Napoleon

by Emil Ludwig

  A Man Born to Rule

  He commissions an attache, who, like most of his tribe, has little to think about and nothing to do, to make a register of the art treasures in the possession of the petty States of Italy. In subsequent treaties, he demands the best of these for Paris.

  For the Paris Conservatoire, he instructs experts to make copies of the best Italian music. Writing on this topic, he says : " Of all the arts, music has the strongest influence on the passions, and for that reason the legislator must make it one of his chief concerns. An inspired symphony composed by a master cannot fail to stir our feelings, and has far more influence than a treatise on morality, which convinces our reason without affecting our conduct." When he becomes a member of the Institute, he flaunts this title at the head of all the letters he writes as commander-in-chief, and declares : " The true power of the French Republic must henceforward consist in this, that no new idea shall arise anywhere which is not the property of France." In confidential talk he says: " The soldier must, above all, regard his commander as wiser and more cultured than himself; and the soldier will regard this title with respect for the very reason that its meaning is obscure to him."

  Such actions disclose, not the statesman alone, but the man born to rule, the prince who regulates every gesture, every word that he says or writes, Avith an eye to the legend as to his personality which he wishes to inculcate upon his people. But when the door is closed, and he is among intimates, he opens his heart.

  Here is a description of Napoleon as he was in those days, penned by an exceptionally shrewd observer : " The power of the man impressed every one with whom he came in contact. . . . His demeanour was still rather ungainly at times ; but there was something imperious in his nature, his glance, and his speech. Every one obeyed his orders. In public, he deliberately tried to heighten this impression. In private life, on the other hand, he was unconstrained, genial, and even confidential; with a taste for witticisms, which were never ill-natured, but were merry and discreet. Frequently, he shared in

  Devotion to Josephine

  our amusements. He did not take his work too strenuously, not finding it necessary at that time to measure out his hours; and in leisure moments he was always accessible. But when he had withdrawn to his work-room, his door was closed to every unauthorised intruder, without distinction of rank.—He needed a great deal of sleep, like all people of nervous temperament and very active mind. I have often known him to stay in bed for ten or eleven hours at a stretch; but if it was necessary to wake him up, he was unperturbed, and could easily make up for the lost hours afterwards—or could store up reserves of sleep in expectation of a strenuous time. He had the precious faculty of being able to go to sleep wherever and as often as he pleased. Fond of vigorous exercise, he rode very often, and at a great pace, though he had an exceedingly bad seat."

  He has a taste for talking, and chooses politics or general questions of life as his theme; if the conversation flags, he suggests the telling of stories; should this be followed by a general silence, he spins a yarn of his own, pregnant and humorous.

  The loveliest women set their caps at him in vain ; he is wholly devoted to Josephine. Not, indeed, so frenzied in his adoration as he was a year back, when she betrayed or disillusioned him ; it is she, and she alone, who has trifled away this passion for self-surrender. Now there is a moving note in his tone towards her; a fervent courtship, a smile, a petition : " You are sad," he wrote to her while still in the field. " You do not write ; are you longing to get back to Paris ? Have you ceased to care for me ? The thought makes me wretched. My life has become unbearable since I have known that you are not happy. Perhaps I shall soon make peace with the pope; then I shall join you at once." Three days later: " The peace with Rome has just been signed. Bologna, Ferrara, and Romagna are ceded to us.—But there is not a word from you! Good God, how have I offended you ?—I fear you know only too well how absolute is your power over me ! For life, wholly yours."

  He Threatens Paris

  Now, at Montebello, he is for the first time tasting the joys of uninterrupted connubiality, while he is delighted to watch Josephine's winning charm in social intercourse. Occasionally he steals time for a brief love festival. They drive across to Lake Maggiore; and when, among the rhododendron bushes beneath the baroque stone edifices on Isola Bella, Grassini, the heroine of La Scala, uplifts her thrilling voice and sings an appassionata by Monteverde, Napoleon sits wrapped in thought, his companion's hand clasped in his own.

  " In the carriage "—so his adjutant relates—" he would take marital liberties which were apt to be rather embarrassing to Berthier and me. But it was all so simple and natural, that there was no ground for offence."

  IX

  What is Paris saying ?

  Since yesterday, there has been a watchman on duty there. Hitherto, the cabinet ministers had all been nothing more than lawyers; now, a statesman was at work in that innermost circle. Sprung from the old nobility of France, a bishop, then as a republican placed under the ban of the Church by the pope, Talleyrand had recently spent years of waiting in the United States. Now he was back in Paris, and had grasped a share of power. The recently elected Chambers were predominantly " right," and had been railing against the Directors ; the commander-in-chief in Italy wanted to revolutionise Europe ; he wished to perpetuate the war; the rape of Venice was an infamy. Perhaps many of the accusations were only too true, but when the echoes of what was being said in the place of words made their way into the place of deeds, they could not fail to arouse the contempt of the man of might. He sent the Chambers a memorial, or, rather, a memento : " Speaking in the name of eighty thousand men, I warn you that the days when cowardly

  (Photograph by Braun, Paris and Dornach.)

  General Bonaparte. Unfinished portrait by Jacques

  Louis David. From the collection of the Duke of Bassano.

  Talleyrand

  lawyers and pitiful chatterers could allow valiant soldiers to be butchered are over and done with ! "

  At this date, Bonaparte had dispatched Augereau to defend the Directors, as he himself had defended them a year or two before; for the growing power of royalists and priests was becoming an ever greater menace to the new constitution of the Republic. If either of the Bourbon brothers should venture to set foot on French soil, all the malcontents would flock to his standard, and in a hand's turn he would win his way to the throne. But the Bourbons stayed in their safe retreats, and the Directors could risk a little coup d'etat. Now, they were five instead of three, and felt more self-confident.

  Called to office after this coup, an expert was for the first time in charge of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. From afar, he measured the strength of his only rival. Though he had never seen Bonaparte face to face, he knew him for the coming man. To begin with, at any rate, he was willing to play second fiddle, and set to work that he might win the confidence of one greater than himself.

  In all respects, Talleyrand was Napoleon's counterpart. Not a born negotiator ; passionless, except for his avarice ; cold and crafty, never natural and frank; always adapting himself to the mood of those he wished to use as his tools. His cynic's head, his long, pointed, prying nose, now surmounted the gold-braided collar of the republic ; they would surmount the imperial and the royal uniform ; and then, for a fourth time in the service of the ruler of the French, he would don the livery of the bourgeois king. For forty years he served the man who happened to be in power ; but never unreservedly, and therefore he was never tied to any ruler's fortunes. Lamed by an accident in childhood, he was unable to enter the army, and became a priest, remembering that, in this guise, the great Richelieu had been master of France. Talleyrand was the only man in the country able to measure his strength against that of Bonaparte. Never would the man of destiny be able to shake off Talleyrand,

  A Political Programme

  even when he had come to hate the subtle diplomat; and when the final breach between the two men occurred, it was at the ve
ry time when Talleyrand, with a smile, could limp across the body of the master he had cast down and enter the cabinet of the enemy. Talleyrand was the man who overthrew Napoleon; but, if we think of elemental forces, Napoleon was felled by his own hand.

  Talleyrand's breadth of view and utter lack of principle make their due impression on the distant Bonaparte. These September days, the commander has gone to Udine, to sign the peace whose preliminaries had been arranged in the spring. In this sprig of the old nobility, in this connoisseur of the rococo, in this cold nihilist, Napoleon sees the tool he will need. Hitherto, he has wanted none but soldiers. Now, when he has become a statesman, he wants and finds a statesman. While he is discussing matters with the Austrians, he sends the new Minister for Foreign Affairs a long letter (a letter of betrothal, we might call it), disclosing his whole political programme:

  " The organisation of French power has only just begun— Despite our good opinion of ourselves,—we Frenchmen are still tyros in political matters. As yet we do not even understand the difference between executive, legislature, and judiciary. In such a State as ours, where all authority issues from the nation, where the people is sovereign—governmental power, in the full comprehensiveness I ascribe to it, must be regarded as the true representative of the nation, who rules in accordance with the constitution."

  " Does your heart express itself so openly, Bonaparte ? " thinks the inscrutable recipient, smiling to himself as he reads.

  " It is an immeasurable misfortune that, in the eighteenth century, a nation of thirty million persons should still be compelled to take up arms in order to save the country. These forcible means are a burden upon the legislator, seeing that a constitution for human beings must take human beings into account."

  Worldwide Schemes

  " Is your aim so high ? " muses the reader, with astonishment. " He is already sated with martial fame, and aspires, under the new constitution, to become dictator! " Talleyrand reads on:

  " Why should we not make sure of Malta ?—I had good reason for confiscating the estates of the Knights of Malta.— With Malta and Corfu in our hands, we should be masters of the Mediterranean. If we cannot dislodge England from the Cape, we must take Egypt. With twenty-five thousand men and from eight to ten ships of the line, the expedition could be risked. Egypt does not belong to the sultan. I wish you could find out what impression an Egyptian expedition would make upon the Porte.—The break-up of the huge Turkish Empire, day by day more imminent, must lead us to think of our trade in the East."

  As he sits in the Foreign Office, reading this, the diplomat raises his eyebrows yet higher. He feels that the writer is a man of genius, if not the very devil. A week or two later, comes another letter.

  " If our doings are guided by a sound policy, which is nothing else than the calculation of combinations and chances, we shall for a long time to come be the Great Nation and the arbiter of Europe. The scales are in our hands, and, should fate be propitious, within a few years there may be great happenings. To-day, these may seem the vague anticipations of a visionary enthusiast; but a cold, pertinacious, and far-sighted man will be able to make them a reality."

  X

  How slow these German diplomats are to make up their minds. For weeks we have been at it, discussing matters far on into the night, and still the titled negotiators hesitate to sign the document, though any reasonable man would come to a decision in an hour or two ! Throughout, the Austrians are looking over their shoulders at the emperor in Vienna. In the

  Hectoring the Diplomats

  room where the conversations take place, there is an empty throne on which the shadowy Francis is supposed to be sitting beneath the canopy. " Better carry that chair away before we begin," says the commander. " I have never been able to see a raised seat without wanting to sit in it."

  His letters to the enigmatical Minister for Foreign Affairs, those fervid preludes, had been nothing more than the soliloquies of a man chafing at idleness, to whom weeks spent in thinking about peace seem wasted, even though the peace be one for which Europe has been longing for years. His patience is exhausted, and he assumes a menacing tone : " I have been too lenient with you," he growls to the Austrians. " I might have made the conditions much harsher ! You are frittering away my time. I stand before you as the equal in rank of any of your princes. Don't talk to me about congresses. . . . With the means at our disposal, in a couple of years we Frenchmen can conquer the whole of Europe. Not that we want to do so. Our wish is to give our citizens peace, and quickly. . . . You tell me that this, that, and the other are your instructions. If, when the sun is shining, your instructions said that night had fallen, would you insist that it was dark ? "

  At last, to give them a salutary fright, he bursts into a rage, dashes a vase to the ground, and thus forces them to sign the peace in which every one gets what Napoleon had promised six months before in Leoben.

  When Europe learns the news, there will be a sigh of relief. But what is going on in Bonaparte's mind ? The day after he has signed at Campo Formio the peace which ends a six years' war, the peace he has fought for and won, he writes to the Directors, in the most matter-of-fact way: " It is absolutely indispensable to our government that we should speedily overthrow the English monarchy. Unless we succeed in doing this, we can be sure that the corruption and the intrigues of these active islanders will ruin us. The moment is favourable. Let us concentrate our energies upon increasing our navy, so that we

  Tuckets for the Crowd

  may crush England. Then Europe will be at our feet." He issues a manifesto to the navy : " Comrades ! Now that we have established peace on land, let us conquer the freedom of the seas. Without your aid, the glory of the French name could be carried only through a corner of the Continent. With your help, we shall cross the ocean, and the fame of our nation will reach the most distant lands ! "

  His mind is full of titanic schemes. As he gallops along the causeway of his great deeds, fame vanishes behind him in the dust raised by his charger's thundering hoofs, but fame ever looms in front of him, beckoning from the mirage of his fresh designs. In this spirit he hastens back to Milan, to Montebello, whence he is to give Italy her final orders ; for now, carrying the peace treaty, he will go to Paris. In the tone of a prince speaking to his people, Bonaparte issues a proclamation to the newly formed Cisalpine Republic :

  " Yours is the first nation in history to win freedom without partisan struggles, without a revolution, and without a blow. We have given you liberty, and you will know how to keep it! . . . Let your minds be full of the sense of your own strength, and of the self-respect proper to the free man. . . . Had the Romans of old used their powers as the French are using their powers to-day, the Roman eagles would still wave above the Capitol, and the human race would have escaped being dishonoured by eighteen centuries of slavery ! To consolidate your liberties, and with the sole end of bringing you happiness, I have completed a task such as hitherto has only been performed by ambition and the will-to-power. ... In a few days I shall leave you. . . . Your happiness and the glory of your republic will always be matters very dear to my heart."

  Is this a warrior blowing a trumpet ? Is it a poet, into whose mouth the ecstasy of life puts words that are to arouse popular enthusiasm ? During these very days, in the company of a diplomat belonging to this very country, he is strolling to and fro in the park of Montebello. His whole nature is straining

  "The People Needs a Chief

  towards Paris ; his companion is a good listener, and a man of ability. Napoleon, in one of those bursts of frankness which genius sometimes allows itself, delivers himself as follows :

  " Do you fancy that I have won my triumphs in Italy that I may help the lawyers of the Directory ... to achieve greatness ? Or can you imagine that I want to stabilise the republic ? What a ridiculous notion, a republic with thirty million inhabitants! With our customs! With our failings! France will soon forget these whims. The French need glory and the gratification of their vanity, b
ut they do not understand the elements of freedom. Look at the army ! Our vic-tories have restored the French soldier to his true self. I am the idol of the soldiers. If the Directors, for instance, were to try to withdraw my commission, they would soon see who is master of the army.

  " The people needs a chief, made resplendent by fame and victory; it does not want theories and governments, the phrases and the oratory of the ideologues. Give the masses a toy ! They will play with it, and allow themselves to be led—provided always that the leader is adroit enough to hide his true aims ! Here in Italy, it is not necessary for me to be so circumspect. . . . Still, the time is not yet ripe. For the present, it is necessary to yield to the fervour of the moment, so here we shall have two or three republics after the French model. . . . Peace is opposed to my interests. ... If peace were firmly established, and if I were no longer at the head of the army, I should have to renounce the power and position I have gained, and should have to pay homage to the lawyers in the Luxembourg. If I leave Italy, it is only that I may play the same part in France. But that fruit, likewise, is not yet ripe. Paris is divided. There is a Bourbon party, and I cannot fight on its side. In due time I shall weaken the republicans, but I shall not do so to the advantage of the old dynasty ! "

  Such are Bonaparte's real plans. What he says' is true:

  "Half a Page"

  " Everything has happened as I foresaw ; and I believe that I am the only person in the world who is not surprised. So will it be in the future; I shall make my way whithersoever I will."