Napoleon Bonaparte - John S. C. Abbott (book club reads .txt) 📗

of thirty millions of people, had been for ten years agitated by the most terrible convulsions. There is no atrocity, which the tongue can name, which had not desolated the doomed land.

Every passion which can degrade the heart of fallen man, had swept with simoom blast over the cities and the villages of France.

Conflagrations had laid the palaces of the wealthy in ruins, and the green lawns where their children had played, had been crimsoned with the blood of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. A gigantic system of robbery had seized upon houses and lands and every species of property and had turned thousands of the opulent out into destitution, beggary, and death. Pollution had been legalized by the voice of God-defying lust, and France, la belle France , had been converted into a disgusting warehouse of infamy. Law, with suicidal hand, had destroyed itself, and the decisions of the legislature swayed to and fro, in accordance with the hideous clamors of the mob. The guillotine, with gutters ever clotted with human gore, was the only argument which anarchy condescended to use. Effectually it silenced every remonstrating tongue.

Constitution after constitution had risen, like mushrooms, in a night, and like mushrooms had perished in a day. Civil war was raging with bloodhound fury in France, Monarchists and Jacobins grappling each other infuriate with despair. The allied kings of Europe, who by their alliance had fanned these flames of rage and ruin, were gazing with terror upon the portentous prodigy, and were surrounding France with their navies and their armies.

 

The people had been enslaved for centuries by the king and the nobles.

Their oppression had been execrable, and it had become absolutely unendurable. “We, the millions,” they exclaimed in their rage, “will no longer minister to your voluptuousness, and pride, and lust.”

“You shall, you insolent dogs,” exclaimed king and nobles, “we heed not your barking.” “You shall,” reiterated the Pope, in the portentous thunderings of the Vatican. “You shall,” came echoed back from the palaces of Vienna, from the dome of the Kremlin, from the seraglio of the Turk, and, in tones deeper, stronger, more resolute, from constitutional, liberty-loving, happy England. Then was France a volcano, and its lava-streams deluged Europe. The people were desperate. In the blind fury of their frenzied self-defense they lost all consideration. The castles of the nobles were but the monuments of past taxation and servitude. With yells of hatred the infuriated populace razed them to the ground. The palaces of the kings, where, for uncounted centuries, dissolute monarchs had reveled in enervating and heaven-forbidden pleasures, were but national badges of the bondage of the people. The indignant throng swept through them, like a Mississippi inundation, leaving upon marble floors, and cartooned walls and ceilings, the impress of their rage. At one bound France had passed from despotism to anarchy.

The kingly tyrant, with golden crown and iron sceptre, surrounded by wealthy nobles and dissolute beauties, had disappeared, and a many-headed monster, rapacious and blood-thirsty, vulgar and revolting, had emerged from mines and workshops and the cellars of vice and penury, like one of the spectres of fairy tales to fill his place. France had passed from Monarchy, not to healthy Republicanism, but to Jacobinism, to the reign of the mob. Napoleon utterly abhorred the tyranny of the king. He also utterly abhorred the despotism of vulgar, violent, sanguinary Jacobin misrule. The latter he regarded with even far deeper repugnance than the former. “I frankly confess,” said Napoleon, again and again, “that if I must choose between Bourbon oppression, and mob violence, I infinitely prefer the former.

 

Such had been the state of France, essentially, for nearly ten years. The great mass of the people were exhausted with suffering, and longed for repose. The land was filled with plots and counterplots.

But there was no one man of sufficient prominence to carry with him the nation. The government was despised and disregarded. France was in a state of chaotic ruin. Many voices here and there, began to inquire “Where is Bonaparte, the conqueror of Italy, the conqueror of Egypt? He alone can save us.” His world-wide renown turned the eyes of the nation to him as their only hope.

 

Under these circumstances Napoleon, then a young man but twenty-nine years of age, and who, but three years before, had been unknown to fame or to fortune, resolved to return to France, to overthrow the miserable government, by which the country was disgraced, to subdue anarchy at home and aggression from abroad, and to rescue thirty millions of people from ruin. The enterprise was undeniably magnificent in its grandeur and noble in its object. He had two foes to encounter, each formidable, the royalists of combined Europe and the mob of Paris. The quiet and undoubting self-confidence with which he entered upon this enterprise, is one of the most remarkable events in the whole of his extraordinay career. He took with him no armies to hew down opposition. He engaged in no deep-laid and wide-spread conspiracy. Relying upon the energies of his own mind, and upon the sympathies of the great mass of the people, he went alone, with but one or two companions, to whom he revealed not his thoughts, to gather into his hands the scattered reins of power.

Never did he encounter more fearful peril. The cruisers of England, Russia, Turkey, of allied Europe in arms against France, thronged the Mediterranean. How could he hope to escape them? The guillotine was red with blood. Every one who had dared to oppose the mob had perished upon it. How could Napoleon venture, single-handed, to beard this terrible lion in his den?

 

It was ten o’clock at night, the 22d of August, 1799, when Napoleon ascended the sides of the frigate Muiron, to France. A few of his faithful Guards, and eight companions, either officers in the army or members of the scientific corps, accompanied him. There were five hundred soldiers on board the ships. The stars shone brightly in the Syrian sky, and under their soft light the blue waves of the Mediterranean lay spread out most peacefully before them. The frigates unfurled their sails. Napoleon, silent and lost in thought, for a long time walked the quarter deck of the ship, gazing upon the low outline of Egypt as, in the dim starlight, it faded away.

His companions were intoxicated with delight, in view of again returning to France. Napoleon was neither elated nor depressed.

Serene and silent he communed with himself, and whenever we can catch a glimpse of those secret communings we find them always bearing the impress of grandeur. Though Napoleon was in the habit of visiting the soldiers at their camp fires, of sitting down and conversing with them with the greatest freedom and familiarity, the majesty of his character overawed his officers, and adoration and reserve blended with their love. Though there was no haughtiness in his demeanor, he habitually dwelt in a region of elevation above them all. Their talk was of cards, of wine, of pretty women.

Napoleon’s thoughts were of empire, of renown, of moulding the destinies of nations. They regarded him not as a companion, but as a master, whose wishes they loved to anticipate; for he would surely guide them to wealth, and fame, and fortune. He contemplated them, not as equals and confiding friends, but as efficient and valuable instruments for the accomplishment of his purposes. Murat was to Napoleon a body of ten thousand horsemen, ever ready for a resistless charge. Lannes was a phalanx of infantry, bristling with bayonets, which neither artillery nor cavalry could batter down or break. Augereau was an armed column of invincible troops, black, dense, massy, impetuous, resistless, moving with gigantic tread wherever the finger of the conqueror pointed. These were but the members of Napoleon’s body, the limbs obedient to the mighty soul which swayed them. They were not the companions of his thoughts, they were only the servants of his will. The number to be found with whom the soul of Napoleon could dwell in sympathetic friendship was few—very few.

 

Napoleon had formed a very low estimate of human nature, and consequently made great allowance for the infirmities incident to humanity. Bourrienne reports him as saying, “Friendship is but a name. I love no one; no, not even my brothers. Joseph perhaps a little. And if I do love him, it is from habit, and because he is my elder. Duroc! Ah, yes! I love him too. But why? His character please me. He is cold, reserved, and resolute, and I really believe that he never shed a tear. As to myself, I know well that I have not one true friend. As long as I continue what I am, I may have as many pretended friends as I please. We must leave sensibility to the women. It is their business. Men should have nothing to do with war or government. I am not amiable. No; I am not amiable. I never have been. But I am just.”

 

In another mood of mind, more tender, more subdued, he remarked, at St. Helena, in reply to Las Casas, who with great severity was condemning those who abandoned Napoleon in his hour of adversity: “You are not acquainted with men. They are difficult to comprehend if one wishes to be strictly just. Can they understand or explain even their own characters? Almost all those who abandoned me would had I continued to be prosperous, never perhaps have dreamed of their own defection. There are vices and virtues which depend upon circumstances. Our last trials were beyond all human strength! Besides I was forsaken rather than betrayed; there was more weakness than of perfidy around me. It was the denial of St. Peter . Tears and penitence are probably at hand. And where will you find in the page of history any one possessing a greater number of friends and partisans? Who was ever more popular and more beloved? Who was ever more ardently and deeply regretted? Here from this very rock on viewing the present disorders in France who would not be tempted to say that I still reign there? No; human nature might have appeared in a more odious light.”

 

Las Casas, who shared with Napoleon his weary years of imprisonment at St. Helena says of him: “He views the complicated circumstances of his from so high a point that individuals escape his notice. He never evinces the least symptom of virulence toward those of whom it might be supposed he has the greatest reason to complain. His strongest mark of reprobation, and I have had frequent occasions to notice it, is to preserve silence with respect to them whenever they are mentioned in his presence. But how often has he been heard to restrain the violent and less reserved expressions of those about him?”

 

“And here I must observe,” say Las Casas, “that since I have become acquainted with the Emperor’s character, I have never known him to evince, for a single moment, the least feeling of anger or animosity against those who had most deeply injured him. He speaks of them coolly and without resentment, attributing their conduct in some measure to the place, and throwing the rest to the account of human weakness.”

 

Marmont, who surrendered Paris to the allies was severely condemned by Las Casas. Napoleon replied: “Vanity was his ruin. Posterity will justly cast a shade upon his character, yet his heart will be more valued than the memory of his career.” “Your attachment for Berthier,” said Las Casas, “surprised us. He was full of pretensions and pride.” “Berthier was not with out talent.” Napoleon replied, “and I am far from wishing to disavow his merit, or my partiality; but he was so undecided!” He was very harsh and overbearing.” Las Casas rejoined. “And what, my dear