Bonaparte, like the race of princes, wanted nothing and sought nothing but power, attaining it however by way of liberty, because he made his first appearance . on the world's stage in X793. The Revolution, which was Napoleon's wet-nurse, soon appeared to him in the guise of an enemy, and he never stopped beating her. For the rest, the Emperor could recognize evil, when evil did not come directly from the Emperor; for he was not devoid of all sense of morality. The sophism put forward concerning Bonaparte's love of liberty proves only one thing, the misuse that can be made of reason; nowadays it lends itself to any argument. Has it not been proved that the Terror was a period of great humaneness? In fact, were not our leaders demanding the abolition of the death penalty while they were killing all and sundry? Have not great civilizers, as they are called, always sacrificed men, and is it not for that reason, as has been proved, that Robespierre is the continuer of Christ?
The Emperor took a hand in everything; his mind never rested; he had a sort of perpetual agitation of ideas. With his impulsive nature, instead of progressing steadily and continuously, he advanced by leaps and bounds, He threw himself upon the world and shook it; he did not want that world if he had to wait for it: an incomprehensible creature, who found the secret of debasing his loftiest actions in despising them, and who raised his least elevated actions to his own level. Impatient of will, patient of character, incomplete and as it were unfinished, Napoleon had gaps in his genius: his understanding resembled the sky of that other hemisphere under which he was to die, that sky whose stars are separated by empty spaces.
One may wonder by what magic spell Bonaparte, so aristocratic and so hostile to the mob, came to win the popularity which he enjoyed: for that forger of yokes has certainly remained popular with a nation whose pretension it was to raise altars to liberty and equality; this is the solution to the enigma:
Daily experience shows that the French are instinctively attracted by power; they have no love for liberty; equality alone is their idol. Now equality and tyranny have secret connexions. In those two respects, Napoleon had his fountain-head in the hearts of the French, militarily inclined towards power, democratically enamoured of a dead level. Mounting the throne, he seated the common people beside him; a proletarian king, he humiliated the kings and nobles in his ante-chambers; he levelled the ranks of society, not by lowering but by raising them: levelling down would have pleased plebeian envy more; levelling up was more flattering to its pride. French vanity was puffed up too by the superiority which Bonaparte gave us over the rest of Europe; another cause of Napoleon's popularity was the suffering of his last days. After his death, as people became better acquainted with what he had endured at St. Helena, they were moved to pity; they forgot his tyranny and remembered only that after conquering our enemies, and after subsequently drawing them into France, he had defended us against them; we imagine that he might have saved us today from the disgrace into which we have sunk: we were reminded of his fame by his misfortune; his glory has profited by his adversity.
Finally, his wonderful feats of arms have fascinated the young and taught us all to worship brute force. His incredible good fortune has left to the conceit of every man of ambition the hope of reaching the point which he attained.
And yet this man, who passed an egalitarian roller over France, was the mortal enemy of equality and the greatest organizer of aristocracy within democracy.
I cannot join in the false praises with which others, trying to justify everything in Bonaparte's conduct, have insulted him; I cannot surrender my reason nor go into ecstasies before that which arouses my horror or my pity.
If I have succeeded in conveying what I have felt, there will remain of my portrait one of the leading figures in history; but I have taken over no part of the legendary being composed of lies: lies which I saw being born, and which, recognized at first for what they were, gradually assumed the appearance of truth through the infatuation and the imbecile credulity of mankind. I refuse to behave like a simpleton and fall into a fit of admiration. I strive to depict people conscientiously, without robbing them of what they have, and without giving them what they lack. If success were considered to be innocence; if, corrupting even posterity, it loaded it with its chains; if, a future slave, begotten by a slavish past, that suborned posterity became the accomplice of whoever had been victorious, where would be the right, where would be the reward of sacrifice? Good and evil becoming purely relative qualities, all morality would be banished from human actions.
Such is the difficulty which a great renown causes an impartial writer; he ignores it as far as he can, in order to lay bare the truth; but the glory returns like a golden haze and instantly covers his picture.
In order to avoid admitting the diminution of territory and power which we owe to Bonaparte, the present generation consoles itself with the thought that he has given back to us in glory what he has taken from us in strength. `Are we not famous now,' it asks, `in the four quarters of the earth? Is not a Frenchman feared, noticed, sought out and recognized on every shore?'
But were we placed between those two conditions: either immortality without power, or power without immortality? Alexander made the name of the Greeks famous the world over; yet for all that he left them four empires in Asia, and the language and civilization of the Hellenes extended from the Nile to Babylon and from Babylon to the Indus. At his death, his ancestral kingdom of Macedon, far from being diminished, had increased a hundredfold in strength. Bonaparte spread our fame to every shore; under his command, the French brought Europe so low that France still prevails by her name, and the Arc de l1toile can rise up without seeming a puerile trophy; but before our reverses that monument would have stood as a witness, instead of being only a record. And yet, had not Dumouriez with his conscripts given the foreigner his first lessons, Jourdan won the Battle of Fleurus, Pichegru conquered Belgium and Holland, Hoche crossed the Rhine, Massena triumphed at Zurich and Moreau at Hohenlinden: all exploits which were difficult to perform and which prepared the way for others? Bonaparte made a whole of these scattered successes; he continued these victories and made them shine forth: but without those first wonders, could he have achieved the last? He triumphed only when his reason was putting into execution the inspirations of the poet.
Our sovereign's fame cost us only two or three hundred thousand men a year: we paid for it with only three million of our soldiers; our fellowcitizens bought it only at the cost of their sufferings and their liberties for fifteen years: can such trifles count? Are not the generations that have come after us resplendent in their glory? So much the worse for those who have disappeared! The calamities which occurred under the Republic served to ensure the safety of all; our misfortunes under the Empire did much more: they deified Bonaparte! That should be enough for us.
It is not enough for me: I will not stoop so low as to hide my country behind Bonaparte; he did not make France: France made him. No genius, no superiority will ever induce me to support a power which, with one word, can deprive me of my independence, my home, my friends: if I do not say of my fortune and my honour, it is because one's fortune does not seem to me to be worth defending; as for honour, it is immune to tyranny: it is the soul of martyrdom; bonds encompass it but do not enchain it; it breaks through prison walls and carries the whole man away with it.
The wrong which true reason will never forgive Bonaparte is that of having accustomed society to passive obedience, thrust mankind back towards the times of moral degradation, and perhaps corrupted human nature to such a degree that it is impossible to say when men's hearts will begin to throb with noble feelings. The weakness of our situation as regards both ourselves and Europe, our present abasement, are the result of the Napoleonic slavery: it has left us nothing but the ability to bear the yoke. Bonaparte unsettled even the future: it would not surprise me if, in our sickly impotence, we were to grow even weaker, to barricade ourselves against Europe instead of going to seek it out, to give up our liberties within to deliver ourselves from an imaginary danger without, and to lose ourselves in ignoble precautions, contrary to our genius and to the fourteen centuries which have gone to the making of our way of life. The despotism which Bonaparte left in the air will close in upon us like a fortress.
The fashion nowadays is to greet liberty with a sardonic laugh, to look upon it as an outdated notion which, like honour, has fallen into disuse. I am not in the fashion: I believe that there can be nothing in this world without liberty; it makes life worth while; if I were to remain the last to defend it, I would never cease to proclaim its rights. To attack Napoleon in the name bf things that are past, to assail him with ideas that are dead, is to provide him with fresh triumphs. He can be fought only With something greater than himself, and that is liberty: he offended against liberty and thus against the human race.
Vain words! More than anyone else I can feel how useless they are. Nowadays any observation, however moderate it may be, is considered blasphemous; it needs courage to dare to brave the cries of the mob, and not to be afraid of being branded as a narrow mind, incapable of understanding and appreciating Napoleon's genius, simply because, for all the lively and sincere admiration which one professes for him, one is nevertheless unable to praise all his imperfections. The world belongs to Bonaparte; what part of it the ravisher did not have time to conquer, his fame usurps; living he failed to win the world, dead he possesses it. You protest in vain: the generations pass by without heeding you. Antiquity makes the son of Priam say to the shade: `Do not judge Hector by his little grave; the Iliad, Homer, the Greeks in flight, there you see my sepulchre: I am buried beneath all those great deeds.'
Bonaparte is no longer the real Bonaparte, but a legendary figure fashioned from the vagaries of the poet, the talk of the soldier and the tales of the people; it is the Charlemagne and the Alexander of the medieval epics that we behold today. This fantastic hero will remain the real character: the other portraits will disappear. Bonaparte was such an absolute despot that, after enduring the tyranny of his person, we have to endure the tyranny of his memory. This latter tyranny is more overbearing than the former, for if men sometimes opposed Napoleon when he was on the throne, there is universal agreement that we should accept the chains which he throws to us now that he is dead. He is an obstacle to future events: how could a power issuing from the camps establish itself after him? Has he not killed all military glory by surpassing it? How could a free government come into being, when he has corrupted the principle of freedom in men's hearts? No legitimate power can now drive the usurping spectre from the mind of man: soldier and citizen, Republican and Monarchist, rich and poor alike place busts and portraits of Napoleon in their homes, in their palaces or cottages; the sometime vanquished are in agreement with the sometime victors; one cannot take a single step in Italy without coming across him: one cannot enter Germany without meeting him, for in that country the young generation which rejected him has gone. Generally, the centuries sit down before the portrait of a great man, and finish it by dint of long, successive labours. This time, the human race refused to wait: perhaps it was in too much of a hurry to stump a pastel drawing. It is time to place the finished part of the idol side by side with the defective part. Bonaparte is not great by virtue of his words, his speeches, his writings, or by virtue of a love of liberty which he never possessed and which he never attempted to foster; he is great in that he created a solid and powerful government, a code of laws adopted in various countries, courts of law, schools, and a strong, active, intelligent administration on which we are still living; he is great in that he revived, enlightened and governed Italy superlatively well; he is great in that, in France, he restored order from the midst of chaos, in that he rebuilt the altars, in that he pressed into his service wild demagogues, vain scholars, anarchical men of letters, Voltairean atheists, open-air orators, cut-throats from the prisons and the streets, starvelings from the tribune, the club and the scaffold; he is great in that he curbed an anarchical mob; he is great in that he put an end to the familiarities of a common fortune, in that he forced soldiers, his equals, and captains, his superiors or his rivals, to bend before his will; he is great above all in that he was born of himself alone, in that he was able, with no other authority than his own genius, to compel the obedience of thirty-six million subjects, in an age which has no illusions about thrones; he is great in that he overthrew all the kings who opposed him, in that he defeated all the armies, however much they differed in discipline and valour, in that he taught his name to savage as well as to civilized peoples, in that he surpassed all the conquerors who preceded him, in that he filled ten years with prodigies so great that today we find it difficult to comprehend them.
The famous offender in triumphal matters is no more; the few men who still appreciate noble sentiments can do homage to glory without fearing it, but also without repenting of having stigmatized all that was baleful in that glory, without recognizing the destroyer of freedom as the father of emancipation: Napoleon has no need for merits to be ascribed to him; he was sufficiently endowed at birth.
Now, therefore, that, severed from his time, his history has ended and his epic is beginning, let us go to see him die: let us leave Europe; let us follow him beneath the sky of his apotheosis! The trembling of the seas where his ships struck sail will show us the spot where he disappeared: `At the extremity of our hemisphere,' says Tacitus, `one can hear the sound made by the sun sinking into the sea: sonum insuper immergentis audiri.'