Napoleon

by Emil Ludwig

  On the other hand, those who fearlessly speak the truth to him, impress him. He praises Chateaubriand, who has attacked him. In the days when he was Consul he was wont, after a sitting of the Council of State, to invite to dinner the man who had most vigorously opposed his wishes. In the Russian campaign, a captive general tells him some home truths about the burning of Moscow. Napoleon dismisses the prisoner in a rage; but presently has him recalled, and shakes the Russian's hand, saying : " You are a brave man ! " Mehul plays a trick on the Emperor, producing his new opera as the work of an Italian composer, and thus earning approbation. Paisiello also plays a trick by introducing into one of his own compositions an aria by Cimarosa, a composer whose work Bonaparte cannot endure. The Consul applauds; and when afterwards told of the deception, he only laughs.

  Madame de Stael has been a worry to him for fifteen years, voicing Europe's call for freedom. He suppresses her books, banishes her from Paris, continues to take measures against her even when he is in Russia, speaks of her as the dangerous driving-wheel which sets the salons in motion; but he pays this enemy the high compliment of dreading her, and acknowledges as much in many of his private letters.

  In the Bavarian muster rolls, he comes across the name of a former regimental comrade, a declared royalist. He makes this man his military attache. They have not met for fourteen years. Now, during the campaign, they meet, and the old com panion

  A Former Fellow-Student

  introduces himself. The Emperor rides with him out of the press, dismounts, and sits down on a convenient stone ; the other wishes to hold his horse. " Let be," says Napoleon; " that's not your business," and beckons a chasseur to take the bridle-rein. The Emperor promptly becomes reminiscent: " Do you remember how, at the lieutenants' mess in Besancon, you flung your table napkin down and shouted : ' I will not sit beside an officer who belongs to the Jacobin Club !' That is ancient history, and is of no consequence now." He beckons his attendant staff and points to his interlocutor, saying: " Look at this fellow. Ability of the old school. He and I worked at equations together." Then, coming down to practical matters : " Have you plenty of ammunition ? What is your artillery like ? How soon will you be ready ? "

  Unique, perhaps, in Napoleon's life, is the scene at Erfurt in the year of 1813, when von Miiller, the Weimar chancellor, braves his anger. Two privy councillors have written letters in cipher. These have been seized at the outposts. The writers have been arrested. Miiller has been sent for. The Emperor has stormed at him, threatening to burn Jena, to shoot the culprits. Miiller breaks in impetuously : " No, Sire, you will not commit this abomination ! You will not tarnish your record for all time by shedding innocent blood! " In his excitement, the German presses so close that the Emperor anticipates a personal attack, and lays his hand on his sword-hilt. Miiller is dragged back by a companion. A pause. " You are a bold man, but I see that you are a good friend. Berthier shall look into the matter once more." The privy councillors are pardoned.

  This scene, creditable to both participants, is another proof of Napoleon's invulnerable dignity. It is invulnerable, unless the arrow is poisoned. A sense of honour is the vulnerable point of self-confidence. " If the French people expects certain advantages from me," said Bonaparte when First Consul, " it must put up with my weaknesses, and the chief of these is that

  Honour

  I cannot endure an affront." It was he who said : " I am a man whom people may kill, but will not affront." Bourrienne tells us that from Bonaparte's earliest days he had no faith in law or morality, but always believed in honour. This compensated for his fundamental amoralism. The power exercised over him by his conception of honour distinguishes him absolutely from the condottieri of the Renaissance, with whom he ought never to have been compared. When he is Consul, betwixt night and morning he breaks off his intimacy with this very Bourrienne, who has been his private secretary for so long, because Bourrienne is involved in an unsavoury financial scandal. Years afterwards, he refuses to admit Bourrienne to the Legion of Honour, saying : " One who worships the golden calf may have money, but not honour." When a bill signed by King Jerome goes to protest, Napoleon writes : " Sell your diamonds, your silver plate, your furniture, your horses—anything to pay your debts. Honour comes first! "

  He was so sensitive on this point that after his coronation he summoned to his presence a notary who had long before advised Josephine against marrying a person of doubtful character ; Napoleon wished to rehabilitate himself in this man's mind. In exile at St. Helena, he remembered how his German teacher in Brienne had always treated him with contempt: "I should very much like to know whether Herr Bauer ever learned how I made good ! "

  He is a stickler for morality, just as he is for honour. "Nothing can be worse in a ruler than immorality. He makes it fashionable, and it poisons society." Napoleon does not say this merely because he has been warned by the example of the Bourbons and the Directors. He has an inborn sense of decency, which is part of his dignity. No one has ever recorded having heard Napoleon, the soldier, tell an obscene story. Nor did he ever listen to one complacently. When he becomes First Consul, he forbids Josephine to have anything more to do with friends of hers who are leading gay lives. Years afterwards, when the

  A Stickler for Morality

  empress allows Tallien to visit her, Napoleon writes to reprimand his wife, saying : " I can see no excuses for Tallien. I know that some poor devil has married her with her eight bastards, and I despise her even more than I did before. She was an amiable cocotte; now she is nothing more than a common woman."

  Talleyrand, who has had a liaison for many years, is told that he must marry his inamorata or quit Napoleon's service within twenty-four hours. Berthier is made a prince, but the same condition is imposed on him, Napoleon saying : " This passion of yours has lasted too long, and is becoming ridiculous. You are a man of fifty, but may live to be eighty, and these thirty years are left you for marriage." The revolution had encouraged nudity in mythological representations, but Napoleon wants nakedness to be draped. When in one of the squares there is set up a fountain where there is a group of naiads with water spouting from their breasts, he has " these wet-nurses " removed as improper, and decrees that " the naiads were virgins." His own women friends must not make themselves conspicuous. He lavishes money on them ; but if they are actresses, he does not allow his liaison to be used as a reason for promotion. On the other hand, like any bourgeois he boasts of sharing his wife's bedroom, saying: " It has a remarkable influence upon conjugal life, strengthens the man's influence, guarantees his faithfulness, promotes intimacy and good morals ; a couple will never become estranged if they spend the whole night together. As long as Josephine and I kept this custom, she was familiar with all my thoughts."

  One of the most sublime forms of his egotism is gratitude. This is not ordinary kindness, but the pride of a man who feels he is unique, and overwhelms with benefits any one who has ventured to be useful to him, lest he should possibly remain in the other's debt. That was the consideration which really underlay his frequently declared policy, that he would never make use of any party, lest he should incur obligations. We must not

  Gratitude

  look upon these things in a romantic light. But it is an actual fact that he was not content to promote only the friends of his youth, his fellow-students at the military academy. As soon as he rose to power, he found for the priest who had been headmaster at Brienne a sinecure at Malmaison as librarian— without any books ! The sometime school porter became lodge keeper at his country house. A young lady of noble birth to whom, in his lieutenant days, he had once paid court for a whole evening, and who sixteen years later applied for help to the Emperor, received what she wanted, together with a post for her brother, and a friendly letter. He remembered many of his former associates in his will. Years after his brief intimacy with " Giorgina," when he hears that she is in difficulties (though she has made no application to him), he provides her with a competency.

  Hith
erto we have been talking about money, or money's worth. But the nature of his gratitude is different when he loves, as in the case of Josephine. When we consider his relationships with her, we realise the truth of Marmont's tribute, which is all the more remarkable as coming from an enemy : " He had a grateful, kind, indeed affectionate, heart." At the time of the coronation, he says to Roederer: " What right have I to put away a good wife merely because I have become a greater man than I was when we married ? . . . Before all, I am a just man." A little later, he writes to Josephine : " As far as I am concerned, I deem ingratitude the greatest weakness any one can have,"

  III

  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

  Revolutionary Traits

  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 emigres ; noncommissioned 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

  Transitional Characteristics

  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 Csesar 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

  Legitimist Weaknesses

  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 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

  A Scion of the Lesser Nobility

  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 trag
ical 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."

  France Is His Mistress

  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.