History of the Consulate and Empire-unphilosophical, but lucid and great in its design-and lastly with Béranger's ballads, amongst which the pearl is Les Souvenirs du Peuple, where the narrative is placed in the mouth of an old peasant woman. Here he is already complete as the legendary hero with the little cocked hat and the long grey coat: "He spoke to you, Grandmother, he spoke to you!"

In Germany, Heinrich Heine's verses and prose correspond to this; later those of Laube and others. In the English-speaking world Napoleon did not gain admirers until much later; in our time he has a great number.

Under Louis Philippe the change of feeling was so decided that the Government had to send the King's son to bring back Napoleon's remains from St. Helena, and had to enshrine his sarcophagus in the Invalides.

Outside France the deification of his memory went farthest with the Polish poets. To them Napoleon had become by the year 1830 the supernatural man, the mysterious one, who was not to be fathomed by any intellectual process; he alone had called forth anew the faculty of admiration, which, according to their assertion, the eighteenth century had lost. No human being could have vanquished him, no other general than His Excellency General Frost and His Excellency General Famine in Russia.

In Mickiewiez and Krasinski, Napoleon becomes a demi-god, a Messiah. His mission was to save the nations. And since St. Helena is to them something approaching a Golgotha, a gleam of the passion of Christ falls over the imprisonment and death of Napoleon.

IV.

In our days the purely human in Napoleon's nature has been studied, in a hostile spirit during the reign of Napoleon III.when it was sought to strike at the nephew through the uncle -and since then impartially. The monster and the superman have long ago been merged in a dæmonic figure, whose origin explains the extremes in its nature.

Napoleon was originally an out-and-out Italian. In his earlier years the conquest of Corsica filled him with continual exasperation and impassioned hatred of the French. Although formally of French birth, he was by nature not French; he was late in learning to use the language like a native; he never mastered French orthography, a fact which he concealed by dictation. He had a true Roman genius, which was sheer lucidity, but not a spark of genuine French esprit.

His mother was a Cornelia, no French lady of the eighteenth

century. There is in him an ancient Roman element (his head reminds us of Augustus) and a still more pronounced Italian Renaissance element. His family is of Florentine origin, and he has certain essential qualities in common with a condottiere of the fifteenth century: his concentrated energy and, at first, his relative indifference to the cause serves, since at bottom he serves himself. Like the warriors of that age, he has stubbornness of will, unyielding determination, the ability to make a fresh decision on the spot, if the first one proves impracticable. He never loses sight of his aims. And he has the pronounced political instinct of the Italian, the instinct of relative power, of the means of shifting the political centre of gravity, which is equally marked in Machiavelli, in Julius II., and in Mazarin (Giulio Mazarini). When we follow him in his political wrestling match with Alexander I. we seem to be watching a contest between an Italian's cunning and a Byzantine's agility and shrewdness.

He reminds one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance by his combination of realism and magnificent fantasy. The French genius has a foundation of sound commonsense, a clear intellect entirely free from the fantastic. We see this in its most pronounced embodiments in Montaigne, La Fontaine, Molière. Genius in the most French of Frenchmen is characterised by taste and tact; it is analytic, as in Racine and Voltaire, or verbal as in Hugo. Bonaparte is practical, not verbal; synthetic, not analytic. As regards his taste, there is not much to be saida great deal, on the other hand, about his creative fantasy. Like Michelangelo, he has a fondness for the colossal, the grandiose. During his long stay at Carrara in 1505 Michelangelo saw a mountain which dominated the coast. He was seized with the idea, which he cherished for a long time, of transforming the whole mountain into a gigantic statue. This corresponds to Napoleon's plan in 1808 of founding a world-empire by attacking England in India by three routes simultaneously-across the isthmus of Suez, from Central Asia, and around the Cape, fitting out for this purpose fleets in Brest, Lorient, Toulon, Spezia, Genoa, Flushing, Boulogne, Dunkirk, Havre, Cherbourg, Rochefort, Bordeaux, Ferrol, Lisbon, and Carthagena: the squadron from Toulon was to embark 20,000 men at Tarento and reconquer Egypt; the fleets from Brest and Lorient were to land 18,000 men in India; the Franco-Russian Army was to reach the Euphrates rapidly, after having divided Turkey on the way between France and Russia. Everything was prepared, when the revolt in Spain forced Napoleon to postpone his plan.

In that tendency of Napoleon's genius which is akin to poetry and art-he not infrequently called himself an artist-he is more

Italian than French. His genius has the mathematical framework which underlies Dante's Divina Commedia with its strictly symmetrical architecture; and it has the gigantic element which appears so early in Michelangelo, who even portrays the little David in his fight with Goliath as a giant.

If Bonaparte, in spite of his Italian blood, arrived at supremacy over Frenchmen, this was due to that law of the exceptional, by virtue of which the men who have exercised the greatest influence in a country have often been of foreign origin. Moreover, of course, he became more French every year.

V.

The personality of Napoleon cannot be understood without an examination of the data which rendered its development possible. They are three: Corsica, the French Revolution, and the French Army.

In his native island the forces which found an outlet in him had long been accumulating unseen. In him his race reached its zenith. The unbridled energy of antiquity and of the middle ages, which in more recent times had been lost in the policerestricted States of the rest of Italy, was preserved in wild and lonely Corsica. Among his countrymen this energy took the form of the vendetta and general brigandage; in Bonaparte that of ambition, lust for power. In Iceland, which offers a feeble parallel, pagan energy disappeared much more rapidly, and no great man embodied it in modern times. In Corsica this energy became personified.

His desire for power found a soil, where it could take deep root and grow as high as heaven, since the French Revolution towards the end of the eighteenth century had swept away all the barriers of the old régime, had at first with noble enthusiasm introduced a new judicial system, and then at last put wild lawlessness in the place of justice. Nobody was any longer sure of life or property; justice was the perquisite of political dilettanti. Bonaparte's earliest political action was therefore the suppression of the insurrection of 1795.

Under the Directory, France was no longer revolutionary, but it was revolutionised. Boundless disorder prevailed, even to widespread highway robbery. France sighed for a ruler, an organiser.

The year 1798 swarmed with exceptional laws. Relatives of émigrés and former noblemen were excluded from the franchise. The tribune of Parliament was reserved for Revolutionists approved by the Government. In the provinces a man was bound to the soil; if he absented himself for some time from his com

mune he was liable to be entered on the lists of émigrés. The Press was fettered; the proprietors and editors of thirty-five papers were under police supervision. Public worship was free on paper, but any priest could at any time be deported. Liberty of association also only existed on paper, and personal freedom was abolished, as anybody could be arrested at pleasure. The former nobles, who had remained on their estates, were exposed not only to the plundering of the Inland Revenue, but to innumerable humiliations. The Government was so anti-clerical that the peasants were forbidden to dance on Sunday, which day, of course, was done away with. Liberty itself thus turned against the Revolution.

On the other hand, society no longer possessed a ruling caste, but boundless possibilities of rising step by step.

Involuntarily, France gave to Napoleon the whole epitome of new and victorious ideas to which he owes his spiritual significance, his historical value.

After Corsica and the Revolution, the preliminary conditions of Napoleon's success were that he was a soldier and a military genius. While the civil community had collapsed and the former social restrictions were broken down, there was still cohesion in the army, discipline in the army, mutual confidence and respect in the army. The Revolution had penetrated the army with its enthusiasm and with its passions, but had not dared to destroy it, as victory was of the first importance. The military spirit had become one of the forms of the Revolutionary spirit.

The motto of the Revolution had been liberty, equality, fraternity. Liberty excluded any equality in possessions. Equality, if absolute, excluded liberty, since equality can only be brought about by force. Of fraternity not much was ever seen. In the army alone there was a fraternal spirit.

VI.

If the French of 1799 endured Bonaparte as their master, although they had just made a ten years' Revolution in order to shake off the yoke of their master, it was due to the fact that of the two watchwords, liberty and equality, under which they had conducted the Revolution, equality was much dearer to them than liberty. Bonaparte may perhaps be charged with not having established liberty, but not with having demolished it, since he found it nowhere. The Jacobins had idolised the word and eradicated the thing.

Bonaparte strongly upheld the principle of equality as the right of everybody to rise to the highest summits, if only he was useful

or brave. He did more than maintain equality: he glorified it. He further endeared it to the French. And by thrice resorting to universal suffrage he consolidated the revolutionary principle of the sovereignty of the people.

Even before his time the rights of birth and the privileges of wealth had ceased to exist, but under him there were no Jacobin privileges either. Napoleon protected the expelled, the worsted, the émigrés and their relatives, the nobility, the clergy, and the returned, appointing them as well as the Republicans to any position they could fill.

In so far he appeased the Conservatives. But the new division of property, which was brought about by confiscating and parcelling out estates of the Church and the aristocracy, he secured for the benefit of citizens and peasants. Those who had founded the Revolution and survived the Terror were to enjoy in peace the benefit of their deeds and work. Napoleon gave them this security.

In this he appealed to the Revolutionaries.

And the liberty, which was lost, but in reality had never existed, was turned into free promotion: all paths open to efficiency. Not birth, but courage, strength, talent, genius, decided the matter.

To the Emperors, Kings, and Princes of Europe the Revolution was, of course, a horror. They only dreamt of re-introducing the old régime in France, lest the spirit of revolt might infect Europe and spread to their countries. Napoleon defended the new state of things, the abolition of caste divisions and prerogativism, the dependence of the Church on the State, the rights of man, the rights of citizenship, the new economical order, against the whole of hostile Europe, which entered into one coalition after another against him. He gave the final blow to the age of feudalism.

Nay, what is more, wherever he went on his military expeditions he brought the new age with him. He abrogated the Inquisition in Spain; he gave the Jews of Germany human rights. He introduced the "Code Napoléon" with its reforming principles in the Rhenish Provinces and in Russian Poland, where, in spite of all, it is in force to this day; and thus this man, who was the conqueror of the Revolution at home, spread the principles of the Revolution everywhere abroad.

When he reached power, France expected two things of him : domestic liberty and peace with foreign countries. He gave her neither.

He feared political liberty, but he professed it and preserved the appearance of it. He never condemned it, and he conceded it at last in "L'acte additionel," 1815.