Napoleon

Front matter

HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

Editors:

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I Youth 7

II The Italian Command 28

Chapter I

As we think of Napoleon Bonaparte what a world of visions and memories rises before the mind ! Who does not know the outward form of the greatest conqueror and captain of modern times : the small, almost dwarfish, figure, the rounded symmetry of the head, the pale olive cheek and massive brow, the nose and lips carved as it were from the purest marble of the antique world, and above all the deep-set eyes of lustrous grey, now flashing with electric fires, now veiled in impenetrable contemplation? The set of his figure is familiar too, as are the clothes in which it has been the delight of painters to portray him. We know the compact energy of his chest and shoulders, the flashing impetuosity of each gesture and movement, the white teeth and delicate hands, and the little cocked hat and long coat of grey in which he was used to ride to victory. Who has not seen him in print and picture, the gaunt young hero of the Republic charging with the flag at Areola, the Emperor kneeling before the altar of Notre Dame in the long and sumptuous robes of his coronation, the grim leader of a haggard cavalcade treading the deadly snows of a Russian winter, the cloaked figure upon a ship's deck with huddled shoulders and sunken chin and a far-off look of tragedy in his set and melancholy gaze? And the thoughts and feelings which glow into consciousness at the sound of this illustrious name are every whit as varied and chequered as the outward events of his life seen through the imagination of the painter.

Perhaps in the whole range of history no one has aroused emotions so opposite and so intense, or within his own lifetime has claimed so much of the admiration, the fear, and the hatred of mankind. Even the colder critics of posterity view his course not only with mixed and blended judgments, but with a kind of bewilderment at the union in one life and character of so much grandeur and roguery, gold and alloy. For those to whom psychological analysis is wearisome he stands simply as the miraculous man of action, who without assistance of wealth or station mounted to the highest pinnacle of human fortune, supplying by the weight of one transcendent example a conclusive answer to the theory that the art and mystery of politics is an esoteric thing, a perquisite of pedigrees and privilege. The man of whom Madame de Stael said, that "of all the inheritance of his terrible power there remained only to the human race the deadly knowledge of some further secrets in the art of tyranny," is also the child of the Revolution, the most dazzling proof of his own democratic doctrine that in every society a career should be open to talent. And so long as men go to the past for the pathos and romance of great vicissitudes of fortune, or for the serious interest of feats of statesmanship, or for documents of human power and resolve, or for the more elusive secrets of the passionate temperament, or else that they may win an insight into the human forces which move the world, they will continue to study the life of Napoleon, and to find in it at the very least a story as wonderful as those of the giants and fairies, and at the most the greatest explosion of human energy which in modern times has altered the politics of civilised man.

He was born at Ajaccio on August 15, 1769, the second son of Charles-Marie Bonaparte and Marie-Letizia Ramolino. His paternal stem drew its root from Florence (branches of it have been traced at Sarzana and San Miniato in Tuscany), but ever since 1529 the ancestors of Napoleon had been settled in Corsica. Here in this lovely scene of rugged mountains and dark chestnut forests and azure spaces of sky and sea the Bonapartes flourished in the esteem of their simple neighbours. Proud of its patrician origin, the family, though far from wealthy, was by the standard of that rude and primitive society reckoned to be the most prosperous in Ajaccio. Five Bonapartes served at different times on the island council. But the evidence of ancestral ability is stronger on the maternal than on the father's side. The father of Napoleon was handsome, intelligent, with a not uncommon Italian turn for poetry and rhetoric, but extravagant and restless, constantly embarrassed for money, and driven to every kind of ingenious solicitation and shift to obtain it. His mother Letizia was a woman in a thousand. Far into old age she retained the beauty of face and dignity of carriage which were hers by right of nature, and which would have won her admiration in any company in the world. Her mind was plain and unfurnished. To the end of her life she could neither pronounce nor speak the French language without ridiculous mistakes, and her economies were carried to the point of avarice; but her character was solid as a rock of granite, and as she had faced adversity with courage, so she was neither changed nor spoiled by the marvellous revolution in her fortunes. In 1793 Paoli addressed her as Cornelia, meaning that this shrewd, resolute and beautiful country-woman was fit to bear a progeny of heroes.

In the middle of the eighteenth century it was a title of honour to be a native of Corsica. Every lover of liberty had followed with sympathy the gallant struggle which the inhabitants of that small and freedom-loving island had waged, first against the odious rule of Genoa, and then against the powerful monarchy of France. The name of Pasquale

Paoli, the hero of the War of Independence, the leader and law-giver of his people, was famous in every capital in Europe, and the characteristics of a country so remote, and apparently by reason of that remoteness retaining the large and simple heroism of classical times, was matter for the curiosity of travellers and politicians. Europe thought of Corsica then, as she has thought since of Greece struggling against the Turk, or of the Boer Republics of South Africa as they contested the collected might of the British Empire. And the youth of Napoleon, born in the very year in which Corsica finally passed under the dominion of France, was filled with the reverberation of that island epic. Stories of the strokes and hazards of the patriotic war must have been everywhere around him. He learned to know how his father had drafted a proclamation to the Corsican people, and how just before his birth his mother was driven out into the woods and mountains to share the perils of the patriot army. The star of his youth was Paoli. His dream was, now to write the history of his island, now to effect its liberation from the French.

/The Corsican bore a character for sobriety, courage and hardihood. Hate was for him a virtue, vengeance a duty, pardon an infamy. He felt the call of the clan like a Highlander, an Albanian, or a Zulu, and was full of the pride and self-assurance common to gallant men who have never met a superior./ Vigilant and astute in his judgment of character, he was a master of dissimulation save where passion broke in and spoiled the reckoning. His standard of honour forbade theft, enjoined hospitality and tolerated woman as the drudge of the household and the field. In general his deportment was noted as grave and stoical. He was sparing of amusement, would sit at cards without a word and suffer torture without a cry; but when the seal of silence was once broken, language would stream from him like a torrent, an index of that uneasy, impatient, quarrelsome energy which was a common attribute of the race. In these and other particulars of temperament Napoleon Bonaparte was a true Corsican. I The main part of Napoleon's education was conducted not in Corsica but in France. For seven years and nine months he never set eyes upon his home or upon his mother. When he left Ajaccio on December 15, 1778, to embark on the study of the French language at Autun, he was a child of nine, when he returned upon leave in September 1786 he was seventeen years old and a sub-lieutenant in a regiment of artillery. Yet absence had rather quickened than dimmed the fervour of his patriotism. As a schoolboy at Brienne, and again at the military school in Paris, he felt himself an exile in an enemy's country, using a foreign tongue and compelled to associate with boys who despised him for his alien accent, his lean purse, and his lack of influential connections. The sense of isolation drove him inwards on himself. As a little child he had been quarrelsome and turbulent; he was now taciturn, morose, unpopular with his fellows, "dry as parchment," in his own words, but secretly tormented by the flames of ambition. Linguistic capacity he never possessed, but from childhood he had shown an aptitude and taste for mathematics which was further developed by his French instructors. His father had originally designed him for the navy, but the project was changed, perhaps at the boy's desire, before the five years' course at Brienne was concluded, and it was decided that he should enter the artillery, being that branch of the profession of arms in which brains and industry might most easily balance the lack of outward advantages. He had given early proof of military tastes; as he trotted down to his little school at Ajaccio he would exchange his breakfast of white bread for the coarse brown rations of the barrack, saying that he must prepare to lead the life of a soldier.

The evidence with regard to his intellectual and moral development at this period of life, though not abundant, is decisive in quality. His letters written from school are serious, lucid and practical. At fourteen he summed up the character of his elder brother Joseph, and decided that being too frivolous for the army, he should certainly be sent into the Church. At fifteen and a half, learning of the death of his father, he wrote with a precocious sense of civic service : " Our country has lost a keen, enlightened and honest citizen. It was so decreed by the Supreme Being." We are tempted to ask whether he was ever young. It is clear that even as a schoolboy he viewed the profession of arms, not as an occasion for brilliant spectacles, but as that branch of science, complete mastery of which, only to be achieved by devouring industry, was the secret of political greatness. History and geography were his absorbing passions. He would imagine himself one of Plutarch's heroes, and he found his first incitement to ambition in that famous Discourse upon Universal History in which Bossuet unrolls the succession of the Empires.

On October 28, 1785, Napoleon left the military school in Paris to join the artillery regiment of La Fere which was quartered at Valence. He was then a youth of sixteen years, poor, friendless, destitute of any kind of influence likely to promote his fortunes in the army. His father was dead, and Marbceuf and Boucheporn, the French officials in Corsica who had hitherto forwarded the interests of the family, were dead also. His « mother was in great straits for money, and his own pay as sub-lieutenant amounted to seventeen-and-sixpence a week. In the normal course of events six years would elapse before he became a full lieutenant, twelve years before he became a captain; in middle life he might find himself retired on half -pay with hardly enough to keep body and soul together. The grey horizon only steeled his character. Frugality was his second nature, and with no opportunities for vulgar dissipation he plunged the deeper into the world of study. "Even when I had nothing to do," he confessed afterwards, "I vaguely thought that I had no time to lose."

There was at that time in France a body of prose literature more certain and magisterial in its direction, more seductive in its rich combination of hopefulness, sentiment and wit, and therefore more cogent in its sway over the generous impulses of youth, than any which Europe had yet known. The French philosophers of the eighteenth century preached the doctrines of reason and humanity to a country swiftly rising to a consciousness that the institutions under which it lived were the relics of a barbarous and superstitious age. They attacked every part of the existing order of society, invoking the widest principles, asking the gravest questions, and exhibiting, as against the darkness and confusion of the present, the dazzling vision of a world governed by the simple rules of rational arithmetic. To this literature of humanism and revolt men of every type and temperament contributed their quota: Voltaire his easy learning and nimble wit, Turgot his grave and philosophic statesmanship, Raynal his gift of angry declamation, Rousseau an incomparable facility for translating into musical French the confessions of a sensitive nature and the ideals of a logical mind. To an impecunious sub-lieutenant of artillery, not wholly absorbed in the technical study of his craft, contact with writers such as these was a liberal education, and in his lonely garret Bonaparte devoured the writings of the philosophers. At seventeen he was a passionate admirer of Rousseau and of Raynal, and attuned, if not to expect, at least to welcome, a political revolution in France.

During his first seven years in the army Napoleon enjoyed large and fruitful opportunities for reading. His military duties were light, his furloughs frequent and prolonged, and he had that exquisite passion for acquisition which comes once only with the first unfolding of intellectual power. "I have no resources here but work," he wrote to his mother in 1788. "I sleep very little since my illness. I go to bed at ten, I rise at four, I have only one meal a day, at three o'clock." From the philosophers he learnt to despise monks, to hate kings and to disbelieve in the doctrines of the Christian religion; but philosophy was neither his most congenial study nor the true formative influence in his life. His mind was of the positive, not of the metaphysical order. He revelled in facts and figures, analysing in detail books of history, geography and travel, that he might understand the political conditions of the world in which he lived. His early copy-books show how painstaking he could be in the tedious drudgery of accumulation. Yet the appetite for the concrete coexisted with spiritual sensibilities of a different order, not only with those which specially belong to youth, such as the delighted acquiescence in vague ideas and indefinite emotions, but with others more purposive and ministerial to action. Romantic dreams of greatness, passionately imagined, mingled with the striving to be literal, to be free from clouds and to see men and things through plain glass. Ossian and Werther touched him with a sense of the illimitable; Corneille and Racine by their finished portraits of civic greatness. In history he found not only an encyclopaedia of important facts, but "the base of the moral sciences, the torch of truth, the destroyer of prejudice." Though he practised his pen on essays and novelettes, his principal ambition was to be the historian of his native land, to exhibit the tyranny against which she had heroically struggled, and of which she was still the reluctant victim. In 1787 he began to compose some Letters on Corsica, and later on made collections at Ajaccio for an elaborate history of the island.

The Revolution which broke out in the spring of 1789 opened sudden and indefinite prospects of advancement to all the poor and disinherited in France. Bonaparte's thoughts flew to Corsica; he would help to free his countrymen from the odious yoke of the French bureaucracy. In September 1789 he obtained a furlough, and with his elder brother Joseph plunged into the whirlpool of the Corsican revolution. He declaimed in the clubs, composed hot revolutionary addresses and helped to organise a national guard. At Ajaccio, a town of fisher-folk, he was the soul of the opposition to the priests and aristocrats. In 1790 he succeeded, by means even then judged to be unscrupulous, in securing his election as second in command of a battalion of Corsican volunteers, an appointment not held to be incompatible with his French commission, and giving him an insight into the leadership and discipline of irregular troops. Meanwhile his view of the political situation was altered by the abolition (November 30, 1789) of crown colony government in Corsica, and by the recognition of the island as a department of the new democratic monarchy of France. From that moment, though his interests were still mainly Corsican, his aversion for France was diminished. The Revolutionary Assembly had acknowledged the merits of his countrymen, had permitted Paoli to return, and had arranged for the due representation of Corsica in the parliamentary system to be created in France. But Napoleon was not destined to be ruler of the goatherds and shepherds of his native hills.

As war broke out upon the Continent and as the government in Paris passed more and more under Jacobin dominion Paoli, himself a constitutional monarchist, who had owed much to English hospitality, fell under suspicion as a moderate, an Anglophile and a traitor. An expedition to Maddalena, a little island off the coast of Sardinia, miscarried owing to a naval mutiny; but in the opinion of some the failure was due to a lukewarmness shading into treachery on the part of the Dictator of Corsica. Lucien Bonaparte, then a fiery young democrat of eighteen summers, having failed to become Paoli's secretary, discovered that he was a traitor, and informed the Jacobins of Toulon that the national hero of Corsica was fit for the guillotine. The Government in Paris accepted without examination the idle word of a young incendiary, decreed (April 2, 1793) Paoli's arrest, and ordered the three Commissioners of the Convention who were at Bastia to effect it. The news of this insult to a man who, for more than a generation, had been regarded as the father of his country, set all Corsica in flame; and surrounded by his faithful herdsmen the old General in his mountain fortress at Corte defied the French Government to do its worst. The island was upon the point of civil war, and the position of the Bonapartes, fatally compromised by the rash action of Lucien and surrounded by the fervent Paolists of Ajaccio, became at once extremely critical.

Napoleon had by this time outgrown his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution. He had passed the summer of 1792 in Paris, had watched the invasion of the Tuileries on June 20, and the massacre of the Swiss guards on August 10. His sense of soldierly discipline was outraged by the spectacle of a mob running riot, and of a regular force hacked to pieces for the want of a prompt and regular leader. "What cowards!" he exclaimed to his friend Bourrienne, as the crowd streamed into the royal palace on June 20 : "How could they let in this rabble? Why don't they sweep off four or five hundred of them with the cannon? The rest would scamper home fast enough." In the midst of the revolting slaughter of August 10 he went down into the Tuileries gardens, and with the superb phrase, "Man of the South, let us save this unfortunate," stayed a Marseillais at his butcher's work. Such scenes as these cured him of his last ideal illusions. He wrote home that the Jacobins were lunatics, that the wheel of State was turned by a pack of vile intriguers, and that the people, viewed at close quarters, was unworthy of the efforts expended in courting its favour. From the distractions and fever of the Terror he found a refuge in "the sublime science" of astronomy.

Returning to Corsica in the autumn with a captain's rank, Napoleon learned that his family stood in the shade of Paoli's displeasure. The uncrowned King of Corsica had done nothing to help, and therefore had done much to hinder, the candidature of Joseph for the French Convention. He was in truth a Republican of the old school, doubtful of these Jacobinical young Ronapartes, who were in league with suspected or declared enemies. Nevertheless Napoleon continued to cultivate relations with the man who still claimed the allegiance of the better part of the island. He commanded the artillery in the unfortunate expedition to Maddalena, and when the news came to Ajaccio that the arrest of Paoli was decreed, he composed an address to the Convention, protesting in warm and generous terms against so flagrant an injustice to a great and honour <= able patriot. But the struggle which had now begun in Corsica was too fierce to be assuaged by a pamphlet, however vigorous. The Bonapartes were known to be friends of Salicetti, the French commissioner at Bastia, and were therefore counted as the foes of Paoli; and Lucien's crowning act of insolence, becoming bruited at Corte, precluded any chance of reconciliation. It came to an open and unequal war. How Napoleon was taken by the Paolists in the mountain village of Bocognano; how he escaped down the long valley to a place of hiding in Ajaccio, and thence again by sea to the north; how, soon after, his mother was waked up at midnight and with four children safely drawn from the angry town to the lovely olive groves of Milelli, and thence upon news of Paolist bands across the fragrant hills to the tower of Capitello on the gulf; how the Paolists wreaked their vengeance on the offending clan, pillaging or burning six Bonaparte houses, two gardens and a mill; and how, finally, after many escapes and wanderings, a boat sailed from Calvi harbour on June 10, 1793, carrying Napoleon and his family away from their native shores and three days later landed the homeless fugitives at Toulon — all this may be found in many books, or may be still learned from the lips of hillmen among the granite homesteads of Corsica.

That summer marked a crisis in the destiny of France. The royalists were up in arms in the West, the Girondins in Normandy, Bordeaux, Marseilles. A serious revolt broke out in Lyons. The Allies recovered Belgium, drove the French from their capital frontier posts, Conde, Mainz, Valenciennes, and threatened an advance into the heart of the country. On August 28, 1793, Toulon, the great military port in the Mediterranean, received a British fleet and hoisted the flag of Louis XVII. At no time was the unity of France or the preservation of the republican government so gravely imperilled. For honest and moderate men the course of duty was by no means clear, for on the one side was a government stained by regicide and the excesses of martial law, on the other the white flag of reaction and the advancing insult of foreign conquest.

Napoleon had no difficulty in making his election. Meanly as he thought of Paris politicians he stood for the government of the day, and in an able dialogue, the Souper de Beaucaire, argued against the Girondins of Marseilles that the cause of the Mountain was the cause of France. Soon afterwards, on September 16, 1793, at the request of his Corsican friend Salicetti he joined the republican army before Toulon as commander of artillery; and it was here that his quality as a soldier was first decisively shown. He saw, as none had seen before him, that the problem of the siege was to dislodge the British fleet from the inner harbour, and that the key to victory was the fort L'Eguillette on the extreme tip of the western promontory of Caire. Three months of untiring energy and fearless courage were crowned with complete success. On December 19, 1793, the troops of the Convention entered Toulon, and the horrors of the siege were soon forgotten in the disgrace of the reprisals. To the young officer who had helped to procure this brilliant and well-timed victory the government of Robespierre owed a debt of gratitude. He was promoted to the rank of brigadiergeneral, and in the spring of 1794 dispatched at his own suggestion to Genoa nominally to negotiate for provisions, in reality to explore the ground with a view to hostilities. But in those days the life of a republican general, however loyal and eminent, was at the mercy of any random slander or base intrigue. Bonaparte, as the friend of the younger Robespierre and the emissary of the Terrorist government, became involved in suspicion after the revolution of Thermidor. Returning from Genoa with a mind stored with geographical knowledge, he was accused of being the plan-maker of the fallen tyrant, deprived of his military rank, and on August 12, 1794, thrown into prison at Fort Carre, near Antibes. There was nothing compromising in his papers. He had in truth studiously avoided over-close relations with the dead dictator. When Maximilien Robespierre offered him a military command in Paris, he wisely refused it, reckoning that no head could be safe in such a city, nor could laurels be won there yet. His prudence was rewarded. On August 20, he was released, and soon afterwards restored to his rank. How essential were his talents was proved on September 21 at Dego, when an Austrian force attempting to cut the French communications with Genoa was routed, largely owing to the skilful dispositions of the general of artillery.

His heart thenceforward was set upon the Italian command. He knew the ground and had thought out a plan by which a vigorous offensive in Italy might shatter the left wing of the continental coalition. But the Government cried a halt on the Riviera, and then summoned Napoleon to join the Army of the West as an infantry brigadier. Here he would be engaged as an officer in an arm not his own, in a civil war at once desperate and inglorious, against irregular bands of royalist nobles and peasantry. Pie came to Paris and boldly refused to go, under pretext of illness and reckoning upon the favour of B arras and Ereron, leaders of the dominant party who had seen and duly appreciated his work outside Toulon. For a time success crowned his resolution. He was consulted by the military committee of the Government, and drew up a new plan of campaign in Italy which was accepted and forwarded to the front. Then, by the retirement of Doulcet Pontecoulant, his patron and friend in official quarters, he was left unsheltered. The War Office awoke to his contumacy, and on September 15, 1795, just as he was expecting to be dispatched to Constantinople to organise the artillery of the Sultan, removed his name from the list of generals.

At this crisis of his fortunes Napoleon was saved by the lucky accident of an insurrection in Paris. The Convention, odious on many just accounts not only to the whole royalist connection, but to all men of moderate opinions, had excited a storm of indignation by decreeing that two-thirds of its members were to sit in the Legislative Assembly established under the new Directoral Constitution. Plain men argued that such a provision exhibited the hollowness of arrangements professedly contrived to conclude the Terror and to give to France an orderly and respectable government. What, they asked, was the use of the new constitution, with its Directory of Five, its Council of Ancients, its Council of Five Hundred, its wise and reassuring precautions against mob rule, if the ship of State was still to be steered by the old gang who had endured the September massacres, killed the King and the Queen, turned Paris into a slaughter-house, and given a recent exhibition of its clemency by doing the Dauphin to death in the Temple prison? The National Guard, some 30,000 strong, determined to wreak vengeance upon the body which had passed the odious "Law of the Two Thirds " ; and as the Convention had but 5000 troops under its control, the situation of the Government was gravely imperilled. From this almost desperate position the Convention was saved on the afternoon of October 5, 1795, by the guns of General Bonaparte. He had obtained an appointment through the friendship and esteem of Barras, who on the previous evening had been placed in command of the Paris troops, and since Barras was no soldier, the brunt of the defence was borne by Napoleon.

"His activity," says Thiebault, "was astonishing: he seemed to be everywhere at once; he surprised people by his laconic, clear and prompt orders; everybody was struck by the vigour of his arrangements, and passed from admiration to confidence and from confidence to enthusiasm." In street-fighting success depends upon artillery, and when Murat galloped in with the guns from the Place des Sablons the victory of the Convention was half secured. As the heads of the insurgents marched from the Church of St. Roch upon the Tuileries they were shot away by a welldirected cannonade; and after a brief struggle, and only at the cost of some 200 lives, the day was won. Had the issue been otherwise, we cannot doubt but that France would have been overwhelmed by a fresh wave of anarchy and civil war. However tarnished its credentials, however discreditable its most recent phase of policy, the Convention was at least as honest in purpose as many of its assailants, and more truly representative of the substantial interests of France. It stood at least for three things, all of which would have been endangered by its overthrow in Vendemiaire; for the revolutionary settlement, for the unity of the nation, and for the defence of the frontiers against foreign arms. Napoleon was rewarded by the command of the Army of the Interior. In saving the Convention he had preserved for France not only a social order grounded on equality, but a regicide government committed to war.