NAPOLEON.-(I.)

It is just a hundred years ago that, with the campaign in France, 1814, and the Battle of Waterloo, 1815, the Napoleonic period came to an end. The War, which at this moment sets two-thirds of mankind in motion, and embraces the whole of it, is, in its extent, kindred to the wars of that time; but it is in the highest degree different from them, not only in the enormous masses of soldiers which it employs, but owing to the evolution of the means of communication during the past century.

Napoleon waged war like Alexander the Great, more than two thousand years before him: on foot, on horseback, and in waggons along roads; with sailing ships on the sea. If he required information from his Ambassador at St. Petersburg, he had to send a courier on horseback, who six weeks later brought back the reply. His battles lasted a day, two at the outside. His campaigns were comparatively short.

The whole of his reign was short. He was Consul for a little more than four years, and Emperor for ten years in all. Seldom has so short a period been so eventful and so memorable.

I.

THE first time Napoleon felt his plans painfully crossed by Fate was on the news of Dupont's capitulation at Baylen in 1808. From that moment the unqualified success which had carried him victorious over all difficulties deserted him. But even as late as the beginning of October, 1812, Napoleon appeared at Moscow as the undisputed master of the Continent of Europe. He personally had as yet suffered no defeat. He was forty-three years old, Emperor of the French and King of Italy. He had married an Emperor's daughter and had an heir to the throne. His realm extended from the coast of Holland to the Ionian Islands, from Danzic to the southern extremity of Italy. He ruled as a despot over a hundred millions of mankind. But on October 19th he began the retreat from Moscow, and in 1912 Russia celebrated the centenary of this retreat with great festivities as the memory of a triumph for the Russian people. However, it is scarcely doubtful that, had Napoleon succeeded in gaining a footing in Russia, it would have been a blessing for the country. Then the Russian serfs would have been liberated half a century earlier; religious liberty, which was ostensibly proclaimed by

the Czar in 1905, would have been a fact in 1812, and altogether the misruled Russian nation would have been led into the way of liberty and prosperity along which the French nation has marched since that time. But the collapse in Russia gave the decisive blow to Napoleon's power. Eighteen months after his occupation of Moscow, his dominion was reduced to the island of Elba. A year later he was a prisoner at St. Helena. The edifice of his power then apparently collapsed like a house of cards.

Nevertheless, the whole structure remained intact within the frontiers of France down to the present day, because Napoleon was not only the heir of the Revolution, but the man who gave it legal form. He did not originate the great steps in advance which the Revolution owes to the thinkers of the eighteenth century, but he secured them. He poured the red-hot metal of the Revolution into the moulds of the law, so that the metal became hard and shining bronze on which nothing bites. When the imperial power slipped from his hands, he left behind-like old Rome when it lost the empire of the world-his laws, which for the most part are in force at the present day.

The third French Republic has entered upon a difficult transformation-has, for instance, substituted for the Concordat with the Catholic Church a separation of Church and State, which, in itself a great achievement, though clumsily accomplished, has not yet had very profitable results, but has divided the French people into two hostile camps. And still less are the traces of Napoleon's domination obliterated beyond the frontiers of France, where it rendered obsolete the old forms of administration and justice.

II.

Goethe, in the first scene of his Faust, invented the word 'Superman." (It is used contemptuously by the Spirit of the Earth in addressing Faust.)

In the days of his power, Napoleon appeared as the superman. During the wars against him he was throughout Europe looked upon and described as the monster. In the caricatures of that age, especially the English ones, he is frequently the devil himself, or the devil points to him and says: "This is my only begotten son, in whom I am well pleased." Since then the human being in him has been understood.

After his fall every good quality was denied him. He was simply the tyrant, a stupendous butcher, a destroyer of human life on a grand scale. And it is not to be denied that 1,700,000 Frenchmen and 2,000,000 of other nations fell in the wars of the Empire, 1804-1814, alone.

It was said that he was a liar through and through, that he lied in his bulletins-those productions of a great writer-that he appropriated the honour of his Generals' victories, of Augereau's exploit at Arcole, of Desaix's victory at Marengo, although in this very bulletin he speaks of Desaix almost as Achilles of Patroclus. He was said to have appropriated the honour of the legislative work of his lawyers, since Portalis had draughted the "Code Napoleon "-as if he himself did not overwork his lawyers! He was supposed to have grossly falsified the story of his life while at St. Helena. His very nature was humbug. In Alfred de Vigny's famous tale in Stello the imprisoned Pope calls Napoleon alternately "Commediante" and "Tragediante." It was said that he rehearsed his elocution and attitudes with the actor Talma, whereas Talma certainly imitated him.

It was even sought to deny his military talents. In Chateaubriand's pamphlet, Buonaparte et les Bourbons, Napoleon is described as an incapable general, who could do nothing but send his troops to the attack, and who was doubtless victorious, but solely on account of the excellence of those troops, a thing that was independent of his leadership. Literally, Chateaubriand says: "By what qualities did this foreigner seduce the French nation? By his military glory? But even of this he is now stripped. He no doubt won a great many battles. But apart from this the most insignificant general is more capable than he. It has been imagined that he developed and perfected the art of war, but in reality he took it back to its infancy." (Flaubert has included this passage in his collection of notable foolish sayings.) It was asserted that Napoleon was personally cowardly. See the description in Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'Outretombe of his terror during the journey through France after the abdication at Fontainebleau. He borrowed the uniform of an Austrian colonel,

the

cap of a Prussian, the cloak of a Russian. He trembled and changed colour at the slightest noise. But the mob wanted to tear him to pieces. No wonder that he, who had preserved the calmness of a statue in every shower of bullets, dreaded such a death. In German lampoons of 1813-1814 he is frequently called a coward, and every little German State, even Hesse-Darmstadt, claimed the honour of his defeat. In a Darmstadt soldiers' song of that period I have found these lines :

"Napoleon, du Schustergesell'!

Kujon, was läufest du so schnell?

Hättest du mit Darmstadt Frieden gemacht,
Du hättest es wahrlich weiter gebracht."

"Napoleon of the cobbler's last!

Coward who runs so far and fast.

Had you made peace with Darmstadt-say,
Would you not happier be to-day?"

In France it was again and again asserted that he was not French at all, but Italian, and therefore a foreigner. His name was Buonaparte. He lied when he said he was born after the conquest of Corsica (1769); he was one year older, and was thus born before the incorporation of Corsica with France; he had caused the entry of his baptism in the register at Ajaccio to be forged.

This assertion is untrue, although in France one may still hear it uttered by eminent men. I have myself examined the register, and convinced myself that a falsification is out of the question. So little attention was paid at that time to the orthography of proper names that "Bonaparte" is spelled differently, with and without the "u," in the two instances in which the name appears there.

In Germany it is an article of faith that Napoleon was a liar. Certain it is that, being a politician, he, like most other politicians, did not scruple to use an untruth when it would serve him. He was, moreover, a warrior, and, as a Corsican, was brought up in the belief that a ruse was as legitimate as fair fight. But how careful one ought to be in accusing him of mendacity is shown, for instance, by this irascible letter of his to the Duke of Rovigo after the glorious battle at Montmirail and Vauxchamps in 1814:

"You must have lost your head in Paris, since you have it proclaimed that we were here fighting against odds of three to one, while I have everywhere blazoned forth that I have 300,000 men, and got the enemy to believe it, and I continue to repeat it ad nauseam. Thus you destroy with one stroke of the pen all the good results of our victories. You ought to understand that this is not a question of an empty halo, and that one of the first axioms in war is to exaggerate one's forces. But how is one to explain such things to poets, who only think about flattering me and flattering the national vanity?

Here, then, he lies from a sense of duty, despising the glory which a knowledge of the true circumstances would bring him.

At that time his adversaries were not satisfied with emphasising the violence and harshness of Napoleon, his ability to mould men as his tools and make use of them. Again and again his crimes are exposed: the grim judicial murder which—immediately before he became Emperor in 1804—he caused to be committed on the Duke of Enghien in order to terrify his royalist opponents; the judicial murder in 1806 of the bookseller Palm of Nuremberg for publishing a pamphlet on the degradation of Germany and the bad behaviour of the French troops in Bavaria at that time; the judicial murder in 1810 of Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese champion

of liberty, whom the wretched Emperor of Austria could not even protect.

It is possible to defend the two last homicides according to the barbarous martial morality of that age, which, by the way, still persists, and that in a greatly aggravated form.

The first homicide might seem indefensible; but it should nevertheless be remarked that no less a man than Goethe has defended it, nay, did not even consider it needed defence. In a conversation at Wolzogen's table in the beginning of October, 1808, at Weimar, Goethe pointed out the greatness and wisdom of Napoleon in always having an end in view. Other princes permitted themselves sympathies and antipathies; Napoleon, on the other hand, never allowed himself to love or oppose anything but what promoted or obstructed his object. What stood in his way was struck down. Goethe thought it perfectly in order that Napoleon should blow out the brains of a pretender like Enghien, or a ranter like Palm, in order once for all by a conspicuous example to frighten the public, which always interferes with the undertakings of a genius. And Goethe concluded (according to Falck's report): "He fights with circumstances, with a corrupt century among a corrupt nation. Let us count him fortunate, him and Europe, that he himself, with his immense world-plans, is not corrupt.

Napoleon was regarded in 1815 by princes and peoples simply as the crucial danger to the peace of Europe so long as he was free. Therefore his imprisonment was considered justifiable, although it was unprecedented, and, speaking generally, it is an unheard-of thing that a monarch who surrenders-and surrenders of his own free will after losing a battle and abdicating— should be treated as a criminal and kept in custody, not merely until peace is concluded, but as a prisoner for life. The few weak parallels are the fate of Mary Stuart, when she, too, trusted to the magnanimity of an English Government, and the fate of her husband, Bothwell, when he reckoned upon a Danish Government's neutrality and noble-mindedness. One has often heard the warning against building upon sand. It can, however, very well be done. Sand has been calumniated. It is magnanimity that should never be built upon.

III.

Both in and out of France, as we know, a violent reaction took place about the time of the Revolution of July. In France, with Henri Beyle, with Victor Hugo (in his oriental songs and twilight poems), with Armand Carrel in his articles, with Thiers in his