in the most natural way in the world.... It is true that the duke compelled me to cut the crisis short. I had expected to carry on the Consulate for another two years, although its forms conflicted with the reality of things. France and I could have walked along arm-in-arm for a while longer, for France had confidence in me, and wanted everything that I wanted. But after this conspiracy, which was to set the Continent in motion, it was necessary to show Europe the error of her ways....

“The political parties I wished to conciliate, the royalists and the Jacobins, will not lose heart as long as they have somebody to dread. I realised, therefore, that no pact between them could be concluded, but that it would be possible to conclude one with them to my own advantage.... Now, they have been reduced to silence. Still opposed to me are the republicans, the cranks who believe that Europe will look on quietly while a republic is being established upon the ruins of a monarchy.... That is why I preferred the imperial dignity to a dictatorship, for in an empire people no longer feel that they are travelling in unmapped country....

“You will soon see what a lure court etiquette will exercise on the émigrés. The old familiar forms of address will win over the nobility.... You French love monarchy. It is the only form of government which really suits you. I will wager, Monsieur de Rémusat, that you feel a hundred times more at ease now that you call me ‘Sire’ and I address you as ‘Monsieur’.... Your vanity was always being bridled; the strictness of the republic would have bored you to death.... Liberty is no more than a pretext; equality is your hobby horse; the people are content to be ruled by a prince who comes from the army.... To-day, soldiers and people are on my side. A man who could not rule under such conditions would be an idiot.”

He broke off, resumed a formal demeanour, and gave Monsieur de Rémusat an order of no importance whatever in the dry tone of the absolute master.

These moments of confession; these quarters of an hour in which we stand opposite him, silently listening and watching, while he lounges on his chair, this newly made emperor of thirty-four in his well-worn green coat, looking askance up and down the room, rising to walk restlessly to and fro, pouring out his most intimate thoughts and then with a brusque transition cutting off all the springs of familiarity; when we see him in such movingly close proximity, in scenes full of nature and purpose, full of surrender to destiny and animus against the present—we can see and hear for ourselves even more than he frankly discloses in simulated self-forgetfulness. We become aware of his easy contempt for persons of noble birth, which is none the less conjoined with a secret wish to make a good impression on them; we discern programmes which he is always willing to adapt to changing circumstances; we observe the robust cynicism aroused in him by the folly of mankind, and see that it exists side by side with the foreign character traits of this Corsican, the very traits which enable him to rule the lovely Marianne with such gallant rigour.

Of course he discloses no more than half his motives, for he is here confining himself to political issues. Still, at the outset of the imperial epoch these political issues exert a predominant influence. It seems as if, to begin with, he regards the change of title with the utmost sobriety: “My brother will not hear a word of his new title,” writes Napoleon to Madame de Staël. “He says he is just the same man he was before, and at the same time he puts on great airs. The truly great man is the one who fully realises that such empty names, which only the system of society compels us to assume, make no difference to friendship, to family life, or to social relationships. I am certain that since I have been ‘Your Majesty,’ not one of those who live with me will have been able to detect any difference in me.”

Yet it is an event that now for the third time he takes leave of his name. It may be nothing that the leading persons in the country who appear at the first court reception address him and Josephine as “Sire” and “Madame,” and that the members of the noblesse, who on this same polished floor fifteen or twenty years earlier had said “Sire” and “Madame,” should feel their hearts revive as they bandy courtiers’ compliments. That may be nothing. Certainly, as regards essential nature, clothing, and deportment, the Emperor of to-day is no different from the Consul of yesterday.

But the proclamation, the thousand and one letters, memoranda, and decrees, will henceforward be signed with a new name. For eight years they have been signed with the rudiments of a “Bonaparte.” Now he signs with a name which he himself has never written since he was a child, and which his nervous hand will speedily compress into an initial N. and a flourish. Josephine has always addressed him as “General.” His brothers and his sisters have for a long time past spoken to him with the ceremonial “you” instead of the familiar “thou” (the change was initiated, not by the Consul himself, but by Joseph). Only his mother in rare moments of expansion has occasionally used her son’s Christian name; and she utters it in her own dialect as “Napolione.”

There is a profound significance in the newness of this name when, adding to it a brand-new title, he writes for the first time in his life:

Napoleon I., Emperor of the French.