Napoleon’s self-confidence, his self-esteem, his egotism, lies at the root of his wavering between revolution and legitimacy. Relying entirely upon himself, scorning all whose pride rests upon the accident of birth, he has nevertheless to take the egotism of others into account in so far as this egotism becomes embodied in achievement. And yet he is constitutionally incapable of suffering others to be on an equal footing with himself. For his own sake he has to choose the most capable to fill administrative and other positions, and yet he has to please the masses: he must stand for equality of all, and at the same time bear the individual in mind. These contradictions give rise to a tragical conflict.
Both the weapons he has chosen for his battle of life, namely, the spirit and the sword, he conceives of in a revolutionary sense. “Why is the French army the most dreaded in the world? Because the officers became émigrés; non-commissioned officers replaced them, and became generals. One can lead a people’s army with non-commissioned officers, for they have risen from the people.” For years, Napoleon refused to confer the grand cross of the Legion of Honour upon Metternich and Schwarzenberg. It was only after their gallant behaviour during the fire at Schwarzenberg’s mansion, that the Emperor relented, and conferred the decoration. The orders which his brother, the king of Holland, distributed with so lavish a hand, Napoleon would not allow to be worn in Paris. He sends his brother the following memorandum for kings:
“How can one give this indelible mark of appreciation to a man one does not know, to a person who may before long prove to be a rogue? Learn to know those who gather round your throne! The wish to distribute decorations should not be gratified suddenly, as one can gratify a desire to go out for a day’s shooting. Noteworthy achievements must come first.... You have as yet done nothing to deserve the honour of decorating others with your effigy....”
His egotism makes him emphasise the advantage of the lack of any ancestry to an original or unusual person. When flatterers suggest that one of his Italian forebears should be canonised, he calls the suggestion an idiocy. Metternich lays before Napoleon an ancestral tree manufactured in Vienna from records of the Buonaparte family in Tuscany. The Emperor says: “Take these papers away!” In the official gazette, Napoleon has the following notice inserted: “To all questions as to when the house of Bonaparte began, the answer is simple: on the Eighteenth Brumaire. How can one show so little tact and good breeding for all one owes the Emperor as to stress the question of his ancestry?” Once he is so angry because some one has contradicted him in this matter of his genealogy that he exclaims: “I shall not suffer any one to insult me by treating me as if I were a king!”
Then come transitions in which the cleavage begins to show itself. “I shall be the Brutus of the kings and the Cæsar of the republic:” which saying is certainly ambiguous. “I know of no aristocracy but the rabble which I have allowed to escape; and of no rabble but the aristocracy which I have created:” here there is hardly any ambiguity. “Tacitus is praised because he made the tyrants fear the people—and that was a very bad thing for the people:” which is open to but one interpretation.
No one, in the presence of such a man, can be satisfied with the facile assertion that Napoleon only pretended to believe in the principles of freedom until he attained to power, and then promptly betrayed them. On the contrary, we have here to do with a spiritual struggle. This is the one problem with which the self-confident man had to wrestle; a problem he never solved.
“I am the man of the people: its pulse beats in unison with my own.... The aristocracy remains always aloof, and never forgives.” Such utterances show us the original trend of his character. Inasmuch as he overcomes this trend, never becomes an ideologue, but gets the better of his inborn sympathies, he is a statesman of genius. Of course it is ridiculous when he, who only rewards merit, decorates his baby son’s cradle with the grand cordon of the Legion of Honour; or again, when he has the deposed king of Spain, who addressed him as “cousin,” informed through the intermediation of Talleyrand that the Emperor must be addressed as “Sire.” These weaknesses are grotesque, and yet they are superficial; he himself recognises them and spurns them if the mood is upon him. When he is hesitating whether he shall send Eugene, or perhaps better still Talleyrand (a man sprung from the old noblesse), to prepare the ground for the “imperial diet” at Erfurt, he suddenly, in virile fashion, ceases to bother about the question: “After all, what does it matter to me whether I am criticised? I will show them that I do not care.”
A more serious problem, both for him and for us, is when the origin and the laws of the right of succession to the throne come up for discussion. “It is false to call me a usurper; I have simply taken the unoccupied place which Louis could not keep for himself. Had I been Louis I should have hindered the revolution in spite of the amazing progress which has accrued to thought because of the change.... My strength is in my good luck; I am as new as the Empire.” Yet, in spite of this somewhat confused reasoning, he ventures a step farther, and writes to Brother Louis: “I hold myself responsible for everything that has happened since Clovis’ days down to the days of the Committee of Public Safety; and I shall consider everything that is deliberately said against the governments as an attack on myself.”
Thus we see that his egotism reaches so paradoxical an intensity in the championship of legitimacy, and that he sails so near the serious acceptance of rule by divine right (which is otherwise only used by him as a political formula), that he makes himself responsible for the actions of those very kings whose dethronement has opened the way to his rise!
All his life he restlessly hovered round this question of status. At Kaunitz Castle, during the night after Austerlitz, while at every minute Austrian and Russian colours, captive generals, and dispatches from the beaten commanders, are being brought to him, he thrusts everything aside because the courier from Paris has entered the room. Then he does the same with all the tidings from the capital, in order to read a letter full of gossip from a lady, who tells how the Fronde of the Faubourg has sworn never to put in an appearance at court. He is furious: “Ah! so these people fancy that they are stronger than I? Very well, gentlemen of the old aristocracy, we shall see! We shall see!” This is on the evening after the battle of Austerlitz!
Here we see such hatred as that which a man gradually comes to feel for a woman who stubbornly resists his wooing. He must win over the spirit of tradition, cost what it may. One evening, not very long before the scene just described, he takes Roederer from the drawing-room into the billiard-room, begins knocking the balls about, and then says, apropos of nothing in particular:
“Your Senate has no feelings for the aristocratic, no esprit de corps in favour of the imperial system.”
“Sire, it is devoted to your person.”
“That is not what I want. It must be devoted to my mantle, no matter who wears it. The mantle ought to be enough to guarantee the safety of the wearer. This is the aristocratic spirit, which is lacking to you ideologues!”
The whole problem of hereditary succession is implicit in these considerations; it logically develops therefrom, leading to the second marriage, and thus to the tragical issue. There are only two things which Napoleon cannot create unaided: children and ancestors. He therefore asks the world of legitimate rulers to enter into an alliance with him, which will settle his difficulty as far as offspring is concerned, and will also provide his children with an ancestry. He is not really a man of the people, but a nobleman; and who can complain because he regards himself as such?
“I am in a peculiar position. The genealogists want to trace my pedigree back to the deluge, while there are some who describe me as sprung from the lower middle class. Truth lies between. The Bonapartes are a good Corsican family, not celebrated, but certainly better than these coxcombs who believe themselves entitled to humiliate us.”
This is the tone of the sixteen-year-old lad, scion of the lesser territorial nobility, whom a handful of counts made fun of at the military academy and slighted at the boarding school in Paris. They are the very words which the young man had used in his letters and literary sketches when the noblesse of monarchical France had mortified him. Nothing can expunge the memory of his early mortifications. It may well be that, but for these never-to-be-forgotten affronts suffered at the hands of a few silly young marquises, his whole outlook upon the question of legitimacy would have been different; his court life, his marriage, his destiny, would have been different; and therewith the course of European history would have been other than it was.
His egotism finds expression in the struggle with France, just as it does in the struggle with the noblesse. He does not wholly belong to the high nobility, and therefore throughout life he remains critical of the pretensions of birth. In the same way, though formally he was a Frenchman, he was not French by blood, and he was therefore irritably critical of the French, just as he was irritably critical of the noblesse. He conquered both, but never felt perfectly secure in either of his conquests.
But he had more success with France than with the legitimists. Because he is not really a Frenchman, France never becomes his legitimate spouse; she remains his beloved mistress. He knows this; he wooes, gives himself, renounces; and from the perpetual uncertainty of his relationship to France, he derives the keenest joys of his life. “I have only one passion, only one mistress: France. I lie by her side. She has never been untrue to me; she pours out her blood for me, and lavishes her treasures upon me. If I need half a million men, she gives them!” When he chides his mistress, he does it as a jealous lover; he rules her “with an iron hand in a velvet glove”; he gratifies all her caprices; and he knows better than any one else how to allure her by the glamour of fame and fantasy. That is why she beams on him when he comes home victorious; that is why she gives him her children.
Yet lover and mistress remain critical of one another. Mutual jealousy persists. Neither of them ever forgets the wish to master the other. Hear his exclamation in the tone of a despotic lover: “I swear that I do everything for the sake of France alone! If I do not give her more liberty, it is because she does not need more!” He is standing in the middle of his drawing-room, scrutinising his guests sharply as he speaks to them with raised voice. Among intimates, he will often use harsher words: “Always the same old Gauls! The same frivolity, the same vanity! When, if ever, will these be replaced by a proper pride?”
The French, likewise, remain sceptical. Must they not, in confidential talks, say of this Italian the very thing that he once wrote to his brother Louis? “Since you ascended the throne, you have forgotten that you are a Frenchman, and have strained every nerve to persuade yourself that you are a Dutchman. The foreign environment tickles your fancy, but it is still foreign.” Roederer writes of Napoleon: “He is making a mistake. They are by no means so enthusiastic about him as they were about Lafayette (who did nothing practical for them). At bottom, they merely admire and respect him because he is useful to them.”
Such a liaison cannot fail to end tragically. The mistress discards her lover when he is no longer useful to her.
Tragical, too, is the ending of another embodiment of his egotism, its noblest incorporation. “I wish I could be my own posterity, and read what such a poet as Corneille would make me feel, do, and say.” From boyhood’s days down to the time of his exile, in the island where he was born and in the island where he died, his self-esteem is nourished on historical parallels. History, he said, was the only true philosophy. Had he not had his peculiar feeling for history, Napoleon’s career would have been very different; nay, it would have been impossible. His political calculations are fed from two sources, history and imagination; the first of these streams being intellectual, and the second passionate. It is history alone which gives him alighting places on his flight. In his own age he is unique; he travels alone; nowhere but in history can he find prototypes by whose example he can guide his impetuous progress. With Cæsar, the lieutenant begins to soar. At Rochefort, the Emperor ends the active phase of his existence by trusting too implicitly in the heroic example of Themistocles.
Between the opening and the close, we find numberless indications of the way in which his imagination remains at work, mirroring the great incidents of classical and modern history. Why is he opposed to Tacitus and Chateaubriand? Because they warn the people against tyrants. Why does he blame the assassins of Cæsar? Because he wishes to defend his own sentence upon the duke of Enghien. When he is First Consul, he actually thinks of writing a few chapters of Roman history, to prove “that Cæsar never wanted to become king, and that he was murdered because he wished to re-establish order by uniting all parties.” He goes on to add that Cæsar had been killed in the Senate House, and that in the Senate were forty Pompeians, personal enemies of the dictator. Napoleon’s unexpressed inference is that he must clean up the Senate, and he does so.
In the Roman style, he sketches the ideas for eight splendid bas-reliefs which, on triumphal arches, are to illustrate the doings of his reign; they are to be representations of fact, devoid of self-commendation, and only in a formal sense illustrations of historical egotism. He summons historiographers and imaginative writers from all civilised lands, and converses with them for hours, in order that, through their intermediation, he may win the approval of posterity. When his portrait seems to him too crudely lifelike, he says that Alexander never sat to Apelles; David must paint him “in a tranquil attitude, mounted upon a fiery steed.” It pleases him to write army orders when he is sitting in Frederick the Great’s study; at Sans Souci, to invite the biographer of the former master of the house to dine with him; in Lombardy, to visit the arch of Augustus, in Egypt, the pillar of Pompey, and on these monuments to inscribe the names of those who have recently fallen; in Madrid and Moscow, to study the environment and the habits of Philip and of Catherine. But his pleasure in these things is not purely æsthetic. The hours he devotes to them are heroical; they are Napoleon’s true recompense; they are realisations of his earliest dreams.
With his own hand, he is continually writing his own history. The young general records his first victories in orders of the day; with each new campaign, and after every battle, he adds to the long series; and the work is done with the hand of an artist, is wrought with an eye to immortal fame. When he is offered the crown of Italy, he surveys his own deeds of little more than five years ago as if they had come down in legend: “When, a few years later, we learned on the banks of the Nile that our aims had come to naught, we were bitterly distressed at this evil turn of fortune; but, thanks to the courage of our armies, we were able to appear in Milan at a time when Italy believed us to be still on the shores of the Red Sea.” Actually, in the interim, he had, before the eyes of all the world, trampled on the constitution of France, and even the meanest herd in the Apennines knew of his return from Egypt.
When he is carrying on a struggle with the pope he pens a long letter, and sends it to Eugene for the latter to copy, since ostensibly it is to be a letter from Eugene to the pope; therein Eugene is made to say that Napoleon can only be compared to Cyrus and Charlemagne.
At the height of his career, he says to his Austrian ambassador: “Don’t you make any mistake, I am a Roman emperor, in the best line of the Cæsars. Chateaubriand has compared me with Tiberius, who could only travel from Rome to Capri. A pretty idea! Trajan. Aurelian—that would be another story. They were self-made men, who shook the world out of old ruts. Do you not see the resemblances between my regime and that of Diocletian? The net so widely spread; the Emperor’s eyes everywhere; the civil authority omnipotent throughout an empire that is fundamentally warlike.... A man is born to be a Cæsar.”
This is not a proclamation, not a political letter, not an attempt to seduce any one. The words are spoken lightly, in a drawing-room, without emotion and without ulterior aim, with all the simplicity of a man aware of his own strength.
After victories and successes, this historical feeling for his own personality becomes as objective as the attitude of the chessplayer towards the pieces on his board. We seem to be contemplating a man whose fondness for the game is the only thing which makes him want to win; and who, as soon as he has won, can converse dispassionately with his defeated opponent about the mistakes they have made and the artifices to which they have had recourse. When he is talking to enemy generals whom he has taken prisoner or with whom he is negotiating, he will say: “You ought to have done this, that, or the other. There, you were in an advantageous position. That would have been an excellent move.”
Immediately after his victory at Wagram, he says to Count Bubna: “I am certain that you are damnably strong, for you can deliver shrewd blows. At what figure do you estimate my forces?... You appear to be uncommonly well informed! Would you care to have a look at my army?... No? Well, at least you had better study my position on this map. It was my own fault when I failed to win a victory at Aspern-Essling. I got the punishment I deserved.”
Only with regard to one matter does this detachment fail him—Waterloo. In St. Helena, an English surgeon ventured to say that people in England would be glad to hear his opinion of Wellington. The remark was followed by an embarrassing silence.
Fame is the supreme goal of his egotism; substantially, it is the only goal. All his energies are directed towards this end: his consciousness of his uniqueness; his historic sense; his sense of honour; his dignity; the boy’s dreams, the youth’s plans, the man’s deeds, the prisoner’s unrest. Posterity is the great confused picture which fills his imagination; and the desire of his heart would seem to be rather the Latin “gloria” which thinks of future generations, than the French “gloire” which suns itself in the smile of contemporaries. He is animated by a daimonic being’s eager wish for immortality, although he knows that he must share the fate of all mortal men. “Better never to have lived; than to exist, and pass without leaving a trace.”
He modifies the coronation oath by swearing, not only to protect the realm and the happiness of France, but also to rule for the glory of his people. On one of the battle-fields of Henry IV in Normandy he has a column erected with the inscription: “Great men love the fame of those who resemble themselves.” Frederick’s sword is “more precious than all the treasures of the king of Prussia”; but it is not only when he is campaigning that his thoughts turn towards the future. When he is having houses built for the unemployed, his order to the minister to whom the task is entrusted ends with the phrase: “We must not pass out of the world without leaving traces that will commend us to the thoughts of posterity.” At the close of his career as Emperor, he refuses to make peace on terms that will involve the renunciation of territories upon whose conquest part of his fame depends; and towards the end of his life he utters a melancholy parable, darkly significant, lonely as his own destiny:
“The love for glory is like the bridge which Satan tried to build across chaos in order to make his way into paradise. Glory is a connecting link between past and future, from which an abyss separates him. I leave to my son nothing but my name.”