Napoleon For and Against

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NAPOLEON
FOR AND AGAINST
By the same author
THE NETHERLANDS DIVIDED.* 1609-1648
THE REVOLT OF THE NETHERLANDS
NAPOLEON
FOR AND AGAINST
by
PIETER GEYL
Professor of Modern History in the Universitj of Utrecht
Translated from the Dutch hj
OLIVE RENIER
Spirit Sinister: *. . . My argument is that

\Var makes rattling good history; but
Peace is poor reading. So I back
Bonaparte for the reason that he will give
pleasure to posterity,’
THOMAS HARDY, The Dynasts
Part First, Act ii. Scene v.
JONATHAN CAPE
THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE
LONDON
FIRST PUBLISHED 1949
Dewey Classification
923*144
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN THE CITY OP OXFORD

AT THE ALDBN PRESS
BOUND BY A. W. BAIN 8c CO. LTD., LONDON
CONTENTS
PREFACE 7
PART ONE
THE ANTITHESIS AT THE BEGINNING

ARGUMENT WITHOUT END 15
I CHATEAUBRIAND 17
ii MADAME DE STAEL 19
III THE NAPOLEONIC LEGEND 23
PART TWO
THE FIRST CHRONICLERS

I M. MIGNET 35
II BARON BIGNON 37
III ARMAND LEFEBVRE 45
IV ADOLPHE THIERS 53
PART THREE
REACTION AGAINST THE LEGEND

THE CIRCUMSTANCES 71
I JULES BARNI 73
II EDGAR qUINET 77
III PIERRE LANFREY 86
IV COMTE d’hAUSSONVILLE 106
V HIPPOLYTE TAINE 133
PART FOUR
ADMIRERS
THE POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND 151
I PRINCE NAPOLEON 156
II HENRY HOUSSAYE 160
ni ARTHUR-LfeVY 169
IV FRfeDfeRIC MASSON 177
V COUNT ALBERT VANDAL 210
5
CONTENTS
PART FIVE
THE PROBLEM OF FOREIGN POLICY

I OLD ACQUAINTANCES 235
II EMILE BOURGEOIS 241
m TWO MORE OLD ACQUAINTANCES 250
IV ALBERT SOREL 254
V EDOUARD DRIAULT 308
PART SIX
THE ANTITHESIS AT THE END

CURRENTS AND COUNTER CURRENTS 351
FIVE ‘UNIVERSITAIRES’
I ALPHONSE AULARD 356
II A. L. GUfeRARD 362
ni G. PARISET 364
IV JULES ISAAC 371
V CHARLES SEIGNOBOS 373
THREE ‘ACADfeMICIENs’
VI JACQUES BAINVILLE 376
VII LOUIS MADELIN 390
vin GABRIEL HANOTAUX 403
ANOTHER ‘uNIVERSITAIRe’
IX GEORGES LEFEBVRE 421
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 453
INDEX 467
INDEX OF AUTHORS 475
MAPS
CENTRAL EUROPE IN 1796 Facing 17
CENTRAL EUROPE IN "1807 » >»
6
PREFACE
TO THE FIRST DUTCH EDITION
I CANNOT claim to be an expert on Napoleon. To do so rightfully

one must have devoted a lifetime of study to the man and to the
period.
This book is a by-product of our recent experiences. In the
early months of 1940, finding it difficult to pursue the work on
which I was engaged, I plunged into reading about Napoleon and
wrote an essay which was to have appeared in the June number of
one of our monthly reviews. After the capitulation, in May, the
manuscript was returned to me, still marked with an instruction
to the printer to be quick, and without a word of explanation. No
explanation was needed for me to understand that, although
I had not written a single word in it about Hitler or National
Socialism, the parallel with our own times had seemed to the
editor a little too pointed in the new circumstances. In Septem¬
ber 1940 I used the article for some lectures in the Rotterdam
School of Economics, where occasional bursts of laughter showed
the audience to be equally alive to the parallel. Again, when I
repeated those lectures, not much more than a month later, in
very different surroundings and for a very different public, namely
in Buchenwald concentration camp for my fellow hostages, it was
the parallel that roused the keenest interest and amusement.
After Buchenwald, in the various places in Holland where I
spent the remainder of my forty months of internment, I did a
good deal of further reading on Napoleon, but it was only after my
release on medical grounds in February 1944 that I conceived and
executed the plan of the present book.
Let me state, in fairness to my own work, that I found a good
deal more than the parallel to attract me. Napoleon had his own
fascination, and French historiography a charm of its own. Not
even the article of 1940 had been in the first instance suggested to
me by the problem of the resemblance or contrast between Napo¬
leon and Hitler, but by the historiographical problem, the problem
of the endless variety of interpretations of Napoleon, his career,
his aims and his achievements. Yet — how could it be otherwise?
—• I had been struck by the parallel no less than had my readers
7
PREFACE
or hearers, and in this book, too, it has undeniably remained an
element, even though I have alluded to it only very occasionally
and have nowhere worked it out.
‘I always hate to compare Hitler with Napoleon’, so, listening

to the B.B.C. the other day, I heard that Winston Churchill had
been telling the House of Commons, only to continue with a ‘but’
and to enter upon the comparison all the same. So it is with all
of us, and so it is with me. It is simply impossible not to do so.
The resemblances are too striking. No doubt — and I want to
state this with unmistakable emphasis — the differences, the'con¬
trasts, are no less obvious. History does not repeat itself. Between
noticing a parallel and establishing an identity there is a wide gap.
Between the two world assailants in question the differences, the
contrasts, are such that, even when as in my case one had hated
the dictator in Napoleon long before the evil presence of Hitler
began darkening our lives, one almost feels as if one should ask the
pardon of his shade for mentioning his name in one breath with
that of the other. The Revolution which he represented — in so
far as he did represent it — was a different one. The national
civilization by which his conquests were accompanied was ... but
no! I do not want to say that French civilization was made of so
much finer stuff than German: the difference is that under Napo¬
leon French civilization, albeit stifled and narrowed by him, still
accompanied the conquest, while the character of the conquest
that it has been the lot of our generation to undergo, is not com¬
patible with any civilization at all. Lastly, the personality of
Napoleon — indeed, when I think of elaborating the comparison
on that score, I suddenly feci a surge of revolt against the ‘detrac¬
tors’ with whom generally (as will be seen) I am on quite friendly
terms.
‘But’ ... But the fact remains that we are here faced with
phenomena that show an unmistakable relationship. In both
cases there was a revolution — two revolutions, I am not forget¬
ting it for a moment, animated by principles that are not only
radically different but in some respects even diametrically
opposed. But, for all that, in both cases a revolution moved by the
conviction, by which all revolutions are moved and which causes
them to be so incalculably dangerous, that it is bringing a new
world, a new order; that, therefore, all the standards, all the laws,
8
PREFACE
of the past have become antiquated; and that it has on its side not
power only, but right, so that everything must give way and all
opposition, if not contemptible, will be criminal.
Napoleon certainly did not embody, or did not embody in
their purity, the principles of 1789, but he derived from the Revo¬
lution the conviction I have just described, and it made him the
dictator and conqueror he was. He was a dictator who attempted
to break with new legislation what resistance was left in the old
society; who intensified his power in the State by means of a cen¬
tralized administration; who suppressed not only all organized
influence or control and expression of opinion, but free thought
itself; who hated the intellect, and who entered upon a struggle
with the Church which he had first attempted to enslave; and who
thought that with censorship, police and propaganda he would be
able to fashion the mind to his wish. He was a conqueror with
whom it was impossible to live; who could not help turning an ally
into a vassal or at least interpreting the relationship to his own
exclusive advantage; who decorated his lust of conquest with the
fine-sounding phrases of progress and civilization; and who at
last, in the name of the whole of Europe, which was to look to him
for order and peace, presumed to brand England as the universal
disturber and enemy.
Methods of compulsion and atrocities? The worst that our
generation has had to witness, the persecution of the Jews, had no
parallel in Napoleon’s system. Indeed that system remained true,
from first to last, to conceptions of civil equality and human rights
with which the oppression or extermination of a group, not on
account of acts or even of opinions, but of birth and blood, would
have been utterly incompatible. And yet methods of compulsion
and atrocities are inseparable from the character of the dictator
and conqueror, and we shall see that Napoleon incurred bitter
reproaches, at home and abroad, for some of his acts. Neverthe¬
less this is one of the points where the comparison is bound to do
good to his reputation. What is the prescription of The general
staff of the Jacobins’ beside the annihilation of all opposition
parties in jails or concentration camps such as has taken place in
the Third Reich? What is the murder of the Duke of Enghien
beside those of Dolfuss, of General Schleicher and his wife, and of
so many others on June 30th, 1934? What are the executions of
Palm, of Hofer, what are even the severities with which so ma ny
9
PREFACE
villages and towns in Germany and Spain were visited, beside
what in our time all occupied territories have had to suffer from
Hitler’s armies? The French police was hated and feared in the
occupied and annexed territories, but when one reads about their
conduct with a mind full of our present experiences, one cannot
help feeling astonished at the restraints and resistances they still
met with in the stubborn notions of law and in the mild manners
of a humane age.
I do not grudge them, nor do I grudge the entire Napoleonic
regime, the credit which here again accrues to them from the com¬
parison. But if we are to be true to our own standards, if we want
to live up to our determination that no retrogression in civilization
shall be dated from our time, we must not in contemplating the
past react less sensitively than did the men then living. The case
of the persecution of the Jews remains singular: for the rest we
must be alive to the fact, when we compare then and now, that
although there is a difference in degree, there is none in
principle.
There is another point to which it is difficult not to fear that the
parallel may extend — it is only a later generation that will know
for certain. .1 am alluding to the legend. When one secs the
French licking the hand that had chastised them; when one
notices how the errors and crimes of the Hero, the trials of the
people, the disasters and losses of the State, were forgotten in the
glamour of military achievement, of power, unsound and transi¬
tory though it was; when one notices the explanations and con¬
structions, ingenious, imaginative, grandiose, that were put up as
much as a century later by historians — and such excellent his¬
torians! — then one seems already to discern among later genera¬
tions of Germans the apologists and admirers of the man who was
our oppressor and who led them to their ruin.
But, as I have said, I should not be fair to the present book if I

gave the impression that it was written for the parallel and owed
to the parallel, in my opinion, its principal interest. Certainly it
has been a constant surprise to me, while reading and writing, to
find the parallel presenting itself to my mind again and again at
ever fresh points. The idea that the course of Revolution and of
Dictators is predestined, or subject to some law, repeatedly forced
itself upon my mind. But in the end the book has come to be
lO I
PREFACE
what I wanted it to be and what the title indicates, a book on
Napoleon as seen by French historians.
In two ways have I myself been constantly fascinated while I
was engaged upon it. First, by the inexhaustible interest of the
figure of Napoleon. I shall not attempt in this preface to give what
I have not wanted to undertake in the book, a synthetic valuation
of that figure. I am not suffering from the illusion that I have been
able to relate the various interpretations, without subjecting them
to a judgment of my own. I have striven to give the more impor¬
tant of them their full due, but still the reader will easily discover
that I have my preferences and my aversions, connected with
personal convictions and principles, and that — to use the some¬
what over-simplified division of my sub-title — my sympathies are
with the against rather than with the for category. But I shall not
on that account imagine that the entire Napoleon is to be found
in Lanfrey or in Taine. I feel grateful to Masson and Bainville too
for having taught me to see other aspects of that many-sided per¬
sonality, and to Sorel and Vandal for having expressed the
historical phenomenon in terms which, problematical as they may
be, make one hesitate before any all too single-minded rejection of
Napoleon as the Dictator and Man of Violence.
And in th second place I have, I may almost say continuously,
enjoyed the spectacle presented by French historiography. What
life and energy, what creative power, what ingenuity, imagination,
and daring, what sharply contrasted minds and personalities!*
And all the time the historical presentation turns out to be closely
connected with French political and cultural life as a whole.
I can only hope that I shall be able to communicate to the
reader something of my interest in the protean figure of Napoleon
and in the manifold problems of his regime, as well as in the
picture given by his historians and its connection with the modern
histoiy of France.
P. G.
Utrecht
October 14th, ig44
All I want to add to the above preface, which was written

nearly seven months before Holland was liberated, is a cordial
^ I do not claim to give a complete survey, but I do believe I may say that the
omissions do not affect the general outlines of the picture.
II
PREFACE
word of thanks to the translator, Mrs. Renier, for her devotion and
patience, and to my friend Professor Renier, for his belief in the
book as well as for his assistance.
P. G.
Utrecht
November 2^d, ig4y
13
PART ONE

ARGUMENT WITHOUT END
My aim in this book is to set forth and compare a number of

representations of Napoleon as given by leading French historians.
Striking differences will emerge, but this is hardly surprising.
History can reach no unchallengeable conclusions on so many-
sided a character, on a life so dominated, so profoundly agitated,
by the circumstances of the time. For that I bear history no
grudge. To expect from history those final conclusions, which
may perhaps be obtained in other disciplines, is, in my opinion,
to misunderstand its nature.
I say this with some emphasis, for Professor Romein, in his
inaugural lecture at Amsterdam, did take precisely this point of
view. He was dealing with a subject similar to mine. He was
tracing the various accounts that have been given at different
times of the Dutch revolt against Spain, and the resulting chart of
conflicting opinions seemed to alarm him considerably. He called
his lecture ‘An Image Shattered’, and the scientific method as
applied to history seemed to him to have failed, since its conse¬
quence is not unity but diversity.
Without entering into philosophical or methodological discus¬
sions I must nevertheless make it clear that this lack of finality
strikes me as both unavoidable and natural, and that the scientific
method is certainly not to blame. The scientific method serves
above all to establish facts; there is a great deal about which we
can reach agreement by its use. But as soon as there is a question
of explanation, of interpretation, of appreciation, though the
special method of the historian remains valuable, the personal
element can no longer be ruled out, that point of view which is
determined by the circumstances of his time and by his own pre¬
conceptions. Every historical narrative is dependent upon
explanation, interpretation, appreciation. In other words we can¬
not see the past in a single, communicable picture except from a
point of view, which implies a choice, a personal perspective. It
is impossible that two historians, especially two historians living
in different periods, should see any historical personality in the
same light. The greater the political importance of an historical
character the more impossible this is.
15
Is there anyone whose decisions have been more affected by the
ever-widening network of international relations than Napoleon?
Is there anyone whose decisions have had greater consequences
for the whole of Europe? It goes without saying that the various
writers who have tried to express their opinions of him and his
career have reached different conclusions. No human intelligence
could hope to bring together the o,verwhelming multiplicity of
data and of factors, of forces and of movements, and from them
establish the true, one might almost say, the divine, balance. That
is, literally, a superhuman task. A man’s judgment — for, however
solemnly some people may talk about the lessons of History, the
historian is after all only a man sitting at his desk — an historian’s
judgment, then, may seem to him the only possible conclusion to
draw from the facts, he may feel himself sustained and comforted
by his sense of kinship with the past, and yet that judgment will
have no finality. Its truth will be relative, it will be partial.
Truth, though for God it may be One, assumes many shapes to
men. Thus it is that the analysis of so many conflicting opinions
concerning one historical phenomenon is not just a means of
whiling away the time, nor need it lead to discouraging con¬
clusions concerning the untrustworthiness of historical study. The
study even of contradictory conceptions can be fruitful. Any one
thesis or presentation may in itself be unacceptable, and yet, when
it has been jettisoned, there remains something of value. Its very
critics are that much richer. History is indeed an argument
without end.
i6
CHAPTER 1
CHATEAUBRIAND
Napoleon had his detractors and his glorifiers, even during his
lifetime. To see him as he appeared to his detractors it is not neces¬
sary to go to that part of Europe which opposed and finally
brought him down. In his own France there were Chateaubriand
and Mme de Stael, of whom the former painted a most repulsive
picture of him at the critical moment after his first abdication,
when the Bourbons were making their initial somewhat hesitating
appearance on the scene. ^
Chateaubriand is a figure of great importance in French litera¬
ture, one of the very few which the period produced. Mme de
Stad, however greatly her work may differ from his, is the only
writer whom one would immediately and unhesitatingly place on
the same level. Romanticism is vested in him, not only in his origi¬
nal, lively style, but in his attitude towards himself and towards
life. He is the nobleman, homesick for the ancien regime^ with a real
feeling for those values of beauty and tradition imperilled by the
Revolution. Yet he had too deep an understanding, too developed
an historical instinct, to be a pure reactionary. At an early stage
Chateaubriand had made his peace with the regime, he was a
rallie^ as it was called, and had established his reputation by the
publication of Le Genie du Christianisme^ a wholly emotional and
traditionalist apology for Catholicism, on aesthetic and sociological
lines, which made a tremendous hit at that moment of reaction
against the anti-clerical tendencies of the Revolution, and served
the reading public as suitable companion-piece to Bonaparte’s
Concordat. Young Chateaubriand was in good odour at the new
Court, through the influence of Fontanes, the Consul-Emperor’s
Court poet and orator, himself a man of the ancien regime^ but he
was made of tougher stuff than the pliable, self-seeking Fontanes.
Two courageous actions, at a time when Napoleon’s power ap¬
peared unassailable, had earned him the right to attack the Em¬
peror in 1814. In 1804, after the murder of the Due d'Enghien,
he resigned from the diplomatic service during the stricken silence
^ De Buonaparte^ des Bourbons; 18x4.
B 17
which follow’êd the crime. In 1807 he wrote an article in his paper,
the Mercure^ which made an even greater sensation. In scarcely
veiled terms he attacked imperial tyranny, summoning it before the
judgment seat of history. The paper was immediately suppressed.
But Napoleon still hoped to be able to do something with
him, and the Academy took the risk, therefore, of making him a
member. His inaugural address, however, was of stich a characte,r
that his meddlesome overlord refused him permission to deliver it
without alterations which he refused to make. If it was his pride,
his vanity, as much as a fundamental dislike of despotism, which
made him stand up to the Emperor, the fact remains that he did
stand up to him, and Napoleon, though he took no measures
against the vicomte (certainly to his secret disappointment), was
worried by the opposition, however ineffective, of the great writer.
Indeed this one testimony by a Catholic nobleman of royalist con¬
nections, encouraged all those who still, in their hearts, resisted,
even when their emotional and intellectual background was very
different.
The work that appeared ir\ 1814 was simply a pamphlet, and
its importance is largely due to the moment at which it appeared.
In that atmosphere of uncertainty it sounded a positive note,
hatred of the fallen emperor. What was Napoleon? The destroyer,
the despiser of men, the foreigner, the Corsican, especially scornful
of Frenchmen, careless of French blood, devourer of generations of
young men, suppressor of all free opinion, demanding of writers a
toll of flattering unction as the price of permission to publish ~~ in
a word, the tyrant.
18
CHAPTER II
MADAME DE STAEL
There was open war between Mme de Stael and Napoleon. In

1803 she was exiled from France, and her books, at first merely-
branded as indecent by the obedient press, were banned. The
angle from which she judged the regime, her personality and her
methods, explain why Napoleon was less tolerant to her than he
was to Chateaubriand.
Mme de Stael was the daughter of the Swiss banker Necker,
who at the eleventh hour of the ancien rigime was to have been the
minister responsible for its reconstruction, and from whom, in the
first stage of the Revolution, the National Assembly had expected
so much. She admired her father, and remained faithful through¬
out her life to the original liberal aims of the Revolution. Perhaps
this can be explained by her Protestant origins and upbringing.
Perhaps it was also the fact that she was not French by birth, how¬
ever deep her love for France, which made her immune to the
lures of glory and power which undermined the resistance of so
many others. Her personal fortune and the title of her husband,
a Swedish diplomat, enabled her to play an important part in the
social life of Paris, and this, thanks to her vivacious and energetic
personality, she was able to maintain through many a change of
government. Her salon was the centre of her life. Conversation,
as she herself says, was her greatest pleasure, but perhaps it gave
her even more satisfaction to exert influence, to play a part, through
her friends and her activities, in the development of the great
events going on aroun^ her.
As a woman with a devouring need for action, whose aim it was
to know, and if possible to influence, everyone worth knowing in
political circles, she had naturally tried to get hold of General
Bonaparte after his triumphs in Italy. In this she had not much
success, for Bonaparte did not care for intellectual women. Never¬
theless Mme de Stael was still among his admirers after the
Egyptian campaign, and rushed eagerly back to Paris after i8th
Brumaire to enjoy the spectacle of what she considered a reforming
and conciliatory administration. But before long disillusionmen
19
set in. The young dictator’s determination to do everything him¬
self, his refusal to admit discussion, revolted her. She had a sharp
eye for the dangerous implications of his cavalier attitude to the
law. As a result she egged on her friend Benjamin Constant to
outspoken warnings and criticism in the Tribunate. Nothing
more was needed to make Bonaparte see her as an enemy. The
concentrated spite with which he persecuted her, and the energy
with which she carried on the fight verbally and through her
writings, combined to convert her from a celebrated into a great
European personality.
There was something European about her. She was enthu¬
siastically French, but she knew Europe better than most French¬
men. Her Swiss-Protcstant youth gave her the key to a world
which it was difficult for them to penetrate, particularly after the
Revolution. Before her time her great compatriot Rousseau had
done everything he could to carry French culture beyond the
limits of a narrow classicism which to most people seemed to be
solely national. Though politically his spirit might have found
triumphant expression in the Revolution, culturally this upheaval
had given rise to a reaction against that interest in the intellectual
life of England and Germany which had begun to show its broad¬
ening and fertilizing effect.* The Revolution followed the
reactionary classical tradition of Voltaire not only in those literary
outpourings which later generations have found unreadable, but
in that general idea of Man as a universal abstraction, in that
indifference, or even impatience, displayed towards the individual,
the distinguishing, features of peoples and of national cultures.
Naturally the features of this abstract Man were predominantly
French, but the demands of universality made it necessary to ex¬
clude those special characteristics which are at the same time the
deepest and the truest, with the most deleterious effects on the
originality and vitality of French civilization.* These tendencies
^ cf. Joseph Texte, J.-J. Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitisme litter aire
(1895), PP. 406 sqq.
* Voltaire cited the fact that Corneille and Racine were played everyw^here while
Shakespeare, so far, only in England, as a sufficient proof of the inferior literary
value of the latter. His reasoning has since lost its basis, but apart from that it is
typical of the French classical spirit. The following point of view, which could be
called traditionally English, would be completely unintelligible to Voltaire:
‘A man does not attain to the universal by abandoning the particular, nor to the
everlasting by an endeavour to overleap the limitations of time and place. The
abiding reality exists not somewhere apart in the air, but under certain temporary
and local forms of thought, feeling, and endeavour. We come most deeply into
communion with the permanent facts and forces of human nature and human life,
20
MADAME DE STAEL^^^
were only emphasized under Napoleon. His own outlook was
classicist, universalist, in the typical eighteenth-century way, even
though, as we shall see, there was a strong romantic streak in his
personality. At the same time he consciously excited the pride and
self-satisfaction of la grande nation. The wars automatically brought
about a disparaging attitude towards cultures other than the
French, and in particular hatred of England, and the isolation and
sterile rigidity of French culture was never so marked as when the
French were pouring over the whole continent of Europe.
The importance of Mme de Stael in the cultural history of
France lies in the fact that in spite of unfavourable circumstances
she kept up her opposition against this cramping of the spirit. This
was the declared aim of her famous book on Germany, which
especially called down on her head the thunderbolts of Napoleon
and his policy. But politically she reserved her greatest admiration
for England, the land in which popular forces had free play, the
land of liberalism par excellence^ a view which was not likely to make
Napoleon regard her with more favour. At the end, in 1813, she
visited princes and ministers who were getting ready for the last
lap of the struggle, and spurred them on, but only to the war
against Napoleon, for the distinction between the tyrant and the
France she loved was a fundamental in her view of the situation.
She felt herself too much a part of the Revolution to glorify the
Bourbons, as Chateaubriand had done. Her charge against Napo¬
leon was that he had assassinated Republican liberty. Her ideal
remained liberty, enlightened, moderate, the liberty of philoso¬
phers and writers.
It was from this point of view that she wrote her Considerations
sur la Revolution franâise, which was published in 1818 after her un¬
timely death. The idea of Napoleon which she develops in the
second part, illustrating it by an account of his whole career, is
remarkably well thought out. There are personal memories and
observations, and yet the whole work has nothing in it of the
inimoire or of the pamphlet. This woman of genius has succeeded
in portraying her subject in historical perspective, which is not of
course the same as saying that she has succeeded in giving the
objective truth about Napoleon. But it is in her writings that for the
by accepting first of all this fact,—that a definite point of observation and sympathy,
not a vague nowhere, has been assigned to each of us.’ E. Dowden, Sfiakspere ...
His Mind and Art (3rd Edition, 1883), pp. 8 sqq.
21
first time it is possible to find unfavourable criticism allied to

the actual events, in such a way as to set one thinking. Moreover
the problems with which the liberal spirit, the spirit of belief in the
rule of intellectual and moral values, must always wrestle when it
comes in contact with the phenomenon of power, its rise and de¬
cline, are stated by her in such a way that it sometimes seems as
though later writers, though capable of finer shades and possessing
a far richer store of data, can only elaborate her themes.
Here are the brief outlines of her portrait of Napoleon, his career
and his personality.
He comes to the fore as a soldier. The principles of political
warfare do not interest him. He destroys republican idealism,
first in the army, then, with the help of the army, in the State. He
is the complete egoist, for whom human sympathy does not exist,
for whom men are despised tools, pieces on a chess board. He is a
foreigner among the French. Having no faith and no fatherland,
he pursues no other purpose than his own greatness. He is the sly
machiavellian, who promises peace and makes play with the bogy
of Jacobinism, but who, when once power is in his hands, can do
nothing but make war. He is the man for whom religion and
literature mean nothing, except in so far as they minister to his
greatness or his power, and under whom both must wither. In
short, as in Chateaubriand’s pamphlet, he is the tyrant.
CHAPTER III
THE NAPOLEONIC LEGEND
The first to provide a portrait in which there was nought but

unblemished beauty, endearing humanity, greatness and virtue,
was Napoleon himself. On St. Helena he set about the task of
shaping his reputation for posterity. The Memorial^ in which the
Marquis Las Cases noted his conversations,^ a book which had an
immeasurable influence in France, and which was the first and
foremost source of what is called the Napoleonic legend, was
peculiarly suited to become a popular classic. Anecdotes and
reminiscences chosen at random from the whole miraculous life
are interwoven with speculations, the whole within the framework
of the Longwood tragedy and the bitter struggle with Sir Hudson
Lowe, which Las Cases describes from day to day. This plan gives
the book its human note. It catches the emotions as well as the
interest of innumerable readers. It presents Napoleon not just
as the aloof, mighty Emperor, but as somebody who, for all
his incomparable cleverness, greatness and luck, is nevertheless
accessible, one of ourselves.
From this living, variegated backcloth emerges the political
Napoleon. He is before everything else the son of the Revolution,
the man who consolidated the possession of equality, and made
good his country’s escape from feudalism by restoring order, by
ridding France of those factions which had practically dissipated
the fruits of the Revolution, and by wresting peace from the mon-
archs who hated France and the Revolution. That peace (Lune-
ville, i8oi, Amiens, 1802, when Bonaparte had only just become
First Consul) was a breathing space, which brought sudden over¬
whelming popularity to the victorious young hero. There was
nothing Napoleon liked better to recall after his downfall, and the
fact could hardly be denied, but how brief was that respite! How
endless, bitter and bloody were the campaigns which followed, up
to the disasters and the final collapse! It was all the fault, so the
Napoleon of the Mimorial would have us believe, of those self-same
monarchs, and of envious Britain, His conquests had adorned the
^ Le Mimorial de Sainte Hiline; some editions carry the title Mimoires de Napoliorty
which properly belongs to the Mimoires dictated by Napoleon and dealing mainly
with his campaigns.
name of France with undying fame — gloire, that word dear to the
Frenchmen of the period — but they had been forced upon him.
He had been obliged to conquer Europe in self-defence. And even
this conquest was fraught with benefits. After the French it was
the turn of the Dutch, the Swiss, the Germans, the Italians, the
Spanish, to receive the blessings of the codes of laws and other
revolutionary reforms. Had he been allowed to go his own way,
or had he remained victorious, Europe would have become a
federation of free peoples, grouped round enlightened and fortu¬
nate France in an eternal peace. It was the hatred of the monarchs
and the envy of England, the mischief-maker, the pirate swayed
only by low, materialistic motives, which had destroyed this noble
future for France and for Europe.
Such is Napoleon’s apology. But I would give an incomplete
outline of the Memorial, and would fail to account for the impres¬
sion it made, were I to omit to add that not only is this apology
embedded among anecdotes, reminiscences and daily particulars
of the mournful exile, but that no sense of inconsistency prevents
the fallen Emperor from enlarging with inexhaustible compla¬
cency on his military achievements. The whole work glows with
the glory which surrounds Napoleon even in his fall, and which
the people of France share with him. The glory of France is the
thought to which he constantly returns; and what he did, he did
for France.
POETS AND NOVELISTS
The Napoleonic legend was enriched from many sources, and it

may well be said that the most important was Napoleon’s own
downfall. Was it not easier to glorify him, when he was no longer
there to oppress men, and when his insatiable demands had no
longer to be satisfied? Chateaubriand says something of the sort
in his Memoires d'Outre-Tombji. Here, though he repeats all his
indictments, he allows free rein to the admiration which obsessed
him and which forced him to compare his own career, from his
birth in the same year, with that of the All-Powerful, to compare,
to contrast, to extol, in particular in connection with his own
opposition.
Tt is the fashion of the day’, he writes,* ‘to magnify Bonaparte’s
^ III, 341. The Mhnoires (TOutre-Tombe appeared in i860, a few years after the
death of Chateaubriand.
24
THE NAPOLEONIC LEGEN
victories. Gone are the sufferers, and the victims’ curses, their
cries of pain, their howls of anguish, are heard no more; exhausted
France no longer offers the spectacle of women ploughing her soil;
no more are parents imprisoned as hostages for their sons, nor a
whole village punished for the desertion of a conscript. No longer
are the conscription lists stuck up at street corners, no longer do the
passers-by crowd round long lists of death sentences to con them
anxiously for the names of their children, their brothers, their
friends, their neighbours. It is forgotten that everyone used to
lament those victories, forgotten that the people, the Court, the
generals, the intimates of Napoleon were all weary of his oppression
and of his conquests, that they had had enough of a game which,
when won, had to be played all over again, enough of that exist¬
ence which, because there was nowhere to stop, was put to the
hazard each morning.’
Indeed it was all forgotten. People were forgetting their dislike
of despotism, now that they were faced with the Bourbons, their
Court of emigres and their priests, and now that France could
harvest no new glory. They were forgetting it as they saw the
famous soldiers neglected by a despicable government. The oppo¬
sition, the men of 1789, listened with emotion when General Foy
voiced their complaints in the Chamber of Deputies, and praised
them, and in them their dead leader.^ Take the case of Beyle —
Stendhal — who had been grumbling about trampled liberty while
Napoleon lived and who only now came truly under his spell.*
The young people in his novels idolize Napoleon. Fabrice in La
Chartreuse de Parme is an Italian, and in Stendhal’s own view the
French conquest of Italy meant an altogether desirable liberation
from government by priests and obscurantism, while after Napo¬
leon’s fall stupidity, senility and cruelty set the tone once more.*
In Le Rouge et le Jôir^* the action of which takes place in France,
Stendhal proclaims his old dislikes through the mouth of an em¬
bittered republican, to whom Napoleon is merely the man who
^ Vaulabelle, Ilistoire des deux restaurations^ V, 295 sqq.
* A. Chuquet, Stendhal-Beyde (1902), chapter *Napol^n’.
* The tredici mesi (1799-1800), when French rule was interrupted by an Austrian
victory, appeared to Milan, according to Stendhal, as a return to gloom and dark¬
ness; only the monks and a few nobles like the Marquis del Dongo (the father of
the hero), who ‘professed a lively dislike of enlightenment*, were disappointed
when Bonaparte won the battle of Marengo and the French returned. In 1810 the
more amiable characters look back upon ‘ten years of progress and of happiness*.
See La Chartreuse de Parme^ 13, 17.
* The subsidiary title is Chronique de 1830,
2^
has restored all that monarchical nonsense and put the Church
back on its pedestal again. But for Julien, the young Frenchman,
Napoleon is a god, and the Mimorial ‘the only book in the world,
the guide of his life, and object of ecstatic admiration’. And yet h^
wants to be a priest! But the lesson he gets from the book is that
one must be accommodating, that with will power you can achieve
anything in life. The world no longer belongs to the man with
the sword, courageous and gay, but to the soft-voiced, ruthless
dissembler, in his cassock.
That was a lesson indeed. Not everyone dared to learn it, and
so perplexity, a sense of powerlessness, of being crippled, overcame
a generation ‘begotten between two battles’. It was De Musset,'
speaking with the melancholy voice of the romantics, who voiced
their woes. He did not see in Napoleon that professeur d'energie,
proclaimed, as we shall see, to the French youth of a later age, nor
did he know what to make of the advice ‘faites-vous pretre’ which,
according to him too, was addressed to his youthful contempora¬
ries from all sides. But among the dreary ruins of his day, what an
impression the figure of the Emperor made on his imagination,
how overwhelmingly mighty, inspiring a sense of oppression and
of admiration alike!
No criticism, no cynical inferences, no despair, nothing but
open-mouthed astonishment at that supernatural good fortune,
pity for that end, and a generous, satisfied acceptance of his glory
as exalting all Frenchmen, and in particular the masses who had
given him his soldiers — this is the reaction, as Balzac describes
it,* of peasants listening to an old soldier telling them about Napo¬
leon’s career. It is a tale of miracles that is unfolded to them.
The hero’s mother dedicated him to God, that he might raise
religion from where it lay prostrate. And so he was invulnerable.
Though his comrades fell around him, the hail of bullets left him
unharmed. His soldiers became accustomed to victories. Some¬
times he would encircle and capture ten thousand of the enemy
with but fifteen hundred Frenchmen. He began by conquering
Italy, and the Kings grovelled before him. Was that a man like
you or me? But in Paris they began to be afraid he might swallow
up France, too, and so they sent him to Egypt. ‘There you see his
likeness to the Son of God.’ He promises land as booty to his
soldiers. More miracles, and it was India’s turn, but then there
' Confettion d’un Enfant du Siicle. * Le Midecin de Campagne, 1832.
came the plague. So he returns, to save France (that is, from the
Directory).
‘ “What have you done with my children, my soldiers?” he
asked the lawyers.’ He shuts them up in their chatter-barracks,
and makes them dumb like fish, and flabby like tobacco pouches.
The Pope and the Cardinals come in state to his imperial corona¬
tion. ‘ “Children”, says he, “is it right that your Emperor’s
relations should have to beg? Let’s go and conquer a kingdom for
each of them.” “Agreed”, answers the army. Those were good
days! Colonels became generals, generals became marshals, mar¬
shals became kings. More victories. “Vive I’Empereur”, you cry,
as you die. Was that natural? Would you have done that for just
an ordinary human being?
‘Then comes his call to us to go and conquer Moscow, after all
the other capitals, because Moscow had allied itself with England.
Kings flock to lick his boots — difficult to say who is not there.
The Poles, whom he wants to raise from their degradation, are
our brothers. But the mysterious Man in Red, who has crossed his
path more than once, warns him that men will abandon him, that
his friends will betray him. Moscow: the fire: the fearful retreat.
They say he wept at night for his poor family of soldiers.’ Betrayal
as it was foretold, everywhere, even in Paris, so that he has to go
away, and without him the marshals commit one folly after
another. Napoleon had fattened them up till they would no longer
trot. Even now he makes splendid soldiers out of conscripts and
civilians, but they melt away like butter on a grill, and at his back
— the English! They rouse the people to revolt, whispering non¬
sense in their ears.
His abdication at Fontainebleau; he says goodbye to us and we
cry like children. ‘Children, it is treason that has defeated us.’ He
comes back with two hundred men, and this is the greatest miracle
of all. With them he conquers the whole of France. Waterloo!
But Napoleon cannot find Death. France is crushed, the soldiers
despised, in their places noblemen who never bore arms. By
treachery the English seize the Emperor and nail him to a rock in
the ocean. In France they say now that he is dead, but that only
shows they don’t know him! ‘Vive Napoleon, the people’s and the
soldiers’ father!’
This is indeed legend and in its most naive form. As usual, the
cry of betrayal goes up to mitigate the bewilderment and shame of
defeat. But indeed in this story, so typical of Balzac, in whose

pages we must not look for Stendhal’s critical spirit, but who can
bring reality to life with so fine an imaginative skill, arc to be
found all the elements needed to dazzle the common man unused
to reasoning. He appeals to the craving for the miraculous, to the
national self-conceit, to religious feeling, to rapacity, to republican
and anti-aristocratic tendencies, and to the simple need to give
hero-worship and trust. The fact that these elements conflict does
not make the mixture any the less heady. Napoleon is the man of
the hero-worshipping boy, the man of the dreamy poet, but he is
also the man of the people. ‘The only king remembered by the
people’, thinks Stendhal’s Julien, hearing two workmen talking
regretfully of the days of the Emperor,
But indeed Beranger, affecting, in his bourgeois way, a popular
tone, at once frivolous and sentimental, lover of liberty and hater
of priests and aristocrats, idealizing Napoleon in reaction to the
Restoration, preferred to approach him through some old ser¬
geant — memorids of glory, of enthusiasm for liberty: the nations
were made kings by our conquests, and crowned our soldiers with
flowers, but our leaders, ennobled by him, have betrayed the good
cause and flatter the tyrants. Let the People arise! — or through
an old woman who has seen the Emperor in his glory, and in his
adversity received him in her hovel, and set before him dry bread
and her sour local wine:
II me dit: ‘Bonne esp^rance!

Je cours de tous ses malheurs
Sous Paris venger la France.’
II part; et, comme un tresor,
J’ai depuis gardd son verre.
But he fell into the abyss. There was bitter sorrow.
On parlera de sa gloire
Sous le chaume bien longtemps.
Bien, dit-on, qu’il nous ait nui,

Le peuple encore le rdv^re,
‘One asks oneself’, says Chateaubriand,* ‘by what sleight of

hand Bonaparte, who was so much the aristocrat, who hated the
* Mdmoires d’Outre-Tombe, IV, 6o.
people so cordially, has been able to obtain the popularity which

he enjoys. For there is no gainsaying the fact that this subjugator has
remained popular with a nation which once made it a point ofhonour
to raise altars to independence and equality. Here is the solution.
‘It is a matter of daily observation that the Frenchman’s instinct
is to strive after power; he cares not for liberty; equality is his idol.
Now there is a hidden connection between equality and despot¬
ism. In both these respects Napoleon had a pull over the hearts
of the French, who have a military liking for power and are
democratically fond of seeing everything levelled. When he
mounted the throne, he took the people with him. A proletarian
king, he humiliated kings and noblemen in his anterooms. He
levelled the ranks, not down but up. To have dragged them down
to plebeian depths would have flattered the envy of the lowest; the
higher level was more pleasing to their pride. French vanity, too,
enjoyed the superiority which Bonaparte gave us over the rest of
Europe. Another cause of Napoleon’s popularity is the affliction
of his latter days. After his death, as his sufferings on St. Helena
became better known, people’s hearts began to soften; his tyranny
was forgotten; it was remembered how, having vanquished our
enemies and subsequently having brought them into France, he
defended our soil against them; we fancy that if he were alive
today he would save us from the ignominy in which we are living.
His misfortunes have revived his name among us, his glory has fed
on his wretchedness.
‘The miracles wrought by his arms have bewitched our youth,
and have taught us to worship brute force. The most insolent
ambition is spurred on by his unique career to aspire to the heights
which he attained.’
But Chateaubriand’s sombre warning was the voice of the past
— or of the future. His contemporaries took refuge in illusion. So
did Victor Hugo, who, in a manner quite different from that of
Stendhal or Balzac or B^ranger, found in the figure of the Emperor
an outlet for his romantic longing for greatness, which was myster¬
iously combined with a love of freedom. In his ‘Ode to the Column’
— the triumphal column in the Place Vendome from the top of
which on March 31st, 1814, the day of the Allies’ entry into Paris,
a group of royalist noblemen with their plebeian hirelings had
removed the statue of the Emperor —the poet, writing in 1830,
dedicated to Napoleon ‘his youthful muse, singing nascent free-
dom’, and promised the departed hero that this generation, which,
though it had not known him as master, honoured him as a god,
would come and fetch him from his island grave. And what
transports there are when ten years later his mortal remains
actually return to Paris. ‘The blessed poets shall kneel before you;
the clouds which obscured your glory have passed, and nothing
will ever dim its true lustre again.’
Sainte-Hd^ne, leôn! chute! exemple! agonie!

L’Angleterre, a la haine epuisant son genie,
Se mit a devorer ce grand homme en plein jour.
Jadis, quand vous vouliez conqucrir une ville,

Ratisbonne, ou Madrid, Varsovie ou Seville,
Vienne I’austere, ou Naple au soleil radieux,
Vous fronciez le sourcil, 6 figure idcale!
Alors tout ^tait dit. La garde imperiale
Faisait trois pas comme les dieux.
Tu voulais, versant notre s^ve

Aux peuples trop Icnts a mfirir,
Faire conquerir par le glaive
Ce que I’esprit doit conquerir.
Tu pretendais, vaste esperance!
Remplacer Rome par la France
Regnant du Tage a la Neva;
Mais de tels projets Dieu se venge.
Duel effrayant! guerre etrange!
Jacob ne luttait qu’avec I’ange,
Tu luttais avec Jehovah!
Here are elements which we shall meet with in the writings of

historians right down to our own time. Here you have pity for the
hero’s personal fate, dislike for cold-blooded England, unregenerate
pleasure in military power, and at the same time an attempt to
give spiritual life to the great struggle by linking it to the spread of
French thought all over Europe, to liberty, to world peace, so that
the spectacle of the catastrophe may be lifted on to a higher plane.
Victor Hugo voiced the spirit of the time in his poem, while
Chateaubriand’s was an isolated, independent view. This is true.
Yet amid the chorus of adulation there were other discordant
notes. One poem has remained famous; in it the Napoleonic
legend is challenged and assailed with vivid force at the very
moment of its clamorous emergence. It is all the more remarkable
for the fact that the writer was a young man and spoke, not in the
name of religion or of monarchy, but of liberty and republicanism.
The young man was Auguste Barbier, and the poem L'Idole {1831).
Everyone knows the lines:
O Corse a cheveux plats! que la France etait belle
Au grand soleil de messidor!
C’etait une cavale indomptable et rebelle.
Sans frein d’acier ni renes d’or.
The Corsican succeeded in controlling that marvellous animal,
and rode it without pity, spurring it till the blood ran, pulling at
the bit till its teeth broke, till it sank down dying — and crushed its
rider. Certainly, cries Barbier (and here he is obviously aiming
at Hugo), I too suffer from the memory of that humiliating day
when they pulled down the statue under the eyes of the foreigner,
the day when French women bared their breasts to the Cossacks,
but I heap my curses on one man only; ‘Be thou cursed, O
Napoleon.’ But the unholy image is set up again.
Grace aux flatteurs mclodieux,
Aux poetcs menteurs, aux sonneurs de louanges,
Cesar est mis au rang des dieux.
Ah, ends the poet, good princes, wise men who lighten the
peoples’ chains:
Lc peuple perdra votre nom;

Car il nc se souvient que de I’homme qui tue
Avec lc sabre et le canon.
The masses honour those who force them to carry stones to build
their pyramids; the masses are like a street girl who gives her love
only to the man who beats her....
PART TWO

CHAPTER I
M. MIGNET
3ne of the remarkable phenomena of the first generation after the

all of Napoleon is the association of Napoleonic legend with
radicalism. Indeed we found from Barbier’s hymn of hate that
Dpposition under the banner of liberty and 1789 was never inter¬
rupted. With regard to historical writing in the earliest period I
shall draw attention only to Mignet’s short history of the French
Revolution, which appeared in 1824, before the legend had really
taken shape, but which was continually reprinted. This, too, was
the work of a young man. Some hundred pages are devoted to
the Consul-Emperor’s administration. With a few deft, incisive,
strokes Mignet gives us the portrait of a despot who subordinated
both the Revolution and the country to himself.
‘The nation’, says Mignet, speaking of the period of the Peace of
Amiens, ‘lay in the hands of the great man, or of the despot; his
was the choice, either to preserve it in freedom or to enslave it. He
preferred his ambitious schemes; he set himself above the rest of
mankind, alone. Brought up in camps, a late arrival in the Revolu¬
tion, he understood only its material side, the language of its
interests. He believed neither in the moral cravings which had
stirred up the Revolution, nor in the convictions which had swayed
it, and which sooner or later were bound to emerge again and
bring about his downfall. He saw a revolt approaching its end,
a weary people delivering themselves up to him, and a crown
which was his for the taking.’
For Mignet the Concordat was nothing more than Bonaparte’s
plan to acquire domination over the Church, and through the
Church, over the people. He concludes his short account of it
with the scornful reply of the general whom the First Consul asked
how he liked the Te Deum sung after the ratification (all the
unbelieving generals of the Revolution had had to attend whether
they liked or not): ‘Pretty monkish mummery! Only those million
men were absent who died to overthrow what you are setting up
again.’ In the institutions Mignet sees nothing but their lack of
freedom. The press, the representative bodies are crippled and
CHAPTER I
M. MIGNET
One of the remarkable phenomena of the first generation after the

fall of Napoleon is the association of Napoleonic legend with
radicalism. Indeed we found from Barbier’s hymn of hate that
opposition under the banner of liberty and 1789 was never inter¬
rupted. With regard to historical writing in the earliest period I
shall draw attention only to Mignet’s short history of the French
Revolution, which appeared in 1824, before the legend had really
taken shape, but which was continually reprinted. This, too, was
the work of a young man. Some hundred pages are devoted to
the Consul-Emperor’s administration. With a few deft, incisive,
strokes Mignet gives us the portrait of a despot who subordinated
both the Revolution and the country to himself.
‘The nation’, says Mignet, speaking of the period of the Peace of
Amiens, ‘lay in the hands of the great man, or of the despot; his
was the choice, either to preserve it in freedom or to enslave it. He
preferred his ambitious schemes; he set himself above the rest of
mankind, alone. Brought up in camps, a late arrival in the Revolu¬
tion, he understood only its material side, the language of its
interests. He believed neither in the moral cravings which had
stirred up the Revolution, nor in the convictions which had swayed
it, and which sooner or later were bound to emerge again and
bring about his downfall. He saw a revolt approaching its end,
a weary people delivering themselves up to him, and a crown
which was his for the taking.’
For Mignet the Concordat was nothing more than Bonaparte’s
plan to acquire domination over the Church, and through the
Church, over the people. He concludes his short account of it
with the scornful reply of the general whom the First Consul asked
how he liked the Te Deum sung after the ratification (all the
unbelieving generals of the Revolution had had to attend whether
they liked or not): ‘Pretty monkish mummery! Only those million
men were absent who died to overthrow what you are setting up
again.’ In the institutions Mignet sees nothing but their lack of
freedom. The press, the representative bodies are crippled and
35
muzzled, the authorities and the courts exercise arbitrary power.

In the wars of Napoleon he sees nothing but an attempt to use
Europe for his crazy dream of power.
Yet was there not something more in these wars after all? ‘As
regards France, he was a counter-revolutionary because of his
despotism, but as a conqueror of Europe he became a renovator..
Several nations which slumbered before he came, will live with the
life he brought them. But in that Napoleon merely followed the
dictates of his nature. Born as he was from war, war remained his
inclination and his joy.’
There is something doctrinaire and arid about this sketch; it
lacks life. And life would result only from admiration inspiring an
array of serious works; these in their turn brought about recon¬
sideration — in which many of the young Mignet’s ideas would be
seen to emerge.
36
CHAPTER II
BARON BIGNON
THE WRITER
The first historian who undertook a broad treatment of the subject

and whose work is still of value, is Bignon, Histoire de France
depuis le i8 Brumaire began to appear in 1829. He died in the
beginning of 1841, having brought his voluminous work as far as
1812.^ His son-in-law, Ernouf, took it up to the Battle of Leipzig
on the basis of his notes.
In Napoleon’s will, signed at Longwood, on April 15th, 1821,
the thirty-second legacy reads as follows: Îtem to Baron Bignon,
one hundred thousand francs. I commission him to write the
history of French diplomacy from 1792 to 1815.’
Bignon entered the diplomatic service in 1797, and had filled
important posts under the First Consul and the Emperor in
various German capitals and in Warsaw, in the capacity of
Minister, sometimes also as Governor. In the foreword to the
first part of his book he gave an account of himself intended to
allay the suspicions of a supposed inquisitive reader — the general
attitude to Napoleon was still rather unfavourable. Tt is true’, he
says, in effect, ‘that I served Napoleon zealously, and that I
flattered him. Who did not? It is also true that I was commis¬
sioned to write the book by the Emperor himself. Indeed I have
the greatest admiration for him.’ Does that necessarily imply that
he supports despotism? Certainly not. Since 1817 he has sat in
the Chamber of Deputies, on the left wing benches. ‘Having
served glory for a long time, I have devoted the rest of my life to
liberty.’ ‘Then you will let us have some slashing attacks on
imperial tyranny?’ suggests the reader. But the writer, having
affirmed his dislike of despotism, whatever its label, and having
confessed that in his youth, in common with many others, he had
succumbed to republican illusions, explains that the imperial
despotism was a dictatorship, not, as Turgot desired, to establish
liberty, but to build the supremacy of France in Europe. The
^ Eleven volumes; in 1842 there appeared a double column edition in two quarto
volumes, published in Brussels, from which I quote,
37
Empire inspires thoughts of strength, greatness and glory. Bignon
declares himself satisfied with constitutional monarchy, which,
through the Charter, preserves the inheritance of the Revolution,
and he would gladly see it, too, strong, great and glorious.
For anyone familiar with French history this career and this
creed evoke an easily recognizable! type. The officials who worked
with Bonaparte from the beginning and who remained faithful to
him through every administrative metamorphosis, sprang from
revolutionary origins. After them came the royalist rallies^ whose
principles were less outraged by the monarchical evolution of
dictatorship, but who, on the other hand, found it all the more
easy to conform when the Restoration came in 1814. The old
republicans had accepted Bonaparte’s leadership because they
considered that both the Revolution, and the international posi¬
tion of France, demanded a strong government. Unless their
readiness to accept each successive stage in a conservative, or
frankly counter-revolutionary direction, be ascribed entirely to
concern for their own careers, it may be supposed that they were
influenced by the glory and the power this matchless war hero
was earning for their country. This particularly applied to a man
like Bignon whose official life was passed abroad. And it is
perfectly natural that on the disappearance of this exceptional
ruler he gave free rein once more to his old libertarian tendencies.
The new government was far from strong. It could boast of no
glittering triumphs won for a France forced back behind its old
frontiers by the peace treaties, and feeling cramped and sore,
particularly over the loss of the Rhineland and Belgium, both
conquered during the Revolution. Moreover the new government
favoured priests and Jesuits. The point is important, for no old
revolutionary Bonapartist could imagine Liberty as other than
anti-clerical.
THE BOOK
What approach did Bignon make to the history of Napoleon?

He was certainly no mere eulogist, indeed he may be called
remarkably independent. But before I illustrate this and attempt
to define his limitations, I wish to deal briefly with his treatment
of his material and to show what sources he had at his disposal.
He did not confine himself to diplomatic history, as Napoleon
had directed. In plan his work became a history of France during
38
BARON BIGNON
the period. He tends to adhere to the method of the chronicler,
so that within certain limits of time chapters on foreign affairs
succeed chapters on domestic matters. His documentation is
fairly extensive. Not only was he able to use his own papers and
those of many other contemporaries, but in 1829 when a relatively
liberal government was in office, to which the name of Napoleon
was not merely a bogy, he extracted permission to delve into the
actual archives, so that he was able, especially in the later portions
of his work, to quote from official papers and above all from
Napoleon’s own correspondence. He handled this material most
intelligently. On a number of points the outline of events is firmly
drawn by a man of experience and insight, skilled in portraying
the official point of view, and capable also of showing, from time
to time, its disadvantages. His work bears throughout the hall¬
mark of the Foreign Office official who is thoroughly at home in
matters of state and is accustomed to ‘ a clear-cut and lucid
presentation.
When in the foreword to his seventh volume, however, he claims
that the future historian worthy of Napoleon (he makes no
pretence to be that man) will have need of no further discoveries,
since his, Bignon’s, work presents him with so faithful an account
of the real facts concerning political events, the modern reader
can hardly help smiling. That ideal historian, according to
Bignon, ‘will merely have to produce a work of art, in which the
facts are more agreeably presented, the whole is better arranged,
the details beautified and the story made more fascinating by
improvements in the composition and by the use of a more
elevated and more brilliant style’. He had no conception of the
insatiable craving of later research workers to know more and
know it more accurately, nor of the multiplicity of standpoints or
of possible problems. The refinements of psychology and the bold
flights of imagination were not for him. In short he did not guess
how never-ending would be the argument in which he was one
of the first participants.
The mistake is typical of the work. I have mentioned Bignon’s
independence but intimated that it had its limits. As a matter of
fact it is severely circumscribed. Bignon the historian remains
Bignon the diplomat, the official, Bonapartist to his finger tips.
What makes his book so attractive is that its reader is offered access
to the Napoleonic world. Even when he is critical, the writer takes
39
for granted many things for the understanding of which we must
grope backwards in time.
THE RELATIONS WITH THE POPE
Let US take as an example his account of the increasingly

Strained relations between Napoleon and Pius VII, the Pope with
whom the First Consul had concluded the Concordat, who had
later come to Paris to crown the Emperor, whose secular power
was finally destroyed by decree in 1809, his State, including Rome,
being incorporated with France, and he himself taken away as
prisoner. We shall see this problem of the Church treated from
various sides later on, but I know no other account which makes
Napoleon’s handling of the situation appear so completely reason¬
able and inevitable, if one accepts the Napoleonic point of view
that the supremacy of the State and of the Emperor is irrefutable,
and that all resistance to it is evidence of unendurable clerical
ambition and medieval backwardness.* The matter is handled
calmly; the opposition is neither abused nor belittled. There is
even a sympathetic sketch of the Pope, who remarked that having
lived like a lamb he should know how to die like a lion.
FOREIGN POLICY
In dealing with foreign policy Bignon undoubtedly shows his

independence. Though the power and glory of France come first
for him, though he served Napoleon so faithfully for these very
ends, and still admires him on their account, he is not blind to the
excesses, to the untenable position, into which the regime had
strayed. He dates this development somewhat late.
‘From the i8th Brumaire’, he writes at the beginning of his
seventh volume,* ‘up to the Peace of Tilsit’ — that is, the peace of
1807, which was to establish amity instead of war with Alexander I
of Russia, and by which Prussia lost half its territory and the sub¬
jection of Germany was confirmed — ‘the greatness of France had
steadily increased in the most marvellous fashion, but it could still
be justified by the defensive nature of the wars from which it
sprang, and it was still capable of consolidation.’ Much might be
said of the defensive nature of those wars, against England in 1803,
against Russia and Austria in 1805, against Prussia in 1806, and I
*11,201.
* Beginning of the second volume in the Brussels edition.
40
BARON BIGNON
shall say something of this later. ^ The possibility, again, of con¬
solidating French rule not only in the Low Countries and the
Rhineland, but also in the whole of Germany and Italy seems
dubious. ‘But from that moment’, Bignon continues, ‘the Empire,
although still outwardly expanding, was to lose in real strength
what it gained in territory. Napoleon understood as well as any¬
one how little durability there could be in an indefinite expansion.
He could perfectly distinguish between that which was permanently
necessary to the power of France, and that which appertained only
to his own reign. “After me,” he said, with reason, “after me the
Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees.” And indeed, these were the
conquests of France, the rest were his own.’
It was certainly nothing unusual, even in the circles closest to
Napoleon, to make this distinction between his earlier policy and
that of his later years, between France’s and his own private
policy. The principal exponent of this view, even during the
regime, was, as we shall see later, Talleyrand. It has remained
current, also, among historians. But Napoleon himself rejected it
wholeheartedly, in spite of Bignon’s quotation. Many of his pro¬
nouncements at St. Helena were solely intended to give the lie to
this very distinction, and, as we shall also see, many later writers
were more influenced in this respect by the legend than was the
practical, able and sober Bignon.
Thus Bignon does not in the least hesitate to condemn Napoleon
for certain excesses to which his power policy led him. The
notorious Convention of Bayonne (1808), where the Spanish
Bourbons were tricked and bullied into abdication, he described
frankly as ‘an ambush’, and compared it with the crimes of
Tiberius — a piece of erudition calculated to appeal to the pre¬
vailing fashion for things Roman. It is noteworthy that Bignon is
here following the very writer — the bitter Tacitus — whom
Napoleon could not forgive for his vilification of the Caesars.
Nevertheless the way in which even this writer deals with events
in general gives us some clue to the reasons why French public
opinion was for so long impressed by Napoleon’s successes and by
his methods. The joy in the military triumphs of France, the
scornful relish of her enemies’ discomfiture, the taunts — to take
one example at random —when Russia and England deserted
^ See, for example, pp. 242 sqq.; pp. 270 sqq.;pp. 28i^sqq. Bignon affirms the
justice of Napoleon’s wars as of his peace conditions in 1805: Book I, 4a4, 482.
41
their ally the Kingdom of Naples, after Austerlitz, in spite of their
previous eloquent protestations, removing the troops they had
there just at the moment when they were needed, such reactions
show just how much the French identified themselves with their
Emperor.
Throughout Bignon is particularly hostile to the English. Not
that he allows himself to be carried away into declamatory tirades.
Indeed he never departs from his flat diplomatic style, and
remains throughout matter of fact and businesslike. The argu¬
ment, for instance, in which he maintains that Napoleon’s
attitude to the Continental System was completely reasonable is
well worth reading.' He points out that the Emperor did not
introduce it as being in itself lawful, but as a measure which was
forced on him by the illegal nominal blockade proclaimed by the
English, and in which the neutral states were obliged, however
unjustly, to acquiesce. Similarly, in a different class of matters
entirely, though his judgment here is even more one-sided and
lacks that insight into the opposite point of view which the histor¬
ian should have, one might quote his defence of the severe sen¬
tence passed in Nurcmburg on the bookseller Palm, who was shot
in 1806 by the French army of occupation for distributing
inflammatory literature.* Bignon admits that, in the peaceful and
kindly Germany of that time, nothing did more harm to the good
name of France. Yet he unhesitatingly accepts the ruling of the
laws of war as conclusive, and his dispassionate, logical argument
provides a revealing picture of the way in which the official mind
works in such cases. But it is always the supporter of the regime
speaking.
‘despotism’
For all that, Bignon does show his independence in the way he
discusses ‘despotism’. In 1800, after an attempt on the First
Consul’s life, penal measures were rushed through, without a trial,
and the wrong men suffered. In dealing with this case, on which
I shall have more to say later, Bignon expresses sharp disapproval,*
and although he tries to find excuses for the killing of the Due
d’Enghien — this, too, I reserve for fuller treatment— he does not
defend it. The creation of a new nobility, so characteristic of the
^ II, 28 sqq. * I, 560.

® pp. 93b and following, pp. 94 sqq.
42
BARON BIGNON
reactionary tendencies of Napoleon’s administration, he roundly
declares to be in contravention of the principles of the Revolution
dear to the majority of the French people. It is possible to detect a
personal note in his complaint that abroad, ‘where hitherto every
French citizen enjoyed a prestige like that of the civis Romanus in
the palmy days of the Republic, and where the whole French
nation was regarded as the cream of humanity’,^ the distinction
now made had the effect of degrading those who had no share in
the new honours.
Such comments are, however, no more than incidental. Bignon
refers with due respect to Mme de Stael and her friends (which can
by no means be said of all later writers), but he is not so shocked
by her banishment at the resumption of the war with England as
the famous literary lady and Benjamin Constant would have liked
the whole world to be. His exposition is shrewd, his estimate of the
element of self-esteem just, and he is certainly right in thinking
that it was not only Mme de StaH’s brilliant conversation, but also
the fact that her salon was a centre of the opposition, which
earned her Napoleon’s disfavour. Yet, having pointed out how
small the minority was which gathered round her, and that the
First Consul, as he then was, had offered her terms, he regards the
subject as closed. The dictatorship itself, sensitive to the slightest
opposition, he accepts.^
ADMIRATION
What delighted Bignon most, apart from military conquests,

were the material benefits which accrued to France from that
ever-watchful vigilance and care, that readiness of the ruler to use
his power to get things done. And to those inclined to make fun of
the adulations of his Minister for Internal Affairs (up to 1807 it
was Champagny) in the annual reports in which these wonders
were vaunted, Bignon would point out that the Emperor, ‘nearly
always animated by generous feelings, passionately desirous of the
good, and intelligent in his desire’, at least worked hard for his
glory.® He prefers to base his chronicle, and’s deservedly proud
of the fact, upon the actual orders and plans to be foun.l in the
Emperor’s own correspondence, and even so, what a magnificent
picture! ® Bignon allows himself a smile when he finds the Emperor
meditating measures to improve literary criticism; he knows
»II, 42b. “ I, 307- ’ I. 500b. * 11,1553-
43
Napoleon’s ‘habit of mixing the State up in everything’ sometimes
leads him ‘to take the wrong turning’.^ Nevertheless the Emperor’s
aims, and most of the time even his actions, in the sphere of
spiritual matters, fill him with the purest admiration.
When he deals, for instance, with the Emperor’s complete
control over education, he does permit the voice of criticism to be
heard for a moment, but among the reasons for the inevitability of
the system he mentions not only Napoleon’s dictatorial character,
but the needs of a new regime, and the example offered both by
the republics of antiquity and the Emperor’s immediate revolu¬
tionary predecessors. ‘Whether one agrees or not with his ideas on
this delicate matter’ ~ the political struggle during the Restora¬
tion had at least taught him that the matter was a delicate one —
‘one must acknowledge that he was ever striving after what is good,
that he was ever desirous of ennobling humanity through the
education of the mind, and of preparing the way for generations
which would contribute to the glory and well-being of the State.’®
When it comes to the institution of the University, that formidable
corporation whose task it was to wield the State monopoly in
education, the point that seems of most interest to Bignon is that
of the party affiliation of the Grand Master. Fontanes, Chateau¬
briand’s protector, was one of those supporters of the old regime
who came to enjoy Napoleon’s especial favour. Bignon calls him a
man of the clerical party, in opposition to that of the‘philosophers’*
and he is specially concerned to show that Napoleon was not really
an enemy to progress,^ as though there were no more in it than
that. On the significance of the University we shall be hearing
comments of a very different character.
^ I, 667. * I, 491b.
* The usual word for the rationalists of the Encyclopaedia. Freethinkers would
be another word for them.
* II, 156a. Grand Master was the title of the Rector of the University.
44
CHAPTER III
ARMAND LEFEBVRE
THE SPIRIT OF HIS WORK
In 1845 grtSit works began to appear. They were Armand

Lefebvre’s Histoire des cabinets de Êurope pendant le Consulat et
VEmpire and Thiers's Histoire du Consulat et de VEmpire^ a continua¬
tion of his youthful Histoire de la Revolution Jrangaise^ completed
nearly twenty years earlier. Thiers's book became the great
popular history of Napoleon. Volume succeeded volume in an
inexhaustible stream, until by 1862 all twenty had appeared. In
spite of the magnitude of the work its success was overwhelming.
For a generation Thiers’s was the last word on the subject, and his
book overshadowed that of Lefebvre. Lefebvre, who was a few
years younger than Thiers, being born in 1800, a diplomat, and
the son of a diplomat who had served Napoleon, suffered from
this.^ It is true that his book, the unattractive title of which con¬
ceals a history of Bonaparte's foreign policy, cannot stand com¬
parison with that of Thiers for pace, fullness and colour. Never¬
theless it has its own special qualities. Even though the writer sets
his diplomatic history in its wider background — the development
of the Revolutionary idea and of the Consular and Imperial
regime in France— the limits imposed by the subject give his
work more unity. This becomes apparent when one compares
him with Bignon. The contrast makes the latter take on even more
the appearance of a chronicler, while in Lefebvre one can appre¬
ciate the attempt at truly historical presentation.
Lefebvre had his own interpretation of Bonaparte and his states¬
manship, which he develops with a sure touch. The actual
narrative is not the most important part of his book. His docu¬
mentation is not up to present-day standards. Though he did
draw from archive material he failed to consult non-French sources,
in itself an irreparable omission in a book dealing with a subject of
this nature. For all his positive tone, he is often wide of the mark.
^ According to Sainte-Beuve in one of his Causeries du Lundiy reprinted before

the first volume of the edition which was edited and completed by the writer’s son
in 1866. I quote from this edition.
45
particularly in dealing with aims and motives. His style lacks
personality. What makes his book worth examination is his view
of the subject as a whole, his generalizations, his interpretation of
the central figure in relation to the course of events. We shall see
directly that he has much in common with Bignon, not only in
descent and circumstances, but also in spirit. He too accepts the
bourgeois ideals of the Revolution, supports anti-clericalism,
equality and even liberty, but his chief enthusiasm is reserved for
the greatness and power of France.
DEFENCE OF i8th BRUMAIRE
Lefebvre is more consistently realistic, in a sense, than Bignon,

as appears from the introduction in which he discusses the rise of
Bonaparte and the coup d'etat of 18th-1 gth Brumaire. The vigour of
the reconstruction is certainly striking. The situation of France
before the coup d'etat is described as critical, what with administra¬
tive confusion, bitter popular unrest — the backwash of ten
revolutionary years —, leaders irresolute and incompetent, and all
Europe watching for an opportunity to suppress that power which,
after bursting forth with irresistible force during the first passionate
confident years, was still sufficiently disquieting. The coup d'etat
was thus not only beneficial but absolutely essential. Given this
view there is no further need of argument concerning justice or
injustice or the propriety of Bonaparte’s ambition.
Once in the saddle, he had three courses open to him, according
to Lefebvre. He could have accepted the support of the royalists,
and brought about a restoration, but that would not appeal to a
man who wished to be himself the master, and who was in any case
aware that a restoration of the ancien regime, however strong the
reactionary element, would arouse uncompromising resistance
and bring to a head the latent civil war. He could have co¬
operated with the Jacobins, who wished for nothing better, but
that would have meant a .resumption of the war in its most
revolutionary form, and a European convulsion which would not
have accorded with Bonaparte’s ideas; moreover he would in that
case have had to share control of France with Jacobin clubs and
radical demagogues, hardly a prospect to please a general ‘who
only loved popular energy when clad in military uniform’.* There
remained the broad central mass of public opinion, tolerably
‘1.13-
46
ARMAND LEFEBVRE
satisfied with the social reforms of the Revolution and anxious to
retain these, but longing for stability. Order, that was the slogan
which Bonaparte understood, unity, an end to all that interminable
bickering, a sweeping away of the parties, a chance to enjoy the
fruits of the Revolution, work, reconstruction — and peace. But
it must be a peace which would consolidate the powerful position
that had been won.
Once in the saddle — but the horse was not yet quite broken in.
After the coup d’itat came a constitution (that of the year VIII)
which still imposed certain parliamentary limitations on the dic¬
tator’s power. From the beginning Bonaparte secretly meditated
shaking himself free from these limitations, to gain undisputed
control of France. ‘The constitution was not granted in good
faith.’ This calm statement, and still more the remark which
follows, shows Lefebvre’s realism ‘And it could not be. There
were lies everywhere, in words as in things. The nation, monarchi¬
cal in its traditions, republican in its ideas, was all unconsciously
a prey to the strangest contradictions ... It was only through
dissimulation and concealment and tricks that he was able to carry
out successfully the most formidable undertaking ever shouldered
by mortal man.’ What was this undertaking? To reconcile the
French people, to break resistance in the Vendee and elsewhere,
to bridge antitheses, to bring into line the Church, which, in the
words of Lefebvre, had been made, through the Concordat, ‘one
of the most useful instruments of his government’,* in short to
establish that unity under strong authority which was necessary to
safeguard both France and the fruits of the Revolution against an
envious and covetous Europe.
But could it stop there? After Marengo and Amiens, Bona¬
parte feels strong enough to throw out the opposition in the Tribu¬
nate; the more obedient Senate, too, is muzzled, in 1802, by an
appeal, over the heads of the representative bodies, to the people,
who, blinded by his victories, make Bonaparte Consul for life by
three and a half million votes to 8000. Having described all this
Lefebvre exclaims: ‘If God does not teach moderat'on to this man
to whom he has given so much might, he will sooner or later abuse
his good fortune and commit errors likely to jeopardize the future
of a whole people.’* But is not this a somewhat belated reflection?
Was not this possibility already implicit in the coup d'Hat, and was
* I, 26. * I, 19^- * 1.209.
47
the 18th Brumaire in fact so fortunate a date in the history of
France? Lefebvre does not draw this conclusion, and yet he says,
and repeats at various points, that Bonaparte’s first mistake, a
fatal one, the source of all the disasters which later overtook France
had been committed before 1802.
THE FATAL ERROR OF LUNEVILLE
This was the peace of Luneville concluded with Austria in 1801,

after her conclusive defeats, by Bonaparte himself in Italy at
Marengo, and by Moreau in Germany at Hohenlinden. This
peace, argues Lefebvre, could and should have been a peace of
reconciliation.* ‘We had two great enemies in the world, one con¬
tinental, that is, Austria, and one naval, that is, England.’ To¬
gether they were already sufficiently formidable, and there was the
possibility that, if they both continued hostile, the two remaining
powers, Russia and Prussia, with whom France’s relations were in
a state of flux, might join them. Such a four power coalition would
endanger the Revolution and even the nation. ‘The First Consul
should have taken thought, should have called up all the perci-
pience of his powerful intellect, and should have spared his country
this terrible and precarious hazard.’ To this end he should have
broken the alliance between England and Austria for ever by con¬
cluding a real peace with one or the other. In practice this meant
with Austria, for Lefebvre is firmly convinced that England was
irreconcilable.
He paints a highly coloured picture of England, as a country
whose social condition made war necessary for the ruling class (the
‘English oligarchy’, the expression which Napoleon also favoured).
War was the only means by which to distract the people’s attention
from that oligarchy’s policy of disinheriting the yeomen and
sequestrating the land. The money-grubbing middle class, caught
by a fever of speculation, could be induced to see in war the means
of conquering world markets. A genuine peace with such an Eng¬
land would have been possible only at the price of renunciation of
all naval, colonial and industrial power. The surrender of Antwerp
and Egypt, of San Domingo and Louisiana, of the merchant navy,
of the French principles of maritime law (the principle that the
flag protects the cargo, ‘that sacred and inalienable principle’, as
the writer calls it elsewhere),’ would hardly have sufficed,
*1,94. ’1,114-
48
ARMAND LEFEBVRE
according to Lefebvre, to conciliate England Thus he does not

blame the First Consul if the peace of Amiens was merely a truce.
It could be nothing more owing to England’s insatiable lust for
power. (As we shall see, this point, which I shall not discuss further
at the moment, was to give rise later to not a little difference of
opinion.)
In passing, however, it must be noted that this view of England,
as unfavourable as Bignon’s, dominates the whole of Lefebvre’s
work. In fact, with his emphatic, humourless style, he surpasses
his predecessor in vituperation. According to him the English are
always concocting new deceits and committing cowardly crimes.
Coldly egoistical, unflinchingly heartless, they trample on the
weak, desert the victims of their fair promises, and smugly count
their gains.*
But Austria was another matter. Only, she should have been
allowed a free hand in Italy, and Germany east of the Rhine
should have been left alone. The archiepiscopal electors of
Cologne, Mayence and Treves should have been compensated on
the other side of the Rhine. Thus Austria would have been satis¬
fied, the spectre of coalition would have been laid, and ‘master of
our movements, we might have risen to our full height against our
great naval enemy, confronting him face to face, and landing on
his coast in order to strike at the heart of his power, all without the
fear of a diversion on the Rhine’.*
Instead of this Bonaparte at Luncville took pitiless advantage of
the power given to him by his victories. By the peace of Campo
Formio the Directory had deprived Austria of all her Italian pos¬
sessions, in exchange, it is true, for Venice. Although Lefebvre
does not say so, this had in fact been Bonaparte’s own arbitrary
policy, imposed on the Directory after his first Italian triumphs in
1796. Subsequently, indeed, the Directory had proceeded with it
con amore. That had been the first step in the wrong direction. But
now, instead of turning back, the First Consul went further.
Venice, too, was taken from Austria, and in Germany all the
powers through which Austria was accustomed to \vork, no<^ only
the ecclesiastical electors and all the clerical nobility and corpora¬
tions, but the knights ‘immediate to the Empire’, were dispossessed,
* See for example I, 60, 66; 113, 134; II, 5: ‘Un people froid, calculateur, qui
n’estime la gloire qu’autant qu’elle s’escompte en argent.’ And so on.
* I. 99-
D 40
for the sake of strengthening the States of the centre, particularly
Bavaria, always jealous of Austria, and setting them all against her.
Is there any point in wishing to discount what has happened and
make one’s own programme of action for the benefit of an earliei
generation? Lefebvre recognizes that its realization would have
met with almost insuperable difficulties. Fired with enthusiasn"
for the magnificent role which seemed prepared for her on the
continent, France would not have understood voluntary renuncia¬
tion of the fruits of her sacrifices. To give up Italy would indeed
have damaged trade interests and the control of the Mediterf anear
vital for the maintenance or the reconquest of Egypt. But, above
all, Bonaparte regarded Italy as his special domain. He desired tc
rouse the Italians from their age-long sleep, to awake their nationa
feelings. And he was the last man to recoil from future dangers
‘He was passionately keen on war, because he excelled in warfare
He favoured it above all as a means of rousing the nation and o
impressing it, of strengthening his authority and of establishing hi
dynasty. He thought himself able to reduce both Austria am
England, and clever enough to make Prussia and Russia his allies.
In writing thus, Lefebvre is not so much laying down the lawfo
the past, as trying to explain and to establish responsibility, whicl
he tends to divide between the French people, in their intoxication
and the dictator thirsting for power and action, whom they ha(
wished on themselves. ‘From the womb of that fatal peace treaty,
he concludes, ‘have issued our glory as well as our disasters. It wa
no doubt a magnificent and an epic undertaking to bring aboi
the rebirth of Italy; but at the end there yawned a chasm. Fc
fifteen years we did nothing but win victories and conquer cour
tries, and what was the result of all that greatness? The treaties (
1815 and the martyrdom of St. Helena.’
We have seen that Bignon makes 1807 a landmark, and onl
begins to shake his head at Napoleon’s foreign policy after thi
date. Lefebvre sets the beginning of the disaster much earlier, an<
from the point of view of historical perspective, there is somethin
attractive about his more organic, more concrete interpretation (
events. We shall see the problem viewed from entirely differei
angles by later authors, but at times, and making allowances fi
appreciable differences, we shall recognize Lefebvre’s approach
50
ARMAND LEFEBVRE
APOLOGETIC TENDENCY .
It should be noted, however, that Lefebvre does not always bear

in mind the thesis which he has propounded so firmly. He is car¬
ried away by his admiration for Napoleon and his dislike of
France’s enemies. He describes, for example, how the Emperor,
having subdued Austria in 1806, overthrows Prussia also, and is
then faced with a situation which inspires him to ever more ambi¬
tious schemes, to the subjugation of half Europe and the founda¬
tion of le Grand Empire based on his brothers’ vassal kingdoms.
He is under no illusion as to this being ‘a terrible situation’. ‘Our
own errors, our enemies’ acts of violence, our disasters at sea’,
(Trafalgar) have brought it about. That is his first comment, but
he goes on to conclude that ‘it was inexorable Fate and not, as has
been alleged, a contemptible dynastic pride, which compelled
Napoleon to undertake this gigantic scheme. For seven years we
shall see him, with incomparable mental vigour and consistency
carrying it out’.
If inexorable Fate, then what of ‘our errors’? In this passage
Lefebvre sounds a note of admiration which makes one wonder
whether he was in fact able to discern his hero’s faults. The answer
is that the whole of his work is full of contradictions in this respect.
That this is nothing unusual we have already seen in the case of
Bignon, and we shall find further examples.
No, Lefebvre is certainly not blind to Napoleon’s faults. He sees
the coarseness of his behaviour towards the Pope when the latter
resists incorporation in Napoleon’s power system. ^ He does not
gloss over the stupidity and treachery of Bayonne.’* He says some¬
where, and with truth, that diplomacy was Napoleon’s ‘weak
spot’.® ‘Here he was in every way at a disadvantage, and not the
least in respect of his own character. Reared in the army camp,
more aware o^ fact than of law, like all military men, too great a
commander not to enjoy the gruesome game of war more than was
good for his country’s interests, he lacked in habit of mind and in
method the moderation, patience and delicate dexterity which
the art of negotiation in its highest form demands.’ Elsewhere
Lefebvre remarks that he was only too much inclined to use for
this purpose military men like himself, General Beurnonville,
' III, 257. ® III, 460,501, 512.

® III, 126.
51
THE FIRST CHRONICLERS-
for example, ‘tough and imperious with a mouth full of threats,

his favourite argument being war and the sword’.*
The writer seems to shrink from drawing general conclusions
from these and similar observations, however. He generally pal¬
liates them, and cools his irritation and disapproval on the enemies
of France, on England, of course, in particular. We see again and
again, and not only when he is attacking the English, how much
his mind is under the spell of the system. Sometimes the sort of
fatalism which he professes seems designed especially to serve as an
apology for Napoleon and for France. Nevertheless, and without
for a moment wishing to subscribe to this fatalistic interpretation,
it cannot be denied that the author has thereby contributed a
fertile idea to Napoleonic literature.
* I. 193-
52
CHAPTER IV
ADOLPHE THIERS
THE WRITER, HIS TIMES AND HIS WORK
I HAVE already said that Thiers's Histoire du Consulat et de VEmpire

was a work in twenty volumes* (of at least five hundred pages
each), that it appeared between 1845 and 1862, and that it was a
tremendous success. Apparently Thiers wrote more quickly than
the printer could print, since his afterthoughts on the completed
work date from as far back as 1855. Merely as a physical feat the
Histoire du Consulat et de VEmpire is quite out of the ordinary.
Thiers was from Provence, like Mignet, his contemporary, and
the two were close friends. Already in Thiers’s earliest work on the
Revolution, however, it is clear that they were poles apart in their
ideas. Since that time Thiers had become immersed in politics.
He was made for the daily hurly-burly and the struggle for power.
He was one of the journalists who gave impetus to the revolution
of 1830 and under Louis Philippe he was soon in the government.
In 1840, as Prime Minister, he almost involved France in war with
England. He was now in opposition to his successor, the conserva¬
tive, cautious, peace-loving Guizot (also a first-rate historian), who
negotiated an entente cordiale with England. To glorify Napoleon as
the implacable enemy of English imperialism was for Thiers a
fprm of opposition to Guizot. Thiers also paid homage to Napo¬
leon as the representative of the Revolution, the Revolution as it
was understood by the bourgeoisie, and as the creator of un¬
paralleled gloire. During his premiership Thiers had given a
powerful impetus to the cult of Napoleon, which had been flourish¬
ing for a long lime, by arranging for his remains to be brought
back in state to France. Even before 1830 the parliamentary
opposition used the name of Napoleon as the symbol of enlighten¬
ment and progress against the reactionary tendencies of the
monarchy. After 1830, too, the memory of the hero, the leader
who had given greatness to France, spelled danger to that
unimaginative, dreary middle-class monarchy, under wliich, as
^ I quote from the two-column edition published in Brussels in six volumes and
more readily available in Holland.
53
Lamartine testified immediately before the revolution of 1848, the

French people became so bored. Radicals and republicans appro¬
priated the memory, and, while he was busy with his great work,
Thiers suddenly woke up to find himself in a Republic, and was
thereafter surprised, in an even less pleasant fashion, by the rise of
Bonapartism and of Napoleon III.
It would be most unjust to give the impression that Thiers’s
history was nothing more than a piece of propagandist writing. It
was a respectable attempt to make a readable and orderly story
out of the material on Napoleon which, though not nearly as
extensive then as now, was already overwhelming. Thiers, too,
made use of Napoleon’s correspondence, then preserved at the
Louvre, and also of course of whatever was available in the way of
memoirs and documents of every description. Thus he was able to
gain an impression of the infinitely varied industry of the ruler and
the general. In this he was not breaking new ground, for Bignon
had been before him. Indeed, he was in a sense the ideal historian
for whom his modest predecessor had hoped. Lcfebvre will have
had his own thoughts on the subject, but the public was delighted.
Nor was the public wrong. Thiers is a master of historical nar¬
rative. One’s first impression is of the unfailing lucidity of hh
presentation, throughout the work. In spite of its broad flow, iU
circumstantial manner, it holds the attention by its perfect clarity
logical arrangement and orderly divisions. Knowledge of humar
nature and practical experience of political life inform it. In short
it is a triumph of‘intelligence’, the attribute which, according tc
his own view,^ the historian must possess before all others. Shal
we admit that the ‘true superiority’ of the historian must be rootec
therein? It must be said that his account has not thereby acquiree
profundity. Thiers asks no ultimate questions, he is quite con
tent with answers that are little short of conventional, and hi
unfailing and plausible eloquence enables him to steer round an^
number of unsolved problems and contradictions.* But we neec
not judge him by his own standard. He possesses other qualities
He may not be witty, nor will he surprise; but when his story ask
for dramatic effects or contrasts (and how could a history of Napo
leon fail to do so), he can rise to the occasion. In the last volume?
^ Avis au lecteur, before volume XII, 1855; Brussels edition after volume III.
* Typical of the grande histoire. De Sacy feared that the increasing amount c
historical criticism would put a check on this: Frxjin, Verspreide Geschriftei
lx, 355 sqq.
54
ADOLPHE THIERS
for example, his emotion at the disasters which his hero brings on
himself and his country is genuine, and inspires some really forceful
writing.
Thiers shows the influence of the Napoleonic legend more
clearly than either of the two previous writers. This does not mean
that he admires Napoleon more or is less inclined to criticize. It
means that he accepted a certain reading of the figure and of the
aims which had been suggested by Napoleon’s own propaganda.
He is critical of Napoleon, and more so as he proceeds. One
might say that while before 1848, circumstances favoured the
tendency to admire Napoleon, they made for an attitude of greater
reserve when the later volumes were written. Thiers was not
enamoured of the irresponsible and anti-parliamentarian activities
of the great man’s nephew. But the more critical spirit of the later
volumes was entirely in keeping with their subject. The further
Napoleon advances in his career, the more difficult it is for the
eulogist to find justification, not in respect of the general, but of
the statesman. Even at that stage, though he makes much of the
dangers of despotism, with an eye to the new Emperor, Thiers
excuses the faults of his hero wherever it is possible, and where it is
impossible discusses them more in sorrow than in anger. He is
critical; but in all the volumes, and especially the last, the domi¬
nant motif is admiration, and more than admiration — affection,
love.
THE general; the son of the revolution
Perhaps I should mention first the intense interest Thiers felt in

the art of war. I shall have little to say of Napoleon the general in
this book. His greatness in this capacity is obvious, from his first
amazing successes in Italy to the last wonderful defence on French
soil in his adversity. The comprehensive view of positions, the eye
for the key point, the capacity to read the mind of his opponent,
the ability to take quick decisions, a personality powerful enough
to impose obedience, all these qualities Napoleon possessed in their
highest form. If the fact has sometimes been denied, it has only
been in a paradoxical fashion or from hatred of the man, <*nd no
historian of any importance has ever done so.* Tolstoy's view of
him in JVar and Peace is fundamentally unhistorical, even anti-
historical; and he reduces the statesman, too, to nothing.
* Unless it be G. Ferrero in his little book Aventure (1938).
55
My object is to discuss the various opinions concerning the
statesman, and concerning the political significance of the
personality and achievements of Napoleon. But one would give
an imperfect impression of Thiers’s Histoire du Consulat et de VEmpire
if one failed to point out the important part played in it by
Napoleon’s battles. Thiers’s description of them is not only
detailed, it shows a real understanding. The military experts of
his day were loath to recognize his competence, although in 1870,
when the old man was sought out to lead the country after its
defeat, they felt some uneasiness in the presence of the politician
who had so earnestly warned them. Marshal Foch, the general of
a later generation, declared that it was from Thiers’s book that he
had learnt to read.
As regards Napoleon the statesman, for Thiers the peak of his
career came at the outset. He recognizes this already in describing
that early triumph: ‘The man who ruled France from 1799 to
1815, knew, no doubt, days of intoxicating glory in the course of
his career, but surely neither he himself nor the France over which
he cast his spell ever again lived through such days as these, days
whose greatness was accompanied by so much wisdom, and by
that wisdom which prompts the hope of durability.’ * These words
follow his account of the bringing of law and order, of victory,
(Marengo), of peace (Luncville and Amiens), of reconciliation
(the Concordat and the amnesty), and his description of the
public’s amazement at the part played by the young soldier in the
Council of State towards the completion of the new Civil Code.
It is not only the statesman’s strength and wisdom which Thiers
admires. He sees in him, with fewer reserves than Bignon and
Lefebvre, and in accordance with Napoleon’s own presentation of
himself, the consolidator of the Revolution at home and its
promoter abroad. Above all, unlike Chateaubriand and Mme de
StaH, he sees in him the good Frenchman. As Napoleon pro¬
claimed at every stage of his life, as the French people were
assured in countless proclamations and speeches, as the voice from
St. Helena tirelessly repeated, so did Thiers believe: that the main¬
spring of his life was his fierce love of France, her honour and her
might, his desire to further her true interests.
* 1,317b-
56
ADOLPHE THIERS
THE FATAL CHANGE OF COURSE AFTER

AUSTERLITZ
Nevertheless Thiers considers that Napoleon’s policy was to

blame for the disasters which ended his career and which engulfed
France, that personal ambition and lust for conquest had a share
in luring the peace-giver of i8oi and 1802 on the adventurous
road which was to lead to Waterloo. He explains this as the
corruption of a beneficent character by superhuman success, and
sometimes, again, as the ravaging of a great spirit, in spite of the
highest intentions, by a passionate temperament. He places the
first fatal change of course only after Austerlitz (December 2nd,
1805). This amazing victory inspired in Napoleon the dangerous
belief that his genius and the power of France were insuperable
and made him lose all sense of moderation.^ The conquest of
Prussia in 1806, and her humiliation in 1807, were tremendous
events, but they drew France outside her natural sphere of
action. The conquest of the whole of Germany, the dizzy edifice,
erected at Tilsit in 1807, exceeded the limits of caution and of self-
knowledge. And yet Thiers even then ventures to speculate that
‘had not more and more been heaped upon the groaning founda¬
tions’ they need not have collapsed; France’s fortunes had not yet
been compromised irretrievably, and ... ‘his glory was immense’.^
It will be seen that this view bears some resemblance to that of
Bignon; the difference lies in the moment at which the fatal change
is supposed to have taken place. Thiers puts it earlier than his
predecessor, but not very emphatically. In the passage just quoted
he allows his imagination to play with the idea which Bignon had
quite seriously entertained, that the position won for France at
Tilsi^ could have been maintained. For the moment I leave on one
side the question whether it is better not to speak of a change
of coupe, but to follow Lefcbvre and seek (if I may so interpret an
idea w'îch he never expressed in so many words) ineluctable
fatality ';in the fact that this wonderful brain always lacked the
balance and self-control which an enduring peace would have
demarided. And when Thiers stressed unfavourable circumstances
it must be remembered that these, by the peace treaties of Leoben
and/of Campo Formio, were largely of Napoleon’s own making.
I aym ready to believe, with Thiers, in the honesty of Bonaparte’s
1II, 87b. * II, 323b.
57
intentions regarding the peace treaties of Luneville and Amiens
(though we shall later see how much that of Amiens can be called
in question). But even so I still find it difficult to accept the theory
that he was not to be blamed for the breaking of the peace with
England, a year later, in 1803. Was not that year the turning-
point?
THE RUPTURE WITH ENGLAND IN 1803
Thiers gives the impression — and here at least he is at one with

his two predecessors ~ that in the renewed conflict with England
the First Consul had indisputably the right on his side. True, he
censures the notorious outburst of rage, not the first of a long series
which became part of Napoleonic tactics, in which the English
ambassador was shouted at in front of the whole diplomatic corps,
and the most terrible misfortunes predicted for England, if she did
not leave continental affairs to Napoleon’s pleasure. This out¬
burst was but the outward sign, according to Thiers,^ of a revolu¬
tion which had taken place in ‘the impressionable and passionate
soul’ of Napoleon. ‘A fertile and hard-working peace’, that was the
dream which he had cherished. ‘Now all of a sudden he was
mastered by a patriotic and at the same time personal wrath, and
from now on to conquer, humiliate, trample down and annihilate
England became the passion of his life.’ Nevertheless he was able
to control himself, and once more bore himself with an unshak¬
able steadiness, to make it perfectly clear that it was England, not
he, which desired war.* This is the point in Thiers’s treatment of
the episode: he himself is completely convinced of this. He seems
not to have the faintest notion that in using his position of power
on the continent, which had been ceded to him at Amiens only
with the greatest reluctance, to interfere in Switzerland, to atinex
Piedmont, to march into other parts of Italy, to keep troops in
Holland, the First Consul was bound to excite aversion and resist¬
ance in England against an arrangement which many there
already regarded as humiliating and dangerous. And eveA before
the scene with Lord Whitworth, there had been threats as >vell as
actions designed to intimidate the English, and of a kind to arouse
doubt as to whether the First Consul was so sincere in his dream of
a fruitful peace as Thiers appears to think. There was Sebasti^ni’s
notorious report, published in the Moniteury concerning the rec6n-
^ 1,460b. * 1,462b.
58
ADOLPHE THIERS
quest of Egypt; there was the dispatch dictated by Bonaparte, in
which Talleyrand, who was just the man to realize the complete
unreasonableness of such language, was made to warn the English
that if they drove France to war, they would force her to conquer
the whole continent. ‘The First Consul is only 33 years old, he has
so far destroyed second-class states only. Who knows in how brief a
time, if he is forced to it, he will change the face of Europe and
raise the Western Empire up again.’ Thiers reports all this, but it
does not shake him in his conviction that it was England who, by
holding on to Malta, broke the peace treaty just signed and so
brought about the war. He complains that Whitworth, who just
before the famous scene, but after all these challenges and displays
of power, had a quiet conversation with Napoleon, did not under¬
stand ‘the greatness and sincerity’ of the First Consul’s words; and
when Bonaparte insists on the integral execution of the peace
treaty, he is only, according to Thiers, speaking ‘the language of
justice and of insulted pride’.*
THE MURDER OF THE DUG d’eNGHIEN (1804)

Thiers’s attitude is strikingly shown in his account of the murder
of the Due d’Enghien. It is impossible in this connection to use any
other word than murder, and Thiers himself does not defend the
action.
The war with England, resumed, as we saw, in 1803, was drag¬
ging on. A camp had already been in existence in Boulogne for a
year and feverish plans and preparations were being made. But
was the invasion ever likely to come off? Relations were strained
with Austria and Russia, but for the moment there was peace on
the continent. Meanwhile the English were working up unrest in
France, and the Comte d’Artois,* who was living in England,
recklessly lent a hand. Royalists came secretly from overseas and
hatched plots with their sympathizers. Attempts to assassinate the
First Consul were all the rage. In England he was regarded as an
adventurer who had made himself master of France. People were
expecting at any moment to see his ephemeral administration
collapse. Bonaparte was infuriated by these conspiracies, about
which a good deal had come to light. He could not get at England,
* 1,458a.
* The youngest brother of Louis XVI, later Charles X.
59
nor at the Comte d’Artois. But in Baden, close to the French
frontier, was another Bourbon, the young Due d’Enghien, son of
Conde. Was he waiting for a sign to play his part in the plot? Was
he in touch with the conspirators? Suspicions of this kind —
prisoners had let out that a prince of the blood was expected — in
no way justified the kidnapping on neutral territory which Bona¬
parte ordered. Nothing could be proved to the court martial save
that Enghien was in English pay, nor was there any other charge.
On this ground he was shot, the same night. It was a warning,
and at the same time a challenge, to the Bourbons and the royal¬
ists. It was a gesture for which a human life, and justice itself, were
ruthlessly sacrificed.
Thiers does not deny this. But he puts the blame on the royalists
who had driven the good First Consul to such a measure by their
conspiracies and their collusion with England. ‘His heart, generous
and kind, whatever may be said by those who never knew him’;’
thus he does not scruple to write in connection with this very crime.
Nor is this an unconsidered statement: there is an entire theory
behind it. For Thiers, Bonaparte is the exponent of the principle
of the Revolution in its benevolent aspects. To the man of 1830
this is especially obvious when a question of opposition to the
Bourbons is involved. ‘Just as twelve years ago’, he writes, ‘the
emigres and their treason had incited the Revolution, guiltless till
then, to the shedding of blood’ — for had not the Terror been the
answer to the invasion and royalist risings in connivance with the
foreigner? — ‘so now these same people’ — still the hated royalists —
‘caused the man who till that day had been wisdom incarnate at
the head of the State, to turn from good to evil, from moderation
to violence.’ ‘The ingratitude of the parties’ — to the man who
had brought about reconciliation —, ‘the insolent enmity of
Europe’ — , and the deplorable incident is explained.“
UNSHAKABLE ADMIRATION
Thiers then regarded Bonaparte’s conduct up to this moment as

that of ‘wisdom incarnate’. I have already said that he found
much to question in the later years. He knew that Napoleon was
subject to outbursts of passion and he knew the dangers to peace
this involved." I have told, too, how dubious he was concerning
the peace of Tilsit. He knows that Napoleon was so flushed with
‘ I, S3ab. " 1, 535. » I, 631a.
60
ADOLPHE THIERS
his victories that he lost all sense of proportion, and that France
had to pay the bill. He realizes how irresponsible — looking
at it merely from the pragmatic point of view — was the imprison¬
ment of Pope Pius VII in 1809, and he quite rightly links it with
the murder of Enghien and the forced abdication of the Spanish
royal family (the ‘ambush’ of Bayonne, in 1808, of which more
later), as episodes in that ‘embittered struggle with the old Euro¬
pean order’,1 into which Napoleon had thrown himself. He knows
too that Napoleon could not bear to be contradicted either in his
own circle or in France, that his system became more and more
despotic, and that this state of affairs gradually undermined the
self-reliance of his colleagues and servants, and paralysed all their
initiative, to the great detriment of both France and himself. He
knows how weary the French people were of those endless wars, how
fraught with peril the eastern digression of 1807 appeared even to
contemporaries, and that Napoleon, though with his unerring
perspicacity he could perfectly discern such feelings, would not
have these storm signals actually discussed.^
Nevertheless Thiers’s Napoleon, besides being incomparably
great, both as ruler and as commander, remains a good, and indeed
an attractive man. His shortcomings are chronicled with a certain
wistfulness. This appears even after one of the severest passages,
in a reflection on the campaigns of 1810 and 1811 in Spain. Thiers
states that Napoleon was a tired man, that he had been wilfully
blind to unpleasant facts, and had given orders, uncertain and
doubtful orders sometimes, based on numbers to which he knew
that the worn-out armies could no longer attain, and that finally
he put the blame on his generals and treated Massena in particular
with cruel injustice. Even then, when he comments that jealousy,
vengefulness, anger, bewilderment and error had taken possession
of Napoleon’s soul, it is only to ask how, if ‘his own great spirit’
was capable of these weaknesses, he could close his eyes to the
inevitability that his generals would also succumb to them.®
And what of his greatness and wisdom as a ruler? In Thiers’s
opinion Napoleon’s correspondence with the brothers he had
created kings ‘deserves to be studied as a succession of profound
lessons in the art of government’.* Certainly the reader of this
correspondence feels himself in contact with an extraordinary
mind. The decisiveness, the precisely expressed recommendations,
UII, 210a. *11,593. ® III, 416b. *11,130a.
Gi
the aversion to empty phrases, the ability to pick out relevant facts
from the general confusion — it is a constant pleasure to observe
these qualities. There are passages which fully deserve the praise
Thiers bestows. One of these, from a letter addressed to Jerome,
the youngest brother, much younger than Napoleon, and created
by him King of Westphalia, I shall quote:
‘Do not listen to those who will tell you that your people, used
as they are to subjection, will receive your benefits gratefully.
There is more enlightenment in the Kingdom of Westphalia than
you will be told, and only in the confidence and love of the popula¬
tion will your throne stand firmly. What is above all desired in
Germany is that you will grant to those who do not belong to the
nobility but possess talents, an equal claim to offices, and that all
vestiges of serfdom and of barriers between the sovereign and the
lowest class of the people shall be completely done away with.
The benefits of the Code Napoleon^ legal procedure in open court,
the jury, these are the points by which your monarchy should be
distinguished . . . your people must enjoy a liberty, an equality, a
prosperity, unknown in the rest of Germany.’^
Such a letter must have especially appealed to Thiers, with its
picture of Napoleon as the conscious propagator of the principles
of the Revolution. One might only express some doubt as to
whether it was an example of the ruler's wisdom to lay a task so
far above his powers on the shoulders of so useless a youth as
Jerome, but I shall not go into this matter at present. Even if one
confines oneself to the correspondence, Thiers’s unqualified praise
seems strange.
Take for example the correspondence with Louis, separately
published in 1875.^* There is perhaps both truth and wisdom in the
comment that Louis was too set on being regarded as good-natured,
and that a prince who in the first year of his reign is regarded as
‘so good’ is likely to be laughed at in the second year. Louis’s
extravagance and his empty display were also assessed at their
true value by his brother. But how arid docs his severity appear
after a time, what a lack of understanding is revealed by the cease¬
lessly repeated admonitions, as if the entire art of government
consisted of the giving of orders and the application of force. I
leave on one side the brutal tone used to the younger brother after
^ See for example Rambaud, L'Allemagne sous Napolion ler.f p. 219.

* By Felix Rocquain, Napolion ler, et le roi Louis,
62
ADOLPHE THIERS
the crisis of i8io, the scorn, the rubbing in of his stupidity and his
powerlessness. Napoleon had enough of Louis’s kingship and any
means seemed to him justified to induce Louis to abdicate. Among
the deserved rebukes are some which are grotesquely unjust, and
when Louis’s retorts are to the point no notice is taken, or a
reminder of promises made, an appeal to honour, is countered by
a savage sneer: ‘You might have spared me this fine display of your
principles.’ But what can be said of the warning that if Louis
ignored his exhortation to be ‘fran5ais de coeur’, his people — the
Dutch, by the way — would chase him away with scorn and con¬
tumely. ‘One has to admit’, says the French editor of 1875,^ ‘that
it would be difficult to show more hardheartedness and pride,
combined with so little shrewdness in the appreciation of events.’
A succession of wise lessons! Are we to suppose that to these
belongs ‘that famous repression theory which Napoleon so fre¬
quently expounded, to Murat for Spain, to Joseph for the Kingdom
of Naples, to Junot for T uscany, to Davout for Northern Germany’? *
The theory, that is to say, that severe punitive measures in
oceupied or annexed territories were humane, since they prevented
a renewal of disturbances. But was even this remarkable humanity
more than a pretext? Was it anything more than an unquenchable
lust for power? In 1808 Napoleon wrote to Joseph, then still King
of Naples: ‘I wish the Naples mob would attempt a rising. As long
as you have not made an example, you will not be their master.
Every conquered country must have its rising.’
Meanwhile Thiers does not conceal the faults of Napoleon, nor
the great weariness and reluctance, long before the end, of French
public opinion. He gives a really telling picture of the reaction to
the Emperor’s retreat behind the Rhine frontier with his beaten
army after his second military disaster, the German one of 1813,
which succeeded that in Russia of 1812.’
‘In Paris he found the public profoundly cast down, almost
despairing, and in particular greatly incensed by his actions. His
police, however zealously and arbitrarily they worked, could
hardly prevent those widespread feelings from breaking forth . ..
He was not forgiven for having neglected the happy chance of
concluding peace offered by his victories of Luetzen and Bautzen.
^ p. cxx.
* A. Rambaud, UAllemagne sous Napoleon let. (i896)> p. 193,
«V, 247b.
63
His explanation of the peace negotiations of Prague was simply
not believed’ (and indeed it was false); people were convinced that
the failure was due to him. His ambition was looked upon as
excessive, cruel to mankind and fatal to France .. . The fettered
and paid scribblers who alone were allowed to write the news-
sheets and who were believed by nobody any more, had received
instructions from the Duke of Rovigo’ (that is, Savary, the
Minister of Police) ‘as to how they were to represent the disasters
of the campaign. The frost having done service as explanation of
the misfortunes of 1812, the defection of the allies was to make
intelligible those of 1813 ... “He wants to sacrifice all our children
to his mad ambition”; that was the cry rising up from every family,
in Paris as in the remotest provinces. The genius of Napoleon was
not denied; worse, it was ignored. People only remembered his
passion for war and conquest. The detestation once felt for the
guillotine was now evoked by war . . . France, which after ten
years of revolution had had its fill of freedom, now, after fifteen
years of military government, had learned to loathe despotism
and the shedding of French blood from one end of Europe to the
other. ...’
1814 AND 1815
Yet, as Thiers pursues the story further, Napoleon’s downfall

touches his heart more deeply. This of course is connected with the
sorrow he felt at the consequences of France’s downfall. In other
words, unlike Mme de Stacl, he will not separate Napoleon from
his country. However much developments at that critical moment
seemed to point to such an attitude, he is determined to make no
such distinction. The profound difference between his view of
Napoleon and that of Mme de Stacl, indeed, between their whole
social and political outlooks, makes this intelligible.
When the allies have reached Paris, in 1814, Napoleon is at
Fontainebleau with the remnants of his severely battered armies.
He still wishes to risk an attack, and Thiers, who thinks he had a
chance (it certainly needs a fervent admiration to share this belief),
bitterly reproaches the marshals for refusing to follow him in his
last despairing attempt, and for thus forcing the abdication upon
him. I do not wish to take up the cudgels for those children of the
fortunes of war. They had been made gjrcat by Napoleon, from
• * Cf. below the discussion of the negotiations of Prague, pp. *99 sqq.
64
ADOLPHE THIERS
him they had their fancy uniforms, their high-sounding titles and
their broad acres; yet now they had no thought but of saving as
much as possible of their gains from the wreck, and of seeking a
quiet life at last. It is not surprising that, in the public mind of the
day, Marmont (‘Duke of Ragusa’), who played an important role
in that praetorian resistance, and who became a great man under
the subsequent regime of the Bourbons, was never regarded in any
other light than that of the traitor of 1814.' But Thiers has more
general considerations in mind. He imagines that the Rhine
frontier could have been held. What binds the French patriot to
Napoleon at this moment is the possession of the German Rhine¬
land and of Flanders, the countries which the Revolution had
conquered in its first onrush, and which were now being lost in the
last stages of the Napoleonic adventure. Had Napoleon by his
mistakes gambled all this away? At any rate only Napoleon can
win it back. This idea must put an end to all criticism of the
internal administration; to make a separation between the dictator
and his country is betrayal.
The same problem appears again in 1815, after the return from
Elba. As soon as Napoleon is once more in the Tuileries, Thiers
considers it the duty of every Frenchman to support him in his
resistance to the advancing allies. Those departements which
struggle to make their young men available for yet another trial
by battle, are praised for their ‘laudable attcmpts\® The men of
the Vendee who, as a generation before against the Revolution,
and again under a de la Rochejaquelein, rise in revolt, are reproved.
By doing so ‘they withdrew fifteen to twenty thousand Frenchmen
from the formidable rendezvous at Waterloo, and thus made their
contribution to the most tragic disaster of our history’.* This
attitude towards Waterloo, this unconditional rallying behind
Napoleon at the critical moment, we shall observe again in the
work of many later French historians. Thiers is all the more prone
to it in that he, as we know, is able to believe in the real goodness
of Napoleon, in the purity of his motives, and so also accepts the
sincerity of his conversion to liberal and peace-loving intentions.
' In July 1830 Charles X made him Commandant of Paris, thereby irritating the
people still more. ^Raguser* was used in the sense of ‘trahir*: Vaulabellf, Histoire
des deux Restaurations^ VIII, 209.
*VI, 295b.
* VI, 319a. ‘Led^sastrele plus tragique de notre histoire,* Unfortunate France
has since had to face worse disasters.
E 65
For in that amazing final curtain of the great drama, the Hun¬
dred Days, the most astonishing sight is that of Napoleon in
the role of the despot and conqueror chastened and made wise by
misfortune. Freedom ofthe press, parliamentary government, peace
— all these he was now prepared to guarantee to the French
people. Yet Thiers is not so naive (although it is impossible not to
use that word occasionally in connection with this typical world¬
ling, who prided himself on his shrewdness) as to be blind to the
fact that there were good grounds for the distrust of the French
people. He understands the suspicions of the French liberals and
democrats as well as those of the foreign princes and peoples.
‘God’, he says, referring to the first, ‘sees our repentance and is
satisfied. Men have neither this insight nor this pity. They are
aware only of the transgressions that are committed, and their
rough law demands actual, complete, and visible chastisement.*'
Concerning the second category, he can up to a certain point
sympathize with their fury against the destroyer of their peace, and
admits that Napoleon had brought it on himself by ‘an unendur¬
able abuse of victory over a period of fifteen years’.
At the same time Thiers is convinced of Napoleon’s repentance.
He gives a moving description of the Emperor’s visit to la Mai-
maison, jUst before he set out for the final, fatal battle, and in the
midst of urgent and pressing preoccupations. It was in the country
house bound up with the memory of Josephine, who had lived
there after her repudiation until her death in 1814, and where
he, when still First Consul, had passed his happiest days with her.
How different things were then, how the world had honoured him
in those days! ‘But at that time he had not yet wearied, enslaved
and devastated it; the nations regarded him not as a tyrant but as
a saviour. Brooding over those days he did not deceive himself,
nor fail to mete out to himself the inexorable justice of genius, but
still he told himself that, since he had renounced the error of his
ways, the world might give him some confidence in return, and
enable him to put into practice the new wisdom brought from
Elba.’* I
Though Thiers repeats that men cannot be expected to grant a
second chance, and that only God can judge true repentance, it is
clear that for him despotism and lust for conquest had been onl^
subsidiary faults, and flât now that disasters had purified him, th<
»VI, a9ib. • vl, 334b.
66
ADOLPHE THIERS
true Napoleon, the benefactor of the French people and of man¬
kind, was once more appearing -- only to be destroyed at Water¬
loo. There is here, then, deep human tragedy, quite apart from
the blow sustained by France, for whom the new peace terms were
harder than those of 1814. It is also clear that for a man who held
such views, the St. Helena pronouncements of Napoleon must be
testimony worthy of trust, indeed of reverence.
FINAL JUDGMENT
If one tries to get a view of the work as a whole, it must be

admitted that there is some truth in the criticism of Saintc-Beuve
that the picture of Napoleon as politician is somewhat vague,
nebulous and lacking in precision.^ The great narrator, with his
intelligence and his enthusiasm for the innumerable problems
which he encounters, has given an admirable exposition, which
can still be used as a basis for further work. But synthesis is not his
strong point. His own personality was too opportunist, too pliable,
too adaptable.
Unprincipled, too impressed by success, said his enemies.
Indeed, scarcely was the great work completed but there was a
reaction against the Napoleonic legend, which had triumphed in
Thiers’s book, for all his care for accuracy and his occasional severe
criticism. The reaction was often directed against Thiers in person,
in itself a recognition of his importance for Napoleonic studies.
The fact will give me further opportunity to add to my all
too scanty review of his inexhaustibly rich work.
^ In his review of Lefebvre’s book: Histoire des Cabinets de VEmpire, etc., printed
at the beginning of the later edition: I, xxxiii.
67
For in that amazing final curtain of the great drama, the Hun¬
dred Days, the most astonishing sight is that of Napoleon in
the role of the despot and conqueror chastened and made wise by
misfortune. Freedom ofthe press, parliamentary government, peace
— all these he was now prepared to guarantee to the French
people. Yet Thiers is not so naive (although it is impossible not to
use that word oceasionally in connection with this typical world¬
ling, who prided himself on his shrewdness) as to be blind to the
fact that there were good grounds for the distrust of the French
people. He understands the suspicions of the French liberals and
democrats as well as those of the foreign princes and peoples.
‘God’, he says, referring to the first, ‘sees our repentance and is
satisfied. Men have neither this insight nor this pity. They are
aware only of the transgressions that are committed, and their
rough law demands actual, complete, and visible chastisement.’*
Concerning the second category, he can up to a certain point
sympathize with their fury against the destroyer of their peace, and
admits that Napoleon had brought it on himself by ‘an unendur¬
able abuse of victory over a period of fifteen years’.
At the same time Thiers is convinced of Napoleon’s repentance.
He gives a moving description of the Emperor’s visit to la Mal-
tnaison, jtst before he set out for the final, fatal battle, and in the
midst of urgent and pressing preoccupations. It was in the country
house bound up with the memory of Josephine, who had lived
there after her repudiation until her death in 1814, and where
he, when still First Consul, had passed his happiest days with her.
How different things were then, how the world had honoured him
in those days! ‘But at that time he had not yet wearied, enslaved
and devastated it; the nations regarded him not as a tyrant but as
a saviour. Brooding over those days he did not deceive himself,
nor fail to mete out to himself the inexorable justice of genius, but
still he told himself that, since he had renounced the error of his
ways, the world might give him some confidence in return, and
enable him to put into practice the new wisdom brought from
Elba.’’
Though Thiers repeats that men cannot be expected to grant a
second chance, and tnat only God can judge true repentance, it is
clear that for him despotism and lust for conquest had been only
subsidiary faults, and that now that disasters had purified him, the
»VI, 291b. ’VI, 334b.
66
ADOLPHE THIERS
true Napoleon, the benefactor of the French people and of man¬
kind, was once more appearing — only to be destroyed at Water¬
loo. There is here, then, deep human tragedy, quite apart from
the blow sustained by France, for whom the new peace terms were
harder than those of 1814. It is also clear that for a man who held
such views, the St. Helena pronouncements of Napoleon must be
testimony worthy of trust, indeed of reverence.
FINAL JUDGMENT
If one tries to get a view of the work as a whole, it must be

admitted that there is some truth in the criticism of Sainte-Beuve
that the picture of Napoleon as politician is somewhat vague,
nebulous and lacking in precision.' The great narrator, with his
intelligence and his enthusiasm for the innumerable problems
which he encounters, has given an admirable exposition, which
can still be used as a basis for further work. But synthesis is not his
strong point. His own personality was too opportunist, too pliable,
too adaptable.
Unprincipled, too impressed by success, said his enemies.
Indeed, scarcely was the great work completed but there was a
reaction against the Napoleonic legend, which had triumphed in
Thiers’s book, for all his care for accuracy and his occasional severe
criticism. The reaction was often directed against Thiers in person,
in itself a recognition of his importance for Napoleonic studies.
The fact will give me further opportunity to add to my all
too scanty review of his inexhaustibly rich work.
' In his review of Lefebvre’s book: Histoire des Cabinets de VEmpirey etc., printed
at the beginning of the later edition: I, xxxiii.
67
PART THREE

THE CIRCUMSTANCES
The reaction against the Napoleonic legend was closely connected

with the opposition to the Second Empire, which grew in strength
in the ’sixties.
One of the pillars upon which Napoleon III and his government
rested was veneration for the first Napoleon. How much he him¬
self realized this, appears from his sponsorship, in 1857, of a majes¬
tic edition of Napoleon I’s letters, and still more from the decree
of 1864 in which he disbanded the committee engaged upon the
work and which had already produced fifteen volumes, and set
another in its place under the chairmanship of Prince Napoleon.
The first committee had on the whole set about its task in a
scholarly fashion. The second committee began by announcing to
the Emperor ihat it would be guided by the Very simple idea’, ‘that
we were charged with the task of publishing what the Emperor
would have made available to the public if he had wished, se
survivant d lui-meme et devangant la justice des dges^ to display himself
and his system to posterity’. Thus a number of letters which threw
an unfavourable light on Napoleon were quietly omitted from the
seventeen volumes issued by this new committee. It is amusing to
note that, since this official patronage did not go unobserved, its
effects were the reverse of what was intended, and it was followed
by a flood of writing prejudicial to the hallowed memory.^
At first many, like Thiers, who had scant liking for Napoleon III
and his semi-dictatorial regime, shared the veneration for Napo¬
leon I, and a popular method of attack was to point out the
^ Thiers had access to the originals in the Louvre, but when the committee
started work, this was apparently no longer permitted. There were, however, quite
a number of letters in private collections, and while the committee, working from
the minutes, made their selection, independent historians sometimes published
letters which had been excluded by them. An example is d’Haussonville, with
whose work I shall be dealing in a later chapter. After 1870 the great archive collec¬
tion was of course reopened. As early as 1875, for example, Roequain, whose work
has been already mentioned, made additions to the Correspondance. In 1897 L6on
Lecestre produced two volumes from material which the official editors had set
aside (including material already made public variously by other hands). The work
was called Lettres Mdites de Napoleon ler. There were later volumes of additions
to this by other editors. In his introduction Lecestre wrote: T1 convient de faire
remarquer que ces lettres ainsi riûnies laissent une impression bien diff^rente de
celle qu’elles auraient produite, si elles avaient ins^rês k leur place respective
dans la Correspondance. Encadrês dans les pieces si nombreuses ou delate le g^nie
de I’Empereur, elles auraient peut-^tre pass^ presque inaperûes, ou du moins
71
contrasts. Victor Hugo contemptuously called the new Emperor
Napoleon le petit. Yet the coup d’etat of 1851, had revealed in a
flash the danger inherent in the combination of democracy and
Caesarism, or, to put it another way, the unreality of a democracy
based on ‘strong government’ and militarism. The new regime,
unable to conceal, even though it might mitigate, its authoritarian
character, saw itself forced to interpret the Napoleonic legend less
liberally than the first Emperor himself had done during the
Hundred Days and on St. Helena. It became customary to pre¬
sent the Revolution, of which Napoleon must still pass for the heir
and exponent, as undertaken on behalf of civil not political liberty,
and the French as being content with equality, and with social
reforms safeguarded by a government which was not responsible
to them. The fighters for trampled liberty could not avoid seeing
that this had indeed been the position of the first Napoleon, and
the never wholly forgotten tradition of rejection established by
Mme de Stael was resurrected.
I’admiration inspirê par les incomparables qualit^s du souverain et du g^n^ral

auraient fait oublier dans une certaine mesure les coups de butoir du despotc.*
According to this view, which has much truth, Napoleon Ill’s policy of falsifying
the sources achieved an effect the reverse of his intention. Sainte-Beuve was among
the members of the new committee which started work in 1864 with that remarkable
declaration of principle: see the introduction to volume XVI of the Correspondance.
See hereafter, p. 15, the defence put forw'ard by Prince Napoleon many years later.
72
CHAPTER I
JULES BARxNI
Even before the appearance of the historically more important

works which I intend to discuss, the problem was clearly set forth
by Jules Barni in a critical examination of Thiers’s history. The
writer lived as a political exile in Switzerland. His book,^ a series
of lectures given at Geneva in 1863, was banned in France. A
certain number of copies were, of course, distributed clandestinely,
but in 1869 the writer had it reprinted in France. He and his
publisher believed that the court would leave that edition alone,
and indeed as far as I know there was never any prosecution.
Jules Barni had translated Kant, and written books such as La
morale dans la democraiie^ and Les marlyres de la libre pensee.
In his examination of Thiers he begins by asking himself what
the writer’s standpoint is. He finds that Thiers’s only measure is
success and that he has no moral scale of values. Lamartine had
already remarked: ‘This author is the accomplice of Fortune: he
only recognizes evil-doing when it is punished by adversity.’ The
conflict between reverence for the historical fact as such (Barni
does not put it in these words), and the consciousness of an obliga¬
tion to test the fact by eternal moral values, always has and always
will exist in both historical study and its object, the strife between
men called politics. In those years of resistance to arbitrary power,
born of violence in the coup d'etat of December 2nd, Frenchmen
became very much aware of that conflict.
Barni’s little book is no serious contribution to Napoleonic
historiography, for it is too purely polemical. But from the mass
of Thiers’s utterances, discretions and palliations, Barni skilfully
extracts the spirit of the great work, and most of the theses inspiring
the four later works, which I shall be discussing shortly, are to be
found in his book.
Barni has no patience with the idea of Napoleon as propagator
of the Revolution. Rather does he regard him as the man who
obstructed the Revolution, and where he could not destroy it,
debased it. I will glance at one or two of the points he makes.
* NapoUon et son historien M. Thiers.
73
Thiers admires the centralization introduced by the First Consul,
in which the prefects were the principal instruments of central
authority. Barni recalls de Tocqueville’s demonstration that this
was completely contrary to the wishes of the Assemblee constituante,
that it was a return to the ancien regime and the intendants. ‘The
elective principle introduced by the Revolution was suppressed.’^
He is irritated by the way in which the suppression of representa¬
tive bodies is glossed over, and the nonchalance with which those
who attempted to organize a defence are brushed aside with the
comment: ‘that they were blind to the general development of
opinion and to the needs of the time’.* Against Thiers’s enthu¬
siasm for the setting up of the Legion of Honour, ‘ce beau systîme
de recompense’, he quotes Bonaparte’s cynical comment: Tt is
with rattles that men are led’;* the institution was established for
no other purpose than to undermine equality, still regarded as the
great benefit brought by the Revolution, and for the undisturbed
enjoyment of which Napoleon claimed gratitude. The establish¬
ment of a new nobility under the Empire was of course an even
more flagrant encroachment on equality. In this Histoire de la
Revolution frangaise the youthful Thiers had written that Napoleon
carried out the Revolution by creating an aristocracy from among
the people.* It is indeed not very plausible, but his view of the
imperial coronation is closely connected with it.*
‘Among the triumphs of our Revolution this was not the least,
to see the soldier sprung from her own bosom consecrated by the
Pope, who had left the capital of Christendom for that very pur¬
pose.’ Barni comments: ‘As for me, I admit that I find it impos¬
sible to discover a triumph of the Revolution in the overthrow of
her most sacred principles, in the ruin of her dearest achievements,
in the restoration of such institutions and forms as were most
opposed to her spirit.’ Thiers continued: ‘If only control of ambi¬
tion had shared that throne with genius, that France might have,
been guaranteed a sufficient measure of freedom, and that a
reasonable limit might have been put to heroic enterprises .. .’ —
‘Here I interrupt the historian,’ Barni says, ‘and I exclaim: “What!
You praise that man when he tramples underfoot the fundamental
laws and appropriates the sovereignty; you praise the Consular
and Imperial Constitutions, which deliver all power up to him;
‘ pp. 57 and 59. * p. 64. * p. 69. * p. 145.

* Thiers, I, 602b; in Barni, p. 158.
74
JULES BARNI
and you want that usurper to control his ambition, you want that
despot, who rules the country according to his whim, to guarantee
a sufficiency of freedom, you want that omnipotent commander to
limit his enterprises, which you call heroic? What a strange piece
of reasoning, and, in a historian, what a surprising forgetfulness of
all the lessons of history! . . ^
Arbitrary administration of the law, the press controlled, the
Concordat, intended not to save religion but to make it an instru¬
ment of government — a censure, be it noted, very different from
that of Mignet,^ though Mme de Stael had already written in
these terms, and we shall meet it later in extenso ~ and then the
wars! Did no blame at all attach to Bonaparte for the breaking of
the Treaty of Amiens? Barni merely poses the question, but he
does protest against the systematic Anglophobia, which Thiers, in
common with many other French writers, displayed. Next there
were the acts of violence, the executions, the terrorism. Barni
notes that Thiers does not bother to speak of the Tyrolean national
leader, Andreas Hofer, executed in Mantua in February i8io,
Napoleon had written to Eugene, his stepson and Viceroy of
Italy, in whose hands the prisoner was: ‘My son, I had com¬
manded you to send Hofer to Paris, but since you have got him in
Mantua, give instant orders that a military commission be set up to
try him and execute him on the spot. See that this takes place
within twenty-four hours.’ Not a word on this matter, says Barni,
in spite of the deep impression made on German-speaking countries
by the death of Hofer. But what we do get is a detailed account of
the ‘festivities, preparations and details of etiquette’ to which
Napoleon ‘devoted himself with so much pleasure’ at the same
moment, in anticipation of the arrival of the Austrian Arch¬
duchess, out of loyalty to whose house Hofer had sacrificed his life,
and who was now to be the wife of the conqueror.
Finally Barni contests, point by point, the ‘portrait’ of Napoleon
with which Thiers had concluded his twentieth volume. I shall
only take one of these. Napoleon, according to Thiers, ‘etait par
son genie fait pour la France, comme la France etait faite pour
lui’. Barni’s criticism is here in line with that of Mme de Stael and
Chateaubriand. Napoleon, he says, was no Frenchman. He sup¬
ports this view with quotations from Fichte (from his Reden an die
deutsche Nation^ 1813)3 and from Quinct, one of whose books I shall
^ cf. above, p. 35.
75
be discussing next, and who had already put forward his theory of
the Italian origin of Napoleon’s Imperial dream. Barni concludes:
‘That contempt of humanity, that misprision of the opinion of
others, that Caesarean pride, that insensitive heart and that pro¬
found moral indifference, these characteristics which distinguished
Napoleon were not those of a Frenchman.’
We shall see how all these ideas recur in the works of the writers
whom I am now going to discuss, and which it might be thought
must bring to an end the veneration of the French for their
Emperor.
76
CHAPTER II
EDGAR QUINET
THE WRITER
I AM going to begin with Edgar Quinet’s book La Revolution^ pub¬

lished in 1865. It is not so much a history as an interpretation of
the Revolution, One should not go to it for a thorough examina¬
tion of the facts. But in spite of the lack of detail, his portrait of the
man of the i8th Brumaire has historical significance. (Quinet, it
should be noted, closes the period of the Revolution with the
coronation of the Emperor, that is, half way through Napoleon’s
career.)
Quinet, a friend of Michelet, had been, like him, a professor at
the College de France. In 1844 ^^45 the two had caused a great
sensation by their lectures on the Jesuits, which were tantamount
to a declaration of war on Catholicism. Indeed Quinet, though in
no way an atheist or a man without religious feeling, regarded
Catholicism as the great impediment to the development of the
French social heritage. From a strictly scholarly point of view his
many writings on religious history, on German and Italian cul¬
ture (he was acquainted, before Barni, with the German philoso¬
phers and poets, a most unusual accomplishment among his
generation of Frenchmen), on the struggle for freedom in his own
day and in antiquity, have little value. Quinet was a prophet, one
of wide and real culture, and he preached his own undogmatic
religion, his own anti-dictatorial liberalism. In 1851 he was
obliged to leave France, and thenceforth lived in Switzerland. He
was over sixty in 1865,
THE FRENCH AND FREEDOM
Quinet’s Revolution was received with some surprise. So fierce

an attack on the Comite de salut public had not been expec ted from
a combative anti-clerical, who would not have scrupled to use the
university monopoly to propagate a deism better calculated, in his
opinion, to develop the social heritage of France than Catholicism.
Perhaps his view concerning State education accorded ill with his
liberalism, which was nevertheless sincerely held.
In his view the Revolution, in its earliest phase, was most cer-
77
tainly the dynamic expression of a generous impulse towards;
freedom, and of a desire for a nobler, a more humane, and a more
enlightened society. If in later years it engulfed the republic
which might have realized these ideals, if it was satisfied with
equality, the code civile and material welfare, 4f it took refuge under
the sceptre of an ambitious soldier, by so much did the Revolution
fall short of its own high ideals. But backsliding did not begin
with the 18th Brumaire. Long before that time the French people
had shown themselves incapable of fulfilling their Revolution.
The massacres of September 1792 — ‘les evenements de septem-
bre’, as they were called, a training in the hypocritical glossing
over of horrors — were preparatory to the Terror, by which the
noblest minds of the Revolution were annihilated.
‘Quinet laments in particular the downfall of the Girondins,
whom he regards as the true friends of freedom, for they wished to
break down that centralization which was the product and the
instrument of the old despotism. The Jacobins of the Comite de
salut public desired nothing more than to make themselves masters
of that instrument of the late domination. Their restoration of
arbitrary power did even more moral harm than their savage
methods with the leading figures of the Revolution. It left such
demoralization that the Directory was powerless to act, however
good its intentions and however strong its desire to build firm
foundations for the Republic. Indeed the Directors themselves
were only too easily tempted to resort to force, and when in Fruc-
tidor 1797 three of them, with the help of the army, pushed aside
the other two and attacked the legislative assemblies as well,
the total rout of freedom was only a question of time.
The man who had directed this coup^ from Italy, was General
26hSp2x"tC. Twe yC^rs late.r S-nmaire, after his Egyptian
adventure, he gave the death-blow. ‘As long as there had been a
civilian government, and a constitution, and a republic, there
were at least the roots from which liberty might still spring, to
blossom once more; now there came, with the sword, a regime on
principle opposed to liberty.’
But after all that men had been through, after the atrocities, the
shocks and disappointments, after the betrayals of principle, ex¬
haustion and apathy were universal, and the parliamentarians’
appeal to the people was powerless against brute force, and met
with no response. Indeed men were content with civil rights and
78
EDGAR QUINET
material acquisitions. But what blindness, and to what disasters,
degeneracy, moral and spiritual death, did it lead!
What is the explanation of this failure of the French people? It
was not the only occasion. Whenever a liberal government was
tried, in 1791 when the Constituante organized the constitutional
monarchy, in 1795-99 when the Directory tried to clear the way for
the republic, in 1848-51 under the Second Republic, the public
failed to support it.‘ A people cannot free itself from its historical
tradition in the space of a few years. The French had every reason
to hate their history, which had nothing to offer them, no parlia¬
ment like that of the British, no free cantons like those of the Swiss,
nothing, indeed, save absolutism. In 1789 they revolted against it
and in a moment of joyous enthusiasm imagined themselves free.
But the old ways, ‘les moeurs servilcs’, soon reasserted themselves,
all the more easily since the French Revolution, unlike the English
and the Dutch, was not accompanied by a religious reformation.
In Quinet’s view freedom cannot coexist with Catholicism. It is
one of his grudges against Rousseau, whose spirit governed the
Revolution, that he shrank from this reformation, and still more
that he made men’s minds impervious to it by the doctrine * of his
‘vicaire Savoyard’, which was death to all faith. T regard all the
various religions as so many salutary institutions. I look upon
them all as good, where God is served in fitting manner.’ And so
men adapted themselves to the old slavery once more.
What a melancholy spectacle they presented, these heroes of
1792, when, after Brumaire, they had to serve under a master.
When friends reminded them of ideals formerly shared, there was
only an embarrassed mumble, unless they snapped angrily back:
‘Let us forget all that.’ They decked themselves in the titles and
the livery of the Emperor. And so this Revolution, begun as
resistance to absolutism, to a stifling administrative centralization,
and, in Quinet’s view,’ to the outworn Church of Rome, petered
out in a government under which men could no doubt enjoy the
lands they had acquired from the Church or from Emigres, and which
introduced the codes, but which was as authoritarian as the
monarchy had ever been, even more highly centralized, and with
the link between Church and State restored by the Concordat.
‘The French who since 1804 imagined that they had salvaged
the Revolution because they possessed their five codes, argued like
* La Rivolution, I, 137 sqq. ’ 11, 481. ’ II, 537.
79
the Byzantines, who also thought that they had preserved Athens
and Rome and the heroic soul of ancient civilization, because
Justinian had given them the Digests and the Pandects.** The
First Consul’s description of his regime, which turned everything
into its opposite, as ‘definitely consolidating the effects of the
Revolution’, was nothing more than an audacious sophism. ‘The
most surprising part is that this sophism and the ambition of a
great commander became the guide for the historian’s judgment
(a thrust at Thiers), and the bait by which a portion of posterity
allows itself to be snared.’*
This civil freedom itself, so cunningly used as a pretext for the
destruction of political life,* was but a fragile possession in the
absence of political guarantees. ‘Everything had been sacrificed
to equality, the divinity which devoured all others; it came first in
the tables of the law. And yet this equality itself was suspended by
the creation of a new nobility and of entailed estates which
brought the old privileges with them. The nobility of the old
France is revived and resumes its proud position, as the democrats
who cannot penetrate into its ranks are seen to be forging new
titles for themselves... Equality perished twice, when the new
men repudiated her, and when the old names were restored.’
There was a spiritual servitude so great that literature withered
away. ‘Neither Kant, Fichte, Schelling, nor Hegel, could have
put forward in France those daring theses which gave a new con¬
tent to the moral world; they would have been imprisoned at the
first word.’* Mme de Stael was not allowed to live in France.
‘You know what the Empire asked as the price of restoring to her
her country, her fame, her honour and even the two millions that
were owing to her. Two lines of praise; and these she had refused.’ *
But to exile she owed the opportunity of gaining strength and fresh
life from the new ideas springing up elsewhere. Because of this,
and because she had not needed to subjugate her mind to the All-
Powerful, as the others had been compelled to do, because of her
solitary sojourn at Coppet and her wanderings through Europe,
at a time when the world and the French liberals were getting used
to the yoke and were losing their way, she was able to echo the
voice of 1789 in her Considerations. That almost forgotten sound
aroused wonder and trouble of spirit. As if by a miracle the tradi¬
tion of free minds was restored.
7 sqq. • II, 535. X • II, 596. * n, 560. ‘ II, 570.
80
EDGAR QUINET
THE CONCORDAT
Was the Church at least free from persecution? We know that
Quinet could no longer regard it as a force for freedom. As we
shall see, people never tired of citing the famous Concordat of i8oi
as the conclusive proof of the young First Consul’s statesmanlike
wisdom. If Quinet condemned it, it was largely on the grounds
that this measure was no true liberation for the Church, that it
was, in fact, servitude. With a stroke of the pen, he writes, the
First Consul had abolished the healthy modern principle of the
separation of Church and State established in 1795 in place of
the Constitution ^civile du clerge which had proved unworkable.
‘Religion is henceforth no more than a matter for authority and
police; conscience is again in the clutches and under the seal of
policy. Nobody shall pray to his God without the permission of
the State, which authorizes only those ancient forms of creed
which have been consecrated by time. Hence the impossibility of
renewing anything in religious life. Death is made into a rule . ..
Every non-salaried faith, every non-official god is suppressed; and
that change actually takes effect as soon as the order is given. Not
a soul offers resistance. The officially admitted religions rejoice
that life has been made impossible for others; and what strikes one
dumb is that this spiritual regime, of which police supervision is
the most constant feature, could be called the regime of religious
liberty, so completely and suddenly had every idea of real liberty
been driven out.
‘The clergy, enslaved by the sovereign, itself sovereign over con¬
science; a despotic church in the power of a despot. Such was the
Concordat! A mace in the hands of Hercules I Yet it can be turned
against him.’
‘In the speech of Portalis’ (the Minister of Cults) ‘by which the
Concordat of 1802 was, as it were, prefaced, lies the origin of that
conventional Catholicism, seen by no mortal eyes, fabulous,
liberal, tolerant, without monastic orders, without monasteries or
convents, without ultramontanism, without theocracy, almost
without Pope, a mere figment of the imagination of a great lawyer
serving a great soldier. We talk of Utopias: the first Utopia is the
Concordat.
‘Here is its true significance: as regards policy the Revolution
was seeking a refuge with Caesar, as regards religion with the Pope.’ ‘
* II, 525 sqq.
F 81
I hardly need remark that all these views were so many attacks
on the regime of Napoleon III. Quinet too was living in Switzer¬
land, able to draw strength from the world of ideas outside France
because he had not been willing to bow to the tyrant. In his day,
too, a materialism reigned supreme and was to reconcile men to
the loss of their freedom. Were not the intellectuals and the
lawyers well satisfied, did not the air resound with praise for the
blessings of imperial rule, uttered by those who were sunning
themselves in its favour, and enjoying its decorations, and who,
many of them, had formerly served Louis Philippe or dreamed of
liberty under the second Republic?
Under Napoleon III Church and State were linked together as
closely as ever, Lamennais had fallen into disfavour at Rome
shortly after 1830, and the Concordat of 1801 seemed sacrosanct
to priests and officials alike. But that Quinet wrote under the
influence of his own experiences does not lessen the importance to
history of his ideas concerning Napoleon and his work.
THE PICTURE OF NAPOLEON
For Quinet Napoleon is first and foremost the general, the mili¬
tary man. He does not question his merits as such, though he does
hint that Bonaparte neglected no means to make them apparent.
Massena, for instance, whose campaign in Switzerland during
Bonaparte’s absence in Egypt had just as much title to become
legendary, confined himself to the most meagre dispatches, which
failed to fire public imagination. Bonaparte used his military
reputation as political capital. Precisely at the moment when ir
Brumaire he had to throw everything into the balance, the sue
cesses of Massena in Switzerland and of Brune in Holland causec
the danger to the Fatherland, which he was going to save, to appeal
much less threatening. Had not public opinion been so thoroughh
prepared and ready to follow his lead, this might well have upse
his calculations. HoWever this may be, Napoleon is the soldiei
the enemy of civil administration, of discussion and of freedon
the man of power, of brute force, the man, too, who was afrai
neither of advertisement nor of deceit.
‘One thing assured Napoleon’s success. He perceived from afi
the goal towards which he strove. Among the men of his genen
tion he was the only one who had known for a long time what I
wanted. While the others were running aimlessly backwards ar
82
EDGAR QUINET
forwards, he went straight ahead. Absolute power was his
compass.’^
The case of Venice showed how unscrupulously he brushed
aside everything which stood in his way. It was in 1796, at the
very beginning of his career, after his sensational success in Italy.
He was only a general in the service of the Republic, but already
he was giving orders and negotiating in a high-handed way,
establishing States here and doing away with them there. Thus,
after finding pretexts to gain control of the neutral republic of
Venice, he delivered it up to Austria, high-handedness which
aroused a certain uneasiness even in Paris. And what a piece of
sophistry was his justification after the event.
Tt was intended to strengthen the patriotism of the Venetians,
to prepare the way for their future independence, and to ensure
that at some later time they should receive a national government,
whatever its composition.’ It was at St. Helena that the fallen
Emperor made this statement; there ‘where passion was stilled,
and only posterity was his witness’, he invented, in cold blood, this
worse than Machiavellian example of special pleading. By his
writings we may know him. ‘What writer, what philosopher,’ says
Quinet mockingly, ‘has the good fortune, in all religious, political
and sociological difficulties, and at the moment when the road
seems closed to all others, to possess a star which shines exclusively
for him, so that he can reply to every question: “My interest was
that of the universe, my rule was liberty for the others, my victory
was that of earth and of heaven, my defeat is that of Providence,
the key to all mysteries is my sceptre. I was the alpha and the
omega. After me nothing remains, neither kings nor peoples, the
old world and the new are empty.” ’-
Qiiinet can see nothing of the Frenchman, nothing of modern
man, in Napoleon.
‘The ideal of Napoleon was the Empire of Constantine, and of
Theodosius. He inherited this tradition as did all the Italian
Ghibellines, from his ancestors . . . Instead of assisting fhe libera¬
tion of the individual conscience, he always postulated a Pope, of
whom he would be the Emperor and master. It is a conception
which takes its origins from the idea of the Ghibellines and the
medieval commentators. When he dreams of the future it is always
of the submissive world of a Justinian or a Theodosius, as imagined
111,489. "11,487.
S3
by the medieval imperialist thinkers. In the midst of such concepts
modern freedom seemed an anachronism; worse, to him it could
appear only as the people’s whim, as a snare for his power.’
That is Napoleon — an Italian strayed into France, a victim of
the superstitions of the Monarchia del mondo^ and testamentary exe¬
cutor of the wild imaginings of Dante — whom he had never read.
None of the generals of French descent who had at first been some¬
times regarded as his rivals, men like Moreau, Hoche, Joubert,
Bernadotte, would have discovered the tradition of Roman uni¬
versal monarchy in their ancestral archives. More grandiose than
great, the vision of le grand empire^ limitless, unbounded even by the
sea, belongs to Napoleon and is Italian. And it is the true setting
for his triumphant restoration of Catholicism, by which he hoped
to give his authority the necessary foundation. What he had
gained by surprise on the i8th Brumaire, he consecrated with the
Concordat.
CONSTANTINE AND THEODOSIUS
Quinet has one more interesting observation to make concerning

Napoleon’s ecclesiastical policy.^ In order to bring the earth once
more under the yoke of Constantine or Theodosius he had been
compelled not only to restore the Papacy along with Catholicism,
but thereafter to put himself in the place of the Papacy. Thus the
Pope would merely have been a patriarch in the power of the
Emperor. Like Constantine, Napoleon would have been able to
preside over Councils of Nicaea. He would have had absolute
authority over men’s souls as well as over their bodies. Such was
his aim. But in trying to realize it he made one mistake. It con¬
cerned the so-called liberties of the Gallican Church. Here his
discernment failed. He did not realize that those liberties, which
he intended to convert into servitude, had already disappeared
with all the others . . . He believed that with the four articles of
Bossuet he could tie the jChurch fast to his triumphal chariot. But
the Church would have nothing to do with them any more. ‘These
articles, by which he imagined he could limit the Papacy, were an ^
illusion . . . That was the weakest side of the Empire.’
Napoleon, argues Quinet, could not remedy his mistake, be¬
cause he did not dare touch doctrine. As a true Latin he was
suspicious of the Greeks, he was lacking completely in the audacity
UI, 534sqq.
84
EDGAR QUINET
of the pioneer or the reformer. The Church remained for him an
unsurmountable obstacle to the attainment of his Byzantine ideal.
How businesslike and sober, after these vast and timeless
philosophizings, appears the account of Thiers. Or should I say
that, compared with Thiers, Quinet seems fantastic and far¬
fetched? As regards the ecclesiastical policy, in any case, I shall
later show, when dealing with one of the writers whose books were
soon, in a sense, to provide the factual basis for Quinet’s con¬
ceptions,^ that it is necessary to assume neither Italian descent nor
Byzantine model, since it was in line with French and general
European tendencies. No doubt it has an excessive air, but then
Napoleon carried everything to excess. For the rest I shall refrain
from comment, as later chapters will afford opportunity for
explanation and discussion.
^ cf. below, pp. io6 sqq., on d’IIaussonville, Veglise romaine et le premier Empire.
Much that may seem obscure here, will be explained there.
^5
CHAPTER III
PIERRE LANFREY
THE MAN AND HIS WORK
In 1867 there appeared the first volumes of a new Histoire de

Napoleon^ the aim of which was to do away with the legend once
and for all. It was indeed the first scholarly attack made on it-.
While Barni contributed only scattered observations, and Quinet
confined himself to generalities, Lanfrey, the author of the new
work, undertook to give a straightforward and matter-of-fact
account, and to support his critical attitude in every particular.
Thiers’s work, as I observed, cannot be regarded as purely
polemical. There can be no doubt, however, of the polemical
character of Lanfrey’s book, in spite of the customary introduction
in which the writer affirms that, now that both the vilifiers and the
apologists have shot their bolts, he will provide that calm, just,
perspicacious assessment which the passage of time makes possible.
As well-known journalist and publicist, he is trying to attack the
government of his own day by undermining the foundations upon
which it rests. He desires to show the falseness of the current view
of the ‘great’ Napoleon, particularly as coined by Thiers, Of
Constantine or Theodosius, of the ten-century-old tradition of the
French monarchy, he has nothing to say. Yet even so his view is
strongly reminiscent of that of Quinet. He recognizes no springs of
action in Napoleon other than ambition and the lust for power.
He sees not the man who consolidated the Revolution, but the
man who suppressed liberty, the man of violence and trickery, from
whom France had nothing save misery, who took away free speech,
enslaved parliament and the press, who expelled all men of
independent mind, and wh© created a new aristocracy, supremely
vulgar and flashy, from among his sword-rattlers and his boot¬
lickers. There were, besides, those endless wars with all Europe,
yielding sterile victories, but a rich harvest of distrust and of hate
and, finally, the disasters of 1812 to 1815.
Lanfrey’s book is a piece of polemical writing because he is
nearly always more concerned to prove these contentions, to spar,
so to speak, with both Napoleon and his eulogists, than to give a
86
PIERRE LANFREY
true picture of the man. In so far as he attempts this, one has the
feeling that his pen is guided by aversion and hostility. Wherever
it is possible to choose between a favourable or a less favourable
interpretation of Napoleon’s actions and intentions, one can be
sure that Lanfrey will always choose the less favourable, and put it
in the most unpleasant way. His reading of Napoleon’s character,
too, is composed from the least attractive testimonies.
‘If there is one characteristic and striking trait’, he writes, ‘in
the innumerable conversations noted down by those who could
approach him most intimately, it is the absence of all unforced
utterances. He is always seen concerned, either to gauge the
intentions of the other person, or to make an impression on his
mind so as to lead him towards a certain conclusion; it would be
trouble wasted to look for a moment of abandon, of enthusiasm,
of sincere outpouring, be it about himself or others. Even
when he allows himself to be carried away in these coquetries
of cat-like grace, the charm of which contemporaries have so
repeatedly described, he does not lose sight of the effect that he is
aiming at; even his rash words are ciilculated. He is impenetrable
to those near to him as well as to strangers. It would even be
impossible to point out, in the whole of his life, a single one of those
sayings of philosophic self-mockery which delight us in Caesar or
in Frederick, because they show us the man rising above his role,
commenting on himself with a judgment unclouded by his own
success . . . Napoleon is always on the stage, always concerned
about the impression he is making . . . He is lacking in that final
human greatness which consists in estimating one’s self at its true
value, and as a result of his incurable self-conceit he remains on
the level of small minds.’^
That is a striking passage, and no doubt it gives a recognizable
picture of Napoleon. But does it give the whole Napoleon? We
shall come across other representations of him, later on, based on
the very opposite impression, and yet these too are not without
a certain truth. But Lanfrey is blind to the greatness of the figure,
if only as the creator of power, as conqueror, as ruler setting his
stamp on France and on Europe. He is blind to the magnitude of
his operations, even if regarded as nothing more than a breath¬
taking adventure.
Since Lanfrey had the substantial volumes of the Correspondance
^ II, 336 sqq.
87
REACjTION AGAINST THE LEGEND
at his disposal, he was able to make a much fuller use of the letters
than Thiers, faced with the overwhelming mass of archive material,
and he used them with much perspicacity. But the importance of
his book, in the final analysis, is its point of view. It is one closely
related to that of Mme de Stad and Quinet, the point of view of a
man who sees in history primarily the moral problems. What I
said above concerning greatness and power, he would probably
have rejected as rhetoric, or even denounced as dangerously mis¬
leading. He instinctively sets his face against hollow phrases about
national honour and glory, and judges, unshaken by success-or
popular approbation, by his standards of freedom, love of truth,
humanity and reverence for spiritual values.
The living Napoleon is not to be found in Lanfrey’s book. For
absolute historical truth one would also search in vain. It has
no place among these sharp judgments, this setting of black against
white. The available material, was still too one-sided, and
Lanfrey is sometimes completely positive about relationships
which later research has shown to be far more complicated and
intricate. To give only one example, there is the pas ^ in which
he presents Napoleon in 1812 as preparing ‘with^s^;^ utmost
secrecy’ the attack on Czar Alexander, while the latatt^ only
set in motion ‘a few defensive operations’, and haions^^vise
loyally accepted the consequences of his declaratiorventv^ J on
England’. Since the Russian archives have been opentc^'and the
story of Alexander’s ambitions, plans, dissimulation and tricks
told in great detail,^ nothing remains of this theory of the innocent
Czar and the wicked Napoleon.
Lanfrey must therefore be used with caution. His picture is not
the one which History can mark as her own. Nevertheless, where
he did possess the necessary data, he again and again provides
irrefutable arguments which are of the greatest importance for
the formation of the picture. Any number of illusions perish before
‘the keen, searching north wind’® which blows through this book.
BONAPARTE BEFORE BRUMAIRE
In Thiers’s opinion, as we have seen, Napoleon’s authoritarian

and military excesses were due to the fact that his better nature
^ By Vandal, in his Napolion et Alexandre ler. (1893-94); ^f. Sorel, Lectures
historiquesy p. 192.
* According to G. P, Gooch, History and Historians of the Nineteenth Centuryy
PIERRE LANFREY
succumbed to the temptations of overwhelming success. Lanfrey
— who thus continues in the direction pointed by Mme de Stael —
shows us a very different Napoleon, consumed with ambition from
the first, thirsting to succeed and to reach the top, and yet, with
all this fiery passion, coldly calculating, completely unscrupulous
in his methods, absolutely unprincipled himself but capable of
making skilful use of the principles of others when he deigned to
notice them at all. Long before the French made him, to their
own undoing. First Consul, they could have realized, had they
not been so blind and so frivolous, what sort of man he was.
There was his little book, Le Souper de Beaucaire, published in 1793
when he was not yet twenty-four years old, in which, at the very
opening of the Terror and the domination of the Montagnards, he
exhorted the Girondist population of Marseilles to submission.
And why? On no other ground than that of the accomplished
fact. Young Bonaparte does not care for justice or reason, but,
with frightening maturity, recognizes power as the all-important
factor.'
He makes one further contribution to the cause of the revolution¬
ary left, this time with cannon shot. It is in October 1795, he is
just twenty-six and since Toulon a man of some importance. What
caused him to join forces with Barras against the royalist revolt?
‘His personal sympathies were as little with the one as with the
other’, writes Lanfrey. ‘He was guided more by calculation than
by principle.’’' He gets his payment, the command of the army
intended for Italy. In the famous proclamation delivered by the
young general to his shabby troops Lanfrey reads the signs of an
ominous deviation from the spirit which had up to then inspired
the republican armies. The call was no longer to their patriotism
but to their greed. ‘Soldiers, you are ill-fed and almost naked ...
I shall lead you into the most fertile plains of the world, where you
will find big cities and rich lands. You will gather honour, glory
and riches.’ Such language no longer heralded a war of liberation
but one of conquest.’ Thus Lanfrey, who says later on: ‘Our
national self-love has generally cast a veil over those motives of
shameless rapacity which characterized our fust occupation of
Italy .. . People prefer to let themselves be beguiled by the fine-
sounding phrases and rhetorical commonplaces intended to befog
the crowd ... But in that way the true meaning of events remains
' I, 30 sqq. ‘ I, 72- ’ I. 83-
89
hidden and there is surprise when so much alleged heroism and
virtue result in so cynical a peace treaty as that of Campo Formio.
People do not understand why our work in Italy was so quickly
undone/ nor why in the end our own Republic was doomed to
suffer extinction at the hands of its own republican soldiers.’®
It will be seen that his point of departure is quite different from
that of Thiers. The coup d'etat of Brumaire, a few years after, was
not regarded by Lanfrey as salvation from confusion and impo¬
tence, but as the downfall of the Republic set up by the Revolu¬
tion. He admits that the Republic had fallen into bad hands, with
the Directory. But the worst deed which the Directory had on its
conscience was to have given a free hand to this young general.
There he was, sending money and art treasures to Paris, turning a
blind eye to the corrupt practices of his subordinates, making
political arrangements on his own authority, like the shocking one
whereby the old Republic of Venice was first dissolved and then, at
Campo Formio, handed over to Austria. And meanwhile he was
building such power for himself and the army that the French
Republic itself would be safe no longer.
With what calculated cunning the young man already played
men off one against another. How unctuously he describes the
state of political inferiority in which the Venetian Senate was wont
to keep the nobles on the mainland.® They are not likely to fare
any better under Austria, those nobles — but that plan is not yet
made public. The whole of that Venetian'tragedy, the cunning
design, the impudence with which weak opponents are put in the
wrong, the demagogic exaggeration of occasional resistance to
the French troops in order to have a grievance against the
Venetian Senate* — Lanfrey uses it all to show that Bonaparte
practised the unhallowed arts of dictatorial government as to the
manner born. Most revealing of all is the instruction given by
Bonaparte on May 26th, 1797, to a general whom he sent to take
possession of the Ionian Iânds. For the time being the general
was to show outward respect to the authority of Venice, but he
must have the control all the same. Tf the inhabitants should
prove to be inclined towards independence’ (that is to say,
inclined to free themselves from Venetian rule), ‘you are to
^ The Italian republics set up by Bonaparte collapsed as early as 1798 under the
fresh Austrian attack.
® I, 102. • I, 261. ^ I, 244 sqq.
90
PIERRE LANFREY
encourage that inclination, and in the proclamations which you
will be issuing you must not omit to speak of Greece, Sparta and
Athens.’^
Lanfrey considers that the last phrase ‘is one of the most
characteristic passages ever written by Bonaparte, shedding light
into the darkest recesses of his soul’. We can certainly see from it
that he had learnt the technique of propaganda appropriate to a
conqueror even before he came to power in France, and that he
did not scruple to use noble ideas for the purposes of deception.
The Ionian Islands meant for Bonaparte a springboard to the
East, for an attack on Turkey. The impetuousness with which
he threw himself into this dream, forgetting Italy, as it were,
‘betrayed’, says Lanfrey, ‘the unsoundness of that immoderate
spirit, which at a later stage imagined itself to be building for
eternity when it did but collect the material for a gigantic ruin’.^
The Egyptian adventure falls into the same category.
But even before relinquishing his command in Italy, Bonaparte
used the independent power he had acquired there for an inter¬
vention in France. The Directory had let him go his own way, had
allowed him to train himself, as it were, for the role which he
designed for himself in France. The Directory, however, was even
then divided: two of its members, Carnot and Barthelemy,
especially the latter, were in contact with an opposition group in
the Councils. Anti-Jacobin and liberal, this opposition wished to
curb violence and abuse of power. It desired peace, a lasting
peace, and thus was prepared to moderate the war aims. This
‘constitutional’ opposition was inevitably urged on from behind
by the royalists. But the member of the Five Hundred who put a
question on the war with Venice in which the country had become
so unexpectedly involved, was certainly no royalist. It is char¬
acteristic that he spoke up for the right of the Five Hundred, and
not without a reference to English parliamentary usage, to con¬
sider matters of war and peace. Bonaparte’s fury at this timid
attempt at criticism of his leadership is of the greatest significance.
In his protests to the Directory he complained that, afteT the
services he had rendered, he was being persecuted and put under
suspicion. He said that the speaker in the Five Hundred was
‘inspired by an emigre and in the pay of England’, and with his
letter he sent a dagger. It was one taken from the conspirators on
* I, 123 and 269 sqq. “ I, 285.
91
Venetian territory who had given the pretext for the occupation,
but it must now serve as symbol for the daggers with which the
opposition in the Five Hundred were, according to Bonaparte,
threatening his life ... Nor did he confine himself to protests. He
used his eighty thousand men quite openly as a threat; he quotes
the figure repeatedly as an argument which must stop all criticism.
They were, he said, longing for the moment when they could save
the constitution from royalist conspirators. In this Italian out¬
burst his adversaries were referred to as ‘cowardly lawyers and
miserable chatter-boxes’. When one knows what was to happen
two years later at Brumaire, one recognizes the same brand of
demagogy. It is nevertheless somewhat unexpected to find Bona¬
parte and the most fiery Jacobins in the same boat on this occasion,
to find him appealing to the fiercest revolutionary instincts of his
soldiers, instincts which were then still easy to arouse. He allowed
the army to demonstrate and draw up addresses to its heart’s
content, and finally supplied the general, Augereau, needed by the
majority of the Directory, and by Barras, his patron, in particular,
in order to liquidate Barthdemy and Carnot and the opposition in
the two Councils. And indeed it was by means of physical force,
by the use of troops, that this was carried out on the 18th Fructidor
(September 3rd, 1797). The victims were not guillotined, as after
previous crises: that time was past. Instead they were transported
without trial to Guiana, where most of them died.
This then was the famous act of violence which so undermined
the moral strength of the regime, the Directory and the Councils
alike, that Bonaparte, once the pear was ripe and he himself in a
position to undertake his own coup d'etat, had an easy task. Mean¬
while Lanfrey, in giving his account of the story, has taken care
that we shall note (though later historians, as we shall see, some¬
times appear to forget it again), that Bonaparte, who was to profit
from this moral decline in Brumaire, had had a leading part in the
crime of Fructidor, simply because he would not suffer a word to
be breathed against his arbitrary government in Italy.
There follows the Egyptian expedition. Lanfrey has nothing to
say about the romantic side, the serious conversations with scholars
whom Bonaparte had invited to Egypt, the admiration for ancient
monuments. He is more interested in the famous proclamation to
the population, in which the invader presented himself as nearly
as possible as a Mohammedan. It is a striking example of Bona-
92
PIERRE LANFREY
parte’s propaganda style, but it was too crude to make the desired
impression. And then, when the situation, what with the failure of
the Syrian campaign and the defeat of the French fleet, became
dangerous, and a crisis was developing in France of the kind which
he had always hoped to exploit, there was the return journey,
alone, except for a small band of the best generals, leaving the
army to the command of Kleber. Kleber, earnest and loyal
republican, was deeply indignant at the impossible task with which
he was burdened. He sent the Directory a bitter accusation, fully
substantiated. When it arrived, however, Kleber was dead and so
was the power of the Directory. Bonaparte was First Consul and
could take on himself the adjudication of the charge made against
him. He published it with the most tendentious and dishonest
annotations, and who was then going to call him to account?^
THE PROSCRIPTION OF THE JACOBINS (l 8 0 O )
That Lanfrey must look upon Bonaparte’s accession to power

with emotions other than those of Thiers or Lefebvre, is now
intelligible. His attitude will be that of Mignet or Quinet. But his
introduction was intended to provide the reader with something
more than theoretical principles or general ideas. He was to be
made to see, and as it were to touch, the truth that nothing good
could be expected of this man, that France would not be safe in his
hands. The coup d'etat of Brumaire itself is laid bare with all the
deceit and lies.* And the story docs not end with Brumaire.
Thiers, as we saw, considers that, until the unhappy affair of the
Due d’Enghien, in 1804, Bonaparte behaved like a philosopher at
the head of the State. Lanfrey, on the other hand, shows the
extent to which, in the years after i8th Brumaire, the First Consul
resorted to stratagem and broken promises, in order to get rid of
those limitations to his power which still existed, and how im¬
patiently he reacted to any criticism or independence. It goes with¬
out saying that Lanfrey will not ignore the protests of doctrinaire
republicans still sitting on representative bodies. That these no
^ 1,414 sqq. I must here add the warning that all these matters could be presented
very differently. For example, the opposition in the Five Hundred against Bona¬
parte’s Italian policy, was most certainly to a large extent royalist or at a.iy rate an
instrument in the hands of those royalists who w’ere aiming to overthrow the
Republic; Kleber’s accusation was greatly exaggerated, according to other authori¬
ties, and Bonaparte had done what he could for the army he left behind: see for
example Madelin, Histoire du Consulat et de VEmpire,
* I shall deal with this subject more fully, in connection with Albert Vandal.
93
longer had public opinion behind them does not put an end to the
argument for him; one may, if one likes, call him a doctrinaire or
abstract liberal on that account. Certainly it was the uncritical
approbation of the people which made it possible for Bonaparte to
draw the stings of parliamentarians and journalists. But the
people were to be cheated in the end. Besides, Lanfrey argues,
there are methods which nothing can excuse.
Leaving aside Lanfrey’s treatment of Bonaparte’s constructive
work as First Consul, to which I shall have occasion to return
later, I shall give one example of this point, in connection with an
incident concerning which I have already briefly quoted Bignon.^
These first years had also had their conspiracies. Just before
Christmas 1800 an ‘infernal machine’ exploded in the street as the
First Consul was driving to the Opera. He was unhurt, but there
were a number of dead and wounded. Bonaparte took this oppor¬
tunity to purge the left opposition. In spite of considerable
reluctance on the part of his nearest associates (he was as yet far
from being the Emperor at whose voice all objections ceased) he
forced through an extraordinary measure: one hundred and thirty
well-known republicans ~ they were for the occasion called
terrorists — were proscribed without any legal process. Among
them were quite a number who had opposed him simply on
grounds of principle, men, for example, who had resisted the coup
dêtat of Brumaire in the previous year, and whom he hated for that
reason. The hundred and thirty were either interned or deported,
and most of them failed to survive the climate of Guiana.
But a few days after the decree, Fouche, Minister of Police, who
had not for one moment believed that the republicans were guilty,
found the real perpetrators of the crime. They were right-wing
opponents, chouans, royalists. The new batch of prisoners were
found guilty and guillotined, but the Jacobins who had been
deported were not set free. Bonaparte was much too pleased to be
rid of them, and he had had the foresight to see that the ground for
proscription was given in the decree as concern for the safety of the
State, not the attempt of December 24th. He laughingly pointed
this out to a member of the Council of State who had the courage
to come and plead for the innocent victims.®
^ cf. above, p. 42: Lanfrey, II, 264 sqq.

® I must point out here that I take this from Lanfrey, who does not give his
source — certainly mhnoires.
94
PIERRE LANFREY
Thiers too gives these facts.^ The conduct of Fouche he con¬

demns but he says of Bonaparte, without a word of blame, that he
troubled himself little about ‘unorthodox methods’, provided he
was rid of the ‘General Staff of the Jacobins’. It is only in reading
Lanfrey’s account that the real cruelty and hideousness of such
arbitrary action emerges, and Thiers’s later remark about Bona¬
parte’s ‘cocur genereux et bon’ acquires an odd flavour.
NAPOLEON AND THE DETHRONING OF THE

SPANISH BOURBONS (l8o8)
There is one incident in Napoleon’s career, undefended save by

his most fervent supporters,^ which did him an immeasurable
amount of harm at the time, and which in its consequences con¬
tributed to his fall. This was the dethroning of the Spanish Bour¬
bons in 1808. We have seen that neither Bignon nor Armand
Lefebvre concealed their disapproval.®
The old, weak King of Spain, Charles IV, was a Bourbon, a
direct descendant of Louis XIV, whose grandson had acquired the
Spanish throne in 1700 after the Spanish Habsburg line had died
out. Under the influence of his wife and her lover Godoy, who was
Prime Minister and was known by the somewhat ridiculous title of
Prince of the Peace, Charles IV had all the time held fast to the
alliance with France, in spite of the fate of his relative Louis XVI.
How little this could be relied upon, however, Napoleon had dis¬
covered in 1806, when Godoy, who thought that the war with
Prussia would prove the grave of imperial greatness, revealed his
secret hostility—just too soon, for immediately afterwards came
the battle of Jena. Although Godoy beat a hasty retreat, even
agreeing to the dispatch of a Spanish army corps to the Baltic to
purchase his forgiveness, the Emperor had not forgotten. After the
fall of the Bourbons in France and in Naples, where he had
driven them out himself, he regarded the continued existence of
the rival dynasty — for in that light he now saw the relationship
between Bourbons and Bonapartes — as a dangerous anomaly. In
addition the weak misgovernment of Charles IV and Godoy
offended Napoleon in what one might call his professional self-
^ I, 21 ib. ,
* For example by Prince Napoleon (cf. later); others w ho condemn it emphasize
strongly the objectionable nature of the Spanish Bourboiis and Napoleon’s convic¬
tion that he could do better than they (e.g,, Vandal, cf./later).
* cf. pp. 41 and 51.
95
respect, apd harmed his interests in so far as it destroyed the value
of Spain as an ally.
Now at last the moment had come for Napoleon to give his
attention to the affairs of Spain, and it was the most radical
solution to which he felt himself driven. The Bourbons were to be
forced to abdicate and their place was to be taken by one of his
brothers. It was true that Ferdinand, the heir, had approached
him. Ferdinand’s quarrel with his mother and his attempts to
open the eyes of his father had given rise to a scandal, in which
Spanish opinion was passionately on his side; with him the nation
was ready to await deliverance at the hands of the great Napoleon.
But Ferdinand displayed a pitiable weakness and lack of loyalty in
this family quarrel, and though the Spanish people were not
disillusioned, it is not surprising that Napoleon was not very
anxious to put his trust in him. What gives so unpleasant an air
to the whole business is the manner in which he carried out his
scheme.
He had already troops in Spain, on their way to Portugal, where
the English had landed — the beginning of great events. More and
more Frenchmen arrived and fewer and fewer went on to Portugal.
No explanation was given. Murat was in command of these
troops in Spain, but not even he was told of Napoleon’s intentions.
Suddenly, in an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, there was a
revolt against the miserable trio, husband, wife and lover, and at
Aranjuez the King was forced to abdicate in favour of Ferdinand.
Not for a moment did Napoleon think of allowing this event to
shake his resolution, and he continued at first to recognize Charles
IV. Under French protection Charles, still accompanied by his
wife and Godoy, renounced his forced abdication. This was now
to serve as a weapon in Napoleon’s hand against Ferdinand. But
as long as the Prince was surrounded by his Spaniards, Napoleon
was careful not to disturb his hope that at the final account the
French would be on hiS side. Murat was still left in the dark, but
meanwhile Napoleon had sent Savary to Spain, Savary, the man
he liked to use for delicate tasks, for the dirty work, one might say.
Of him he said: ‘If I ordered Savary to murder his wife and
children, I know he would do it without a moment’s hesitation .. .’
Savary’s task was to entice the ingenuous Ferdinand to France.
There, at Bayonne, Napoleon was to compose the differences
between him and his parents.
96
PIERRE LANFREY
The King and Queen, with Godoy, were brought to this frontier
town, and there, too, came Ferdinand, still the darling and the
hope of his people, and never suspecting but that Napoleon would
confirm him in his recent greatness. But he found himself in a trap.
From the first he was virtually a prisoner and was told he must
relinquish his crown. With a certain devilish glee, if Lanfrey is to
be believed, Napoleon watched the unedifying and noisy scene
between father and son. Old Charles threw himself into his arms
as though he were his saviour. Ferdinand resisted for a long
time, but coward as he was, crumpled up when Napoleon openly
threatened his life, and recognized his father as King. The father
then handed his crown to Napoleon who gave it to Joseph, and a
junta of francophil Spaniards summoned to Bayonne confirmed the
choice. Ferdinand and his brothers remained in France under
observation. It was an ironical touch typical of Napoleon, that he
chose Talleyrand for the ‘honourable’ task, as he described it, of
offering them hospitality on his estate, for Talleyrand had for a
long time been opposed to the whole tendency of his foreign policy,
and particularly disliked this Spanish adventure. Or did he per¬
haps play a double game, and was he, while really urging Napoleon
to the action he took, trying to hide his own responsibility from the
outside world? Concerning this and other matters to do with this
complicated character, there are conflicts of opinion; but even if
the second interpretation be the correct one, the task must have
been given to Talleyrand with the intention of compromising him.
Europe reacted with shocked abhorrence. There was the
terror of the old dynasties at the upsetting of one of their number
by that son of the Revolution, the role which Napoleon again saw
himself acting. Worse still was the violent recoil in Spain itself,
where the French had not been unpopular as long as they could be
expected to support Ferdinand, but where now the betrayal of
Bayonne was all the more keenly felt. Even before that tragi¬
comedy was played to a finish, there had been a rising in Madrid
on May 2nd, 1808, against the French occupation. Murat sup¬
pressed it with much bloodshed, and Napoleon did not doubt but
that ‘this good lesson’^ would ensure peace in the future. He was
revolving great plans for Spain. If he brushed the Bourbons so
unceremoniously aside, it was that he might set up under his own
auspices — for Joseph would really be merely his lieutenant — an
^ From his letter of May 6th: Lanfrey, IV, 297.
G 97
up-to-date regime in that backward priest-ridden country. He

would regenerate them, he promised the Spaniards; their children
would bless him. They themselves certainly did not. Dos Mayos
became a battle cry for the Spaniards. Who does not remember
the terrifying picture of hate and resistance which Goya’s imagin¬
ation created from the executions of that day? A popular revolt
was organized throughout the country, which, led by the
aristocracy, and inspired by the priests, made Joseph’s rule a hope¬
less undertaking from the very first, and this was to prove a turn¬
ing point in the history of Napoleon. Spain, with the English on
the spot, remained a continuous drag on his system, and no less
important than the military aspect was the moral impression made
in Germany and elsewhere.
As I have said, practically all writers recognize Napoleon’s
error, though not always with the same intensity. Lanfrey treats
the whole deceitful business with cold contempt; he lays it bare
point by point to bring out the whole treacherous intention. He
puts far more emphasis than Thiers on the complete belief in brute
force and power. This he shows was the basis of Napoleon’s action,
contempt for a people as such, a conviction that every nation will
allow itself to be moulded into the desired shape by the use of a
sufficiently strong force. In this connection he has one very
remarkable point.
There appeared in the Memorial de Ste. Helene^ a letter from
Napoleon to Murat, purporting to have been written on March
29th, that is between the rising of Aranjuez and the meeting at
Bayonne. Although they found no minute of it, and there was no
trace of the original among Murat’s papers, the editors of the great
Correspondance inserted the letter as an authentic document: its
having been communicated to Las Cases on St. Helena by Napo¬
leon seemed to them sufficient. Nevertheless, when the rest of the
story is known, it makes curious reading. From Napoleon’s day to
day correspondence with Murat, and with Savary — which was
not of course known at the time when the Memorial was published
•— it appears that the Emperor had the threads of the intrigue
firmly in his hands and was controlling everything. In this one
letter, however, we see him hesitating. He lectures Murat for
having given him incorrect information concerning the state of
public opinion in Spain. He warns him not to go too fast. He
* Und^ the date June izth, 1816.
; 98
PIERRE LANFREY
prophesies the whole obstinate resistance of the Spanish people
and foresees the furious energy they were to display. Something
seems to be wrong here. What are we to make of it?
Thiers, who already knew the other letters of Napoleon, has
recognized the existence of a problem here and devotes an appendix
to it.^ He asks himself whether it is a forgery. But the letter bears
the indubitable marks of Napoleon’s style. Is it possible that
Napoleon put it together himself on St. Helena to provide an
excuse for the crudest error of his reign? This solution, too, Thiers
rejects, firstly because one unimportant fact, which Napoleon
could not possit)ly have remembered, is correctly mentioned in it,
but also because the great Emperor was too proud to stoop to such
a trick. 2 Finally he gets out of the difficulty by suggesting that
Napoleon wrote the letter during a moment of doubt occasioned
by some particular piece of information, but never sent it. He
must have forgotten on St. Helena that he had not sent it. . . .
Lanfrey is scornfuP of the way in which idolatry and his critical
spirit struggle for mastery of Thiers’s mind. The only advan¬
tage presented by the desperately forced conclusion was that it
allowed him to proclaim the ‘almost superhuman’ perspicacity
which even in this case his hero displayed, without — it had to be
admitted — any practical results . . . And yet it is so obvious that
this isjust another of Napoleon’s customary tricks by which he hoped
to create just that unmerited impression and so put the blame for his
mistake on someone else, who might be supposed to have misled
him with over-optimistic information, on Murat, who was no
longer in a position to answer when Napoleon indited that charm¬
ing piece olf fiction, because he was dead, shot by the Austrians.
As for Napoleon being too proud, was he not quite at home in the
art of forgery? Every day he packed the Moniteur with trumped-
up diplomatic dispatches, fanciful news from abroad, debates in
the Chambers, edited to suit his purpose. And is not every line of
the massive memoires of St. Helena a lie?
Thus Lanfrey. There is no question but that he was right in con¬
sidering the letter as a forgery. Whether Napoleon was actually
the author is another matter, on which I do not venture to pass
judgment.*
^ In the later part of volume II; volume VIII of the Paris edition.
* II, 663b. * IV, 265 sqq.
* pH. Gonnard, Les origines de la Ugende napoleonienne (Paris ‘thesis*, 1906),
draws attention to the fact that the document which he regards as a forgery, was
99
NAPOLEON AND THE ABDUCTION OF PIUS VII

(1809)
I shall now introduce another case, in some respects reminiscent
of the previous one. It does not involve falsification this time, but
it does show that for Napoleon to put the blame on others was
nothing unusual. At the same time it once more illustrates Thiers’s
tendency to credulity.
In 1809, when Rome and the Papal State had been occupied
for a full year by Napoleon’s troops, and were in practice governed
by him, relations with the Pope — that same gentle Pius VII,
with whom the Concordat had been arranged, and who had
visited Paris to crown Napoleon — had become so strained, that
the Emperor’s not very large stock of patience was exhausted and
he decided to remove his refractory antagonist from Rome. I shall
have more to say later concerning the view taken of Napoleon’s
actions with regard to the ecclesiastical problem. Here I am
merely concerned with the question whether it was really he who
decided upon the abduction of the Pope.
The Emperor was at Schoenbrunn, where he stayed for quite a
time after Wagram, when he heard that the thing was done, and
he appeared extremely upset. T take it ill that the Pope has been
arrested; it is a very foolish act. They ought to have arrested
Cardinal Pacca and have left the Pope quietly at Rome.’ Thiers,
who publishes this letter, dated July i8th, 1809, to Fouche, in a
footnote, writes that ‘Napoleon greatly deplored the act of violence
which had been resorted to’.* But immediately before Thiers had
given other letters from Schoenbrunn, dated a month earlier, in
which Napoleon wrote to Murat, who was then King of Naples
and who had to keep an eye on affairs in Rome; ‘I have already
let you know that it is my intention that affairs in Rome be con¬
ducted with firmness, and that no form of resistance should be
allowed to stand in the way ... If the Pope, against the spirit of his
> III, 212b.
published in the periodical La hibliothkque historique^ with other forgeries, in 1819,

that is, while Napoleon was still alive and before the Memorial appeared. It is also
produced in RScits de la captiviU, by another member of the St. Helena group,
Montholon, published in 1847. It is there given as having been dictated to Montho-
Ion by Napoleon, a considerable time after the departure of Las Cases. Gonnard’s
theory (see pp. no sqq.), that Napoleon could not therefore have forged it himself,
does not convince me,
100
PIERRE LANFREY
office and of the Gospels, preaches revolt and tries to misuse the
immunity of his domicile to have circulars printed, he is to be
arrested . . . Philip the Fair^ had Boniface arrested, Charles V
kept Clement VII in prison for a long period, and those popes had
done less to deserve it.’ This was the letter which served as
authority to the French officials in Rome. Thiers believes that
Napoleon later regretted having given this instruction.
Lanfrey’s interpretation is very different. He notes that
Napoleon’s order, in spite of its severity, remains general and
leaves something to the initiative of his subordinates. He has no
doubt that this was intentional, and indeed, did not the Emperor
wash his hands of the whole business afterwards? In the letter to
Fouche of July i8th he does not, as Thiers asserts, regret the
instruction he gave; he writes as though no such instruction had
been given. In a letter to Cambaceres, quoted by Lanfrey, he goes
even further:^ ^The Pope was removed from Rome without my
orders and against my wishes.’ It is surprising, if that is the case,
that he acquiesced in the accomplished fact. But indeed it is a
flagrant untruth. It is all part of the system. In the Enghien
affair he sheltered behind the alleged over-hasty action of Savary.
In the case of Spain it was Murat. And now it was Miollis, the
Governor of Rome, who had to bear the discredit of a deed which
Napoleon had undoubtedly wished done.*
NAPOLEON AND LITERATURE
Before I leave Lanfrey, there is one more subject with wider

implications to discuss.
One of the famous occasions in the life of Napoleon was his
meeting with Goethe during the Congress of Erfurt in 1808. The
intercourse with his friend of Tilsit, the Czar, soon to be his
enemy, the homage of the multitudes of German princes, to all
intents and purposes his vassals, on some of whom he had bestowed
^ King of France, 1285-1314.
* Bignon, again the typical official, therefore refuses to regard it as an instruction.
He says that a definite instruction from Napoleon would have named those who were
to carry it out, the place of imprisonment, the route to be taken, etc.
* Lanfrey, V, 16.
* One could make a comparison here with Queen Elizabeth, who was also very
ready to saddle her servants with the blame in difficult situations. The best known,
but certainly not the only example, is that of her rage against Davison, on the pre¬
text that he had given the order for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots without
her authority.
101
their royal crowns, the quiet opposition of Talleyrand, all this has
failed to dim the memory of the encounter between the Emperor
and the poet. It is worth while noting the differences in the histor¬
ical treatment of the episode.
From Thiers’s account one would hardly guess that perhaps not
everything was quite as it should be.^ He describes Napoleon at a
soiree of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, whose minister Goethe was,
having a long conversation with Goethe and Wieland. He spoke
of Tacitus, in whose dark picture of Imperial Rome he said he did
not believe, he spoke of Werther, was extremely gracious, and ‘let
the two famous writers see that he deserted the cream of noble
society for their sake’. Finally ‘he left them flattered, as they well
might be, by so distinguished an attention’. He afterwards pre¬
sented them with the Order of the Legion of Honour, ‘a distinction
which they deserved on every ground, and which lost nothing of
its brilliance by being given to men of their merit’.
One might conceive a report in the Moniteur drawn up in this
style. Thiers is obviously overwhelmed by the honour done to
Goethe. He does not even work himself up to lyrical raptures, such
as have often been indulged in, concerning the Man of Action and
the Man of Thought, face to face, each doing honour to himself
in his appreciation of the merits of the other. Of course, as Thiers
knew no German, or very little, Goethe was not much more than
a name to him, while Napoleon was not only his hero, but in his
estimation a very great mind as well. Some chapters before he
had discussed the condition of French literature under Napoleon
and had been obliged to admit that it was not much to boast of.^
Chateaubriand, certainly, must be called a writer, though Thiers
did not care much for all that nostalgia for the past. But, and here
our practical-minded author lets himself go, ‘that age did have
one immortal writer, deathless as Caesar. It was the ruler himself,
a great writer because he was a great mind, inspired orator in his
proclamations, the singel' of his own epic actions in his military
dispatches, powerful exponent of policy in his innumerable
letters, articles in the Moniteur\ and so on. ‘How wonderful was this
man’s destiny, to be the greatest writer of his age as well as its
greatest commander, legislator and administrator!’ It is not to be
wondered at that Thiers considered Goethe to be the one honoured
')ien the two met.
^ II, 583b sqq. * II, 363b.
102
PIERRE LANFREY
That Lanfrey was not rendered dizzy by the spectacle of His
Majesty the Emperor of the French doing honour to a great poet,
will be readily believed. But on top of the many reservations we
have seen this stern critic make when dealing with the greatness
that seemed so blinding to Thiers, came his conviction, which in
fact he shared with Mme de Stael, Chateaubriand and Quinet,
that Napoleon had a nefarious influence upon the literary life of
France.
Thiers saw grounds for commiseration of Napoleon in the fact
that the contemporary literary scene was not more brilliant. He
took enough trouble about it. There were prizes, annuities. He
demanded a report from each section of the Institute on the pro¬
gress of literature and the arts. In the Council of State when the
chairman of the section of literature had read his report — ‘simple,
forceful, elevated’ — he answered with a few short sentences of
which Thiers says: Tf governments are to meddle with the works
of the human mind, may they always do it in so noble a manner . . .
Moreover Napoleon was able to give that most fruitful of encour¬
agements, the approval of genius.’^
Lanfrey, on the other hand, made Napoleon’s despotism
answerable for the petrified condition of the literary landscape.
As to prizes, who can read the list of names without laughing?
And the two great figures, Chateaubriand (whom Thiers
mentions here without recalling the awkward fact), and Mme de
Stael (whom he does not mention in this connection at all), were
in disgrace because they were too independent, and because they
had the courage to put the mind above material power, and did not
abase themselves in the dust before success. Mme de Stael was
obliged to seek in Germany for the French spirit, enslaved by its
government.^ Her book [De rAllemagne, i8io) was banned, and
Savary, now Minister of Police, ‘the hero of so many unpleasant or
sinister jobs’, wrote an unmannerly letter to her, in which, between
gibes, he explained that her book was ‘unFrench’. The press,
which Napoleon described as ‘ a public service’, was under control,
the number of news-sheets soon reduced to one for each departement,
and all types of journal, including scholarly and ecclesiastical,
subject to the arbitrary powers of the censor. There were annuities,
too, granted by the Emperor, but they were charged, according to
the whim of the moment, on the budget of some periodical, which
^ II, 364a. Lanfrey, V, 306.
103
REACTION AGAINST THE LEGE’ND
kept quiet and paid up. Nothing bloomed in France save official
flattery and rhetoric.
‘Sire’, thus the President of the Senate addressed Napoleon after
Tilsit, ‘these are miraculous achievements for which probability
would have asked centuries, and for which a few months have
sufficed to Your Majesty ... It is impossible worthily to praise
Your Majesty. Your glory is too great. One has to place oneself
at the distance of posterity to become aware of your immeasurable
elevation.’ And the President of the Court of Appeal: ‘Napoleon
stands above human history. He stands above admiration; our
love alone can rise to his level.’ And a prefect: ‘Truly, these
miracles surpass our capacity. Only the astonished silence
which admiration imposes upon us can express them.’^
But the false pathos and hollow rhetoric are even more repulsive
than these hyperboles. When Napoleon called once again on his
Frenchmen to show him their love and give him the necessary sup¬
port, this time for ‘the restoration of order’ in Spain, which ‘was
to assure the safety of their children’, the same President of the
Senate answered: ‘Anarchy, that blind and ferocious monster, of
which the genius of Napoleon has freed France, has lighted its
torches and reared its scaffolds in the heart of Spain. England has
been quick to throw her phalanxes into that country and to plant
her standards among the terrible banners of the satellites of the
Terror. The Emperor’s strong right arm shall liberate the
Spaniards. Ah, what a comfort must this generous decision of
Napoleon be to the royal shades of Louis XIV, Francis I, and of
the great Henry . . . The French will respond to his sacred voice.
He is asking for a new pledge of their love. With what glowing
hearts will they run to meet him.’^ That was the tone of the period.
How differently Chateaubriand spoke — it was his immortal merit
— when, albeit tucked away in a book review in his Mercure^* he
dared to write a passage like the following:
‘When in the silence of humiliation there is no sound save the
clanking of the slave’s fetters and the voice of the informer, when
e^yerything trembles before the tyrant, and to earn his favour or
inct^r his wrath implies equal danger, then the historian appears
to ave^^ge the peoples. It is in vain that Nero prospers; the Empire
has alrCcBdy born a Tjdtjor’
nv, 178.-
*IV, 192. See abovel,^ p' a previous allusion to this famous article.
104
PIERRE LANFREY
The paper passed from hand to hand, and the brave words were
greedily read. Young Guizot comes to Coppet and knows them by
heart. He has to recite them to Mme de Stael and her circle of
friends, who listen breathlessly.^ But the censor stifles the discord¬
ant sound immediately and once more the air is full of the
sickening chant of hypocrites and flatterers. Tn his ascent’,
writes Lanfrey, ‘Napoleon already understood how false rhetoric
might be used for the benefit of his false greatness, and so had
given it the encouragement of his example.’
It is hardly necessary for me to state that to regard Napoleon the
writer and orator as an empty rhetorician betrays as much par¬
tiality as to proclaim him the greatest writer of his century. But
it will now at least have become clear that the scene of Napoleon
making himself pleasant to Goethe could affect Lanfrey with
nothing but contemptuous boredom. As he saw it, moreover,
Napoleon was oppressing and humiliating Goethe’s fatherland.
We shall see later that here, too, other views were possible. For
German patriots at any rate it was natural to be pained by the
scene enacted at Weimar, though a Frenchman needed to have
steeped his mind in the liberalism of Mme de Stael to understand
this. There were actually Germans, says Lanfrey, who glorified
Goethe because he was able to rise above these low earthly con¬
flicts. They ought to take example from the poet himself who said
apologetically to Eckermann that it is not everyone’s task to fight.
In his reminiscences of the talk with the Emperor Goethe notes,
not without satisfaction, that Napoleon, after looking at him
silently for a few minutes, cried: ‘Vous etes un homme, monsieur
de Goethe.’ Lanfrey comments: ‘Great praise indeed, and de¬
served at that. But while we admit that Goethe was certainly a
man in the highest sense of the word, we must add that on this
occasion he was but a courtier.’*
Although Thiers so often speaks of the ever-growing tyranny of
Napoleon and of its injurious effects on French society, yet when
one reads writers such as Quinet and Lanfrey, the older man seems
at times to be lacking in the true sense of spiritual freedom. We get
the same impression from reading another book which appeared
towards the end of Napoleon Ill’s regime, and which dealt in par¬
ticular with the relations between the First Consul and the Church.
1 P. Gautier, Mme. de Stael et Napolion (1902).

* IV, 410.
105
CHAPTER IV
COMTE D’HAUSSONVILLE
We have already touched upon aspects of Napoleon’s ecclesiastical

policy, and have noticed differences of opinion with regard to it.
With the work of d’Haussonville we meet for the first time a syste¬
matic and thorough treatment, from a point of view which,
though liberal, I would regard as primarily religious, and if we
take Bignon, or perhaps rather Thiers, as typical of a worldly
etatisme^ we shall be able to make comparisons. For the con¬
venience of the reader, however, I shall begin with a survey of
the events, such as would be acceptable to all writers, whatever
their tendency.
THE CONSUL-EMPEROR AND THE CHURCH

(1801-14)
The Revolution had begun by trying, in spite of the protests of
Pius VI, to force upon the Church a ready-made settlement, the
Constitution civile du clerge. This attempt had merely led to perse¬
cution, and within the Church to confusion and out-and-out
schism. It was abandoned in 1795, and the State ceased entirely
to meddle with the Church, in theory at any rate. In practice the
Church was no better off under the separation regime now pre¬
vailing. The clergy felt itself misunderstood and ill-treated, and
its attitude to the Republic remained hostile. The reconciliation
effected by the Concordat was valuable to Bonaparte, because it
afforded him the gratitude of the priests, who were in any case
subjected to his influence by the recognition of his right to appoint
bishops. This gratitude was understandable. The Pope felt it too,
in spite of his irritation cPver the Organic Articles which the First
Consul unexpectedly tacked on to the Concordat. The unity of
the Church had been restored, it had a recognized position in the
State and was relieved of financial worries, and there was matter
for satisfaction in the mere fact that the attempt to impose a
revolutionary Constitution Civiky with a view to withdrawing the
French Church completely from the Pope’s authority, had failed.
More than that, in order to facilitate the reorganization of the
106
Church Bonaparte got the Pope to dismiss the whole episcopate.
For the impatient dictator this was the easiest way to break the
resistance of royalist and of'constitutionaP bishops. To far-seeing
Rome it was an unhoped for and unheard of precedent for papal
interference, a negation of apparently victorious Gallicanism.
How grateful the Pope remained, and how set on good relations
with the powerful son of the Revolution, was apparent in 1804,
when, not without much inner conflict, he allowed himself to be
persuaded to come to Paris and consecrate as Emperor the second
Charlemagne, indeed, the greater Charlemagne, for the earlier
ruler was only crowned in Rome, in the papal city. But after this
event relations soon became strained. The Pope was disappointed
that his sensational step brought him no concessions in respect of
ecclesiastical grievances or ambitions. Moreover, after the tremen¬
dous extension of Napoleon’s power policy arising out of the defeat
of Austria at Austerlitz, the overthrow of Italy and the subsequent
inclusion of the Papal States in the French system gave the Pope
as temporal prince every reason to tremble for his independence.
Napoleon would brook no neutrality within his orbit. After the
victory all resistance to his wishes and schemes for the reorganiza¬
tion of Europe irritated him more than ever.
Already in February 1806 he had written a letter to the Pope full
of complaints and reprimands. It included the famous dictum:
‘Your Holiness is sovereign 6f Rome, but I am its Emperor; all my
enemies must be those of Your Holiness.’ The gentle Pius, who
was so much more capable of resistance than the Emperor
imagined, answered proudly: ‘There is no Emperor of Rome’, and
maintained his full sovereignty. Napoleon was no longer accus¬
tomed to hearing such language — and from this feeble creature
too! Continual difficulties over the application of the Continental
System which he was demanding from all his allies and vassals,
aggravated a relationship which was already hopelessly disturbed.
In 1808 Napoleon ordered the occupation ot the Papal States,
including Rome. The defiant attitude subsequently maintained
by the Pope in his capital annoyed Napoleon in the extreme. In
1809, lifter Wagram, a victory which seemed to have brought
Europe to submission, he issued the decree from Schoenbrunn,
whereby, as heir of Charlemagne, the original donor ot the tem¬
poral power, and vested in his rights, he declared the sovereignty
of Pius over the Papal States abolished. When Pius answered with
107
excommunication, he was immediately taken away, and after being
carried to Grenoble, was finally interned at Savona on the Gulf
of Genoa, which was then, of course, part of the French Empire.
The Pope now refused to carry out any papal functions, on the
grounds that he was not at liberty and was out of reach of his
councillors. The cardinals had been called to Paris when he was
removed, and graced Napoleon’s court festivities in their crimson
robes, while the Head of the Church was in bondage. The most
zealous upholders of church law in the Sacred College, however,
thirteen in number, fell into disfavour with the Emperor in
February i8io, when they failed to attend the reception given
after his marriage with Marie Louise. Indeed, important issues
were raised by this abstention. The declaration of nullity of Napo¬
leon’s marriage with Josephine had taken place quite indepen¬
dently of the Pope in the Ofiiciality of Paris. Naturally this
ecclesiastical court was unable to refuse any request of Napoleon’s,
but was it within its powers to give a verdict of this kind? The
demonstration made by the thirteen seemed to cast doubt on the
legality of the new marriage and of the hoped for heir. The Em¬
peror was furious. They had to doff their crimson robes — hence
the nickname by which they were known, ‘black cardinals’ — and
were interned in various parts of France.
There was at least one function which only the Pope could
perform and which was essential to the satisfactory management
of affairs in the French Church according to the Concordat. This
was the canonical ‘institution’ of bishops ‘nominated’ by the
Emperor, who became bishops only by that papal act. Even
before his imprisonment the Pope’s refusal to institute bishops had
perpetuated vacancies in Germany, where he was already at log¬
gerheads with many of the princes owing to the secularizations
after the peace of Lun^ville in i8oi. And what concerned Napo¬
leon even more, although he was increasingly involved in Ger¬
man affairs, was, that the Pope was doing the same thing in
Italy. In February i8io the Emperor issued a sinatus consulte, by
which he hoped to cut the Gordian knot. This arranged the parti¬
culars of the annexation of Rome by the French Empire. Rome
was to be the second city of the Empire. The heir to the throne,
still to be bom (but the All-Powerful expressed himself quite posi¬
tively concerning his sex) would have the title of King of Rome.
A prince of the blood was always to hold his court in Rome, and
108
the popes, bound to the Empire by a handsome allowance and an
oath of allegiance, would spend part of their time at the Emperor’s
side in Paris, whither the papal offices and boards would be trans¬
ferred, henceforth to be maintained on the imperial budget. Was
there any chance of getting the Pope to agree to these arrange¬
ments? Napoleon thought it possible. Faced with his supreme
power, urged on by so many cardinals and by the majority of the
higher ranks of French clergy, how could the Pope avoid bowing to
the inevitable?
However, the opposition of the Pope to the Emperor’s plans was
unexpectedly discovered to be much stronger than the latter had
imagined. Napoleon had decided to make his nominees for the
vacant sees (of which there were now twenty-seven) fulfil their
functions even without canonical institution by prevailing upon
the chapters of the various sees to give them vicarial powers. The
canons, whatever their reasons and feelings, gave their co-opera¬
tion, and finally the Emperor had commanded the nominees to go
to their dioceses and to take up their duties. Scarcely had this
taken place when, at the end of i8io, his police got wind of letters
from Pius smuggled out of Savona to trusted canons in the chapters
of Paris and of Florence urging them in no way to recognize the
archbishops nominated by Napoleon but not instituted by himself,
and not to give them vicarial powers. This discovery was not such
as to incline Napoleon to concessions. He was stung to violent out¬
bursts of rage. One of these achieved notoriety. Its immediate
object was his Privy Counsellor Portalis, son of his former Minister
of Cults, and cousin of the Paris canon, recipient of a papal letter.
The canon had made a clean breast of it to Portalis. Thereupon
the latter had uttered a general warning to the Minister of Police
to the effect that something was afoot, without mentioning his
cousin. Tn league with my enemy! Traitor!’ Napoleon had
shouted at him in full Council of State, and had finally ordered
him out of the room, while the others remained silent and ill at
ease. Napoleon also meted out severe punishments — imprison¬
ment for an unspecified term —to the incautious canons, and more
rigorous and oppressive treatment to his prisoner at Savona. The
Pope was deprived of the few trusted followers who were still with
him, and was guarded more closely than ever.
At the same time Napoleon called a National Council in Paris to
obtain the ecclesiastical approval for his programme which he
109
intended to use for putting pressure on the Pope. The threat in

the background was the formation of a national church, a schism,
and Napoleon, who had always compared himself with Charle¬
magne, at this time frequently let fall the name of Henry VIII.
Conscious of this, and apprehensive of fresh troubles if there should
be resistance to his power, a few French Jjishops obtained the
Emperor’s permission to go to Savona before the opening of the
Council to persuade Pius to come to an agreement. They wrung
from him a few reluctant promises, which they took down in writing,
but which he partially retracted as soon as they had gone.
Nevertheless assertions concerning the Pope’s capitulation had
to do service to influence the Council to a pronouncement in line
with Napoleon’s policy. What the Emperor wanted was an
arrangement concerning the episcopal institution, whereby if the
Pope withheld it, the archbishop of the relevant see would be
empowered to grant it. The main point to him certainly still was
that the Pope should submit to the Senatus consulte of February 181 o,
should resign himself to the loss of his temporal power, and accept
the comfortable dependence offered him, but to this he thought
the Pope would have to come in any case if the means of defence
offered by institution escaped him. To Napoleon’s complete
surprise, however, a hitch occurred over this not apparently so
unreasonable preliminary demand. Anxious though the prelates
were to carry out his wishes, and for all the terror inspired by the
arrest of the canons of Paris and Florence, the clerical spirit, which
individually could not but lie low, roused itself to action in the
assembly. Sympathy with the prisoner in Savona created an atmo¬
sphere in which these old, venerable, frightened ecclesiastics were
moved to an attitude at which they were themselves surprised. In
spite of all the efforts of the hdnehmen of the Minister of Cults in
the assembly and of the chairman, no less a person than Cardinal
Fesch, the Emperor’s uncle, it proved impossible to persuade the
Council to accept as a decree the draft agreement of Savona, which
had, as we have seen, been disowned by the Pope in the meantime.
More, the Council declared itself incompetent to deal with the
institution question.
Never had Napoleon felt himself so thwarted, in his own empire,
and by those whom he called ‘my bishops’. Once again he had
recourse to fury, penal measures and a more rigid insistence on his
policy. Three of the ringleaders, one of whom was the Bishop of
no
Ghent with whom William I of Holland had trouble some years
later, were arrested without warrant, like the canons, and thrown
into prison. This frightened the remainder, so that the great
majority agreed to the decree which they had just rejected. Care
had been taken, it is true, to make sure that they should not seek
courage from one another. On the advice of the new Archbishop
of Paris (who was recognized as such in practice solely from fear of
the consequences), the Minister of Cults had interviewed each
member of the Council separately in his office.
With the decree thus obtained the bishops who had been at
Savona before made another journey thither, and a couple of
trustworthy, that is, of course, ‘red’, cardinals were also permitted
to see the Pope. These clerical ambassadors were now able to
obtain concessions from Pius on both the main points, the insti¬
tution, and the residence of the Pope in France at the State’s
expense. Napoleon, who received the news during his tour of
Holland, was still not satisfied with certain reserves and claims
made by the Pope. He ordered the negotiators, who were con¬
gratulating themselves on the peace they had achieved, to make
further demands. The Pope, however, refused to make any more
concessions. At that moment Napoleon’s mind became pre¬
occupied with his plan for a campaign against Russia, and he
considered that he would be able to impose all his desires when he
returned, after a brief interval, crowned with fresh laurels and
more powerful than ever. So the Pope was once more completely
isolated in Savona, till in the summer of 1812 he was suddenly
removed to Fontainebleau.
At the end of that year, however, Napoleon came back from
Russia, defeated. He felt his position endangered through loss of
prestige, and in these circumstances the ecclesiastical question,
which he had once, by the Concordat, hoped to settle in his favour
once and for all, seemed to him a danger. So to Fontainebleau
this time went the same negotiators, but soon the Emperor
arrived there himself. In the course of talks which lasted several
days he obtained his prisoner’s signature to the preliminaries of a
new concordat in which his leading ideas were embodied, though
in a weaker form than before his Russian campaign. One stipula¬
tion, however, which the Pope had refused to forgo, was that his
cardinals should have unimpeded access to him. No sooner had
the ‘black cardinals’ arrived in Fontainebleau than the Pope
lU
realized that the new Concordat was a mistake, indeed an offence
against the Church, and he informed Napoleon that he withdrew
his signature. Thus before the Emperor embarked on his German
campaign, which was to be as disastrous as that of the previous
year in Russia, he once more made war against the Church,
ordered the arrest of a cardinal, threatened others, and con¬
scripted seminarists from dioceses whose bishops had incurred his
displeasure.
To the defeats of 1813 succeeded the invasion of 1814. Once
more Napoleon began to negotiate, but when the Pope said he
wished for nothing but to return to Rome, he was allowed to leave
Fontainebleau. At one moment when Napoleon hoped that he
might defeat the invaders he sent orders to have him detained once
more, but countermanded them after a fresh defeat. Only after
the first abdication was the Pope able to return at last to his
States. Of the rejected Concordat of Fontainebleau there was
naturally no question any longer. Relations between the Holy See
and France remained based on the Concordat of 1801, and since
an attempt made under the Restoration at a new settlement never
led to anything, so they remained till 1906.
THE WRITER AND HIS BOOK
Through his marriage to a daughter of the Due de Broglie

Comte d’Haussonville already belonged to that liberal elite which
honoured the memory of Mme de Stael. De Broglie, himself a
leading figure in that group, had married a daughter of the great
writer. In religious matters the liberalism of these men was far
removed from the Voltairianism so powerful in France, so self-
assured and often so intolerant. Nor did it savour of that spirit of
secular bureaucracy which frequently seemed related to the other
tendency and which out of suspicion of the Church favoured its
control by the State. D’Haussonville, in fact, was a practising
Catholic. His combination of liberalism and Catholicism suggests
the influence of Lamennais, an influence which remained a stimu¬
lating one to faithful Catholics even after Lamennais’s quarrel with
Rome, while at the same time penetrating into Protestant circles.
Montalembert’s slogan, ‘a free church in a free state’ was found
convenient by a worldly minded statesman such as Cavour, but
when d’Haussonville uses it, as he does in his introduction, it
cannot be doubted that he is arguing from the point of view of the
112
Church and it was out of consideration for religion that he advo¬
cated the separation of the two powers. Nevertheless in so doing
he showed a certain independence of Rome, for Pius IX had
shortly before condemned this solution in his Syllabus errorum.
He indicates his point of view quite frankly in his introduction.
Like Quinet he reacts against the current glorification of the Con¬
cordat of iSoi, but there is naturally no trace ofQuinet’s impatient
disapproval of Catholicism or of Rome. Both the clergy and official¬
dom, surprisingly enough, are pleased with the Concordat. The
Church officially honours its tradition. But according to d’Haus-
sonville it is the temporal partner in the combination that has the
best of it, and the spiritual partner is blinded to the true interests
of the Church by its satisfaction with material advantages. With¬
out saying so in so many words, and entirely in the spirit of
Lamennais, he argues against the Gallican spirit, the worldly
tradition of the French Church, its readiness to be dependent on
the regime of the day. That this for him was the regime of
Napoleon III is really hardly relevant, since after every change,
and the French had seen a good many, the Church never failed to
accommodate itself with equal zest. It is true that under Napoleon
III praise of the wisdom shown in i8oi, enthusiasm for the fine
spectacle of 1804 and the joint display given by the Pope and the
Emperor in Notre Dame, were particularly fashionable, and
d’Haussonville wishes to show that this view can only be supported
from contemporary official phrase-making, that is to say, lies. He
is desirious of seeking the truth behind the outward appearance,
and finds it in the official correspondence; he wants to show, too,
how the unedifying scenes of 1809 after, about which official
spokesmen of his day preferred to remain silent, were implied in
the origins of the existing connection between Church and State.
THE CONCORDAT
Napoleon the restorer of the altars, Napoleon the saviour of the

Church ~ Pius VII himself never tired of testifying to that view.
In the eyes of d’Haussonville the pure, gentle and thoroughly
well-meaning Pius showed his weakness in this. The Pope was led
to his position, as were most of the higher ranks of the clergy, by
his conviction that the Church was now near to its total dissolution.
The Revolution, and the devastation it had wrought in the field of
religion, coming after a century of increasing sceptism, had pro-
H
foundly shaken their confidence. It was not long since Pius VI
had died on French soil, a prisoner of the Directory after a revolt
in Rome in which a French general had lost his life, and the Papal
State had then become a republic. The Austrians had soon put an
end to this situation, but the Pope had not found comfort from
them for very long. In any case the French were there once more.
What a blessing then that Bonaparte, the man sprung from the
Revolution, talked of reconstruction. Pius VII and his circle were
inclined to regard him as an instrument of heaven. His assurances
that he would make religion respected once more were as balm for
their souls. They trembled at his warnings that if they did not do
what he wanted, he would oppress religion still more, he would
even destroy it, or, as was his favourite expression, ‘change’ it.
D’Haussonville considers this attitude defeatist and pusillani¬
mous. Religion did not thus hearken to the commands of the
First Consul. Regeneration was taking place spontaneously in the
hearts of the multitude, and this process had begun before his
accession. Thousands of priests were labouring in spite of indiffer¬
ence or persecution. But the Church no longer dared trust to
their power alone. When it allied itself with Bonaparte, the notion
that he was indeed the restorer had to be officially accepted, and
the hierarchy fell over itself to express its thankfulness and adula¬
tion. All this served to strengthen Bonaparte still more in his
infatuation with absolute power, and made a conflict unavoidable.
In their faint-heartedness the Pope and his councillors had shut
their eyes to the fact that the First Consul was not himself a
believer, even though the Concordat asserted that the head of the
French State was a practising Catholic. They had not allowed
themselves to be deterred by his cynical remarks, which showed so
clearly that he intended to use the Roman Catholic religion as he
had used the Mohammedan in Egypt. Thus they passed over
the Organic Articles which still further increased the power of
the State over the ChuAh, already sufficiently established in the
Concordat itself, and they ignored the lack of good faith displayed
by Bonaparte when he surprised them with the Articles.
If we now turn back to Thiers’s account of the birth of the
Concordat, we find none of these doubts. That the promulgation
of the Organic Articles (‘that wise and profound law’)^ was an act
of bad faith towards the Holy See, he contests with the argument
* 1,35ofc>.
114
that ‘it was purely a matter of French internal administration,

and did not concern the Holy See’. Nevertheless the Articles
include regulations which forbid the publication of any bull,
pastoral letter or any other papal communication without
permission of the government. There are others concerning the
catechism which is to be introduced for the whole country, and
for which the approval of the Government will be required; and
concerning the four Gallican theses of 1682 which are to be taught
to the clergy. The Holy See must obviously asseverate that these
matters were indeed within its province, and if the French Govern¬
ment answered that they were all included within that Gallican
tradition of 1682, ‘ces beaux principes de soumission et d’inde-
pendance’, as Thiers says,‘ the Holy See might retort that for that
very reason Rome had condemned those theses. What Thiers does
dislike on the other hand, and what he regards as little short of
bad faith, is the attempt of the papal nuncio to obtain at the
eleventh hour a recantation from the‘constitutional’ bishops, those,
that is, who had worked under the constitution civile and had thus
become schismatics, and who were now included in the episcopate
along with the former refractaires. The two writers start from such
different points of view that one cannot expect them to agree in
their evaluations.
When Thiers describes the induction of the Concordat with a
solemn Te Deum in Notre Dame as the triumph of a wise and
courageous policy of conciliation, he is undoubtedly, within cer¬
tain limits, justified in his contention. The measure had to be
pushed through against the opposition of the republican old guard
in the representative bodies. The generals of an army born of the
Revolution only the day before almost rebelled against the order
to attend the Te Deum. Only Bonaparte’s formidable ascendancy
forced them, grumbling and scornful, to give way. Mignet’s story
of a typical comment will be remembered.But however little
the healing of the schism had touched the intellectuals of the
Revolution, its soothing effect was noticeable in the country at
large. There can be no doubt that the measure was popular with
the masses, and on this basis Bonaparte now ventured to introduce
an amnesty for imigrh. D’Haussonville would find it difficult to
deny all this, but he is concerned with tendencies and perils which
at the time were visible to very few. The remarkable fact about
* I. 3Soa. “Jcf. p. 35.
his position is that his dislike of the Concordat is based on con¬
siderations entirely different from those held by the contemporary
opposition. If that opposition was almost satisfied by the promul¬
gation of the Organic Articles, for him these make the whole
transaction only more offensive.
D’Haussonville was the first to describe in detail the beginnings
of the Concordat and its working under the Empire, but his point
of view, though different with regard to Catholicism, is closely
related to that of Quinet. This can be seen if both accounts are
compared with that of Thiers. To my mind d’Haussonville’s view
means an advance. One might ask if it is fair for the historian to
approach a past action by the light of values and conceptions
which were then scarcely valid. It goes without saying that his
later wisdom does not justify him in taking up a patronizing atti¬
tude towards his characters, and that his imagination must
primarily help him to see them within the limits of their period.
But with this proviso, the taking of a new perspective is an inalien¬
able prerogative of the historian. More than that, it is only by
doing so that historical presentation can be enriched and kept
alive.
THE CORONATION IN NOTRE DAME
D’Haussonville considers, then, that the Church underestimated

its own strength, and moreover was insufficiently aware, when it
accepted the Concordat, of the dangers threatening it from Bona¬
parte’s conception of the State and his ambition. Pius and his
councillors made the same mistake once more in 1804, when they
decided, reluctantly, in spite of many warnings, to go to Paris.
Was this not a humiliation, a Canossa in reverse? Was it necessary
to be a counter-revolutionary to take the view* that Pius took too
little account of Enghien’s freshly spilt blood, or that religion lost
as much as it gained when its representative took his part in that
ostentatious show, in that court of worldlings and atheists? The
more so as bad faith had once more to be taken into account. For
Pius, who certainly felt that his dignity and that of the Church
was endangered, had stipulated, among other matters, that the
coronation should take place according to precedents. In spite of
this, at the last moment Napoleon took up the crown himself and
placed it on his head. This was a symbolic gesture which delighted
^ cf. Dr, Bartstra in Pelgrimstocht der mensheid, p, 508.
T rfi
the whole anti-clerical section of the public, and which also corre¬
sponded to Napoleon’s own deepest conception of his attitude to
the Church. But the Pope would never have left Rome merely to
perform a consecration.
I mentioned in an earlier chapter^ Thiers’s satisfaction at the
scene in Notre Dame, where, in his view, the Revolution itself was
consecrated by the Pope. The ruthless self-calculation of Napoleon
in his relations with the Church he never noticed. With regard to
the Organic Articles, which we know he thought a model of wis¬
dom, that is not surprising, however much of a blow their unex¬
pected declaration was for the Pope and his Secretary of State
Consalvi. As regards Napoleon’s action in crowning himself,
Thiers simply does not mention the bargain previously made.*
CARDINAL CAPRARA AND THE IMPERIAL

CATECHISM
The worst of it was that all this confirmed Napoleon in his

overweening pride, which was to prove a disaster for the world,
but especially for the Church. Immediately after the signing of
the Concordat, Pius and Consalvi were put in a difficult position
because the First Consul intimated his desire to have Cardinal
Caprara and no other for papal nuncio. Thiers describes Caprara
as a man ‘too enlightened and too wise to appeal to the other
cardinals’,* and when one thinks of the demands which Pius
thought himself entitled to make after the coronation and which
could not possibly be granted, the judgment is intelligible. These
demands were drawn up by the most reactionary party at the
papal court and Caprara had warned against them. But in general
Caprara’s ‘enlightenment’ appeared to consist in a blind zeal for
the service of the First Consul, soon the Emperor. Even those
cardinals, who, like Pius himself, realized that a certain recognition
of the new spirit was inevitable, regarded Caprara with the great¬
est suspicion. Weakness in respect of the powerful worldling,
which overcame them all at times, was with Caprara raised to a
system. ‘His absolute power is everywhere recognized’, he was in
the habit of saying, ‘and, given his character, the only way to save
Rome from total defeat is to submit systematically to his wishes.’ *
^ p. 74-
* Armand Lefebvre tries to prove Napoleon not guilty of deception, but on very
weak grounds: Histoire des Cabinets^ II.
* I, 613b. * DTIaussonvilli:, I, 145.
II7
Later Consalvi wrote that, under pressure from Napoleon, Cap-

rara repeatedly acted arbitrarily, sometimes even against the
strict orders of the Pope. More than once there was question of
recalling him, but the necessary courage was never found.
I shall deal with one instance only in which Caprara took his
orders as it were from Paris rather than from Rome. Mme de
Stael had already expressed her indignation concerning the section
of the new catechism of 1806 which dealt with the duties of sub¬
jects to their Emperor. She did not know, and d’Haussonville was
the first to give documentary proof, that this chapter was forced
upon the Church, which oft'ered only feeble resistance. (Thiers
has nothing on the matter.)
Some years before the Minister of Cults had set up a committee
of clergy to draw up a catechism under his supervision. It was
laid down in the Organic Articles that there should be one single
liturgy and catechism for the whole Empire. It was not one of the
provisions to which Rome objected, since the thought occurred to
no one that Rome would not be consulted in this beneficent work
of unification. And indeed, already in 1805 a project was handed
to Caprara, which he passed on to Rome. The Secretary of State,
Consalvi, thereupon charged him most emphatically to prevent
such a catechism being proclaimed. Not only did the draft docu¬
ment submitted contain errors, but it was fundamentally unac¬
ceptable that the temporal power should dictate a catechism to
the bishops: ‘The Holy Father trusts that His Majesty will not
take unto himself a function which God has reserved for the
Church and for the Vicar of Christ.’^ In spite of this letter, dated
September 1805, eight months later it was from the public press,
from the Journal de rEmpire, that Consalvi learned of an imperial
decree of April 4th, 1806, which, after specifically mentioning the
approval of the nuncio Caprara, announced a catechism for the
use of the whole Empire. It was actually published in August.
On March 11 th, 1806, Caprara had given his formal approval in an
interview with the Minister in his office. From the beginning the
Minister had indeed been convinced, as he wrote to the Emperor,
of the Cardinal’s ‘good disposition’, but he was nevertheless a
little anxious lest he should raise ‘theological quibbles’. Less than
a fortnight after Caprara had removed these doubts, Napoleon
wrote to Eugene de Beauhamais, his stepson and Viceroy of
‘ D’Haussonville, II, 279.
118
Italy, instructing him to buy for Caprara his palace in Bologna

(where he was archbishop), so as to relieve him of his monetary
difficulties... Here we have the explanation of Caprara’s
enlightenment, so praised by Thiers.
And what were the duties of the subject according to the new
catechism? The seventh lesson, which dealt with this, was for
Napoleon and his Minister of Cults the one that mattered. The
catechism had been practically ready for signature as early as
1803, but the First Consul saw the change in his position coming
and had suspended the work till he knew where he was. And now
Portalis, in a letter to the Emperor, put forward the suggestion
that a general statement of the duty of obedience to the ruler was
not enough. Bossuet’s catechism merely laid it down that it was
everyone’s duty according to the fourth commandment ‘to respect
all superiors, pastors, kings, magistrates and others’. ‘History does
not relate’, writes d’Haussonville, ‘that Louis XIV regarded him¬
self as slighted because he was put after the pastors and only
preceded the magistrates.’ But Portalis thought, and Napoleon
heartily agreed with him, if indeed the idea was not originally his
own, that it was necessary in present circumstances ‘rightly to
direct the submission of the subject’, and to mention the ruler by
name. After a thorough exchange of views between Emperor and
Minister the ecclesiastical committee received a text which they
dutifully adopted. It had become quite a treatise.
SEVENTH LESSON
‘Christians owe to the princes who rule them, and we in parti¬

cular owe to Napoleon 1, our Emperor, love, respect, obedience,
loyalty, military service, the dues laid down for the conservation
and the defence of the empire and of his throne; we also owe him
fervent prayers for his safety and for the temporal and spiritual
prosperity of the State.
‘ — Why do we owe all these duties towards our Emperor?
‘Firstly because God ... plentifully bestowing gifts upon our
Emperor, whether for peace or for war, has made him the minister
, of his power and his image upon earth. Secondly, because Our
Lord Jesus Christ, both by his teaching and his example, has
taught us himself what we owe to our Sovereign....
‘ — Are there not particular reasons which should attach us
more closely to Napoleon I, our Emperor?
‘Yes, because it is he whom God has sustained, in difficult cir¬
cumstances, so that he might re-establish public worship and the
holy faith of our fathers, and that he might be their protector. He
has restored and maintained public order by his profound and
active wisdom; he defends the State with his powerful arm; he has
become the anointed of the Lord by the consecration he has
received from the sovereign pontiff, head of the universal Church.
‘ — What must one think of those who should fail in their duty
to our Emperor?
‘According to the apostle Paul, they would resist the established
order of God himself, and would render themselves worthy of
eternal damnation.’
Before the catechism was introduced, rumours of its contents
had got about, and the bishops were somewhat troubled. One of
them expressed his indignation — the letter, it should be noted,
was private ” that such a glorification of the Emperor should be
smuggled into religion. ‘Is it within his province to take a hand
in these matters? Who called upon him to do so? He is concerned
with earthly affairs, we with heavenly. If we allow him to proceed,
he will soon lay hands on the censer, and then perhaps will mount
the altar.’^ In practice Napoleon’s interference went much further
even now, for it was at his wash that the doctrine of no salvation
save within the Church, which appeared unmistakably in Bos-
suet’s work, was dropped from the catechism. Episcopal dissatis¬
faction, not daring to attack the objectionable seventh lesson,
vented itself in opposition to this point. Even here the need was
felt of a privileged spokesman. Such a one was found in the
Emperor’s uncle, Cardinal Fesch, who did indeed succeed in ob¬
taining redress in this matter. For the Emperor’s enlightenment,
which had revolted against this intolerance, was not quite so
firmly attached to principle but that it could not wink upon occa¬
sion at a deviation, if by so doing he might obtain the damnation
of those who denied his own omnipotence. The catechism ap¬
peared with the seventh lesson intact and no one ventured a word
of disapproval. Far from it — most of the bishops greeted the work
with a great show of gratitude and joy. Rome kept silent.
^ II, 289.
120
SUBMISSIVENESS OF THE BISHOPS
It is this submissiveness which presents so alarming a spectacle.

Before talking of the blessings of the Concordat of i8oi — this is
one of d’Haussonville’s theses — one should have a clear picture of
the enslavement to which the French bishops were brought under
that regime. From Thiers no such picture is to be got. He keeps
extolling the peace-loving qualities of the bishops, and thinks it
perfectly natural that they were inclined to be pliant in order to
keep the Church’s benefactor, that irascible potentate, in a good
humour.
Meanwhile Napoleon knew perfectly well, as always, what he
was about. Later he wrote in his Memoires that he had intended to
adapt religion to his policy without actually interfering in it, and
entirely by exerting temporal influence. As d’Haussonville rightly
remarks, 1 he was under an illusion in believing that this involved
no interference with religion. Its close association with him was a
real danger to the Church. He was after all not a Catholic and
made no bones about it. He had no desire to detract from the dig¬
nity of the Church, he gave no encouragement to scoffers. On the
contrary, at his court bishops had precedence over generals and
cardinals over marshals. But Napoleon negotiated with the
Church as he negotiated with other allies: the lion’s share of the
profit derived from the association was to be for him. The form in
which he demanded his share from the priests was that they
should exercise their influence on the faithful invariably in the
direction of blind submission to him and to the demands of his
policy.
Napoleon, who never contented himself with general directives,
and who, with an unbelievably concentrated personal attention,
concerned himself with the smallest details of his administration,
was not satisfied with the spontaneous demonstrations which the
bishops hastened to give him. They frequently received special
hints, as well as general advice. When he was at wai with Russia
for example he indicated in detail how, in sermon or pastoral
letter, they should arouse the zeal of the faithful by drawing their
attention to the schismatic nature of the Greek confession.
Another time they were to remind their hearers of the Protestant¬
ism of the English. A bishop in the Vendee, where the chouans
ni,2i3.
121
might now be quiet, but where there was always a possibility of a
revival of royalist agitation in conjunction with England, would do
well, Napoleon wrote to Portalis, to emphasize in his pastoral
letter the persecutions suffered by the Catholics in Ireland. The
Minister was urged to write ‘un bel article’ in the Moniteur which
would serve as an example. A careful eye was kept on all sermons,
and a thoughtless word might result in a term of imprisonment
without trial for the priest. Napoleon hit on the idea, which he
passed on to Portalis, that the disposition of the higher ranks,
including deacons, might be controlled by demanding from them
a degree in the Imperial University, that powerful monopolistic
organization. The University would have to refuse the degree in
the case of candidates known to cherish ultramontane or other
notions dangerous to the Government. When he became aware,
in 1806, of the existence of various clerical papers, he ordered at
once that they should be amalgamated into one journal, entitled
Le Journal des Cures. At the slightest sign of deviation from Gallican
ideas in the paper, Napoleon urges his Minister of Cults to take
action.
In addition there must be incense for himself. This was achieved
by, for instance, the cult of St. Napoleon, of whom nobody had
heard until the Emperor achieved greatness. Now chapels and
fraternities were set up, although it was difficult to find out any¬
thing in Rome about the saint. De Broglie, the bishop of Ghent,
relates how Real, the Minister of Police, once told him that he
should give more praise to the Emperor in his pastoral letters. De
Broglie, who for his sermon on the birth of the King of Rome had
used as his model Bossuet’s sermon on the occasion of the birth of
a grandson to Louis XIV, thought his course must be safe under
that flag. But what was good enough for the Roi Soleil would'not
do for the second Charlemagne, neither in the case of the lesson
on the fourth commandment, nor in this instance. ‘Please give me
the yardstick?’ said de Broglie.'
THE POPE imprisoned; the council of 1811

When Thiers comes to treat of the abduction of Pius in 1809,
and of the high-handed way in which the Council was managed
in 1811, he is hardly less disapproving, particularly of the latter
' II, 239. From a letter of de Broglie dated September iith, 1810; d’Hausson-
ville does not state where the letter is to be found,
122
COMTE D’H AUSSON VILLE
case^ than d'Haussonville. He has even an impressive passage^
concerning the delusion which had attacked Napoleon, ‘that all
problems, including spiritual and moral problems, were included
in the one which preoccupied him in i8ii, that of the war with
Russia. If he could defeat Russia, the only country which, if it did
not actually oppose him, was inclined to cross him in some of his
wishes, he would also have overthrown all the various open or
hidden oppositions still rampant in Europe. Of what account then
was this poor priestly prisoner, who ventured to dispute Rome
with him? Of none, or hardly any, and the Church would recog¬
nize the might of Caesar, as she had so often done’.
And yet, here too, Thiers judges events, and lays his emphasis,
very differently from d’Haussonville. He is shocked by the
methods used, he disapproves of the plan to deprive the Pope of
his last weapon by putting a term to canonical institution, and to
make him the obedient servant of his prince, albeit in the lap of
luxury, on French soil. All this he regards as the overthrow of that
‘beautiful edifice’, that precious balance, which is his idea of Gal-
licanism. But when it comes to the point his sympathies are almost
automatically with the Emperor. Those ecclesiastics who let them¬
selves be used as go-betweens, and who tried to force the aged
Pope to make concessions, by threatening him with the wrath of
the Emperor, were men after his heart. They are described as
being among ‘the most venerable, the most learned, the most con¬
versant with the traditions of the French Church’, and also ‘those
best shaped for the handling of business’, since ‘they joined to a
profound knowledge of ecclesiastical affairs a first-rate intelligence,
extreme tact, the art of dealing with men, in short, a remarkable
political sense of the kind that was growing rarer every day among
the leaders of the Church’.^ The opposition party, which drags
the Council into resistance, he calls ‘imprudent, passionate, wild,
unenlightened, fanatical’,^ The bishop whose annoyance at the
way in which the Emperor meddled with the catechism I referred
to above, was naturally one of these frenzied and backward priests.
The rejection of the institution decree by the Council, the first
warning to Napoleon that his writ did not run everywhere, gives
Thiers an opportunity to write: ‘Those crazy spirits, who
^ IV, 47b (Quoted by d’Haussonville, V, 64).
* IV, 31a.
•Prince Napoleon used the last word (see p. 158) in the same way; it was an
expression in the party jargon of the anti-clericals,
123
were only longing for confusion, might congratulate themselves.’^
Thiers, however, told only half of the ecclesiastical section of
his story. As d’Haussonville remarks in his introduction, with the
necessary respect for the doyen of Napoleonic historiography: ‘He
knew practically everything, but it did not suit him’ (in the
structure of his work) ‘to tell everything.’
There are no blacker pages in the history of Napoleonic despot¬
ism than those devoted to his ‘negotiations’ with the Pope, in
which the Council was forced to provide him with an additional
weapon. Thiers’s much-praised bishops made themselves acces¬
sories to the almost intolerable moral pressure brought to bear
on their chief. They did so out of fear of the Emperor. In the
interests of the Church, they put it themselves, but if so, they
took a petty, mundane and short-sighted view of these interests.
One must picture to oneself Pius, gentle, none too strong, whose
very over-conscientiousness often enough made him a painfully
irresolute old gentleman, cut off completely from the outside
world since the interception of his letters to Paris and Florence.
He had been deprived of books and papers, and even, by express
instructions from Napoleon, of the signet ring with the fisher. His
servants, including his personal physician, were bribed. The pre¬
fect of Montenotte, Chabrol, supervised everything, and gave to the
prisoner such information as the Emperor wished him to have.
When Napoleon instructed Chabrol to express to Pius his sorrow
for the Church which had such a master, a man who did not know
what was due to the temporal sovereign, and to add that the good
work would go on without him, one is shocked at the impudence.
Yet utterances of that kind were nothing new with Napoleon. He
always knew much better than the Pope, and was ready at all
times to air his theology. Once, for example, when he was visiting
Belgium, he had told a number of Brabant priests that he was pre¬
pared to’protcct the religion of St. Louis, of St. Bernard, of Bossuet,
of the Gallican Church, with all his might, but not that of Gregory
VII, of Boniface VIII, of Julius II, who, he was convinced, were
burning in hell because of all the dissension to which their extra¬
vagant claims had given rise. ‘The Popes have committed too
many follies to allow us to believe in their infallibility.’*
It became worse, however, when Chabrol was ordered to assure
' IV, 45a.
* D^Haussonville, III, 363. Many such utterances of Napoleon’s exist; he was
free with the names of popes and saints.
124
COMTE D’HAUSSON VILLE
the Pope that ‘all canons and theologians of France and Italy are
indignant at his letters to the chapters; and that he is the cause of
the arrest of’ a large number of Florentine and Parisian priests, all
mentioned by name, and of a cardinal; ‘that he brings misfortune
to everyone with whom he corresponds’.^ The impudence might
be called irresponsible, but the lie — for the statement about wide¬
spread ecclesiastical indignation was nothing else — had something
devilish about it.
But that was the game in which the three bishops came to take
their allotted part. When one reads in d’Hatassonville the daily
reports of Chabrol to the Minister of Cults, about the way in which
the Pope was being besieged, how tired he was, how he suffered
from insomnia, how the forsaken old man was plied with sophisms
and misleading suggestions, as though the whole Church was
accusing him of offering obstruction merely for fear of losing his
temporal power, how the doctor had his part to play; when one
reads of Pius’s collapse after the ambassadors had gone, of his des¬
pair at the thought that he had conceded too much, it becomes
difficult to feel any admiration for the ecclesiastics who might have
torn through the web of intrigue, but who failed to do it.
After the Council, pressure was again brought to bear on the
Pope, with the help of the decree extorted from it. This time, in
addition to Napoleon’s tame bishops, several of the ‘red cardinals’
were let loose on him. The old man had to make up his mind
without knowing anything of the real state of affairs in the outside
world. There was a complete conspiracy of silence concerning all
that had happened in the Council. Before being sent to Savona,
the cardinals, whom Pius regarded as his natural councillors, had
actually been made to bind themselves in writing to the views
officially favoured. They had promised to advocate these with the
utmost vigour to the Pope.’* It is no wonder that Pius gave in in
the end.
When Napoleon was still not content with his agreement, and
the Pope on his side set himself firmly against further concessions,
the Emperor arranged that Chabrol should read him a lettei,’* not
directly addressed to him, though the Pope had just written one to
the Emperor. The letter began with a declaration in Napoleon’s
1 IV, 481. It should be noted that a letter like the one quoted was not included
in the official Correspondance de Napoleon ler. It is also printed 111 Lecestre,
Lettres iniditeSy II, 107.
* D’Haussonville, V, 8. * D'Haussonville, pp. 127 sqq.
125
most domineering style that direct correspondence between
crowned heads was seemly only for the exchange of compliments.
Thus the letter was addressed to his Minister of Cults and was
supposed to be intended for the negotiators, who had in fact just
left Savona. In it he first refused the Pope’s request to be allowed
to eommunicate freely with the faithful. The Pope, he said, had
forfeited this freedom by his act of excommunication. He seemed
to want to forget that now, but Napoleon did not: ‘Is it for the
sake of cursing sovereigns that Jesus had himself nailed to the
Cross? Is this the principle of the Supreme Redeemer?’ Next,' he
had forfeited it by inciting the chapters. ‘Has he since tried, out
of love for truth, for religion, for humanity, to persuade the thou¬
sands of kindly priests who allow themselves to be excited by the
idea of their allegiance to him, to give their sovereign what is his
due? .. . He must have no hopes of any intercourse with the black
cardinals. In the meantime there is no interruption in affairs. In
the absence of bishops the dioceses are administered by capitular
vicars. He [the Pope] had counted on trouble. But he was mis¬
taken. Public opinion today is too enlightened. For this criminal
speculation, however, frustrated by men and condemned by his
divine master, the Pope will one day have to account. His Majesty
pities the Pope’s ignorance. He is sorry to see a pontiff who might
play so great and noble a part sinking to be the misfortune of the
Church. All the advantages possessed by the papacy he might have
retained, but, egged on by his prejudices, he preferred breaking
with me, in spite of what the doctrine of the Church enjoins.’ The
negotiators — they were, as we know, actually on their way back —
were then instruc ted to leave Savona if they did not obtain com¬
plete submission within three days. And the document proceeds:
‘Simplicity, sincere and faithful hope in His Majesty’s generosity
is the only course remaining to the Pope. H.M. has a better know¬
ledge of all these matters than His Holiness, much too good a
knowledge ever to allow himself to be pushed off the course he has
laid for himself. . . Seeing the Pope in this false situation, H.M.
looks forward with equanimity to his rejecting the decree and
covering himself with the dishonour attached to ignorance. If he
does not feel himself sufficiently justified, not sufficiently enlight¬
ened by the Holy Ghost and the hundred bishops’ (that is, by the
hundred out of the hundred and twenty, for whom the pressure
applied in the office of the Minister of Religious Cults had been
126
too much), ‘then why does he not acknowledge that he is unable
to distinguish what belongs to the dogma and the essence of reli¬
gion from what is merely secular and subject to change, and why
does he not abdicate? That distinction is simple enough for the
greenest seminarist to understand. If the Pope cannot grasp it,
why does he not vacate the papal see for somebody with a stronger
head and a firmer grasp of principle who might at last repair the
untold damage done by him in Germany and in all the countries of
Christendom?’
This churlish piece is nothing out of the way among Napoleon’s
writings, but as an example of unbridled exercise of power against
the weak it is in the running for a place of honour, Pius endured
the recital patiently, but, weak though he might be, he rejected
decisively the suggestion that he might abdicate, and the dictator
was left with his insoluble problem.
THE DRAFT CONCORDAT OF FONTAINEBLEAU

(1813)
There is nothing of all this in Thiers’s account. If only for this
reason the affair of the Concordat of Fontainebleau a year later is
shown by him in quite another light. It is only when we know
what pressure was put upon Plus at Savona, that we appreciate the
shamelessness of the embrace with which Napoleon greeted his
victim on the occasion of their so-called unexpected encounter.
Only then can we imagine what fresh moral pressure must have been
brought to bear on that impressionable old man, still surrounded
only with councillors picked by his jailor, by an Emperor whose
heart, in his decline of fortune, wâs set on compromise. It was a pres¬
sure all the more painful for the fact that this time he did not scorn
the weapons of amiability and even of concessions on subordinate
matters. It is therefore not surprising that the Emperor obtained
the assent he so greatly desired, and without waiting for a definite
treaty triumphantly authorized the bishops to order a Te Deum.
But at the same time one can readily believe that the Pope did not
put his signature without grave doubts, and that w^hen, some days
later, the black cardinals were at last allowêd to see him, his con¬
science was already troubled. ‘
^ On both points d’Haussonville quotes only the memoirs of one of the black
cardinals, Pacca, indomitable among the indomitable. The evidence is perhaps
not completely satisfactory, and Thiers has apparently rejected it, but now that the
previous history is known from sources additional to his work, it has internal
probability.
127
Thiers believed — and this was of course what Napoleon tried to
make the world accept — that the black cardinals were the mis¬
chief makers who changed Pius’s mind for him; the argument they
were supposed to have used was that of the approaching downfall
of the autocrat, the possibility of which had not even occurred to
Pius in his innocence and isolation from the world. Such explana¬
tions are not strange coming from a writer who appears to regard
the new Concordat as reasonableness itself, though that he should
take that view is indeed odd, when at the beginning of his account
of the negotiations concerning the right of institution he had
expressly described this as indispensable to counterbalance the
temporal right of nomination.^
It is only as one realizes the way in which the Concordat of i8oi
was misused, that it is possible to understand how a harsher edition
of it was bound to give rise in the Pope’s mind to reflections very
different from those relating to temporal power in the States of the
Church or to the fortunes of war. Indeed, every lover of liberty
will be disturbed at the thought that this unscrupulous government
would have removed the Pope’s only remaining means of defence
by a new settlement, and would have established him in its own
territory as a kind of high ecclesiastical official. Did Thiers not see
this? In theory he recognized it, but as I have shown, he had not
given the essential facts in the earlier volumes of his history.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE THEORIES

OF CHURCH AND STATE AS HELD BY
NAPOLEON AND THIERS
We must, however, carry a little further our interpretation of his

attitude of mind. To understand it, and to do justice both to him
and to Napoleon, it is necessary —- if we are to observe the condi¬
tions ufider which I said that the historian uses historical per¬
spective — to keep before us the values and ideas which both saw
still prevailing in their own time. Nothing can ever excuse the
broken promises, the pride degenerated into pedantry, the use of
moral violence, which is worse than physical coercion. But the
spirit of Napoleon’s clerical policy will then become more intel¬
ligible. And at the same time, harking back to Quinet, we shall
^ IV, 32. The treatment of the Concordat of Fontainebleau, IV, 4x2 sqq., seems
to me utterly irreconcilable with this earlier passage.
128
come to the conclusion, which I indicated when I discussed his
Revolution^ that in this connection Byzantium and Constantine
provide no short cut to an explanation.
Thiers was a liberal with a strong eighteenth-century back¬
ground, a man of the Enlightenment with outward respect but
little real feeling for religion, penetrated with fear and at the same
time scorn for ‘rule of priests’ and ‘superstition’. ‘A free Church
in a free State’ was a conception only beginning to attract atten¬
tion. The old tradition, a very old tradition, but one which was in
full flower during the second half of the eighteenth century,
and of which Thiers, like many thousands after him, had not yet
freed himself, pointed to the placing of the secular power above
that of the Church as the only means of defence. In Protestant no
less than in Catholic countries the leading intelligentsia of Europe
had long familiarized themselves with the exaltation of the claims
of the State as a means of defence against ecclesiastical ambitions
which it was feared might endanger public order by their influence
over the masses. Grotius and Oldenbarnevelt, Hobbes and Spinoza
have their place in this current of thought.
In France the tradition had acquired a strong national colour;
it appeared as one of the pillars on which rested the unitary State.
Rossuet, who had formulated the famous four Gallican theses
within the Church itself — though the Assembly of the French
clergy in 1682 did not actually possess much more freedom than
the Council of 1811—was not regarded as the instrument of
Louis XIV’s despotism but as the defender of national rights
against sinister, Jesuitical Rome. Thiers swore by this Gallican
tradition. We have seen that he sometimes tried to allow the
claims of the Church a fair place in that compromise, but for the
most part he used the slogan to further the triumph of the State,
and even of the State as personified by Napoleon, though he some¬
times disliked the latter’s extremism. Already in the eighteenth
century the French ‘philosophes’ had taken possession of these
ideas, and sealed the ascendancy of them in the spirit of etatisme.
The enlightened despots took them as directives for their policy
with respect to the Church. Just as the Gallican tradition had
gained a footing in the French Church itself, so did a considerable
part of the German episcopate now follow the teaching of Fcbronius.
The Constitution civile du clerge (1790) was extreme in a typically
revolutionary manner, but its origins were in the current tradition.
I 129
Thus Napoleon also, though at first he reacted against revolu¬
tionary trends. In any case it should not be thought that his harsh
driving of the French clergy, or even his brutal treatment of the
Pope, caused much of a sensation in that part of Catholic Europe
which had remained outside the Revolution. Austrian diplomacy
was less upset by the annexation of the Papal States than by the
excommunication which was Pius’s answer. Indeed, ‘upset’ is too
strong a word in either case. The Austrians shrugged their
shoulders over the excommunication, and laughed. Yet memories
of Gregory VII caused a slight shiver, and even the suggestion of an
attack on secular sovereignty was looked upon as a bad example.
In his prison at Savona the unfortunate Pius received the visit
of the former Austrian ambassador to his court. Metternich
had just arranged the marriage of his master’s daughter with
Napoleon, in itself a proof of how little the Catholic court of
Vienna troubled about the Pope — particularly when one remem¬
bers that the Habsburg had not allowed himself to be deterred
from the match by the irregularity involved in the annulment of
the previous marriage without the Pope’s consent. The smoothly
official report which the Austrian diplomat gave of what was
nevertheless rather a pathetic encounter, shows how right Napo¬
leon had been in thinking he could safely let him visit the prisoner.
On this point there was much agreement between the men of
the world. Everywhere the Church was looked upon as something
at once old-fashioned and dangerous. Modern institutions
those of Joseph II in Austria as well as those of the Revolution in
France — had to be protected against it. States which had adopted
civil marriage, the subjection of the whole of society to civil law,
inevitably wished also to break clerical control of education. To
recall the ambition of medieval popes in times so different was
foolish, but such reminiscences helped to justify the national,
centralized state, run by bureaucrats who allowed little scope to
pastors or priests and kept a careful eye on the relations of the
Catholic clergy with their chief outside the country. This ten¬
dency contffiued with unabated vigour into the nineteenth cen¬
tury. Metternich, whom I mentioned earlier, was powerful in
Austria till 1848. Dutch William I was a disciple. In France
Gallican principles survived the Restoration.
As I have said, it is worth while recalling all this, because one
has to see Napoleon’s actions against the Church within the frame-
130
work of his day in order to judge of them fairly. But it is just as
necessary to explain Thiers’s attitude. I believe it is not going too
far to say that the most important factor was not Thiers’s admira¬
tion for Napoleon so much as his sense of spiritual kinship. It
seems at first sight strange that the Napoleonic legend was so
successful among just those radical sections of the French people
which drew their inspiration from the Revolution. Anti-cleri¬
calism — the restorer of altars had long before the end revealed
himself as the tamer of priests — anti-clericalism is a connecting-
link of prime importance.*
d’haussonville’s ideas in the catholic

WORLD
D’Haussonville’s book is imbued with respect for spiritual free¬

dom. He did not feel that the Restoration had completely restored
this freedom. For most of the clergy, in spite of their former enthu¬
siasm, in spite of the papal consecration, and of the lessons in the
catechism, glorifying the Bourbons, continued to believe — and
until the reactidn started by Lamennais they believed it, one would
almost say, as a matter of course, innocently — that a close asso¬
ciation with the State was healthy for religion. D’Haussonville’s
work made a valuable contribution to the knowledge of Napo¬
leonic despotism which, however, by no means all the writers who
succeeded him have digested.
His treatment could find no favour in leading Catholic circles in
France, nor, indeed, in Rome, where under Pius IX a sharp turn
was taken against liberalism, and where, even before him, Lamen¬
nais had found no mercy. There the attack on the Concordat met
with no approval, as was demonstrated with the appearance of a
history of the Concordat by Father Theiner, archivist of the Vati¬
can, which amounts to a glorification not only of the famous
agreement but of Napoleon also. A generation later another
history of the Concordat was written, this time by a Frenchman,
Cardinal Mathieu (Theiner was a German, though he wrote
in French); Mathieu’s work was also pro-Concordat. At that
moment, at the beginning of the twentieth centur)', attacks were
being made on the Concordat by those who wished to ‘laicize’ the
^ That men in England and America rejoiced at the fall of Pius, and prophesied
the ruin of the Roman Church as a result, is not without connection with such
ideas, but has naturally a specifically Protestant, and anti-papist inspiration.
131
State. To defend it seen>ed a Catholic duty. After the separation
of Church and State in 1906, however, the Church seemed to
prosper well enough in the secularized state; there was even a
Catholic revival. In these circumstances there is greater inclina¬
tion in Catholic circles to entertain d’Haussonville’s view.*
^ A deft characterization of Bonaparte’s attitude at the negotiations of i8oi is to

be found in J. Cr6tineau-Joly, Bonaparte^ le Concordat de 1801 et le cardinal
Consalvi (1869), 56:
‘Bonaparte a I’instinct des belles choses; mais, enfant gftt^ de la fortune et de
la victoire, il veut, il d^cr^te, il ordonne que ces belles choses s’improvisent son
heure et k son temps. Il n’y a pas de d^lais, pas d’atermoiements, pas de transac¬
tions, pas de reflexions possibles avec lui. Il a juge opportun et n^cessaire de
rompre avec I’atheisme legal et de renouer la chaine des temps. Il y procfede comme
a coups de canon; il tente d’enlever le Concordat k la baionette.’
This agrees with the account of d’Haussonville. The writer, a fervent Catholic,
proud of the approbation expressed at his work by Pius IX, also considers the Con¬
cordat a blessing for religion. This does not prevent him from polemizing
furiously with Father Theiner.
One point on which Cr^tineau-Joly disagrees with d’Haussonville, is on the
latter’s contention that Bonaparte was personally not a Catholic. It seems to me
that it is impossible to maintain the thesis that Bonaparte was a sincere Catholic.
It can be said that his conviction of the social and political importance of religion—
religion in general, and as far as France was concerned, the Catholic religion—was
not necessarily pure interest or ‘cynicism’, but was derived from a sincere religious
feeling. That is a typical eighteenth-century sentiment, such as was expressed by
Rousseau’s vicaire Savoyard^ and not everyone, naturally, condemns it so severely
as Quinet. See p.409 below, for what Hanotaux wrote concerning Napoleon’s strong
religious awareness.
132
CHAPTER V
HIPPOLYTE TAINE
THE WRITER
The two last works, those of Lanfrey and of d’Haussonville,

dissimilar as they are, have this much in common, that their
authors could not shake off the influence of Thiers. They correct,
they amplify him, but he still dominates the territory in which
they operate. This is not so in the case of Taine. It is not, as with
Quinet, because he soars above the period in the ample sweep of
his speculations. He delves deep into his subject, but his method
is so different that the reader forgets his immediate predecessors.
Nevertheless there is a relationship with all those who have come
under review in this section. Like them he was a spiritual heir, if
a bitterly disillusioned one, of Mme de Stael. Like them he had
his place in the reaction against the Napoleonic legend. Indeed,
in him this reaction culminated.
The first volume devoted to Napoleon, in Taine’s great work
Les Origines de la France contemporaine, appeared in 1890. It con¬
tained the brilliant ‘portrait’, as an introduction to a discussion of
the institutions which Napoleon gave to France. I shall, in the
first instance, confine my attentions to this portrait.
Taine is in a different category from writers such as Thiers,
d’Haussonville or Lanfrey. Nor can Quinet compare with him.
The hundred and forty pages of the chapter on Napoleon belong
to literature. No one has a greater capacity for making his readers
see a character. Taine’s Napoleon, a creature devoid of all human¬
ity, an evil demon let loose on France and Europe, is alive, is alive
with a gripping, an oveiwhelming intensity. This does not mean
that Taine’s Napoleon must be true to life. Imagination plays too
important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination
but the projection of the author’s personality? It is to a supreme
degree the Napoleon of Taine, and Taine, a creative imagination
without a peer, was by no means the calm, objective observer he
declared — and believed — himself to be.'
Deeply shocked as he was by the defeat of 1870, and no less by
^ See the Introduction to the Origines,
the Commune which followed, he wanted to show his compatriots
how the conditions and state of mind arose from which had sprung
those disasters and the other ills that visited France. It was for
this reason that, though his fame hitherto rested on books of philo¬
sophy and literary history, he now undertook the purely historical
work of Les Origines. The Ancien Regime could not have been
painted in darker colours than it was in his first volume. But the
Revolution aroused even greater abhorrence. He hated the triumph
of frivolous theorizing, the blindness to historical growth, and to
indispensable order, the letting loose of the animal in man. He
might have gone on to celebrate Bonaparte as the man who
scorned the ideologists, and restored order. But when his friends
somewhat reproachfully commiserated with him on the compro¬
mising approval accorded to him by conservatives of every colour
for his withering attacks on the Jacobins, Taine would answer
with a smile: ‘Je les attends a Napoleon.’^ And indeed it was with
hate that he painted the portrait.
Taine’s mind was so constructed that everything and everybody
in history was seen by him subjected to a few, precisely defined,
guiding ideas. It is curious that this tendency has much in com¬
mon with that passion for general ideas which he condemned in
his eighteenth-century Frenchmen, and from which, as he was
never tired of declaring, derived their blindness to realities. Not
less curious is the way in which, in spite of this cramping and some¬
times highly artificial structure into which he forces his subject, he
contrives an astonishingly close contact with life. Yet his is in no
sense an historical method. Taine has no understanding of develop¬
ment. He has no power to trace the origins and connections of
events, and to extract from them their meaning. He tries to distil the
quintessence of a whole period, a career which embraced so many
lands, wars, revolutions, reformations. It is the weakness of his
Ancien Regime that he neglected the differences between the period
of Louis XV and that of Louis XVI, using his notes concerning the
one or the other indiscriminately, without regard to the circum¬
stances, to make a composite picture which for that very reason
cannot have existed in reality. His Revolution is, in my judgment,
a complete failure as a history, because he is only interested in
describing feelings and states of mind, and never places the actions,
incidents and utterances from which he deduces these in their
‘ SoREL, Nouveaux essais d'histoire et de critique^ 1898, p. 138.
1.^4.
HIPPOLYTE TAINE
natural relation to the wider course of events. And it must be
admitted that his Napoleon suffers from the same defect.
THE PORTRAIT OF NAPOLEON
Napoleon is not portrayed as the course of an amazing life, as

contact with mighty events, made him, but as he was. Taine
knows only one Napoleon. He sees the Emperor implicit in the
Corsican boy or in the poor lieutenant of the royal army. It is
therefore not the Napoleon of any one stage, but the quintessence
of Napoleon which he gives us. To what central ideas is this
portrait related?
Napoleon, says Taine, is not a Frenchman of his time. He is a
foreigner, an Italian. Here we are reminded of Quinet, but
Taine’s Italian is of the Renaissance, preserved, as it were, in
isolated Corsica. From this follows his mental attitude (‘I’intelli-
gcnce’), his independence of the eighteenth-century French
tendency to generalization, his complete indifference to all current
theories and principles, and his unfailing and tireless instinct for
facts. I must remark here that this interpretation seems even more
fantastic to me than Quinct’s. Napoleon’s brain was brim-full of
conventional ideas, among them many that were typical of the
French of his day. We have already noticed examples of these in
his attitude towards religion, his respect a la Rousseau for the
established religion of any country, and his general ‘philosophical’
and Galilean conception of the correct relationship of Church and
State. Nevertheless no one has given so telling an account as
Taine of the insatiable passion for facts of that extraordinary
human mechanism called Napoleon.
Next, Taine describes his character. The Italian Renaissance
is again called in to explain the violence of his passions. And this
extraordinary mechanism, this emotional violence, are, in Taine’s
view, subject to one ruling trait, egoism. This egoism, the tendency
to make oneself the centre of things, to recognize no othei motive
than that of one’s own advantage or greatness, was, Taine says,
nourished by social conditions in Corsica, where no notion < f law
or of common interest served to moderate the struggles of the
chiefs and their clans. The confusion in France after the upheaval
of the Revolution offered just such an arena on a larger scale.
The complete egoist is a solitary being, irrevocably shut off from
his fellow men. He is self-insulated against all spontaneous feelings
of sympathy, admiration or pity. That is how Taine paints Napo¬

leon. So intense is his egoism that he is unable to conceive of any
other driving force in other men. This great realist is morally
blind and his scorn for men leads him into stupid blunders. High
motives lead to independence, and, without realizing the cause,
he is always impatient of that effect. He surrounds himself with
servants instead of collaborators. If someone inclined to indepen¬
dence compromises himself in his service, like Caulaincourt, how¬
ever innocently, in the Enghien affair, he rejoices at the greater
hold over the man this will give him. Napoleon demands the
performance of turpitudes: Savary and men of that kidney are
his ideal. He can see men only as instruments. He hounds on his
ministers, his generals, his officials, even his puppet kings, his
brothers, like a slave-driver. His harsh commanding voice easily
takes on the accents of brutality, even of a refined cruelty. He
wounds, he humiliates, he tries to break spirits.^ The lot of those
nearest to him was far from enviable. Strict etiquette and a tone
of eternal constraint prevailed at the court. Everyone trembled
before the master, who could not cease, even for one moment, to
be a master.
Finally, in a score of pages of irresistible power, Taine links all
this up with Napoleon’s attitude to the world beyond France. An
insatiable thirst for conquest; the fact that compliance and pro¬
mises never meant anything more than tactics; that for him allies
were but instruments of policy to be broken when they had done
their service. ‘As long as his reign lasts there will be war ... no
barrier is sufficient to fence him in, no treaty can bind him. With
him peace will never be anything but a truce, he will only make
use of it to recover himself, and as soon as he thinks himself
recovered, he will begin again; he is, in essence, unsociable’.* One
cannot live with him. ‘On that matter, Europe’s mind is made up,
definitive, unshakable.’ ■4
France’s interests are not what matters to him. Indeed he
takes advantage of her trust to drive her to the abyss. In later
days at St. Helena, Napoleon sentimentalizes over ‘that French
people he had loved so much’.’ ‘The truth is that he loves it as a
Ân example can be found in the correspondence with Louis, previously
referred to, pp. 62 sqq.
* Origines de la France contemporainey Regime moderne^ I, 129.
• Words from the Emperor’s will. The comparison of the rider and the horse
which follows is not entirely original; the reader will remember the poem of
Bar bier; see p. 31.
136
HIPPOLYTE TAINE
horseman loves his horse; all the grooming and smartening up, all
the stroking and encouragement, is not for the benefit of the horse,
but to prepare it as a useful animal for his service, so that it may
fulfil his purposes, even to exhaustion, so that he may force it on
over ever wider ditches and ever higher obstacles — come up, now,
one more ditch, another wall. .. But after what seemed the last
obstacle, there are always new ones to overcome, and in any case
the horse always and inevitably remains what it always was, that
is, a mount, and an overburdened mount . . For, says Taine,
imagine for a moment that this Russian expedition, instead of
turning into a frightful disaster, had been a triumphant success,
what would the outlook for France have been then? At best a
French European Empire undermined by European resistance,
French residents and commanders at St. Petersburg and Riga, as
at Danzig, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Barcelona and Trieste; all
fit Frenchmen employed, from Cadiz to Moscow, in maintaining and
administering the conquest, in hunting down refractory conscripts,
no career left save that of policeman or bully to keep down subjects
and to gather in tribute, to seize and to burn merchandise.
But these beautiful prospects came to nothing; in 1812 the
Grande Armee lies prostrate in the snow. The horse has bungled its
jump completely. Fortunately it is only a horse ridden to death.
‘His Majesty’s health has never been better.’* The horseman is
unharmed and all he thinks of is, not the death struggle of the
wretched beast — but his own mishap, his damaged reputation as
a horseman. ‘It is the catcalls, it is the comic effect of a saut peril-
leux announced with fanfares by so large an orchestra, and ending
in so pitiable a fall.’ When he reaches Warsaw he keeps on re¬
peating the phrase: ‘There is but one step from the sublime to the
ridiculous . . . ’ And the upshot for France? Not only the collapse
of Napoleon’s empire, which all things considered was not a
French Empire any more; but the loss, as well, of the conquests of
the Republic, the Rhine frontier and Belgium, which had been
entrusted to Napoleon in 1799, ‘the natural frontiers’ (to which
we shall hardly admit France to have so obvious a right, although
this is a point on which practically all French writers are in agree¬
ment), ‘those too, Napoleon, with his policy inspired by nothing
but egoism,’ so Taine concludes, ‘has lost for us’.
' The famous closing sentence of the bulletin in which the disaster was at last
announced.
IQ*7
THE INSTITUTIONS
The portrait of Napoleon is merely an introduction. The work

as a whole is concerned with an analysis of the institutions for
which France has to thank Napoleon, though Taine would cer¬
tainly not have put it in that way. ‘The institutions inflicted on
France by Napoleon’ would be more in accordance with his
approach. The general tendency of‘le regime moderne’, as Taine
sees it, he describes in his arresting and picturesque manner as
follows:
‘A new France, not the communistic, egalitarian, spartan
France fondly imagined by Robespierre and Saint-Just, but a
practicable and durable France, the France of reality, yet levelled,
made uniform, fitted together according to logic and after a
general and simple principle, a centralized and bureaucratic
France which, apart from the petty and individualist activities of
private life, was to be set in motion entirely from above; in short,
the France which Richelieu and Louis XIV would have wished to
bring about, which Mirabeau saw coming already in 1790; there
you have the creation which the practice and theory of both the
monarchy and the Revolution had prepared, and for the achieve¬
ment of which the ultimate concourse of events, I mean the
alliance of philosophy and of the sword, made ready the First
Consul’s sovereign hands.
‘Nor could he, with his character as we know it, with the quick¬
ness, the activity, the range, the comprehensiveness and the style
of his intelligence, have willed any other construction or have been
satisfied with a lesser. His itch to administer and to manage was
too great, his capacity for it was too great; his genius swallowed
everything up. Moreover, for the external task that he took upon
himself, he needed internally not only the undisputed possession of
all executive and legislative power, but more than that, the annihi¬
lation of all moral authority other than his own, that is to say,
public opinion silenced and every individual isolated; and conse¬
quently the systematic destruction, in advance, of all initiative, be
it religious, ecclesiastic, educational, charitable or literary, depart¬
mental or municipal, which in the present or in the future might
group men against or even by his side. As a good general, he
covers his rear; in his struggle with Europe he sees to it that, in
this France which he drags along with him, the recalcitrant souls
138
HIPPOLYTE TAINE
or minds shall not be able to come together . . . The end of every
thread which might draw together a number of men for the same
objects is in his hands; he keeps a firm hold on all these threads
together, guards them jealously, that he may pull them as taut as
possible. Let no one be bold enough to try and slacken them,
above all let no one attempt to seize them; they are his, his only,
they constitute the public domain, his domain.’
Even so the ruler admits the existence of a carefully defined
territory within which, for all his power, he does not enter. Taine
hastens to add that here, too, Napoleon is only acting from an
enlightened sense of self-interest. He was realist enough to take
the men of his day, the products of a civilized epoch with a long
tradition of law, as they were. And it was in order to make them
the more ready to work for his aims that he guaranteed them the
free and untrammelled enjoyment of their own little plot, their
property, for that is what is meant. I remark in passing that on
this point considerations which did not occur to Taine are bound
to present themselves to the modern reader. In the first place he
did not foresee that rulers might arise who would violate this fron¬
tier too. In the second place this self-control, whatever its motives,
is regarded by Taine as an undoubted boon, so great in his day
was the domination still exercised by liberal economy over men’s
minds. At the present time many observers will inevitably con¬
sider this respect for private property a characteristic through
which Napoleon ranges himself on the bourgeois, or evgn the
reactionary, the anti-social, side of the Revolution.
However much one may wish to criticize Taine’s view, the pages
which I have quoted form the starting point of bold and pene¬
trating speculations concerning Napoleonic institutions. Their
sombre tone may perhaps find more echo among our own con¬
temporaries than among the author’s, though doubts had already
begun to make breaches in nineteenth-century optimism. In any
case the shattering of individuality and of group, the uprooting of
local government, the destruction of all initiative and all conviction
in political mattei's — these constitute for Taine the distinguishing
features. When he compares the work of Napoleon with that of
Diocletian and Constantine, without suggesting, as does Quinet,
that their spirit was still working in the Italian blood of the
Corsican, it is in order to note that in their day too human
material was smashed to make that classically simple and sym-
139
metrical structure. I shall not follow him further in these con¬
siderations, and I shall merely note that he does not deny
Napoleon’s work all merit. Order was restored, the bureaucratic
machine itself became a model of tidiness, regularity and equipoise.
The incidence of taxation was regulated most excellently and the
principle of opportunity for all — ‘la carri^re ouverte a tons’ — had
a stimulating effect. But the driving force that was continually
brought into play was the purely personal one of competition,
while all direction came from above.
After having discussed Napoleonic institutions in general, Taine
planned to show how various departments of life fared under the
regime. He was only able to finish two chapters, which together
make one volume, on the Church and on the schools. Remember¬
ing d’Haussonville’s book, it will be readily understood that Taine
found the Church a rewarding subject. I shall confine myself to
discussing something of what he has to say about the schools under
Napoleon.
EDUCATION
What is the aim Napoleon sets himself in his educational policy?

He indicates it himself; ‘My chief aim is to have a means whereby
a lead may be given to political and moral conceptions.’‘ Quite
agreeable to his way of thinking, then, is this statement of advant¬
ages of uniformity as set forth by a minister to the Corps Legislatif:
‘Education must impart the same knowledge and the same
principles to all individuals living in the same society, so that they
will make, as it were, one body, informed with one and the same
understanding, and working for the common good on the basis of
uniformity of views and desires.’
This then was the purpose to be served by the monopoly
accorded to the Imperial University. This University is in no
sense to be regarded as a college; it is the organized totality of
public education in France. This powerful body acquires more
and more privileges, so that private education may be crushed out
of existence. Heavy pressure indeed is needed, for parents do not
much care for the new imperial lycês. They are too militaristic for
their taste, there is a barracks atmosphere about them. Parents
prefer to send their children to the private schools which try to
maintain themselves against the tide of State education. This is
^ In the Council of State, 1806; Taine, Origines, VI, 157.
140
HIPPOLYTE TAINE
made more and more difficult. Not only does the State make life
impossible for the private school, but it frequently seizes upon the
children too. In 1808 the Emperor had a list drawn up of old and
rich families throughout the country who must send their sons to
St. Cyr. In 1813 a similar measure was drawn up on a wider
scale. This was the institution of the garde d^honneur^ which
aroused such perturbation in Holland, and the object of which,
in France also, was to force the notables to offer up their sons
to Moloch.
To get the type of education at which he aimed, Napoleon
wanted to train a body of teachers who would be filled from youth
onwards with the spirit of obedience and sacrifice to the Empire.
He thought with a certain envy of the Jesuits. Naturally he could
not use them, and distrusted them as servants of Rome, but his
ideal would have been ‘a corporation, not of Jesuits whose
sovereign resided in Rome, but of Jesuits who had no other
ambition than to be useful, no other interest than the public
interest’.‘ The £cole Normale would have to supply the need.
Napoleon had his ideas concerning the syllabus and the kind of
literature which should be read. He frowned upon the use of books
such as Montesquieu’s Dialogue de Sylla ei dÊucratey Thomas’s Eloge
de Marc AurelCy or the Annals of Tacitus. Such reading smacked of
republicanism, and stimulated the reader to independent judgment
and to criticism. ‘Let youth rather read Caesar’s Commentaries . . .
Corneille’ (the supreme example of classicism in the drama, and
the eulogist of will-power and unhesitating fulfilment of duty),
‘Bossuet’ (the preacher of unity and obedience, to whom Napoleon
was especially drawn, as we have seen, because of his Gallican
ideas, and his ecclesiastical support for Louis XIV’s state ambi¬
tions); ‘these are the masters they need, for they navigate with the
sails of obedience set in the established order of their period; they
strengthen it, they adorn it.’
Among the ‘fundamentals of education’ Napoleon included ‘the
precepts of the Catholic religion’. Taine does not omit to point out
that in doing so he was in no way governed by disinterested con¬
viction.* He wanted to obtain the sympathy of the clergy, but
took good care at the same time that religion did not spoil his
officials, his officers or even his subjects. As he explained in 1806
in the Council of State: ‘The end to aim at is that the young people
1 Taine, VI, 170. *p. 17S.
141
should grow up neither too devout nor too sceptical; they should
be made to fit the state of the nation and of society.’
Let me remark here that judgment on sayings such as this
depends entirely on the general outlook of the historian. Thiers
too quotes similar utterances of Napoleon. On one occasion, for
example, during the establishment of schools for children of
necessitous members of the Legion of Honour, the Emperor
declared^ that religious instruction was only of secondary impor¬
tance for boys, though in the case of girls ‘a solid piety’ was the
first consideration. ‘Make of them women who believe and do not
argue. The weakness of the female intellect, the volatility of their
ideas, their appointed lot in society, the necessity of promoting in
them, together with a constant resignation, a tender and yielding
charity, all this makes the yoke of religion indispensable for them.’
Thiers is not in the least shocked by this view of the usefulness of
religion in relation to social needs, and these very one-sidedly
estimated at that. At least he makes no comment on it.’*
Taine continues with his description of the schools, and ex¬
patiates upon the strict discipline and mechanical regulation of
life in the lycees. These boarding-schools were ‘ante-rooms to the
barracks’, and the militaristic tone which reigned there was far
from popular. Nevertheless the education given stamped their
pupils’ minds for life. Systematized competition as an incentive
was taken over from the Jesuits. Prize-givings which were turned
into grandiose and theatrical performances went with this. Loyalty
to the Emperor, admiration for his military prowess, ambition to
share that glory —- such were the virtues that were fostered above
all others. The presence everywhere of imperial scholars, sons of
officers and officials, who owed all to the imperial favour, and
whose future fortunes depended on it, did much to secure the
dominance of this spirit in the schools. The blind submission and
enthusiasm of these boys set the tone. But everything was arranged
to maintain it at that pitch. Reports of victories were read aloud
and commented upon. Essays dealing with the latest triumph
received the prizes. ‘In this teaching’, Taine concludes, ‘literature
and science are of secondary importance. What matters is the
training, an early, methodical, continuous, irresistible training
^ Thiers, II.
® Thiers, who was not shocked by a purely social valuation of religion, also ad¬
mired the rigid organization of education under the UniversitS. Of all Napoleon *s
creations, he thought it ‘perhaps the most beautifur. II, 132b.
142
HIPPOLYTE TAINE
which, through the concentration of all means — lesson, example
and practice — inculcates the principles and permeates the youthful
souls for good and all with the national doctrine^ a kind of social and
political catechism, the first article of which enjoins fanatical sub¬
jection, passionate devotion and complete surrender of self to the
Emperor,’
THE CRITICISM OF PRINCE NAPOLEON;

MME DE RfeMUSAT
Lanfrey’s book was already almost forgotten.^ Taine’s work, so
much more powerful in its brevity — I am thinking now of the
portrait of Napoleon, the publication of which in the Revue des
Deux Mondes (Feb.-March 1887) preceded the main work by a
year or two, and which certainly has since found twenty readers
for one who was willing to wrestle with the institutions, the schools
and the churches — this study, which was not merely destructive,
but which unveiled, within the temple of Napoleon worship, an
idol of monstrous aspect, caused a tremendous sensation. It was
not to be expected that it would tempt the faithful to apostasy.
The French people had fed its pride too long on that wonderful
epic, had been too ready to admire its own greatness and energy
in the conquests and the expansion of revolutionary principles, to
allow its Napoleon to be taken away from it. Thus the horse
attaches itself to the most exacting rider.
But indeed it was only too easy to point out exaggerations and
weaknesses in the portrait. The first who did this, and it must be
admitted with much perspicacity, was Prince Napoleon, who had
‘edited’ his uncle’s correspondence with so disconcerting a mixture
of frankness and clumsiness. I shall discuss his book, Napoleon et
ses detracteurSy which appeared in 1887, at a later stage. Here I want
to deal only with his criticism of Taine.
His general characterization of the great writer, as a man with¬
out style, who could present us with a string of notes from his card
index, like an entomologist with a purely microscopic vision who
failed to see the broad lines and was blind to moral values, is so
obviously a caricature born from indignation — though certain
traits of the original are indeed recognizable — that we might
seriously ask ourselves whether this passionate Bonaparte was
^ At any rate among the general public; though it has always found interested
and grateful readers, and still does.
143
equipped to give a judgment on moral conceptions. But his actual
criticism is much to the point. Let us ignore a number of errors
due to negligence, which he lists, and merely mention in passing
that a passage in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in which Taine, carried
away by his comparison of Napoleon with the Italians of the
Renaissance, and in particular with the Borgias, boldly asserted
that the Corsican had seduced all three of his sisters — a story
often whispered — is not reprinted in the book. I shall confine my
remarks to the main charge that Taine was in general too much
inclined to rely on memoirs, and preferably those of hostile writers
and that he failed to subject those sources to a much needed
criticism.
That criticism Prince Napoleon proceeds to give. One after
another Mettemich, Bourrienne, Mme de Remusat, I’abbe de
Pradt, Miot de Melito, are considered. Metternich’s was a special
case. The others had this much in common, that they had served
Napoleon when he was in power, and uttered their destructive, or
hostile, criticism only after his fall. The apologist who attempts to
discredit witnesses for the prosecution on this ground alone, that
of inconsistency, ingratitude and treachery, will not readily
receive support from the historian. He is more likely to have his
way with the general public, which is liable to be moved by
nationalistic or political passions. In France, any reminder of the
humiliating circumstances to which the regime which succeeded
Napoleon owed its existence — the defeat, and the patronage of
foreign conquerors — never failed to touch a chord. So did any
representation of Napoleon symbolizing in his downfall the fate
of the fatherland. Prince Napoleon certainly does not disdain to
use these themes in a demagogic manner, but he also has argu¬
ments which cannot but impress a cooler critical judgment. I shall
deal here only with the case of Mme de Remusat. It is undeniable
that her memoirs, which were published only in 1880, had strongly
coloured Taine’s view of the personality of Napoleon.
Mme de Remusat had come as a young married woman to the
court ofJosephine, then still wife of the First Consul. Her husband
accepted a post a.s prefet du palais. They were aristocrats, not of the
highest rank, but authentically of the ancien rigime, people such as
Bonaparte thought he should have about him in his rising fortunes.
They had been among the first to ‘rally’ to his side, in the golden
spring of the Consulate, and Mme de Remusat had begun with
144
HIPPOLYTE TAINE
genuine admiration and enthusiasm. The memoirs describe her

disillusionment. The book is certainly among the most fascinating
written about Napoleon by contemporaries. The writer gives the
impression of being a serious-minded, highly cultured woman. She
had an eye for the colourful event, and could tell an amusing
incident with the best, but what sets her apart from most writers of
memoirs is her judgment, and the independence with which she
seems to have maintained her own standards against Napoleon.
Her attitude is not purely individualistic, and it is not simply a
question of an over-sensitive ego as in the case of Chateaubriand.
She represents a definite tendency, she is spiritually akin to Mme
de Stad. In this connection it is significant that her son, and later
also her grandson, became, under the Restoration and the Second
Empire, important figures in French liberalism, which was then
intellectually rather than politically influential.
The picture she gives of Napoleon tallies to an extraordinary
degree with that of Mme de Stad. That he was completely heart¬
less, without any spontaneous human feeling, without any generos¬
ity, nothing but self-love, and accomplishing all his works in a
whirl of egoism or of crafty calculation — all this one can read in
Mme de Remusat, and of course one is reminded of Taine’s
portrait also. So conscious was Napoleon of these qualities in him¬
self that he measured all others by the same standard, thus com¬
mitting the gravest psychological errors. He was quite unable to
believe in disinterested, charitable actions. If he was forced to
admit their existence, he only despised the doer, doubly despised
him, for he started with a low opinion of mankind in general, and
in particular of the French, among whom he still felt himself a
stranger though he tried to conceal it. Mme de Remusat believed
that she had seen him descend to these depths by slow degrees, or
rather the Enghien crime had accelerated the process, making him
lose all respect for moral values, and all sense of moderation. She
and her husband, she tells us, belonged to the secret opposition
which had Talleyrand for its centre, and longed for the return of
the Bourbons and freedom.
Prince Napoleon’s most telling charge against the reliability of
Mme de Remusat, is that her later memoirs contradict her letters
of the time. What admiration and enthusiasm she was still ex¬
pressing for Napoleon and his victories, Napoleon and his
gracious ways, at a time when, according to the memoirs, she
K H5
already saw him as the conqueror run mad, as the heartless robot.
When exactly were these memoirs written? In i8i8, to take the
place of a previous version which had been burned by the writer
for security's sake during the Hundred Days. According to her
son’s introduction, occasion was given by the appearance of Mme
de Stag’s Considerations^ containing a study of Napoleon with
which Mme de Remusat felt herself in general accord, but which
she wished to check by her own reminiscences, particularly as she
was conscious of having had at one time other opinions of him. I
have already remarked on the kinship between Mme de Remusat’s
account and that of Mme de Stael. It gives a slight but salutary
shock to be reminded that the former was not written absolutely
independently of the latter. Prince Napoleon suggests an even
more unpleasant possibility. Had the writer, in presenting matters
as she does, some special object or interest in view?.
At the moment of the first abdication, in 1814, when Chateau¬
briand’s pamphlet appeared, and her son, brought up in the
customary adoration of the Emperor, expressed great indignation
at it, Mme de Remusat gave him a lesson in worldly wisdom which
though delicately expressed, makes one wonder whether, when
everyday problems arose, she did not exchange her high moral
standards for more practical ones.
‘Mr. de Chateaubriand’s book is not a pamphlet. I could put
my hand to each of his pages . . . We shall explain to you how we,
respecting your tender years, took care to shield your eyes from
a thousand matters which it was better for you not to know.
Destined as you were to enter his service, you had to be fed on
illusions respecting him. For the last three months’ (compared
with the memoirs this period must indeed be accounted short)
‘your father and I have anxiously been looking for a change such
as is now impending . . . Do not forget at this juncture to draw
upon yourself the good regard of the public.’^
THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE WORK

un'^toughed
How far the testimony of the memoirs is weakened by these

letters I do not intend to assess, nor shall I attempt to judge how
far Taine’s portrait would be affected by being deprived of those
touches which were contributed from the memoirs. It is clear that
‘ NapoUon et ses dStracteurs, io8.
146
HIPPOLYTE TAINE
there is a problem here, which Taine, with his customary assurance
did not recognize, and not only in the case of Mme de Remusat’s
memoirs.
I should add, however, that the criticism levelled at Taine for
excessive and uncritical use of memoirs does not hold good for the
most important part (in content and range) of his work, the
brilliant study of the institutions of the Consul and Emperor.
Naturally he uses memoirs here too, but the names of Mme de
Stael, Miot, Bourrienne, and Mme de Remusat will hardly be
found any more, and generally speaking, the quotations given
are of a kind less liable to objections. Moreover much use is
made of official docuihents, of the Moniteur and of Napoleon’s
correspondence.
However this may be, Taine’s description of Napoleon was very
far from henceforth dominating French historical literature.
147
PART FOUR
ADMIRERS
THE POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL
BACKGROUND
A N T I - D E M O G R A T I G AND ANTI-ENGLISH
TENDENGIES
Taine’s book, one might almost say, was the starting-point for the
best in Napoleonic literature which accepted and eulogized
Napoleon. I would not go so far as to assert propter hoc^ but the
post hoc is undeniable. It was only now that the real stream of
studies, monographs, serious histories of this or that aspect, made
their appearance. They were much more thorough than previous
works, and were based upon the archive material which was slowly
being brought to light. And most of this new output was favour¬
able to Napoleon.
There is indeed something symptomatic about this trend, and
the question arises whether it can again be explained by the cir¬
cumstances of the day. The answer must undoubtedly be in the
affirmative, but not every admirer of Napoleon should be labelled
Bonapartist. After Napoleon Ill’s fall Bonapartism possessed
little weight as a party with pretensions to an imperial restoration.
The humiliating memory of 1870 was an unsurmountable obstacle.
In 1879 ^ further blow was dealt the cause by the miserable death
of the young Prince-Pretender in South Africa. This was followed
by paralysing divisions in the party. Bonapartism was still affected
by the cleavage which had characterized the career of the great
Napoleon. There was the radical tendency, to which the Napo¬
leonic legend had from the first given prominence, harking back
to the Revolution, anti-clerical, and almost republican. But there
was also a conservative tendency, to which Napoleon III had
most closely adhered, though not without contradictions and
hesitations. His coup d'etat of 1851 had cast him for the role of
‘saviour of society’, like the First Consul in the year VHL And
just as the latter had seen in the Catholic Church a useful basis for
his power, so did Napoleon III rely on the clergy, and this v/ithout
relapsing into those conflicts to which his great forebear had owed
the support of the anti-clericals.
Yet, divided though it was, and played out in the realm of
practical politics, in one respect Bonapartism still showed its unity
ADMIRERS
and reflected a trend existing among large sections of the French
people. Whether radical or conservative, whether on the side of
the workers or of the capitalists, whether anti-clerical or clerical,
it was filled with suspicion, contempt and hostility towards parlia-
mentarianism and towards that liberalism and intellectualism
with which this had its closest associations. These were the forces
on which the Third Republic had to rely, but they did not show
to the best advantage in its service, nor did the regime succeed in
winning for them universal respect. Many who would certainly
not have called themselves Bonapartists were sufficiently antagoa-
ized to become conscious of a sense of kinship with the Consul-
Emperor.
This was aggravated by a feeling of discomfort in wider intel¬
lectual spheres. There was a sharp reaction against the high
expectations held in the third quarter of the century with regard
to science, and against the exclusive domination of the analytical
spirit and of reason. Youth turned away from the spiritual leader¬
ship of Renan and Taine, and even Zola had already passed the
zenith of his influence. But to explain the readiness of the public
to accept the Napoleonic legend, we must point to political events
before everything else.
People were smarting from 1870, and it seemed to many as if
this peaceful bourgeois government was taking that disgrace lying
down. How strong this impatience was appeared in 1888, with
the senseless adventure of Boulanger, the general and minister of
war, who had little to commend him save his easy eloquence and
his handsome charger, but who stirred up ideas of revanche and
thus for a moment endangered the existence of the Republic. It
appeared possible to arouse elemental feelings of scorn and con¬
tempt against the parliamentary regime. In the case of some,
anti-German feelings were offset by Anglophobia. Colonial ex¬
pansion, that dominating feature of French history after 1870,
brought about much frictiop with the leading colonial power. In
the ’nineties the Fashoda incident nearly led to war. It is true that
at the same time it was argued vehemently that overseas interests
must never be allowed to wipe out the painful memory of the loss
of the Rhine. And in any case, the anti-English tendency gave
rise to a sense of kinship with the man who had hated la perfide
Albion so bitterly. There was so close a connection in the French
mind between England and parliamentarianism, England and
152
POLITICAL BACKGROUND
liberalism, that in moments of tension these great conceptions
appeared almost un-French and Napoleon the autocrat was
instinctively seen as a patriot.
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR
Then there came the Panama scandal which poured discredit in

large doses on both Parliament and the RepubUc. Hard on its
heels came the Dreyfus affair. At first it threatened to raise the
army into an independent force, and the only true exponent of the
State, on a wave of anti-semitic and chauvinist passion, supported
by every conservative and reactionary interest, drowning parlia¬
ment, free speech, justice and reason. But the forces of the mind,
armed with the best traditions of French civihzation, put up a
brave defence, and after a struggle which will always be among
the finest episodes in French history, the Dreyfus affair ended in a
severe defeat for fascist tendencies — if I may use this word avant
la lettre — in French intellectual and political fife.
All this had a direct effect on the view taken of Napoleon. It
must, of course, not be imagined that all the defenders of the inno¬
cent but condemned Dreyfus were hostile to the historic figure of
the Emperor, or vice versa, although at first glance this over¬
simplification seems not untenable. In any case the mental atti¬
tude which was suspicious of all analysis and inquiry, especially
when the hero of Austerlitz, the martyr of St. Helena, was the
object, which accepted the legend as worthy of veneration, which
preferred to deal in such categories as patriotism versus defeatism,
the true Frenchman versus the servant of the enemy, of the hate-
ridden, envious outside world, the servile imitator of Enghsh
politics and culture (a hit at all liberalism this — Mme de Stael,
Quinet, Taine, were always citing the example of England) —
this mental attitude came into its own with the agitation against
the Jewish traitor. When Dreyfus was found to be innocent
there was a collapse. The masses reflected this, however; and
through them political life. The Republic was now based on firm
foundatioiis. But as far as cultural life was concerned the victory
of justice and common sense was not so fruitful. In partis ular
many of the intellectual leaders who had risen in support of the
Army’s honour, as though it would have been damaged by the
reversal of an unjust sentence, kept their minds obstinately shut to
evidence, and the mental mood which had given rise to the tragic
153
ADMIRERS
mistake was proudly carried into the new century. Maurice
Barr^s remained more of a leading figure in literary circles than
Anatole France, who, sceptic though he was, had seen where
justice lay in the Dreyfus affair.
MAURICE BARRks
In 1899 Maurice Barr^s had written from Rennes some sensa¬

tional articles on the re-trial, in one of which he had given, after
his own fashion, a sketch of the noble figure of Colonel Picquart,
the officer who had dared to break right through the officers’ plot.
Of this article he says in his memoirs that his mother took it and
read it by the grave of his father. ‘And therefore’, a French
literary historian says sarcastically, ‘the bordereau was indeed by
Dreyfus.’ Barres also wrote in his memoirs: ‘I have never felt the
need of any other ideas than those in which I was soaked from
birth onwards. Thanks to them I have always had a perfect know¬
ledge of what was truth.’ The same literary historian quoted
above, having contrasted Anatole France’s relative loneliness with
Barres’s circle of kindred spirits, also states: ‘The basis of objective
truth, on which the intellectuals of 1897 triumphed juridically,
morally and politically, has therefore proved, from the literary
point of view, an ungrateful ground compared with the basis of
organic, inherited, passionate truth.’^
In 1897, when Barres was thirty-six years old, his famous novel
Les deracines appeared, the first part of a trilogy, Le Roman de VEner-
gie nationale, in which he proposed giving a sociological study of
French youth, for whom at the same time he developed a social
philosophy. The figure of Napoleon is given the central place in
the first volume. Barry’s young people, burning with desire to do
something, to place their lives in the service of a purpose, visit the
tomb in Les InvalideSy to receive inspiration from Napoleon. They
do not seek out the Napoleons of history, nor do they attempt to
choose between them, foj* ‘they have disentangled from among
them the Napoleon of the souL Without any social or moral precon¬
ceptions, without weighing the benefits of his wars or the worth of
his governmental despotism, in all simplicity, they love Bonaparte.
And indeed, the author speculates, what was Napoleon’s pro-
foundest capacity? He has stated it himself: ‘As for me, I have the
^ A, ThIbaudet, Histoire de la littirature frangaise de 17S9 d nos jours (1936),

pp. 413, 42Q.
154
POLITICAL BACKGROUND
gift of electrifying men.’ His enduring significance, so Barres con¬
cludes a rhetorical passage which I shall spare the reader, will
for ever remain: ‘napoleon teacher of energy.’ Even
today, ‘his touch still has the power to enlarge the soul’. Nor is the
character made up merely of what Napoleon Bonaparte was in his
lifetime: all that has since been said or sung by the admirers
and the poets, the great man’s voices, has made it expand in the
world of imagination, and the lads who are now meeting round
his tomb add their tribute of sound to that triumphant
symphony of the still lengthening cortege of Caesar.
There is no need to quote further. It is obvious that Barres is
purely pragmatic in his view of the Napoleon figure. What does
he care for this or that interpretation of the wars or of the cen¬
tralized administration, or for moral or social ‘preconceptions’?
The great Napoleon is what he wants, his greatness still increased
by tradition and legend, to provide inspiration for youth, to spur
them on, to give them courage to perform great deeds and make
great sacrifices. Barres was a disciple of Taine, and in many
respects continued to venerate him. In Taine’s writings, too, can
be found this idea of the value of tradition, of what is a nation’s
own, the respect for what has grown. But in resolutely putting
those values above morality and truth Barres was joining the
reaction against Taine, as is conclusively proved by his glorifica¬
tion of Napoleon. Resulting from a combination of political and
spiritual factors it is typical of the period. That is why I have
included it in my introduction to the historical glorification of
Napoleon.
I intend to illustrate this historical glorification from the works
of four writers, but first I must pause to consider the curious figure
of Prince Napoleon.
155
CHAPTER I
PRINCE NAPOLEON
POLITICAL CONCEPTIONS
Prince Napoleon, son of Jerome, the king for a day of the

shadowy Kingdom of Westphalia, was 65 years old when he took
up his pen to refute Taine. He was an excitable and crotchety, but
by no means insignificant, figure. Robust, dark, with acquiline
nose and flashing eyes, he seemed when the Second Empire
crumbled the epitome of vital will power as compared with the
ailing, disheartened and vacillating Napoleon III.* He had played a
political role under his cousin, if only that of an impotent grumbler.
Against Eugenie’s aggressive conservatism and clericalism he had
been the spokesman at court of a popular, anti-clerical tendency,
the opponent of the attempt to preserve the favour of French
Catholics by bolstering up the temporal power of the Pope in his
last bastion, and thus raise a barrier against Italian unity. He
was a representative of the Napoleonic legend in its most radical
version.*
The historic figure of Napoleon which he defended with such
asperity against its traducers, had for him a profound significance,
not only, as he was wholly convinced, for his own personal life^
but for that fatherland which had banished him after his family’s
second downfall. ‘To defend Napoleon’s memory is still to serve
France’, he declares. As to the principles which Napoleon be¬
queathed to posterity, he believes that only these can solve the
problem of the coexistence of democracy with a strong authority.
‘Executive authority springing from a direct, particular and
separate mandate, legislative power confined within the sphere of
deliberation and control. Our parliamentary regime, which is
becoming impracticable if only as a result of the multiple divisions
^ cf. P. DE LA Gorge, Histoire du Second Empire^ VII, 164; G. Hanotaux, Histoire
de la France contemporedne, IV, 472; the same work, I, 488: ‘Le prince 6tait un
homme de haute valeur intellectuelle, ambitieux, intemp^rant, plus embarrassant
peut-€tre pour les siens que pour ses adversaires.*
* ‘N’oubliant pas* (writes Hanotaux) *les origines r^volutionnaires, ii avait
recueilli, dans I’h^ritage des Bonaparte, la th^ r^publicaine, populaire et pl^bis-
citaire.*
156
PRINCE NAPOLEON
of public opinion, is condemned by all far-seeing minds. We are
faced with this alternative; either the country will be subjected to
the dictatorship of an assembly, or it will return to the true con¬
ception of democratic and representative government.’
PRINCE NAPOLEON AND HISTORY
Given this attitude, how docs he view the history of his famous
uncle? We have already seen how his work as editor of the cor¬
respondence had been influenced by it. He defends himself against
the attacks which he had to endure on that score, though without
adding any new arguments. His argument, that the publication
on such a scale of the whole political correspondence of so recent
and hotly debated a figure was in itself an unusual and a coura¬
geous action, has some force. A Dutch historian, remembering
what has happened to other royal and non-royal archives, cannot
venture to reproach the Prince and his principal Napoleon III too
sternly for having omitted a small part of the correspondence from
a number of considerations of tact and prudence.
On all points Prince Napoleon is ready to defend the great
Consul-Emperor. Throughout he sees him as the man of the
people, the man of the Revolution, and if he grew too authori¬
tarian during the period of the Empire, it was only under the
compulsion of the wars which the rulers inflicted upon him out of
their hatred for young, dynamic and promising France. In the
end, during the Hundred Days, he was able for once to show him¬
self in his true colours, though it was a pity, says the writer,
permitting himself a faintly critical note, that with his new Cham¬
ber he followed the English system, instead of‘developing consular
institutions to their full possibilities of representation’.^ But on St.
Helena his radiant wisdom at last appears to the full. ‘There he
prophesies the future, and he, the captive of kings, forces them to
hearken to his lessons. Freedom dawns in his spirit as the neces¬
sary shape of the new society. He foresees the republic as demo¬
cracy’s own form of government.’
But although this final wisdom had only been revealed to Napo¬
leon on St. Helena, his nephew is not less ready to defend
everything, literally everything, he had done before attaining this
1 An example of how the antithesis French-English was equated with the anti-
thesis authoritarian-liberal; cf. above, pp. 152 sqq.
157
ADMIRERS
state of grace. Take the case of Bayonne. How could the Emperor,
faced with that spectacle of baseness and folly, stand aside and
leave Spain to the English? And if he came up against Spanish
resistance, he did arouse national consciousness, there as in Italy
and in Germany. Even though it was aroused against him, it was
he who had awakened it, and to him the nations owed their liberty.
Or take the treatment of the Pope, and the scene against Portalis.
Without hesitation Prince Napoleon approves of it all. In his
eagerness he leaves out that half of the story which might excuse
Portalis, but the canon who had received the Pope’s letter was a
‘fanatical priest’. With regard to the failure to secure peace in
the summer of 1813 at Prague, he here presents Metternich in the
role of criminal. The plot to truncate France existed already in
spite of all the fine phrases. (We shall be hearing more of this.)
So Napoleon was above all the hero whose strong arm defended
France. Hero he remained to the very end. ‘Weariness invades
the hearts of his generals. He alone, who carries within him the
destiny of France, struggles to the last.’
Prince Napoleon’s popular, and plebiscitary, Caesarism, which
sometimes approached out and out republicanism — were not the
republicans among the most ardent disciples of the Napoleonic
legend? — included a strain of intense and chauvinistic patriotism,
vainglorious, sabre-rattling. Taine had said hardly anything
about Napoleon’s battles. And yet, writes Prince Napoleon,
‘Arcole, Rivoli, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Montmi-
rail, these victories of which we can see the names inscribed on our
banners, remain to us’ (he means, after our defeat of 1870) ‘as an
inexhaustible treasure of glory and honour, as an intangible inheri¬
tance, which will enable us to recover all that we lost’ (Alsace and
Lorraine). ‘... These are the memories which constitute the soul
of a people. M. Taine speaks with the true sceptic’s contempt of
“those poor trusting and gullible Gauls” ’ (the French who threw
themselves into the arms of Napoleon). ‘Indeed, to them Napo¬
leon gave the most precious of gifts: self-respect, confidence in
their own work, the fame of a limitless courage and of an im¬
measurable energy. In the passing days of our misfortune (before
long la revanche\) ‘the value of those priceless boons is felt more
deeply than ever. The glory of Napoleon is a national possession:
whoever touches it defaces the nation itself’.
It may be said, all this is no longer history. But among the
158
PRINCE NAPOLEON
historians I shall be discussing next, and not only among the first
four, these same ideas and emotions may be detected, not so fer¬
vently expressed, and barely emerging from a more sober historical
context, but even so the driving force of historical imagination and
reconstruction.
159
CHAPTER II
HENRY HOUSSAYE
‘1814’; FOLLOW NAPOLEON TO THE END!
1814, by Henry Houssaye, appeared in 1888. The book had an

amazing success, and brought its author into the Academy. (I
must remark in passing that from that day to this the writer who
was pro-Napoleon has had a much better chance of becoming a
member of that illustrious company than one who had indulged
in criticism. Besides Houssaye there are Vandal, Sorel, Masson,
Madelin, Bainville, among those with whom I am concerned.)
Houssaye, who had previously devoted himself to Greek history,
continued to exploit his new mine, and followed up the weighty
volume on 1814 with three weighty volumes on 1815. The last of
these appeared in 1905.
1814 gives a very detailed account of the events of that year, the
campaign in France, the abdication at Fontainebleau. The writer
does not enter into discussions as to intentions and responsibilities.
With all the greater assurance does he distribute blows and favours.
The previous events, which had landed France and Napoleon in
that tragic situation, he brushes aside in his introduction with a
remark supposed to have been made by a peasant; ‘It is no longer
a question of Bonaparte. Our soil is invaded. Let us go and fight.’
From this reasoning — or refusal to reason — follows naturally the
thesis of complete solidarity between France and Napoleon. It
leads the writer to take up a position of fierce hatred against all
those who thought that in this crisis France could be saved at the
cost of Napoleon. When finally, after miracles of leadership and
energy, Napoleon’s resistance against the allied armies is beginning
to collapse, he appears at Fontainebleau (Paris is in the enemies’
hands) as the true hero of-tragedy, abandoned by cowards, and
Marmont, the marshal whose defection forces him in the end to
abdication, is the traitor. We already know this interpretation
from Thiers.^ With what vehemence does Houssaye’s clear-cut
account, for all its constant matter-of-factness, drive it home!
The villains of 1814 are Talleyrand and Marmont (the Prince
* cf. above, p. 6$.
160
HENRY HOUSSAYE
of Benevento and the Duke of Ragusa). Houssaye considers the

sole motive of the marshal to be ‘vanity’:' he succumbed to
the .appeals that were addressed to him to raise France out of the
depths. He was flattered that it was to him that men turned. He
already saw himself as a second Monk receiving Louis XVIII and
making a name for himself in history. Nor is Talleyrand any
better. He is nothing but an intriguer and a self-seeker. Houssaye
scornfully describes the log-rolling and wire-pulling, the whisper¬
ing and scurrying, going on in those Parisian circles which had for
so long (certainly since 1807, and more or less enthusiastically
according to circumstances) indulged in frondist activities. These
were the circles of the aristocracy, recently, and in many cases
only apparently, ‘rallied’, with ramifications among the Emperor’s
higher officialdom. Houssaye scoffs at the liberals’ ca’ canny; the
royalists were at least active. The most cunning, and the most
careful, was Talleyrand. What was he after? Not a restoration of
the Bourbons, on whom he could not rely for his own future and
who could not, in any case, give him more than a premiership.
His dream was a Regency Council for the King of Rome, of which
he would be the President, and for fifteen years.. . But Napoleon
had to be got out of the way first. If only he would get himself
killed in action. If necessary there were other methods, and
Talleyrand did not shrink from them. This model of ‘perfidy’,
writes Houssaye, was no more fastidious than the allied rulers.
Talleyrand was certainly used to treading labyrinths. In his
career as Minister of Foreign Affairs he had not forgotten his own
interests and his fortune was mostly built up in the years after the
.peace of Luneville, when the German princes scrambled after
secularizations of Church property, and used to come to Paris to
obtain — or to buy — the necessary authorization. But does he
therefore deserve to be accused of basing his actions after 1814
solely on personal motives? No better treatment can be expected
from a writer whose mind is hermetically sealed against the idea
of a distinction being made between Napoleon and France. But
is this idea so foolish? We have already encountered it a number
of times, as entertained by men of some account. It was not sur¬
prising if, in 1814, all of a sudden, it became a matter of practical
^ 1^14, p. 593: ‘Marmont trahit — car livrer ^ Tennemi une position et un corps
d’armê s*appelle trahir— uniquement par vanity, par la vanity de jouer un grand
r61e glorieux.’—cf. above, p. 65, note i.
L l6r
ADMIRERS
politics. Houssaye does not discuss the matter. Yet in order to
persuade the well-informed reader, he ought first to have disposed
of the theory, which is on the face of it only too acceptable, that
Napoleon’s mad lust for power, his overweening pride, had led to
this catastrophe. He ought to have refuted the thesis — denied, as
we saw, by Prince Napoleon' — that Napoleon could still have
obtained peace in the summer of 1813 at Prague on reasonable
terms, but had thrown away that chance; that even in the spring
of 1814, as long as he saw the ghost of a chance that the fortunes of
war might yet turn, he went on putting difficulties in the way
of the eleventh hour negotiations undertaken by the unfortunate
Caulaincourt, his Minister of Foreign Affairs, and that he had
thus brought upon himself the suspicion of the allies. Must France
meekly suffer his moods, and pay the price in the end? If Talley¬
rand thought otherwise, and saw a chance to come to an agree¬
ment with the allies, without Napoleon, if necessary against
Napoleon, that was surely not a policy to be set aside as treacherous,
cowardly, interested or false. Talleyrand’s policy has its own
relative justification and at least deserves serious consideration.
When I go more deeply into the problem of Napoleon’s foreign
policy in the next section, the problem of Talleyrand will inevit¬
ably crop up again. He had his own well-thought-out system to
which he tenaciously adhered, even though his actions were not
always in conformity with it. But generally French historians are
little inclined to praise Talleyrand, least of all Houssaye, who in
this connection, too, fails to see beyond the year 1814.
Resistance to the uttermost is the only policy he recognizes in
the tragic circumstances of the invasion. He continually empha¬
sizes that the people would have supported such a policy. A
defeatist mentality was to be found only among the aristocrats, the
well-to-do middle classes, the intellectuals, and against this the
high officials hardly dared to take strong measures, if indeed, like
the marshals themselves, they were not tarred with the same brush.
Hence those scenes, which so disgusted Houssaye, when the allies
entered Paris, and while Napoleon was still at Fontainebleau with
his army. Cheering crowds flaunting the white of the Bourbons
greeted the foreign troops, the statue of Napoleon was pulled down
from the triumphal column in the Place Vendome, and the next
day there was a gala performance at the Opera, with Alexander of
' We shall meet more discussion of this matter; cf. Sorel, p. 294.
162
HENRY HOUSSAYE
Russia and William Frederick of Prussia as the guests of honour,
and a packed hall listened excitedly to the hymns specially made
for the occasion:
Long live Alexander

Long live this King of Kings. . .
Long live William

And his valiant warriors. .
Far be it from me to say that I cannot sympathize with the

shame and irritation felt by the Frenchman at memories like these.
The exhibition was certainly not distinguished by taste. Shame at
the scene can, however, be expressed in a variety of ways. Barbier
expressed it, as we have seen,^ by passionately cursing Napoleon.
Houssaye gives vent to it in a bitter recollection of French peasants
driven from their homes by the invader, of French women raped
by them, of those who died on the battle-fields of Craonne, la
Fere-Champenoise, and so on. We are growing familiar with such
contrasts through what we have already seen of French reactions
to the Napoleonic drama. But to us, who have seen a similar
situation elsewhere develop so differently, other considerations are
suggested. How much more intelligible, in view of the Paris scenes,
is the consistent distinction made by the allies at the peace between
the French people and Napoleon. Talleyrand’s policy is explained
thereby and to a certain extent justified. But how did it come
about that the Napoleonic regime had so loose a hold on the
French that it could be thrown off, as it were, in one jerk?
I mentioned in passing the slackness of the high officials, even
Savary, Minister of Police, in dealing with the conspiratorial
activities of Talleyrand and his colleagues. Houssaye tries to
explain this, and in so doing gives one proof that he did not after
all confine his view entirely to the year he was describing. Indeed
it goes without saying that no historical presentation can take
shape without awareness of the events which have preceded it. I
want, at any rate, to draw attention to the fact that Houssaye heê
seeks an explanation in an error committed by his hero in the p.^st,
an error proceeding from a profound instinct in the man ~ Thiers,
too, repeatedly referred to it. With his oppressive and unrelenting
supervision and his demand for complete, blind obedience, Napo-,
^ p. 504. * cf. above, p. 31.
16^.
ADMIRERS
Icon had undermined the initiative of his ministers and servants.
Of Joseph, who, driven from Spain, in 1814 was entrusted with a
sort of regency, Houssaye says that what will he once possessed
had been broken by Napoleon.^
But there is another factor of more importance, of which he
seems dimly aware; it is, indeed, implicit in his repeated observa¬
tion concerning the difference in attitude between the people and
the upper middle classes. What was the use to Napoleon of the
people’s readiness — always supposing it in fact existed, which is a
debatable point — when the people had no place in his govern¬
ment and had fallen into a state of complete incapacity under his
rule? One of two things would have been necessary for resistance
to the last ditch. Either the lower levels of the nation would have
to have been associated with the public interest by a democratic
system of government, or, and this was an idea which could hardly
occur to the generation before our own, the dictatorial regime would
have had to organize the nation as well as the State. At the critical
moment for Napoleon’s government, however, the defection of the
men at the top was sufficient to overthrow the rigidly organized
and centralized state structure, while the nation, abandoned to its
own devices, looked passively on.
‘1815’: THE SAME PROBLEM ONCE MORE
In 1815 the same problem had to be faced. Naooleon is back.

Without meeting resistance anywhere, he has readied Paris, and
is Emperor as before. Not quite as before, though,' for he is now
to be a liberal Emperor, and before departing for the wars, he has
permitted the election of a parliament. Houssaye admits, like
Thiers,* that Napoleon, in spite of his full realization of the need
for peace, had inevitably to bring war once more to France. He
might promise what he liked, he might even believe his own
promises, for war certainly did not suit him at that moment, yet,
writes Houssaye, ‘who is going to believe that he did not cherish
the hope that the moment would come when he could tear up the
humiliating peace treaty of 1814 with one blow of his sword? He
only wanted to win time and choose his hour. It was thus good
policy and good strategy to attack him in the midst of his prepara¬
tions, rather tha^r^ to wait till he had established his authority and
built up his army once morc\*
* 1 Si 4, p. 415. * cf. above, p. 66. * iSij, I, 446.
164
HENRY HOUSSAYE
Much, indeed, is implied in this admission. But Houssaye does
not remain consistent to the view he appears for a moment to hold,
and when, a volume and a half later, he comes to describe the
situation after Waterloo, he puts it like this: The broad masses,
with their common sense, realized that the Emperor, even though
he might be the occasion or the pretext^ (my italics) ‘of the war, had
by no means promoted its outbreak. That formidable and detested
war had been willed and made inevitable by Europe . . . French
pride was revolted by the idea that the powers wanted to impose a
government on the people of the Revolution. The more ardently
peace was loved, the greater was the bitterness against those who
disturbed it with that insolent intention. The peril of a new
invasion ranged all hearts on Napoleon’s side, for in him men still
saw the sword of France.’^
But though these were the feelings of the majority, they were
not, says Houssaye, shared by everyone. There was the small
group of royalists, there were the liberals, who were strong among
the better classes, and who dominated the recently elected
Chamber. Among these the old doubts and difficulties stirred
again. La Fayette, for example, the hero of 1789, was now a man
of importance, and his thoughts were centred on liberty. Indeed,
should Napoleon enter upon a desperate struggle for life or death
with the invading allies, what would the future be? Probably
another defeat and still worse confusion, and even in the event of a
triumph, would not the newly acquired constitution founder in its
wake? If they supported Neipoleon in this gamble might they not
be saddling themselves with another despotism, and start an end¬
less succession of fresh wars and conquests?
It seems to me that the situation made such considerations
unavoidable. As for the passion of the crowd, its blindness, its
readiness to forget, one might well describe these as weaknesses
which the dictator-demagogue is ever wont to abuse. The history
of France in the preceding fifteen years seems to prove nothing so
strikingly as the fatal attraction exercised on the people by the call
to adventure, by the dizzying choice between greatness and down¬
fall, the usual lures offered by conquerors and gamblers; the fatal
conjunction, one might say, over the heads of the thinking minority,
of Dictator and Demos. But Houssaye will have none of these hair¬
splittings: he admits nothing but dereliction o^ ûty.
' 1815^ III, 2.
165
ADMIRERS
Betrayal, personified for him in the previous year by Talleyrand,
is now embodied in Fouche. This ex-terrorist, created Duke of
Otranto by Napoleon, and in his element in the Department of
Police, was certainly a much less attractive figure. Houssaye
ascribes it to his cunning, and particularly to the rumours he
spread, against his own better knowledge, about Napoleon’s plans
to dismiss the Chamber, that this body, in terror, got in first with a
demand for abdication. By thus increasing the importance of
Fouche’s intrigues, the figure of Napoleon is made to stand out
still more radiantly.
‘The Chamber asks me to abdicate,’ so Napoleon burst out in
his ministerial council. ‘Have the consequences of my doing so
been calculated? ... If I abdicate, you have no longer an army . . .
Are declarations about rights’ (of the King of Rome, of the French
nation to decide about its own regime), ‘are speeches, likely to
prevent a collapse? People are blind to the fact that I am no more
than the pretext of the war, which is in reality aimed at France . . .
By delivering me up, France will be delivering herself up ... I am
to be deposed, not for the sake of liberty, but from fear.’
This was eloquence, striking and to the point. Tliesc were the
arguments Napoleon was bound to put forward, and he did it
with an incomparable clarity and energy. But the argument cries
out for criticism. How much was passed over in silence or twisted!
Yet Houssaye’s comment is as follows:
‘These words, whose eloquence was like piercing steel, and
burning like a flame, galvanized the ministers . . . Fouche became
most anxious. “That devil of a man!” he said a few hours later to
a royalist friend, “he did frighten me, this morning. As I sat
listening to him, I believed he was going to start all over again.
Happily, one does not start all over again.”
The second abdication, like the first, Houssaye regards as a
pitiable spectacle in which true greatness is deserted or assailed by
puny beings. He girds at the Chamber for its impudence in asking
that the abdication should" come speedily. For Napoleon was
hesitating, a strange inability to make up his mind had come over
him. Was there still a possible way out, perhaps an alliance with
the restless masses — but this would involve giving a free rein to
their revolutionary instincts. He shrank from it in the end, out of
sincere regard for the interest of his country, says Houssaye. Or
^ i5J5, III, 22.
166
HENRY HOUSS'AYE
was it because he feared that that kind of excitement would be a
straw fire, useless for the purpose of carrying on the war? Anyhow,
our author can only feel bitter scorn for the impatience of the
Chamber in the face of the hero wrestling with his fate.^
FRANCE ‘torn TO PIECES’

Did the second peace of Paris justify Napoleon’s warning that
the Allies’ animus was directed against France? Certainly many
Frenchmen then and later believed it. This explains the bitter¬
ness with which a man like Houssaye regards the collapse of the
united front against the invader. France had to relinquish a
number of frontier towns. Landau, Saarlouis, Philippeville and
Marienbourg were the most important, and the total area
involved was about 2000 square kilometres. She had to pay
reparations of 700 million francs, and was to be occupied for a
period of five years, which in fact was reduced to three. She was
also made to restore the stolen art treasures which had been left to
her in 1814. The Due de Richelieu, the Prime Minister,'signed
the treaty with trembling hand, and returned deathly pale to
v^s colleagues, so Houssaye relates: ‘He burst out “I am
&snonoured!”
When one considers what France had brought upon the world
for nearly a generation and once again after her first defeat, it
must be agreed that she was treated very gently, and that the
allies did indeed stick to their distinction between France and the
disturber of the peace to whom she had entrusted herself.
houssaye’s work
These four volumes of Houssaye are nevertheless exceptionally
fine books. His metliod is that of the mosaic maker. From left,
from right, from every possible source, memoirs, correspondence,
newspapers, often also from unpublished archive materia), from
police reports to diplomatic documents, he takes quotations,
figures, authentic conversations, intimate details, significant
incidents, and reports of the state of mind in the army or among
the general public. He does not throw his light solely on Napoleon;
events in the whole of the country are brought to life. And this
not by means of eloquent phrases, or by the display of his own
theories and views. Every statement is backed at once by apposite
^1815, III, 55 sqq. “1813, III, 561.
167
ADMIRERS
data, if he does not allow it to emerge automatically from the facts.
Yet the general effect is not in the least jerky; the work has pace
and remains clear and comprehensible.
I trust, however, that my comments will have been sufficient
to dispel the illusions of those who think that such methods would
leave a writer little opportunity to infuse historical narrative with
his own political beliefs and preferences.'
^ Even so sceptical a critic as Anatole France has allowed himself to be taken in.
‘M. Henry Houssaye a ^crit d’urt style sobre, une histoire impartiale. Pas de*
phrases, point de paroles vaines et omês; partout la v^ritd des faits et 1’eloquence
des choses.* Vie /itt^raire, I, 184. France compares the attitude of the French in
1814 with that of their descendants in 1870-71, very much to the disadvantage of
the former. In the latter crisis there were no Frenchmen on the side of the enemy;
patriotism is now purer, and more proud, a consequence of democracy . . . He
has not discerned the ideological element in 1814.
168
CHAPTER III
ARTHUR.LfiVY
POLEMIC AGAINST TAINE
In 1892 appeared a book which is still popular, Arthur-Levy’s

Napoleon intimeUnlike Houssaye’s volumes, it extends over the
whole career, and is designedly polemical and defensive. The
book exudes a certain charm, yet at the same time it continually
provokes the reader. For Arthur-Levy really goes too far. His
Napoleon is amiability itself. If he had a fault it was that of
excessive kindness. So anxious is the writer to depict the humanity
that he overlays the greatness with homely touches — about his
relationship with his mother and brothers, with Josephine, and
later even with the Hapsburg archduchess. The whole is sup-
ported with a wealth of quotations. If the resulting somewhat
mawkish picture is laid beside that of Taine, one is inclined to
wonder if the two writers are dealing with the same man. The
contrast is instructive as to the possibilities of partisan representa¬
tion open to the historian through selection from superabundant
material.
MME DE STAEL AND MME DE R^MUSAT
The first aim of Arthur-Levy, with whose later work, Napoleon et

la Paix, equally the antithesis of Taine, I shall discuss further on,
was no doubt to refute the representation, in the famous ‘portrait’,
of an inhuman, or, if I may so call it, a non-humaa Napoleon. Like
Prince Napoleon he attacks the crown-witnesses, Mme de Stael
and Mme de Rcmusat. What he says about them had already
been said or hinted innumerable times, and was to be endlessly
repeated.
Mme de StacFs initial enthusiasm for the victor of Lodi and
Arcole and for the man of Brumaire, followed, as I have previously
told, by disappointment and hostility, he reduces by slight touches
to the story of a tiresome, ambitious woman pursuing a celebrity,
who keeps her at arm’s length, not without some asperity; this the
^ The edition in the ‘Nelson Library’ is somewhat shortened, and what is more
unfortunate, the sources have been omitted.
ADMIRERS
malicious Mme de Stad who had passed from enthusiasm to
tenderer emotions, never forgave him.
But is it so strange that she did not at first perceive the objection¬
able nature of the young hero, as she later described it in her
Considerations^ and took him not only for a republican, but for a
sincere friend of literature, scholarship and culture generally.
Putting aside all evidence, which did not at that moment meet the
eye, of consuming ambition, of pitiless trampling on the weak, of
unscrupulous power politics, there was something uncommonly
attractive in the spectacle of that court, for a court it was, at^
Mombello, where Italian poets were welcome, of that journey to
Egypt, which might almost be thought to have been undertaken
for the exploration of Egyptian antiquities. Scholars accom¬
panied the general and he won their hearts by the seriousness, the
insight and the imagination with which he discussed their subject,
be it literature or the stars, in short, by the impression he gave of a
disinterested taste for the things of the mind. When he gushed
over Ossian’s excessively romantic, archaic nature poetry, faked
by Macpherson, everyone thought it charming. In Paris, in those
weeks before the coup d'etat^ the general was nowhere so much at
home as at the Institute the centre of the learned world, and of the
Revolution’s intellectual strength. There is nothing surprising
about the fact that Mme de Stad did not discover ambition
behind this innocent facade, and nothing is more natural than to
accept the explanation that the coolness she showed immediately
after i8th Brumaire was due to her disappointment at the
authoritarian direction taken by the First Consul.^
As regards Mme de Remusat, she frankly admitted, as we have
seen, that her ideas about Bonaparte changed with the years. She
had started by admiring him at a period when Mme de Stad had
long passed that phase. Even after the Enghien affair she still felt
^ cf. Paul Gautier, Madame de Stail et Napoleon (Paris thesis, 1902), pp. 32 sqq.
Ed. Driault accuses the writer in his review of the work {Revue d'histoire moderne
et contemporaine^ V, 57) of having attaK:hed too much importance to the testimonies
of Bonaparte himself, such as are to be found in the Mhnorial and in Bourrienne.
*M. Gautier a beaucoup exag^r^ les sentiments particuliers de Mme de StaSl pour
Bonaparte; la v^rit^ est sans doute tout simplement que, comme tant d’autres, elle
Pa cru d'abord r^publicain, qu’elle a ^t^ vite d^trompê et que reconnaissant en
lui le ‘‘Tyran’", elle Pa alors combattu.' To this I would add that Sorel too in his
charming, but as regards her ideas, far from sympathetic, little book on Mme de
Stael (cf. below, p. 255) accepts on very insufficient evidence the view that she had
visualized herself in the role of Cleopatra to the new Caesar; and that the hypothesis
of a Mme de Stael disappointed in her amorous dream remained current; see for
example Lacour-Gayet, Talleyrand, 1930, I, 270 sqq.
170
ARTHUR.LfiVY
affection for him, and listened eagerly to those long stories about
his life which the great man was so pleased to relate. She tells of
one small incident in her Memoires. When she visited the army
camp at Boulogne, where her husband was ill, the Consul, as he
still was, would sometimes have long talks with her alone in the
evening; the intimacy even gave rise to scandal. This is enough
for Arthur-Levy. Ts it not pitiful’, he writes, 'to see philosophy
of history’ (an obvious dig at Taine) ‘pay attention to the chatter
of two blue-stockings both smarting from wounds to their feminine
vanity and not inclined ever to forget it?’^
Anyone who can say nothing better of Mme de Stael and Mme
de Remusat than that they were blue-stockings who could not
resist the common feminine weakness for retaliation upon a man
who has scorned them, puts himself in a category of writers from
whom no important judgment on the intellectual and moral
character of Napoleon is likely to emerge.
Of Mme de Stad it is true that Arthur-Levy has something
more to say, namely that she, as she herself tells us,^ was hoping for
a set-back at the time of the Marengo expedition, the Consul’s
first feat of arms. The only explanation he can give is that her love
had turned to hate, and therefore she wished him ill ‘even if the
fatherland were to be ruined’. Mme de Stael, however, feared that
the ruin of France was implied in a victory which would make the
dictator all-powerful. It is open to anyone to question her Judg-
ment, but here an appeal to the reader’s patriotic feelings serves to
cover a completely false presentation of the case.
RUTHLESSNESS
Arthur-Levy skates all too lightly over a number of other points.

I shall only quote the passage* in which he attempts to deal with
‘the main, if not the sole, reproaches upon which his detractors
have based themselves to assert that Napoleon was by instinct
cruel and a persecutor’. To exaggerate the indictment in order to
win an easy triumph is a well-known advocate’s trick. That Napo¬
leon was cruel and enjoyed persecution for its own sake is certainly
not a current assertion made by his ‘detractors’. The real indict¬
ment is that he stopped at nothing to reach his ends, and that in
so doing he did not shrink from extreme callousness and severe
^ Napolion intime, p. 494, * Dix annies d*exile.

* NapoUon intime, p. 472.
171
ADMIRERS
persecution. But according to Arthur-Levy these ‘main, if not the
sole, reproaches^ are: ‘the execution of the Due d’Enghien at
Vincennes, the banishment of Moreau, and the exile of Mme de
StaeP, I shall leave his defence in these three cases for what it is
worth, but the contention that he knows of no other of sufficient
importance to rouse him to a similar effort, is really going rather
far.
I have already dealt with several such: the liquidation of the
‘general staff of the Jacobins’ in 1800-01; the capture and imprison¬
ment of the Pope in 1809; arrest of canons, cardinals, bishops
in 1811; the execution by order of the bookseller Palm in 1806 and
of Andreas Hofer in 1809. ^ have also mentioned Napoleon’s
‘theory’ that ruthless action in occupied territories is ‘humane’,
because of its preventive effect.^ Indeed his correspondence is
strewn with incitements to pitiless repression. Here are a few
further examples.
In April i8o6 Napoleon wrote to Murat, whom he had just
made Grand Duke of Berg: ‘I am astonished that the notables of
Cleves have refused to swear allegiance to you. Let them take the
oath within twenty-four hours or have them arrested, bring them
to trial, and confiscate their possessions.’^ Whenjiews came of an
insignificant revolt in Hesse, which, till it became part of the new
kingdom of Westphalia, was under military rule, Napoleon wrote
to the commander-in-chief on January 8th, 1807: ‘My intention
is that the main village where the insurrection started shall be
burnt, and that thirty of the ringleaders shall be shot; an impres¬
sive example is needed to contain the hatred of the peasantry and
of that soldiery. If you have not yet made an example, let there
be one without delay . . . Let not the month pass without the
principal village, borough, or small town which gave the signal
for the insurrection being burned, and a large number of indivi¬
duals being shot. . . Traces must be left in the cantons which have
rebelled.’ In succeeding letters on the Hesse question Napoleon
demanded that sixty (twice thît of his first order), then ‘at least
two hundred’ people, should be executed. The general had long
suppressed the petty revott and considered one execution quite
sufficient. He could not help doing a bit more now, and Napo¬
leon’s ‘theory of repression’ cost about ten more lives, while one
house symbolized the burning of a town. Throwing priests into
^ cf. above, p. 63. * See Rambaud, op. cit., pp. 132, 193.
172
ARTHUR-LfiVY
prison was also a usual method of government. In 1809 Eugfene

was ordered to arrest a hundred priests from Parma and Piacenza,
fifty from among the ‘disaffected’ of each territory, and to send
them to Corsica. The newcomers found several hundred fellow
sufferers already there. Many of these cases, those of Palm and
Hofer for example, are such as to throw doubt on the efficacy of
the notorious ‘theory’. The most striking example of how such
punishment can lead to more bloodshed is certainly the Dos Mayos,
about which we are already informed.^ This was not directly
ordered by Napoleon, but was a result of ^lis only too-well-known
inclination.
What I have said above is enough to give some idea of the
‘reproaches’ which Arthur-L6vy should have considered, if he
wished to cleanse his hero of all stain.
NAPOLEON AS MAN AND CITIZEN
I do not want, however, to give the impression that this book

has completely missed its purpose, or that it is historically without
value. The writer is not strong on general statements and will
stoop to the cheapest devices for the sake of debating points. Yet
reading his book one has the impression of coming into contact
with a man who was really intimate with the Emperor, though
perhaps he did not understand him. His judgment concerning the
major political decisions and the tendencies of that remarkable
mind is not of much value. But he saw Napoleon as he appeared
in daily life: of this there can be no doubt. It is impossible to read
the many extracts from his own letters, letters to Josephine and
Marie Louise, to brothers and sisters, from the mass of official
correspondence, and the many testimonies concerning him made
by men of all sorts, officers and officials, ministers and courtiers,
men and women, Frenchmen and foreigners, without beginning to
question the picture drawn by Mme de Remusat and Mmede Stael.
Not that this picture should be ignored — far from it. As copied
and enlarged by Taine, it may be unacceptable, but Arthur-Levy
has not proved more than that. These two women have undeni¬
ably made their own approach to the truth. The cynicism, the
scorn of mankind, the lack of belief in nobility of motive these
observations have all been made from other quarters,® and are
^ cf. above, pp. 97 sqq.

® A striking example is the agreement in the memoirs of Chaptal.
173
ADMIRERS
confirmed only too patently by public actions. A portrait like the
one put forward by Arthur-L6vy which preserves no trace of these
traits, is unconvincing. Those gentle pastel tints of melting blue
and delicate pink could never be Napoleon!
Yet the book gives us something nevertheless. It is after all a
reply to Taine. It is strictly limited in scope, for the whole of
Taine’s work is not dealt with. Arthur-L^vy does not attempt to
discuss the figure of the statesman, nor his work as reorganizer of
France. With these limitations the author has proved something
in his debate with Taine.
Napoleon cannot have been so completely cut off from normal
human spontaneity. He did love Josephine and she did make him
suffer. He continued to feel affection for her, and though he cast
her off, it hurt him. He moved his brothers about like pieces on a
dhess-board, he sacrificed their feelings to his policy, trampling on
their self-respect and initiative in his reckless forward march—
though Arthur-Levy says nothing of all this it is none the less true.
But he also had a great deal of patience with them, he felt himself
tied to them, one might almost say, stupidly, and if one thinks of
the fortunes and the peoples he shared out among them, high¬
handedly, at least there was nothing calculated about it, and it
was all too human. He could sometimes treat his generals and
ministers with atrocious unfairness and if his interest demanded it
he could break them without mercy. But with them, too, he was
extraordinarily long-suffering, he overlooked much, and showered
favours and benefits upon them, certainly with the cynical indiffer¬
ence of a man who considers everyone has his price, but also
frequently with a certain geniality and even graciousness.‘
And is it true to say that he could break them without mercy?
True it certainly is if one thinks of Admiral Villeneuve, or General
Dupont. But what is one to > think of his curious indulgence to
Talleyrand? Though he dismissed him as Minister of Foreign
Affairs, and though he did not spare him sarcasm and even some
of his famous fits of rage, he allowed him to remain in a position
in which that man, the most dangerous of his opponents, could
work against him. Long before the notorious scene at Fontaine¬
bleau in 1814 it was no secret to Napoleon that his marshals had
^ Thiers is so impressed by it as to write, in a style that Arthur-L^vy could not
have improved upon: ‘Voir le sourire sur Ic visage de ses serviteurs, le sourire non
de la reconnaissance, sur laquelle il comptait peu en g^n^ral, mais du contentement,
^tait I’unc des plus vives jouissances de son noble coeur.* II, X26a.
174
ARTHUR.LfiVY
had enough of his everlasting ambition and his oppressive superior¬
ity. But it was as though he felt as much tied to them as to his brothers.
‘Alas/ exclaims Arthur-L^vy, after having once more quoted
Taine on the crushing burden his arbitrariness imposed even on
the most devoted, and the way in which he stifled everyone in his
vicinity, ‘Alas, how very much the contrary! It was the gravest
shortcoming of Napoleon’s character in his capacity as leader, it
was, if not the chief, yet the decisive cause of his greatest set-backs,
that he was not always capable of imposing on his inner circle an
inflexible authority, that he lacked the courage brutally to break
the underground or open resistance of those on whom he had
heaped riches and honours, that he was not able to hurt, to
trample underfoot, to crush down or to stifle’ (these last words
having been used by Taine).
The conflict is not so absolute as Arthur-Levy’s simple psycho¬
logy allows him to imagine, but in any case his interpretation
causes one to reflect.
Naturally Arthur-Lcvy cannot begin to compete with his an¬
tagonist in creative power, but the pages he devotes to Napoleon
as a worker are well worth reading alongside those of Taine. ^
Here again it is by means of a string of quotations, mostly from
the letters themselves, that he gives an impression of the tireless,
concentrated attention which Napoleon was able to turn on the
most diverse affairs down to the pettiest details, of his expert know¬
ledge of every branch where he wished to impose his will, of his
devoted and indefatigable industry.
To return once more to the central point of what I called the
debate, was Napoleon indeed the complete egoist, the man who
stood apart from his fellow-men? The very opposite, says Arthur-
Lcvy. He never tires of repeating that Napoleon combines genius
with the simplest humanity. He has all the normal instincts, the
ordinary middle-class virtues. He is above all the social man.
How otherwise, one is bound to ask, could he have become a
lawgiver with such ease and such success? He was industrious, he
had a sense of order and economy. His understanding of conjugal
fidelity and of religion, though it went together v/ith personal
laxity and unbelief, was not merely intellectual, not just the calcu¬
lation of a realist. All these mental habits belonged to Napoleon
the man, were natural and spontaneous.
* Napolion intime, pp. 588-618.
175
ADMIRERS
I said that Arthur-Levy was hardly in a position to reach any
important conclusions on the intellectual and moral character of
his hero. If his book provokes one to disagreement, it is not so
much because he exaggerates, as because one feels the lack of
balance between these humdrum, virtuous interpretations and the
greatness of the historical figure. But one might also suggest,
though not without hurting the feelings of more romantically
inclined admirers, that just because our author was equally con¬
ventional and equally bourgeois ir his views on morality and
religion, in his appreciation of succ ^s and of property, he was
able to get on these easy and genuinely familiar terms with Napo¬
leon — or with one side of Napoleon...
176
CHAPTER IV
FRfiDfiRIG MASSON
HIS MENTAL APPROACH AND HIS VIEW OF

HISTORY
Among writers about Napoleon there is no more singular figure

than FrM6ric Masson. None was more wholehearted in his ad¬
miration, none more passionate, more one-sided, more partisan,
and also none more sincere, more honest, none was more con¬
vinced that he served truth, or more courageous in its service and
more indifferent to what others would say of his revelations and
his assertions. He had need of both courage and indifference.
Not only did he arouse the irritation, the fury, the sarcasm of his
opponents — what did he care about that, being magnificently
contemptuous of the ‘detractors’! But even his fellow-Bonapartists
were disconcerted, hurt, incensed, when he began his great work
on the Bonaparte family, and in no way spared the ‘Napoleonides’,
rather enjoying pulling them down that the greatness of his hero
might appear the more brilliant. This was hard on the descen¬
dants, who fancied themselves as the bearers of the glorious
tradition, while it gave unholy joy to the detractors. But Masson
did not allow himself to be put out, and went on fearlessly, year
after year, volume after volume.
As regards his attitude to Napoleon himself, it had nothing
apologetic. One has only to read the introduction to Napoleon chez
lui, at the outset of the enormously lengthy series which he an¬
nounced in 1894, with great self-assurance, at the age of forty-seven.
Napoleon is for him the representative of military glory, and also
of the State, of Authority. Nothing seems to him more natural
than that professors, journalists and lawyers yapped at his hero.
In his own day Napoleon’s inexorable laws ‘muzzled these three
mouths of the Revolution’. ‘He obliged the lawyers to defend
their clients without insulting either the government o’* any private
persons. He obliged the professors to teach their pupils the sub¬
jects for which they were paid, without preaching to them either
atheism or contempt of the law. He obliged the literary men to
respect their country’s lawful government, not to reveal to the
M 177
ADMIRERS
enemy the weak points in our defence, not to lead the people’s
imagination astray.’ Hence the hatred of all three of these groups.
(Here we have the true Bonapartist method of disposing of the
detractors. Reason, proofs? That would be serving their turn!
Lay about them, beat them up! Vive I’Empereur!)
But fortunately, the writer continues, the tide is turning. When
Prince Napoleon (a real man, with whom he had been on friendly
terms) entered the lists against Taine and his ‘pamphlet’, a shud¬
der went through the whole land. In the army, thank God,
young Frenchmen were taught to honour the great general. A
fresh wave of interest and admiration swept over the minds of
men. Masson dreams of a Hero — in Carlyle’s sense, as he says
later^ — like Napoleon, who shall arise and chase out the rabble
of tub-thumpers and hirelings who have made France their prey.
May his work serve to prepare the way for this saviour!
This was written before the Dreyfus affair. After the debacle for
the adherents of the army and the enemies of the parliamentary
Republic in which this ended, Masson expressed himself with the
same vehemence and clung to the same hope. T am a Frenchman,
a patriot and a militarist’, he snapped at the socialists, who had
spoken tauntingly of his election to membership of the Academy
as evidence of the decline of that honourable body. He insisted
that he would be proud if his glorification of Napoleon, tlie man
who made France great, should fire some youth of genius to
nourish ‘wholesome ambitions’ and to take ‘curative decisions’.
‘Oh, would that he came at last, the^Liberator! Oh, that he might
disturb the parliamentary carousal, over which Circe presides,
and that these swine of the sorceress, rolling in the dregs of their
laws and with their bloody fangs disputing the quivering frag¬
ments of France’s divine flesh, might hear their deathkncll in his
approaching step’; oh, that ‘those fatted pigs’ might, mad with
terror, disperse in all directions, while the young hero, with a
godlike and expiatory gesture, thrusts his sword into Circe’s
throat. ...
The Affaire had not allayed Masson’s excitement. This, then, is
the political faith which inspired him in the task he had chosen,
and which he was to carry out with unbelievable industry and
pertinacity, the task of interpreting Napoleon the man. There was
to be no romanticism, no rhetoric, no imaginative touches or
^ In the introduction to volume V of Napoleon et sa famille (1902).
178
FRfiDfiRIC MASSON
poetry, nothing but facts, hard facts, with no other consideration
than that of bringing the truth to light. ‘The Hero must appear
entire, his every aspect illumined by an implacable light.’^ Thus
not only the vicious pamphlets but the ingenuous, childish apolo¬
gies will be refuted. With the latter category he alludes to Arthur-
Levy, who reduces everything to ‘a bourgeois, banal and staidly
respectable formula’. He, Masson, will shrink from nothing. In¬
deed, if it can be said of Arthur-Levy that he reduced Napoleon’s
humanity to his own level, Masson takes a plunge into it. He
tells everything, including much which was grist to the detractors’
mill.
These thirteen volumes of Napoleon et sa famille^ in particular,
not only damaged the reputation of the brothers and sisters, but
did not do much good to Napoleon’s. It was not only that the
distribution of favours and of fortunes, and afterwards of kingdoms,
among the whole following, seemed to come strangely from the
son of the Revolution, particularly when one thinks of the exces¬
sive greed, envy and inefficiency only matched by self-conceit,
displayed by that peculiarly unpleasant set of people. No; what
was really unbearable and inexcusable, was the way in which as
demonstrated almost ad nauseam by the facts, Napoleon persisted
obstinately and for years in trying to build up his grand empire from
such impossible material, and how he allowed his own position,
the position of France, French property and French blood, to be
jeopardized through their caprices, self-seeking and folly. Was it
not, after all, Arthur-Levy’s view which Masson used to undermine
Taine’s theory and destroy what was left of it? Far from being
inhuman, the Emperor was only too human. But what is left of
the statesman, or of the sense of responsibility for the French
people?
That spectacle did not shock Masson, however. What upset him
was the baseness of the family, and later, in adversity, its ingrati¬
tude. In its activities he saw one of the main causes of the down¬
fall. But his faith remains unshaken. One wonders how it was
possible for a man who was at that very moment engaged in de¬
scribing the family relationships of Napoleon to call for a Dictator
to fight corruption. If it is a question of Tatted pigs’, Napoleon’s
brothers and sisters had the advantage of the parliamentarians.
But for Masson Napoleon remains great and wise. Mistakes, weak-
* NapoUon chez lui, 1894, Introduction.
179
ADMIRERS
nesses, what do they matter? ‘The most astonishing exemplar of

humanity’; ‘truly a human prodigy’; ‘this man who, with all the
humanity he bears, with all the execration heaped upon him, all
.the apotheoses that put a finish to his ascent, is the most admirable
specimen of the human race’.*
Hence that devotion, and that tenacious zeal to find out every
scrap of information about Napoleon, hence that conviction that
the tiniest fact is of historical importance. If it be retorted that
what interests us is not Napoleon the man but Napoleon the
statesman, the writer has yet another line on which to defend his
life’s work.
‘It is time’, he writes, ‘to cease at last from making this senseless
distinction between the public man, whom history may claim, and
the private person, in whom she has no right. There is only the
human being', a person’s character is indivisible like his nature. As
soon as a man has played an historic part, he belongs to history.
History lays her hand upon him wherever she happens to come
across him, for there is no fact in his existence, however petty, no
insignificant utterance of his sentiments, no microscopic detail of
his personal habits, which may not serve to make him better
known. I am sorry for him if he has any vices, or abnormal incli¬
nation, or ugly sides to his nature, for history will tell; and also if
he squints or is crippled, she will tell. She will collect his words,
even those murmured in love; . .. she will question his mistress as
well as his physician, his valet and his confessor. If she is lucky
enough to get hold of his cashbook, she will peruse it carefully and
relate how his services were paid, how he enriched and ruined
himself, what fortune he left behind him. She will lift his winding
sheet, to see of what illness he died and what was his last emotion
when confronted with eternity. From the day he attempted to
play a part in history, he delivered himself up to her.
‘This is how history shall be, no longer either political or anec¬
dotal, but human; no longer a chronological arrangement of dates
and words, of names and facts, but something which will remind
you of life itself, which gives off a smell of flesh and bone, the
sounds of love and cries of pain, in which the passions play their
part and from which may at last emerge the lineaments of men
whom we can greet as brothers.
‘What, shall poetry be allowed to appropriate the right to
^ NapoUon et sa families Introductions to volume V (1902) and XII (1918).
180
FRfiDfiRIC MASSON
express all the passions of humanity, drama to show them on the
stage, fiction to reproduce them from the imagination, and shall
history, condemned to wear for ever the harness of a false modesty
and an assumed dignity, strangled in the swaddling clothes in
which the traditions of a monarchical historiography have wrap¬
ped her up, obliged, if she will not be regarded as frivolous and
incur the strictures of the sticklers for deportment and the Phila-
mintes, to keep within polite generalities and to speak about human
beings as she would about heavenly bodies, shall history, which
records mankind, only be allowed by dint of dexterous circum¬
locutions and of kindly suppressions, to suggest, in noble phrases,
that this same mankind has known passion, love and sin? Political
actions which had none but political motives — they do occur;
but how rarely!’^
I could make this already lengthy quotation still longer, but this
will be enough to show that Masson has his theory of history. It
is a very one-sided theory, as I hardly need point out. The indivi¬
dual is certainly important in history, and it is pleasant to come
across so lively an expression of this truth at a time when mecha¬
nistic ideas were to the fore. Nevertheless it is the historian’s task
to deal with the individual in relation to the community. Further¬
more his task is a very different one from that of the novelist.
Though the historian cannot do without imagination, he remains
tied to the event, to data, to testimonies, and he lacks the omni¬
science which enables the poet to plumb his characters to the most
secret places of their hearts. Fortunately Masson is too much of a
real historian to let his imagination run away with him, and his
work is in no way a collection of vies romancees. Happily, also, he
has, in spite of this profession of faith, an eye for the true con¬
nections with what is historically important. But even so his exag¬
gerated interest in the personal side does constitute, as we shall see,
the weakness of what is in many respects an excellent study.
THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF

NAPOLEON
I shall confine myself for the most part to a discussion of

Masson’s main work on Napoleon and his relatives. I would
gladly say something about his Napoleon cher^ lui (1894), in which
the Emperor’s court and his daily life are minutely described.
* Intcoduction to voltune V.
181
ADMIRERS
Here you can learn how he shaved himself, what paper he used
for his letters; no detail is too insignificant for Masson, but he also
discusses in a most interesting way the importance attached by
Napoleon to etiquette, the reasons which led him to take costumes
and titles from the days of Charlemagne, and many other matters.
I must, however, limit myself to the discussion of another early
work, NapoUon inconnu, and leave on one side, not only Napoleon
chez lui but a whole shelfful of others, about Napoleon and women,
the divorce, St. Helena and many others which cannot be listed
here. Many of these books appeared while the thirteen volumes
of the main work were being written.
The two fat volumes of Napoleon inconnu which appeared in 1895
contained hitherto unpublished papers dating back to Napoleon’s
youth, and by him entrusted to his uncle Cardinal Fesch. The
papers consist of manuscripts and drafts of treaties, many referring
to the Corsican party strife in which the Bonapartes enthusiastic¬
ally participated in the early ‘nineties. Then there are notes on
books he was reading, one copybook after another, mostly from
the years when he was garrisoned at Valence and at Auxonne.
One, unfinished, extract from a geographical treatise has become
famous: it breaks off with the words: ‘Sainte-Hel^ne, petite ile ..
The historical importance of the whole collection is that it gives
some idea of Napoleon’s intellectual development. Masson’s com¬
ment is interesting.
The young Napoleon, he says,* was heart and soul a Corsican,
the more ardently because he was living in France. In the military
academy he felt himself foreign, different, at a disadvantage with
the French born youths. He formed for himself a visionary picture
of Corsica as a community where the ideals of simplicity and
civic virtue, of equality in poverty and nobility of soul, were car¬
ried into effect. How beautifully this all fitted in with the theories
of Rousseau! His mind filled with Rousseau’s eloquent words, he
imagined that he was called to save Corsica from the oppressive
and corrupt French domination. But when as a young lieutenant
he returned to the island during the Revolution and learned to
know reality, when he failed to make himself heard in the midst
of the furious strife between groups and family connections, and
finally suffered defeat, a complete change took place in his mind,
‘fust as France had made him a Corsican, so Corsica made him a
* NapoUon inconnu, II, 500.
182
FRfiDfiRIC MASSON
Frenchman.’ Other factors, too, were at work. The Revolution
opened new possibilities for him in France — much greater possi¬
bilities than he could have found in Corsica, which in any case was
now closed to him. Military honour and a dislike of English
interference in French affairs also had their influence. At the same
time there was another change. He turned away from Rousseau.
Even his style shows the effect. The sweeping sentence of Rous¬
seau, the theorist, the ideologist, ill became a realist, a man of
action. That sweeping sentence, which can be observed in the
youthful political writings of Bonaparte ‘is now broken, splintered,
narrowed, dried, hardened, like steel’. He continues to command
Rousseau’s flourish and is able to use it to express emotion. But for
daily use he has found the style which will serve him throughout
his life — Le Souper de Beaucaire at the end of his youth shows it.
As to the contents, the books read so thoroughly by the young
lieutenant make an extraordinary collection. Masson finds in
them the whole of Napoleon. ‘No literature; no classical reminis¬
cences whatever; not a word of Latin ... no striving after rhythm.
No poetry ... no novels . . . But on the other hand history and
again history. History is his teacher, who supplies him with his
arguments, who moulds his outlook and his philosophy, who from
the beginning stamps him as a statesman.’ The origins of his
military genius will not be found here, but for the rest, once more,
‘as far as outlook on life and politics are concerned, the whole of
Napoleon is in those youthful notes’.^
He read and made extracts from the memoirs of Baron de Tott
on the Turks and Tatars (1784), and from the history of the Vene¬
tian Government by Amelot de Houssaie (1740). He made extracts
from the chapters on Persia, Greece, Egypt and Carthage in the
Histoire Ancienne of Rollin, and from the Histoire des Arabes by I’abbe
de Marigny (1750), also from the Histoire philosophigue et politique
des etablissements et du commerce des Europeens dans les deux Indes, From
this famous book of I’abbe de Raynal he extracts not only the
‘philosophical’ and political views, but all kinds of facts about the
country and the peoples of Egypt and India. From the Swiss
travel book of William Coxe he took pages and pages of notes
mostly on history and political institutions.
Everyone will be struck by the choice of subjects — Egypt,
Turkey, the East. Now one understands, too, how it was that the
^ Masson*s conclusion is quite untenable: cf. below, pp. 186, 394 sq., 424.
183
ADMIRERS
young general knew the weak spots in the Venetian state machine,
and that the First Consul could intervene with such assurance in
the constitutional quarrels of Switzerland. In the year VIII he
immediately showed himself well primed for constitution making,
and here from this old chest comes a complete ‘Constitution de la
Calotte’, consisting of extremely detailed and carefully worked out
statutes for the subalterns’ association of his regiment, drafted by
Lieutenant Bonaparte in 1788 when he was not yet twenty.
There is also an extremely long extract devoted to the history
of England, at least eighty printed pages. The author used is a
certain John Barrow. A history of Frederick the Great is not
lacking.
On one subject which was going to be of incalculable importance
in the career of the ruler of France, the young man is seen to have
already formed his ideas; that is, on the question of the relationship
between Church and State. Among the notes are extracts from
the Histoire de la Sorbome by I’abbe Duvernet (1790), from Vol¬
taire’s Essai sur les moeurs, and from Vesprit de Gerson, a work dating
from 1691, in which, under the name of the fifteenth-century
ecclesiastic of the University of Parjs, who had suggested royal
intervention and a general council as means to put a stop to the
scandal of the papal schism, all the arguments were assembled in
support of the Gallican conception, that is to say in support of the
independence of the French Church from Rome and of the obliga¬
tion of the French ruler to protect this independence. In 1791
Bonaparte noted down a number of conclusions from that book;
that the Council is above the Pope, that temporal princes may call
councils, and that these do not need papal confirmation before
they are valid; also that the Pope cannot touch the temporal power
of princes, and that Gregory VII and Boniface VIII were guilty
of flagrant abuse of their powers. The history of the Sorbonne is
remarkable for its abuse of monks. From Voltaire Bonaparte
extracted details concerning Constantine, Charlemagne and the
decretals of Isidore. All thisJs most striking. It seems indeed pos¬
sible to detect here the directives which were to govern the
development of this man’s mind to the last.
Masson, who shows all this very pointedly, is at the same time
delighted. The later Napoleon, he says ‘is anti-clerical, which does
not imply that he is anti-religious. This Gallican doctrine, which
was that of France as long as France was great, apart from which
184
FRfiDfiRIC MASSON
there was no salvation for sovereigns or nations, which alone could
render religion acceptable because it resisted the abuse of power by
the regulars, because it rejected ultramontane superstition, and
preserved the humanity of God — had he not come to understand
the greatness of this doctrine through his reading at Auxonne?
In his early youth he was more radical and wished to ban the
Christian religion. Later he believed that the priests could be
restrained, and to a certain extent be made the gendarmes of the
conscience... At least he never tolerated that the head of the
Church should arrogate to himself any power in France, and
hardly bore with his spiritual influence. These good principles he
owed to the reading of his youth’.
Masson, younger friend of Prince Napoleon, did not try to
conceal the revolutionary tendencies of his Bonapartism. He had
no sympathy with Christianity. He thought the Church ‘unmanly’
and somewhat ridiculous when it trespassed outside its own
ground. But how differently can what he brought to light con¬
cerning the intellectual beginnings of Napoleon be appreciated!
I cannot refrain from quoting here another French writer,
though he cannot really be included among the ‘admirers’ dealt
with in this section. Geoflroy de Grandmaison, whose principal
work was a study of Napoleon and Spain, as a fervent Catholic
struck an obstinately dissonant note in the chorus of praise preva¬
lent in his day. In an essay entitled La formation intellectuelle de
Napoleon he discussed Masson’s publication appreciatively and
gratefully. But he is not nearly so enthusiastic as Masson over
what is revealed to us of Napoleon’s youthful studies. The young
man worked hard, and methodically, but look at the authors he
used! ‘A collection of writers well below the average, full of para¬
doxes in the eighteenth-century manner. His historical education
was warped for ever.’* Philosophy represented by Rousseau,
religion by Raynal and history by Mably .. . And this Barrow,
from whom he gets his knowledge of England, what anti-papist
twaddle the man talks. Note that Bonaparte seems very impressed
by the slanderous page on St. Thomas a Becket. Mably, whom
he read on French history, is even worse. ‘An empty rhetorician,
and almost publicly a deserter from the Church.’ And then there
is Duvernet, the historian of the Sorbonne, a mercenary scribbler,
a hanger-on of Voltaire, who presumed, to the indignation of the
* Napolion et ses ricettts historiem (1896), p. 23.
185
ADMIRERS
whole circle, to write the master’s life, a man who tried to turn a
penny by making cheap fun of religion.
‘Napoleon’, says Masson at the end of his book, ‘is twenty-four
years old and his intellectual education may be regarded as ended.’
To de Grandmaison this is a horrifying thought. ‘The gravest
problem which he later had to solve was that of the restoration of
the Catholic Church in France. He solved it, alas, with good
intentions I am ready to believe, with sincerity I hope, but with
what profound ignorance of the Church’s dogmas, history and
discipline. What! without knowing, or having retained, a word of
the catechism, his niind stuffed with the stupidities of a literary
hack like Duvernet, of a phrase-maker like Mably, of a protestant
compiler like the unknown Barrow, and (here at last we can men¬
tion a man of some parts) with the views of Gerson, who had, on
the very point where Bonaparte sought his guidance, been con¬
demned by the Church his Mother — such is the way in which the
future restorer of worship in France prepared his mind.’
A non-Catholic will not entirely agree with de Grandmaison’s
judgments, but it was nevertheless worth while to point out not
only the direction but also the contents of part of Napoleon’s
youthful reading — part only, since the notes published by Masson
do not actually give the complete picture. Napoleon also read,
both as a young man and later, Montesquieu, Adam Smith,
Corneille, Plutarch....
THE FAMILY
Let us come now to the thirteen volumes of Napoleon el sa

famille.
Napoleon had a mother,* and an uncle,* four brothers,* and
three sisters.* In addition Josephine had two children* from her
first marriage. There were nephews and nieces, brothers-in-law
and sisters-in-law with their families. It was a motley crowd. The
Corsican origins were humble. But from the first Napoleon Bona¬
parte carried the whole retinue along with him in his dizzying
ascent. Even while his life was still a struggle he spared himself no
trouble to help his brothers. When he became commander-in-
‘Letitia, 1750-1836.
’ Fesch, half brother of Letitia, 1763-1839.
•Joseph, 1768-1844; Lucien, 1775-1840; Louis, 1778-1846; J6r6me, 1784-1860.
•Elisa, 1777-18*0; Pauline, 1780-1825; Caroline, 1792-1839.
•Eugene and Hortense de Beauhamais, 1781-1824 and 1783-1837.
166
FRfiDfiRIC MASSON
chief in Italy the others shared his greatness as a matter of course.
Without ‘Napoleone’Joseph would never have become ambassador
in Rome, nor would Lucien have achieved a seat in the Five
Hundred. From the point of view of later years the sisters’ mar¬
riages did not seem very brilliant, but they were at any rate above
the Corsican level, and it was already prosperity, riches, for every¬
one, in that time of shifting relationships of the later phases of the
Revolution. In 1798, while Napoleon was still in Egypt, Joseph
purchased that splendid estate of Mortefontaine in the vicinity of
Paris, where he was to keep open house as grand seigneur throughout
the period, the equal, even then, of the leading politicians of the
Republic, the protector of writers and intellectuals.
After the i8th Brumaire, to the success of which Lucien, young
as he was, had greatly contributed in his capacity as President of
the Five Hundred (this was practically the only instance in which
a member of the family furthered Napoleon’s career), Joseph
became a senator and diplomat, Lucien, with whom, however,
there was soon a split, became a minister, Louis, without having
served at all, became a brigadier-general. Jerome, at this time
still too young, was to have an equally meteoric career in the navy.
A most surprising advancement began for uncle Fesch — he was
only a few years older than his nephew Napoleon. As a young
priest Fesch had taken the oath to the Constitution civile^ but had
soon, so to speak, forgotten the Church. He had made a fortune
as purveyor to the army and in speculations, and for ten years had
lived a completely worldly life. After the Concordat the First
Consul made him Archbishop of Lyons and put his name on a
short list of prelates for whom he demanded cardinals’ hats from
the Pope. Cardinal Fesch now became the obvious instrument of
his ecclesiastical policy, though the clerical member of the family,
strangely enough, developed clerical tendencies, if not spiritual
ones, which Napoleon sometimes found tiresome. I mentioned an
instance of this in connection with the Imperial catechism. As
chairman of the Council in 1811, too, Fesch was not merely
submissive and obedient.
For the brothers and sisters, or most of them, real greatness only
came with the Empire, and at the same time some knotty problems
arose. At once there was the question; how about the succession?
The matter was all the more important, since Josephine was
bearing no children to Napoleon.
187
ADMIRERS
THE succession: claims
For Masson the Empire is an acceptable culmination of the

Revolution. The people saw its own sovereignty embodied in the
Emperor — this conception, which, as will be remembered, was
also that of Thiers, is dear to the heart of Masson. But the heredi¬
tary succession, in particular as it was arranged, with recognition
of the brothers, seems to him reactionary. Indeed this idea made
a particular appeal to the ‘rallied’ royalists, who in their hearts were
not weaned from the ancien regime. With them Joseph intrigued
merrily. In the end Napoleon gave in, conquered (such is the
explanation offered by Masson) by his Corsican atavism, by that
idea of the family with which he had been imbued as a child on his
island, and Joseph and Louis (Lucien and Jerome both being out
of favour owing to unsuitable marriages), were recognized as
successors to the Emperor, failing a male successor in the direct
line. Nevertheless Napoleon did not entirely divest himself of the
true Revolutionary, or, if one prefers, the strong, unsentimental,
political, Roman conception, and left himself the possibility of
adoption over the heads of his brothers, although his choice was to
be restricted to their sons or grandsons.
This infringement of his claims roused the bitter indignation of
Joseph. Disappointment one might have understood, but it was
indignation he felt. Nothing is more remarkable than the ease
with which the Bonapartes accustomed themselves to their grand
position. I spoke just now of a dizzying ascent, but they did not in
the least suffer from vertigo. They seemed never to realize that
without their brother’s genius they were nothing. Napoleon was
sometimes capable of reminding them, bluntly and angrUy. For
instance when Joseph tried to enforce his ‘rights’ by threatening to
stay away from the imperial coronation and attacked Napoleon in
his most tender spot, his jealous sense of power (‘Power is my
mistress,’ he growled, ‘and Joseph has been trying to flirt
with her’). ‘If you stay away, you are my enemy,’ he said to
Joseph, ‘and where is the army you can bring against me? You
lack everything, and if it comes to that I shall destroy you.’^
Joseph submitted, but how many times had Napoleon given dh,
and how often would he do so again, to his unreasoning weakness
for his family — call it a Corsican trait or not. With regard to
* II, 448, 457.
188
FRfiDfiRIC MASSON
Jerome, because he was the youngest, with regard to Joseph
because he was the eldest (Masson lays great stress on the respect he
felt in spite of himself for the rights of the eldest son), with regard
to his sisters because Pauline was attractive, Elisa tenacious, or
because Caroline was an intriguer and did not shrink from scenes.
What a picture, that family dinner,^ a few months before the
coronation, when Napoleon was present for the first time as
Emperor, and Joseph and Louis, with their wives, as Imperial
Highnesses. Not only were they, and was the Emperor’s mother,
affronted by the fact that Josephine, as the Emperor’s wife, took
precedence of them, but the sisters, Elisa, married to the nobody,
Bacciochi, and Caroline, married to the dashing cavalry general,
Murat, were incensed because they had not been given titles.
There were angry faces, tears, and even in the end a fainting-fit.
There were excited recriminations. Napoleon worked himself up
into a rage. It was then that he made that magnificent remark:
‘They talk as if I had robbed them of their share of the late King
our father’s patrimony.’ But he gave in. The ladies got their
titles.
And they got more than titles. Madame Mere had written a
threatening letter demanding a title also, and when she was
allowed to call hersoli^ Madame Mere^ was not in the least satisfied,
although Imperial Highness was tacked on to it. It should have
been Empress-Mother and Majesty. (But then, they were none of
them ever for one moment contented.) In any case, Madame Mere^
who was notorious for her rapacity, had her monthly income of ten
thousand francs rapidly increased, after repeated complaints and
blackmail, to forty thousand francs, not counting a single grant of
six hundred thousand, and I refrain from reporting other instances
of largesse.
As early as 1805 Elisa became duchess of the miniature state of
Piombino, to which Lucca was soon added. She ruled (for her
husband, Felix I, only carried the title) with much pomp and
circumstance and also with devouring ambition and zeal. As
Masson frequently remarks, of the whole family she most nearly
resembled her great brother, a fact which, though it inspired a
certain esteem, did not make him feel any affection for her, such
as he did feel, first for Louis, later for Jerome, and for the third
^ Masson takes this (though he does not say so, as he unfortunately leaves out
all references; cf. below, p. 209, note) from the memoirs of Mme de Remusat.
189
ADMIRERS
sister, pretty, frivolous and non-political Pauline. Elisa fought the

‘fanatical’ priesthood — ‘only base spirits allow themselves to be
frightened by that foolish yelling’.* She stirred up trouble against
her Spanish neighbour, the Bourbon Queen of Etruria, that is of
Tuscany (another Napoleonic creation), whom Napoleon in the
end dethroned, not for Elisa’s benefit, but in order to incorporate
her country in the Empire; Elisa was only given the regency.
In 1806 Murat became Grand Duke of Berg, a frontier region
made up of territories just handed over to Napoleon by Prussia
and Bavaria against compensation elsewhere. It embraced Wesel,
Dusseldorf and Cleves. Caroline and he were not satisfied — who
would expect anything else of them! He was at once looking round
for adjacent land to lay hands upon, and seemed to have nothing
against a war with Prussia for that purpose — it was a question of
a few abbeys and the territory of Mark. At that moment Napoleon
was anxious to humour Prussia, but naturally this fresh trouble on
her western frontier was making her even more suspicious and
irritable than she already was inclined to be — suspicious and irrit¬
able, that is, about Napoleon. For while Murat was writing to
Talleyrand (still Minister of Foreign Affairs) concerning the neces¬
sity of finally disposing of untrustworthy Prussia, treacherous as he
was, and, like Caroline, full of envy of Napoleon, he sent a honeyed
letter to the King of Prussia all about the latter’s exemplary love
of peace, and how the policy he had pursued since 1795 had earned
his country much more lasting benefit than the eternal, unap¬
peasable war fever and land hunger of. . . others. •
LE GRAND EMPIRE AND THE BROTHERS
Piombino-Lucca, Berg even when it was doubled in size, these

were only trifles. They were only parts of a tremendous expansion
of the Napoleonic system, of a Napoleonic reconstruction of
Europe. At the end of 1805 that which the First Consul had
threatened England, had in fact happened. Napoleon had sallied
forth and by his victory at^ Austerlitz had laid the basis of a
Western Empire. The Austrian ruler gave up his German imperial
title, which had become a mockery, and in 1806 Napoleon not
only created his Confederation of the Rhine from among the
* III, 217.
• III, 290 sqq. He spoils the effect of this flattery by addressing the King as
‘mon frfere*; his grand-ducal quality gave him no right to do this.
190
FRfiDfiRIC MASSON
German princes, who kowtowed to him, but he made Joseph King
of Naples and Louis King of Holland. In 1807, after the downfall
of Prussia, and after Alexander had temporarily given up the
struggle at Tilsit, Jerome, relieved of his first wife, an American,
and married to a Wiirttemberg princess, was provided with a
kingdom, made up of portions of Prussia to the west of the Elbe,
Hanover, Hesse, and called Westphalia. It was unfortunate that
Lucien continued obstinately to stick to his wife, in spite of year¬
long attempts to detach her from him with an eye to other com¬
binations, a campaign in which the cardinal uncle assisted, only
to receive a severe snub from the faithful husband.^ It was also
much to be regretted that Joseph and Louis were no longer free
to marry princesses. Napoleon saw a way, nevertheless, of attach¬
ing Bavaria to himself by a marriage; the husband was his stepson
Eugene, the Viceroy of Italy, whom he had adopted, though with¬
out giving him any prospect of the French succession. He also
secured Baden by adopting a niece of Josephine, Stephanie de
Bcauharnais, and marrying her off to the heir of the Grand Duke
of that German frontier state. Le grand Empire had been created.
A Family Statute, giving special rights to the Emperor in respect
of all imperial princes and princesses, was to consolidate his hold
on his vassals. And vassals they indeed were, these kings of his
blood. They retained their positions as high dignitaries in France;
Joseph, for example, was Grand Electeur, They remained French
subjects, and the Emperor, who was to have so many disappoint¬
ing experiences with them, imagined that their descendants would
accept this position for ever.
One feels amazed at this conception. What is astonishing is that
it comes from a man who was proud of his position as Emperor
by the will of the French people, from a man who desired to be
modern to his fingertips, and who was accustomed to speak with
contempt of the mummery of the old order in countries which had
not been touched by the Revolution, from the man of order, reason
and enlightenment. Masson, who is keenly alive to this violation
of revolutionary principles, and is certainly not inclined, like
^ *Vous avez done oubli^ I’honneur et la religion. Ayez au /noins assez de bon
sens pour ne pas m’assimiler k J^rdme et pour m*^pargner la honte inutiie de vos
laches conseils. En un mot, cessez de m*6crire jusqu’a ce que la religion, I’honneur
que vous foulez aux pieds, aient dissip^ votre aveuglement . . . Cachez au moins
sous votre pourpre ia bassesse de vos sentiments et faites votre chemin en silence
dans la grande route de I’ambition.* October 6th, 1806; IV, 34.
191
ADMIRERS
Arthur-Ldvy, either to gloss over it or to wrap it up in sentimental¬
ities, always adduces the explanation that Napoleon was the slave
of feelings brought with him from Corsica. But this contradiction
permeates the whole figure of Napoleon, even where there is no
question of an obsessive family sense. However proudly he might
declare himself to be Emperor by the will of the French people, he
still believed that these marriages with the old dynasties must be
used to consolidate his position, and it was strange that to the last
he attached so much importance to the papal consecration for the
same reason. The upshot showed how little all this was worth. He
lived to see the same bishops who had bowed to him as the Lord’s
anointed, address Louis XVIII in language no less submissive, no
less flowery, while in 1813 not only did he appear to have over¬
looked the nations, but the rulers themselves left him in the lurch.
The link between these elements in Napoleon’s mind is not to be
found in Corsica. The fact of the matter is that though he was
never unfaithful to the Revolution in some of its aspects, he was in
other respects led into complete reaction by his profound suspicion
of human nature and of the force of reason, egged on by counter¬
revolutionary forces of which he imagined he was in control. His
policy shows a recrudescence of conceptions and conditions which
the Revolution had by no means destroyed in the minds of men
and which indeed were still flourishing in the rest of Europe. It
was really not in Corsica only that the family sense was strong
under the ancien regime^ The zeal of the ‘rallied’ royalists for the
undiluted principle of heredity was typical; no less was the
promptitude with which Europe accepted not only Napoleon’s
royal state — his genius broke through all barriers — but the royal
state of his relations. Even after the Emperor’s fall this royal
quality continued to envelop them in the eyes of the conquerors.
It is true that by then they were in various ways related by marriage
to old royal houses. If that tipped the scale it only proves once
again how seriously the bonds of family were taken in the inter¬
national circle of princes.
Nevertheless, it remains astonishing that the great man should
not himself have perceived how little could be achieved with the
unsuitable instruments provided him by his family. Of this unsuit-
^ This comment, taken from Driault, was made by Dr. J, Presser in his excellent
article, *The Bonaparte family in modem literature*, Tijdsckrift voor Geschiedenis,
1941, p. 156.
192
FRfiDfiRIG MASSON
ability, resulting not only from incapacity, but from frivolous
conceit, and unteachable intractability, Masson gives a compelling
picture.
JOSEPH IN NAPLES
How was it possible, one wonders, that Napoleon could bring

himself to place Joseph in Naples in 1806 after all that he had had
to put up with from him? It is not only a question of the arrogant
demands which he had so sharply refused in 1804. It is mainly
that he could not possibly have held his eldest brother’s capacities
in high esteem. Joseph too has his legend. In this he is contrasted
with his brother on account of his liberal ideas, of his gentle
methods and of his respect for the things of the mind. No doubt
he was a well-meaning man. Mme de Stael had a high opinion of
him, and for his part he tried to compose the feud between her and
his brother. In 1803 it was well known that he favoured peace.
As king he found nothing more pleasant than giving — at the
expense of his subjects — and forgiving, out of a helpless desire for
popularity. He had long been surrounded by a circle of admirers
who now came to share in his royal fortunes. A certain spirit of
opposition to Napoleon and his ruthless power policy reigned
among them, and afterwards they still celebrated the wisdom and
moderation of Joseph in their memoirs. As we have seen, those of
Miot de Melito made a special impression.
Masson set out thoroughly to probe Joseph and so indirectly to
exonerate Napoleon. Apart from the fact that this was his inten¬
tion, it must be remembered that he had from the start a prejudice
against the liberal spirit. Nevertheless, although later on I shall
have an opportunity for casting a somewhat more favourable light
upon Joseph, Masson’s presentation of him has an unmistakable
touch of life about it. He contrasts his fine phrases and the way he
profited from his position, the way he basked in his royal glory, his
self-satisfied belief in a world created to make him rich and power¬
ful. The contrast is undeniably damaging to the character of the
man. Shocking as may be the coarse cynicism with which
Napoleon was wont to rub in the fact that all Joseph’s glory was
but a reflection of his own, that his throne was shored up not by
amiable intentions or dreams of mutual esteem and trust between
people and ruler, but simply by the Emperor’s power and the
blood of French soldiers, Joseph’s blindness did nothing to remedy
N 193
ADMIRERS
these unpleasant truths. He emerges from Masson’s sketch,
pleasant and endowed with a certain talent for representation,
but pompous and superficial, talkative and lazy.
Once again it strikes us as astonishing that Napoleon, who could
so sharply upbraid him in his letters, can have imagined for one
moment that this man, so completely untried, could dominate,
pacify and reform a newly conquered country, whose banished
king was still in Sicily under the protection of the English. Joseph
was delighted with the expressions of loyalty showered on him
when he arrived by lazzaroni and nobles alike. He devoted himself
to the resuscitation of the theatre, and wrote long and detailed
letters concerning the coat of arms he wished to possess and the
orders he wished to found. But he left the French troops to deal
with the war against the still active guerrillas, whom the English
kept going with a landing here and there and with money and
arms. Nor was this slackness, combined as it was with an un¬
believable complacency, the worst.. Like Louis in Holland he
took his kingly position extremely seriously. That is to say, in
spite of the Family Statute, and the duty encumbent upon him to
remain a Frenchman, in spite, one might say, of the hard realities
which tied him hand and foot to his powerful brother, he insisted,
in a spirit of extreme emulation, upon his independence. He
thought he ought to take into account Neapolitan sensitiveness in
the first place, lest his popularity should suffer, and even taught
the Frenchmen who held important posts in his court and govern¬
ment (a phenomenon unknown in Holland under Louis) to side
with him rather than with the Emperor.
Naples, says Masson, became a well into which was poured
French gold and French blood; if the peace with England,
which seemed possible in 1806 after the death of Pitt, failed to
materialize, it was owing to the claims which Napoleon made
upon Sicily on Joseph’s behalf. There is no need to assume that
the decisive motive in this was brotherly love. In his utterances at
any rate Napoleon continued to make the sharpest distinction
between private feelings and public interest. At the same time it is
undeniable that by placing a member of his family in Naples he
had pawned his prestige and limited his freedom of action. This
was in any case a direct result of this system of governing through
his brothers, which, where it was carried on, threatened to de¬
moralize French officials and even high French military officers.
194
FRfiDfiRIG MASSON
Napoleon no longer always got the truth. Those who cherished their
careers were chary of acting contrary to the wishes or views of
the Emperor’s brother. Many placed their hopes upon their imme¬
diate protector, and were only conditionally loyal to Napoleon.
We have seen how much Thiers admired the statesmanlike
qualities of Napoleon’s letters to his brothers.^ In those to Joseph,
it is true, one can see him sweeping away the web of illusions.
‘What love’, he asked him,^ ‘do you suppose a people can have for
you when you have done nothing to deserve it?’ (Joseph had
actually told a deputation from the French Senate that he was
regarded by the Neapolitans in the same way that the Emperor
was regarded by the French . . .) ‘You are among them by right of
conquest,’ Napoleon continued, ‘supported by forty to fifty
thousand foreigners ... As for me, I certainly do not need a
foreign army to maintain myself in Paris. I observe to my sorrow
that you are creating illusions for yourself, a dangerous occupation.’
If one remembers how coolly Napoleon wished his brother a little
local trouble in order that he might establish his authority, one
is inclined to ask whether an attempt to build up a European
domination on a basis of naked force could be called wise, and
whether the idea that the truth could be hidden behind a show of
fraternal royalty was not also a form of illusion. Even to throw
away such wisdom as that contained in the letter previously quoted®
on so worthless a lad as Jerome was in the end nothing else.
JEROME IN WESTPHALIA
Jerome, who became King of Westphalia in 1807, was a spoiled

youngster of twenty-four, who had given proof of nothing save
utter frivolity and instability of character. He had sworn solemn
oaths to his American wife, but had nevertheless allowed himself
to be robbed of her and of their unborn child. In the navy he had
proved good for nothing, but when, after his marital adventure, he
was sent on an expedition with the strictest instructions to the
commander to treat him as an ordinary subordinate, he could
write quite freely about ‘my squadron’, just as even before he
became king he could write to his brother Lucien, the ‘frondeur’
of the family, about ‘notre maison et celle des Bourbons’. The
following year he was commanding a German army corps in the
campaign in East Germany, followed by a string of wagons con-
' cf. above, p. 61. * III, 254* * cf. p. 62,
195
I ADMIRERS
taining the most improbable luxuries, and a staff of flatterers and
yes-men who pandered to his vanity. He made mistake after
mistake, and his offences against army discipline were-legion.
What was the advantage of making Jerome a king?
In a sense, nevertheless, it was from him that Napoleon received
the greatest satisfaction. He too had begun with attacks of
independence, and believed from time to time that his subjects
worshipped him. Like Joseph he had at first wanted his French
officials to take the oath of allegiance to him. The idea of identi¬
fication with ‘his people’ was very fine, but meant nothing save ki
the case of Louis, whom Masson persists in regarding as a neuro¬
path, and whose strangeness he certainly exaggerates. In Jerome’s
case, at any rate, the inclination to maintain his independence
against the brother who had made him king did not last long.
The French officials and generals reformed, drilled and made
demands, precisely as the Emperor instructed them, and Jerome
used his independence on the theatre, amusements, women and
building, none of it serious work, though, as it cost a lot of money,
it hampered the work of others.
As for Napoleon, he would sometimes send him extremely curt
admonitions, but at other times, carried away by his tenderness
for the Benjamin who was so skilful in flattering him, he could not
refrain from writing such a postscript as the following: ‘Friend, I
love you well, but you are outrageously young.’* Arthur-L^vy
might exclaim about this being so human or so charming, but
whatever one may call it, it is certainly far from wise.
ERRORS OF THE SYSTEM
The problem becomes still more puzzling when, after two years’
experience of this wretched system, the Spanish Bourbons are
removed from the throne and Napoleon proceeds to extend it. He
begins by offering the Spanish throne to Louis, though this
brother had opposed him most emphatically of all, and, as Masson
expresses it, ‘had become popular in Holland by making all the
nation’s grievances his own’.* Louis haughtily refused to be trans¬
ferred or promoted like any official; he was a king, and knew only
one loyalty. Joseph was not so particular. But what a choice!
Napoleon’s experiences with him had been no less unfortunate.
And indeed, though he had allowed himself to be transferred,
‘ IV, I9S. * IV, 196.
FRfiDfiRIG MASSON
though he now had a new public for his performance, a new lan¬
guage, new historic formulas (the Catholic King, ‘yo el rey’), he
once more began to go his own kingly way quite undeterred, until,
when the tragic complications of the Spanish adventure became
apparent, he showed himself even more helpless, bewildered and
useless. And in Joseph’s place Murat, with his Caroline, now came
to Naples. This coxcomb, as will be remembered,^ had prepared
matters in Spain, as he fondly believed, for himself. His reports
that the Spanish people would be delighted to receive a king from
Napoleon had obscured the latter’s view of the situation (Masson
stresses this side of the case, without, of course, mentioning the
forged letter).2 Now, egged on by his passionately ambitious wife,
he was cut to the quick that he was ‘only given Naples’.
I have called all this puzzling. Masson too asks himself in a
different connection how it was to be explained. ‘Only’, he says,
‘by assuming Napoleon not only to have been possessed with a
blind tenderness for this brother’ (Jerome) ‘but to have been
suffering from a kind of intoxication of family feeling, which
caused him to judge all those nearest to him by his own measure.
Just as Joseph is destined to conduct negotiations and Lucien to
preside over Parliaments, so Jerome is to command fleets, as he
himself leads armies. Disillusioned in respect of one, he clings the
more desperately to another. Does he ever admit even for a
moment that they are not equal to their tasks? No, it is their
cussedness if they do not succeed. Whatever may have been their
training or their start in life, it must be sufficient for them to turn
their minds to anything in order to find within themselves all the
abilities which he found. It must be sufficient that his name is
theirs and that they are of the same blood: he touches them with
his sceptre as with a magic wand, and they have genius.’^
This seems more probable than the Corsican theory, until one
thinks of Murat. Napoleon could not cherish these illusions with
regard to him, and yet he used him for a position which was not
only difficult, but held the most dangerous temptations for an
ambitious and unreliable man.*
^ cf. above, p. 96. * cf. above, pp. 98 sqq. * III, 107.

* Looking back Napoleon had no illusions about his brothers* suitabilitj^Tfj^g
following extract from the Manorial could have served as motto for Masso^g book.
There is no need to add that this view does not exonerate the Emrfor from
responsibility; on the contrary it implies a recognition of his own mistajt
J*ai n*ai pas eu le bonheur de Gengis-Khan en ses quatre fils qui ne^maissaient
197
ADMIRERS
The whole system of the vassal kings was a mistake. There was
an insoluble antimony between the investing of a man with the old
historic majesty of kingship, calculated to awaken expectations in
his people and ambitions in himself, and the insistence that he
remain a Frenchman, act upon Napoleon’s slightest hints, and
accept the offensive remarks to which the great man’s impatience
so easily led him. I would seek the source of this error (and here
I am giving my own opinion, not that of Masson, though his narra¬
tive provides all the necessary data) in the pride which made it
difficult for Napoleon to believe that anyone could set himself
against his authority, and in his blindness, which again sprang
from his pride, to the national feelings of nations, particularly of
small nations, other than the French. Let them be given a good
administration, and the Code, suppress ruthlessly the first revolt,
let them feel that they are powerless against the power of Napoleon,
and they will seek their advantage in the only course left to them,
surrender and submission. This is how Napoleon argued. The
new Europe which he was shaping had nothing in common with a
federation of nations each trying to further its own interests by
friendly understanding with the other. Everything was to be for
the greater glory of himself, or, as he put it, of France. Writers
like Masson and Arthur-Levy, who accept the identity of Napo¬
leon and France as an article of faith, regard this policy of
domination as perfectly natural.
‘Napoleon’, writes the latter, ‘when he took to himself the right
to dispose of the throne of Spain according to his own good plea¬
sure, was a great deal less concerned with that country’s happiness
than with the interest of France.’* The somewhat mocking tone
accords with the writer’s conviction that his French readers would
find it as foolish as he would, if Napoleon had thought differently.
I shall not now discuss the aims and the pros and cons of Napo¬
leon’s policy of conquest. The only point which concerns us here
is that this policy being what it was, Napoleon should have tried
^ NapoUon intime, p. 254.
^ •'utre rivalit^ quc de le bien servir. Moi, nomiriais-je un roi? il se croyait aussitdt
grdce de dim. Ce n'^tait plus un lieutenant sur lequel je devais me reposer;
c etai» yjj ennemi de plus dont je devais m’occuper ... Si, au lieu de cela, chacun
“ ^t imprim^ une impulsion commune aux diverses masses que je leur avais
connees eussions march^ jusqu'aux poles; tout se fut abaiss^ devant nous;
nous cuss.^j^ change la face du monde; TEurope jouirait d’un syst^me nouveau;
nous serior^ _»
198
FR£D£RIG MASSON
another means for imposing his will on the conquered peoples,
than that, so outwardly impressive, so satisfying to his vanity, of
the vassal kings.
In i8io things were going the wrong way in Holland. Louis had
been resisting Napoleon by leaning upon the independent spirit of
a people with a strong historical consciousness, whose instinct of
independence had at the same time found support in Louis.
Napoleon thought that by breaking his brother he would induce
the Dutch to throw themselves into his arms. He broke him, with
all the cunning, with all the disregard for the rights of others,
which he could always summon to aid him in a conflict.^ Masson,
though he emphasizes the strangeness and difficult temperament
of Louis, nevertheless has to admit that the grievances put forward
by Napoleon were in part pretexts. Louis was forced to a first
surrender of territory by a threat to his personal freedom while he
was in France. The rest was simply occupied by an army which,
as in Spain two years before, marched in without giving any
explanation, till Louis left the country. What an overthrow, what
a sensation in Europe, and what a shock for the other brothers!
Masson, faithful to his system of personal or family explanations,
connects the insecurity with which the thrones were sud¬
denly threatened with Napoleon’s second marriage and his hope
of a family of his own. The development proceeds, however, from
the deepest and most fundamental tendencies of the Emperor’s
power policy. Jerome was not removed, but he had to shed
a plume. A piece of his kingdom was taken away, another piece
put on. Were these men.kings? They were governors. How much
better would it have suited the system, had this reality been
recognized from the first, and had Napoleon simply used officials
who could be dismissed, and who would obey.
JOSEPH IN SPAIN
Joseph in particular continued to be a source of worry. His

position was, of course, unfortunate. It had all seemed so simple.
The king and the heir had abdicated. Murat had sent a. junta of
francophil officials and nobles from Madrid to Bayonne to pay
homage to Joseph. With a very incomplete Cortes he had discussed
and sworn a constitution drawn up under the eye of the Emperor.
The most difficult problem had been provided by the abdica-
* cf. above, p. 6a sq.
'99
ADMIRERS
tion of Naples in favour of Murat, in the arrangement of which
Murat and his Caroline were beaten down both by Napoleon and
by Joseph. At last, full of quiet confidence, the new king crossed the
Bidassoa. News of resistance here and there in the provinces had
made no impression at Bayonne. Indeed, only a minor French
victory was needed, and it was soon forthcoming, to allow Joseph
to enter his capital. However, before he arrived he was entirely
disillusioned.
It is not quite fair of Masson not to refer to the letters written
en route by Joseph to his brother, in which he warned him, on the
grounds of the reception he was getting everywhere, that he had
been misinformed, Aat he, Joseph, found himself entirely without
supporters, and so on. He was scarcely a week in Madrid when
the crushing news reached him that a French army corps under
General Dupont had capitulated to the rebels at Baylen, a good
two hundred kilometres south of Madrid. He had to take headlong
flight from Madrid, withdrawing towards Burgos, two hundred
kilometres to the north, and from there, after a while, to Vittoria,
another two hundred kilometres nearer the French frontier. Here
Napoleon found him in November when he came to his assistance
with a large French army. There was no other remedy. In his
first dismay Joseph had wanted to go back to Naples. But was it
possible to dispossess Murat and the ambitious Caroline of their
new territory, when they had already moved there from Berg? It
was no more possible, of course, than to leave Joseph without a
kingdom.
So Spain had to be conquered methodically. Dispirited, aware
of the fact that he was cutting an awkward figure, Joseph trailed
behind the French army, and was in the end once more able to
enter Madrid. Abashed though he felt, he was none the less jealous
of his royal dignity. Napoleon could laugh about it, and about the
fine constitution he had himself made, and to which Joseph was
now constantly appealing, as though realities had not put it out
of date. His position was entirely based on the presence of the
French armies, who had to fight not only the rebels in their remote
retreats, but also the English forces, in order to protect him. Yet,
dtrrounded by francophil, that is, generally speaking anti-clerical,
^^jsten, he clung to the illusion that the Spanish people could be
d’eux «ver to his side by kindness, by a show of independence with
‘p his brother,^ and by
novis euss. /
social reforms. He issued decrees of
nous serion^ 200
FRfiDfiRIC MASSON
the utmost nobility, which lacked nothing save execution, and
meanwhile disputed with the French generals and tried to impose
his authority on them.
In the end Napoleon determined on a measure which can be
looked upon as a preliminary to annexation. Masson compares it
with the gradual process carried out in Holland, beginning with
the annexation of Zeeland and North Brabant. By a decree dated
February 8th, i8io, a considerable section of Joseph’s kingdom
adjacent to France, that is, Catalonia, Arragon, Navarre and
Guipuzcoa, were organized in four military governments under
completely French administration. Joseph, profoundly hurt, spoke
of abdicating. There is no doubt that Napoleon wished to provoke
Joseph to take just this step. France was losing blood rapidly from
the Spanish wound and Napoleon was willing if necessary to re¬
store Ferdinand, if only he could count upon him to make common
front against England. But when he made ready to take Joseph
at his word, the latter had already changed his mind. Naturally
he complained bitterly about the decree, and henceforth ascribed
to it everything that went wrong in Spain. ‘Only moral forces can
carry through the affairs of Spain’,' he affirms, while repressive
military government and the attack on the country’s unity could
not but alienate men’s minds. Striking words, but Masson shows
their hollowness when he reveals that Joseph at the same time
declared his readiness to abdicate if he might go back to Naples.
In any case he wanted territorial compensation .. . The Spaniards
could expect no more from such a king than could Napoleon. At
the same time, as Masson states very plainly, the military adminis¬
tration of the four governments did have a most deplorable effect.
The French generals, their former ideals long forgotten, thought
of nothing else than lording it and feathering their own nests.
In every way the Spanish affair was a burden for Napoleon, an
illness, a sore. One can understand that he would have liked to
liquidate it. Why did he not force Joseph to abdicate?—that is the
problem. He openly declared that by continuing the war England
forced him to subjugate the whole of Spain, but when Joseph, even
more angry than hurt, came to France, he nevertheless obtained
considerable concessions in a personal interview with the Emperor.
The Emperor even made him his lieutenant in Spain, and com-
mander-in-chief of the French troops. When in 1812 the long-
' VI, 165.
301
ADMIRERS
meditated campaign against Russia was at last begun, this position
acquired real significance, with, as might have been expected,
disastrous results. Spain was, in any case, a training ground in
disobedience for the marshals. With Joseph as commander-in¬
chief the result was bound to be ‘anarchy among the men, disunity
among the commanders, inefficiency in the general staff, and
sooner or later defeat and collapse’.* There was to be a long via
dolorosa before that ending, but when the final disaster came in
June 1813 at Vittoria—Joseph had once more been expelled
from Madrid in July 1812 —it was accompanied by the most
unsavoury incidents, a precipitous flight into French territory,
bitter recriminations against French commanders, who must bear
the blame for the King’s mistakes. And even in the gilded exile
of Mortefontaine, Joseph still kept raising objections to Napoleon’s
plan, long overdue, seriously to undertake the liquidation of the
Spanish venture and the restoration of Ferdinand. Joseph was
determined to remain king, ‘roi cathohque, roi des Espagnes et
des Indes’.*
Masson’s whole account is intended to show how foolish, clumsy
and self-centred Joseph was. The conclusion which he presses
upon the reader is that it is really not fair to blame Napoleon for
his impatience and rough handling of such a man, and that
Joseph’s utterances should not be produced in evidence against
his powerful brother. Even Thiers had let himself be taken in by
Joseph and his protagonists, and while recognizing that he was
lacking in energy, believed in his insight, his ‘sens’, his ‘esprit
juste’. After the Vittoria disaster he considered that instead of
giving free rein to his wrath against Joseph and Marshal Jourdan,
Napoleon ought to have remembered that it was to be imputed in
the first place to his own mistakes.® But when Masson himself
pictures Napoleon as ‘a victim of the family sense, of the Corsican
spirit, of primogeniture’,* he hardly adds to his greatness as
statesman. And if he is right in thinking that Thiers conceals
Joseph’s pretentiousness and glosses over his stupidities, thus giving
a completely false picture of his true character, ‘ Thiers’s view that
d Napoleon ‘with his penetrating genius and his perfect knowledge
/><”")f affairs was better able than anybody else to foresee, and with
d’eux e
confines , ^ VI, 347. * VIII, 259.
nous euss * Histoire du consulat et de VEmpiret V, 93a.
nous serionf<fapoUan et sa famillej VI, 347. ® op. cit., VIII, 140 note.
202
FRfiDfiRIC MASSON
his undisputed power to prevent, everything’ is not thereby
refuted.
We see here once more that Masson’s judgment, as soon as it
deals with Napoleon, cannot command unquestioning confidence.
If we moreover remember that he preferred to set aside those
shrewd observations of Joseph’s which might seem to show up the
Emperor’s blindness, we shall, at a later stage, note with interest
other comments upon the Spanish episode which put the eldest
brother in a somewhat better light.
MURAT IN NAPLES
After the fall of Louis in i8io the man who trembled most for
his position was Murat. His fear led him into schemes which were
nothing less than disloyal. He formed a party on which he could
rely to maintain himself in his kingdom, should Napoleon try to
take it away from him. Its components were dissatisfied French¬
men, and Italians whose thoughts reached beyond Naples. There
was in particular a minister, Maghella, who pointed out to Murat
how much support he might obtain from the rising Italian desire
for unity. When disaster came, Murat put these lessons into
practice.
He had accompanied Napoleon on the expedition to Russia.
To whom should the Emperor confide the supreme command,
when he left the army to counteract the effect of the catastrophe
in Paris? ‘The hierarchy which he had created’, says Masson,
‘hampers his freedom of action. He feels obliged to transfer the
command, not to the one most worthy, not to the ablest or the
most persevering, but to the one with the highest title . . . Murat
is king, so Murat is to be the commander-in-chief. Napoleon
believes in the prestige of that crown which he made with his
own hands, like the savage who renders homage to the graven
image which he has fashioned.’^ Murat begins by making all
sorts of conditions, political conditions, and gets satisfaction of a
number of cherished wishes regarding Naples. In the ensuing
weeks, however, his leadership was hesitating, he seemed to have
lost his head. His thoughts were not, indeed, with la grande arme'e,
but in Naples. On one occasion he gave vent to a fierce outburst
against Napoleon in the presence of a number of marshals and
generals.
* VII, 339 sqq. ^
203
ADMIRERS
Finally he, too, deserted the army in its desperate plight, and
hurried to Naples, there to negotiate with the Austrians, who were
still outwardly friendly to Napoleon, but likely to be a force to
reckon with in Italy if the Emperor should fall, and even with the
English in Sicily, that he might save his throne from the ship¬
wreck. Napoleon knew much and suspected more, but his
treachery remained concealed for a considerable time. Murat
again fought at the side of the Emperor in the German campaign
of 1813, but after the defeat of Leipzig he lost no time in making a
pact with the Austrians. A few months later Napoleon was
expecting to see him come to his aid with a Neapolitan army, but
when Murat moved north at the head of this army, he did so in
consultation with the enemies of Napoleon and against him.
There is no need for me to describe Murat’s further adventures
which brought him before an Austrian firing party a year and a
half later. Nor need I say more about Jerome, whose kingdom
collapsed like a pack of cards with the change of fortune in
Germany.
THE FAMILY AFTER THE COLLAPSE
The defeat of Napoleon opens up a new scene. It is with

restrained bitterness that Masson tells in detail how each of his
characters tried to save himself, his titles and his possessions, seeing
that he could not save his power, without bothering about
Napoleon, who might be remembered in a few well-chosen words,
if even that was not too much trouble. Eugene, the beloved
stepson, always obedient and dutiful, whose conduct compared
so favourably with that of the Bonaparte family, acted more
prudently than Murat. He cut himself adrift in good time from
Italian ambitions and French rights, that he might enjoy the
undisturbed possession of his enormous fortune with his Bavarian
princess in her own country, Joseph was still elegantly doing the
honours at one or another of his mansions. That he might be
spared trouble with the royal police, he did not scruple to enlarge
to Talleyrand, now the King’s minister, and to the ambassadors
d of Russia and Austria, ‘ upon his complaints against his brother
/’{^d his dislike of the latter’s ungovernable ambition, for which he
d’eux' «ld not be regarded as responsible. Lucien, who had at least
^^^^cuse of years of opposition to the dictator, tried to retain
nous serioD^ 1X, 220 sqq.
204
FRfiDfiRIG MASSON
his French senatorship under the Restoration. So did Bacciochi,
the Prince of Lucca, Elisa’s husband, and she herself moved
heaven and earth to convince ‘Europe’ that compensation was due
to her for her losses.
Pauline alone, the family beauty, frivolous but not completely
self-seeking, came to Elba to keep her brother company in his
misfortune. Madame Mke was there too. In an appendix to his
tenth volume Masson refutes the charge of incest (to which, as
we have seen, even Taine had given credence in a weak
moment'). He produces all the documents and shows that the
story was based on the mischievous gossip of a royalist police spy.
As always when it is a question of human relationships he here
shows real understanding and a sense of measure. He outlines
the figure of Pauline without sentimentality or embellishment, as
the easy-living, sensual woman she was. Coarse-grained she was
not, indeed, she was delicate and sensitive. But she was super¬
ficial, and Masson does not hide the fact that when her little son
died in 1806 she did not allow the event to affect her participation
in court functions. According to legend, she had watched at his
bedside. Masson shows that the child in fact died alone in the
family where she had boarded him out. Arthur-Levy’s account
of Pauline gives the measure of the difference between these two
writers. He does not conceal the lovers — in fact a French public
would not expect him to — but he wraps it all up in a haze of
conventional romanticism.
CONFLICTING ATTEMPTS AT SYNTHES“IS
I began by saying that the impression of Napoleon left by

Masson with the reader of his work is on the whole not favourable.
It is impossible to view that tremendous career, the world-wide
events, one might say, of those full and terrible fifteen years,
within the orbit of the Bonaparte family, without a sense of
incongruousness, of disharmony. By his choice of subject alone,
as a consequence of which we hear just so much of the diplomacy
and the wars and the internal reorganizations and relations to
religion and the Church as is necessary to understand family
complications and preoccupations, Masson gives the impression
that to Napoleon himself these were really what mattered. And
the writer was the first to be influenced by stating his problem in
»cf. p. 144.
205
ADMIRERS
this fashion. His attention was so entirely and so continually
concentrated upon the personal side, as to make him seek there
the explanation, and the aims and motives, of his subject.
He was well aware that he was exposing himself to a dangerous
temptation. This appears from his full introduction to the eighth
volume, written in 1906. He says in so many words that the aim
of his inquiry is to find out what influence upon Napoleon’s ‘plans,
negotiations and destiny’ was exercised by his family sense. He
says that though the family did contribute to the catastrophe, he
is well aware that the true cause lies elsewhere. He then gives a
sketch of international relationships as he sees them from 1799 to
1815, and also from the beginnings to 1906. England is the enemy
throughout. England has always pursued her aim of world
dominion with cold calculation and unrelenting pertinacity, and
for this purpose, while roaming the seas and conquering territories,
has had to keep the European continent divided. France has no
enemy as inevitable as England. Napoleon tried to hit her, first
by an invasion project, then by unifying the continent. But Eng¬
land continued to foment division and to promote the formation
of coalitions against the dangerous rival. Hypocritical England,
who begins to call the slave-trade immoral once she has no
further use for it, but knows that abolition will cause the French
West Indies to languish, who fights with the aid of mercenaries, or
better still, by subsidizing rulers, who does not scruple to ally her¬
self with Japan against the white race (we are now looking far
beyond Napoleon), England on whose account unhappy France
has allowed herself to be trapped (the Entente Cordiale dated from
1904) into serving, with her blood and probably with her existence
as a nation, against the new fival for world markets, Germany;
this England it is who defeated Napoleon and with him the hope
of a united Europe, and this England is for ever the enemy of
France.
All this is appallingly crude. It is certainly only too character¬
istic of a particular French mentality, and it helps to explain by
what ways Napoleon’s imperial policy was able for so long to
touch French hearts, but as history it is childish. Nor does this
introduction fit organically into the work as a whole,* and the
^ So much 80 that Pierre Muret entirely overlooks it in his important article in
the Revite d'histoi/e tnodeme et contemporaine^ XVIII (1913), on ‘La politique
^trangfcrc de Napol^n ler*, and writes: *. . . M. Fr^d^ric Masson a congu une
politique de Napol^n toute p^^r^ de ses sentiments et de ses passions person-
206
FRfiDfiRIC MASSON
writer was unable to make the ideas he expressed in it into the
flesh and bones of his great work. Indeed international history
is not really his affair. His domain is personal and family relation¬
ships, and so, in spite of himself, he succumbs, as I have said, to
the temptation to overestimate their significance as factors in history.
This is shown clearly in a number of cases. For example, he
dates the change in the relations between Napoleon and Pius VII
from the latter’s refusal of the Emperor’s request to declare invalid
Jerome’s first marriage (with the American, who was, as Napoleon
stressed, a Protestant). The request was, in fact, more of a demand,
and Masson, who is quite indifferent to Pope or to Christendom,
was well aware of the extreme tactlessness of Napoleon’s letter, and
remarks, neatly, that the refusal ‘annoyed him as an act of insubor¬
dination’.* There was so much that was difficult in this relation¬
ship and it was more Napoleon’s unbridled obsession with power
than his special family sentiment which made the break inevitable.
Again, Masson maintains that Joseph’s reluctance to quit his shaky
Spanish throne in 1812 was the only obstacle to a settlement with
England. It adds a dramatic touch in his whole picture of Napo¬
leon’s enslavement to the family, this suggestion that the Emperor
threw away his last chance of avoiding final catastrophe out of
deference to Joseph. But this time every detail is wrong.** That
Napoleon’s proposals to England were not intended seriously, and
that he did not dream, whatever happened, of giving up his
Russian adventure, are facts as solidly established as any can be
in history.
^ III, 157; cf. also above, p. 107.

* VII, 280 sqq. Compare for example Vandal, NapoUon et Alexandre ler, II,
386 and Holland Rose, Napoleon, II, 238 note. Masson certainly says that the
seriousness of Napoleon's proposal has been doubted, but he began by calling it
moderate and to describe it as an attempt to preserve the peace with Russia; in fact,
if Napoleon intended anything at all, he intended to safeguard himself on the
English side in preparation for his attack on Russia. The passage is typical of the
light-heartedness with which Masson disposes of international questions.
nelles, rdvdlant chez lui la volont^ de plier Thistoire k ses conceptions au lieu de se
laisser entrainer par des courants ant^rieurement formas.' In the Introduction to
volume VIII this is exactly what Masson tries to arê. And which, according to
Muret, are the sentiments and passions indicated in Masson’s book as the true
motives of Napoleonic policy? Family feeling, centred in the first instance on his
brothers and sisters: ‘Les royaut^s vassales, que les historiens avaient jusqu’alors
consid^rês comme un moyen de gouvemer Tempire, deviennent une des raisons,
peut-fitre la principale, de la conqu^te de cet empire’; next on his son; ‘la naissance
du roi de Rome, parce qu’elle a modifi6 la conception imp^riale de Napoleon et de
ses sentiments les plus intimes, est un ^v^nement plus gros de consequences que
pombre de batailles ou d’annexions.’
207
ADMIRERS
But even if one does not follow Masson in the exaggerations and
errors to which his one-sidedness leads him, his presentation of the
story forces upon one the conclusion that the family factor, the
pride and self-conceit extended to include the family, did all too
often influence Napoleon’s political action, so much so that his
clear-sightedness, his sense of reality and balance, indeed his feeling
of responsibility for the French people and for humanity in general
were disastrously affected.
It is, as I have said, most remarkable that Masson’s ecstatic
admiration for Napoleon is in no way diminished. He never falters
in his view of Napoleon as not only a character of unequalled
greatness, an admirable human being, but also throughout as the
man of the people, the son of the Revolution. His cause is that of
the nations, and with his fall the freedom of the peoples went too.
To this view, surprising to Dutch or British readers, but far from
unusual in French historiography, I shall be returning. In any
case, as regards France, it will now be understood that in Masson’s
view it was the Liberator who returned in 1815, and that like
Houssaye, he regarded the Chamber’s demand that Napoleon
should abdicate after Waterloo as ‘a coup d'itat against national
sovereignty’, as ‘a crime against the fatherland’.'
FINAL IMPRESSIONS
To his twelfth volume Masson added yet another introduction,

written in November 1918. The old man — he was seventy-one —
imagines that it was the spirit of Napoleon which had won the war.
It would be interesting to know how he reconciled this view with
his introduction of twelve years previously, in which he declared
that defence against an England eternally and unchangeably
hostile was the essence of Napoleon’s policy, linking it with French
tradition. But we must not go to Masson for strict logic or con¬
sistency. He has now discovered a new enemy, emerging from
the victory itself, that is, the League of Nations, and attacks the
profiteers of victory who have not taken part in the fight.
According to Thibaudet, shrewd, and, it must be added, Leftist,
historian of modern French literature, Masson’s work had taken
the place of Thiers’s on the bookshelves of the generation before the
first World War. The fact makes it difficult to be very proud of
‘ XI, 164, 335.
208
FRfiDfiRIC MASSON
belonging to that generation, he comments sadly.* I can under¬
stand this comment if it refers to the mistake of looking to Masson
for the authentic story of Napoleon. But Masson himself had
pointed out that he intended to give something different, even
though in practice he sometimes finds it difficult to separate the
history of the man Napoleon from history proper. Certainly his
introductions are enough to put on the defensive anyone who
expects a balanced outlook from historians.
What a hothead the man is! His emotions and his feelings jostle
his ideas; in the general confusion the goal is left behind. But the
historical impulse derives inspiration from many sources. I find it
pleasing to observe how diverse opinions and heterogeneous tem¬
peraments may assist in disclosing truth. In spite of all his
exaggerations and shortcomings Masson has certainly made a
contribution to the understanding of Napoleon by his intense
and persevering interest and his sharp eye for character and
human relationships.*
‘ A. Thibaudet, Histoire de la littâturefranfalse de 17S9 d nosjours (1936), p. 271.

* This was immediately recognized, and this in spite of the fact that Masson
clung obstinately to his pernicious habit of not giving his sources. See, for example,
the article by P. Caron on volumes V and VI in the Revue d*histotre moderne et
contemporainef V, 556 sqq. (1903-04).
0 209
CHAPTER V
COUNT ALBERT VANDAL
THE WRITER AND HIS IDEAS
We pass to a writer very different from any of those with whom I

have placed him in this section. The contrast with Masson is
particularly striking. Count Vandal is as controlled and conven¬
tional as Masson is excitable and eccentric. Masson’s style has
something direct, not too polished; he pours out his animated
story, now interrupting it to make a slashing attack or to shrug
his shoulders in an angry aside, now flying off into rhetorical
eloquence. Vandal on the contrary, for all his colourful descrip¬
tions, and his far from charitable judgments, remains composed
and urbane, and his work, though lively and varied, preserves a
conscious poise.
The introduction to the first of the two great works he left,
written in 1890, announces the spirit in which he intends to ap¬
proach Napoleon. The subject was the relations between Napo¬
leon and Alexander of Russia from 1807 to 1812, that is, the foreign
policy from the period of greatest power to the beginning of the
disaster. For Vandal there was something fascinating and im¬
posing about the gigantic historical figure in itself, something
which silences criticism. With Pozzo di Borgo, ‘one of the men
who hated and admired Bonaparte most’, he says that ‘to judge
him would be like judging the universe’. This expression of respect
and of awe, when confronted with fact, with power, certainly
takes us far from Lanfrey, with his ethical rejection, and his obsti¬
nate refusal to see anything great in the figure of Napoleon. It is
certain that such respect and awe form a pre-eminently fruitful
element in the historical mind and that their absence explains the
unfavourable impression left by Lanfrey’s work on Napoleon, in
spite of all its merits.
But it would be a mistake to believe that historians who talk so
much about awe do not therefore hold opinions of their own. To
write history without introducing opinion is unthinkable. Vandal
takes his standards from Napoleon himself, and from the interest
of France as conceived by Napoleon. He adopts no ethical,
210
COUNT ALBERT VANDAL
freedom-loving, internationalist standards, or any others inde¬
pendent of Napoleon. Such an attitude has, I repeat, advan¬
tages for the practice of historiography, but, in its turn, it leaves
the independent critical mind unsatisfied. In any case it does
contain a judgment, involving acceptance, admiration and
identification.
We are far now from Lanfrey or Mme de Stael. But with Vandal
we are also far removed from Houssaye or Masson. He does not
greet Napoleon as the man who fulfilled the Revolution, the idol
of the people. Far from it; he shudders at the excessive. As a
Frenchman he feels oppressed by the triumphant spectacle in
which the morrow was ever left uncertain, and he looks back wist¬
fully on former periods in French history: ‘When she combined a
serene temper with strength, faith in the future with a complete
possession of the present, and with the advantage of virile virtues
that of ancient traditions, when she had not yet suffered the mis¬
fortune, of all that can befall a country the least easy to repair:
the loss of a tutelary dynasty consecrated by the centuries.’
With the reservation implied in this royalist and anti-revolu¬
tionary profession of faith, he still feels admiration ‘for the genius
which carried out or inspired amazing deeds, whose magical power
raised to their highest pitch those qualities of honour, audacity
[bravoure), obedience and dedication, which are peculiar to our
people, for him who, having reconciled our nation with itself,
created from it an army of heroes, and for a time lifted the
Frenchman above mankind’.
Much was spoken about honour in the days of Napoleon, but
was the honour of a people drilled to fulfil the purpose of a dicta¬
tor, their freedom of expression hampered, was that indeed the
highest honour that may be conceived? Is bravoure the highest form
of courage? Is not obedience in this context a polite word for
submissiveness or even servility? Is dedication a virtue in itself?
Finally, are these qualities typical of the Frenchman particularly?
Wemaytakethis as a warning that we shall find Vandal concerned
with other values than — let us say once more — Mme de Stael.
We are warned, as well, that he is capable of a remarkable idealiz¬
ation of the past, under the impact of his political prejudice. The
‘serene temper’ with which Louis XIV expelled the Huguenots,
with which Louis XV gave himself up to dissipation, leaving him¬
self just sufficient time to intrigue against his own ministers;
2II
ADMIRERS
France’s ‘strength’, her ‘feith in the future’, her ‘complete posses¬
sion of the present’, when Louis XIV brought her to the brink of
disaster in the War of the Spanish Succession, or when Louis XV
gambled away her colonial possessions in the Seven Years War —
reflections like these put us on our guard against Vandal’s
judgment.
For the moment I am leaving Napolim et Alexandre ler, from the

introduction to which these quotations have been taken. It will be
glanced at again when I come to deal with Napoleon’s foreign
policy. I shall pass now to Uavinemnt de Bonaparte, which appeared
in 1903, and has since been generally and rightly recognized as a
show piece of Napoleonic literature.
‘ L’AvkNEMENT’ ; SPIRIT AND TENDENCY
Among the books I have discussed so far, the only work com¬
parable is Houssaye’s 1814 and 1815. There is no survey or recapitu¬
lation of the whole career, no discussion, no argument, but simply a
thorough and detailed study of a very short period. Houssaye
takes the tragic final phase. Vandal the radiant d^but. From an
historical as well as stylistic point of view, his work is of a higher
quality. Indeed it is extremely fine. His documentation is no less
circumstantial and careful, but the joins in the jig-saw puzzle are
not so obvious, he has succeeded in building from his material a
picture which is more vivid, more alive. He keeps his hero even
less to the fore than Houssaye; indeed, the value and the attraction
of his book reside in the broad treatment of the conditions and
circumstances which made possible the rise of the dictator.
Possible — and desirable.
For that is the conclusion which the writer underlines; the skill
and forcefulness of his presentation are such that the reader almost
believes he has reached it unaided. Something had to happen.
Such was the confusion, that one might almost call it a society in
dissolution. There was loyalist resistance, backed by the English,
in various districts aU along the periphery of France, and here
and there assuming the form of chronic banditry. There was
the Church broken up by the Constitution civile, even when it was
declared no longer valid; the majority of priests regarded as dan¬
gerous to the state, and treated as such, while the loyal minority
was dnpised by the faithful. The army, badly equipped and
212
COUNT ALBERT VANDAL
shabby, was in retreat on all the frontiers, while rascally army
purveyors made fortunes. In Paris the members of a revolutionary
rump, the relic of many murderous quarrels, were still concerned
solely with the thought of staying in power, a kind of parliamen¬
tary oligarchy, suspicious, after all they had been through, of
democratic pressure, averse to social revolution, and regarding
revolutionary freedom as freedom for the upper middle class.
Their heads, it is true, were still filled with revolutionary phrases
conveying abhorrence of kings and the Church, and with these
they teased the masses, who had expected something quite differ¬
ent from the Revolution, and governed, or rather failed to govern,
by the aid of special decrees and arbitrary measures. The wind¬
bags of that quasi-parliamentary regime appear in Vandal’s pages
little less hideous than the bloodthirsty Jacobins whom they had
put out of office, but who, to the annoyance and terror of the
ordinary people, whose only prayer was for peace and quiet, rose
once more from their hiding-places. Could one be sure that they
had been put down for good?
A sigh of relief goes up when at last a man appears who knows
what he wants and who understands authority and order, a realist
who does not care a rap for high-sounding principles which serve
no other purpose than to worry the people or provide the so-called
government with a facade of fine phrases. A man who, though at
first he is played off by some of those windbags against others, soon
sweeps them all aside and takes power to himself. The reader
feels relief and understands the relief felt by the people of France.
And next, seeing Bonaparte at work, with that amazing certainty
of touch, he cannot help understanding the ascendancy he exer¬
cised, the approval he won, and how it was possible that he could
throw off in a few years the last vestiges of control which the
parliamentarians had been able to include in the new constitution.
And at the same time one begins to wonder whether the irregu¬
larities he permitted himself, before and after the i8th Brumaire,
in order to get rid of the intellectuals and the bourgeoisie, to tame
them or break them, should be judged so in the abstract, as moral
questions, so entirely apart from the circumstances, as we have
seen done by the writers under Napoleon III, themselves typical
opposition liberals. Vandal is not so particular. It is not that he
flatters the motives and methods of the First Consul. He is quite
liberal with such words as ‘cupidity* and ‘astuce*. But with him the
ai3
ADMIRERS
balance is different. From his account of persecutions and
deportations of political opponents under the Directory (the worst
cases were after the coup d’itat ofFructidor 1797), or of its ambition
to use the educational system to obtain uniformity of public
opinion, we are forced to conclude, though this is never explicitly
stated, that Bonaparte was at least not worse than his immediate
predecessors. The only difference was that whereas he acted
efficiendy and purposively they provided the depressing spectacle
of a crude impotence. There is one passage in which Vandal
attacks with a certain vehemence the point of view of what I
might call for simplicity’s sake the liberal school:
‘Among the legends which have found acceptance about the
18th Brumaire’, he says, ‘none is more completely erroneous than
that of the Assassination of Liberty. It was long an historical com¬
monplace to represent Bonaparte as shattering with one blow of
his sword a truly lawful state of affairs and in the Orangerie of St.
Cloud’ (where the Five Hundred had been summoned for the coup
d'itat) ‘stifling with the roll of his drums the last groans of French
liberty. It is no longer permissible to repeat that solemn absurdity.
Bonaparte can be blamed for not having founded Liberty, he can¬
not be accused of having overthrown it, for the excellent reason
that he nowhere found it in being on his return to France.’*
The plea is a striking one. Yet if one remembers what I have
said of Quinet and Lanfrey’s views, the objection can be raised
that neither of them had overlooked these two points, that liberty
had been undermined before i8th Brumaire, and that the crimes
of the Directory had paved the way for the dictator. Quinet’s
lamentation, already mentioned, is none the less justified: ‘As long
as there had been a civilian government, and a constitution, and
a republic, there were at least the roots from which liberty might
spring to blossom once more; now there came, with the sword, a
regime on principle opposed to liberty.’* Apart from all this, the
critical reader will from time to time get the impression that Van¬
dal is trying to take him further than the facts warrant. Again and
again it becomes only too clear that the writer feels himself at home
under a dictatorship. Strong government means more to him than
freedom. This appean throughout in his comments and evalua¬
tions. The people’s blind surrender, always the strength of a
dictator in his first phase, he regards as instinctive wisdom. He
* 1,26. * cf. above, p. 78.
214
COUNT ALBERT VANDAL
takes an obvious pleasure in the bewilderment of the ‘ideologists’
who discover too late that they have given themselves a master.
Would he have described the Parliamentarians of the Five Hun¬
dred and the ‘lawyers’ of the Directory and their civil agents so
scornfully, would he have belittled them so systematically, were
he not hostile to parliamentarianism in general?
‘Vain and declamatory world, coarsely gesticulating, devoid of
that external decency which, in times of monarchy, covers the ugly
side of politics’ — ‘Directorial anarchy, parliamentary noise, these
things were becoming abhorrent to the generals. This regime of
impotent babblers revolted their manliness; their gorge rose at last
with disgust against the malodorous untidiness of the revolution¬
aries.’* It will be noticed how unconditionally the writer takes
sides in the eternal conflict between ‘the generals’ and ‘the politi¬
cians’, in which a different conception of history will hardly attri¬
bute all the wrongs so exclusively to the latter. Elsewhere we are
struck by the strong moral disapproval he displays in judging one
of the Directory’s proscriptive meaisures, designed, indeed, to
remain inoperative, ‘this cowardly and barbarous deed’.’ One
reflects that he never treats Bonaparte so harshly. It is true that
in passing {for the story of ‘the infernal machine’ lies outside the
scheme of his book) he calls the proscription of ‘the general staff
of the Jacobins’ ‘a cruel and arbitrary measure’, but this qualifi¬
cation is, as it were, hidden among explanatory and adulatory
comments.’
One begins after a while to wonder whether the Directors and
commissioners were really so entirely ruled by low motives, selfish¬
ness, petty fanaticism, as Vandal insists. Is not the whole back¬
ground, against which Bonaparte |tands out as a figure of light,
painted in too sombre colours? I do no more now than put the
question. We shall see that later writers have faced it, and I shall
have something to tell of the answers they propose.
‘coup D’feXAX’ OF BRUMAIRE
But is it not possible, without the aid of these other writers and
without any original research of our own, solely by careful and
discriminating reading, to arrive at more positive conclusions?
Let us go more tlioroughly into Vandal’s account of the coup d'itat.
*1,75,114. ’I. >83. *11,452.
215
ADMIRERS
A comparison with Lanfrey’s older version, so contemptible in the
eyes of Napoleon’s eulogists, will prove to be quite useful.
As an historical narrative, as the evocation of an important
event in all its particulars, the lengthy passage in Vand^ is in¬
finitely more successful. It is a piece of artistry which it would be
diificult to match. It is more true to life, less superficial, less ornate,
too, than Motley, has more mobility and vitality than Fruin, is
more subtly shaded, more colourful and yet more direct and
clearer than Treitschke. A round hundred large-size pages are
devoted to the two days, the i8th and 19th Brumaire, during
which the coup d'itat was accomplished.
A conspiracy was hatched between Bonaparte, who had just re¬
turned from Egypt and had immediately been hailed by the public
as France’s saviour from the threat of war, and Siey^, who had
recently become a Director, and who had even before that been
cogitating a thorough, and if necessary, revolutionary, change in
the constitution. The intention was to profit by the divisions in the
ruling bodies themselves. The majority in the assembly of the
Ancients was in favour of the change. It was now, making use of
its constitutional powers, to move to St. Cloud the less tractable
Five Hundred, in which the Jacobins were strong, and at the same
time — this was really already going outside the constitution — to
entrust Bonaparte with the command of all troops in and around
Paris. The purpose of it all was simply to fix on a firm basis the
shift to the right in the republican regime. So it was thought; so
at least Siey^ imagined. Bonaparte had his own views about the
aim.
The coup d’etat was carried out in two tempi.
THE i8tH brumaire
On the morning of the 18th the Ancients decided on the removal

of the Five Hundred to St. Cloud and the handing over of the
command to Bonaparte. Unreliable elements had not been asked
to the assembly; they might have put awkward questions about
the reason given, a Jacobin conspiracy, which was indeed an in¬
vention, and necessitated the use of big words to take the place of
names and particulars. At the same time Bonaparte had invited a
large number of generals and high-ranking officers to his house.
Gueising what was on foot, they talked excitedly and in a state of
cheerful anticipation, until Bonaparte received the decree and was
316
COUNT ALBERT VANDAL
able to ask for their support to save the Republic. The noisy group
accompanied him enthusiastically to the Tuileries, where he began
by taking the oath in the assembly of Ancients, without however
mentioning the constitution, and then set up his headquarters.
It was here that Bonaparte revealed that he was aiming at the
Directory. Barras, who personified corruption among the Direc¬
tors, and who had been Bonaparte’s protector a year or two before,
sent his secretary to find out how the land lay, and it was to this
obscure and trembling personage that the general made his
famous outburst, the echo of which we heard even in Balzac’s
story: ‘What have you done with that France which I left so bright
in your hands?’ (He was referring to his departure for Egypt.) ‘I
had left you peace, I found war; I left you victories, I found
defeats! I left you Italy’s millions, I found nothing but predatory
laws and poverty. What have you done with the hundred thou¬
sand Frenchmen whom I knew, who were my comrades in glory?
They are dead.’ That eloquent charge was carefully rehearsed,
and it had scarcely been declaimed, when Bonaparte whispered
to the secretary that Barras himself need not take it to heart.
Meanwhile the Five Hundred had to wait for the following day
before they could meet at St. Cloud, and were, as a result, reduced
to silence; but the conspirators were losing no time in seizing the
Directors whom they wished to get rid of. These were three out
of the five (Siey^ and a friend of his being in the plot, as we know).
Of the three, Barras signed the high sounding offer of resignation
which was presented to him by Talleyrand, Bonaparte’s admirer
and follower since the Italian campaign. The two others, who
refused to sign, were placed under supervision. The revolution
had begun. The true test did not come until the meeting with the
Five Hundred the following day. Siey^s wanted to weaken the
assembly beforehand by taking into preventive custody their
strongest Jacobin spokesman. But Bonaparte thought he could
tackle them without this precaution.
THE IQTH BRUMAIRE
But on the 19th Brumaire things nearly went wrong, and brute
force, which Bonaparte in his desire for public approval would
have liked to have kept in the background, had to be used publicly.
It was a mistake to spread the whole affair over two days. The
opponents had time to consult each other, many of the supporters,
217
ADMIRERS
particularly the mere hangers-on, began to hesitate. The partial
revelation of Bonaparte’s true intention and the prominent part
taken by the military element in the coup d'itat, contributed greatly
to this development. In St. Cloud, whither Bonaparte went sur¬
rounded by generals, the Ancients were now meeting in the palace,
while the orangery was being prepared for the Five Hundred.
These latter were in a pugnacious mood, and when in the after¬
noon their hall was at last ready, they began by once more
swearing allegiance to the constitution.
Bonaparte, compelled to wait aimlessly, found himself in an
extremely awkward position, and there were worried faces aud
anxious whispers among his following. His own nervousness
appeared when, in order to hurry on the business, he came down to
the assembly of Ancients and made an incoherent speech, in which
self-justification alternated with threats and bombast, the whole
interspersed with insinuations and insults against the Five Hun¬
dred. In spite of the efforts of his supporters, he was unable to
overcome the hesitation of the assembly. From there he went
straight to the orangery. The rumour of his violent words in the
other place had preceded him, and members were in a state of
angry excitement. His entry was the signal for a frightful uproar.
‘Down with the dictator! Down with the tyrant! Outlaw him!’
That last phrase, hors la loU, had an ominous sound. It was with
these words that the Convention had brought about the fall of
Robespierre and doomed him to the guillotine. A few members
laid hands on the intruder, officers and soldiers rushed to his
assistance, but Bonaparte had completely lost his head, and was
carried away from the brawl in a half-fainting condition.
Within the hall there was now a move to turn the cry of ‘outlaw
him’ into a decree, and it was fortunate that Lucien was chairman.
With amazing coolness he acted his part so skilfully that he
managed to create confusion in the maddened assembly and to
delay proceedings until finally, at his wits’ end, he was able to get
outside, more or less by smprise. Here Bonaparte, once more in
control of himself and alarmed by the report that the decree of
outlawry had already been passed, had call^ aux armes through the
windows, but the CTenadiers who acted as guard for the assembly
hesitated to take orders from him. In the garden the regular
troops were drawnVp, eager for action; these Bonaparte might if
necessary march against the Five Hundred. Beside himself, he
218
COUNT ALBERT VANDAL
was already denouncing the assembly as sold to England, and
accusing it of a murderous attempt on himself. But a tussle with
the grenadiers would have made an unhappy impression. It now
became Lucien’s task to persuade the greriadiers. He used all his
authority as president of the Five Hundred to implore them to
bring to reason those traitorous representatives who had drawn
their daggers against the suppressor of the Jacobin plot. When
the grenadiers still hesitated he sent for a sword, placed its point
against his brother’s breast, and swore he would be the first to kill
him, should he ever assail the freedom of France. This worked.
The drums sounded a roll. The doors flew open and in marched
the grenadiers with lowered bayonets. The deputies admonished
them, but the drums drowned their protests, the bayonets ad¬
vanced and the deputies fell back and fled. Bonaparte had won
the battle of St. Cloud.
EXAMINATION OF THE NARRATIVE
To a high degree graphic and dramatic Vandal’s story un¬

doubtedly is, but his comments and the way he lays his emphasis
are sometimes surprising. Of Bonaparte’s impressive outburst to
Barras’s secretary he says: ‘These words, in which the inaccuracy
of individual points is wiped out by the overwhelming veracity of
the whole, have echoed through a century and have for ever put
a mark of shame on the Directory.’ A very different judgment is
possible. Cannot the crafty mixture of truth and untruth be
regarded as typical of the demagogue’s art and, in the eye of
history, incapable of imposing marks of shame?
To take the insinuation that the government had failed to
maintain his, Bonaparte’s, peace, the historian must surely ask
whether the new war had not risen from the seeds sown by him in
the treaty of Campo-Formio, from his Italian policy, from his
Egyptian expedition.' And there is a good deal more. Lanfrey,
less impressed by ‘this fine piece of rhetoric’, underlines the words,
which I did not quote, that this state of affairs, if allowed to con¬
tinue, 'would bring a despotism upon us within three years'. Likewise, an
hour earlier, in taking the oath in the assembly of Ancients, Bona¬
parte had said: ‘We want a republic based on liberty, on equality,
on the sacred principles of national representation' But once he had
^ cf. below, p. *42.
219
ADMIRERS
carried the day with the aid of his bayonets, to the consternation
of many of his adherents, particularly Siey^, he established a
constitution in which all power fell to him as first of three Consuls,
while the so-called representative bodies were simply nominated,
and moreover were Irft very little say in affairs. The members of
the liquidated bodies, in so far as they had taken part in the enter¬
prise, were enrolled in the new organs by way of reward —
following precedents from the later years of the Revolution, for
which these purifiers had been using the strongest terms of
condemnation.
There is about this a duplicity which indeed pervades the events
of those two days, and which the historian cannot dispose of in
Vandal’s easy way. With reference to the famous ‘What have you
done with this France?’ he sighs: ‘Why must the greatest scenes
of history have their petty sides and their prosaic undercurrent?’*
And he reveals that in his high flight Bonaparte was being carried
on borrowed wings, and was repeating an address just sent him by
a provincial club. As if there were nothing worse! Worse is the
deception, sustained and many-sided, premeditated, and de¬
claimed with all an actor’s skill. Vandal is full of admiration for
Lucien. As far as his strength of mind goes, his resourcefulness,
his impudence, I can indeed see the point. But I am startled by
his comment on Lucien’s role on the 19th Brumaire, when he
worked upon the soldiers with his lie about the daggers and swore
to kill his brother should he threaten freedom. All he says is: ‘His
demeanour was there truly extraordinary and fine.’* Do all great
historical events possess those petty aspects, do they all rest upon a
basis of ruse and deception? ^With that man everything was calcu¬
lated,’ says Lanfrey, when telling how Bonaparte held forth to
Barras’s secretary and then reassured him in a whisper, ‘even his
rage’*. Does not this come nearer the truth? Was it not more
particularly in the case of Napoleon and of the Bonapartes that
these great scenes had always an undercurrent of disingenuousness?
This question goes deeper than one might at first imagine.
Vandal derives a malicious pleasure from the dinoument, when the
deputies take flight in their red robes. ‘These petticoated folk’, he
calls them with somewhat too easy scorn. And he has the courage
to write that ‘moral strength was now on the side of the bayonets,
and that nothing remained to the Revolution, succumbing to her
* I, 316. * I, 316. * Hittohe de NapoUon, 1, 439.
230
COUNT ALBERT VANDAL
errors and excesses, but to seek shelter under the hand of Power,
essentially the dispenser of order and of discipline’.*
That the errors and excesses of the Revolution were destroying
it, cannot be denied. Nothing weakened the Five Hundred at that
critical moment so much as the memory of the coups d’etat and the
acts of violence in which they themselves had taken part. To this
Lanfrey adds (though he is probably wrong in thinking it was the
prime reason) that all the most eminent personalities had lost their
lives in the Terror, in the proscriptions which followed it, or in the
war. However this may be. Vandal’s argument that ‘moral force’
was entirely on the side of the bayonets seems contradicted by his
own laudibly candid story. However frequently he produces
statements or indications to show that the troops felt they had
‘France’ or ‘the nation’ behind them, he cannot make me believe
in this unanimity. Indifference or exhaustion, of which other
historians speak, seem more likely factors to me. And without
undertaking an inquiry into the validity or worth of the evidence,
I think we are entitled to quote as principal argument against
Vandal’s theory those very lies and those fraudulent assurances
and false promises which Bonaparte and his accomplices found
necessary to dispel the soldiers’ hesitations and to win over the
public.
The French people confirmed the result of the coup d'etat in a
plebiscite — this became the system favoured by the new Caesar.
There was no longer to be an elected parliament, which would
represent some power to balance his own, but there was to be
direct consultation of the people. They confirmed — and did so by
an overwhelming majority. Does this reveal the new ruler’s
‘moral force’? Apart from the way in which the plebiscite was
held,* only the official version concerning the events of the two
days was published, and the accomplished fact has a peculiar
persuasive force. Moreover, the masses undoubtedly hailed Bona¬
parte first and foremost as the man who would protect his country
against the advancing invader, and did not realize the conse¬
quences of his rise to power, and the manner in which it was
accomplished.
That is precisely what Vandal’s circumstantial story enables us
to do. It makes us feel that Bonaparte’s appearance not only
* Vandal says nothingaboutthis.butweshallhearmore of it later, p. 308, cf. p. 337-

221
ADMIRERS
brought ‘power as the dispenser of order and discipline’ to France,
but also, however beneficial his grasp of realities, his assurance,
his independence of internecine party feelings might be at the
outset, power that contained the germs of an insatiable militarism
and a crushing despotism. The parliamentarians and lawyers who
had turned to Bonaparte because they were impatient at the short¬
comings of the existing constitution and the Directors, and because
they were frightened of the Jacobins — though these served as
bogy for the man in the street* — began to have an inkling of the
alarming future even before the coup d'itat was completed. They
were warned by the clatter of sabres which accompanied it and by
Bonaparte’s incautious utterances. ‘No more factions’ — the future
dictator considered every party as a faction — ‘I will have none,
I shall tolerate none’, was a typical one. As the affair dragged on,
several people asked themselves whether it might not be possible
to find a better solution after all.
In a striking passage, the wider implications of which Vandal
himself fails, I think, to grasp, he says ‘that the existence of
Bonaparte was never anything else but a struggle against the most
tragic vicissitudes of politics and of war, and that his most per¬
spicacious supporters were therefore almost continuously intent on
having an alternative government ready behind his back, which
could step from behind the scenes and throw itself suddenly on to
the stage in case of a catastrophe. At times it is possible to recog¬
nize and get hold of that thread. The historians have pointed it
out in 1809, after the warning of Essling; in 1808, after the first
reverses of the Spanish war; nay, even as early as 1800, during the
campaign of Marengo. As more light is thrown on the inner
history of the Napoleonic period, one realizes that the first ap¬
pearance of that precautionary attitude has to be set back and
back; it is to be found on the morning of 19th Brumaire itself’.’
How is it possible for a man who is able so clearly to perceive
the insecurity of this regime to regard it as a blessing for his
country? The contradictioi^ can only be explained by his pro¬
found hatred of the Revolution, which in his view was brought to
a close, and of parliamentarism, which was destroyed by it.
* This comment, first made by Mmc dc Sta€l, is of course not to be found in

Vandal, but is very common in later historical literature; see for example below,
PP- 366, 371*
*1. 347-
322
COUNT ALBERT VANDAL
‘order, justice...moderation’
The coup d'Hat's unattractive aspects must not prevent us from

considering with an unprejudiced mind the constructive work
undertaken by Bonaparte as First Consul. It is not only by con¬
trast with the previous regime that Vandal extols his hero. Against
the background of muddle and folly evoked by his picture of the
Directory, he draws a loving, and in its way, impressive picture of
the dispenser of order, the law-giver, the state-builder.
What were Bonaparte’s aims? Let us peruse the draft of the
proclamation which he addressed to the French people after his
coup d’Hat. He wanted, he says here, in the first place to ‘consoli¬
date the Republic’.‘
‘To consolidate the Republic, it is necessary that the laws should
be based upon moderation, order and justice.
‘Moderation is the basis of ethics and man’s first virtue. Without
it, man is but a wild beast. Without it factions may exist, but
never a national government.
‘Order in income and expenditure: such order can be achieved
only through stability in administrative, legal and military organiz¬
ation ... The lack of order in financial matters has caused the
monarchy to perish and has endangered freedom....
‘Justice is the true gift of equality, as civic freedom is that of
political liberty. Without it, nothing governs the relations between
citizens, and its absence causes the rise of factions.
‘Stable and strong government alone can guarantee impartial
justice.’
Vandal unearthed this document from the memoirs of Roederer,
the Councillor of State whose job it was to turn the splendid
‘simplicity’ and ‘precision’ of Bonaparte’s hastily scribbled words
into the emphatic and declamatory style which the period
demanded. This is how he introduces it:
‘As the frontispiece of his government, Bonaparte sets these
words: Order, justice, stability, power, and this word first of all:
moderation.’
Vandal accepts these words as truly characteristic. In his own
description of Bonaparte’s government during these first few years
he makes few reservations, and none that temper his satisfaction
at the spectacle. What most delights him is the reconciliation and
* 1.54*-
223
admirers
unity through which the ruler seeks to solve the contrasts. A man
who is entirely hostile to the Revolution and its ideological
orbit, is not likely to inquire how far Bonaparte sacrifice*i the
principles of 1789 in reaching that synthesis. There is her how¬
ever no point that is not controversial and for which other f^rench
historians could not be found to oppose Vandal’s opinio^w. Two
of these points I shall* now consider a little more closely 1 he one
is the question of the centralization of administration arried out
in the year VIII, and the other is the Concordat. O^ner matters,
such as the question of whether the methods use by the First
Consul to pacify the Vendee were not needlessly brutal, or whether
his methods of restoring and maintaining order were not in
general too reminiscent of terrorism, the qucs'ion of his share in
the drawing up of the code civile and its merits, will be discussed
later in connection with other writers.
THE ADMINISTRATIVE LAW OF

‘PLUVIOSE AN VIIl’
Vandal gives a detailed and lucid description of the origin and

the working of the administrative law of ‘28 Pluviose an VIII’.
As to its origin, it seems clear that it was the work of the experts
in the Council of State, except as regards the central idea, that of
the establishment of the prefects, which is supposed to have come
from Sieyes. The First Consul was not immediately concerned,
but it so closely represented his thought that at later stages he had
only to consolidate and strengthen its tendencies. Vandal’s con¬
clusions are as follows
‘The system of the year VIII constitutes the most powerful
mechanism ever devised to allow the ruler’s will to penetrate from
above into all parts of the social structure, the will which acts,
directs, decides, impels, stimulates and represses.* Everything is
connected and moves in unison. Ninety-eight prefects* act, simul¬
taneously, and in the same direction, under the pressure of the
central motive force; they secure, by decrees, the execution of
UI,i94.
* This is how Thorbccke, the grea t Liberal statesman of mid-nineteenth-century
Holland, described the state mechanism, for the most part derived from the French
occupation, which he was intending to alter by his revision of the constitution in
1848: ‘Our institutions demand above all another and much greater participation
on the pATt of the citizens than has existed hitherto. The Constitution excluded
the people’s strength; this it must now allow to flow through every vein of the Sute.’
* One for each dipartem^t.
224
\
COUNT ALBERT VANDAL
general laws and issue ordinances of local interest. Through four
hundred and twenty sous-prefets^ they control thirty thousand
mayors and municipal councils.* All municipal action is sub¬
jected to them; it is they who start it or approve, supervise, verify
and modify it. By successive transmissions, through channels
regularly disposed, the motive power descends from the top down
to the broad foundations, and spreads without losing its force.’
Vandal does not attempt to deny the evil of this system which
does away with all local initiative. This is so obvious, he says, that
it needs no demonstration. He merely denies iliat ‘this master¬
piece of centralization’ was still weighing on France, as was so
often idly asserted. ‘From 1830 on all our successive governments
have introduced elements of liberty, of local life, and of true
representation.’ Even so these reforms have often borne no fruit
owing to the lack of a favourable soil. And thus there comes the
admission: ‘Even today the spirit of the year VIII still exists both
among the administrators and the administered, and the Act of
Pluviose rules us, morally rather than materially.’ But now an
explanation of this phenomenon is advanced which must silence
all complaints against the men of the year VIII, and against the
dictator who (at the least) made their work possible and took
advantage of it: ‘That organization not only answered the needs
of a period sick of anarchy and yearning for order; it answered the
permanent and traditional aspirations of the French, the fatalities
of their temperament and of their history.’
To justify this statement the writer goes on to maintain that the
reforms which the French people had desired on the eve of the
Revolution were simply those that would have strengthened royal
authority, the source of order and law, which would have freed it
from the excrescences of bureaucratic arbitrariness, and have
brought it closer to the people. ‘The nation desired not so much
to govern itself as to feel the touch of a government, and especially
of an administration, acting in accordance with fixed rules.’ The
Revolution, however, fell into the hands of ‘the philosophers and
their following, the deputies imbued with their doctrines, the
thinkers, the dreamers, the amHtious and the rebellious’, and
these were the men who had attempted ‘to organize liberty and to
^ One for each arrotidissemint, section of a dipartement.

• Moires and conseils municipatix all instituted by the First Consul or in less
important places by the prefect.
P 225
ADMIRERS
extend it to excess’. That is how the constitution of 1791 and 1794
came into being, which had introduced an impracticable decentra¬
lization, a crazy hypertrophy of local autonomy, in reality ‘a
crawling, sanguinary chaos’. No wonder, then, ‘that France has
of her own will adapted herself to the consular administrative
system, authoritarian and too rigid, but organized, and based on
simple, clear, uniform and logical laws’. And so on.
The delicacy and ingenuity of this plea are admirable. It per¬
mits Vandal to call Bonaparte ‘the most awe-inspiring despot that
France has ever known’, if a ‘regularizing despot’, and yet to free
him from all blame, indeed to greet him with cheers. But if, dis¬
counting for a moment his personal liking for strong government
and dictatorships — though this indeed inspired his eloquence on
the subject — we follow his line of thought as far as possible, we
shall see that everything turns on the view that France ‘on the eve
of the Revolution desired not so much to govern itself, as to feel
the touch of a government, and especially of an administration,
acting in accordance with fixed rules’.
WAS THE REVOLUTION BEGUN FOR THE SAKE

OF LIBERTY? (faGUET, MATHIEZ, AULARD)
In asking that question Vandal refers (an unusual step for him)
to a few books which had just appeared. Champion, La France
d'apres Us cahiers de iy8g, and a study of it by Emile Faguet, princi¬
pally known for his literary criticism. I shall not follow him in
taking the debate back to an earlier period, that of the Revolution,
or even the years preceding it. It is enough to point out that
Champion’s interpretation, which became even more positive in
the hands of Faguet, was immediately and most decisively rejected
by other historians. In the Revue d'histoire modeme et contemporaine of
1904 is to be found an article by Mathiez. An equally fervent
supporter of the principles of the Revolution, he was soon to oust
Aulard as the great expert on its history. The article has the
unequivocal title: ‘Uhe conception fausse de la Revolution
franâise.’
What had Faguet made of Champion’s exposition of the Revolu¬
tion? ‘The French Revolution, in the aims of the men who started
it, as well as in the results it achieved in the end, is a purely econo¬
mic and administrative revolution.’ According to Faguet the
cahiers prove that the men of 1789 were thinking neither of Liberty
226
COUNT ALBERT VANDAL
nor of Equality, that they did not dream ofa parliamentary system,
in short, that they had no general principles. ‘The principles of
1789? They never existed.’
Paradoxes, says Mathiez, and he quotes from a cahier which had
just been unearthed, desires which are indeed in total conflict with
Faguet’s formulae. But what makes such untenable theories find
support? Mathiez has no hesitation in explaining the fact from the
political preoccupations of the writers. There are those who hope
by this means to defend the Revolution against ‘Taine and the
reactionaries’, according to whom it was nothing but an epidemic
of violence, and incapable of anything save abstract futility. But
there are also those, the ‘pseudo-liberals, the consular republicans’,
who try to hide their recantation of the principles of 1789 by
denying that such principles exist.
It will have been noticed that this is an old debate, and one
which touches the core of the problem concerning the true
meaning of Napoleon’s work as a statesman. How fiercely Quinet
or Barni protested against this view that the French had been
concerned only with ‘civic liberty’, as though they were indifferent
to political rights, and Napoleon had therefore in fact safeguarded
all that was most valuable in the Revolution.* This assertion,
which in their day expressed no more than a purely personal or
political assessment, was now given historical foundation in such a
way as to exclude from the Revolution, as it were, the Quinets and
the Barnis, the liberals and parliamentarians, deprived of their
most cherished slogan ‘1789’.
It is not surprising that Vandal took over the thesis of Champion
and Faguet with such enthusiasm. Who really was entided to
claim the Revolution, left him as completely indifferent as did the
Revolution itself, but he must have been pleased to see the great
tradition of 1789 so thoroughly undermined. The contention that
the French people had never been interested in anything save
order and prosperity (except of course power and glory) must have
given him the flattering sensation that his own ideas were the only
truly French, national and traditional ideas, and this was at the
same time the best defence for the imputations made against his
hero that he had done violence to the French people, and that he
had changed the true course of French history.
Let us also note that Mathiez’s protest was not unusual or merely
* cf. above, pp. 74, 80.
227
ADMIRERS
personal. He was here in complete agreement with Aulard, how¬
ever sharply he was soon to differ from him in the valuation of
revolutionary phenomena and characters. Along with the resur¬
rected cult of Napoleon (we have already heard a Catholic voice
raised against it) there continued to co-exist the tradition of
hostility on republican or liberal grounds, and it dominated
education. We shall return to this tendency later.
THE CONCORDAT
‘The Concordat’, writes Vandal, ‘was a consequence of Mar¬

engo.’ He means that it was Marengo (June 14th, 1800) which first
gave the Consul the popularity he needed to carry out his pro¬
gramme of reconciliation and bridging of conflicts, in the face of
intellectual and doctrinaire opposition. He is again at his best in
the fine description of the homecoming after the victory; his de¬
tailed picture of the festivities is colourful and significant. In the
midst of the excitement and the glamour, one sees the quiet, small,
unadorned figure of the triumphant hero, romantic in its simplicity
and in the mystery of its brooding, meditating stillness.' And even
more fascinating is the description of Napoleon’s impatience, of
his excited longing for unfettered activity. In his view the Tribu¬
nate is now wholly redundant. He is irritated by the opposition of
all these talkers. Opposition to a king is all veiy well, but opposi¬
tion to him, the people’s choice, is an attempt on the people’s
sovereignty. In this frame of mind he undertakes his ‘cruelly arbi¬
trary’* measure against the Jacobins, and makes short shrift of the
rebels in the West. ‘To destroy the leaders and treat the masses
kindly’, such is his system. In Vandal’s view all this is justified by
the lofty purposes of his policy. And of these the religious pacifi¬
cation forms a significant part.
‘The most politic as well as the bravest deed in his life’* is how
Vandal describes the Concordat. ‘It answered to his immediate
ambition, to the necessities of his pacification policy, to the needs
of the time, and in truth, when he attempted to solve the religious
problem from which France was suffering, he could not do
otherwise.’
The argument, as it goes on, is mainly directed against that of
^ II, 444 sqq., 442.

* I Itove alr^l^dy quoted this characterisation; see p. 215.
MI. 460,
238
COUNT ALBERT VANDAL
d’Haussonville (who is not, however, mentioned). According to
d’Haussonville, as we know, the forging of these new and galling
bonds between Church and State was an error, and the desired
toleration and free development of ecclesiastical life and of religion
might much better have been assured under the already prevailing
system of separation of Church and State, This is contested by
Vandal.
At the beginning of his work he had already emphasized that the
regime of separation introduced in 1795 when the bankruptcy of
the Constitution civile had to be recognized, had hitherto been used
by those in power to destroy the Church. For the new State
recognized no association, no corporation, only citizens in juxta¬
position. According to this doctrine, the Church, unless guaran¬
teed by a special regulation, had no existence, and the State
needed no other means to interfere in a hundred ways with the
work of the priests.^ Now a greater benevolence was shown.
Apart from the constitutionnels, who still formed as it were a separate
Church, a section of the former refractaires — but a section only —
had made a promise of obedience to the consular regime. Was
that sufficient? Vandal regards the division of Catholics into three
groups as an evil in itself to which the State could not remain
indifferent. But above all this modus vivendi of the promise did not
do away with two important factors, which remained a source of
unrest.
First there was the episcopate, for the most part in exile and
systematically counter-revolutionary. Even the most peaceful
non-constitutional priests remained sensitive to the instructions
and exhortations of their emigrS bishops. Besides, these priests were
irreconcilably opposed on principle to certain of the arrangements
made in the Revolution, accepted irrevocably not only by the
French State, but by French society as well: to name only the
most important, the expropriation of ecclesiastical property, now
in private hands, and civil marriage. ‘What France needed, and
what Bonaparte needed, however, was a satisfied priesthood, re¬
called to unity, strictly Catholic, and on that account trusted by the
people, but sincerely “rallied” to, or at least ready to acquiesce in,
the new institutions.’ To such an attitude the Government could
not by itself convert the priests, it needed the collaboration of
the Pope.
‘ 1,26.
829
ADMIRERS
‘And so the imperious despot applied to the white-robed pontiff.’
Can this somewhat artificial pathos and sentiment, to which Van¬
dal has recourse upon occasion, hide the strictly practical and
mundane nature of his conclusion? He does not attempt to dis¬
guise the fact that such was Bonaparte’s attitude. Bonaparte, he
writes, realized that with all his genius, his power, his glorious
armies, his generals, prefects, lawyers, commissioners and gen¬
darmes, he could not hope to drill men’s consciences ... And he
worked out in figures the moral strength possessed by the shepherd
of souls at Rome. ‘How must I treat him?’ asked his first envoy to
the Holy See. ‘Treat him as if he had two hundred thousand men.’*
Do these considerations dispose of d’Haussonville? No: they run
parallel, without touching his argument. But they fill in the
picture and help us to see Bonaparte’s problem as he himself saw
it. That in general is the great merit of Vandal’s work, that he
recreated the period, as it were, from within. But judgment should
not therefore abdicate. Later we shall be considering another
criticism of Bonaparte’s actions in his ecclesiastical policy, a criti¬
cism which also proceeded from a standpoint other than that of
immediate expediency, and we shall see then that our insight into
the problem and the character can be still further enriched.
CONCLUSION
‘The standpoint of immediate expediency’ is perhaps a less sym¬

pathetic way of styling Vandal’s attitude to his problems than he
deserves. I also, a moment ago, spoke of ‘recreating the period
from within’, and at the beginning of this chapter I referred to
Vandal’s ‘awe when confronted with Fact’.
It must be said, meanwhile, that as in the case of Houssaye’s
work, the impression gained from Uavenement de Bonaparte depends
much on the narrow time limits of the subject matter within which
the conception is worked out. We see Bonaparte rising above the
confusion and corruption in which, according to the writer, the
many-headed administration of the five Directors and the two
Councils was so hopelessly involved. Afterwards we see him only
in those first days when the task of reform and of construction
satisfied his devouring desire for action. Even the violent dis¬
carding, after Marengo, of the limitations to which his power was
still subject is dealt with only very briefly, while Vandal has
* II, 470 sqq.
830
COUNT ALBERT VANDAL
aothing to say on the further career of Emperor, dictator and
:onqueror. We also get hardly a glimpse of Bonaparte before his
return from Egypt. Other writers, on the contrary, interpret the
:oup d’itat of Brumaire by the light of what went before, in particu¬
lar Fructidor. The war which he, in his demagogic manner, laid
at the door of the Directory, they connect, as I have already
hinted, with his own conduct in Italy, with the peace treaty of
Campo-Formiio, and with the bargaining away of Venice.
There is, however, more to it than this purely external question
of time limits. Vandal’s view of history is entirely governed by his
tendency to accept what has happened, and contemptuously to
brush aside every postulate of principle or ideal, and criticisms
dictated by reason. He says somewhere that what the situation in
1799 demanded was ‘a government that was truly reconstructive,
tolerant, open to all, superior to party, and broadly national’.* If
it had been suggested to him that this ideal was not permanently
realized by Bonaparte, and that his hero’s unbridled lust for power,
which took the form of despotism internally, and of conquest
externally, must inevitably lead to its ruin, he would not have
demurred. He might have replied indirectly by the passage with
which his book closes:
‘That illustrious war chief became the pacifier of France: he
restored the country’s national cohesion; that is his glory, his in¬
contestable glory, against which nothing will prevail. Could he
have achieved through liberty that pacification which he accom¬
plished by authority? Supposing that this great winner of victories
had been able to triumph over himself, could he at least have
granted to the French certain political rights, have allowed some
control, have called the nation to exercise certain liberties, have
prepared her for a more intimate knowledge of affairs, thus helping
her on the way to a more normal destiny? Did such an attempt
hold out any prospect of success, could it even be undertaken, on
the morrow of unheard-of convulsions, at a time when the parties
of violence were under control, rather than exterminated, when so
few Frenchmen had acquired any feeling and any taste for legality;
at a time especially when France, triumphant though she was,
within her extended frontiers and in the wide development of her
offensive and defensive fronts, nevertheless remained a vast fortress
besieged by Europe? If Bonaparte in that crisis had made a
231
ADMIRERS
beginning with the founding of liberty, he would have proved
himself superior to his age, superior to himself. It is impossible to
say whether the undertaking would have surpassed his genius; it
was certainly above the reach of his character. But while not
attempting this, he devoted the respite left him by his truce with
Europe to proceeding with his work of interior reconstruction and
to reinfusing order and greatness into all parts of the Common-
weeilth.’
There is no doubt that Vandal means that order and greatness
which the ancien regime had possessed but which the Revolution had
destroyed, and that he is not even thinking of liberty. It is praise
in which other admirers of Napoleon, who also admired the Revo¬
lution, could never wholeheartedly join. In any case we are thus
reminded on the last page of something which was to be learnt from
the introduction to Napoleon et Alexandre and which was anyhow on
general grounds to be expected, that the attitude implied by
acceptance of fact, and by impatience of those ideas which have
not managed to impose themselves, goes with a very distinctive
political tendency.
332
PART FIVE

CHAPTER I
OLD ACQUAINTANCES
How far was Napoleon responsible for the wars waged by France
under his leadership? What was the aim of his foreign policy? Had
he any aim at all? These are questions which arise with any exami¬
nation of his character and period. We have already repeatedly
had to touch on them in dealing with the works so far discussed.
At the turn of the century they were given much attention in
historical literature, indeed the whole discussion concerning Napo¬
leon seemed to be revolving round them. Without doing too much
violence to the chronological pattern of my survey, I can assemble
a number of writers, with some of whom I have already dealt,
while others will be new to us, in connection with the problem of
foreign policy, of the wars and their object.
ONCE MORE BIGNON, ARMAND LEFEBVRE,

THIERS AND LANFREY
Let me just recall what older writers thought on these matters.

There was agreement between Bignon, Armand Lefebvre and
Thiers in so far as all three stressed the unsoundness of the system,
which was outgrowing its strength, yet each had his own way of
looking at things.
Bignon gives enthusiastic approval to the first stage of this gigan¬
tic growth. All breaches of the peace are laid to the account of
foreign powers. It is only in 1807 that he begins to have enough.
Thiers is even more concerned than he is to prove how peace-
loving Bonaparte was in his rise, but the date at which Bonaparte
began to over-reach himself he puts somewhat earher, after Auster-
litz. In discussing the breaches of peace of 1803 and 1805 Thiers
follows the broad oudines of Napoleon’s own presentation. He
sees him in a defensive attitude, and what he has to defend is
France’s power position as built up by the Republic and entrusted
to him, that is, France within her natural frontiers, the Rhine and
the Alps, and outside these boundaries, the spheres of influence
necessary for her protection. I leave on one side for a moment the
235
fact that neither frontiers nor power position can seem so ‘natural’
to those who are not French as they were to Frenchmen even a
century later. (A Dutchman cannot help thinking of Flanders,
including Zeeland-Flanders and Limburg, all of them incor¬
porated in France, and of the military occupation of the Batavian
Republic.) I will merely remark that Thiers takes leave of the
Napoleonic presentation, when he sees the effect of intoxication
induced by success, after Austerlitz, in the overthrow of Prussia
and the construction of a Germany under French hegemony or
worse. From that point, according to his view — and we have
found Bignon making the same contrast — Napoleon no longer.
followed the good French policy but an exaggerated and untenable
one of his own. Even then it might perhaps have been possible to
maintain in existence the tremendous edifice of a Germany com¬
pletely subjugated to France, by taking all precautions, and with
the new Tilsit friendship with Alexander of Russia. But Napoleon,
in his irresistible obsession with power, immediately overburdened
the structure with the Spanish adventure. From that time no
further triumphs could prevent the final collapse. The dividing
line is thus brought forward after all from December 1805 to 1807,
and the agreement with Bignon is complete.
Armand Lefebvre, on the contrary, estimated that Napoleon’s
foreign policy became untenable after the peace of Luneville in
1801. In his view everything is dominated by the struggle against
England. Napoleon himself was of course never tired of express¬
ing this view, and for Bignon and Thiers, also, England is the
principal enemy. Lefebvre, however, went much further than
they in giving shape and system to the idea. According to him the
First Consul should have concentrated all his efforts on that aspect,
and should for that purpose have sought friendship with Austria,
even at the price of the position won in Italy. The question of per¬
sonal responsibility, however, comes less to the fore in Lefebvre’s
treatment. Bonaparte was war-minded, but the French people,
too, were drunk with glory and sense of power. No one dreamt
of giving up Italy. And in any case the other powers were
always treacherous^ or greedy, or so weak as not to be worth men¬
tioning (here Bignofi and Thiers took much the same view). The
long drawn-out struwle, at least after Luneville, was inescapable.
Peace had become aA impossibility, and owing to the p>osition of
the irreconcilable and impregnable Britain, the outcome was
336
OLD ACQUAINTANCES
bound to be a disaster for France. Such a theory makes it possible
to follow Napoleon’s career without feeling shocked by the spec¬
tacle of the incorrigible war-monger; it compels fascinated atten¬
tion for his energy, for his triumphs, and though regret at the
approaching doom may be bitter, there is no blame for the hero.
Lefebvre was not able to deal with the defeat, any more than
Bignon, but he certainly would not have subscribed to Bignon’s
contention that Napoleon, had he wished, could have obtained
peace on tolerable terms in 1813. Thiers, as we know, blamed
Napoleon’s conduct during that year. We shall see that a genera¬
tion followed in whose eyes Bignon and Thiers were far too ready
to desert the Emperor.
Lanfrey, on the contrary, is much more criticaiin his judgment
of Napoleon’s foreign policy than these older writers. There is no
question with him of any fatalistic theory such as would eliminate
personal responsibility. But he differs on principle from Bignon
and Thiers, too, in that he draws no line, and chooses no date,
before which he can approve and after which he condemns. In his
view Napoleon never sincerely wanted peace. His whole career,
even before he became First Consul, and before he gave France,
in that capacity, these ardently desired but totally deceptive peace
treaties of Luneville and Amiens, shows him as uncontrollably
ambitious, as a man living for power and to obtain more power,
as one who would not rest while anything or anybody remained
standing beside him. The war with England in 1803 was willed by
Bonaparte; he only wished to give the French people the impres¬
sion that he had wanted to avoid it. In 1805 he as it were deliber¬
ately exacerbated the feelings of Austria and Russia, especially by
the threat to Naples. That restless extension in peace-time of
France’s sphere of influence at the expense of the small states was
unbearable to the Great Powers. And in the end it was with real
joy that Napoleon led to the Danube the army which had for so
long been encamped near Boulogne. His English invasion scheme
had revealed itself as increasingly impracticable as time went on,
and now Trafalgar had made it finally hopeless. A continental
war was for him a welcome way out of an awkward situation. And
so time and again, down to the final disaster. Napoleon’s wars
were his own wars, made inevitable by his measureless greed for
power, wars which never served the interests of France, wars for
which the deceived and all too patient nation paid with the blood
237
of its sons and in the end with the territorial gains won by the
Republic.
ONCE MORE ALBERT VANDAL
The first important contribution to the problem made in the

’nineties, important because it was a detailed and thorough study
of one important diplomatic episode, based on original research
in the archives, was Vandal’s book Napolion et Alexandre ler. To
outline this, or even to summarize his story, would carry me far
beyond the scope of my work. I have already used his book to
correct Lanfrey’s picture of a practically unsuspicious Alexander,
attacked in 1812 by Napoleon.* Here I am only concerned with
the general conclusions which the writer draws from his study —
or which inspired him in it — and which are to be found in his
introduction or scattered through the bulky volumes (there are
three, each of five hundred large pages). The very first sentence of
the introduction aroused controversy when the book appeared.*
It was indeed challenging.
‘Throughout the whole of his reign Napoleon pursued one un¬
changing objective in his foreign policy: to secure by a genuine
peace with England stability for his achievement, the greatness of
France, and the peace of the world.’
In one spring we are back in the Napoleonic legend. Thiers was
much more independent and critical of it, and even Lefebvre,
though he brings England no less to the fore, does not take the fine
phrases about peace too seriously. No doubt, peace is always the
object of war. The only question is, what sort of peace? Some
settlements are productive of nothing but more wars. Napoleon’s
vision of a world order based on the supremacy of France was such
a peace. (Though I am prepared to accept the reality of this
vision in the dreamer’s mind, I cannot admit that it was the
real motive force of his restless activity and daemonic struggle.
Indeed I regard it rather as the subsequent justification and
rationalization of that elemental urge.) Vandal too realizes that
not everything in Napoleon’s methods was suitable for winning
Europe over to his ideal. When Alexander at Erfurt was already
showing a certain reserve towards the friend on whom he lavished
admiration in pqblic. Vandal reflects that Napoleon was here
paying for his dictatorial action of the proceeding year, for the
* p. 80. ’ Sorel say* this in his Lectures Mstorigues, p. 172.
238
OLD ACQUAINTANCES
violence with which he had attacked princes and peoples (this
refers, of course, to Bayonne). This ‘cast a veil over the ultimate
justice and grandeur of his aim, world appeasement’.*
World appeasement — to be obtained first and foremost by ap¬
plying every means to make England accept a peace (that is by
bringing England to her knees). Every means! First of all this
requires an ally, a reliable ally, ‘who could secure the obedience of
the continent, so that he might give his mind to the naval struggle’.
He sought this ally everywhere, ‘and everywhere he met only
disloyalty’. By disloyalty the writer, if we look closely, means the
reluctance to acquiesce in the conquests which France ‘had ob¬
tained by fifteen years of battle and heroic courage’.* He thought
he had found him in Alexander, and he imagined he could attach
the Czar to himself by holding out the prospect of a share in the
spoils of the ramshackle Ottoman Empire, whose falling to pieces
he now anticipated, though not long before he had got it on his
side against Russia by exhorting it to fight for its future and its
faith. This was the purpose to be achieved with the help of Alex¬
ander. But when Alexander became suspicious, not without reason
and no longer wholeheartedly took part in the blockade of Eng¬
land, it was once more to be fulfilled by turning against Alexander;
Russia, too, was to be subjected. In thus working for ‘world
appeasement’, he treated the rest of Europe with even less cere¬
mony. It had to take its chance. Holland was put under one
brother, and when he proved disobedient, was annexed. Poland
was lured with promises of freedom, or once more suppressed,
because Russia so desired. Italy, Germany ... but is it necessary
seriously to demonstrate the folly of the view that a peaceful world
might be constructed in this manner? Only a narrow nationalism,
without imagination where the feelings of other peoples are con¬
cerned, or else a blind belief in the miraculous effects of power, can
have enabled anyone, as late as the year 1890, to advance such
extreme opinions.*
But in the end Vandal does not hide from himself the fact that
all these great schemes ‘are but the outcome of the necessities of the
Emperor’s struggle with England’. We cannot share the view
which Napoleon (and his admirer) had of England, that is, of a
*1,439. *1.46.
’ ‘Pour arracher la paix & I’Angleterre et la donner au monde, U sentait le
besoin . . I, iv.
239
mischievous extra-European power, from which must be wrested
the peace which it grudges our continent.* Given, however, that
irreconcilable struggle, whatever one’s views of its rights or wrongs,
there is something striking about this idea that the whole policy
of Napoleon was shaped by its necessities. ‘The government of
Napoleon has been nothing less than a twelve-year battle fought
all over the world against the English. His campaigns were no
isolated and independent actions, after the conclusion of which he
might have hammered in the boundary stakes of his domain and
put a stop to the bloodshed. They formed the indissolubly con¬
nected parts of a single whole, of one and the same war, in which
our nation finally fell, trampled on by Europe, after having swept
into and reconstructed it, a war in which France was defeated, but
in which the French idea was victorious.’
I do not intend to give more from Vandal’s first work than this
suggestion. It was not of course original. It too harks back to
Napoleon’s own propaganda. Nor was Vandal the first to have
formulated it in historical terms. In spite of his inner contradictions
Lefebvre might be called a forerunner. But no less a person than
Ranke, towards the end of his life, wrote in this same strain in an
essay where, with the typically conservative annoyance at the
arrogance of a radical intellectual, he tried to defend Napoleon
when Lanfrey accused him of being bellicose and animated by a
conqueror’s greed. We shall meet the suggestion again as the leit¬
motiv of the great work of Sorel which I shall presently examine.
^ It deserves to be noted that in Napoleon’s own time his ‘universalist* aims were
certainly taken seriously, even in Germany, or, one might say, particularly in Ger¬
many, a Germany not yet become nationalistic. Thus a German philosopher,
Krause, in i8i i — just in time — constructed an entire theory concerning the develop¬
ment of history and of humanity upon this. See J. B. Manger, Thorbecke en de
historie, p. 28.
240
CHAPTER II
EMILE BOURGEOIS
THE ‘secret’ of BONAPARTE; TO 1803
Before Sorel had given his ideas on Napoleon their full form,
however, a very different note was sounded in the Manuel de
politique Hrangere by Emile Bourgeois,* the relevant volume of
which (the second) appeared in 1898, and which to thiS day has
found numbers of readers for its many editions. The book is more
than its title indicates, it is more than a handbook, being based on
original research and presenting its own view of the development
and significance of the events described.
Bourgeois will have none of that historical necessity to which
Vandal sees Napoleon subjugated, and which for him determines
both his tragic greatness and his indissoluble connection with the
French people. In Bourgeois’s account the young conqueror,
from the moment when as a plain general in Italy he took the
control of foreign policy out of the hands of the Directory, appears
as a personal and an amazingly dynamic factor — from the French
point of view a disturbing factor.
Even before he became First Consul, according to this theory,
Bonaparte’s tempestuous will, fed by his quite personal and
fantastic ambition, forced history off its normal course. The
Italian conquests gave him the chance to make a great position
for himself. The bartering of Venice, where he had fostered riots
that he might strike it down, was to assure temporarily the acquies¬
cence of Austria. By the coup d’etat of Fructidor he broke all resist¬
ance in Paris against his self-willed conduct and his incalculable
plans.* And indeed in the meantime his real purpose had taken
on body, the dream of his life had begun to stir, when, by occupy¬
ing Ancona (in the Papal States), and the Ionian Islands (Venetian
territory), he set foot on the Adriatic and saw within his grasp die
East, the extensive, ramshackle and half-decomposed Ottoman
Empire.* ‘In the Orient alone are great empires possible today,’
^ Member of the Institute Professor of Modem and Contemporary History at
the University of Paris, Professor at UScole litre des Sciences politiques.
• cf. above, pp. 78, 91. * cf. above, p. 90; ManueU II, 164 sqq.
ft 241
he said to his boyhood friend Bourrienne. The Egyptian expedi¬
tion of the following year was truly his own undertaking, though,
when it went wrong, it suited his purpose to make it appear as if
the ‘lawyers’ of the Directory had sent him there to get rid of him,
even at the expense of France. This is the account in the Mimorial'-
and we have already had an echo in Balzac’s story for the peasants.
A reckless adventure, this expedition, not only because it
deprived France of an army which she needed badly when faced
with the Second Coalition, but also because that emergency was
itself provoked by it: it was that stirring up of the eastern basin of
the Mediterranean — which drove Russia to side with England. -
The First Consul did not relinquish the Eastern ambitions of
General Bonaparte. The peace of Amiens, on which the French
people built such joyful hopes, was never regarded by him as any¬
thing but a truce.* Wilfully, deliberately, for the sake of Malta,
and that meant Egypt, Bonaparte moved towards a renewal of the
war. But he could not show his hand to the people of France.
What was the use of Egypt to them, and what did they care
about it?
‘At this decisive moment, when France out of gratitude for the
peace threw herself into his arms, it was his requital to drag her
under false pretences into war. Nobody ever understood better the
art of making men’s passions serve his personal aims. The higher
— patriotism, love of glory —he abused; the lower — hatred,
pride, vanity — he excited. He will take good care not to incur
the blame for a useless war, as did the Directors, a war against
tradition, for the possession of Egypt. Incessantly he points out
England to the French as the false and faithless enemy, enemy of
their new institutions and of their peace. He will manage to have
England declare war on him in order to be able to pose before the
French as the champion of national independence and greatness.
So well did he succeed in persuading them of this, that to this day
more than one historian remains convinced of the arguments
which he dished up to our Ancestors.’
Bonaparte, as Bourgeois expresses it in an old-fashioned term,
has his ‘secret’. It was something very different from that ‘world
appeasement’ towards which Vandal sees him striving. According
to Bourgeois he follows his eastern plan with unfailing pertinacity,
meanwhile telling the French one story or another. His camp at
* Manuel, II, i88. * op. cit., p. 232.
242
EMILE BOURGEOIS
Boulogne was certainly more than a feint, yet his thoughts were
with the occupation, which he set in train at the same time, of
Tarento, Otranto and Brindisi, as ports from which to attack
Turkey. The German secularizations which had meanwhile
materialized as a result of the peace of Lun^ville, were popular
with the French. It suggested a continuation of Louis XIV’s
tradition, this demolition of Austrian-Hapsburg influence in
Germany, and this creation of French ties. Bonaparte’s imperial
title too seemed a victory over the Hapsburgs. It was in this way
that Napoleon carried the French with him in his policy of ad¬
venture. Already in May 1804 the Prussian ambassador had
observed that the new Emperor wanted war on the continent, in
other words that he wanted to be rid of Boulogne and the hopeless
invasion scheme.
‘The French,’ Bourgeois writes, ‘whom he needed as tools, he
tempted by the offer of Germany through an imperial title con¬
secrated by the Pope. His own share was the completion of
Italian unity’ (through the attack on the Kingdom of Naples)
‘intended to put him in a better position for driving the English
from Malta and the Russians from Corfu.’* And indeed, by his
activities and mischief-making in Italy and his preparations for a
further thrust to the East, he obtained his wish of shifting the
theatre of war. The Austro-Russian alliance, entirely brought into
existence by Napoleon’s provocations, laid down that Russia was
to guarantee Austria’s position in Italy, while Austria guaranteed
the integrity of Turkey for the benefit of Russia. It was not Ger¬
many, concludes Bourgeois, that was at stake in the war of 1805,
it was Constantinople.
PRESSBURG AND TILSIT
Napoleon moved with lightning rapidity against his new

enemies. Before the Russians and Austrians had joined up, he had
encircled a Russian army at Ulm and forced it to capitulate. Even
before he had followed this up, by winning his most famous battle,
that of Austerlitz, on the and December, against the now united
Emperors of Russia and Austria, Talleyrand sent him a note
from Strasburg, on October 17th, 1805, pressing him to offer peace
to Austria, without further'humiliation or defeat, so as to draw her
away from Russia and make her join hands with him to defend
^ Manuely II, 253.
243
Europe against ‘the barbarians’. After Austeriitz he again urged
that action should be taken on the lines of his note. His advice has
Bourgeois’s fullest sympathy. Talleyrand appeared, he says, at
that juncture as ‘the interpreter of the nation’s wishes and as
advocate of her interests’.* This famous Strasburg note is not
always so whole-heartedly appreciated. In any case it is a fact
that Talleyrand did not make any impression on Napoleon. How
could it be otherwise? argues Bourgeois; for the means proposed by
Talleyrand to persuade Austria to acquiesce in the loss of Italy
and to break her connection with Russia, was to offer her the
mouths of the Danube (Moldavia and Wallachia), in other words,-
to lead her on upon the road to the East which Napoleon wished
above all to keep for himself. Thus the peace of Prcssburg, to
which Austria had to agree, while Alexander, having escaped with
his badly battered army back to Russian soil, continued the war,
took on an entirely different character. This peace was calculated
to reduce Austria to impotence. She was excluded not only from
Germany and Italy, but she was also, by the loss of Istria and
Dalmatia, prevented from closing the Adriatic, and kept away
from the gate to the East.
In the peace of Pressburg French opinion saw chiefly the final
victory over the Hapsburgs in Germany. This flattered French
pride, all the more when by the establishment of the Confeder¬
ation of the Rhine it was followed by the complete subjugation of
Germany to France. Prussia remained for the moment outside
this arrangement, but Prussia too, which in her increasing fear of
Napoleon’s apparently unlimited ambitions had been on the
point of siding with Russia and Austria, was forced by threats and
the consolation prize of English Hanover, into a new alliance,
which left her little independence. But here too Bourgeois sees
Napoleon’s ultimate purpose as the East, and we begin to suspect
Bourgeois of being the slave of his system. According to him, the
most important demand made of Prussia was not the closing of
her coast to the British, but*the promise of help in maintaining the
integrity of Turkey. This polite formula really covered intentions
against Turkey, whose impending dissolution was admitted by all,
and by involving Prussia Russia was to be completely isolated.*
At the same time — another pointer towards the East — immedi¬
ately after the peace of Pressburg the continental portion of the
* II, ZS7. * II, *70 »qq.
244
EMILE BOURGEOIS
Kingdom of Naples, hitherto protected by Russia and England, was
completely occupied.
After his incredible achievements, and with France so much
impressed that she was willing to swallow even the establishment
of the Family Empire and of the Venetian and Neapolitan
majorates for his generals and officials, Napoleon could imagine
himself to be in a position to realize his dream. ^
‘That dream was not, as has been asserted, a complete revenge
on England. Nor was it world empire, a vague ambition unsuited
to his exact and matter-of-fact mind. In the camp of Boulogne,
during the first advance of the Grande Armee, at Austerlitz, and
in the negotiations of Pressburg and of Schoenbrunn, when he
incites the French against England, the Hapsburgs, Russia,
always the Emperor has his secret, to extend his Italian conquests,
acquired in the service of France, down to the Adriatic, whose
coast he has occupied, under the same cover, but always for him¬
self alone, in order to get closer to the Near East, which he cannot
reach by sea any more, since his reverse in Egypt and the loss of
Malta.’
At that moment when Napoleon’s power was evolving in so
fantastic a fashion, in 1806, England and Russia sent negotiators
to Paris to discuss peace terms, simultaneously but independently.
Bourgeois brings out what an important part the integrity of
Turkey once more played in these extraordinarily involved
negotiations. The complications were equalled by the bad faith.
Napoleon offered England Hanover, which he had just given to
Prussia. The Balearics, belonging to another ally, Spain, he used,
without notifying her, as a prospective compensation to the
Neapolitan Bourbons for Sicily, should Russia agree to allow them
to be deprived of that territory as well. It all came to nothing.
Anxious Prussia secretly sought protection from Russia, and
when the English, whom Napoleon had let slip in hope of reaching
agreement with Russia, informed her of Napoleon’s offer of
Hanover, Prussia, in a mixture of panic and fury, threw* herself
definitely on the side of Alexander. Perhaps Alexander had never
taken seriously the treaty already signed in his name in Paris. In
any case he did not ratify it now, and Napoleon with all his decep¬
tion rudely torn asunder — for even Spain heard what her mighty
ally had been plotting — had nothing left save his sword, which
* II, 26s sqq.
345
indeed he handled with consummate mastery. In a few weeks
Prussia was beaten and he was victorious in Berlin.
But the King had sought sanctuary with Alexander, and as long
as Alexander continued the war, nothing had been achieved. By
appeals and fine protestations in oriental style (‘Fate has chosen
me to save the Ottoman Empire’ is only one example of this),
Napoleon actually succeeded in getting Selim, Sultan of Turkey,
to take action against Russia. He even went to work on Persia. He
flattered the Poles by playing on the theme of their recently lost
national independence, though ready quite shamelessly to betray
them to Prussia or to Russia, if the need arose. It was proving a
hard winter for the French army in the distant, cold and barren
land of East Prussia. The battle of Eylau, in February 1807, in
which the losses were exceptionally heavy, remained in fact
indecisive. Napoleon kept an anxious eye on France. What were
the people thinking of this latest, and unforeseen, adventure? He
pleaded that he had never wanted the war with Prussia, which in
Ae narrowest sense was true. But had he not created the atmo¬
sphere of greed and suspicion from which it arose? He did his best
to turn attention to England. The blockade of England, estab¬
lished in November 1806 in Berlin, was, still according to Bour¬
geois, intended to explain the necessity of his lording it along the
Baltic coast. The colonies were to be reconquered from England
on the Oder.* But finally the Emperor allowed Talleyrand to
explain to the Senate that it was all about the integrity of Turkey.
Bourgeois comments:
‘After having dragged the nation along by means of her hatred
of England and of the glory resulting from the conquest of the
natural frontiers and of the imperial title once belonging to Haps-
burg alone, Napoleon fixes on the Vistula a new objective for her
patriotism: the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire. He pictures
that policy to her as vital for the preservation of her southern trade
and even for the safety of her frontiers. The Russians in Constan¬
tinople would mean before longt “Those fanatics, those barbarians
in our provinces ...” .’
The press received precise instructions to write on these lines.
Napoleon was in a tense and restless mood. As in Paris in 1806, he
still wanted a compromise with Alexander. After Eylau he even
made a great show of horror at the frightfulness of the battlefield:
> II, *85.
246.
EMILE BOURGEOIS
‘His soul’, as Vandal writes, ‘was sincerely moved .. There was,
however, no evidence of this sincere compassion in June 1807,
after Friedland, when he was finally able to beat Alexander
completely.
Then came the sudden change, the romantic meeting between
the two Emperors on a raft on the Niemen at Tilsit, and the
friendship which was to dominate the world. In spite of all the
demonstrations of affection, in spite of a mutual show of spontane¬
ous enjoyment of each other’s company, it was a friendship full of
reserves. The unfortunate King of Prussia had to give up all his
territories west of the Elbe, as well as his newly acquired Polish
lands. The grand duchy of Warsaw which was thus established
was also a possible weapon against Alexander.
But the friendship was to be crowned by grandiose schemes
concerning the East. Selim’s fall, as a result of a rising of the
Janissaries, eased Napoleon’s conscience with regard to the ally
(Vandal says this without irony)* whom he had so recently
assured that he regarded himself as ordained by Fate to save the
Ottoman Empire. He now exclaimed to the Czar, as if carried
away by this news (though it was already known to him, he had
the report given him and received it as a surprise in the other’s
presence): ‘This is a decree of Providence’ (the word ‘fate’,
though suitable for Constantinople, might here have sounded
rather unchristian); ‘it tells me that the Ottoman Empire can no
longer exist.’* Vandal describes Alexander as hanging on Napo¬
leon’s lips, and fired by Napoleon’s imaginative eloquence to
fresh dreams of eastern expansion.* Once more ‘the barbarians’
were the enemy, but this time they were the Turks.
Vandal’s view of these matters is very different from that of
Bourgeois. According to him, as we know, Napoleon was the
instrument of France’s destiny, and he rejects any assumption of
an individual and un-French Imperial policy. Thus he considers
that Napoleon’s mind had not been governed by eastern ambitions
save during his Egyptian expedition. Since then he had used the
East only ‘by way of diversion or compromise; it was on that
terrain that he hoped to divide our enemies, to break up the
coalition by depriving it of one of its members, by drawing to
himself one of the major powers, no matter which,' and so finally
V
^ Napoleon et Alexandre ler, I, 37. * Napolion et Alexandre ler^ I, 73.

* Manuel^ II, 392. ^ Napolion et Alexandre Jer, I, 3.
^47
to forge that great alliance which he needed in order to dominate
the continent and conquer England.’* The coalition against
France, which England again and again had sought to establish,
was not only broken by the Tilsit friendship, but Prussia and
Austria were forced, and Russia prevailed upon, to act against
England.
It cannot be denied that this was the result of Tilsit, but it need
hardly be said that Bourgeois does not for a moment hesitate to
declare Napoleon’s ultimate and real aim to be conquests in the
East, Constantinople, which he was not in any case going to
leave to his new friend, Egypt, India... Only, he was not yet
ready for these far-reaching schemes. First he had to strengthen
his naval position in the Mediterranean, and place Spain under
a trustworthy administration — a mere trifle, this last item! It was
tiresome meanwhile, that Alexander was impatient and had to be
held back. When it became obvious that Spain was no trifle,
but a miscalculation which once more gave courage to humiliated
Austria, the rift in the friendship with Alexander became wider,
just at the moment when it should have held firm. Erfurt did not
heal it. In the new war with Austria, in 1809, Napoleon was
practically left in the lurch by his ally.
After stupendous efforts he was victorious once more. And
what did he demand at the peace? Illyria, that is Carinthia and
Croatia south of the Save. Dalmatia, Istria and the islands
(acquired at Pressburg, in 1805) were not enough for his schemes.
He had to have a wide and safe land route to the Ottoman
Empire, one which was not too liable to be cut by Austria."
1812-13
Again, therefore, according to Bourgeois’s interpretation, the
lure of the East! But in the years immediately following it was still
not possible to take the road thither which had just been opened.
There was Spain, and.in*particular there were the relations with
Alexander, which kept deteriorating. The danger of a resurrected
Poland hostile to himself made the Czar doubly distrustful. Fin¬
ally the moment came when Napoleon made ready to take up his
tried sword, always his last resort, against his opponent, the
sometime friend of Tilsit, blocking the route to the East. The
Poles must play their part. ‘To awaken the national fibre of that
' Manuel^ !!» 293. ^ Manuel^ II, 430.
248
EMILE BOURGEOIS
nation, to carry it with me ... I like the Poles on the battlefield:
they furnish it well...’‘ Poland was only a means. Moscow was
to open the door to his life’s dream, Asia, the Balkans, and if he
had to give up Poland to the Czar, after initial victories, or use it
to buy the good will of his refractory ally, Austria, why not?
Thus to the very last Bourgeois shows Napoleon as dominated
by that single idea, the East. Even after the disaster of 1812, dur¬
ing the negotiations with Mettemich in the summer of 1813,
when Austria, having resumed its freedom of action, has to be
prevented from aligning itself irrevocably with the coalition of
Russia, Prussia and England, Napoleon cannot bring himself to
restore Illyria, and thus throws away his last chance, and with it
the last chance of France to retain the power with which she had
entrusted herself to the First Consul.
‘He pictures Mettemich as an agent of England; it is his theme
and to the last, his pretext. To hand over to Austria Illyria,
perhaps Venice, his share of dreams and of ambition — never!
Sooner ask France, while exploiting her, to make a last sacrifice:
“A man like me is hardly concerned about a million lives.” ’•
(Words which Napoleon is alleged to have spoken in his last
conversation with Mettemich.)
The passages in which Bourgeois emphasizes Napoleon’s
eastern ambitions and the way in which he hoodwinked the
French people I have picked out from his narrative, which in so
doing I have perhaps made to appear unduly simplified and
emphatic. Nevertheless he stated his views without ambiguity.
No reader of his book can for a moment be in doubt as to what he
ascribed to Napoleon, and for what he blamed him. Napoleon
abused the trust placed in him by the French people, he was
responsible for the war and the disasters, and his motive was not
any concern for French interests, however eloquently he spoke
about them, but his own, personal, fantastic longing for the East.
I shall not now discuss this interpretation of Napoleon’s foreign
policy. When I come shortly to expound the systems of Sorel and
of Driault, it will inevitably be tested.
* Manuel, II, 495 sqq. * Manuel, II, 520.
*49
CHAPTER III
TWO MORE OLD ACQ.UAINTANCES
Before I come to Sorel, I must recall the conceptions of Masson,

and deal briefly with a book, in which the author oiNapoUon intime,
ten years after the appearance of that work, set himself to deal
with the problem of Napoleon’s foreign policy.
MASSON; ENGLAND THE ENEMY; NAPOLEON THE

LIBERATOR OF THE NATIONS
We already know that Masson had dealt at length with foreign

policy in volumes III and IV of his Napoleon et sa famille, and
that he gave his own interpretations which do not agree too
well with one another.^ It is possible to gather from those
thirteen volumes that the true motive force of Napoleon’s Euro¬
pean policy was his family sense. On this showing the Emperor
did not so much use his brothers to administer le grand empire,
he undertook his wars and founded the empire on the fruits of his
victories, in order to provide thrones for his brothers. The idea
will be remembered from Balzac’s story;’ it seems somewhat in
conflict with more authentic versions of the Napoleonic legend,
although Balzac’s veteran and his peasant audience found in it
nothing to offend them. But in the introduction to his eighth
volume (published in 1906), Masson takes the completely different
viewpoint advanced by Vandal. Napoleon’s policy and his wars
are no longer determined by his omnipotent will. The Emperor,
and France, are prisoners of the iron necessity of the struggle with
England. Probably it was not under the influence of Vandal,
but of Sorel, that Masson wrote in this strain. No one else at any
rate worked up the theme of the implacable conflict between
France and England to such a hymn of hate, even though his
outburst can certainly be regarded as typical of feelings which no
doubt Napoleon found in existence, but which he subsequently
fanned so successfully that even at the present day they have not
lost their hold on the French mind.
^ See above, pp. 205 sqq. • See above, p. 27.
250
TWO MORE OLD ACQUAINTANCES
But there is another aspect of Masson’s view of Napoleon as a
European figure to which I have only referred in passing when
dealing with his work, but which deserves more emphasis here.
He sees in him the liberator of the nations.
When Napoleon returns from Elba and Louis XVIII is forced
to flee, Europe, still assembled at Vienna, has no thought of
recognizing the Emperor. It excommunicates him, and at the
same time, according to Masson, who however is quite wrong
here, the sovereigns declare themselves ready to afford assistance
to each government for the maintenance of the threatened order
of things.^
‘Thus,’ Masson continues, ‘his worst enemies enunciated, more
eloquently than his most faithful friends could have done, this
truth with respect to Napoleon, that his cause is the nation’s
cause; if he should fail, no nation will have the right to dispose of
itself; each nation belongs to its sovereign. . .; all the principles
proclaimed by the Revolution, popular sovereignty and national
independence, will be compromised by his fall, saved by his
triumph. The doctrine of the Holy Alliance is here already fully
expressed, and the oppression of the peoples depends on whether
Napoleon will vanquish or be defeated.’
This view forms an integral part of the Napoleonic legend. For
half a century after the Congress of Vienna it continued to exert
an influence in Europe. Even in more recent times it can be
traced in the work of French historians.* Yet the Dutchman who
remembers what happened to his countrymen under Napoleon,
will find it difficult even to understand how such an idea could
ever be formed. And indeed, one has to think of other parts of
Europe, of Poland, of Italy, even of West and South Germany.
And if here, too, objections crowd upon one’s mind, one has to
look at the period after the fall of Napoleon, a period of bitter
disillusionment for all these peoples, of longing for a change, for
liberation and for national unity. The legend then becomes at
least intelligible.
I shall be dealing with the problems which arise in connection
with this when I come to another writer, Driault.
* Napolion et sa famlle, XI, 22; cf. the remark at the end of note on pp. 205
sqq. above.
• See e.g, in Lavisse, Histoire de la France contemporaine, volume on Lu R^taura-
tion (1924), by Charl6ty, p. 76: ‘Vainqueurs avec la Fr^ce pendant vingt-cinq ans,
la Revolution et les peoples ^taient vaincus par sa d^faite.*
251
ARTHUR-LfeVY CONCERNING NAPOLEON
^ AND THE PEACE
In 1902 Arthur-Ldvy published a second book, NapoUon et la
paix. Much more ambitious than NapoUon intime, it was not
nearly so successful an achievement. The writer’s blind partiality
and lack of critical acumen are even more in evidence here. The
book is in fact only an extremely detailed study (of 650 pages)
of diplomatic relations with Prussia in the years 1806 and 1807,
although presented to the reader as a demonstration of the truth
that throughout his career Napoleon pursued no other aim but
peace. Arthur-L^vy expresses this idea in an even more pro¬
vocative way than Vandal: ‘During the whole of his reign his sole
aim was to arrive at a just and lasting peace which would ensure
to France that status to which she is entitled.’ Of course one feels
at once prompted to ask, to what status is France entitled? How
far should the interests of other nations be subordinated to French
claims? Writers of other nationalities are likely to disagree with
Napoleon and with Arthur-Levy as to the answer, though fortun¬
ately there have been French writers, too, who realized that this is
indeed the crux of the matter and that a statement such as the
one quoted has no meaning.*
Arthur-L^vy continues: ‘England’s unchanging rivalry, the
terror of ancient thrones at the spectacle of a dynasty sprung up
overnight, the hope of throwing up a dam against the spread of
libertarian ideas, and the secret appetites of all, those were the
elements out of which the successive coalitions were forged and
against which Napoleon’s pacific attempts were ever in vain.’
Arthur-Levy really attempts no more than to confirm by means
of the facts the statements of the great man himself. The Memorial
is his bible. What did Napoleon say at St. Helena? ‘AH my
victories and all my conquests were won in self-defence. This is a
truth which time will render every day more evident. Europe
never ceased from warring against France, against French
principles, and against me, so we had to strike down in order not
to be struck down. The coalition continued without interruption,
be it ojjen or in secret, admitted or denied; it was there in per¬
manence. It dependied solely on the allies to give us peace.’*
* P. Caron expresses this* view in a review of the book in the Revue d'hittoire
modeme et c<mtemp<tr<dtie, IV, 121.
* Quoted in NapoUon et idpaix, p. 257.
252
TWO MORE OLD ACQUAINTANCES
So in his book the writer is concerned to show how false and
untrustworthy were the Prussians (whom he disliked even more
than he did the English, although they too are roughly handled).
His task in this was not a difficult one, for the Prussians were
greedy for their own advancement and at the same time were in
an extremely dangerous position in 1806, which made them
wriggle desperately from one side to the other. But next he sets
himself to bring out that Napoleon was the kindest, most easy¬
going and gentlest creature alive. This too was not difficult
to justify, for in his public speeches, and even in his correspond¬
ence, the Emperor liked to show himself in this guise, and what¬
ever he says is trustingly accepted by his eulogist, who at the same
time does not take the least notice of circumstances which might
excuse a contrary opinion. In the end, with all his long narrative
and his emphatic statements and moralizing, he has not proved a
thing.
It is amusing to notice that here, too, as in Napoleon intime with
regard to the ministers and the marshals, he laments feelingly on
the damage Napoleon did himself by his excessive tolerance.
Tolerance, he means, towards the old dynasties for which he
cherished an ineradicable respect. The writer even ventures to
chide his god for not annihilating once and for ail the monarchies
which victory laid at his feet, as he should have done had he
understood better the interest of France. How many princes
could he not have sent to distant islands, as they sent him in the
hour of his defeat? Had he done this the coalitions would not
have been renewed against him every four years.* Such a con¬
ception of international policy is of course childish. As if, even as it
was, Napoleon had not extended his empire beyond his power,
and as if ‘annihilation’, banishment, extirpation and annexation
were a sufficient cure for all diseases and disasters.
One is tempted to accuse the writer of out-Napoleoning
Napoleon, but no! Here too he finds confirmation from St.
Helena. ‘I may,’ says Napoleon to Las Cases, and Arthur-Levy
concludes his book with the quotation," ‘I may in the name of the
sovereigns have been called “a modern Attila” and “a Robespierre
on horseback”; if they would but search their hearts they would
know better. Had I been such, perhaps I should be reigning still,
but so much is certain — they would long since have ceased to reign.’
‘p. i6i. *P-6s3.
853
CHAPTER IV
ALBERT SOREL
HIS GENERAL ATTITUDE

Albert Sorel was a great figure as an historian, and the influence
he exercised is considerable. His chief work, VEurope et la Revolu¬
tion franfaise, began to appear in 1885 with an introductory
volume reviewing the tendency, spirit and methods of French
and European foreign policy under the ancien regime, and this
reveals the author’s reading and his impressive powers of
constructive imagination. By 1892 three further volumes had
appeared. These gave a detailed diplomatic history of the
Constituante, the Legislative and the Convention, covering the years
from 1789 to 1795. A close organic link was maintained with the
general development of the Revolution, and in particular with its
ideas and its spirit. After ten years’ silence four volumes appeared
at brief intervals in 1903 and 1904. Under the same title,
VEurope et la Revolution frangaise, these dealt for the most part with
the foreign policy of Napoleon.
Sorel had joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs just before 1870.
A young and promising lawyer, his experiences there had an
abiding influence on him and his work, although after a few years,
and in spite of tempting offers from Gambetta, he chose a
professorial career.* He developed consciously and with convic¬
tion, into the exponent, not of this or that party, but of tradition
and of the raison d'Etat. A highly cultured man, subtly sensitive to
ideas and to form, a brilliant stylist, who, like his venerated
senior and friend, Taine, combined a passion for system and
synthesis with great powers of plastic expression and creation,
he saw forces at work in .history other than those of the mind,
impersonal forces which cared not for the mind, which indeed
used it for their ends. The spectacle did not rouse his soul to
opposition. For him true statesmanship consisted in the recogni¬
tion of these forces and alliance with them.
Thb attitude had made it possible for him (how unlike Taine!)
* But it should be noticed that he was Professor at the Rcole libre des Sciences
politiques, that is to say, not under dte auspices of the University.
254
ALBERT SOREL
to consider the Revolution sine ira ac studio, and to perceive that its
foreign policy formed no breach with the past, that those humani¬
tarian impulses which would have meant such a breach stopped
short at words, and that the longing for natural frontiers, which
took the place of these impulses, had deep roots in the methods and
outlook of the monarchy. In that famous first volume he displayed
a wealth of precedents from the monarchy for everything which
the violent years of the Legislative and the Convention were to bring
forth, for the most revolutionary-sounding slogans, for all the
brutalities, for all the encroachments on European international
law, for which its contemporaries so bitterly blamed the French
Republic. Conversely, in the later volumes, he was continually
at pains to show how great a role was played during the Revolu¬
tion by the legistes, the lawyers, a class of men always regarded as
typical of the methods of the ancien regime, and how much use
was made of their juridical arguments and hair-splittings. In thus
bringing out the continuity of French history, in representing the
Revolution as merely quickening tendencies and strivings which
had determined the life of the French nation under the monarchy
too, as having been slowly prepared under those totally different
auspices, Sorel is doing for foreign policy what Toqueville, in his
surprisingly perceptive book, published as early as 1856, had
done for social and administrative conditions.*
From what has been said concerning his attitude to mental
forces in relation to raison d'£tat and tradition, concerning his
realism, it will be readily understood that he did not share the
objections of Mme de Stad and of Taine. He gave sketches,
sparkling with sympathy and understanding, of both authors, but
rejected the judgment of each on Napoleon, and for the same
reason.
‘The crisis that was beginning’, he says in his short study of
Mme de Stael, ‘was not a matter of wit, eloquence or cabales’,
it was a matter of state, the most formidable ever witnessed, and it
needed not those vain Pompeys and Ciceros whom Mme de
Stael never ceased to worship, but some of those Sullas and Caesars
whom she always abhorred ... Her conscience was too fair, her
heart too full of pity, her soul of delicacy; she was capable neither
of leading men, nor of exploiting their weaknesses and utilizing
their vices. To spare someone suffering seemed to her the acme of
* L'ancien Rigime et la Revolution.
255
human activity. Reason of state seemed to her a blasphemy.
The word State in itself contained something harsh and tyrannical
which repelled her... She loved nothing but freedom... .’*
Mme de Stael, he wrote somewhat further on, was less able
than most to recognize the Caesar to whom France was about to
give birth. ‘There is a fundamental error in her judgment
concerning the Revolution ... Of the two aims of the Revolution
that matter, civil liberty and political liberty, the reformation of
society and of the State, she was only moved by the second, while
the great majority of Frenchmen were only excited by the first.’*
(Here we have already a pronouncement on this problem, and we
know that it was not for Sorel that Quinet had written. He
includes in this judgment the entire party of ‘Mme de Stael and
her friends’, the liberals, and this, according to him, is the rpason
why this party, ‘distinguished though it was’, never came into
power. ‘They did not understand that France, left to her own
devices, was transforming herself into a democracy in accordance
with her instincts, impelled by her past and by the education she
had received from her kings. The Roman liberty of the members
of the Convention, the civic liberty of the Consulate, the people’s
obedience to the Comiti de salut public, Bonaparte’s popularity and
his omnipotence, all this remained to the end inexplicable to
those noble and ingenious thinkers. They proceeded with the
development of their theories, while round them France moved
forward on the course mapped out by her history.’
I spoke of Vandal’s respect for fact* and for power. In the
case o,f Sorel this respect has been erected into a system. As for
reason, with all his acute intelligence he forces it to abdicate as far
as the State is concerned, or merely permits it to lose itself in the
mystic creed of historical fatalism. This is what he says about
Taine when, on joining the Academy, he has to pay tribute to
his memory; ‘Until then’ (until the writing of that sensational
portrait of Napoleon), ‘whenever he measured himself with a
thinker, a poet, an artist, Taine, himself a thinker and a poet, was
able, when faced with the irreducible element, when passing
from the formula to life, to supplement the impotence of analysis
by the divination of his own genius. But here this divination
failed him. He had said it himself in connection with Guizot’s
work on Cromwell: “In order to write political history one has
* In Let grands icrivmnt franfois, 1890, p. 33. * p. 38.
256
ALBERT SOREL
to have experience of affairs of state. The literary man, the
psychologist, the artist, are out of their depths.” The State was
to Taine the last of the scholastic monsters which he had resolved
to annihilate; he was absolutely allergic to the raison d’etat.
That is why, as in former days the Comite de salut public’ (Sorel,
great admirer of Danton, also objected strongly to certain aspects
of La Revolution), ‘Napoleon remained a mystery to him.’*
Nevertheless it might be imagined that in spite of his admiration
for Napoleon the statesman, Sorel recoiled before the appearance
of Napoleon, not as lawgiver and administrator, but as soldier
and conqueror, as Thiers had done after 1805; one might expect
him to follow the example of Talleyrand, like Bourgeois and so
many other writers, in making a distinction between the traditional
French policy of moderation, and the personal policy of the
Consul-Emperor, which by its excesses disregarded the true
interests of France. But this is not the case. Long before he came
to deal with the Napoleonic period, Sorel had made it clear in
what light he regarded Napoleon, that is, as the inevitable
product of circumstances determined by the Revolutionary
government which preceded him.
He had, for example, argued at the end of the fourth volume of
his great work that all thoughts of a peace between a France
extended to her natural frontiers and Europe, were no more than
a chimera. England could never accept the possession of Belgium
by France. Had France renounced the Rhineland, she might
have prevented England from finding allies on the continent, but
her dual conquest inevitably aroused the European coalition
against her. This had happened before Bonaparte came to
power. The natural frontiers were an article of faith for the new
regime in France; the oath on the constitution included them.
Bonaparte, in accepting the government, had also had to accept
the task of defending them. This involved the whole drama of his
career up to the catastrophe of 1814-15. ‘The only peace consistent
with the Roman conception of Gaul’ (it will be remembered that
in Roman times Gaul extended as far as ‘the natural frontiers’)
‘lay in an Empire in the Roman fashion, that is to say, England
subjugated and France supreme in Europe.’* Lefebvre assigned
a certain freedom of choice to Bonaparte in his early years, but
^ Nouveaux essais d*kistoire et de critique^ 1898, pp. 138 sqq.
• VEurope et la RH}olution franpaise, IV, 469.
R 257
considered that the decision of Lun^ville bound him irrevocably
to his destiny. Sorel leaves him no freedom at all. The fateful
decision, itself determined by the previous history of France, had
been taken when the Convention annexed Belgium and the
Rhineland. In it were present, as the fruit in the seed, the wars,
the further conquests, the Empire, despotism and finally the
catastrophe. Like Vandal and Arthur-Levy, Sorel accepts
Napoleon’s own view that he had never sought anything but
peace — peace and the natural frontiers, of course — and that
was an illusion.
VOLUME V (‘BONAPARTE ET LE
directoire’)
In the fifth volume, in which Bonaparte, as army commander in
Italy and Egypt, already plays an important part, he does not yet
seem to be entirely subjected to this idea. It is with a real pleasure
that Sorel pictures him at work in his Italian pro-consulate, as he
tellingly calls it, but he stresses the point that the ambitious
general is carrying out his own policy and dragging the Directoire
willy-nilly after him. The conquest and reorganization of Italy
are at first exclusively Bonaparte’s own affair, and tend to divert
attention from the Rhine.
But soon the Directors were vying with their teacher in their
eagerness for conquest and especially plunder of Italy. Sorel is as
contemptuous of their interventions in foreign affairs as Vandal
of their internal administration. They were inefficient and
clumsy, but whenever the army’s victories gave them the chance,
they became supercilious, exacting and greedy. So can Sorel’s
judgment of them throughout his fifth volume be summarized.
In comparison Bonaparte, like Hoche on the Rhine, appears as
the liberator, the protector, the master-builder. ‘It is the fatality
of that age that, through the folly and the corruption of civil
power, the military power appears everywhere as the restoring
factor, as the only one able to accomplish the task of order
without which the nations cannot live, and the work of justice
which the nations expect from the Revolution.
How little does this tally with the story, as told by Sorel himself,
of the subjugation of Venice, so specifically Bonaparte’s personal
achievement. But he tells it without a word of repugnance or
»V, i68,
258
ALBERT SOREL
reprehension. The trick played on the Venetian democrats, first
encouraged to undermine their government and then, when they
had served their turn, sold along with it, is scandalous indeed.
But Sorel has previously referred to the precedent of the partition
of Poland by Austria, Prussia and Russia and with subtle irony,
but apparently to the satisfaction of his conscience, placed the
matter outside moral categories. When the Austrians, in their
first peace talks with the general, inquired how he intended to
carry out his offer of Venetian territory (the Republic of Venice
being at that moment still neutral) ‘he needed only to quote the
precedents of the Polish partition to release himself from the
obligation of explaining how a state can be brought to agree to
its own dismemberment. But he was anxious to show himself at
home in the best circles, and acquainted with the ways of courts,
and versed in all the tricks of the trade. France, he said, has a
quarrel with the Venetian Republic, and her grievances will
provide the excuse for a declaration of war, which will put us
right with international law.’*
This matter does not prevent Sorel from surrendering whole¬
heartedly to the charm of Bonaparte’s appearance at Mombello.
The young hero, with his Josephine, radiant with success and
genius, and the young men about him, a veritable court,
thoroughly enjoyed their good fortune. As yet they were hardly
ambitious, thinking only of their duties and their pleasures (as
one of them recollected later), while Bonaparte himself was
flattered by Italian poets and intellectuals (one brought him his
Italian translation of Ossian), who celebrated in him their
liberator from the Austrian yoke, from clerical tyranny, the
bringer of life, the bringer of peace. ‘What is more natural,’
exclaims Sorel, ‘in those days of universal illusion, than for all
lovers of liberty to acclaim this young man, who seemed to be
restoring the peoples and reanimating men’s souls? Had not
Europe allowed herself to be fascinated by rulers like Frederick of
Prussia and Catherine of Russia, who were after all no more
than builders of empires and destroyers of nations? For those "who
lived through them these were unforgettable days, of that intensity
which makes one wish the course of life could be suspended; but
life does not stand still, and Bonaparte, far from holding back
events, was the very man to hasten them on.’*
»V. 156. •V.178. •
259
History so romanticized reminds one of Vandal, although this
most unusual mixture of romanticism and refined intellectual
scepticism is peculiar to Sorel. As in Vandal, so here, the radiance
of the hero stands out against the dark background of impotence
and trickery, which is the ‘lawyer’s government’ of the Directory
as described by Sorel. I shall shortly give an account of some of
the arguments advanced against this presentation by other French
historians. First, however, I will summarize the pages in which
Sorel, after his sketch of the pro-consul enjoying his triumph and
letting himself be worshipped, goes on to consider the political
figure, already pregnant with so marvellous a future, in all its’
peculiarities and in relation to the circumstances of France and of
Europe at that time. They are splendid pages, and remarkable if
only for the skill with which he, as it were, transfers to a higher
plane factors which till then had been regard/p^j-t *he proper work¬
ing tools of the writers hostile to Napole(t jg vvitF ambition, the
foreignness, even the unscrupulousness. Tj^n pro*^^ of Sorel’s phi¬
losophy ofhistory is here seen in action, thi^t th-jerved acceptance
of fact, argued with such wit as to acquire drapôe of its own. So
irresistible does the stream ofhistory appear »Qj.lth the irresistibility
of a divine power, nay the divine power, the only one, that submis¬
sion is seen to be virtue, the only virtue.
‘Not the general of a republic, now, but a conqueror in his own
right,’ was the description given in May 1797 by a diplomat. Sorel
agrees with that judgment. Bonaparte learned statesmanship in all
its aspects. Is it surprising, when he compares his rule with that piti¬
able misgovernment in France, that he prefers to put his triumphs
at the service of something other than the ^ greater glory of the
lawyers of the Directory?* ‘Everywhere he Cnêrns interests and
passions, and men who can be led by the^g passions and these
interests, by desire, by ambition, by fear; bef they the oligarchs of
Genoa or those of Venice, the princeling of Sardinia’ (Savoy-
Piedmont), ‘the German Eipperor or the Pope himself. How much
more so the Directory!’ The Directors crawl before him, he is in
fact already the master. Nor did he need a very profound know¬
ledge of history to remember the Pope’s reply, more than a
thousand years ago, to the envoys of Pepin the Short: ‘It is better
that he who wields the power should be given the royal title.’ It
was not the title that worried him, however. Director, Consul
* Remark of Bonaparte himself, noted by Miot 4a Melito; in Sorel, V, 178.
260
ALBERT SOREL
(like I Caesar), Protector (like Cromwell) — he cared not for the
word, but for the matter. ‘From the early days of the French
Revolution political prophets had been foretelling that this revolu¬
tion would find its embodiment in a man, who, through it, would
subdue France and govern her with a power greater than that
which had been Louis XIV’s. Bonaparte saw it, as it had been
divined by Mirabeau and Catherine, but with his Roman vision of
history he had a clearer conception of it than the others. He more
particularly feels it, since this history, which is revealed to his
intellect, lives in him and seems to be living for his sake. He does
not analyse it, he finds no subtle delectation in it; he goes for it,
clearing away one obstacle after another; he sets out for the Em¬
pire after the fashion of Columbus, who reached the new world
while imagining that he was encircling the old. The others are
fearing, expecting or blindly seeking the predicted and inevitable
“Man”. He knows him, for he will be that man. He reveals to
himself his ambition, as his destiny finds its explanation in
history.’‘
In a certain sense he takes the place in Europe of Catherine and
of Frederick. These had dominated public opinion with the help of
the French mind, lured from its allegiance to the imbecile rulers
of France. ‘The Revolution had impetuously won back that
“magistrature” for France. It is to be personified in Bonaparte. If
Frederick was the Philosopher King, he will be the Revolutionary
Emperor. He will say so and believe what he is saying, and for
long the French and the peoples of Europe will say and believe it
with him. And in fact he owes all his strength to the Revolution.
He absorbs the Revolution, he appropriates it, he shares its ele¬
mental passions; in his own person he welds together that spirit of
national expansion and that spirit of royal magnificence which are
so strangely mixed in the popular imagination. He will continue,
with the large majority of Frenchmen, to proclaim: whatever is
conquered for France is won for liberty. And he will think: I am
France.
‘But nevertheless France remains for him a conquered country.
He is no product of the soil; he comes from without. He is the son
of foreigners. The French language is not his mother tongue, it is
for him the acquired language of civilization, the European lan¬
guage. France is not the unexcelled^ the sacred plot where his
1V, 179 sqq.
261
ancestors are buried; it can be extended to wherever his charger
will carry him and his Roman eagles will perch ... Therein lies
his strength. Sufficiently imbued with the French spirit to under¬
stand the popular way of thinking, and be understood by the
people; sufficiently peculiar, in his own genius, to remain separate
from the rest while yet being one with them as part of the army and
the people, this Corsican seized France, and identifies the French
Revolution with himself...’* He admires Frederick and has
made a study of him, but he does not allow himself to be dazzled,
far less taken in. And indeed what a contrast does the patient,
stoical, measured Frederick present, struggling with his narrow-
and poverty-stricken circumstances, counting on nobody but him¬
self. ‘As for Bonaparte, he was from the first moment carried along
with the current, the most vehement which history ever saw let
loose, the richest in human force; it was the French Revolution,
spreading through a generous and exalted nation the passions, the
ambitions, the dreams of greatness, accumulated within the State
by a monarchy of eight centuries, than which no monarchy has
lasted longer. Those growing pains of France, these enthusiastic
armies, that is what has made Bonaparte, through that he is every¬
thing, without it, in spite of his genius, he would be nothing but a
prodigious and powerless individual.’*
Bonaparte himself was conscious of being carried on by that
current, and tended more and more to profess the historical fatal¬
ism which, even though Sorel describes it with a touch of irony, is
fundamentally his own. ‘Events open up so broad a highway for
him, he always manages to be so ready to put them to his advan¬
tage, he finds the history of Europe and the prodigious adventure
of his life linked up so curiously and so constantly, that he comes
to look upon his destiny as a kind of law of nature, of which he is
the executor.’* ‘I declare’, says Napoleon at the zenith of his
power, ‘that I am the greatest slave among men, my master has no
entrails, and that master is the nature of things.’
Returning to the Bonaparte of 1797 Sorel shows him surveying
all Europe, and sometimes letting his gaze rest far beyond. The
thoughts that stir within him, though he keeps them to himself,
are always thoughts that live in the French peoples and emerge
from their history. ‘France he sees peopled by men, Italy by
children, Holland by pot-bellied merchants, Germany by herds
*V, i.Sosqq. *V, 183. • V, 185.
262
ALBERT SOREL
enclosed within fences which their masters shift at will.’* The
obstacle is England, or rather the English oligarchy, for, says
Sorel, he makes the same mistakes as the Convention, and separ¬
ates the people of England from their government. England
must be overthrown, for otherwise the new order in France
cannot survive, and then . . . Europe is ours, and then for the
Mediterranean Sea, Egypt. .. ‘The dream,’ comments Sorel,
once more connecting these ambitions with the tradition, ‘the
dream which has fired French imaginations since the crusades....’
It is in this volume that Sorel lays, as it were, the foundation for
his treatment of Napoleon as ruler of France, while from time to
time casting a glance towards those later years. I shall give one
more quotation from it. It is well known that Hoche, who was
commander-in-chief of the army of the Rhine in 1797, was the
only general whose personality and prestige stamped him as a
possible competitor for Bonaparte should a military government
become unavoidable. He died in September 1797, just after the
coup d'etat of Fructidor, which was originally to have taken place
under his direction, at the age of thirty-four. He has gone down to
history as a true republican, a sincere lover of liberty. Sorel,
with a respect through which pierces a scarcely veiled scepti¬
cism, refers to ‘le noble culte’ devoted to Hoche’s memory by
republican France.
‘Hoche benefited from the immense deception to which the
Empire was to give rise. .. France embellishes him with all her
retrospective illusions and imagines that, if he had lived, she
might with his help have broken her cruel destiny . .. The least
Italian, the least Anglo-Saxon of men, neither puritan nor
Machiavellian, as little familiar with the Bible as with the Digests,
but a reader of Sully, whose chimeras of a Europe pacified by the
Franks appealed to his imagination, while Bonaparte on the other
hand nourished his mind with the maxims and the State realism
of Frederick; the most completely and most fundamentally French
of all the heroes of the Revolution ... Would he have been strong
enough to control himself and the victorious nation, to curb the
lust for conquest, and, once the conquest was achieved, to win,
by his use of it, the forgiveness of Europe for France’s supremacy?
Would he have been able to mollify that Europe which refused
to ratify French conquests, being loath to undergo French
»V, 188.
263
supremacy? ... Could he have compelled England to accept and
to respect the Roman peace of the Republic? England alone,
tough, inaccessible on her island and irreconcilable in her age¬
long rivalry, is enough to discourage all hypothetical conclusions
... But the French will go on pursuing, with the shade of Hoche,
the chimefa pursued in vain by their fathers, renewing, against
the evidence of the facts, and against the written documents of the
past, the struggle sustained by their fathers against the nature
of European reality, the hereditary tendencies of the French
nation, and the necessities of the Revolution; so beautiful was this
desire to reconcile, without in any way sacrificing one to the'
other, these three ideals, which a century ago mutually destroyed
one another’s liberty, the Republic, and the Rhine frontier.’*
I said that Sorel’s scepticism was scarcely veiled, but I might
have put it more strongly still. For though at first he appears to be
considering Hoche’s possibilities with an open mind, his respect
for what hcis happened, for the unshakable historical fact,
increases as he writes, and thus brings him to an eloquent expres¬
sion of that fatalistic view of history which is to dominate the
following volumes of his work.
CRITICISM OF GUYOT AND MURET

The fifth volume of VEurope et la Revolution frangaise which
appeared after so long an interruption of the great work, made a
great impression in France and elsewhere. The colourfulness and
vivacity of its descriptions, of which my quotations give little idea,
set within a scheme which for all its compass hangs together
remarkably well, were bound to fascinate and impress its readers.
Houssaye, Masson and even Vandal (to say nothing of Arthur-
L^vy), who hardly gave a more favourable picture of Napoleon
than Sorel, laid themselves much more open to the charge of
partisanship. Sorel appeared to view the fray from serene heights,
and to deliver his judgments in the name of History alone. But
the professional historians had many objections.
In the Revue d'histoire modeme et contemporaine for the same years,
1903-04, there appeared an article by Raymond Guyot and Pierre
Muret. ‘Etude critique sur Bonaparte et le Directoire par M. Albert
Sorel’, which ran to some fifty large pages. The writers begin by
mentioning the general praise which the work was receiving.
* V, 324
264
ALBERT SOREL
They consider it superfluous to add their own tribute of admira¬
tion, but deem it highly necessary to warn readers against the
opinion, here and there expressed, that Sorel had said the last
word on the problems of foreign policy under the Directory.
‘After this attempt at synthesis,’ they conclude, ‘there is still
room for numerous and important studies of the subject.’ Indeed
one of them, Guyot, was to present a thesis of about nine hundred
pages to the Faculty of Letters in the University of Paris, entitled
Le Directoire et la paix de P Europe^
They begin with a minutely detailed analysis of Sorel’s docu¬
mentation. No history of foreign politics, they assert, is satisfac¬
tory which does not take into account records of other govern¬
ments. Now here Sorel fell seriously short. Where published
sources were not available he had undertaken no archive research,
yet such research was essential, particularly in Berlin, London,
Spain and Italy. But even the French archives were used in a
perfunctory manner. The result is an excessive number of gaps
and misapprehensions, which the reader, charmed by the flawless
presentation and beguiled by the writer’s assured tone, fails to
notice, although they undermine the foundations of the book.
The liveliest episodes, the most striking judgments and the
broadest conclusions, turn out to be built on a quite insufficient
factual basis. This is all the more dangerous because Sorel is so
much inclined to see history in the guise of a system, or to force
it into a system. Conversely the critics find in this passion for
system an explanation of the insufficiency of factual material.
‘Did not M. Sorel’, they inquire, ‘to a certain extent, and of
course unconsciously, distort his facts, if only by the way in
which he narrated them, and did he not frequently allow his
attention to be diverted from the critical study of facts to that
imposing edifice of ideas which he was proposing to build?’
They argue that on two important points, both of which in¬
fluenced his view of Napoleon, the facts not only fail to justify
Sorel’s ‘system’ but actually contradict it. The first point concerns
the peace negotiations with England in 1796 and again in 1797. It
is true that General Bonaparte in Italy had directly little hand in
this, but Sorel’s whole theory concerning his career and his place
^ It is known that in France more is expected from a these than from the doctoral
dissertation in Holland (or in Great Britain). It is written by older students, its
scope is greater, and it takes a considerable place among the productions of
scholarship.
265
in French history rests, as we have seen, on the hypothesis that
there could be no end to the war with England, as long as France
did not renounce the natural frontiers conquered since 1793, and
especially the Southern Netherlands.
And indeed of both these negotiations Sorel maintains that they
were not seriously meant. Pitt entered into them merely to demon¬
strate to an uneasy public that France would not be prepared to
give up the Southern Netherlands. That he would never have con¬
sidered making peace while the French were still in Antwerp is a pro¬
position which Sorel thinks it hardly necessary to argue. English
historians have tried to show that Pitt’s attempts to conclude peace
were sincere. Bourgeois was convinced of this. As a matter of fact
Austria’s defection from the coalition and her readiness to accept
Venice in exchange for the Southern Netherlands had been most
discouraging to England. Just because it was of such importance
for Sorel’s whole argument to show not only that these negotiations
had failed but that they could not have succeeded, it might have
been expected that he would have gone thoroughly into the matter.
But here too his documentation is totally inadequate, and he
makes statements concerning instructions and intentions which,
when the documents are examined, are seen to be wide of the
mark.
The second point concerns the contrast consistently shown
between the Directory and the commander-in-chief in Italy, and
which in Sorel’s book, no less than in Vandal’s, turns out so much
to the advantage of the latter. Sorel’s picture of Bonaparte as the
liberator, the state-builder, in Italy, is matched by a presentation
of the Directory concerned with nothing but robbery, intent
upon squeezing the inhabitants dry, and indifferent as to the
regime to be set up after the Austrians had been driven out. It was
Bonaparte and the military in general who had to protect the
Italians against the greed of the self-seeking commissioners ap¬
pointed by the Directory. Ît was Bonaparte who saw the impor¬
tance of spreading revolutionary principles.
The critics show in detail the inaccuracy of all this. I can only
select a few out of the many observations based upon very precise
data. To begin with, Sorel exaggerates not a little the indepen¬
dence of Bonaparte’s conduct and the fear he inspired among the
Directors. In one case he is shown to have kept to their instruc¬
tions, though Sorel stated that he exceeded diem. In another,
266
ALBERT SOREL
where he did exceed his instructions, the Directors did not hesitate
to rebuke him. But in particular it is shown to be untrue that the
Directory had forgotten revolutionary principles. If they delayed
in setting up republican regimes it was as a result of reports
received from their agents concerning the disinclination and im¬
maturity of the inhabitants. As soon as a change in this attitude
develops, the government in Paris proceeds with the republicaniz-
ing without having to be spurred on by Bonaparte. Sorel praises
Bonaparte for having considered the possibility of a religious paci¬
fication through the medium of the Pope — a foreshadowing of the
Concordat policy — while in Paris men still clung to the blind
intolerance of Convention days. The documents, however, show
that the Directory itself had already laid down the main lines of
the policy.
As regards the sucking dry of the inhabitants and the personal
corruption of civil agents in particular, Sorel’s assertions and
distribution of blame are indeed reckless. He neglects to distin¬
guish between different kinds of commissioners. For example he
assumes that one well-known personality had misappropriated
funds (as according to him they all did), when in fact this man
was a political commissioner, direct representative of the Direc¬
tory, and, having nothing whatever to do with finances, provision¬
ing the army or taxation, did not have any funds at his disposal.
But, and this is important for the right understanding of the
relationships, according to the two critics there is no ground for
this belief in the nobility of the military and the depravity of the
civil agents and authorities. I have already quoted a passage from
Sorel which shows what far-reaching conclusions he based on this
belief. ‘ Sorel writes as if the Directory either ordered or at least
approved all violence or extortion at the expense of the Italian
population, while generals and the few honest agents, who wished
to spare the people, protect religion and curb looting, were
suspected in Paris of ‘moderantisme’, of weakness, if not of
intelligence with the enemy.
He gives as example the case of General Championnet. ‘This
rough soldier loved order — he was, as an Italian testified, a
righteous man.’ The commissioners came to Naples, where Gham-
pionnet was in command, and their doings drove the inhabitants
to despair. Sternly Championnet dismissed the troublemakers and
* See above, p. 258.
267
sent them away. Whereupon the Directory had him up before a
court martial, and that was the end of order and justice in Naples.
The whole anecdote seems to have been taken from memoirs,
always a source to be used with caution. In this case the writer
from whom most of the story is taken was an officer, a furious
supporter of Championnet and critic of the commissioners....
Guyot and Muret expound a general theory which is the op¬
posite of Sorel’s. Those who abused their power and were most
greedy for money were the military, acting in connivance with
corrupt agents. The Directory’s civil agents had their work cut
out tracking down and suppressing these activities and they did
so at the instruction of the Directory and with its support. The
critics give one example, that of ‘the notorious Halier’, a banker
and farmer of military contributions. Repeatedly accused of cor¬
rupt practices, he was protected first by Bonaparte, afterwards by
General Brune, till he was finally expelled from Italy in 1799 at the
insistence of a political agent.*
Guyot and Muret do not refer to Vandal, but the reader will
perhaps have noticed that their corrections of Sorel also affect the
picture presented in Vavenement de Bonaparte.
But let me confine myself to Sorel. The criticism of his work
cuts deep, and appears to me to be irrefutable. As regards actual
diplomatic history the fifth volume is unsatisfactory, and we shall
have to take account of similar criticism of later volumes. (It
should be noticed in passing that for volumes two to four, dealing
with the Revolution itself, the documentation is much more solid.)
The thesis so dear to the writer, so often repeated and examined
from different angles, has certainly not been proven. His work
does indeed provide us with a striking example of the historian who
approaches history with his opinions ready made and who seeks
only those facts necessary to support them.
There is no need for me to remark that such a method is open to
serious objections. It is certainly not an ideal way of writing
history to construct theories without the most careful examination
of the facts and without testing them all the time against what can
be established as objective historical reality. But it should not for
i
' I merely note that a later and very extensive work, J. Godechot, LesCommiisairet
aux armies sous le Directoire, I94i> reaches conclusions which entirely justify the
theory of Guyot and Muret. Cf. also in Tijdsckrift voor GeschiedeniSf 194/^ Bartstra^s
thorou^ and instructive article; 'Nieuwe inzichten in de geschiedenis van het
Z)>Vecto»Ve>tijdvak«'
268
ALBERT SOREL
that reason be assumed that Sorel’s work, or its last four volumes,
is worthless. Not even Guyot and Muret suggest that. They
merely conclude that ‘the work seems to us lacking, not in value,
to be sure, but in solidity. M, Sorel’s work, whatever has been
said about it, is not “definitive”. His judgment is not a “verdict”.’
This is absolutely true. Scarcely tnore than that can be expected
from critics who, while the air around them resounds with praise,
have been spending weeks or months studying the shortcomings,
superficialities, mistakes and omissions of the work in question. I
could only have wished that these two excellent historians could
have suppressed a certain spitefulness to be detected in their
remarks concerning ‘the agreeable style of M. Sorel’, as if it were
the sole cause of his popularity.
Sorel, indeed, remains great, for all his shortcomings, and in
this fifth volume, too, not only as stylist, but as historian. In histori¬
cal writing imagination and constructive powers must be kept
severely subdued to critical judgment, but they are nevertheless
qualities belonging to the great historian. Sorel possessed them to
a high degree. We must not accept his views passively, but his
statement of the problem never lacks importance. Even where he
only stimulates disagreement the reader’s understanding is
deepened. Nor do we get the untenable thesis all the time; facts do
not always have to be twisted to suit it, and the untenable itself has
its relative truth. Here are striking observations, amazingly appo¬
site parallels, glimpses of unexpected connections, in short, the
reader is introduced to a rich and lively mind, and he will have to
beware lest he be swept away. Yet some advantage will be gained
from considering a little more closely the volumes that follow.
THE PEACE OF AMIENS (VOLUME VI )
It is only in volume six that the thesis constructed by Sorel as

he was dealing with the history of the first revolutionary wars, and
outlined above, comes to rule supreme. He certainly had not lost
sight of it in volume five, but it appeared as if the figure of Bona¬
parte might to a certain extent escape from it. The pro-consul who
imposed his policy on the Directory, and had a quite individual and
special interest in Italy, could easily have been presented as an un¬
expected element in the situation. But Sorel never did so explicitly.
Now, and until the very end, the Pint Consul and Emperor is
269
subjected to what Sorel seems to regard as an iron law of nature,
the thesis that an enduring peace, especially with England, but
also with Austria, and even with Prussia and Russia, was impos¬
sible while France continued in possession of her natural frontiers,
that is, of the Rhineland, Savoy, and above all the Southern
Netherlands, conquered in the first flush of revolutionary enthu¬
siasm, and declared inalienable parts of the one and indivisible
state, by a decree of 1795 which possessed constitutional authority.*
From this point of view the violation of the peace of Amiens was
not, as I previously called it,* the turning-point in Napoleon’s.
career as ruler of France. The fatal change had taken place before
Bonaparte entered the political arena. Amiens could be no more
than a truce, and it was not the First Consul, but as he called it
‘the nature of things’* which drew France into the new conflict,
which was to end only with 1814-15 and the fall of France.
Quite different interpretations and explanations, however, had
been given to account for the course of events. Bourgeois’s view
will be recalled.* There was also an article by Martin Philippson
which appeared shortly before in the Revue historique,' and in
which, after a careful analysis of the data, the blame for the viola¬
tion of the peace was ascribed to Bonaparte. A view existed that
England in 1802, exhausted and discouraged by the second col¬
lapse of the continental coalition and the defection of Austria and
Russia, was undoubtedly ready to allow France to retain the
Rhineland and even Belgium. To Justify his thesis, therefore, it
was incumbent on Sorel to devote particular attention to the treaty
of Amiens and its failure, nor did he omit to do so. His discussion of
this problem forms an important part of his sixth volume.
The preliminaries for an Anglo-French peace were completed in
London at the beginning of October 1801. It was not till March
25th of the following year that the final treaty was signed at
Amiens.
Sorel is not so naive as to attempt, like Thiers,* to present Bona-
' UEurope et la RSvolution franâise^ IV, 431. * cf. above, p. 58.

• cf. above, p. 262. * cf. above, pp. 242 sqq,
® *La paix d*Amiens et la politique de mpol^n Ier\ Reme Historique^ vols.
LXXV and LXXVI. Martin Philippson, professor in Brussels, who has done much
useful work mostly on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history, writing in both
French and in German, was not a Frenchman. For which reason I do not intend
to cite his concltisions further. (They were most decisively in support of tnc view
that Napoleon provoked the war.) '
• See above, p. 58.
270
ALBERT SOREL
parte as seriously inclined for peace. The peace, he says, was a
move in his game. The French public, which he was at the same
time wooing with the Concordat, expected it of him. He never
regarded the settlement as anything other than a truce, but it was
to strengthen his internal position, and win time for him to con¬
solidate his newly won mastery of Germany and Italy. He would
be able to renew the fight with all the more vigour later.
The London Government (Pitt had had to resign a few months
before and Addington’s ministry was in office) was ‘inclined, for
similar reasons, and with the same undeclared motives’ to accept
a breathing space.' England had been left to face France alone.
In this isolation invasion was an unpleasant possibility, and it was
feared, moreover, that Bonaparte would close the whole continent
to English trade. In case of a settlement, connections could once
more be resumed with the former allies. Both Austria and Russia
seemed to offer possibilities. Moreover, the English confidently
expected to make a clever trade treaty and restore British finances
at the cost of France herself. It is true that most of Pitt’s former
colleagues raised objections, but Pitt supported the idea, antici¬
pating that disappointments arising from the peace would make a
renewal of the war acceptable to public opinion, and that mean¬
while ‘the truce’ would give an opportunity for the necessary
internal reforms.
This is, to begin with, an astonishing passage. Sorel, as he often
does, begins by giving a long list of sources and contemporary
literature of which he has made use. He fails, however, to account
for his assertions individually, a bad habit ^dready condemned by
the contemporary usage of scholars. It is thus not made clear how
he was able to probe the souls of the Addington ministry and of
Pitt so confidently. Certainly the older French writers, Bignon,
Armand Lefebvre and Thiers, all give a similar interpretation.
Data from the English side, however, all show, not only that the
public at large was relieved that the endless war was over, but that
the government had given up the continent as lost, and placed
their hope for the future in the strengthening of their extra-
European position, that, in other words, they were willing to give
the peace a trial, provided Bonaparte did not make it too difficult
for them. As for Pitt, he defended the peace in the House of
Commons as an honourable settlement, not lacking in advantage,
‘VI. IS7.
271
and expressed himself in similar terms in such of his letters as have
come down to us. A few of his former colleagues disagreed, but
Sorel’s statement that this was true of most of them is incorrect.
I shall not analyse Sorel’s account of the difficult negotiations
which dragged on for six months before the peace treaty was
signed. The scorn with which he speaks of Joseph, ‘ who with
Talleyrand was the official negotiator at Amiens, who gathered all
the liberal and faint-hearted elements of the political world round
him by blaming the warlike proclivities of his brother, and who
was so blind as to believe England to be sincere in her desire of
peace — and himself to be able to administer France better than
Napoleon — the animosity with which he constantly accuses the
English government and its negotiators of tricks, evasions and
obstructions; all this is intended to create an atmosphere in which
the reader will accept his conclusion that the English were never
serious about the peace. But our suspicions have been aroused by
the passage quoted previously, and we now notice quite distinctly
that not a single action of the British government is mentioned,
not an utterance by any of its statesman quoted, which would
justify the accusation of bad faith.
It is certainly true that even before the peace was signed opinion
in England had grown much less optimistic. Sorel would have us
think that France’s amazing recovery under Bonaparte had
aroused envy and anxiety among the English. He describes the
surprise of those who visited France after the cessation of hostilities
and who found a country very different from what they had
expected.*
Instead of wanton excess in the midst of devastation and im¬
poverishment, ‘they found cultivated lands, plentiful, abundant
and well cared for cattle, neat cottages, factories under construc¬
tion; everywhere order, people working, contentment, returning
prosperity, a nation growing like a healthy body with powerful
organs cheerfully functioning... And instead of a successful mili¬
tary adventurer, they saw a statesman, and one of the most impres¬
sive bearing. Those who were most favourably inclined expected
something like a cross between Cromwell and Washington; the
most cultivated and the most ingenious’ (everybody will notice
the indirect thrust at Taine) ‘had amused themselves by giving the
^ It is worthwhile noting that he here quotes Masson,
• VI, 241 sqq.
272
ALBERT SOREL
petty squire from Corsica the features of an Italian condoUiere of the
fourteenth century, changed, by the strangest conjuring trick, into
the dictator of a revolution born of Jean-Jacques, Diderot and
Voltaire. What they in fact discovered — an infinitely more
natural spectacle for France — was the gmie d’£tat of the eternal
rival revived in a single man, who was, for the greater glory of the
grande nation reconstituting the State of Louis XIV.’
It is worth our while once more to note how completely Sorel
accepts Bonaparte as the personification of the French State idea.
His views concerning Mme de Stael and Taine had prepared us
for this. But let us stick to the problem of the renewed war with
England. It is not impossible that the spectacle described by Sorel
may have caused some Englishmen to regret a peace which suited
France so well. Nevertheless, it is more natural to attribute the
rising scepticism about a policy of reconciliation in the main to the
blunt manner in which, even before the final treaty, Bonaparte
revealed the ambitions at the back of his mind. Although the
treaty with Austria had guaranteed the independence of both the
Batavian and the Cisalpine Republics, the First Consul strength¬
ened his hold on both in the first months of 1802. Moreover, he
immediately sent a strong expedition to conquer San Domingo,
which was to all intents and purposes independent under its negro
ruler Toussaint L’ Ouverture. He purchased Louisiana from Spain.
Worst of all, perhaps, he turned a deaf ear to the English sug¬
gestions for a trade treaty, and even closed his Italian vassal states
to English goods. Sorel, as much under the sway of protectionist
views as was the First Consul himself, may write as though a trade
treaty could only result in the enrichment of England at the
expense of France; it is clear, however, that these measures in
their totality must crush English expectations of any real slacken¬
ing of the tension. And yet even so they allowed themselves to be
pressed into signing a peace treaty without any of the concessions
which they had tried to obtain.
Before going on to deal with the subsequent events which led to
the expiration of the peace little more than a year later, Sorel
pronounced its funeral oration. It is a passage of remarkable
eloquence and a happy sample of his skill in decking out his thesis
with all the power and splendour of his philosophical ingenuity
and his broad historical outlook.
Glorious though the peace might be for the Consular Republic,
s 273
it was no more than a show piece, an illusion. ‘Later on Napoleon
said: “At Amiens I imagined in all good faith that I had settled
France’s destiny and my own ... I was planning to devote myself
exclusively to the administration of France, and I believe that I
could have worked wonders. I might have achieved the moral
conquest of Europe, just as I have been on the verge of accom¬
plishing it by arms.” ’ If one compares this with what Thiers has
to say about Amiens, ^ it will be seen that he did no more here, too,
than follow Napoleon himself. Sorel is more subtle. ‘It was on
St. Helena that he spoke in this way,’ he continues, ‘where he
fought his lost battles over again, Leipzig and Waterloo, winning
them, and fashioning his life according to his exile’s dreams.’ I
remark in passing that the sincerity of Napoleon’s statement is here
accepted. It is also possible to see in it the conscious creation of a
legend for the sake of his good name with posterity and for the
future of his son. Sorel continues: ‘Thus the people, eternal
dreamer and poet of its own legend, pictures the history of its past
in the likeness of what it would have wished it to be, and moulds
its own destiny to its desires. It divests itself of its passions, which
it no longer understands, and sets up cardboard scenery along the
way as was done for the great Catherine when she went to see the
lands conquered for her by Potemkin. No doubt the hour was a
lovely and a brilliant one; but while that might be a motive for
wishing it to last, it was hardly to be expected that Nature should
interrupt her march and the miracle ofJoshua be repeated. Bona¬
parte attempted — impelled by his interest — to maintain the
continent in the state of submission to which he had reduced it and
to make use of the freedom of action he had obtained for himself
to seek in India and in America for advantages from the peace. He
made the attempt; but it was that very effort to stand on the peace
of Amiens in Europe, and to develop it in France by trade and
industry and by colonial expansion which caused England to
decide on the rupture.’ (I shall in a moment recall the occasion
of the resumption of hostilities. It will then be seen whether this
can with reason be described as ‘standing on the peace of Amiens
in Europe and developing it in France’) ... ‘The treaty of Amiens,
like so many others, proved a precarious achievement, an edifice
of clay built on shifting sands. To judge it one must put it in its
perspective, between its causes and its consequences, which latter
* See above, p. 58.
274
ALBERT SOREL
were but the continuation of its causes ... It is enough to have
followed the negotiations’ (I have, however, indicated how difficult
it is to do so in Sorel’s account) ‘to discern how this peace came to
be shattered. All the avenues by which it had approached its
conclusion were prolonged into so many ways of escape down
which it disappeared.
‘To make the peace of Amiens a lasting one, Europe should have
attributed to it a character possessed by none of the preceding
treaties, neither by that of Nymegen, nor by those of Ryswyk,
Utrecht, Aix-la-Chapelle, Paris, nor even by the latest, Campo-
Formio and Lundville. Europe, three times leagued against Louis
XIV because that king had cast ambitious eyes on part only of the
conquests of 1802, once more leagued, in 1792, to throw back a
France judged too powerful, and to break, in the words of an
Austrian statesman, the spring of that formidable State machine,
should have accepted as a fixed arrangement what as a plan and
as an attempt she had detested like the very monster Leviathan
and fought consistently.
‘There should have been a France who checked herself in the
full rush of her revolutionary ardours, appeasing the passions
which had for the last ten years urged her on to spread out over
Europe, and which had brought her to this triumphant moment;
there should have been a France who turned her enthusiasm into
common sense, her pride into modesty, her impetuosity into
caution; who thought of nothing but how to enjoy within her
magnificent territory the boons of liberty, the products of the
labour and the genius of her people, to enrich herself, to create
masterpieces; she would even have had to give up her interest in
colonial conquests, and surrender Egypt, India, the Antilles, the
Mediterranean, in order not to give umbrage to the English; she
would, by a commercial treaty, have had to open her market to
their industry at the risk of ruining her own, in order to console
them for the loss of Antwerp and Cologne, abandoning her arsenals,
calling back her fleets, retreating before the English on every
ocean; she would have had to retreat before Austria in Italy and
restore Lombardy to her, before Prussia in Germany; she would
have had to allow to Russia the supremacy in the Holy Empire and
tutelage over the Ottoman Empire. And, what is even more im¬
probable, there should have been a Europe which, fascinated by
so much moderation, would refrain from pushing on as France
275
retreated; a France preserving enough prestige and a Europe
enough self-control to permit French Republicans and Kings in
coalition against the Revolution to put by their arms, each on
their bank of the Rhine, and to respect the marks of “nature” as
the Convention had indicated them.
‘There should have been an Austria which did not regret Bel¬
gium nor pretend to the supremacy in Italy; a non-covetous
Prussia without any thoughts of supremacy in Germany; a Russia
turning away from Europe in order to occupy herself with Asia
solely; and, most paradoxical of all these metamorphoses, an
England ceasing to be English, exclusive and ferocious, in order to'
find happiness in cosmopolitanism, no longer out for the control
of the Mediterranean nor for the sovereignty of the seas; a creeping
paralysis would have to seize that England in the abundance of her
strength and activity, with her traditions, her passions, her pride,
her banks, her mines, her furnaces, her thousands of emigrants, her
fleets, her merchants, her trading City, her howling “mob”, her
Parliament demanding war to the bitter end, her inexhaustible
credit, her contraband trade as lucrative as the legitimate, her
untameable pertinacity, her genius for enterprise and for alliances;
the England of the Hundred Years War, of William the Third,
of Chatham, of Pitt.‘ That is to say, there ought to have been
another Europe, another France, other peoples, other govern¬
ments; the history of our Europe would have to have swerved from
the course it had followed ever since the fourteenth century, and
the French Revolution must have turned back on its steps.
‘And finally let us add to this the man, Bonaparte, whose person
and character count for as much at this juncture as those of Pitt in
England or of Alexander in Russia, and who can no more be left
out of account in future events than in those which went before:
the Italian campaigns, the Egyptian expedition, Marengo and the
treaty of Luneville. The lovers of speculation, who dispose of his
genius so light-heartedly, require a manifestation of that genius
more prodigious than all he ever vouchsafed to the world: not only
that he should transform himself, but that he should modify the
nature of things, that he should become another man in another
Europe... Later, and from afar’ (undoubtedly once more from
St. Helena) ‘he said, “I may have conceived a good many plans,
but I was never free to execute one of them. For all that I held
‘ The elder Pitt, minister during the Seven Years War.
276
ALBERT SOREL
the rudder, and with so strong a hand, the waves were a good deal
stronger. I never was in truth my own master; I was always
governed by circumstances”. ’* >
One may estimate the element of apology in this utterance of
Napoleon’s as highly as one likes. One may detect in Sorel’s
dissertation other weaknesses than those I have pointed out. One
may in the end reject his conclusion and continue to hold the view
that Napoleon did have a choice at this juncture and chose war,
not because all the forces of the present and the past within and
without France drove him to it, but because he cherished plans
and ambitions, he, Napoleon Bonaparte, which could only be
realized through war. Yet even then one is obliged to take account
of a whole class of factors, a whole chain of ideas, which correct an
over-simplified view of Napoleon’s responsibility.
CRITICISM OF sorel’s CONCEPTION
Let me not, however, refrain from criticism on that account.

Sorel, repeating Napoleon, refers to ‘the nature of things’. But I
have already shown how much in the case of England the writer
adapted the nature of things to suit his own purpose. The decline
in England’s enthusiasnj for war, the timid acquiescence of the
new government, even Pitt’s concurrence in the peace policy, all
these factors he either ignores or disguises. That Parliament of his
imagination, clamouring for war, actually passed the prelimi¬
naries and even the peace treaty with an overwhelming majority
and amid the applause of that ‘howling mob’. And as for France,
is it really necessary to imagine another France in order to see a
people sick of war and anxious to dedicate itself to peaceful
activities?
It will be remembered that according to Bourgeois, Bonaparte
was compelled, in order to get his war, to throw f and in the eyes of
the French, hiding his real objectives in Egypt and the East, while
seizing hold of everything that would revive the old distrust and
rivalry towards England; in that way he hoped at the same time
to rouse the English to such a state of irritation that they would
declare the war and thus provide him with the excuse he needed
for the benefit of the French public.
When one reads an account of these events (several have been
touched upon already), in a large textbook, or, say, in the article
‘ VI, 202-5.
277
of Martin Philippson, the interpretation that Bonaparte exercised
deliberate provocation is bound to arise in one’s mind. The First
Consul continued to expand his power in Italy, for instance by the
annexation of Piedmont — clearly outside the natural frontiers —
while in Switzerland he established his influence by military inter¬
vention. No wonder that all this caused anxiety in England. The
worst, however, was the provocative tone in which Bonaparte
dismissed all English queries about these matters or about what¬
ever increase of power on the Continent he permitted himself.*
The Treaty of Amiens had stipulated nothing about all this and
therefore England had not the right to meddle. In the end he even
used the unheard of threat that the objections of the British
Government could only excite his appetite for conquests and in¬
duce him to establish that empire of the west they feared so much.*
Then there was not only the refusal of a commercial treaty, but
also a number of economic and even financial measures discrimi¬
nating against the English. Finally there was the publication in
the Moniteur of Sebastiani’s amazing report about Egypt* — the
most amazing thing about it was the fact of its publication! How¬
ever desirous of avoiding a conflict, the British Government now
refused to continue conversations about the evacuation of Malta,
which it had undertaken at Amiens, unless the First Consul was
prepared to give explanations about Piedmont and Switzerland —
‘trivialities’ exclaimed Bonaparte to Lord Whitworth — as well as
about Egypt. Gradually, and not least as the result of the public
scene which he soon made against Whitworth,* the patience of the
weak London Government became exhausted, while the protests
of the anti-French party grew louder — for undoubtedly there was
such a party, the friends of Pitt had never ceased to proclaim the
view that propitiatory words and soft manners were not the treat¬
ment for the Corsican. So at last the breach came.
Of course Sorel, too, mentions all these questions and incidents.
Why then, one might ask, does not his account lead irresistibly to
the conclusion that an exhausted and hesitating England was
roused to fresh efforts by the irrepressible turbulence of this dicta¬
torial conqueror? History makes a choice from the infinite
I refrain from drawing parallels between these events and those of our own time;
they are obvious. I must, nevertheless, recall how after the Munich Agreement
Hider took the line that England and France had no say in the affairs of Eastern
Europe.
* Sec above, p. 59. • ibid. * See above, p. 58.
278
ALBERT SOREL
multiplicity and diversity of life. A review such as I have given by
no means exhausts the possibilities. Sorel finds many other aspects,
utterances and events which he brings to the fore. It appears
certain that Bonaparte did not think the Britisli would dare throw
themselves so quickly into another war. In the spring of 1803 he
was himself not entirely ready, and therefore repeatedly expressed
his desire to preserve the peace. On the other hand it would be
foolish to imagine that the body of English public opinion, apart
from that section of it which opposed war on various grounds, was
only concerned with the fate of those small continental states
which had been subjugated by Bonaparte, and was in no way
influenced by hatred of the French, fear of the Revolution, or
commercial imperialism. I have already quoted the passage in
which Sorel describes the impression made on English travellers
by the new France, ^ and I emphasized that he did not omit to add*
that they not only admired but were full of consternation. France
was not only becoming too powerful; she was too prosperous and
too industrious. ‘And England puts herself on her guard, deter¬
mined to apply in industrial strife the same system as in the
struggle for colonies; preventive war.’
Seen in the framework of such tendentious observations, inter¬
spersed with facts and opinions of quite different tenor, the
arguments which I brought together to support the view of Bona¬
parte as provoker of the war of 1803 lose much of their force.
Perhaps it will have to be called a subjective judgment, but I am
inclined to suggest that Sorel’s presentation, his selection of this
rather than that factor, was decided in the first place by his French
nationalism, which made him fiercely anti-British (it must not be
forgotten that he was writing under the recent impression of
Fashoda and of the Boer War), and secondly by his enslavement
to his thesis, itself not born without the assistance of that same
French nationalism, to that historical fatalism to which it was his
ambition to subject not only this particular critical problem but
the whole of his great work from the first page to the last.
This judgment, it should be added, was immediately formulated
by French historians as well. The Revue d'histoire modeme et contem-
poraine* again had a very detailed study by Muret. The'French¬
man does not speak of French nationalism as motivating sentiment,
but places all the more stress upon historical determinism. In
* p. • VI, a4a. • VI, 7a4-4*-
279 I
contradistinction to the article written in collaboration with Guyot
he now pays generous tribute to the great qualities of the author,
but he still has serious criticisms to make on his method and tech¬
nique. In connection with the problem of the peace and its breach
in 1802 and 1803, of which he too recognizes the central impor¬
tance, he is not convinced by Sorel’s interpretation. The thesis,
he considers, is most forcefully propounded, but in dealing with
sp'ecific problems the author leaves one too often unsatisfied. He
takes no notice of the arguments of Bourgeois and Martin Philipp-
son. Finally, ‘M. Sorel’s views are not sufficiently supported by
facts and the critical method behind them is not sound enough to
permit of their unreserved acceptance.’*
SOREL AND DRIAULT ON THE THIRD COALITION

(1805), VOLUME VI
The story in volume six of the failure of the peace of Amiens

and the argument that England never took the peace seriously are
essential in the construction of Sorel’s work, but equally important
is his account of the completion and the purpose of the Third
Coalition (Russia, Austria and England, 1805), particularly the
Anglo-Russian alliance of April nth, 1805. His presentation,
however, is so distorted, that I propose, for the orientation of the
reader, to give a short summary of the facts as set out by another
writer, Edouard Driault,»with whom I shall be dealing in more
detail later. In his Napoleon et VEurope Driault went over the whole
ground covered by Sorel some years later. His second volume,
with which we are concerned here, dates from 1912.
Napoleon had been at war with England since 1803. As we
already know, instead of concentrating all his attention on the
proposed Channel expedition, he had simultaneously pursued his
Italian ambitions, thereby alarming and irritating both Russia
^ I must note here a little book which appeared in 1904, shortly after Sorci’s
sixth volume: NapoUon et rAngleterre, 1803-1813^ by P. Coquelle. It disputes
SorePs theory (which was also that of Bignon, Armand Lefebvre and Thiers, as the
writer points out) concerning the breach of the peace of 1803 on the grounds of new
data from French and English archives. Coquelle depicts Napoleon as quite con¬
sciously shaping his course for war, because he expected to get his Imperial crown
through war; he considers that the English showed remarkable patience unde^ his
rudeness and provocations; and that the annexation of Holland was the chief factor
which made them decide on war. Coquelle was not a University historian (cf. below,
p. 351). In various places he expresses himself quite sharply concerning Napoleon,
but in the Introduction - this is typical of his period - he &inks it necessary more
or less to apologize for this.
280 '
ALBERT SOREL
and Austria, Russia by his occupation of Tarento in Naples in
1803 (Russia’s interest in the eastern shores of the Mediterranean
made her always sensitive here), and Austria by making the Cisal¬
pine Republic into a kingdom with himself as king, in defiance of
the treaty of Luneville, which guaranteed its independence. To
make matters worse he took the title of King of Italy which gave
rise to suspicion of the most far reaching plans. Announced March
1805, the coronation took place at Milan in May of the same year.
Europe was even more agitated by the subsequent annexation of
Genoa (the Lugurian Republic) to the French Empire. The an¬
nexation of Piedmont in 1802, the lint definite step taken outside
the natural frontiers, had discredited the peace of Amiens in the
eyes of the British public and so contributed to the renewal of the
war. Since then Napoleon had solemnly declared that the period
of annexations was over. The anxiety and suspicion over this new
action in Prussia as well as in Austria were all the greater.
That the elements were present here for the restoration of the
coalition, twice broken by French victories, needs no argument.
Yet it still proved a difficult business. England and Russia dis¬
trusted one another’s ambitions in the basin of the Eastern Medi¬
terranean little less than both distrusted those of France. Austria
hardly dared put her military strength to a third test, particularly
if Prussia persisted in her neutrality. After abortive discussions in
London between Novosiltsov and Pitt, who had returned to office
shortly after the renewal of hostilities, an Anglo-Russian alliance
was completed on April iith, 1805, at St. Petersburg. Not until
August, after the Milan coronation and the annexation of Genoa,
was this enlarged to include Austria, though still with many reser¬
vations and merely through the exchange of notes in St. Petersburg.
Without waiting for the new coalition to be given a more secure
form Austria now took in her negotiations with France, a tone
which savoured of an ultimatum. Napoleon did not need pressing,
and there followed that lightning switch from Boulogne to the
Rhine, to the Danube, to Ulm and Austerlitz.
Anyone who approaches Sorel’s account of these preliminaries
to the new continental war with some knowledge of the facts will
find it surprising reading. We know that he regards all Napoleon’s
wars as having no ultimate purpose other than the maintenance
of those natural frontiers inherited by the First Consul from the
Directory. How does he manage to justify that thesis here?
281
One of his methods is to make appear as innocent as possible
those abuses of power on the part of Napoleon which gave Europe
the impression of unbridled aggressiveness. He does not, for
instance, so much as mention the fact that the independence of the
Cisalpine Republic had been guaranteed by the treaty of Lun^-
ville.‘ His account ofthe new settlement begins thus: ‘The Italian
Republic,* the object of Austria’s covetousness’ (so ugly a word as
convoitise he would not easily bring himself to use for Napoleon)
‘the aim of her armies, was the fortress of French domination in
Italy.’ He does not actually say that this justification covers every¬
thing, but that is the implication. He writes in the same way about
the annexation of Genoa: ‘Napoleon deemed Genoa as essential
on the seaward side as Piedmont on the land. The English in
Genoa’ (not, of course, that they actually were in that town)
‘meant a threat to Provence. Moreover he needed trained sea¬
men.’* And that is all.
On the other hand the attention of the reader is constantly
drawn not only to the ‘covetousness’ but also to the cunning,
deceitfulness and treachery of the other powers. Earlier in the
chapter. La Coalition, the defensive nature of Napoleon’s activities
is deliberately brought into relief: ‘The entire policy, all the mili¬
tary preparations of Napoleon, turned on two aims: either to
prevent or to retard the coalition, keeping Europe in suspense, now
with coups de prestige, then again with promises, until the day of his
crossing to England; or, if the crossing proved impossible and he
judged himself to be threatened on the continent, to throw himself
upon Germany and establish his control there, to crush Austria
before the arrival of the Russians, thus making any coalition
against France for ever impossible, and, since he had been unable
to annihilate English power in London, to reduce them to their
island and to turn the coalition against them.’*
Should the Italian crown a,nd the annexation of Genoa come
under the heading of innocent coups de prestige, or are they already
to be numbered among the defensive measures taken by a Napo¬
leon who feels himself threatened? And would not a mention of
the fact that other powers felt themselves threatened have been
relevant?
‘VI. 4*7.
* This was the name given to the Cisalpine Republic even before it was turned
into a kingdom.
* VI, 435. * VI, 378.
283
ALBERT SOREL
But when he deals with the agreements of April and August
1805, which at last brought England, Russia and Austria more or
less in accord with one another, Sorel sees only one thing, and that
he tries to impress upon his readers, with all the force of his strong
dialectical powers and his stylistic art. ‘Europe’ is uniting ip order
to fall upon France, and, under fair pretexts and to the accom¬
paniment of fine-sounding slogans, to thrust her back behind her
old frontiers. The instructions given to Novosiltsov, on the occa¬
sion of his abortive mission to London in 1804, betray, according
to Sorel, the fundamental, the real aims of Russia. The fine senti¬
ments with which Alexander was so free — indeed the views of his
French tutor, a typical ‘philosophe’, had made a life-long impres¬
sion on him — were entirely mendacious. He wanted, so ran
the document given to Novosiltsov, to deprive the French of their
strongest weapon, the general opinion that they were fighting for
the liberty of the peoples, and to turn that weapon against them.
The purpose of the war was to liberate France as well as the rest
of Europe from the yoke of Napoleon. France was in no way to be
forced back into the ancien regime and its abuses. It was this fine
talk, says Sorel, by which the French liberals were actually en¬
snared in 1814. The French will be told, so run the cunning
instructions of Alexander for his emisiary’, that they can retain the
Rhine frontier, but among themselves the allies will agree that
France’s frontiers are to be limited by ‘the Alps and the Rhine to
a certain height’. There, exclaims Sorel, you have ‘tout le fin de
I’affaire’. The French will think that this means a frontier from
Basle to the mouth of the Rhine, but once victory is gained, they
will be told that a frontier from Basle to the Lauter was actually
intended' — that is, one that includes Alsace and Lorraine, but
excludes the Rhineland, Belgium, North Brabant and Zeeland.
This Sorel appears to regard as an unendurable and humiliating
situation.
The Anglo-Russian treaty is concluded in April. And now Sorel
is firmly convinced — the instructions given to Novosiltsov proved
it — that ‘la pensee derri^re la tete’ of the contracting parties, the
idea ‘which dominates the remainder of the agreement and through
which h is to be elucidated’, is that the war is to be carried on, in
order to push France back behind her old frontiers’. This idea was
maintained to the very end, and in particular in 1813; we shall
‘ VI, 390-
283
later see how debateable it is even as regards 1813. But it might
be objected that this idea is not to be found in the treaty. Not in
so many words, Sorel admits. Tt was not deemed expedient, it
was even considered dangerous to insert it into the treaty.’* He
gives not a single proof, not a single quotation either from Russian
or English sources, to back his assertion.
The most subtle trick, according to Sorel, in this thoroughly
cunning and treacherous treaty, is the provision that a congress is
to be held after the war and that Russia and England will not
make peace with France without the agreement of all the allied
powers, members of the alliance. The purpose of this (‘not obvious,
but juridically certain’) is that if one of the allies has persuaded
Napoleon to negotiate, another can demand the congress, so that
Napoleon could not begin the war afresh without bringing about
his own destruction.*
The argument really becomes too far-fetched here. It is not
surprising that Driault considers this one of the passages in which
Sorel’s ‘thesis is most exposed to criticism’.* Driault’s sober and
matter-of-fact account, in the course of which he more than once
directly joins issue with Sorel, is by comparison refreshing.
When he in his turn analyses Novosiltsov’s instructions, he
points out that there is no need to discover a snare in the re¬
assurances which were to be given to the French concerning the
new regime, and their freedom to make a choice. Alexander tried
to carry out his ‘republican’ ideas in his domestic policy also.* As
regards the article concerning ‘the Rhine to a certain point’, ‘this
formula also need not be regarded as evidence of deep-laid wicked
schemes of Machiavellian intent. It is merely an instance of the
inexactitude which marks the whole document. Russia leaves to
England, as being more interested in Western Europe, the task of
more exact formulation’.
Nothing is more natural than the desire of reducing France to
its old frontiers in the case of ‘a successful war’. In view of the fact
* VI, 416. * VI, 419. * NapoUon et I’Europe, II, 198 note.
* NapoUon et I’Europe, II, 124, It goes without saying that much more could be
said about the sums of Alexander and of England concerning France. One could
point to the pertinacity with which both, though their points of view were so entirely
different (in contrast to the stubborn attachment of the melancholy and unbalanced
Czar to his idea of a united Europe there was England’s sober calculation concerning
national sovereignty, for herself but also for others), resisted in 1814-15 the desire
for annexation of neat and small German powers, which might have cost France
a good deal more than the natural frontiers won at the Revolution. See for example
the suggestive book by W. Alison Phillips, The Cotêderation of Europe (1914).
284
ALBERT SOREL
that successful war had to be waited for till 1813-14, it is obvious
that what happened then corresponds with the plans made in
1804-05 for this eventuality- ‘But one is not entitled to deduce from
this that before this successful war Napoleon would have been
unable to consolidate once and for all the new territorial greatness
of France.’ If only he had known how to moderate his ambitions
just enough to prevent agreement between his potential enemies!*
Indeed, how difficult it was, even so, to establish this coalition of
1805, which does not even deserve the name of coalition. All this
talk about ‘Europe’ which grudged France its power and of
‘Europe’ which followed its aim with cunning determination,'
misses the mark: ‘Was there a Europe?’* Even Napoleon’s ‘inde¬
fatigable activity’ was hardly enough to remove the difficulties.®
The treaty of April iith, 1805, which Sorcl takes so tragically,
which caused Armand Lefebvre to foam at the mouth — ‘let us
keep calm’, says Driault after quoting the latter* — this treaty,
‘full of high-sounding phrases, of which some were in the condi¬
tional mood’, is, in Driault’s opinion, mainly a proof of the mutual
rivalries and suspicions against which the would-be allies had to
struggle. In any case, he says, ‘It is a sophistry to allege that the
conditions to be imposed upon a defeated France were intended for
the glorious France of 1805 and that the Emperor was therefore
compelled to fight against an eternal coalition f?] for the protec¬
tion of France’s new frontiers.’* Indeed, even if one looks more
closely at the secret articles intended for the situation resulting
from ‘a successful war’, one will see that there is no question of
depriving France of the Rhineland or the former Austrian Nether¬
lands. It was only the country north of the line Antwerp-Maas-
tricht that was to have been added to a Dutch State under the
restored House of Orange.
Perhaps the main point made clear by Driault is that the coali¬
tion was the product of the provocations of Napoleon. ‘By crown¬
ing himself King of Italy Napoleon provided a sufficient reason
for the formation of the Third Coalition; it remained surest
foundation. The annexation of Genoa supplied the immediate
occasion.’* The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, on receiving
this piece of news, wrote exultingly of‘Bonaparte’s latest folly’.
* ‘Combien il eOi facile i Napoleon de rompre cette coalition si fragile! II
lui eflt fallu seulement quelque moderation’, op. cit. p. aiq.
•op. cit., p. 113. *op. cit., p. 194. ‘op. cit., p. 198.
* op. cit., p. aoi. • op. cit., p. ziz.
285
th'e problem of foreign policy
Driault deals somewhat ironically with Napoleon’s excuses in
the case of the royal crown of Lombardy. The Emperor began by
offering this crown to Joseph. As though this were a particularly
virtuous and self-denying action he announced it at once to the
Emperor of Austria, who, owing to the Treaty of Lun^ville, was
of course an interested party. Needless to say, the offer was looked
upon in a somewhat different light in Vienna, but matters became
much worse when it was known that Joseph had refused the crown,
and Napoleon pretended that he now had no option but to take
^ the burden upon himself. Sorel puts all the blame upon Joseph,
who is said to have placed the Emperor in an awkward posi¬
tion. Driault, however, is convinced that Napoleon had foreseen
Joseph’s refusal, and, what is more, had provoked it by putting
unacceptable conditions. One feels a momentary surprise when
reading Driault’s conclusion that indeed ‘only Napoleon the
Emperor could be King of Italy. The iron crown of the Lombard
kings could belong only to the possessor of the crown of Charle¬
magne. To give it to anyone else would have been an absurdity
in the light ofhistory and a political blunder which it was impos¬
sible for him to commit’.* In other places, too, we are struck by
expressions of generous admiration for the policy of war and ex¬
pansion which is at the same time described with so much frank¬
ness. These are some of the author’s idiosyncracies which will find
their place in the picture I shall give at a later stage of him and his
work. Here I have only drawn attention to the passages where he
dispels the apologetic fog of defensive intentions with which Sorel
tried to cover the history of Napoleon.
As for Sorel, we can already foresee how he will be going to treat
1813 and 1814. All attempts to sunder the French nation and its
dictator will be deception, all inclination to fall in with it will be
treason. For all their apparently moderate peace offers the allies
will have one purpose only, that of breaking French resistance,
and Napoleon’s sole duty will be to resist to the bitter end.
LE GRAND EMPIRE, l8o6-I2 (VOLUME VIl)
I have pointed out that, unlike Thiers, who draws the line at
Napoleon’s wars after i8o5,Eorel tries to explain as defensive the
whole apparently excessive policy right down to the catastrophe.
Faithful to his thesis, in the years described in his seventh volume,
* op. cit., p. 163.
286
ALBERT SOREL
he sees Napoleon involved in a tragic struggle to preserve and to
consolidate the position of power which France had acquired as
early as the days of the Convention, the position within her
natural frontiers, even though these had been further and further
left behind. A tragic struggle because he was always victorious and
every victory made his position more untenable, in a Europe sub¬
jected but not reconciled, a Europe which no doubt underwent the
influence of France and of the Revolution represented by Napo¬
leon and became profoundly transformed by it, but only to turn
the spirit thus roused against the conqueror and oppressor himself.
This development, which appeared first in Spain, then in Ger¬
many, surprised Napoleon. He never learnt to understand it,
unless perhaps when looking back from St. Helena.
Sorel has no illusions about this lack of understanding. ‘By now
there are Germans in Germany’ — it will be remembered how he
described Bonaparte as seeing only ‘herds’ there* — ‘and perhaps
the most peculiar thing about the French supremacy is that it has
discovered them to the Germans themselves, most certainly with¬
out Napoleon’s knowledge and against all his calculations. Dal-
berg, the most grovelling courtier of them all. Prince Primate, and
the last survivor of the ecclesiastical princes,* even Dalberg would
have liked to see a new Germany spring from the Confederation of
the Rhine. “Rubbish,” Napoleon said, “I have made short work
of these fancies ... In Germany the common people want to be
protected against the great ones; the great ones want to govern
after their pleasures; now since I do not desire anything from the
Confederation but troops and money, and it is the great ones and
not the common people who can supply me with both, I let the
great ones alone, and the others will have to manage as best they
can.” ’• No wonder if Chateaubriand (‘who took a more distant
and a higher view’, as Sorel puts it) judged the Confederation of
the Rhine, originally a profound conception, to have degenerated
rapidly into a fiscal and military machine: ‘The tax-coUector and
the recruiting sergeant took the place of the great man.’
‘But for all its gross materialism’, continues Sorel, ‘the system is
there, and it has far-reaching effects. Napoleon deals with taxable
material and cannon fodder, but that material is human flesh, it
is human labour, and the process produces a consciousness and a
soul. Human beings spring from the clay that has been turned-up,
* See above, p. 262 sq. • Archbishop of Mayence. ’ VII, 486.
287
dug and ploughed ... Napoleon thought that by effacing so many
frontiers and drawing all these strategic roads he was merely
tracing the way from his barracks; in fact he was opening the roads
to a fatherland.’ The rights of Man, the dignity of Man, preached
by Rousseau — the effectiveness of will-power and the need for
action — displayed by the French Revolution — these things are
discovered at last by the Germans under the whip of the conqueror.
They too want to be a nation, and they exchange their dissolvent
cosmopolitanism for patriotic selfishness. Such arc the unforeseen
shapes into which the ideas spread by Napoleon are translated.
Meanwhile in France the dynamism of these ideas has weakened. '
France has become an empire of Diocletian. Napoleon himself
used the comparison in referring to his domination after i8io.
Sorel writes: ‘It is Diocletian’s empire in respect of the administra¬
tion, the codes, the entire apparatus of government, the barbarians
employed in military service, the fortified frontier provinces, and
furthermore, outside, the mystery of the forests and of the limitless
plains, of the Scythians, the Sarmates, and the Slavs.’‘ Sorel
admires that organization for its fitness, as shown by its durability.
Successive regimes have been able to make it serve, with slight
adaptions, and it continues to exist, freshly painted and given a
new dress at every revolution.^ That under Napoleon no liberty
was left, our great realist admits, with, as it were, a shrug of the
shoulders. Political freedom had been abused, and people were
content with civil freedom. ‘National pride and political servitude
— that is what the Convention and its committees had educated
the French people up to. This French people, proud of its Revo¬
lution, though above all happy to have got it over, still looked
upon itself as being the most enlightened people of the Universe,
a torch among the nations, the lord of the world; and this, too, is
after all a conception, and a very Roman one, of liberty.’*
Sorel, however, is perfectly aware of the fact that this conception
no longer possessed the impulse by which Napoleon in his early
days had felt himself propelled.* Nevertheless he puts every em¬
phasis upon the fact that the Emperor and the Empire were still
popular, and particularly with those classes which bore the
heaviest burdens of the war, the peasants and the workers. And
* VII, 46a.
* We have seen Vandal give another account; see above, p. 225.
* VII, 462. * cf. the previous page.
288
ALBERT SOREL
in fact, there was much material well-being in France, the Conti¬
nental System was not as yet a burden to the French. But an
opposition did exist, and it was serious, however hidden and secret;
it was found among the high officers, the court dignitaries, the
senators, and among the officials, especially those of the higher
ranks. Needless to look to Sorel for much sympathy towards these
people’s point of view. He is sure to have read Mme de Remusat
with scepticism. The explanation of the phenomenon he finds in
the fact that Napoleon, ‘after his coronation as Emperor, and more
and more as he ceased to be the Emperor of the Republic in order
to become a sovereign like the others’, began to draw his higher
personnel from among the royalist This was a grave
mistake. There was nothing to attach these men to the Revolution,
nor, consequently, to an Emperor who had emerged from the
Revolution. ‘After having got everything they could out of the
imperial regime, it became their care to preserve their spoils in
titles and goods under the new regime’ (which they felt coming,
and their relations to which they were already preparing) ...
‘Down to 1806 a royalist restoration would have roused to
resistance all the interests in the country, all the prejudices of the
men in whose hands, in that centralized state, rested power...
After 1810 it could count on all possible facilities ... It was not
disobedience or insubordination; it was a treacherous readiness to
do without the Emperor, to wish silently for his disappearance, to
acquiesce in it beforehand ... Peace within contracted frontiers
and “the Empire without the Emperor”.’
While revolutionary dynamism was thus weakened in France,
new feelings and passions were aroused in the defeated peoples by
the principles of the Revolution and even by their very subju¬
gation. Towards the end of the book this change is made visible
graphically in the form of a striking contrast. Napoleon is staying
at Dresden, surrounded by the throng of his vassals, before he
starts upon his last enterprise, the expedition to Moscow, which is
at last going to lead him to a fixed point of rest. At the same time
in the environment of Alexander, who is at Vilna, awaiting the
shock, tense eicitement prevails.
‘Everyone working in Europe against Napoleon hurried to that
' VII, 468; ‘soit pour les rallier, soit qu*il les juge plus dociles*; ‘peu dociies’ must
be a misprint in my edition. The remark of Napoleon is well knov-Ti: ‘Ce ne sont
que CCS gens-lk qui savent servir.,*
T 269
court... If Napoleon had secured the services of the rulers,
Alexander summoned the peoples. He concluded an agreement
with the delegate of the national Cortes of Spain. He built up a
general staff, a secret chancellery, of enemies of France, a prosely¬
tizing agency to rouse the nations of Europe, equally dangerous,
but even more deceptive, than had been Jacobin proselytism
formerly. There you have the great proscript Stein,* together
with English agents and agents of the Neapolitan Bourbons; then
there are the news-writers, the declared enemies, indiscriminately,
of Napoleon, of la grande nation and of the French Revolution ...
Even the failures of desertion and plotting are called to the rescue,
Dumouriez, for instance,* and especially that successful Dumouriez,
that Dumouriez already very nearly crowned, Bernadotte* ... To
rouse Poland with the deceptive bait of independence, Germany
with that of greatness, France with that of liberty “within the
natural frontiers”,* Spain with that of liberation from alien rule
and of a free government — these are the aims for which they all
work with equal zest, some falsely, others in good faith, all for the
benefit of Alexander. They woo him for the support of his strong
arm, they stir him up to the crusade, as in 1791 at Pilnitz the
French hiigres incited the King of Bohemia and of Hungary* and
the King of Prussia to go and crush I’infdme, the French Revolu¬
tion. But the course of events had been reversed. French emigra¬
tion in 1791 went against the current of the time; aristocratic, a
icaste movement, anti-national, summoning the foreigner to take
arms against the French people’s independence, it went under in
the maelstrom. The imigris surrounding Alexander were members
of what were essentially national movements; each of those exiles
spoke on behalf of his nation, and together they were stirring up
* The great minister of Prussia, whose reformist policy was intended to raise the
country after the disaster of 1806, but who was dismissed by the King at Napoleon’s
orders.
‘ The general, who conquered the Austrian Netherlands in 1792, but who,
having joined the opposition during the Terror, entered into negotiations with the
enemy, and had finally to go over without his army.
•General Bernadotte, brother-in-law of Joseph, had always been somewhat
reserved towards Napoleon. Nevertheless he had been made Marshal and Prince
of Ponte-Corvo. In 1810 Sweden chose him as heir to the crown and since he
refused to promise Napoleon that he would never take arms against France, his
princedom was taken away from him.
* Deceptive bait (leurre), because Sorel considers that it was from the beginning
intended to drive France back to her old frontiers; nor would the Spaniards get a
‘free government’.
‘ Leopold II, still not cronued Emperor of the German Empire.
290
ALBERT SOREL
so many national revolutions; they represented the independence
and the liberty of their respective peoples. The effect of their
action, favoured by tide and wind, was bound to be formidable.
The prestige and power of the French Revolution had resided in
the dual character which was also noticeable in the revolution
preached by these exiles; for the prestige, a cosmopolitan, com¬
pletely ideal programme, which would make it possible to unite
the various peoples in one war; for the power, a patriotic and
national plan, differing for each of the allies.
‘While Alexander, transformed into a liberator of nations, was
holding that singular congress of subjected nations in Vilna, at
Dresden Napoleon, the Emperor of the Republic, was collecting
about him — and here was a still more surprising change — a
court of monarchs ... He received his father-in-law the Emperor,
his ally on parchment, but in whose soul lurked defection; and the
King of Prussia, faithful in words, a traitor in his heart* . . . The
Kings of Bavaria and of Wiirttemberg were obsequious and ser¬
vile. But Napoleon divines the treason in the heart of kings, he
has a presentiment of the resistance of the peoples ... At moments
the infirmity of his system is apparent to him... .’*
A truly grandiose conception provides the basis of this volume
and it has been carried out with a master’s hand, strong, fresh,
vivacious and witty, and with surprising insight.
The integrating factor is the recurring representation of the
natural frontiers as the purpose of the wars and as the real motive
of the conquests. This does not reduce the work’s dimensions,
though if one takes historical acceptability as the test it is the weak
point. In this volume the argumentation becomes almost
paradoxical.
I have pointed out® that Lanfrey — one among many — pre¬
sented Alexander’s attitude in the gradually increasing tension
before the crisis all too innocently. As Vandal has established,
Alexander had taken considerable military measures. But it is
quite another thing to conclude from this that he was preparing
an attack, or even that he had not the slightest reason for being
afraid of the continued expansion of Napoleon’s power. When
Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s ambassador with Alexander, arrives in
Paris in i8ii, he beseeches his master not to embark upon the
* F4al swd f/loni both tentis in feudal law. • VII, 571-3.
* p. 88 sq.
291
crazy adventure of a Russian campaign. Caulaincourt was one of
the very few who dared maintain an attitude of their own against
the master; he was a man of unfaltering loyalty and a man of
character. Napoleon angrily reproached him for having been
won over by Alexander, the trickster. But through Caulaincourt,
Sorel remarks bitterly, the Czar was able to convince his contem¬
poraries and the historians that Napoleon alone had willed the
war and prepared it. ‘Napoleon looked upon that war as inevit¬
able; he thought so and he said so, but there was no one to believe
him any more. He was struggling against his own fate and against
posterity in that dramatic conversation with Caulaincourt.’*
Caulaincourt warned him that Alexander was feeling concerned
about Napoleon’s plans for Poland. Napoleon objected that he
had merely taken measures which must deprive the English of all
hope, and compel them to make peace.
‘Thus’, speculates Sorel, ‘matters were reduced to the state in
which they had stood after the peace of Amiens and before
Austerlitz. Then Holland and Italy had been at stake, of which
countries Russia demanded the evacuation. The result of six
years of war, of Jena, of Friedland, of Wagram, was to transplant
the dispute to Poland, but the dispute remains the same. Holland
had to be taken in order to secure Belgium, Germany to be over¬
thrown and dominated for the retention of the left bank of the
Rhine, Naples to be subjected, Rome to be annexed so that Pied¬
mont, Lombardy and Venetia might be kept; the conquest of
Spain was dictated by the need to have forces free to deal with
Austria, that of Poland by the requirements of the war in Spain;
the annihilation of Prussia was necessary for the securing of one of
the empire’s flanks, the enslavement of Austria for that of the other.
Napoleon fears that as soon as he loosens his hold on Poland the
Russians will advance in Germany, and that Prussia, seeing him
retreat, and the Spaniards, thinking his position to be endangered,
will at once take the oflfensive; Austria, which has all the time been
playing for safety, will then also take a hand; he, Napoleon, will
be obliged to summon his troops out of Italy and, Italy once
evacuated, the Mediterranean will belong to the English. The
coalition will automatically be revived, history will turn back in
its course: after the evacuation of Poland that of Germany will be
demanded; after Germany, Italy and Holland; after Italy and
‘VII. 538.
29a
ALBERT SOREL
Holland, Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine. That is to say,
in i8ii he guesses at the secret plans revolved by Alexander in
1804, which in 1813 and 1814 are to be translated only too
faithfully into the deeds of the Coalition.’‘
It would be possible to make a criticism of this interpretation
similar to that of Driault on Sorel’s account of the completion of
the coalition in 1805. In fact Sorel is doing no more than follow
Napoleon’s own presentation of events.’ At the very time when
he was arming himself against Russia, Napoleon spoke in public
about the war ‘against Carthage’. The Continental System, which
Bourgeois sees as a piece of propaganda to divert attention from
the Emperor’s real plans, was taken by Napoleon in deadly
earnest, according to Sorel. He believed that by it he could sub¬
jugate England, and it was his grim determination to carry out
his plan that led him from one annexation to another, on the shores
of the Baltic, the North Sea, the Mediterranean. It was, says
Sorel, in summing up, ‘the raison d'etre of his grand empire'.* Tilsit,
which Bourgeois connects with the oriental schemes, is summarized
by Sorel as: ‘War to the death against England, that is Tilsit, and
to pay for this war, war against Turkey.’*
Driault discussed this seventh volume in the Revue d'histoire
tnoderru et contemporaine. While expressing the greatest admiration,
he pointed out the obvious exaggeration of which Sorel is guilty
in these passages. He too argues the connection between the
South Italian and Dalmatian conquests with eastern schemes,
which cannot possibly be counted among the defensive measures
against England. Not that he tried, like Bourgeois, to explain
everything by the eastern factor: the German settlements ex¬
plained themselves. As to the overriding preoccupation with the
war against England, which Sorel finds everywhere, and which
can in practice be traced back to a determination to hold the Low
Countries in spite of England, Driault makes a comment, which
we have already heard from Bourgeois.*
‘No doubt England is incessantly mentioned in Napoleon’s cor¬
respondence, and particularly in his Bulletins de la grande Armie, in
his Messages au Shat, in his most impressive proclamations. Was
not this for him the only way to win popular approval for his
insatiably bellicose policy, to justify it at least to a certain extent,
‘ VII, S4I- * VII. 114. • VII, S04. «VII, 187.
' cf. above, pp. 242, 246.
293
to place himself in the right with public opinion and later on with
the opinion of historians? It was essential to put forward some
explanation of that mad ten years’ chase across Europe. England
was unwilling to disarm: there you had an excuse for all enter¬
prises against whomsoever they might be directed.’*
THE NEGOTIATIONS OF THE SUMMER 1813

(volume viii)
The last volume of UEurope et la Revolution frangaise is the weakest

of the eight. This is because the thesis has to be defended from
beginning to end, against overwelming odds in the shape of facts
and probability. Nowhere else in the whole work does the thesis
rule so supreme, and nowhere else is it so untenable. As we saw,
from the last quotation from volume seven, and as we already knew,*
Sorel believed that the sole aim of the allies in 1813 and 1814 was
to deprive France of all her conquests, including the natural
frontiers. Indeed, according to his view, they had cherished this
ambition for twenty years, coalition or no coalition, in war or in
peace. It goes without saying, therefore, that after the Russian
disaster they prepared to make good their opportunity. Now the
fact is that during the last year and a half there were continual
negotiations in the interludes between the military operations.
Sorel argues that Napoleon never had a chance to obtain peace
without sacrificing the natural frontiers for which he had fought
for so many years in Italy and in Spain, in Austria and in Prussia,
on the Vistula and the Beresina, and to which his ‘new departe-
ments’ (Holland and the north-west corner of Germany, ‘the Hansa
towns’, the west of North and Central Italy and the Illyrian
provinces), his Confederation of the Rhine, his vassal kingdoms,
his Duchy of Warsaw, were but the outer defences. Thus it was
not Napoleon’s blind obstinacy which upset the negotiations and
brought war at last to French soil and to Paris, and swept him to
Fontainebleau and Elba, but the unreasonableness of ‘Europe’,
which grudged France the Rhineland and Belgium.
Such was not the current view even in France. As we have
already seen, both Bignon and Thiers considered that in the
summer of 1813 Napoleon wantonly neglected the chance of an
honourable peace. We saw Prince Napoleon place the blame on
* Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, VII, 223. * cf. above, p. 283.
294
ALBERT SOREL
Metternich. But Bourgeois, once more, as we saw, looked for
a^ explanation in Napoleon's obstinate refusal to give up Illyria,
his gate to the East, thus sacrificing France to his personal
ambition. 1
The culminating point of the negotiations was reached, as a
matter of fact, at the Congress of Prague in July and August 1813,
where what mattered was the attitude of Austria. This was Metter-
nich's great moment. In describing the circumstances I shall have
recourse not only to Sorel's account, but to the memoirs of Metter¬
nich and, of Caulaincourt, and in particular to an article by
Driault in which he reviewed this eighth volume, at the same time
giving an account of events based on his own research,^ I must add
that this account, though extremely interesting, seems to me some¬
what simplified and for that reason too positive in places.
Before his expedition against Russia, Napoleon had concluded
alliances with both Austria and Prussia; if pressure had been
needed in the case of the former, downright compulsion had to be
applied to Prussia. We have seen how scathingly Sorel writes of
the princes who came to grace the Emperor’s court.* Is there not
more occasion for amazement at the shortsightedness of Napoleon,
who imagined that the rancour caused by his mad misuse of power
could be overcome with ‘parchment’ arrangements? Prussia
deserted in the midst of the retreat from Russia, and in a short
time Russia and Prussia concluded an alliance at Kalisch. The
spirit which had inspired the French Revolution was now busy
on the other side, and the signatories addressed a stirring call to
the German people. The new allies also tried to detach the
French people from Napoleonic policy, in accordance, it will be
noticed, with the ideas which Alexander had expounded to
Novosiltsov in 1804. Austria too began to go her own way. That
marriage, at the very moment when Napoleon expected it to
work miracles, proved powerless to cast a spell on policy.
As early as December i6th, 1812, the Emperor Francis offered
his mediation, a role very different from that prescribed by his
obligations as ally. Metternich saw a chance to restore Austria’s
position. He soon let it be known on what grounds he considered
peace to be possible. Prussia would have to be strengthened, with
‘ cf. above, pp. 158, 237, 248.
* Revue dliistoire tnoderne et contemporaine^ VIII: * Napoleon et la paix en 1813, ^
propos du dernier volume d’Albert Sorel.’
* cf. above, p. 291.
295
at least the return of her Polish territory (this implied the sacrifice
of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, already indeed occupied by the
Russians). France would have to forgo her recent German
annexations, that is, the ‘Hansa towns’, as well as the protectorate
of the Rhine Confederation. She would moreover have to return
Illyria to Austria. To all this Napoleon answered with the most
emphatic refusal to relinquish any territory annexed by a simtus
consulte. He actually bound himself to this not very conciliatory
attitude by public statements. The repercussions in Germany of
the call to arms from Kalisch, the unmistakable war weariness in
France itself and in his own immediate circle — nothing induced
him to hesitate. The fight must be fought to a finish. As his new
ambassador in Vienna, Narbonne (whose predecessor Otto had
been recalled because, like Caulaincourt, he was too much in
favour of peace), wrote to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maret,
Duke of Bassano: ‘The Emperor will, I am sure, clear up every¬
thing with his magic wand, which for the moment can but be his
sword ... So please ask him, were it but to lighten my task here,
that he win me speedily one of those battles of Marengo, Auster-
litz or Jena. More I do not desire of him to reduce everything to
peace and to render the universe happy.’ ‘Here we have the
authentic tone of Napoleonic diplomacy’, comments Driault.*
One will look in vain for this passage among the quotations from
Narbonne’s correspondence in Sorel.
But the magic wand had lost its power. Luetzen and Bautzen
(in May) cost the lives of tens of thousands of the young men
France had been obliged to provide, and though the latter battle
was proclaimed a victory, it was in no sense decisive. This was all
the more dangerous because Austria was using the delay to make
preparations for war.
Mediation had become armed mediation, and the idea of having
to yield to the threats of his fiilse ally filled Napoleon with bitter
and fierce anger. Nevertheless fear of Austria was a contributory
factor in making him agree*to a truce, which he intended to use to
make his battered army once more fit for the field. The Russians,
the Prussians and the Austrians, however, were equally ready to
put a couple of weeks to good use. It has often been considered
since that the conclusion of the truce was the proof of his declining
power even as a military leader.
^ Revue, etc., VIII, i86.
296
ALBERT SOREL
What certainly had weakened was the spirit around him. Not
only did the army consist to far too great an extent of hastily trained
conscripts called up before their time, but the marshals them¬
selves were tired. They were pining for rest, they grumbled and
muttered among themselves. Even Maret, previously a fierce
believer in Napoleon and his power policy, and accustomed to
carry out the wishes of his master with a certain impetuousness
as behests of the divine law, wavered, and with much caution
and courteous respect, allowed the unpleasant word ‘peace’
to escape him, and the still more unpleasant reference to ‘con¬
fidence shaken’.' But Napoleon thought of nothing but a fresh
test of arms. He was in any case determined not to submit to the
Austrian yoke. Rather would he seek for a direct understanding
with Russia. But he had no idea of the obstinacy with which
Alexander was now determined on his downfall, a mistake which is
perhaps pardy to be attributed to the influence of Caulaincourt,
who longed passionately for peace and cherished illusions con¬
cerning his friend the Czar. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s gamble on
coming events, or rather his unconcealed annoyance at the media¬
tion, drove Austria further and further in the direction of Russia
and Prussia, who had now reached agreement with England, too.
In Sorel’s reading of the situation these four had really been in
agreement from the outset and till Metternich’s negotiations had
had no other aim than to win time and to put Napoleon in the
wrong with Europe and with France. One has only to look at the
realities of Austrian conditions and of Metternich’s policy to under¬
stand that the mediation was meant seriously, at any rate at first.
The Kalisch manifesto had shocked the conservatism of Metter-
nich as much as that of his master Francis II. The popular
enthusiasm in Germany made them feel thoroughly uncomfort¬
able. They were uneasy moreover at the thought of the influence
which Russia stood to gain in Europe from the fall of Napoleon,
and they particularly disliked Alexander’s Polish plans. So true
is this, that at the end of the war which they did after all fight
together, the antagonism came to light once more: it will be
remembered that in 1815 it was touch and go whether a war
between Austria, supported by France (which then meant Talley¬
rand) and by England, against Russia and Prussia would not put
an untimely end to the Congress of Vienna. How obvious it would
I SoRBL, VlII, las.
297
have been for Napoleon in his distressed situation of the summer of
1813 — with Hamburg in revolt, supported by Sweden, and with
the most deplorable news soon to come froin Spain, Vittoria — to
accept Austria’s overtures. But he could not do it.
The truce was to last till August loth. On July 26th Napoleon
received Metternich at Dresden. Already then matters had
assumed a sterner aspect. In conversations with the Prussians and
the Russians at Reichenbach Metternich had prepared a treaty, in
which it was agreed that Austria would declare war on France, if
her agreement to certain peace proposals had not been obtained
by August loth.
This Dresden meeting has become famous.* We possess two
versions of it, one from each of the two antagonists, and there was
no witness present to tell us which was correct. According to his
own memoirs Metternich was considerably more eloquent than
he is made out to be in the note which Napoleon had made, and
according to which he scarcely said a word. Metternich tells us
that Marshal Berthier, Prince of Neufchatel, chief of the general
staff, while ushering him in to the audience, anxiously asked
whether he was bringing peace, and told him that France, and
Europe, had need of it. Here we also find the story of Napoleon’s
angry outburst, provoked by a remark concerning the youthful
appearance of his troops, in which he declared that Metternich
did not understand a soldier’s spirit, that he had never learnt to
hold his own life cheap or that of others. ‘A man such as I cares
little for the lives of a million men . . .’ Metternich, if we are to
believe him, replied that they ought to throw open the doors and
the windows so that all Europe might hear. Whereupon Napoleon
climbed down a little and said that of the 300,000 men he had
lost in Russia, less than a tenth were French. To spare the French
he had sacrificed Poles and Germans. To this Metternich replied:
‘You forget. Sire, that you are addressing a German.’
From Napoleon’s own report, too, it appears that the meeting
was a stormy one. The Emperor began straight away with the
most bitter reproaches. Austria had gone over to his enemies.
‘Without your ill-omened intervention peace with Russia and
Prussia would have been restored.’ What did Austria ask in
return for neutrality? Would she be satisfied with Illyria?
It seems to me that the basis of Napoleon’s policy reveals itself
* cf. Fniin’s rectoral (wldress, 1878: Verspr. Geschr., IX, 356.
298
ALBERT SOREL
for one moment in these questions. He was ready to buy off Aus¬
tria, if she would no longer concern herself with Russia and Prussia.
What infuriated him was the idea of mediation. Mediation would
inevitably lead, and had already gone a long way, in the direction
of collaboration between Austria and his enemies, and might well
produce a settlement, guaranteed by all of them against him. On
the other hand, should the first possibility materialize, he would
begin by disposing of Russia and Prussia — ‘my army is quite
sufficient to make the Russians and the Prussians see reason’ — and
would then be able to turn against Austria herself once more and
recover what he had paid. In his outburst against Metternich,
Napoleon summed up what he imagined would be the result of
acceding to the collective demands, to the following effect:
If Austria (on these terms) got Illyria, she would not be content
with that, but would want Italy too. Russia would want Poland,
Sweden would want Norway, Prussia would demand Saxony and
England would put in a claim for Holland and Belgium. They
wanted to tear the French Empire to pieces. And he, still in
possession of half Europe, was expected meekly to withdraw his
forces! What sort of a figure did they mean to make him cut
before the French people?
‘Oh, Metternich, how much has England given you to decide
you to play this role against me?’ At these words (Metternich
always denied that they were spoken), Napoleon’s three-cornered
hat, which he had under his arm, fell to the ground, and in the
course of his angry outbursts he kept kicking it away, while
Metternich, who also mentions the incident, did not deign to pick
it up for him. According to Metternich Napoleon’s last words
were an infuriated threat: ‘Ah, you persist, you still want to
dictate to me. All right then, war! But, au revoir, in Vienna!’
And when, at his leaving, after an interview which had laisted for
hours, Berthier hurried up to ask if he was satisfied, Metternich,
according to his own report, answered: ‘Yes, he has made every¬
thing abundantly clear; it is all over with him.’
Immediately afterwards Napoleon felt that he had handled the
affair unwisely. In a second conversation he was amiability itself,
and arrangements were made for a congress at Prague, where
peace would be discussed under the by now recognized armed
mediation of Austria. But is it to be wondered that Metternich,
already in a sceptical frame of mind after months of shilly-shallying
299
and boasting, could now no longer believe in the possibility of an
agreement? Even then Napoleon did nothing which bore witness
to any desire for peace. Quite the opposite — the opportunity
offered by the congress was allowed to pass. As Maret wrote
to Narbonne on June 17th (the other French plenipotentiary
Gaulaincourt was to keep the conference waiting till July 28th!)
Napoleon wanted to draw out the negotiations if possible till
August 20th, because by then the harvest would be in, which
would be an advantage for the new campaign. He hoped, more¬
over, that time would allay the ardours of Prussia and Russia, and
that Austria too would think again, when she saw the tremendous
forces he was collecting both here and in Italy. The cause of the
unfruitfulness of the Prague Congress has often been sought; it is
sought by Sorel, in the ill will of the allies. But is not, asks Driault,‘
this letter explanation enough? It was not Caulaincourt’s fault
that he stayed away so long. He had tried every means to avoid
leaving for Prague if he was to be sent with evasive instructions,
but at the same time he did his very best to move Napoleon to a
more conciliatory mood. He urged giving up the new German
departments and the Confederation of the Rhine. In return he got
angry answers, doors were slammed on him, reproaches heaped
on his head.' After days wasted in this way he did obtain a
promise but to his disappointment it was followed by a perfectly
useless instruction.
So, once at Prague, he could not refrain from going beyond his
instructions in bringing pressure to bear on Metternich. He even
did it in a way which according to French historians' verges on
treason, though it can also be said that his action is only another
proof of the disapproval, not to say the despair, with which
Frenchmen with any sense of responsibility regarded the Emperor’s
line of conduct. ‘Look on me’, said Caulaincourt, who now no
longer sought comfort from Russia but from Austria, ‘as the repre¬
sentative not of the Emperor’s whims, but of his and France’s true
interests. I am, in the qu^tions now at issue, as good a European
as you are. Promote our return to France, be it by peace or war,
and you will earn the blessings of the entire French people and
of all the Emperor’s sensible servants and friends.’*
^ Revue, etc., VII, 190.
’ This all from Caukincourt himself: M^moires du gMral de CauUnneourt, Due
de Vicence, Introduction .. . par Jean Hanoteau, 1933,1, 153.
•op. cit., p. 156. •Sorel, VIII, 165.
300
ALBERT SOREL
Metternich now uttered a grave warning that Austria had
pledged herself to declare war on France if nothing had been
obtained by August loth. The transmission of ‘that threat’
earned Caulaincourt a reprimand, but at any rate Napoleon now
allowed him to ask for the conditions. More days were lost owing
to an undoubtedly obstructive absence of the Emperor from
Dresden. His question was dated August 5th. The conditions
Metternich laid down were: another partition of Poland between
the neighbouring states; restoration of Hamburg and Liibeck
and abandonment in principle of the rest of the new German
departments and of the protectorate over the Confederation of
the Rhine; restoration of Prussia with a tenable frontier on the
Elbe (which meant that the former territories of Prussia in the
West, now part of the Kingdom of Westphalia and of the French
realm, were not demanded back); Illyria was to return to Austria;
all the powers great and small, mutually to guarantee their
possessions.
Caulaincourt sent the document to the Emperor together with
an impassioned appeal. ‘No doubt Your Majesty will see in this
ultimatum some sacrifice of amour-propre, but there will be no real
sacrifice for France ... I beseech you. Sire, let all the chances of
war be weighed in the balance with peace; have regard to the
irritation in men’s hearts, the state into which Germany will be
thrown when Austria declares herself, France’s fatigue, her noble
devotion, the sacrifices she made after the Russian disasters; listen
to the prayers of this same France for peace, to the prayers of your
faithful servants, true Frenchmen, who, like myself, are bound to
tell you that Europe’s fever must be allayed.’‘
But Napoleon’s answer, which could only be conveyed after the
fatal term, August i ith, was on the usual lines. It consisted of two
counter-proposals, the second of which was to be put forward only
in case of necessity. Sorel does not consider it necessary to state
the first. Yet it is important enough. In return for the partitioning
of Warsaw (which he ‘did not mind’ in itself),* Napoleon wanted
compensation for the Grand Duke, the King of Saxony, and that
in the form of Prussian and Austrian territory. In the Prussian
territory Berlin was included!... Prussia would thus become in
the main a Slav state.* Metternich’s remark that this did not give
»SoRBL, VIII, 173, and Caulaincourt, -1,157. * Caulaincourt, 1,151,
* Revue, etc., VIII, 193.
301
the impression that the Emperor wanted a durable peace, is only
too understandable. And even in the second proposal, he still
tried to bargain. Napoleon refused, for example, to let go
Hamburg and Trieste. There was still mention of compensation
for Saxony at the expense of Prussia and Austria. The negotiations
were broken off. War was left, and war not only with Russia and
Prussia, but with Austria also. At Leipzig Napoleon was to find
out what that meant.
Sorel, who has been at pains, throughout his account, to show
that Metternich’s sole purpose was to reach active co-operation
with Russia and Prussia (and I have already pointed out that he
neglects very important factors), makes no comment upon
Caulaincourt’s appeal to Napoleon other than to say that it was
naive of him to believe that the Emperor’s affirmative could have
brought peace. At that eleventh hour, no doubt, everything had
gone too far for the process to be arrested by one word. But is not
Caulaincourt’s complaint, in a letter to Maret, that this affair
had been so badly handled, completely justified? ‘The cause of
our disappointments is in the refusal to make timely concessions,
and it will end by ruining us completely.’ Napoleon had had the
most splendid chances to divide his opponents. The Dutch — or
let me say all good Europeans — may \êll be glad that he
neglected to use them and that Metternich, almost in spite of
himself, became the hero of Europe’s liberation. But the whole
story brings out Napoleon’s uncontrollable pride, his gambling
propensities, his complete indifference to human life, his blindness
to moral factors such as the national ferment in the subjugated
territories and the exhaustion of France.
This is not to suggest that the good European ought to close his
eyes to the selfishness of the powers who finally encompassed
Napoleon’s fall. The Europe they resurrected or built anew was no
perfect construction, and each of them strove, some with more
success than others, to realize its own ambitions in the field of
power politics, and thus, in some cases more than in others,
brought about fresh injustice, fresh oppression. That is a point
of view which Sorel is very ready to bring into prominence.* It
^ Thus he underlines, for example, in the bitter letter in which Louis XVIII pro¬
tested from exile against the imperial coronation, the phrase: * Jamais on n*opposa
le droit au crime . . la L^gitimit6 k la Evolution*; and adds on his own account:
*Rendre la Pologne aux Polonais, restaurer la rdpublique k Venise, restituer les
legations au pape, les 6v6ch^ et abbayes d’Allemagne aux princes eccl^siastiques
302
ALBERT SOREL
is as if land hunger and despotism appeared primarily on the
coalition side, so bitterly does he harp on Alexander’s unlimited
greed for power, the maritime and colonial imperialism of the
English, the avidity and the hatred of France shown by the
Prussians, and the immovable conservatism of Austria, which
was again going to stifle Italy and a large part of Germany. In
all such comments there is some truth. What is unacceptable is
that they should be brought forward as part of a system of
apology in which at the same time the fact that the entire public
opinion of contemporary Europe groaned under Napoleonic
oppression and was wea^ry of the Emperor’s eternal restlessness is
passed over.
This is Sorel’s conclusion concerning the abortive negotiations.
‘So the war began again, the war without end, which had been
going on ever since 1792, and it began again for the same reasons
which had caused its twenty years’ duration and its extension into
the firthest corners of Europe ... What the coalition wants is the
destruction of the grand empire, the overthrow of the French
supremacy, the repulsion of France within her old frontiers.
What Napoleon is in reality defending on the Elbe, what he is
inevitably bound to lose in case of his being beaten back, are
those bridge-heads, those advance posts, which the Comite de Salut
Public and the Directory had marked on the map, and which were
essential for the conquest and for the retention of the natural
frontiers.’
How is it possible^ is Driault’s comment on this passage.* The
reasoning is indeed such as to make one rub one’s eyes. Driault
queries ‘the old frontiers’, and it will have been noticed how far
even now the demands of the allies fell short of them. As Caulain-
court and others had warned Napoleon, it was only owing to the
war that the natural frontiers were brought into question. I am
not going to discuss the rest of Sorel’s book, but Driault points
out that even in 1814, had Napoleon only been content with what
was attainable, there were still possibilities of dividing the allies
and saving the natural frontiers. But Sorel passes over these
possibilities too, because they do not fit into his thesis.
^ Revue^ etc., VIII, 194.
^taient des pensês qui n’entraient dans Tesprit ni du tsar restaurateur de la justice,
ni des augustes assesseurs de son tribunal* le roi de Prusse et Pempereur d’AutricheP
VI, 409.
303
THE OBSESSION WITH NATURAL FRONTIERS
The criticism of professional historians has not been able to

deprive Sorel’s' arguments of their authority. Let me repeat that
they are stimulating to the historical imagination and must be
considered as an enrichment of Napoleonic literature. They cry
out for criticism, however, and a good deal must be rejected.
Yet they have been swallowed whole in numbers of French and
even non-French books.* Many thousands of readers have met
them a generation later in Jacques Bainville’s biography of
Napoleon, of which I shall shortly have something to say.
There is something in this whole trend of reasoning which
charms French chauvinism. The disaster of 1814-15, the loss of
the Rhineland and of Belgium, have been sore points for a century
or more. Talk of the bad faith of the allies, of their covetousness,
of Prussian hate, of English selfishness, hcis been indulged in for
its alleviating effect. And I need not repeat that the liberators
of Europe did have other motives apart from those given in the
Kalisch manifesto. All these are reasons why the Napoleonic
legend has been able to strike such profound roots in French
thought.
It is true that the Frenchman can oppose Napoleon on that
very ground of the natural frontiers. If it is accepted that Europe
could have been easily reconciled to those French acquisitions,
the conclusion follows that it was only the excessive policy of
Napoleon which irritated European opinion and in the end
brought about the loss of the natural frontiers. That is more or
less how Bignon, Thiers and Bourgeois reasoned, as we have seen;
Driault and Georges Lefebvre will be found to say the same. This
school, therefore, is not less convinced of the plausibility of the
annexation of the Rhineland, Belgium and North Brabant. A
^ As example of the latter I would only take Max Lenz, Napoleon^ in the illustrated
Monograpkien zur Welgeschickte by Velhagen and Klasing. This book, which ap-
S eared in 1908, and from which many Dutchmen have derived their idea of
lapoleon, is entirely influenced by Sorel. In his introduction he praises Sorel and
Vandal for their ‘Ruhe des Orteils’, and at the same time appeals to Ranke and his
Ûnbefangenheit der Betrachtung’ (cf. above, p. 240) to And a patron for the idea
that *the historical world was no clay in the hands of the Titan, whose actions
must be interpreted in the li^t of French and European history and the
connection of centuries’. And who would not assent to this? But the critical point
from which Lena deduces his argument is that in 1803 it was not Napoleon but
England which wanted war^ and he decides all other problems in accordance with
this. He himself rewds his view as a victory of objectivity over the hate-ridden
tendentiousness of German nationalists such as Treitschke and von Sybel. Much
might be said about this.
304
ALBERT SOREL
careful reading of Sorel leads one on the contrary to ask oneself
whether he was not exceptionally reasonable and moderate in
this respect.
If one follows his argument — that the Rhine frontier, including
both German and Dutch territories, was bound to bring in both
England and Germany, that this policy could therefore only be
carried out by establishing a zone of dependent states through
new conquests, which would indeed involve a life and death
struggle with Europe, an endless series of wars, and thus would not
permit of a peaceful republic but would demand the establishment
of an Empire on Roman lines — if one takes in all this, then the
Convention decree concerning the natural frontiers cannot but
appear extravagant, as a measure completely outside European
realities. It may be possible thus to exonerate Napoleon, who was
saddled with this policy from the beginning, but the whole
period becomes stamped with the character of a tremendous
effort doomed beforehand to failure; however grandiose, it
becomes a paroxysm of energy, showing all the tendencies of the
normal French expansionism in an exaggerated form, and
incapable of achieving anything more than that amazing
spectacle. ‘ But is it perhaps Sorel’s intention in his great work to
preach the wisdom of remaining within the old and more modest
frontiers and to warn his public that a renewed struggle for the
Rhine would once more lead to nothing else than a heroic but
in the end fatal clash with Europe?"
As a rule it must be admitted that he makes quite a different
impression. An explicit affirmation of France’s right to the
natural frontiers will, it is true, not be found in his work. The
whole idea of right in international relationships left him too
sceptical for that. But he does repeatedly counter charges by the
other European states against France’s insatiable expansionism
by pointing to their own practice. It is particularly the partition-
^ The final judgment at the end of volume eight is indeed only an extension of
this idea.
* The clearest example I have noted of Sorel’s dislike of the Natural Frontier
policy occurs towards the end of the fourth volume, p. 477, that is to say, before he
treated, after a pause of ten years, the period of the Directory and Napoleon. ‘Only
the victories of Bonaparte’, he says there, ‘made the realization of the conception
of the natural frontiers possible’ (let me remark in passing that this is a curious way
of expressing it; the natural frontiers had been reached before the victories; Sorel
means that the victories were necessary to consolidate them) ‘and by speeding up
the course of events, his policy brought to light the fundamental error of the system
and made the inevitable collapse more disastrous.’
U 305
THE problem of foreign POLICY
ing of Poland, of which Russia, Prussia and Austria had ên
making themselves guilty, which he uses against them. Ihe
French governments were already in the habit of doing this, and
not only with the idea of silencing criticism on moral grounds;
they considered that the territorial expansion of the three
Eastern PoWers gave them a title to compensation. Now Sorel
shows that this idea of compensation was part of the current
European conceptions of public law, and considers that expansion
to the Rhine was in no sense an exaggerated claim for the avoid¬
ance of a disturbance of the balance. He never mentions the fact
that national differences made the' annexation of the Rhineland
and of Flanders unsuitable. In fact the principle of nationality
leaves him cold.
No, Sorel did not erect his system into a warning against the
policy of the natural frontiers on account of its train of fatal
consequences. Rather does it serve him constantly to identify
himself with Napoleon. While he refers throughout to ‘Europe’s’
envy and ‘Europe’s’ desire to divide France, to throw her into
confusion, to weaken her, he defends or extenuates everything
done by Napoleon, since he was merely following the direction
already laid down for France.
He is thus able to write as if Napoleon, who could not give up
the smallest fragment of one of his conquests without bringing
everything, including the early Republican acquisitions, into
danger, was justified in his obstinate refusal to accept what were
on the face of it very fair peace proposals, and in his ‘war to the
death’.* Indeed, his defence of Napoleon and his condemnation of
men like Talleyrand and Caulaincourt create the impression that,
far from uttering a warning against a policy of conquest, he found
it quite in order for a great country to turn the whole of Europe
upside down for the sake of what it regarded as its natural
frontiers. He seems to think that France, in order to keep Belgium
and the Rhineland in her power, had a right to Holland, and
Germany and Italy, that she was free to liberate Poland or barter
it away again, as circumstances dictated, and to put Spain under
tutelage. Napoleon actually did reason thus, when he found it
useful to reason, and if another line of argument (for he had
^ ‘II fallait, comme en 1795, comme cn 1798, comme en i8oo, comme en 1805,
1806, 1809, choisir entre une lutte mort et le retour pur et simple de la France k
sea anciennes iimites. C'est du Grand Empire que I'on pretend Texproprier d’abord,
puis de TEmpire m^me et des conqu^tes de la R^publique*’ VII, 118.
306
ALBERT SOREL
several) did not happen to suit him better. But to find an echo a
century later in the works of a scholar, and one of so remarkable a
mind as Sorel, remains somewhat surprising.
Let me conclude on ground which is more specifically historical.
Driault thought Sorel’s portrait of Napoleon was out of drawing,
and he protested not so much against the white-washing as
against the belittling of the figure. That powerful personality,
which had set its mark on Europe, whose own outlook and
dynamic will shaped the destiny and the institutions of the
western hemisphere, transformed into the slave of Destiny, with
all its endeavours determined by the previous policy of the kings
and of the Comite de Salut Publicl Anyone putting the problem
like this and considering that insufficient justice is done to
Napoleon’s greatness shows that he is himself possessed by a
particular conception. Here is matter for debate, which many will
be inclined to decide by the most general and aprioristic notions
about the free will of the individual or about the compelling
power of impersonal forces and tendencies in history. I have
deemed it sufficient to treat the problem historically, and to show
how much can be advanced against Sorel’s system from this point
of view, and to what a distortion of the facts it led him.
307
CHAPTER V
EDOUARD DRIAULT
A SCHOOL TEXTBOOK
Among the writers I have discussed, only a small minority are

professional historians, products of the University and teachers
under its auspices. Apart from Bourgeois, Driault is the most
important of that description. The work by which he first made
his name was a history of the Eastern Question, covering several
centuries. He followed this with a school textbook. In 1903 he
wrote the section dealing with 1789-1815, Revolution et Empire, in
the Cours complet d’histoire edited by Gabriel Monod- He was then
‘professeur agreg^ d’histoire . .. au Lycê de Versailles’. It is
worth while glancing at this book which, as far as Napoleon is
concerned, belongs unmistakably to the democratic, hostile
school.
There is, for example, the emphasis placed on the loss of freedom
which the coup d’etat of Brumaire implied for the French people.
After a description of the constitution of the year VIII, there
follows the statement that ‘France of the ancien regime had pos¬
sessed more liberties’. Nor is a reminder lacking of how little
the plebiscite to which the constitution was submitted had in
common with a genuine consultation of the people. The con¬
stitution had already been put into operation. Voting was by
writing and public . . . The writer has no more respect for the
‘organic’ laws which the First Consul introduced. Bonaparte, it
is true, respected the great social achievements of the Revolution,
but in every way he did away with liberty ‘under the pretext of
saving France from anarchy and “of ending the Revolution” ’i
his administrative law killed practically all local freedom; the
municipalities became ‘minors’, the State exercised administrative
guardianship over them.
Towards the end Driault writes that the Emperor’s renown
cost France more than it brought her, and that in a certain sense
she was the victim of the great role he made her play. ‘Caesarism
only displayed its power and its glory by exhausting the country’s
resources.’ That is what the scholars of republican high schools
308
EDOUARD DRIAULT
must be made to realize. The horrors of conscription, of the
rounding-up of absconding conscripts (the refractaires) are told,
as also the suppression of all representative bodies (that of the
Tribunate after Tilsit), of all free expression of opinion (the
censorship), the oppression of the Catholic Church. The passage
leads up to a quotation from the memoirs of Mme de Remusat
(characteristic choice!): ‘The egoist Napoleon, thinking of
nothing save himself, killed the Empire.’ Dissatisfaction in Italy,
ferment in Germany, war in Spain. . ..
The opinions of Driaylt in 1903 would not, however, be fully
known, if no account were taken of his treatment of the events of
1813 and 1814. He had then apparently not yet investigated the
negotiations of Prague independently, and put all the blame for
the failure on the bad faith of Metternich (a very different story,
therefore, from that told in 1907).’ But his indignation only
reaches its height when he comes to describe the manifesto of
December ist, 1813, and the congress ofChatillon in February and
March 1814. The action of the allies in holding up Napoleon to
the French people as the man responsible for the withdrawal of
their offer of a peace leaving the natural frontiers intact, he
regards as rank hypocrisy, and when, having reached French soil,
they reduce their proposals to the frontiers of 1792, he, like
Houssaye, simply sees Napoleon as the hero defending France’s
holy right to the Rhine frontier and "to Belgium, with the courage
of despair, and glories in the fact that the French people did not
back Talleyrand in his ‘treachery’. Here the non-French reader
is struck by the crass contradiction with the writer’s other views.
I draw attention to it because we can perhaps find the explanation
here of the change which Driault’s appreciation of the whole
figure of Napoleon was to undergo, and which would otherwise
remain a psychological puzzle. But first let us turn to his original
contributions prior to the change.
REJECTION OF EARLIER INTERPRETATIONS
The books from which we can obtain data, consist in the first
place of two monographs, dated 1904 and 1906, entitled respec¬
tively La politique orientale de Napoleon^ 1806-08, and Napoleon en
Italie, 1800-12. What strikes one in both is that the writer
used them to develop theories respecting the policy of Napoleon
309
in general, about the aims that were shaping in his mind. It is
thus not to be wondered at that Driault next embarked on a great
work entitled Napolion et VEurope^ which appeared between the
years igio and 1927 in five volumes. It is this work which has
given him his important place in Napoleonic historiography.
Nevertheless, in setting forth his ideas I shall chiefly use the two
earlier monographs and one or two articles, and of the larger
work I shall quote only from the earlier volumes. The reason for
this will appear in the course of my survey.
We have already seen how forcefully and how positively Driault
let himself be heard in the debate on SorePs theories. He rejected
the conception of Napoleon as driven by the impersonal forces
of the history of France and of Europe; Napoleon exercised his
own personal influence on the course of history. SorePs theory
distorts and belittles him. It does so not only by reason of its
historical fatalism which subordinates personality to the course of
events, but also, and even chiefly, because of the interpretation
given of this compelling development itself: that it was all done
solely for the sake of the retention and security of the natural
frontiers already achieved, that Napoleon did nothing more than
continue the work of the Comiti de Saint Publicy and of the Directory,
which for their part continued the work of the monarchy.
Driault will have none of this. Thus far he is in agreement with
Masson and Bourgeois who likewise discover a strong new personal
factor in Napoleon’s policy, by which French history was forced
from its normal, traditional paths.^ But Driault is satisfied neither
by the explanation that Napoleon’s family feeling, first for his
brothers, then for his son, was the true motivating force, nor by the
idea that his eastern dream was behind everything.
As for Napoleon having, as Bourgeois called it, his secret, that
to Driault is beyond question. Thus he feels urged to offer
another hypothesis. Napoleon had an aim. His clear mind could
not remain satisfied with a"* vague longing for world domination.
There must have been something more precise, something that can
be defined and described.* The uncertainty results only from the
fact that Napoleon was indeed a secretive person. He gave no one
^ I follow here the interesting survey of MtniET in the Revue ii*kistoite moderne et
contemporaine, XVIII (1913), ‘Une nouvelle conception dc la politique ^trang^re
de Napoleon* (pp. 177-200, 353-80), written after the appearance of the second
volume of Driault*8 Napolion et rEurope.
* La politique orientate de Napolion^ p, 375.
310
EDOUARD DRIAULT
his confidence, he hid his inmost mind. His correspondence is
certainly an invaluable source, but Ht is not always frank. He
does not display all his ambitions, he never admits himself to
have been wrong. He throws on his enemies, particularly
England, the responsibility for the long wars by which he
exhausted France. It appears as though he was always in a
lawful state of self-defence and that nobody possessed the virtue
of moderation to the extent that he did. It is not incumbent on
anybody to take him at his word.’^ As, I would add, Arthur-Levy
and Sorel believed him, in his correspondence and even in the
utterances from St. Helena.
England, which Napoleon so much likes to bring up as an
excuse, is important in SorePs presentation not only for that reason
but also because, as the most obstinate fighter for the independ¬
ence of the Low Countries, it did seem to bear out the theory of
the outstanding importance of the natural frontiers. Vandal, as
we have seen,^ was even more positive in his view of England as
the enemy, never for one moment out of Napoleon’s thoughts.
Without mentioning him, Driault joins issue with an English
historian, Seeley. This writer, endowed with vision, and
attracted by great subjects,’ wrote a striking biography of Napo¬
leon in which he pointed to the subjection of England as the real
aim of Napoleonic policy, and this, it should be added, chiefly
for the purpose of obtaining room for economic and colonial
expansion. ‘What?’ Driault exclaims, ‘When he made himself King
of Italy, it was to strike at England? When he destroyed the Holy
Roman Empire of the German nation, when he founded the
Confederation of the Rhine, when he resuscitated Poland, when
he added the Illyrian provinces to his empire, when he set out for
Moscow, it was to strike at England? That is indeed hard to
believe.’ True — he found England constantly in his way, she
resisted him, she fought him, and finally brought him down.
‘England was his obstacle, but not his aim. If he had only wished
to beat down England, why did he not attack her directly? Had
he spent at sea one tenth of the effort which he undertook for the
conquest of Europe, he would have stood a better chance of
settling accounts with his everlasting enemy. But on the contrary,
if he was defeated by England, it was because he gave no sufficient
^ NapoUon en Italic^ p. i. ’ See above, pp. 238 sqq.
* His best known work is still, perhaps, The Expansion of England,
attention to her, because he turned his back on her most of the
time, digging himself in in the East.’*
This view of England the enemy as a slogan with which to
deceive, this reference to the East, are both reminiscent of
Bourgeois. And indeed Driault admits that much of the latter’s
explanation is attractive and that it has shown him his dirtction
a good part of the way. But it is too limited, too one-sided. In
particular he cannot agree with the reading of Tilsit which
postulates Napoleon’s willingness to share the Turkish empire
with Alexander. On the contrary, he used Tilsit to keep the-
Czar’s attention occupied and at the right moment to lay hands
on the entire inheritance of the Sultan. But the chief difference is
that Driault is unable, like Bourgeois, to explain everything by
the hypothesis of Eastern ambitions. What have these to do with
the Confederation of the Rhine, or with the annexation of Spain
and Portugal, or with the crushing of Prussia? ‘Prussia certainly
did not bar Napoleon’s way to the East.’*
It was not the natural frontiers, then, not England, not, or not
only, the East. Nor was it dynastic feeling. In a review of
Masson Driault wrote: ‘One must not attach greater importance
to that intimate family history of Napoleon’s than it deserves.’
Napoleon did not allow his policy to be decided by his relatives,
he used them for his policy: ‘He gave them such thrones as suited
him, took them back at his pleasure, and hardly allowed the
incessant demands of that insatiable band to trouble him.’
NAPOLEON A ROMAN EMPEROR
What then?
Napoleon, says Driault, ‘was a Roman Emperor’.’ Or rather,
he became one, he wanted to be one. His command in Italy —
Driault takes this idea gratefully from Sorel — was his preparation
for the Imperial office, as jthe campaigns in Gaul had been for '
Caesar. But at first the forms and tradition of Emperorship
which gave shape to his policy were those of Charlemagne.
‘One of the most remarkable traits of Napoleon Bonaparte’s
mind was his instinctive but eminently picturesque feeling for the
^ La politique orientale de Napolion^ p. 376.
* La politique orientale de NapoUon, p. 377; cf. Bourgeois on this subject, above,
^ • t?apolion en ItaHe^ p. 30.

3*2
EDOUARD DRIAULT
scenery of the past and for the historical significance of his own
times and career. He carefully measured the symbolic importance
of the imperial title, with one bold leap of the imagination he
lifted himself up to Charlemagne, to Rome itself, and was
immediately at home in that apparently archaic role: there was in
his behaviour no trace of the upstart.’‘
Charlemagne: this, then, was for the time being to be the figure
he wished to embody. Even before the coronation in Notre Dame
this was made clear during a visit to Aix-la-Chapelle, the ancient
capital of the Frankish Emperor. There, in September 1804, he
received the new Austrian ambassador in solemn state: ‘That
already suggested the abdication of the head of the Holy Roman
Empire making room for the new Emperor of the West.’ Indeed
Francis II was not to carry that tide much longer. He was to lay
it down in 1806 after the territorial reorganization of Germany.
It was from Mayence — surely there was irony in the choice of the
ecclesiastical capital of the moribund Empire — that Napoleon
sent his congratulations on the new title of Emperor of Austria
which Francis had taken beforehand. After Aix-la-Chapelle and
Paris, Milan. For Charlemagne, too, the iron crown of Lombardy
had been the necessary completion to the Imperial crown which
the Pope had placed on his head. As in Notre Dame, Napoleon
in Milan Cathedral himself placed the crown on his head. In his
title. King of Italy, claims to the whole peninsula were implicit.
But for his contemporaries the imperial title was eloquent
enough. ‘There could be only one Emperor really, the Emperor
was the sovereign, the sole master of the other princes. That was
the classic tradition, handed down through die centuries from
the Roman Emperors.’* This imperial tide, the imperial character
of Napoleon’s power — therein is contained the explanation of the
new coalition which was formed against him, and which he broke
up at Austerlitz.* But Austerlitz and Jena extended reality
beyond the Charlemagne dream. Italy and Germany, with
France, now formed the basis of a truly imperial and super¬
national power. In all directions he sent out kings of his blood to
govern the conquered peoples and to assure to the imperial idea
as many firm supports. Other vassal kings he bound to himself by
marriage. The Holy Roman Empire, whose shade he had so
^ NapoUon en ItalUy p. 294. * La politique orientate de NapolSon, p. 394.
• NapoUon en Italie^ p. 304; cf. above, pp. 281 sqq.
313
recently annihilated, lived again with its centre of gravity in
France.
But is it not obvious that there could be no arrest at this
juncture? Napoleon desired, and had been aware of his desire
at an early stage, the dominion over the Mediterranean. That
sufficed to break through the form of the Western Empire.
Automatically the idea grew and became a resurrected Roman
Empire before the split, when it included both East and West.
The system of vassal states had to give way before the system of
unity. In 1806 Napoleon had written to the Pope saying that he
was Emperor of Rome, ‘ but in 1809 he went further and annexed
Rome. The expectation and soon the birth of an heir, strength¬
ened this tradition. And then, not only Rome but Constantinople!
The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation had so easily
been shattered with a couple of sword thrusts; could the tottering
Ottoman Empire give more trouble? Rather the opposite. ‘Napo¬
leon, the successor of Charlemagne, can also be the successor of
Constantine. Only then would he in truth be Emperor.’*
That the imperial idea in its full classical import became for
Napoleon a compelling law of life — nothing could be more
natural in Driault’s view. ‘By his birth, by his origins, by all the
characteristics of his genius, penetrated with the feeling for order,
with the passion for unity, he was in truth a Roman. And that
inclination was strengthened by his circumstances. The genera¬
tion to which he belonged was permeated with the classical spirit.
It applied it in everything, in literature, in art, in politics, in the
very forms of the language. Palaces, columns, triumphal arches
were built after the Roman fashion. From the Romans were
taken the noblest motifs in sculpture and in painting; the Sabines
were pictured, the oath of the Horatii. In his painting of the
imperial consecration David hid the Gothic forms of Notre Dame
behind Classic colonnades and tapestries. The terms of Tribunate,
Senate, Consuls, were revised; a new Rome was built on the
ruins of the Revolution. Follow that line, and it leads to Imperial
Rome. The Consulate was succeeded by the Empire, and to the
Romans, the Empire meant unity of power secured by the military
prestige of the eagles. The Imperator, that was the conqueror
mounted on the Capitol, the top of the world. Napoleon clasped
the imperial diadem round hi® temples, and in his brain was born
* cf. above, p. 107. * La politique orientale de NapoUon, p. 394.
314
EDOUARD DRIAULT
the ambition to undertake the complete imperial function. With
his clear-cut profile, his obstinate chin, his haughty look, his
smooth-shaven face and hair cut short, he was the very image of an
Emperor. He wanted to be the Emperor.’
And in so far as it was possible in modern <imes, Driault con¬
tinues, he actually did become the Emperor. At Austerlitz he
defeated the two other Emperors. ‘He overthrew the eight cen¬
turies old Holy Roman Empire and took possession of his inheri¬
tance. He conquered Italy and like Charlemagne came to own the
iron crown of the Lombard Kings. For a time he spared the
Pope. Like Charlemagne he was already extending his empire as
far as the Adriatic and the Ionian Sea. He conquered Germany
and became the patron of the Confederation of the Rhine, whose
frontiers he brought down to the Elbe. He crushed Prussia, which
had dared to oppose his imperial destiny. He restored Poland
under the name of Grand Duchy of Warsaw and made it into a
military frontier of his empire: had not the ancient Western
Empire possessed marches on the confines of the barbaric world?
He did not call the Polish nation into being again: he took no
notice of the rights of the nationalities which he wanted to pound
to pieces in an imperial unity. He stood apart from his period:
that is why he himself was bound in the end to be broken.
‘Being a Roman Emperor, he wanted to rule over the Mediter¬
ranean, which had once been a Roman lake .. . For that reason
he coveted the East. Aix-la-Chapelle he had; Constantinople he
wanted to have. Only then would he be the Emperor, and not
simply an emperor. At the same time, to crown his ambition, he
coveted Rome, which he took. From then on he surpassed
Charlemagne, who had left the Pope at Rome. He dispossessed the
Pope, he had the papal archives carried to Paris. In the days of
Constantine the Pope was a humble servant of the Emperor, by
whom he used to be confirmed as such so that he could not en¬
croach with his claims on the majestic unity of the Empire...
His son, the King of Rome, was an Emperor’s son, and the
grandson of an Emperor.
‘Permeated with those ideas taken from antiquity but brilliantly
rejuvenated in his mind, he did nothing directly against England.
England had no place within the sphere of imperial policy. In that
aspect he stood apart from his period and was doomed to defeat.
‘How could he,’ Driault concludes, thus coming back to the
3»5
subject of the book in which these reflections are to be found, ‘how
could he have shared the Ottoman Empire with Russia? The
Ottoman Empire was his, he had staked it for his domain: for it
was the Eastern Empire. How could he have established a sincere
and durable alliance with the Czar, who also wanted to be the
Emperor of the East?’ ‘
On the contrary, he was obliged to oppose this ambition. That
message to the Senate in the spring of 1807, sent from East Prussia,
when the war in Germany had enticed him ever further east
against the Slav hordes, before Tilsit; that message in which he
warned the French against the disasters which would arise from
the barbarian Russians’ domination of Constantinople — it will be
remembered perhaps that Bourgeois regarded it simply as a piece
of propaganda inspired by an awkward situation,* but for Driault
it enshrines Napoleon’s most profound convictions.* Thus, after
attempts properly to subjugate Spain, after having forced Austria
into his system, the great undertaking at the end becomes a real
culminating point. All the peoples of Europe, jumbled together
for a moment in the Empire, were led by him, in order to throw
Russia back into Asia. ‘It had been the task of the Roman Em¬
perors to control the barbarians, to protect civilization under the
laws of a single authority organized on a grand scale. Once he had
beaten Russia, he could settle matters in the eastern world once
and for all....’
In practice this meant a dynamic foreign policy which turned
out to be a great misfortune for France, and Driault is not blind
to the fact. In 1805-06 an alliance with Prussia was within Napo¬
leon’s reach, if only he would moderate his German policy, and
return to the tradition of remaining entrenched behind the
natural frontiers and seeking beyond them nothing save influence.*
Tilsit might have been a real peace with Russia, had Napoleon
been prepared to open for Alexander the way to the East, as the
Czar had expected, and a»he had in fact been promised. In that
case no one could have taken away from Napoleon Italy or Spain
or the Confederation of the Rhine. But: ‘He was less concerned to
safeguard France’s security behind her natural frontiers than to
conquer the Empire for himself.’ Indeed, Driault remarks,* the
* La politique orientale de NapoUon^ p. 396. * cf. above, p. 246,

• NapoUon en Italie^ p. 674. * Napoldon et VEurope^ II, 445 aqq*
•op. cit., 1,471; II, 448.
316
EDOUARD DRIAULT
whole notion of alliance was alien to the imperial idea. The
Emperor could not share, the Emperor could not recognize con¬
ditions, the Emperor scorned the basis of equality, the only
basis on which alliance can exist. He only knew vassals, he only
desired obedience, he took all advantages for himself.
THE PROPHET OF THE REVOLUTION IN EUROPE
But, Driault pronounces, the last word should not be with the
Frenchman, resentfully considering the loss of the Rhineland and
of Belgium as a result of this over-ambitious policy, or impatient
at the stifling centralization which Napoleon’s institutions fastened
on his people for so long. He should also have an eye for the
greatness of the work done in Europe. However transitory may
have been the structure of the Napoleonic Empire, its influence
makes it one of the most fruitful, one of the most profound forces
in world history. Napoleon — and this it is which constitutes his
greatness — was ‘often unintentionally the agent of the Revolu¬
tion. On entering upon the First Consulship, he declared the
Revolution to be at an end. As regards France that was certainly
so, but for Europe it had only just begun. Napoleon’s victories
were victories for the Revolution’.
We have already met with this view in Mignet, who could see
in Napoleon’s work in France nothing but reaction, but who
would not deny him praise as the propagator of the principles of
1789 in Europe. ‘ Driault quotes a passage, dated about 1840,
from the socialist philosopher Pierre Leroux — a man so little
inclined to autocracy that after the coup d’etat of Louis Napoleon
in 1851 he was obliged to seek refuge in England:
‘The great events of the Empire and of the march of humanity
would became totally unintelligible if one were to see in Napoleon
nothing but a fascinating despot or an ostentatious conqueror, and
tried to put it all down to his personal ambition and superhuman
pride ... Wherever he ruled or placed his rulers, the Inquisition,
feudal rights, aU exclusive privileges, were abolished, the number
of monasteries was reduced, customs barriers between provinces
thrown down ... Viewed in that light, it was he; and he alone,
who carried through the Revolution. Feudalism, priest rule,
barriers isolating the nations, social prejudices which divided
humanity into castes, all sorts of inequalities — he took up his
* cf. above, p. 35 sq.
317
sword to cut those gordian knots of mankind. At every step for¬
ward that he made, his Code smoothed out everything in his rear.
That Code was the conqueror’s gospel: his victories expanded its
domain and it presented him with armies.’'
Vandal, the conservative Vandal, whose attitude to the prin¬
ciples of 1789 was indifferent, if not downright hostile, would
certainly have marked this eloquent passage with a good many
queries. Yet he too claims for Napoleon the honour of having
guided the peoples of Europe along new paths; there is no doubt
that he was thinking not so much of the principle of equality and its
blessings, as of the growing national consciousness of the oppressed.
It will be remembered that Masson too considered that the fall
of Napoleon in 1815 was the fall of the ‘liberator’, not only of
France, but of ‘the nations’ as well.* In the introduction to his
Kapolion et Alexander ler Vandal puts it as follows: ‘It was his
dream to be Charlemagne. He wanted to bring unity to the scat¬
tered states of the West, and seizing the peoples, and snatching
them away from their memories and traditions, to subject them to
an authority which rejuvenated them for all that it was imposed,
he tried to impel them violently on the course of their future
destinies.’
The idea is almost a commonplace in French historiography.
There is for example the striking passage from Sorel, which I
quoted above,’ about the stirring up of the European soil for a
new harvest, a passage which Driault was eager to quote.
Thus the idea was by no means new, when Driault took it up,
neither in the form in which Napoleon was regarded as being the
propagator of the social reforms of the Revolution, nor in that in
which Napoleon was seen as the liberator, in the name of the
Revolution, of the nationalities; indeed it is part of the inheritance
of St. Helena. But in the importance Driault attached to it in his
presentation as a whole, there was an element of novelty. Vandal,
after the passage just quoted, says that these conceptions do not
spring spontaneously from Napoleon’s mind: ‘They only appeared
there, so to speak, as reflexes, occasioned by the necessities of his
struggle against England.’ Sorel, who looks for the source of
Napoleon’s s^cngth in the impetus of the Revolution, certainly
relates the propagation of Revolutionary principles more closely
^ cf. Quack,Socialisten, III, 333. * See above, p, 251.
\ • Above, p. 387 sq.
318
EDOUARD DRIAULT
and more organically to his policy. His emphasis, however, falls so
much on the purpose of protecting the natural frontiers, that he
cannot do justice to the other idea — no more than Masson, who
was fundamentally too narrow, and too exclusively the French
nationalist. Now this is what Driault set out to do, and his main
thesis gave him the necessary latitude. For Charlemagne and the
Roman Emperors had something to carry out, they too had a
European task.
‘Towards the close of antiquity’, writes Driault,* ‘the Roman
Empire gave to the world the political unity needed for the propa¬
gation of those principles of moral and religious unity which
classic philosophy had been slowly maturing and which were now
represented by Christianity. At the close of what we call the ancien
regime the Emperor Napoleon gave for a while to the historical
world the unity needed for the propagation of those principles of
a political and social revolution which had been announced by
eighteenth-century philosophy and which have not ceased ever
since to change the face of Europe. There you have the whole of
the historic significance of the Emperor’s role, and it suffices for
his greatness. He was the prophet of the new age.’
One’s immediate reaction to this passage is to say that the writer
has greatly overrated the significance of the transition from ancien
regime to modern times, but it becomes historically more question¬
able when he attributes this conception to Napoleon himself and
uses it to measure the stature of the statesman.
Having described how the First Consul plunged France into the
renewed war with England, how he aroused the ancient hatred
for England, and with it the old ambition and fighting spirit neces¬
sary to defeat England in Europe and help him to build the Gallic
Empire, Driault asks whether we have on that account to condemn
Bonaparte." ‘History,’ he answers, ‘is not ethics; the task of under¬
standing and portraying him already demands quite enough of us.’
Indeed, Napoleon could not do anything else: ‘He was victory
itself, the genius of war ... And above all, after the Convention
and the Directory he had to follow another career, which they had
indicated to him. For a secret instinct called him, as it did France
herself at that time, to represent the Revolution in all its power of
expansion, as Charlemagne had represented Christianity at the
^ La politique orieniale de NapoUan^ p. 399.
* NapoUon et VEurdpe, I (La politique extirieure du Premier Consul), p. 473,
319
THE PROBLEM OF FOREIGN POLIOY
moment when it was definitely spread over the Continent of
Europe.
TThe Revolution produced Napoleon. With its immeasurable
force of destruction he was able to overthrow the whole of Europe
so that there might be room for new political and social reforms.
His labours were favoured by the weakness and decrepitude of the
ancien rigime as well as by the youthful energy of the revolutionary
spirit... What a progress had been made since Brumaire! Then
France was still threatened in her natural frontiers ... Now the
old thrones have to think of their own defence; the old Europe
feels death approaching. It is the Revolution in the service of the
conqueror, the conqueror in the service of the Revolution. Napo¬
leonic conquest is the Revolution on the march: the Revolution is
aggressive by nature.’
What was it be did?* ‘He crushed the kings. In particular did
he break down the crumbling edifice of the Holy Roman Empire,
he freed the peoples from old despotisms, he awakened nationalities
which had been slumbering for centuries. “The whole of Poland
mounted on horseback” and took service in the Grande Armee.
Illyria ... Servia ... but above all Italy ... It is owing to Napo¬
leon that Italy began to be something more than a geographical
expression. No other European nation is so much in his debt...
Wherever he passed the marks of his activity can be shown. In
Spain he destroyed the Inquisition and called into being the liberal
party who were at first called the Josephines, and who have never
ceased to labour for the resuscitation of the country. Even in
Russia, who can tell if the year XII has not contributed to the
rise of that great liberal party which is so actively undermining
autocracy?’ (It should be borne in mind that this was written in
1906, when the first Duma was in session in St. Petersburg.) In
all the countries over which Napoleon has reigned, however briefly,
new institutions, based on the equality of classes and on liberty of
conscience, initiated that revolutionary transformation which shook
the entire nineteenth centufy.
‘He was as it were the prophet of the new nationalities ... How
great would he have been if he had kept on serving the Revolution
instead of making use of it for his own ends, if he had omitted to
make of liberty a means to power, if after rousing the Italians and
his other peoples to independence he had not kept them under the
* The passage is from Napolion en Italie, pp. 667-70.
330
EDOUARD DRIAULT
yoke, if he had not violated his promises. But has any conqueror
in history ever been known to let go of his conquest? He was never
willing to do anything in order to free the nations over which he
ruled . .. He was afraid, and certainly not without reason, to see
them rise against him. He tried to melt Europe down in the great
revolutionary unity which was the grand empire.
‘No doubt he could find grounds for the reassurance of his
conscience. Perhaps he looked upon the work of his hands as
“providential”. At least he could sincerely believe that the coun¬
tries he had conquered would, if left to themselves, immediately
revert to the forces of the past. The whole of Europe had not gone
through the philosophic education which had been the lot of
France, and even in that exceptionally developed France it was
possible after him for the Restoration to try and restore the ancien
rSgime. He could well believe that he alone had the strength
needed to establish and to maintain everywhere the Revolution
and that his retreat would be the signal for the reaction. It was
the aggressive nature of revolutionary propaganda, rather than the
need for lawful self-defence against the coalition of the kings, by
which he was dragged into his incessant wars. And as a matter of
fact these terms are not mutually exclusive.’ (So he was in a state
of lawful self-defence after all?)
CRITICISM OF THE IMPERIAL IDEA
Driault’s views concerning the general tendencies of Napoleonic

policy are, as far as this study is concerned, the most important
part of his work, but they are also the most open to criticism.
Before letting criticism have its say, I would point out that there
is a great deal more to be found in his monographs and in his great
history of Napoleonic foreign policy. His account of diplomatic
negotiations, his analysis of political situations at this or that
critical moment, are all based on substantial research (though he
too has been charged with having neglected foreign archives), and
apart from that his narrative is sound, acute, sober and to the
point, generally not without a pleasant matter-of-fact flavour. He
certainly managed to find firm support for part of his thesis from
his own investigations. The legend of the peace-loving Napoleon,
with no thought for anything but the natural frontiers, he has
shorn of much of its plausibility — we already noticed that when
X 331
I compared Sorel’s account of the origin of the coalition of 1804-05
with that of Driault in his second volume. Likewise, it is more
difficult, having read Driault, to maintain that Napoleon only
thought of England, or of Egypt and Syria, or of his family.
Especially interesting is his independence of the anti-English
prejudice, so noticeable in many of the French writers. What
tirades have we not already heard about the wickedness of the
‘English oligarchy’.
In discussing Pitt’s return to office after the resumption of the
war in 1803 and the coincidence of this with the plots against
Bonaparte’s life, Driault points out that the latter did not neglect
to hold forth on the complicity of the British agents on the conti¬
nent, who were in fact stimulated to greater activity by Pitt. ‘This
was his most precious means for the influencing of public opinion,
the one which therefore he used most frequently. “L’or anglais” —
that was the customary theme of the proclamations with which he
kept the fires of French patriotism burning. ‘‘La perfide Albion.”
A century later French hearts still thrill to that phrase and feel the
throb of anger; long before Waterloo Napoleon made a cult of it.’*
Driault, at least the Driault of those days, would have nothing
to do with the anti-English tradition which was so strong among
his contemporaries, such as Sorel, Vandal, Masson.
His attempts at constructive argument, however, are less
convincing.
In the first place, what are we to think of this imperial idea,
of these recollections of Charlemagne, gradually superseded by
recollections of ancient Rome, as affording the true explanation of
that tremendous career, and the motivating force of that restless
spirit of enterprise? It is certain that Napoleon’s mind, and the
thought of his time, was permeated with images and ideas, with
terms and phrases, taken from Roman antiquity. Nothing is more
plausible than the argument that in the reaction against enthu¬
siasm for Republican memories, men turned to imperial times. It
is striking to find this pointed out time and again in Napoleon’s
ideas, in his deliberate showing off as well as in his more intimate
utterances; moreover Driault has independently elaborated the
parallel in point after point, sometimes with telling effect. But is
it more? Is it more than an artistic illusion, a superficial frame
superimposed loosely on great events which were hardly moulded
* Napol4«n ft I’Evfop*, 11,114; cf. another example, p, 159,
338
EDOUARD DRIAULT
by its discipline? Just as when Quinet tried to see in Napoleon a
Constantine reborn through the mysterious workings of atavism,
I find myself inclined to write: far fetched. The comparison is
exciting, and awakens all kinds of slumbering notions; I am even
prepared to admit that Napoleon’s mind was occasionally set
going in this fashion, and driven into a certain course. But can it
be the real explanation? Even with regard to his ecclesiastical
policy, where the influence was perhaps the strongest, this seems
to me entirely unacceptable. And as for its being the motive for
the wars, the decisive factor in directing the ambition, the true
reason why, for example, England remained outside Napoleon’s
active interest while Constantinople drew him, I cannot bring
myself to believe this. I believe rather that the Western Empire,
and afterwards the Empire in its wider sense, Charlemagne,
Constantine and Diocletian, were names with which to adorn
the untameable urge for action, the insatiable lust for power
and each new object of conquest as it appeared on the horizon.
In other words I believe that the interpretation which Driault
rejected as being too vague for so precise and definite a mind, is
the right one — the desire for world domination (‘une domination
universelle’).
But let me rather relate what another French historian has to
say on this point. Muret, whom we know already as a critic of
Sorel, published, in the Revue d’histoire modeme et coniemporaine of
1913, an elaborate argument,* in which he compared all the
different hypotheses presented in the course of the last few years
about the meaning and the purpose of Napoleon’s foreign policy.
He assigned a central position in that article to Driault’s ‘new
conception’. Muret, by the way, limited himself to criticism in the
domain of Napoleonic study, and this is a pity. I know nothing more
penetrating, more cogent and more balanced on the subject.
Muret has much praise for Driault’s work. He looks upon it as
a contribution of outstanding importance, which sweeps away a
number of misconceptions and one-sided views and brings new
light. The main attraction of this interpretation to him is its
breadth. For the explanation must cover a conquest and a domi¬
nation which did not cease to expand in all directions. This
requirement was certainly satisfied by the conception of an irrecon¬
cilable Europe which compelled France to conquer ceaselessly in
* I haw already quoted eotnethint from this on p. 310.
323
order to preserve (Sorel), but since the study of the documents is
leading historians ever further from this view, Driault’s thesis of
imperial ambitions becomes tempting.
Nevertheless it is imperative that one should be clear as to what
one means by it. ‘The word empire is a vague term.’ (It is amusing
to find Muret here turning against Driault the qualification with
which the latter set aside ‘domination universelle’.) ‘And as soon
as one tries to be more precise, the question arises whether M.
Driault does not draw excessive conclusions from a single word.
‘The word empire can be connected either with the extent of the
territories to which Napoleon’s ambitions were directed or with the
nature of the power which he desired to exercise.
‘If territorial extent be considered, the word empire must be
called exceedingly vague. The empire of which Napoleon may
have “dreamt”, has no analogy with any of the great empires
mentioned by history. No doubt it may be roughly said that he
reached at first more or less the boundaries of Charlemagne’s
empire, that then, through domination of Germany and Italy, he
approached the extent of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, and
that finally he seemed to strive, by appropriation of part of the
Mediterranean lands, and by aiming at the East, towards a
restoration of the Roman Empire. But would he have found his
limit there? Already in 1812 the French Empire extended along
the course of the Elbe and the Vistula into regions never dominated
by the Romans. But above all, at the point it had reached, the
Napoleonic Empire must, in 1812, involve the ruin of two great
empires: the continental Russian and the maritime and colonial
English. Suppose’ (and Muret is able to justify the activity of his
imagination with the example of the ‘dream’ ‘ with which Driault
credited Napoleon just before the catastrophe of December 1812,
when at Moscow he deluded himself into thinking that he had the
Russian Empire at his feet) ‘suppose that Napoleon had re¬
mained victorious in 1812. According to M. Driault he would, in
that case, not only have occupied Constantinople but have thrown
back the Russians for good and all towards the north in Asia. That
is to say, he would have restored Poland, he might even have
taken away the Baltic provinces. Suppose further that, as a result
of the establishment of Napoleonic domination over the whole
European continent, England was compelled to make peace.
* Napol4on *n Italie, pp. 675 sqq.
324
EDOUARD DRIAULT
Would not Napoleon then have thought of India where he did
actually plan more than once to strike at the English? Once in
control of Constantinople and of India, would he have suffered the
continued existence of the Persian Empire, another territory with
which he had already meddled, in 1806 and 1807? What would
have become of the old Spanish colonial empire? Since we are
now launched on the wide waters of supposition, I am beginning
to wonder whether we are justified in saying that Napoleon would
have halted in Constantinople or at the eastern basin of the
Mediterranean, or at the Atlantic coast. Can one not imagine a
vast empire, outside the bounds of the old Roman Empire, down
to the far corners of Iran, down to Ceylon, across the Indian
Ocean, and covering Central and South America? What does all
this mean if not that it is impossible to confine the Napoleonic
dream and to draw an arbitrary limit which his ambitions would
not have crossed? Applied to the extent of territory, the word
empire has no sense unless it means world domination.’^
Muret is thus led to ask whether the search for the aim of
Napoleon’s policy, in which all the recent authors had joined, had
any object at all. ‘Had this policy an aim? Was there a great
Napoleonic plan capable of definition?’ Was there a secret? ‘To
speak of an aim is to speak of choice, is to speak of subjecting all
other objects to a definite plan of disciplined activity. Now Napo¬
leon — this is at least the impression which we have gathered from the
writings of M. Driaulf (my italics)—‘has never been willing to choose.
He has carried on, simultaneously, and in all directions, the most
varied enterprises ... Napoleon could never bring himself to
sacrifice certain ambitions for the better success of others. No
mind was ever less capable of understanding the necessity of com¬
promises’ {transactions). ‘This does not mean that he could not in
certain circumstances be an accomplished diplomat, nor that he
did not in certain cases voluntarily reduce his claims. But — and
M. Driault has proved it with abundant evidence — he never con¬
sented to moderate his claims otherwise than temporarily, never
withoi^ the thought at the back of his mind that he would soon
leave Kêhind him the signpost at which he was halting. Never was
he w/ding to take into account the interests or the ambitions of
others.’*
The conclusion to which Muret is led by his argument* is:
‘ PP- 375 sqq- ’ P- 379- ’ P- 380.
325
‘That the Napoleonic policy is not to be explained by a definite
plan but by a state of mind.’ It is as though we were back with
Taine, or with the entire school of Mme de Stael.
Meanwhile Muret has also been arguing that the word empire
applied to the nature of Napoleon’s power is no more capable of
precise definition. No doubt analogies can be noted. ‘The
creation of vassal states, the family connections, characterize the
Napoleonic Empire as belonging to a type of medieval dominance;
later on the idea of unity seems to make it approach the Roman
form. But how small is the significance of these analogies when
we try to be a little more precise. At the origin of the Carolingian
conception or of that of the Holy Roman Empire we find the
Christian idea; and what remains of that in the Napoleonic con¬
ception?’ Has not Driault himself written that Napoleon, who
wanted to be a Constantine, could, in the eyes of the Church, be
no other than a Diocletian, a persecutor? And rightly so. ‘Napo¬
leon, the Emperor of the Revolution,’ says Muret, ‘did not
resemble, he was the opposite of, Charlemagne, the Emperor of the
Church.’ Let us note, in fairness to Driault, that he did not try
to establish an identification, but explicitly declared that Napo¬
leon, as Emperor, brought another message than Charlemagne, to
wit, the message of the Revolution. But it was a message all the
same, and thus far there was a resemblance. Yet it is also true that
this made a radical difference at any rate in the attitude to the
Church. But, Muret continues, Driault admits that Napoleon had
more in common with the Roman Emperors. ‘In Rome, too,’ (so
Driault had written) ‘the Emperor’s function was of popular
origin, and had been instituted in democratic fashion. Like Napo¬
leon the Caesars were the chosen of the people, so much so that
they did not dare make their power hereditary. Reaching across
the royal dynasties, which based their existence upon divine right
and which were consecrated by the bishops, he recovered the
antique conception of the supremacy of civil power, secularized
political authority, and linked the doctrines of the Revolution with
those of imperial Rome.’
Muret does not contest the truth of this, but he judges never¬
theless that there is an essential contradiction between the two
systems. The rights of man, the idea of equality, which behind
the imperial armies Napoleonic adminisfrations brought to the
nations, have no foom in the Roman world of ideas. The revolu-
326
EDOUARD DRIAULT
tionary force which propelled Napoleon, and which is essentially
French in origin, the national resistances which by themselves
formed so strong an obstacle that it was crushed against them,
have created for Napoleonic activity circumstances which find no
analogy among those in which the Roman Emperors had to work.
‘But what then is the significance of all these Carolingian or
Roman formulas, which were not invented by M. Driault, which
he did indeed find in the official literature of the Empire, but
which he gives so unexpectedly important a part to play? In my
opinion they were destined to strike the popular imagination; by
evoking almost legendary figures or reminiscences the public was
to be made to feel the grandiose character of imperial enterprise
. . . One must not take for the aim of Napoleonic policy what was
no more than a kind of symbol, an attempt to express it in the
language which was most consonant with the mentality of con¬
temporaries.’^
‘the prophet of the revolution’:

CONTRADICTIONS
There is yet another aspect of Driault’s theories which is also of

essential significance in his system; I refer to his exaltation of
Napoleon as the disseminator of the principles of the Revolution.
We have seen that he introduces it into his development of the
imperial idea and tries to establish an organic connection between
the two. From two points of view and in two manners, as we have
also noted, he depicts the Emperor’s activity. He shows him
introducing social reforms in the conquered territories and at the
same time creating the spirit and the condition which will give
rise among populations that are oppressed or divided between
several states, to a national consciousness and to modern national
movements. Muret refers to this only in passing, yet in so doing
he raises a question of essential importance. ‘It is necessary’, he
says, ‘to distinguish between the aims of Napoleonic policy and its
consequences.’ And he wonders whether it is valid to conclude
from the fact that the Napoleonic conquest was favourable to the
development of liberalism and of nationalities, that this advance
animated the conquest and provided it with its purpose.*
There is no doubt that the latter opinion is sometimes expressed
‘ pp. 377 sqq- * Revue, etc., XVIII, 378.
327
by Driault. When he has to admit that Napoleon did not liberate
his subjected nations and did not even prepare their freedom, he
is ready at once with the excuse — we have met it before' — that
they, and Europe, were not yet ripe for freedom. It is true that in
another place he frankly admits that Napoleon paid no attention
to the rights of nationality, that he crushed the nations within the
unity of his empire, and that therefore, as not belonging to his own
time, he was broken himself.*
Elsewhere, at a later stage of his work,* he describes Napoleon
as ‘the very conscious and determined agent of the expansion of
revolutionary principles ... the most forceful apostle of social
equality, which forms the kernel of the French Revolution’s
doctrine’. He considers that the Code Civil which Napoleon ‘taught
to and imposed upon the major part of Europe’ rightly bore his
name if only for a moment, and he even propounds the hypo¬
thesis* that Napoleon fought Russia because this ‘autocratic and
still Asiatic’ country was felt by him to be the principal obstacle
to the decisive forward step of civilization.
Yet, it is true, some ten years earlier' Driault had quoted the
letter in which Napoleon urged Joseph, only that moment ap¬
pointed King of Naples, to introduce the Code forthwith. But
why? Out of love for social equality and to make civilization move
a step forward? ‘Introduce the Code Civil in Naples; then you will
see all that is not devoted to you melt away in a few years’ time
and what you want to retain will be more firmly established ...
The Code will confirm your power because it does away with
everything that is not protected by entails and no great estates will
remain except such fiefs as you will found.’ (Those fiefs he wanted
granted especially to Frenchmen, and soon there followed the
establishment of duchies for his marshals and for others who were
to form, in Naples, Illyria and elsewhere, a trustworthy French
nucleus.) ‘This’, Napoleon concludes, ‘is what has made me
preach the need of a civil code and has persuaded me to introduce
it.’ The Driault of 1906 looked upon this as ‘a curious admission’
and judged that one could hardly apply it to the action of the
First Consul in France. This may be, but as regards Naples this
conception of the Code as in instrument of power policy has
* Above, p. 321. * Above, p. 315.

*NapoUon et VEurope, III; Tilsit (1917), p. 18.
* cf. above, p. 316. • Napolion en Italie, pp. 463 sqq.
328
EDOUARD DRIAULT
nothing incredible.* The Driault of 1917, however, who saw
Napoleon as the protector of social equality against Russia, had
forgotten even^ the pronouncement applied to Naples.
Contradictions like these are typical. Vandal has told us already
that Napoleon Hried to propel the nations faster along the road of
their destiny’;* Vandal, who, as appears from his book, knew as
well as anybody the complete lack of scruple, the exclusive preoc¬
cupation with the interests of his power policy, which animated
Napoleon in his dealings with the Poles; Vandal, who even
commits himself to the general statement that for Napoleon
‘human beings are first and foremost tools’,' and who would
hardly have thought of arguing that he looked upon nations in
another light. And when Masson laments the fall of Napoleon in
1815 as being at the same time the fall of the nations, need I
mention how little he cares as a rule for the freedom or the well¬
being of non-French peoples?
Undoubtedly national pride is a motive force. Driault roundly
admits that ‘we’, we Frenchmen in spite of the ill turns which
Napoleon has done France, ‘cherish a secret admiration for the
glorious deeds performed by him at the head of the Grande Armee,
when we realize that he, and through him, we, have prepared the
revolutionary transformation of Europe’.*
Actually we are facing here the emotional factor which was
going to animate Driault’s main work and which came more and
more to dominate his judgment: pride at the spectacle of this
Roman Emperor who did such great deeds with France. That
instead of trying to conquer the whole of Europe he might, by
following a more modest policy, have secured the natural frontiers
for France is admitted by Driault in so many words more than
once. He rejects explicitly Sorel’s opinion that ‘Europe’ would
never have resigned itself to this.' ‘In a hundred ways and on
many occasions Napoleon might have consolidated the frontiers
conquered by the Republic.’ But however much the possession of
the Rhineland and of Belgium may appear to him desirable and
altogether suitable, Driault, after having studied the Emperor’s
^ The argument Napoleon uses to persuade Louis to introduce the Code in
Holland, is similar in tendency. ‘Cela resserre les liens des nations d’avoir les
m^mes lois civiles et les mfimes monnaies*: in other words, not to introduce social
equality among the Dutch, but to bind Holland more closely to France.
* See above, p. :}i8. • NapoUon et Alexandre ler^ I, Foreword, p. vi.
* La politique onentale de NapoUon, p. 2.
* For example: NapoUon et VEurope, III, 362.
329
the ’problem of foreign policy
policy for many years, cannot find it in his heart to reproach Napo¬
leon for his failure. His admiration for this imperial, this salutary
activity is unbounded. ‘Perhaps’, he speculates, ‘he might have
avoided the final disasters if he had stopped there’ (that is in i8o8
when, having previously fought only with princes, he entered upon
his struggle against the Spanish people), ‘if after having brought
to life or resurrected the Italian, German, Spanish, Polish nation¬
alities, he had only applied his genius to the completion of French
nationality within its national frontiers’ (it should be noted in
passing that the natural frontiers have now become the national
frontiers, and that this enthusiast for the idea of nationality thinks
it perfectly reasonable for Napoleon to ‘complete’ French national¬
ity with Rhineland Germans, Flemings and Brabanders), ‘and to
the organization of the Europe of the nationalities which has
during the last century been endeavouring so painfully to come
into existence. But a happy Napoleon would not have been as
great as the Napoleon of Leipzig and of Waterloo.’ Moreover; ‘It
is easy for those who are not heroes to preach moderation in
victory.’^
When the Frenchman looks with such complacency upon
Napoleon’s policy of conquest, when he seeks Napoleon’s glory,
shared by the whole nation, in his contribution to the propagation
of the beneficial principles of 1789, and to the awakening of the
consciousness of modern nations, it becomes highly relevant to
examine how this actually took place, and, as far as Napoleon is
concerned, what objective; he pursued. Phrases like ‘that it was his
historical task’ or ‘that a secret instinct drove him’, are, when all
is said and done, no more than romantic or pseudo-philosophical
fog which hinders close, matter-of-fact study of the historical
problem. Before I show to what extent Driault lost his way in that
fog, I want, with a few more or less arbitrarily chosen examples,
to give a hearing to other French historians who have expressed,
in the course of detailed studies, opinions about French domina¬
tion in one or other of the occupied territories.
madelin’s satire
Let me begin then with a somewhat lengthy quotation* from an

early work of Louis Madelin (about whom we shall have more to
say). La Rome de NapoUon (1906). It is doubly interesting because
’ III, 373 sqq. * pp. 132-6.
330
EDOUARD DRIAULT
in the attitude of mind of the Napoleonic officers and officials as
described by him, there are aspects which one could easily apply,
if maliciously inclined, to Driault and other enthusiastic authors.
‘In the Frenchman of 1809 there was something of the mission¬
ary as well as the victorious conqueror. Ever since 1791 he had
been an apostle, and however paradoxical the claim may appear,
under Napoleon he still looked upon himself as the great apostle of
liberty. With the missionary he shares the belief in the excellence
of the creed which he propagates and the pitying contempt for the
Heathen who has had to live without it for so long; he burns with
zeal to impose it and is borne along on a proud conviction that the
savages whom he converts to his religion will in course of time
appreciate the benefits it confers.’ That creed, Liberty, relates,
so Madelin goes on to explain, to ‘Roman liberty’, that is, civil
liberty, for the sake of which political liberties have had to be
surrendered; since 1792 this has become French liberty. Bonaparte,
for all that, since Brumaire, he has suppressed the political
liberties of the French, ‘is none the less, in Europe, the champion,
the incarnation of liberty. He liberates the peoples while at the
same time regenerating them.
‘Similarly every soldier is wanting to “regenerate Europe with
the breath of liberty”, and so behind him is every French official.
The one in his haversack, the other in his dispatch case, both
bring liberty to the citoyens of Europe, and to their minds darkened
by obscurantism^ by priestly superstition^ and by the despotism of
tyrants, enlightenment.’ He quotes Sorel (‘the master of us all’,
as he calls him, for to him his book is dedicated), to characterize
the Frenchman of that period: ‘Let not the universe reject the
regeneration which we offer it; to resist it is rebellion.’ ‘The
nation’, Madelin continues, ‘which has undertaken so great a task
and has in part achieved it is La Grande Nation. It is a signal honour
to be allowed to become, as is the case of the Spaniards and the
Neapolitans, the vassals of the Grande Nation^ to share the benefits
of its code, to be ruled by its princes. But the greatest honour in
the world is to become, like the Belgians, the Rhinelanders, the
Lombards, the Illyrians, a part of the Grande Nation. Every general
in his proclamations, every prefect in his circulars, will loudly
assert this; more, they believe it in good faith, or, let me say,
naively.
‘The Grande Nation has conquered a dozen countries for this
331
THE PROBLEM OF FOREIGN POL ICY
unique “French liberty”, and the salvation it alone ensures, at the
cost of a series of incredible victories; the French have grown used
to laying down the law in the most literal sense. Caesar’s generals
and pro-consuls combine the pride of the missionary with the
superciliousness of the conqueror, and without admitting any
comparison between the systems they have brushed aside from
Amsterdam to Naples, and that which they have substituted for
them all, they consider themselves to be born masters of the
universe.
‘Out of so proud a reliance upon his strength there springs in the
Frenchman a contempt, tempered by an almost friendly condescen¬
sion for those “poor fellows” whom he has compulsorily liberated
with his arms and whose eyes he has opened to the light with
cannon fire.’
On the whole the soldiers behaved well, discipline was strict.
But the conquerors could not fail ‘profoundly to humiliate the
conquered by an incessant boasting of their superiority, which
soon became insulting ... Every people has its pride and suffers
when this is offended every day. And it was offended by those
confident assertions that the crying need of these people was to be
civilized, liberated and regenerated, and that in the mean time
they were deserving of compassion. ...
‘Another consequence of this French conceit is the wish of the
majority of French administrators to substitute their laws, their
institutions and their regulations, for those of the countries
annexed, and even their spirit, their ways of living, their customs.
Sometimes a prefect, more sensible than many others, and realiz¬
ing the undesirable effect of this line of conduct, would tiy to
reconcile his instructions with local usage or would even set them
aside in response to local aversion.' Immediately he was called to
order and reminded of the Napoleonic conception, the.^French
tradition, the doctrine of centralization. Twice, in 1798 and in
1809,’ (that is to say, after the, abduction of Pius VI by the Direct¬
ory and after that of Pius Vll by the Emperor) ‘French officials
resented the spectacle of the clock of the Quirinal indicating the
hour according to Roman instead of French time. Small as it is,
the incident reveals a state of mind. The Imperial University,
with its programmes and its lecture hours, the clergy reduced to the
unalterable rule of the Concordat, the administration, supervised
by the ministries in the Rue de Rivoli, or the Quai Voltaire,
338
EDOUARD DRIAULT
working with its unvaryingly similar bureaus and its holy red
tape on a strictly centralized pattern, the prefects making their
tour of inspection from Amsterdam, Hamburg, Laybach or
Rome, on the same date, the same tour of inspection which is
at the same time performed by the prefect of Seine-et-Oise, and
by the prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhone, the courts of law from
Haarlem to Naples, under the auspices of the Grand Juge of the
Place Vendome, applying the articles of the Code Napoleon, that
was the dream, and for five years it was the reality. A cruel
reality, because it offended and crushed local habits, malignant,
because it corroded the desirable and charming variety of the
peoples, mad, because it went against the nature of things,
against the character of men, against the needs of the climate. At
times it became ludicrous as when — and this is but an instance —
the French prefect at a distribution of prizes, whether at Lay¬
bach, the Hague, or Rome, addressed the scholars with the identi¬
cal speech which he might have used for the collegiens of Arras or of
Besanôn.’
This, it may be objected, smacks of the conservative, and it is an
impression that will later be confirmed. But this does not prevent
there being truth in Madelin’s satire (for it deserves this name),
and one need not be a conservative to smile at it and to learn from
it at the same time.
GRANDMAISON, CONARD, PISANI, LANZAC DE

LABORIE ABOUT SPAIN, DALMATIA, BELGIUM
Madelin is by no means singular among French historians with

his sceptical treatment of the policy of reform in the subjected
territories. Take Grandmaison, from whom I have already given
a. quotation,* and whose principal work deals with the relations
between Napoleon and Spain. Naturally we know beforehand
that the attitude of this Catholic author towards the problem will
be different from that of Driault. He sees in the intervention in
Spain nothing but the blindness of the despot, who, having found
it possible to mould according to his whim that uprooted gener¬
ation of Frenchmen prepared for despotism by Rousseau, imagined
that every other nation would be equally powerless to resist. But
in Spain he hit his head against the untameable resistance of an
entire nation, and above all of the masses.*
* p. isj. * cf., however, the remark in note a on p. 335.
333
THE PROBLEM OF F O R E I G N. P O L I C Y
It is not uninteresting to have an opportunity of observing
Napoleon at work. Grandmaison describes his arrival in the little
town not far from the French border where Joseph had taken
refuge, and where he was holding his court, in November 1808,
in expectation of being taken back to Madrid by his brother’s
army. This Spanish expedition came at a most inappropriate
moment for Napoleon. Earlier in the year he had imagined that
his coup at Bayonne would give him quiet in that direction and
enable him to give the whole of his attention to eastern affairs.
Since then he had met Alexander at Erfurt, where things had
seemed bright enough on the surface. But although he was un¬
aware exactly how far the inner estrangement had already pro¬
ceeded under Talleyrand’s encouragement, he had been acutely
conscious that the Spanish contretemps had affected his prestige.
Now to have to undertake a campaign in that country which was
in itself unimportant, and this while Austria, spurred on by the
Spanish example, was on the lookout for a chance to get its own
back, was dangerous, was costly, was an intolerable delay. Tt
was therefore with a bitter mind, with tingling nerves, with a
worried look, and a mouth inclined to utter reproaches, that he
crossed the Bidassoa.’^ Without warning he fell in with Joseph and
his French and Spanish courtiers, and talked and talked. The
need for a close unity between France and Spain was his theme;
Spain must follow the French system step by step. Long faces
among the Spaniards. But Napoleon took no notice of anything
and began to inveigh against the monks: he would dissolve every
monastery. One Spaniard found the courage to tell him that
these words, if they became known, would be worth an extra
hundred thousand men to the rebels. Napoleon did not listen.
On the previous day at Tolosa he had already snarled at the
Capucins who came to greet him: ‘Messrs. Monks, if you have
the hardihood to meddle with our military affairs, I promise you
I’ll have your ears cut off,’ and he went on and on in this tone.
As early as the beginning of December Madrid had to capitulate.
The hot-tempered population submitted to this with difficulty,
but Napoleon was able to avoid an assault, and thereupon caus^
his propaganda machine to hand out the most sugary description
of the attitude and the state of mind of the Madrilenos. At the
same time, however, he was already engaged upon reforms, and
* Grandmaison, VEtpagru *t NapoUon, I, a6o.
334
EDOUARD DRIAULT
this without even consulting Joseph. Monasteries were dissolved,
the tribunal of the Inquisition was abolished (Grandmaison sees
no merit even in this, since this institution had become completely
innocuous) and also seigneurial rights and tribunals; officials
were dismissed ignominiously. The unrest continued and the
tone of the imperial bulletins grew sharper. All groups of the
resistance were condemned in most offensive terms. The corregidor,
accompanied by a number of deputies, had to listen to a speech by
Napoleon which was a mixture of threats, reassurances and boasts.
His contemptuous remarks about bad conditions and about back¬
wardness certainly contained more truth than Grandmaison is
prepared to admit, but when one reads the text one readily under¬
stands that this was not the way to achieve anything with the
Spaniards: ‘Your grandchildren will bless me as your regenerateur.
The day when I appeared in your midst, they will count among
the most memorable, and from that day Spain’s prosperity will
date its beginning.’^ The arrogance is equalled only by the
blindness.
Taken as a whole Grandmaison’s picture is undoubtedly
partisan,* and this in a sense unfavourable to Napoleon. Every
measure taken against the Church is in his opinion reprehensible.
But now take Pierre Conard, who in 1909 wrote a thesis about the
French military government in Catalonia (February 1808 to
January 1810).* He argues that it will not do, as has been
repeatedly attempted, to put all excesses to the account of the
generals. They acted on the strength of Napoleon’s orders, and
gained his approval. He held up their conduct as an example to
Joseph, and the judgment of Conard, who shows no special
tenderness towards the Church, is ‘that their measures did not
seem in any way to aim at regeneration. Even those which were
occasionally announced as preparatory for reforms or renovations
in reality sprang from military or financial considerations’.
In 1893 there appeared a work about the French administration
in the regions along the east coast of the Adriatic. The author was
an abbe. * He describes Dalmatia as a country which at the begin-
' op. cit., p. 483.

• A more recent book on the same subject is that of A. Fugcbr, NapoUon et
VEspagne^ which rejects a presentation of the resistance as general, national, un¬
hesitating, on account of this being a conventional or romantic presentation.
• La captiviU de Barcelona^ pp. 368 sqq., 386.
^ The abb4 Pxsajni, La Dalmatia de i797 to
335
ning of the nineteenth century was still in the middle ages. Its
clergy were all-powerful, and yet the French authorities (Mar-
mont, Duke of Ragusa, was for a time the governor) tried to
govern without, and against, the clergy. French legislation was
introduced without any reference to the educational level of the
population. ‘A people’s legislation is the product of its habits,
its traditions, its history, even of the nature of its soil. France was
in those days too proud of its laws to be able to admit that they
might not answer the needs of all times and all peoples ... The
result... was that this population was turned into rebels. Await¬
ing the call to arms the Dalmatians kept as much as possible out¬
side the administrative machinery of which they did not, and
would not, understand the mechanism. With an instinctive
aversion they looked upon that formidable machine: their simple
and narrow minds were able to discern these two of its functions
only: conscription and taxation. All the legislator’s great ideas,
his wise, beneficial and farsighted intentions were misunderstood.’
A third case is that of Belgium, about which Lanzac de Laborie,
also a man of fairly conservative inclinations, wrote: ‘One can, of
course, not say of Belgium that little was achieved there, because it
was exposed too long to the systematic operation of French
assimilation, and because the spread of the French language
among the aristocracy and intellectuals at an earlier date made
its influence felt during the twenty years of annexation. But what
causes for irritation there were, and what aversion! The religious
policy which, as a result of the Concordat, had for one moment
taken a direction acceptable to Catholics, became, when Napoleon
found himself at odds with the Pope, repellent to the Belgians and
particularly to the Flemings.’ But in his conclusion Lanzac de
Laborie speaks in quite general terms about ‘the diffidence and
hostile sentiments of the population’, which in the end ‘were the
answer to the irksome meddling of the administration’.^
If one asks whether the result of the undoubtedly profound
transformation of Belgium which resulted from this episode, was
salutary, one will at the very least have to take into account some
darker aspects. ,The old administrative forms which were cast
aside without mercy, afforded protection to valuable social
institutions. The new leading class which rose with the new
administrative jifrangements was in many respects, and in
^ ^ La domnation frartfoUe en Belgiqug (1895), II/335,
336
EDOUARD DRIAULT
Flanders in particular, owing to the language, more remote from
the population. The centralization was fatal to much that was
characteristic and independent.
GERMANY: RAMBAUD
The most backward countries, Spain, Dalmatia, which were still

most deeply immersed in feudal ways of living and of thinking,
proved to be the least accessible to French reforms. It was not in
the backward but in the enlightened part of Europe that these
were readily accepted. In Western Germany, in Italy, in Holland
— but in Holland their effect was extremely limited^ — there
existed a civilization and a social consciousness which had certainly
been stimulated by the French ‘philosophy’, but which was mainly
nourished from currents and traditions that were both native and
universally European. The French philosophy, after all, was by
no means exclusively French. One has only to recall the English
contribution. It was principally their political disruption which
made it difficult for the nations mentioned to take the initiative
for thorough reform, and it was the French conquest that helped
them over this obstacle. Who dare say that if it had not taken
place, civilization and progress might not have found another way,
a better one, perhaps? There were indeed minds in those countries
which could have taken the lead. We have already seen French
writers who contrasted the German civilization of those days to
its advantage with that of the French, as it had become under
Napoleon. Before the French Revolution a number of European
countries possessed reforming ‘enlightened despots’. In Holland
there was a highly promising middle-class agitation. Who will be
able to weigh the speeding-up of the process of development as a
result of the violent interference by the French Revolution and
Napoleon against the disasters that resulted from it, against the
clumsy mistakes, the violence and the unnecessary breaches with
the past, against the intensification of national antagonisms, in
^ Dutch historiography is accustomed to emphasize the advantages of the
annexation. It should be realized, however, that in taking this line Dutch historian^
have chiefly had in mind political reforms, the resolute imposition of unity and an
administration to match. From the social point of view, the French had n<' great
contribution to make, the rule of privilege which they had had to overcome in
France had been on the wane for centuries in Holland, and to a certain extent had
vanished altogether. Owing to the Reformation the problems of the monasteries,
ecclesiastical property, and the attitude of the Catholic hierarchy to the State had
ceased to exist in Holland. Thus French annexation of Holland did not involve a
social revolution such as resulted from it in various other countries.
Y 537
particular, of the German hatred for France, which has been a
curse for Europe and most of all for France herself? Even the
reaction about which Driault likes to expatiate — ‘the Holy
Alliance’ of princes is a nightmare to him — might perhaps never
have taken on such acute forms. It must be admitted anyhow that
in most countries the reaction was not as bad as might have been
expected. It turned only by exception against the civil liberties
which had been everything for Napoleon. Against the political
liberties, yes, and also against the freedom of nationalities like the
Poles and the Italians, it was at its worst. But one must indulge
in a good deal of crooked reasoning to presume to place Napoleon
in shining contrast on these two points (although we have already
seen a few French historians writing in this sense, and presently we
shall see Driault doing it as well).
Let us look at one other well-known book which deals with
the French domination in Germany. It appeared in 1897, and the
author was Alfred Rambaud.* What do we read here about the
case of Palm?* That Napoleon gave orders not only for the arrest,
but for the death sentence, including its justification; that the
unfortunate bookseller of Nuremburg had done nothing very
dreadful; that the deed caused profound emotion and indignation
in Germany and contributed mightily to the rise of the German
sense of cohesion across the boundaries of the small states, and at
the same time turned it intensely against the French — all this
we are told uncompromisingly. The conclusion is, nevertheless,
somewhat surprising in an historical work, in the work of a
University scholar particularly. ‘The death of an innocent man,
or if one prefers to put it so, a punishment so ill proportioned to
the offence, is well calculated to bring about a revulsion of humane
sentiments. But we must harden our hearts about such matters,
we who have since’ (an allusion of course to the war of 1870)
‘seen German generals threatening French towns with sack and
bombardment for the sake of a newspaper article.’*
‘When we see the dictator’, says Rambaud in trying to draw
up the balance, ‘proclaiming in Westphalia, in Bavaria, in Poland,
the liberation of the peasants, freedom of conscience, equality
before the law, when we see the Code of the Constituent Assembly,
^ La domination franfOise en Allemagne, The second volume is called L'Allemagne
sous NapoUon let (x 804-11). The author was Professeur d la FaculU des Lettres de
Paris, \
* cf. above, p. 42. ^ • p. 33-
338
EDOUARD DRIAULT
which has become the Code XapoUon, get a footing on the Rhine
and on the Vistula, we have the right to feel proud on behalf of the
French Revolution which was made by the nation as a whole.It
was only natural that the Germans of the Rhineland, who in 1792
had enthusiastically welcomed the French revolutionaries, should
recognize in the Napoleonic measures the realization of part of
their programme. But the eternal wars were not in accordance
with the principles of 1789, they were the Emperor’s personal
policy. ‘It is no use saying that his victories were necessary for the
propagation of the new principles. It needed no more than a
France strong within her frontiers of Rhine and Alps for the
French principles to find their way in Europe. Thus the propa¬
ganda would have been slower but surer, and liberty and equality
would not have been exposed to the vicissitudes of war, finally to
succumb in Germany, after Leipzig, because a despot was beaten
in the field by other despots. Western Germany, daily growing
more like France, daily further outstripping Eastern Germany in
progress, would have recognized its friends and compatriots not in
Berlin or Vienna, but in Paris. The period of national hatreds and
of the terrible national wars could not have come upon us. Out
of that great crisis would have been born not a Prussian Germany,
for which we remain the hereditary enemies, but a French and
democratic Germany, united with us in a common political faith,
co-heir of the Revolution.’
Napoleon accepted in the name of the Revolution as legislator
but rejected as man of war; this is an entirely different conception
again from that of Driault, with his ‘the Revolution is aggressive
by nature’,^ and with his ‘the nature of humanity is such that the
sword is sometimes necessary for the triumph of ideas’.* But this
well-meaning and pacific Rambaud deems it best, nevertheless, for
the Rhinelanders to become French. And he views with regret and,
what is worse in an historian, without understanding, the national
uprising of the German people against French domination.
Fichte, who welcomed the French Revolution in 1792, inveighed
against Napoleon in his Reden an die deutsche Nation. ‘To this
evolution of the great philosopher corresponded that of the w hole
of liberal Germany, which no doubt acquitted itself dutifully in
1813. But what did it profit liberty?’* Thus Rambaud, and he
^ p. 471. *cf. above, p. 320.
* La politique orientale de Napoleon, p. 5. * p. 478. ^
339
opposes the current German view, which applies the national
standard as a matter of course, and sees good Germans only in
those who took part against the conqueror, while it rejects those
who supported him. ‘There is nothing dishonourable to Germany
in the fact of our hegemony’, he declares, and he observes that the
Napoleonic system was accepted by statesmen, rulers, scholars,
and men of letters, industrialists and peasants. But one has only
to read his own book to understand how completely unacceptable
that regime was. I have mentioned already the impression made
by the execution of Palm. How could German opinion remain
indifferent to the attempts at armed resistance in 1809? How
could the Westphalians regard it as an honour to be governed by
a playboy like Jerome, whose sole virtue was to be the brother of
the conqueror; who knew no German; in several of whose ministries
all business was conducted in French, while at the head of the
secret police was a Frenchman, who also knew no German.*
If, having looked at the problem a few times from various angles,
we now return to Driault, we are in a better position to under¬
stand how immensely simplified is his conception. No one will
deny that the French Revolution and the French conquest under
Napoleon have given a tremendous impulse to the development of
new social and political forms in the rest of our continent. But
Driault’s antithesis between enlightened, mature France and back¬
ward, simple-minded and monarch-ridden ‘Europe’ bear witness
to a somewhat naive national self-conceit, and betray not only
a lack of understanding for the feelings of other nations but also
ignorance concerning their history. As I have already suggested,
his view was more or less that of the imperial officials described by
Madelin. And his increasing tendency to exalt Napoleon as the
liberator of the nations, the prophet of their national sentiment,
without asking himself whether this was a conscious endeavour or
the unintentional outcome of the oppression to which he sub¬
jected them, exposed his ^historical understanding to most sur¬
prising aberrations.
OVER THE BORDERLINE (VOLUME iv)
At the beginning of this chapter I said that I would try to

reconstruct Driault’s interpretation as much as possible from his
earlier works. Even this has turned out to be a difficult enterprise
• ‘ p. 286,^264.
340
EDOUARD DRIAULT
because, while ceaselessly revolving the same conception, he
modifies the accents on each occasion. But although even then
this acute and critical mind displayed a tendency to lose itself in a
Napoleonic mysticism, his friends of the Revue d’histoire moderne et
contemporaine can hardly have foreseen, though they must now and
then have shaken their heads over him, that gradually he would
throw away all self-control, all judgment, for the Roman imperial
fantasy, and end by writing books which are in flat contradiction
to his first. Anyhow, he soon went his own way, and in 1911 he
became the first chief editor of the Revue des Etudes napoleoniennes.
The third volume of his Napoleon et VEurope, which appeared in
1917 in the midst of the war, is still on the borderline, although I
have quoted passages which make an odd impression.* With the
fourth volume, published in 1924 the borderline is definitely
crossed. Driault has become the victim of the system which he had
been constructing for years, and in the end proves unable to stand
up to contact with Napoleon and his imperial dreams. But the
shock which caused him to lose his balance was (as will become
still clearer in the last chapter) the first World War.
The style, always a little disjointed, short of breath, colourless,
but at the same time sharp and to the point, has now become
impatient, staccato, nervous. The fourth volume opens with a
recapitulation of the whole system in which every characteristic is
more strongly marked. I shall try to lift from a good thirty pages
the most striking sentences.
The historical tradition of the imperial title — ‘History was severe to
the first emperors, Tacitus and Suetonius dealt hardly with Tiber¬
ius and Nero and the rest. This is because they knew them only
through their crimes and their despotism; they lived too near
them — as we do to Napoleon — to be able to judge rightly of their
historic function.’ (The reader is now warned that crimes and
despotism will no longer disturb the author.) ‘The imperial idea
throughout the centuries was not an accident born from personal
ambition; it was one of the fundamental laws of world history.
This if still is, and will be for a long time, for ever . .. This
activating idea (idee-force) meets with contradiction, with obstacles.
The conception of individual liberty does not square with it, at
least so it seems. Nor does the conception of nationality — but per¬
haps that too is so only to the eye... The universal, humanitarian
* pp. 3*8-30.
revolution of 1789, with its new political creed, sprung from the
teaching of Christianity, of the equality of all human beings before
death and before God, will find its instrument, its conqueror...
The Roman Education of France — ‘Gaul was Rome’s best pupil. . .
A Frankish Mediterranean Empire ... The Merovingians and
Carolingians, barbarians as they still were, had imitated the laws
of Rome with touching zeal .. . Pan-Germanic historians have
never ceased to exploit the Treaty of Verdun of 843 .. . The
greater Lotharingia’, created by this treaty, ‘will ever mean death
to France unless it becomes French. The Rhine frontier is indis¬
pensable for the normal life of France ... Germania had nothing
Roman . . . The Emperors were strangers in Rome, barbarians . . .
France created the law of the balance of power, a refuge for the
weak... As a form of political organization, however, the balance
cannot compare with the empire. The empire is best for peace,
because it imposes peace. . ..’ (Whether that really is the safest
way for peace, everyone may judge for himself.)
Now follows the application to Napoleon. ‘All that he touched
at once took shape and became great in history.’ Even in the
controversy with the Pope, in which until that moment Driault
had shown much understanding for the ecclesiastical point of view,
he now takes sides with Napoleon; there was an Emperor of Rome!
‘There was even a Roman Emperor.’ Napoleon’s benefactions to
Italy are recalled. But his greatest benefaction was Austerlitz.
‘There at last he overthrew after ten centuries the Holy Roman Em¬
pire, the enemy of the nations, the Bastille of Europe, the barrier
against the Revolution. There, without perhaps expressly' (my italics)
‘willing it, he pointed the way to the oppressed nationalities . . .
Westphalia, a colony of the French spirit.’ As Charlemagne once
tried to introduce Germany into the civilized world through
Christianity, so he, ‘a second Charlemagne, with a clearer mind
and greater genius,’ tried to do the same through the doctrine of
the Revolution, and in this way it will no doubt at last be a success!
In passing, Lavisse, the great universitaire historian of that gener¬
ation, is rapped over the knuckles because he had called Napoleon’s
empire ‘an unbearable anachronism’. Driault, who in former
days had placed Napoleon outside his time because of his lack of
understanding of the nationalities and his neglect of England,^
now will have nothing of this. The unbearable anachronism is the
342
EDOUARD DRIAULT
Holy Roman Empire which he destroyed: ‘In that way he assured

the existence of the new nations; he calls them, he already allows
them to live, to begin with under his guardianship, for they are
still fragile, and by his fall their life will be jeopardized.’
Need I say that while this is a profession of faith, it is not
history? ‘The Emperor’, says Lavisse with a truly satisfying sense
of balance, ‘clothes the Revolution in archaeological dress . .. but
the Revolution is within him. It is the Revolution he serves, in
spite of himself and against himself, when, oppressing Europe
because such is his pleasure, he awakens the soul of the Spanish
and of the German peoples.’^ In spite of himself and against himself—
once upon a time Driault too knew this.^ Yet we are now pre¬
sented with this coloured print of the Emperor fondling the
nations. Pure legend of St. Helena!
Later, when discussing European conditions in i8io, Driault
defends the whole of the Emperor’s unsound and shaky structure
in Germany. The greatness of modern Germany originates with
Napoleon. (Had he intended this too? It is not said in so many
words, but it seems to be implied.) Yet, says the author, his Ger¬
man work was less successful than his Italian, one would almost
say that his ‘Latin genius’ felt less at ease there. But he was inter¬
rupted in Germany — and, with this apology, the author allows
himself to soar into dithyrambics on this account as well: ‘His
Latin genius, given a little time, would have perfectly sufficed for
the task. The Latin genius is sufficient for all organization; it is
capable of bringing order into the worst chaos, even into the
Germanic chaos.’’
If, at the outset, Driault’s treatment of the theme, ‘Prophet of
the Revolution’, still showed contradictions, these have now been
solved. But how? Through admiration for the impressive pheno¬
menon, carried away by remarkable and striking parallels (which
are, after all, no more than parallels), the man who seemed to take
position against Sorel’s determinism, who saw Napoleon’s great¬
ness in the freedom, in the personal nature of his policy, has now
slipped back into determinism himself. At first there were only
passing references to the necessary, the providential, character of
\
^ In the two pages which deal with Napoleon in his Vue geuerale de Vhistoire
politique de VEurope, 1890.
* IV, 168. Driault never consistently proclaims the true ‘universalism* of
Napoleon’s aim, as Vandal does (cf. above, p. 238 and note to p. 240).
343
V
Napoleon’s interventions in Europe, to his task as the agent of the

greatest and most salutary revolution mankind has ever known,
at any rate since that of Christianity. Napoleon may have acted
consciously or unconsciously, this did not seem very clear to the
author, and the worse is that he did not care. Now the system has
been closed, Napoleon has become inviolable. To set oneself
against him is to put oneself outside history. All liberal opposition
within France, all national opposition without becomes senseless,
or if it has a sense, reactionary. We are not to inquire too nicely
into his mentality or his intentions, Napoleon has become the
chosen champion of the goddess Revolution, of the French Idea,
in other words, of Enlightenment, Progress and Civilization.
There remains one slight reservation as a relic of the author’s
past opinions: Napoleon perhaps did not intend all these beautiful
things; or rather he did intend them, but perhaps not explicitly , .
The fourth volume was not Driault’s last. In the final volume even
this reservation has been thrown to the winds.
THE CONVERT (VOLUME V); ‘THE TRUE FACE’
In the fifth volume. La Chute de VEmpire, we turn with anticipa¬

tion to the chapter on the Congress of Prague. What do we find?
I note the title; Le Congres derisoire. It is a quotation from Napoleon’s
correspondence — that correspondence about which Driault had
warned us twenty years earlier that the Emperor never admitted
himself to be in the wrong, that he always showed a pacific face, in
short, that one ought never to take him at his word.* I also note
the conclusion: ‘War was indeed inevitable. The allies wanted it,
and Napoleon could not capitulate.’ One would like to press into
the author’s hands the article he once wrote against Sorel — n|Ot
that I consider that article to be the last word upon this matter.
1814, 1815 — the pathos and the distress of Houssaye, Arthur-
Levy and Masson added together, can scarcely equal the emotion
with which Driault describes the downfall and the treason, the
heroism and the steadfastness. But with the last chapter, ‘The
Legend of Napoleon’, the author recovers all his courage, all his
faith. He is like the veteran of whom Balzac tells that he could not
believe in the Emperor’s death.* Napoleon is still alive, Napoleon
is the People personified for Action. He is Democracy, in the sense
* cf. above, p. 343. ' See above, p. 311. * See above, p. 37.
344
EDOUARD DRIAULT
of popular authority. There exists in France, says Driault, an
antithesis between the consular or imperial democracy and the
parliamentary republic. ‘The University has chosen sides for
the parliamentary regime; founded by Napoleon, it has used the
centralized force which he gave it to preach in all its divisions the
doctrine of parliamentary liberties against authoritarian demo¬
cracy.* Here, one would expect a peccavi from the author, since we
saw how he had associated himself with this attitude in his text¬
book. But he contents himself with the conclusion that these are
two sides of democracy which ought to agree. He has broken now
with Mme de Stael, whom he once protected against her bio¬
grapher Gautier. ‘ He mocks at the few ideologists, distant disciples
of hers, to whom the long dead Napoleon is still the bogyman.
France, he exclaims, knows better, France has not repudiated the
glory of Arcole, and of Marengo, of Austerlitz, and of Jena, of
Montmirail and even of Waterloo. In the war — the first World
War — England participated for the sake of destroying German
trade. (One sees that Driault, who used to shrug his shoulders at
the fashionable French anglophobia, now shares it as an accom¬
plished Bonapartist.) America came in as late as possible in order
to be quite sure that its intervention would be good business ...
(The English, the Germans, naturally, more than ever since 1914,
the Russians, finally revealed as barbarians since 1917, and now
apparently also the Americans — all are in the author’s bad books.
Only the French remain ... or is it, perhaps, the Latins?) ‘In that
war’, Driault continues, ‘it is the dead hero, sleeping in the Invalides
who when France wills it for her salvation and for her greatness,
compels the government to act. In the supreme moment of danger
Gallieni* is put into office at Bordeaux.’ Masson, too, it will be
remembered, imagined that it was Napoleon who won the war of
1914-
The fifth volume of Napoleon et VEurope, which concluded the
work in 1927, is not likely to have reached a wide public. In its
inception it was aimed at the circle of those who ha\e some
historical training, even though such readers in perusing the last
volume must at times have rubbed their eyes. But a few year later
Driault published a popular work called Le irai visage de Napoleon,
which will nicely round off our study of the author.
Though written entirely for effect, and by no means without
' See above, p. 170, note. * V, 431.
345
talent, unless this be the impression created by the inspiration
borrowed from its subject, every page b6ars the mark of the well-
informed scholar. All the problems are faced vigorously, and the
point at issue handled with a sure touch. Only, it is in every
respect the precise counterpart of the school book of 1903. Not a
single word of criticism of the Consul-Emperor appears.
Brumaire, the unpleasant side of which had been brought to the
fore, is now greeted with jubilation, altogether in the manner of
Vandal, except for that challenging declaration (obviously
addressed to him, even though his name is not mentioned) that
Brumaire, which saved the Revolution, was not a counter¬
revolutionary act.* Centralization, of which the deadening effect
on intellectual life was emphasized, and which is still a subject of
grievance in La politique orientale of 1904, has now become one of
the greatest creations of Bonaparte, ineradicable. ‘A Roman
work, performed with good French material, backed by several
centuries of experience and classical education; with the strong
mason work of the First Consul’s will, it seems to partake of
eternity.’* The Concordat ... but this deserves a digression,
which will be the last.
In his book on Napoleon en Italie (1906) Driault made a remark
about the policy of Bonaparte, which we have not yet met else¬
where, and which is nevertheless sufficiently widespread in modern
historiography to deserve our attention for a moment. Bonaparte
wanted an understanding with the Church. But, advised by
Talleyrand, he also wanted to uphold Galilean principles. What
a mistake he made! — thus Driault. For while he was holding
forth on the doctrine of Bossuet, the arrangement he made with
the Pope was its very denial. Indeed, the strength of Gallicanism
resides in the independence it attributes to the Bishops and their
councils. True, even under Louis XIV the State had tried to ally
itself with this and to make use of it. (Driault might have pointed
to the same phenomenon in Germany and in Austria in the shape
of Febronianism). Yet its indispensable source had been the
national theologians’ conviction of the divine origin of the episco¬
pate, which made the Pope appear as no more than primus inter
pares. Bonaparte himself administered the death blow to Gallican¬
ism when he agreed with the Pope that the latter’s spiritual
supremacy would be made to heal the schism born from the
‘p. 83. 'p. ux.
546
EDOUARD DRIAULT
constitution civile. The true Gallican method would have been to
reach an agreement with the French bishops, to unite into a council
and reconcile constitutionels and anti-constitutionels, Terhaps this
would have been the way once and for all to found a national
Catholic Church in France.’ (The perhaps covers a great deal: it
is easy to imagine how impertinent Vandal would have considered
this criticism of the First Consul, since such a reconciliation be¬
tween the constitutionels whom the faithful abhorred as revolution¬
aries and the anti-constitutionels who were mostly emigres and in
whom the government saw dangerous counter-revolutionaries,
must remain impossible without the intervention of the Supreme
Head of the Church.) To compel both parties to resign their
dignities into the hands of the Pope and to submit to be rein¬
stituted by him, in so far as they could be employed — that in
any case was a solution from which must result an ultramontane
Church.
I have indicated already the grounds upon which one could
attack this interpretation. Yet the failure of the Concordat, even in
Napoleon’s own time, and the increasingly ultramontane char¬
acter of the French Church, are symptoms which justify a critical
attitude towards the alleged wisdom of Bonaparte’s policy. But in
Le vrai visage no trace is left of the author’s former insight and
everything done by the First Consul is well done.^
We are noticing all the time how strongly the repercussion of
contemporary events makes itself felt in the work of historians.
For the Driault of Le vrai visage the Bolshevists are still the traitors
of 1917, the destroyers of society, and the far-seeing genius of
Napoleon receives all the more praise, for he it was who wanted to
unite Europe in resistance to Slav barbarism.* Driault is obsessed
by the war through which he has lived, by the brutality of the
Germans, the beauty of the victories that have been won. The
Marne is more beautiful than Austerlitz, more beautiful the
heroism displayed by the nation, its soldiers greater still than those
of the Grande Armee, He recalls the ceremony of 1921, a century
after the death of the hero. Tn the evening at the Invalides
Marshal Focli, Generalissimo of the Allied Armies, holding in his
hands the sword of Austerlitz, saluted, in his turn’ (after the
Minister of War, Barthou, and the President of the Republic,
Millerand) ‘the great emperor reclining in front of him in his
* pp. 112 sqq.; for the whole question cf. above, pp. io6 sqq. ’ pp. 230.
347
porphyry sarcophagus: “Sire, sleep in peace. Even from the tomb
you are still working for France.” ’ And so forth.
Indeed the commemoration of 1921 fell into the hands of
militarists and conservatives to such an extent that M. Herriot,
the present President of the National Assembly of France, felt
himself obliged to resign from the National Committee.
348
PART SIX

CURRENTS AND COUNTER CURRENTS
ANTI-MILITARISTIC TENDENCIES
When I wrote that in the years before and after 1900 the chorus
of admirers dominated, and mentioned the persistence with which
a Catholic author kept on sounding an unharmonious note,^ I
thought of the historical writing with literary pretensions, a genre
which can at the same time possess historical originality and reach
and influence a broad public. In reviewing the apologies and the
glorifications, however, we have come across sharp and inde¬
pendent criticism from quite a number of writers apart from
Grandmaison. I mentioned pronouncements of that kind by
Lavisse, Bourgeois, Rambaud, Muret, Guyot, Conard, Coquelle,
Carron, Godechot. It is worth while underlining the fact that
all these, with the exception of Coquelle, belong to the world of
professional historians, from the Universite^ I shall try presently
to show from works which could not find a place in a section
devoted to the problem of foreign policy, to what extent there
prevailed in that world a conception of Napoleon different from
that held by the Houssayes, the Massons, the Vandals and the
Sorels.
It was only in their circle — we may indeed say the circle of the
Academic, and we may oppose to it the circle of the Universite, even
though the statement ought to be accompanied by a number of
qualifications and restrictions — it was only in the circle of authors
with literary pretensions that, after Taine, the ‘detractors’ were
hardly heard any more. And indeed my attempts to account for
the striking renewal of the legend by the circumstances of the
time and the spiritual atmosphere* did not give the whole story.
True though it undoubtedly is that in the ’nineties among men of
letters and thinkers a conscious and systematic turn can be
observed towards tradition, authority and nationalism which
favoured the Napoleonic cult, there never lacked counter currents
which were swelled consideiably as the result of the Affaire Dreyfus.
Generally speaking, love and admiration have a greater creative
^ cf. above, p. 185.
* Translator’s Note. The usual expression ‘academic’ historians cannot be used
here since it would lead to confusion \vith historians belonging to the AcadMe,
• p. 162.
351
capacity than hatred and aversion. In any case they more easily
established contact with the reading public, and the interest in
Napoleon, precisely at the moment when his figure was slipping
away into the distance of time and the immediate political signi¬
ficance of the various ways of viewing him was perhaps weakening,
became an interest in the great Napoleon, and demanded the
absorbing, elevating, thrilling spectacle rather than the cool,
matter-of-fact, destructive analysis.
Meanwhile the fact remains that the traditional connection
between French radicalism and military valour had grown weaker
about the turn of the century. After the first defeats of 1870, this
tradition had still shown itself personified in Gambetta. That it
was not dead would soon appear in the person of Clemenceau and
the events of our own time prove its unshakable vitality. But just
at that moment there arose against it an anti-militaristic inter¬
nationalist frame of mind which contributed to strengthen the old
liberal humanist aversion to Napoleon. In the Dreyfus affair
these currents joined for a moment, and in Anatole France, the
sceptic, the mocker, who was suddenly and in spite of himself
drawn into the struggle for offended right, we can see them
united. Let us listen for a moment to what he, also an acadhnicien,
but a black sheep in that white flock, has to say about Napoleon.
ANATOLE FRANCE
One naturally turns first to his satirical history of France, Pile

des Pingouins (1908), and one will indeed find some amusing pages,
although they do not amount to more than somewhat broad fun
at the expense of the Napoleonic legend. A Malay traveller finds
the island — not an ile but an insule^ — in a deplorable condition.
The memory of a certain Trinco appears to be worshipped
because he did a great deal of fighting in which, the stranger
reflects, he did not distinguish himself from the rest of mankind.
But the Penguins cling to their pride in his victories although
they had to pay a terrible price for them: ‘Glory is never won
at too great a price,’ they reply severely to the visitor’s doubting
questions.
In La RSvolte des Anges, in 1914, however, there is a passage which
* cf. above, p. 314: ‘even to the form of the language’.

352
cuts far more deeply. It occurs in the paganistic Discours sur
Vhistoire universelle of the fallen angel Nectaire-Aleciel, who surveys
the fate of men with tender and pitying sympathy. The sketch of
Napoleon, in its pregnant brevity, and for all its almost insolent
one-sidedness, is wonderfully stimulating to the historical imagin¬
ation. ‘What made him so eminently fit to dominate, was that he
lived entirely in the present moment, and had no conception of
anything except immediate and instant reality. His genius was
vast and shallow, his intellect, immense in extent, but common
and vulgar, embraced humanity without rising above it. He
thought what was thought by every grenadier of his army, but
there was an incredible strength behind his thinking. . . He was too
clever not to use in his game old Jahveh, who was still a force in the
affairs of this earth, and who was not unlike him in his violent and
overbearing disposition. He threatened, flattered, caressed and
intimidated him by turns. He imprisoned his vicar, whom he
forced at the sword’s ppint to give him the oil which is supposed,
ever since Saul, to make kings strong. He restored the cult of the
Demiurge’ — this is Alaciel’s contemptuous description ofjahveh —
‘chanted Te Deums in his honour, and had himself recognized by
him as God on earth in little catechisms distributed all over the
empire. So did they join their thunders and the noise was some¬
thing wonderful.’*
THE ‘UNIVERSITY’ VERSUS THE ‘ACADYmIE’
But let me stick to the historians. I have already opposed the

Universite to the Academic. As a matter of fact, among the
admirers, the Universite had a bad reputation. We noticed that
after the lawyers, and the journalists and men of letters, Masson
mentioned the professors as a third group of haters of Napoleon.
Driault, who was in a position to know, declared that the Universite
fostered a tradition of anti-Napoleonic doctrines.® ‘From the
elementary school to the university’, he adds, ‘the teachers of youth
used their ingenuity to tear up the finest pages of our history, the
bloc of national unity was smashed. It was a wicked enterprise, it
was an attempt to mutilate us, like the efforts made to blot out of
our imagination the image of the Rhine.’* (Of Alsace Lorraine
* La Rivolte des Anges, p. *49. • cf. above, pp. 177 and 345.
• Napolhn et I’Europe, V, 431 (1937).
Z 353
and of the revanche, of the Rhineland!) The past tense is connected
with Driault’s conviction that the denigration of Napoleon had
made room for a better and more patriotic understanding — an
illusion, as we shall see.
The historians of the Universite did not fail to bear witness to
their convictions. They produced a strong, uninterrupted stream
of scholarly studies, of monographs and of textbooks. To avoid
being overwhelmed by it I shall limit myself to the more general
works, and even there I shall have to make a choice. There is
diversity of views in abundance, and yet there is striking agree¬
ment. The Napoleonic legend has no hold upon these authors
from the Of a Napoleon cult there is no trace. Generally
speaking, these works are weaned from nationalistic or authoritar¬
ian apriorism, and in stating this, I am thinking of the whole
period from the beginning of the century to the second World
War. The first World War, which seemed to create the conditions
for a new efflorescence of the cult, and which indeed was respons¬
ible in 1921 for a considerable output of excited prose (of which we
have had a sample), scarcely made itself felt in this literature. The
sanity of a solitary Driault may have been affected by it, but the
Universite as a whole kept its balance. The historians do not dispose
of Trinco as light-heartedly as Anatole France, but with every
effort to evolve a positive appreciation of the Napoleonic episode,
with all fine shades and distinctions, the opinion of the experts is
not that of the enthusiasts.
The phenomenon will appear the more striking when after five
universitaires — I am keeping a sixth for the conclusion — I shall
place three acadimiciens under the magnifying glass. With the
latter, even with Hanotaux, whose opinion after all is very inde¬
pendent, so much so that one might look upon it as a transition
to the outlook of the universitaires, the tradition of Vandal and
Sorel will still be found present in unimpaired vitality.
And yet, is it right to speak of ‘the opinion of the experts’? I
wish to safeguard myself against the misconception that in the case
of the authors I am now going to discuss I had met with nothing
but scholarly method and objectivity. The scholarliness of their
method is certainly not something purely external; it disciplines
their mental attitude as well. But it would be foolish to overlook
the fact that these authors come to Napoleon with their own, with
different, a priori ideas, that they measure him against standards of
354
spiritual freedom, of culture, of humanity, of social progress, that
politically they are as a rule of the left. With some of them anti¬
clericalism is predominant, with others liberalism, or socialism. It
is rare that upon close inspection one cannot fairly accurately
‘place’ an author.
355
FIVE ‘UNIVERSITAIRES’
CHAPTER I
ALPHONSE AULARD
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF DESPOTISM
Aulard, with whom I want to deal first, has exercised great

influence as an expert of the Revolution period, and founded a
school. Appointed in 1886 as the first holder of a new chair in the
History of the Revolution in the University of Paris, he produced
in 1901, when he was over fifty, after many editions of sources and
monographs, a great work of synthesis, Histoire politique de la
Rivolution frangaise. The leader of the new historical tendency
which claimed to study and appraise events in an objective,
scientific way, ‘historically and not politically’,* Aulard presented
a conception which, though based upon an impressive amount of
factual material, strictly sifted and arranged, is in truth dominated
by a rigid ideology, and that in a tyrannical manner. He follows
the history of Bonaparte as far as the imperial coronation: this in
his opinion brings the Revolution to a definitive end, a conception
which already implies a judgment. Mignet went to 1815; Thiers
saw in the solemnity at Notre Dame the coronation of the Revolu¬
tion, while Quinet thought that it was its untimely conclusion.’
In the eyes of Aulard, also, Napoleon is the man who arrested
the Revolution, who even initiated a reaction towards the
ancien regime, who abolished liberty and encroached upon equality.
His chapters dealing with the Consulate give little else than the
story of the derailment of the Revolution, of the gradual demoli¬
tion of liberty, and the establishment of despotism.
The brutality with which force was used on the 19th Brumaire,
says Aulard, was unintentional, and at first Bonaparte seemed to
make himself as inconspicuous and innocent a figure as possible
in the hope of being forgiven. Public opinion indeed allowed
^ According to a French critic: cf. G. Kalff, De verklaring der Frame Revolutie
btj haar voornaamste geschiedschrijvers (a thesis, igao), p. 176.
• Carlyle, be it noted, thought the Revolution was finished by General Bona*
paite*8 ‘whiff of grapeshot’ of 13 Vend^miairc (October 5th),
concluded hia book,
356
ALPHONSE AULARD
itself to be reassured, but the means necessary to this end proved
how little it desired what Bonaparte really was preparing. There
were professions of undeviating republicanism, of immutable
fidelity to the principles of the Revolution; the general put on
civilian dress, his Minister of Police, Fouche, once more branded
the emigres. But the confidence gained in this way he misused
to press through a constitution which made him practically the
sole master. The remark which I have already underlined in
Driault’s textbook about the plebiscite for the approval of the
constitution being a mere make-believe,* may have been taken
from Aulard’s book, which was older by two years. The whole
interpretation differs as sharply as is possible from Vandal’s
spontaneous popular enthusiasm pushing automatically in the
direction of a dictatorship. Aulard had carefully checked the
registers of the votes which, as we know, had been given publicly
and in writing. Among the 1562 opponents he points out a few
weU-known ex-Conventionnels, but such were also to be found
among the three million who voted ‘y^s’> apart from ‘almost
the whole intellectual elite’ of France; ‘these republicans thought
they were voting for the Revolution and the Republic, against the
monarchy and the ancien regime’.^
The centralization of the law of 23 Pluviose is, according to
Aulard, an instrument of despotism, and the criticism made
against it in the Tribunate has his full sympathy. Nevertheless
he recognizes that the law had good results at first, thanks to the
ability and the genius of Bonaparte. ‘It was only little by little
that it became brutal and despotic, as the master himself was
being transformed from a good into a bad despot.’
The signs of this transformation are not long in appearing. At
first there is no court. Busts of famous men adorn Bonaparte’s
dwelling; Demosthenes as well as Alexander, Brutus as well as
Caesar, Frederick the Great, but also Washington, Mirabeau ...
The daily entourage of the new potentate consisted of men of the
Revolution, liberals, intellectuals of the Institut. But after he had
acquired the Consulate for life, the Consul began to live in
princely style and already then he was bent upon filling his court
with the old nobility, the ‘rallied’ royalists.
The muzzling of the press, the expulsion of the opposition from
the Tribunate, the establishment of extraordinary tribunals and
* cf. above, p. 308. * p. 711.
357
military commissions — all these steps towards despotism which
we already know, are given the fullest attention by Aulard.
Of special interest is his explanation of the popularity which
Bonaparte was meanwhile gaining with the Parisian working
class. The liberal opposition with which the name of Mme de
Stael is linked, full of abhorrence for that despotism to which it
had so naively opened the way by welcoming the coup d'etat,an
opposition of the salons and the legislative bodies, thought, when
it looked for support, of the generals. For the generals, whom we
involuntarily visualize in their later character as courtiers and
marshals, were at that moment still good republicans. These
liberals gave no thought to the labouring class, for it had averted
its face from politics and the dictator had won its heart. Certainly
not because he presented himself as ‘a kind of democratic
Caesar’.* ‘On the contrary. He always treated the working men
as inferiors. By a law of the year XI and a decree of the year XII
(1803 and 1804) he placed them under police supervision,
prescribed for them the possession of an identity book without
which they were liable to arrest as vagabonds, once more
prohibited unions and strikes on pain of imprisonment, and
charged the Prefect of Police with the settlement of wage disputes.
It was a relapse into the ancien regime when the Code Napoleon
laid down that in such disputes the word of the employers was to
be taken. The plebiscite might be the foundation of a new regime
but here, as in other cases, Bonaparte gave evidence of an
inclination to destroy equality and to divide French society into
a politicaUy and socially privileged bourgeois class, and a
subordinate plebeian class.’
But the labourers made no complaint. They did not even
notice the contradiction of the principles of 1789. ‘Their love for
Bonaparte was aroused and maintained by means of material and
moral benefits.’ The former resulted from the care taken by the
First Consul to have Paris well provided with food, and at a low
price; for this purpose takers and butchers were placed under
control. Industry revived, there was work, and wages rose; later
conscription sent them up even faster. As regards the moral
benefits (‘illusory, I should perhaps have said’, adds the author,
who has no liking for Chauvinism), ‘Bonaparte acquired dazzling
martial glory for France and the Parisian working man’s patriot-
*p. 761. *P-76s.
358
ALPHONSE AULARD
ism had taken on a markedly Chauvinistic hue. He was at the
same time passionately anti-royalist and saluted in Bonaparte the
leader of the Revolution, the beneficent dictator, predicted and
invoked by Marat, the protector of the new France against the
Bourbons.’
We have heard little as yet about the working class. Aulard
quotes from police reports to show how they remained deaf to all
incitements on the part of the liberals and allowed themselves
in every circumstance to be carried away by Bonaparte’s
propaganda: against the conspirators, against the English, and,
finally, for the Empire and the hereditary principle.
Aulard’s conclusion is of importance for the right understanding
of the history of the whole nineteenth century in France. ‘This
meek and complete subjection of the Parisian working men to a
master, condemned the republican bourgeoisie to impotence;
their opposition became nothing more than a childishde
salon. It is from that moment that the breach between the
liberals and the people dates; for long years democracy and
universal suffrage were to appear incompatible with liberty.’
THE ECCLESIASTICAL QUESTION
No less important is Aulard’s treatment of the ecclesiastical

question. That his point of view is diametrically opposed to that
of Vandal will be understood beforehand. But he also differs
considerably from d’Haussonvillc. No doubt he considers, as
does the latter, that the regime of separation of Church and State
as Bonaparte found it, might and should have been preserved.
But d’Haiissonville wanted this because only under that regime
could religion and the Church really prosper, while Aulard
considered it desirable because it prevented the Church from
growing strong and from becoming a menace to State and society
as they had been shaped by the Revolution. In his interpretation
we recapture more exactly than in Quinet the spirit of the atheist
intellectuals of the Instiiut and of the Council of State (where
there was laughter at the more ‘mystical’ passages when the First
Consul read the Concordat).
What was the situation of religion? Like Vandal, Aulard
draws attention to the existing division: there was the former
‘constitutional’ Church, which most certainly did not muster the
359
majority of the faithful, but which, nevertheless, by the quality
of its priests among other things, was still a power. Then there
was the former rifractaire Church, recently subdivided into the
rdliis (who had given ‘the promise’) and the royalists. There were
«dso the Protestants and the Jews, and finally the freethinkers and
rationalists, among whom the cult of theo-philanthropy stiU
subsisted. Already in ‘the reaction following upon Marengo’
the police were instructed no longer to protect them, while after an
iconoclastic attack on a theo-philanthropic church ‘probably
carried out by Catholics’, the cult was suppressed by a decree of
October 4th, 1801, even before the Concordat became operative.
‘Fashion’, says Aulard, no longer favoured free thought, but it was
not the religiously inclined souls like Chateaubriand and his
admirers who wanted the altars of other confessions to be over¬
thrown. ‘It was only the intransigent group of papist priests, to
whom the regime of separation seemed to be intolerable.’ The
author himself frankly calls the division among the Catholics an
advantage. The Catholic Church was ‘the most formidable
power of the past against which the Revolution had to struggle’,
and now that the Revolution had succeeded in breaking it into
three groups, the State, with secularized education, was
secularized, free and the master.
How was it that Bonaparte came to give up a regime so favour¬
able to the State? It was not because there existed in public
opinion an irresistible current in favour of a Concordat. On the
contrary, had there been a free press, an almost universal
opposition to the idea would have come to light. In the course of
the long negotiations the press was forbidden to discuss religious
questions of any kind. Nor was it because his own religious
sentiment moved him in that direction. To prove that Napoleon
lacked religious feeling, Aulard quotes the well known pro¬
nouncements: ‘For my part, I do not see in religion the mystery
of transubstantiation bvU the mystery of social order’; and ‘Society
cannot exist without inequality of property, an inequality which
cannot be maintained without religion... It must be possible
to tell the poor: “It is God’s will. There must be rich and poor
in this world, but hereafter and for all eternity there will be a
different distribution.” ’
Bonaparte’s motives, then, were of a political nature. He
wanted to dominate consciences through the Pope and thus t6
360
ALPHONSE AULARD
Realize his dreams of world domination. He also wanted to get rid
iof the Church of the former constitutionels^ among whom the
democratic tendency was too strong for his taste — he was
^specially suspicious of the elections which the constitution civile
|had introduced. Also he wanted to deprive Louis XVIII of his
^last means of influencing French public opinion, and he wanted to
pacify the Vendee.
Are we to believe, as d’Haussonville wants us to, that the
Concordat brought no advantages to the Church? It restored the
Church, even though this was not formally expressed, practically
to the position of State Church. It healed the schism which had
paralysed the Church’s power to weigh upon the State and
society. It provided the Church with considerable financial
advantages, which the Consul-Emperor amply supplemented. In
the sphere of education, too, Napoleon, as we already know, went
beyond the stipulations of the Concordat. In 1808 he did away
with the secular principle and laid down ‘the principles of the
Catholic religion’ as the basis of his newly founded University.
All this went against the spirit of the intellectuals and high
officials, who after the coup d'etat of 1799 had been his principal
collaborators. But all such opposition he pushed impatiently
aside as coming from ‘ideologists’. It is significant that in 1803
he dissolved the class of ‘moral and political sciences’ at the
dstitut in order to deprive such opposition of a centre. And yet in
the end his ecclesiastical policy proved a deception. After having
immensely strengthened the Church’s power in French society by
his policy, he did not find it the willing tool he had imagined.
‘Viewing the whole work of demolition and reaction more or
less consciously performed by Bonaparte,’ says Aulard in con¬
clusion to this chapter, ‘one sees the Concordat stand out as the
counter-revolutionary act par excellence'^
^ p. 747-
361
CHAPTER II
A. L. GUfiRARD
At first sight one might ignore this author as not being typical.
Gu^rard was a Frenchman, but he was half anglicized, wrote in
English, and was professor at an American university. But the
chapter ‘Napoleon’ in his French Civilization in the Nineteenth
Centuryis in its conciseness an excellent summary of what I may
call the opposition point of view. It is sober in the good sense of
the word, that is to say, not clouded by romanticism, or propa¬
ganda and advertisement, but penetrated with respect for
humanistic and cultural values.
All the motifs already known to us — the love of war, the pride
and exclusive faith in force, the spiritual compulsion through
Concordat, University and press censorship, the undermining of
independence by an excess of bureaucratic centralization, the
reactionary tendencies in legislation and social reconstruction,
the vulgar display and undignified snobbery in the improvised
court, find their place in this sketch. And yet the picture is not,
as are those of Lanfrey and of Taine, devoid of light. Guerard
acknowledges that there is something beautiful in the first idea
of the Consulate and in the constructive work then undertaken,
though he sees at the same time the dangers threatening the whole
venture. ‘Bonaparte’s ambition knew no internal check: he had
no scruples, a limited culture, and boundless contempt for
“ideology” and for “imponderable” forces.’
Nevertheless he ends with the remark that the character of the
mperial period, as seen from the point of view of the historian of
:ulture, is more complex than is generally assumed. Through the
ippressive imitation classicism there appear signs of a liberating
ispiration after a new and higher existence. In this young
omanticism the new Caesar is also a factor ‘in spite of his Italian
ncestry, his classical features, his Roman aspirations and the
radical character of much of his work’. ‘The contrasts and
angers of his adventurous career; his constant hankerings after
‘ A. L. GufeAKD, 'Agrigi de VUniversiti'. The book discussed was published in
igland in 1914.
362
A. L. GUfiRARD
■ elusive and gorgeous East; his fatalism and superstition; the
om and isolation of omnipotence: all these were either the
ris or the causes of a romantic turn of mind. And this would
1 expression in his love for Ossian, or better, in sudden out-
rsts of unacademic eloquence which give him a brilliant place
French literature.’
363
CHAPTER II
A. L. GUfiRARD
At first sight one might ignore this author as not being typical.
Guerard was a Frenchman, but he was half anglicized, wrote in
English, and was professor at an American university. But the
chapter ‘Napoleon’ in his French Civilization in the .Nineteenth
Century,^ is in its conciseness an excellent summary of what I may
call the opposition point of view. It is sober in the good sense of
the word, that is to say, not clouded by romanticism, or propa¬
ganda and advertisement, but penetrated with respect for
humanistic and cultural values.
All the motifs already known to us — the love of war, the pride
and exclusive faith in force, the spiritual compulsion through
Concordat, Universite and press censorship, the undermining of
independence by an excess of bureaucratic centralization, the
reactionary tendencies in legislation and social reconstruction,
the vulgar display and undignified snobbery in the improvised
court, find their place in this sketch. And yet the picture is not,
as are those of Lanfrey and of Taine, devoid of light. Guerard
acknowledges that there is something beautiful in the first idea
of the Consulate and in the constructive work then undertaken,
though he sees at the same time the dangers threatening the whole
venture. ‘Bonaparte’s ambition knew no internal check: he had
no scruples, a limited culture, and boundless contempt for
“ideology” and for “imponderable” forces.’
Nevertheless he ends with the remark that the character of the
imperial period, as seen from the point of view of the historian of
culture, is more complex than is generally assumed. Through the
oppressive imitation classicism there appear signs of a liberating
aspiration after a new and higher existence. In this young
romanticism the new Caesar is also a factor ‘in spite of his Italian
ancestry, his classical features, his Roman aspirations and the
practical character of much of his work’. ‘The contrasts and
dangers of his adventurous career; his constant hankerings after
^ A. L. Guerard, Âgrigi de V University. The book discussed was published in
England in 1914.
362
A. L. GU£RARD
the elusive and gorgeous East; his fatalism and superstition; the
gloom and isolation of omnipotence: all these were either the
signs or the causes of a romantic turn of mind. And this would
find expression in his love for Ossian, or better, in sudden out¬
bursts of unacademic eloquence which give him a brilliant place
in French literature.’
363
CHAPTER III
G. PARISET
In the great history of France under the direction of Ernest

Lavisse, one of those collective works which had become fashion¬
able'in historiography, there appeared in 1921 as the third of the
ten copious volumes in which contemporary history beginning
with 1789 is surveyed, the volume of G. Pariset, on Consulate and
Empire. It is a textbook of high quality, sane, sober and clear,
but by no means impersonal. It unhesitatingly presents an
original conception. Let me illustrate the nature of this with a
few of its main points.
FOREIGN POLICY
Bonaparte’s victory at Marengo and that of Moreau near

Hohenlinden led to the peace of Luneville. Hohenlinden formed
an indispensable element in this situation and to that extent
Bonaparte rejoiced at it, but the fact that it was Moreau’s victory
irked him: ‘He could not forgive victorious generals.’* Anyhow,
it was peace, and the joy that reigned in France was indescribable.
Some people, however, were already afraid that the First Consul
would use his success to expand his own power and to undertake
new adventures. But even the most timid admonition in the Tri¬
bunate was apt to anger Bonaparte, and it is therefore difficult to
find out how widespread this concern may have been. ‘This much
is certain, that France was profoundly and decidedly pacific;
never was she less militaristically inclined than immediately after
his greatest successes in the field.’ No doubt men take pride in the
glorious character of the peace. ‘But the destinies of Holland,
Switzerland, Italy, the German princes, touch the nation only
indirecdy. It is satisfied now that the safety of France, for ever
firmly established within her natural frontiers, is no longer
threatened. It remains indifferent to Bonaparte’s distant combina¬
tions. The nation was even more fatigued than in the days of the
Directory. It imagined that the object had now been attained, Us
*p. 5L
364
G. PARISET
object. But the man who was already the sole master of its foreign
policy had no object, or at least he was continually shifting it, and
further away every time.’*
Wc have already learned that Pariset rejects the thesis of Sorel,
that he looks at Bonaparte’s personal policy for the source of the
wars, and that he does not see this policy in the way Driault sees
it as an attempt to realize a grandiose but definite plan, but that
like Muret, he sees it as the effect of a particular mental attitude.
THE CONSULAR ‘tERREUR’

I continue to glance through his pages. There is the pacifi¬
cation of the West, of the Vendee. As Pariset sees it. General
H^douville, who had been sent there by the Directory, was already
working ably at this pacification and with a good chance of success.
Then Bonaparte comes to power and his ‘strong manner’ takes
the place of the ‘prudent and skilful manner’ of Hedouville. He
intervenes roughly. The execution of Frotte, leader of the Chouans,
who thought he had surrendered, upon terms, may not have taken
place upon the explicit order of the First Consul. Bonaparte, in
any case, had now what he wanted, ‘a deed of sensational severity’:
‘disloyally, uselessly, and too late’.’ This view of the incident, by
the way, has no originality; I might Ijrvc pointed to it before, in
Lanfrey, or in Aulard. But of course another interpretation is
current as well.
Let us once more refer to Vandal. It is an instructive compari¬
son, because the presentation of the facts is practically the same
and the divergence arises altogether from the mental attitude
adopted towards them. Vandal does not deny that the execution
of Frott^ was a treacherous act, nor that it cannot be entirely
cleared up, but he exerts himself to show the probability that the
First Consul had absolutely no hand in it, and that, as he put it
himself, ‘he had been deceived in this affair’.* Nor has Vandal
attempted to hide Bonaparte’s immediate conviction that peace
could only be restored by an impressive example. He introduced
his account with the remark that Hedouville acted in a ‘concilia¬
tory’, perhaps too conciliatory manner. And how sympathetically
does he deal with Bonaparte’s ‘strong manner’! ‘The system of
Bonaparte is always to make individual examples and to make
^ P’ 55* * P- 59- * Vavhimmt de Bonaparte^ II, 143,
365
them frightful, while he rallies the masses with a generous gesture
of pardon.’* In any case ‘he waited to destroy the remainder of
the rebellion, in such a way that the noise of destruction would
resound within and beyond France’. But when further on he
discusses the question of responsibility. Vandal fails to recall
this.*
Pariset sees this deed of violence in connection with so many
others, and he detects a system. One reproaches the Directory, he
says, with the measures of proscription after Fructidor, and one
talks about ‘la terreur fructidorienne’; one might equally talk
about ‘la terreur consulaire’.* What Pariset has particularly in
mind are the special tribunals which the First Consul insisted on
establishing against strong opposition from the Tribunate and the
Legislative Body, in order to suppress resistance in disturbed
departements. This institution did not disappear with the occasion
that had brought it about. It was even extended and continued
to exist throughout the Consulate and the Empire.
As regards the case of the proscription after the attempt with the
infernal machine, Pariset considers that the readiness of the public
to believe in the guilt of the Jacobins is proof of the efficacy of
Bonaparte’s propaganda, which invariably aimed at making them
out for the wickedest malefactors imaginable, while at the same
time trying to tar the republicans with the same brush. ‘Do you
want me to deliver you up to the Jacobins?’ is the saying which in
Bonaparte’s mouth must excuse all his arbitrary acts. I recall the
fact that Mme de Stael had already observed that the Jacobins
served as bogymen to Bonaparte.
The ever-increasing restrictions on spiritual freedom, the cun^-
ning with which, little by little, to avoid giving too much offence
to Revolutionary ideology, a new nobility was introduced between
1806 and 1808, the stifling centralization, all this and much more
could be discussed to show the emphasis Pariset places upon all
that is not only oppressive and harsh, but also systematically anti¬
liberal, and hostile to freedom, in the Napoleonic regime. Let me
merely add something about the way in which he deals with the
Code.
^ ciUf I, 488 sqq.
* Lanfrey is naturally convinced that Bonaparte was personally responsible for
the condemnatio/i of Frott6; II, 79. ^
‘p-77-
366
G . PARISET
THE code: a C O M P a R I S O N W I t h
THIERS AND VANDAL
We have already heard so much of the Code, in particular from
Driault, that it will not come amiss to point out that on this subject,
too, the most divergent opinions have been expressed, both about
the share of Bonaparte in the composition of the great work and
about its tendency and contents.
This time I wish to go back even further than Vandal and look
once more at the work of Thiers. From him we hear a paean of
praise. The Code itself is unsurpassed and could not be bettered.
The work of able lawyers, ‘led by a chief who might be a military
man, but who was a superior mind and knew how to cut short
their hesitations and to keep them at their work’, it came to be a
fine compendium of French law, cleansed of all feudal elements.
The very bad reception given the first project by the Tribunate
excites nothing but contempt and mockery in Thiers.* These
revolutionary dogmatists wanted to legislate as though for an en¬
tirely new country; these heroes of the letter, enamoured of new¬
fangled and original conceptions, imagined that they could teach
a lesson to the lawyers. In reaUty, the spokesman of the Council
of State, Portalis, was right when he argued that the old law could
not be set aside, that it must be codified and at the same time
adapted to the new conceptions and to the circumstances which
arose from the Revolution. ‘It was impossible’, is Thiers’s opinion,
‘to do it otherwise or to do it better.’ Certainly, in this extensive
work a word might be replaced by a better one here and there, a
pastime of which assemblies are fond, but let ‘these violent and
ill-trained tribures’ loose upon these thousands of articles? It
would soon sicken one of the whole job.
As regards the role of Bonaparte, it is the admiration with which
it inspired Thiers that led him to write the passage already quoted*
about Bonaparte’s glorious appearance at the beginning of his
rule. ‘The First Consul, who attended each of the sittings devoted
to this subject by the Council of State, displayed in his conduct
from the chair, a method, a lucidity, and frequently a depth of
insight, which were a surprise to everybody. Accustomed as he
was to direct armies and to govern conquered provinces, there was
nothing strange in it when he revealed himself as an administrator
... But the fact that he possessed the quality of a legislator was a
* I, 337 sqq. * cf. above, p. 56.
367
matter for astonishment.’^ He had prepared himself by asking his
fellow Consul, Cambac^rfe, for a few books on law, and ‘he had
devoured them as he had done those books on religious controversy
when he was occupying himself with the Concordat. Soon
ordering in his head the general principles of civil law and adding
to these few rapidly collected notions, his profound knowledge of
the human race, and his perfect clarity of mind, he proved himself
able to direct those important labours and even to contribute to
the discussion a good many sensible, new and profound ideas. At
times, his imperfect knowledge of these matters led him to sustain
somewhat peculiar ideas, but he soon allowed himself to be guided
back on to the right track by the learned gentlemen who sur¬
rounded him. When the moment came to draw from the conflict
of opposing opinions the most natural and the most reasonable
conclusions he was the master of them all’.
On both these points of the opposition of the Tribunate and of
Bonaparte’s share in the preparation, the views one gathers from
Pariset are different indeed. ‘The tribunes said, and not without
reason, that the drafts were ill-digested and insufficiently con¬
sidered and that it was necessary to revise them, but above all they
said, and proved, that these drafts meant a retrogression compared
with the laws of the Revolution, which were sacrificed to the
conceptions of the ancien regime'
And this is his unenthusiastic comment on Bonaparte: ‘He
presided over numerous sittings and took part in the debates with
passion. His mind ever alert, keen and animated, he expounded
his ideas on la mart civile, women, the family, divorce, adoption,
illegitimacy, and all possible matten.’“ And that is all.
His praise for the Code itself is in a much lower key, too. It had
the pretension, says Pariset, to immobilize society or at least to fix
it for a very long time, but in reality It reflected the conditions of
a transitional period and with them soon became out of date.
Nevertheless he does not deny that it had great merit. He too
finds in it the fusion established between traditional law and the
new conceptions. ‘It has secured some of the essential rights of the
Revolution.’ But the makers of the Code, Cambac^r^s, for
instance, had in the course of ten years achieved greatness and
wealth, and their ideals, which used to be dynamic in the revolu¬
tionary period, had become static. The Revolution was over.
‘ ThIBRS, I, 317a. • p. 165.
368
G. PARISET
There were still people without property, but the Code was not
made for them. The articles which concerned them were few in
number and never remarkable for good will. ‘The Code safe¬
guards civil equality and civil liberty; in so far as it is democratic.*
But it has also an undemocratic side: ‘It is the Code of the
propertied classes.’
Clarity of division and of style is a great merit of the work.
Harsh and incomplete though this old conception may appear to
us, in the Western Europe of the early nineteenth century it meant
an immense progress. One need only compare it with the Prussian
Land Laws of 1794. Hence the significance which it was able to
acquire in conquered territories. Thus Pariset.
We find here the expression of views which half a century after
Thiers had become common property. This is apparent when they
are found also in an author who is so far removed from Pariset as
is Vandal. ‘A compromise between new law and old, between
customary and written law, between the “philosophical” and the
legal mind, the Code occasionally sacrificed what was good in
either system in order the more easily to combine the two. In some
places it may make too large concessions to the spirit of the Revo¬
lution, in others it reacted against it too strongly. Nevertheless in
spite of its imperfections and lacunae it contained the greatest sum
of natural and rational equity which men had thus far found it
possible to collect in their laws ... It does not create, it registers,
fixes and stabilizes progress. Red hot matter takes on in the Code
firm and indelible shape; through it, in that respect, the Revolu¬
tion becomes bronze and granite.’ Essentially democratic. Vandal
says in another passage, it was yet in many points bourgeois. This
is exactly the view of Pariset.
At the same time it will have been noticed that Vandal, with all
his reservations,'keeps intact the admiration by which the whole
of his book lives, and so, too, his judgment about the share of Bona¬
parte is different. (With his respect for results and his contempt
for babblers, he does not even mention the opposition in the
Tribunate.)
He notices first of all that Cambaceres was much more conser¬
vative than Bonaparte. Whereupon he says: ‘Taking it all
together it was the great lawyers who did it’, but they would not
have done it without Bonaparte, who put them in a position to
complete the work. It was he who inspired their labours, got them
AA 369
going, kept them on the move, and led them to the goal. The
result was permeated with the spirit which he had imposed on his
period, that is to say, with the idea of a fusion between different
systems and with the determination to come together.’
The reader will have recognized Vandal in my quotations: the
general trend of ideas of his work reveals itself in all its parts, and
his stylistic power suggests connections inspired by a deeper
insight. Personally I cannot help being struck by a contradiction,
not to say a trace of insincerity, in his conclusion about the Code
after the apparently generous concessions to criticism. On the
other hand his judgment about the contribution made by Bona¬
parte, although perhaps more suo a trifle embellished, appears to
me fairer than the somewhat excessively grudging presentation of
Pariset.
370
CHAPTER IV
JULES ISAAC
A SCHOOL-BOOK
The school-book by Driault which I discussed in a former chapter,
was part of a Cours complet d’kistoire, composed ‘in conformity with
the programme of May 31st, 1902’ for the upper forms (les classes
de premiere). I have before me a section of this Cours complet,
composed ‘in conformity with the official programmes ofJune 3rd,
1925’; it is dated 1929. The author is Jules Isaac, ‘professeur agregS
d’histoire au Lycie St. Louis'. I will do no more than glance at a few
passages to show that in its treatment of the figure and rule of
Napoleon it is no milder than its predecessor, the book of Driault,
so that it provides the best refutation of the later Driault’s assertion
that French schoolboys no longer had the finest pages of the history
of France mutilated by bad patriots.*
The story of the machine infemale and its aftermath is told with
a fair amount of detail. ‘Bonaparte made use of the opportunity
to rid himself of the republicans ... He paid litde attention to the
legal guarantees of individual freedom. It was like a revival of the
revolutionary terror and of the monarchical raison d'etat.' An illus¬
tration shows a print of the period in which a ragged, fierce
Jacobin lights the fuse that leads to a small barrel containing
powder and shot. One can see from this, says the caption, that
the government misled the public into believing that the attempt
was a Jacobin plot.*
Napoleon and intellectual life; education. ‘Napoleon’s only care
was to have obedient subjects, and men efficient in their profes¬
sions. He did not perceive in the slightest degree that intellectual
life feeds on liberty, and at times he let this appear in the naivest
fashion: “People complain that we have no literature; that is the
fault of the Minister of the Interior.” ’•
From the small chapter about the Council of 1811 ,1 need quote
only the tide: ‘Religious Persecution.’ Thiers would altogether
fail to understand that matters could be presented in this way in a
republican school. As for Masson, he would roar that one must
* cf. above, p. 353. • pp. 264 sqq. * p. 287.
371
indeed be a ‘professeur’ and a Jew to vomit such slander against
the great Emperor. A few of Napoleon’s coarsest letters with '
orders concerning the treatment of the Pope in his prison are
given among the ‘texts’.
Napojeon’s foreign policy; his responsibility for the wars. The
thesb of Sorel is expounded as well as its refutation. It is apparent
that the author agrees with the critics, and it is in this spirit that
the ensuing account of events is told. I merely note the negotia¬
tions of 1813, about which Isaac remarks that Napoleon thought
of war more than of peace and that the powers had not for one
moment contemplated depriving France of her natural frontiers.
Driault is quoted here — but which Driault? Not the one who
wrote Napoleon et I’Europe, volume fiv<;, but the Driault of twenty
years before, of the article in the Revue d’histoire modeme et contem-
poraine. Driault’s shade might indeed sigh
The evil that men do ives after them.
The good is oft interred with their bones....
One final remark before I pass to another author, which is that
these school-books, that of 1903 as well as that of 1929, give one
a remarkably favourable impression of the standard of French
historical teaching. It is particularly the courageous introduction
of pupils to the discussion of historical problems that appears to me
worthy of admiration.
37a
CHAPTER V
CHARLES SEIGNOBOS
MATTER OF FACTNESS RAISED TO A SYSTEM
The pages — not more than half a score — devoted by Seignobos

to Napoleon’s rule in his Histoire sincere de la Nation frangaise are
characteristic. Seignobos wrote this pleasing little book towards
the end of his life, about 1930. He was a university professor in
Paris and had made a name for himself by his dry, but able and
independent, history of civilization, and by his excellent volume
about the period of Napoleon III in Lavisse’s Histoire de la France
contemporaine. ‘Dry’ is also the epithet one might apply to his
Histoire sincere-, it lacks every flight of imagination and has neither
colour nor warmth of style. Yet it is not the word which occurs to
one in the presence of a work so unpretentious, in which a man
with extensive knowledge and who has reflected much, indicates
the connections and consequences which, in the course of his study,
have gradually impressed themselves upon him as the essentials, a
man, moreover, who, without any straining for effect, always calls
things by their names.
It will appear in a moment that he starts from a definite philo¬
sophy of life, and also that, judged by this philosophy, Napoleon
does not cut an advantageous figure. Even before introducing him
upon the stage, Seignobos wonders whether the chaos in public
life and in finances which is alleged to have existed in France
under the Directory, has not, like the licentiousness, ‘been exag¬
gerated in order to enhance the importance of Bonaparte’s work
of reorganization’.* As regards the administrative system which,
though it was introduced under the Consulate, cannot be con¬
sidered as Bonaparte’s work, because in those early days he had to
leave such measures to the experts, Seignobos concludes his
description with these words: ‘A centralized system of government
agents, opposed to the regime of elective self-government created
by the Revolution. The nation had no longer any share in the
conduct of its affairs or in the choice of its local leaders. The
*p. 381.
373
French ceased to be citizens to become once more subjects, no
longer of the king, but of the government.’
In his remarks about the Concordat we recognize the idea of
Driault.' Bonaparte created the conditions which must make the
French clergy ultra montane, although he wished to preserve its
Gallicanism.
What, according to Seignobos, is there about Napoleon which
explains the admiration, the enthusiasm, of so many adherents?
It cannot be expressed more soberly: ‘His marvellous activity,
his astonishing quickness of decision, his incredible memory for
detail, the sureness of his practical judgment.’ And what of the
other side of the account? ‘His despotic nature tolerated no
activity independent of his own. He abhorred the liberals, whom
he called the ideologists. He had no conception of disinterested
devotion to a cause, and ascribed all actions to self-interest or to
vanity ... Educated in Corsica before that country had been
merged into a unified France, Napoleon never managed to feel a
real Frenchman.’ In support of this conception which has by now
become so well known to us, Seignobos adduces an argument that
is novel. ‘I wish’, Napoleon wrote in his testament, ‘that my ashes
may rest on the banks of the Seine amidst that French nation
which I have loved so much.’ ‘It would have occurred to no
Frenchman to express himself like that,’ says Seignobos, and the
remark is strikingly true. Yet, as everyone knows, the sentence
is inscribed on the wall of the crypt of the Invalides, and it has
never failed to move the French. ‘His method of government’,
Seignobos continues, ‘did not dovetail into French tradition. In
his native island he had learned to know only clan solidarity, and
this is why in France and elsewhere he failed to recognize the
strength of national consciousness.’
‘Restrained by no inner moral curb, he went on to the point
where his power met with an unsurmountable obstacle.’ Armed
force was the real basis of his domination, which was bound to
collapse, when, one after another, his armies had been used up.
‘In the upshot France retained nothing of his military achieve¬
ments and moreover she lost the conquests of the republic. In
Europe a profound distrust of the French remained; they were
looked upon as a people fond of war, while France was left with
the Napoleonic legend, which was a disturber of domestic peace
^ cf. above, p. 346 sq.; Seignobos, Histoire sincire, p. 387.
374
CHARLES SEIGNOBOS
and which in the end landed the nation in an adventurous foreign
policy/
At the end of his small book, the author reverts to this idea and
says that in the period behind us the misconception of a bellicose
and fickle France, based on the wars of Louis XIV and of the
two Napoleons and upon the Paris revolutions of the nineteenth
century, is beginning to fade out in foreign countries. ‘The
French nation is beginning to be seen in its true nature as
sensible, reasonable and peace-loving.’‘
I doubt whether the French nation is more intelligent, more
reasonable and more peaceful than another. I should certainly
not care to call it more bellicose or more fickle, but it has had its
unintelligent, unreasonable periods, when it was a worry to its
neighbours. It has been, to keep to our subject, a most willing
tool in the hands of Napoleon, and after his death, a credulous
dupe of the legend. The thought which it repays our trouble to
meditate in this conclusion of Seignobos, seems to me to be that in
the course of history a nation can assume many very different
aspects.
ip. 491.
375
THREE ‘ACADfiMICIENS’
I shall now, after the five universitaires deal with three acadimi-
ciens. The example of Anatole France has already proved that
one can belong to the Academy without rating Napoleon par¬
ticularly high. About Hanotaux, the third of the trio now under
survey, it will soon be noticed that his admiration is by no means
unmixed. To be sure, he strikes a different note from that of the
universitaires, and one seems to feel that he has been in closer
communion with Vandal and Sorel than they. Nevertheless the
true outlook of the Acadeniie will be found rather in Bainville, and
especially in Madelin, and I have therefore deemed it appropriate
to deviate here from the chronological order and to deal with the
work of Hanotaux after that of the other two. My last author,
George Lefebvre, an unmistakable universitaire, but who has
absorbed much of the other conception, fits in too well with
Hanotaux for me to part them from one another.
CHAPTER VI
JACQUES BAINVILLE
THE AUTHOR AND THE ‘ACTION FRANÂISE’
Bainville’s Napoleon of 1931 is probably the most read biography

of Napoleon in our time. If only for a moment, the book confronts
us with a difficulty which we have usually been spared. Ought we
to classify the author as /or or against? I have already mentioned
him in passing, among the admirers who achieved access to the
Academie, but when one reads in his conclusion that ‘apart from
glory, apart from art’ it would probably have been better if
Napoleon had never lived,* one would be inclined to assume that
we are dealing with one of the critics. The book, however, con¬
stantly strikes another note. By whatever point among those
which usually give rise to disapproval we test it —the wars,
centralization, terroristic methods, lack of spiritual freedom, the
attempt to subject the Church — we shall meet either with apology
*p. 581.
376
JACQUES BAINVILLE
or with complete indifference. But this negative test is not the
only one we can apply. The whole book, leaving on one side
approval or disapproval of political trends, is pervaded with
admiration for the central figure. The greatness, the beauty of
this figure, the satisfaction it gives to the spectator’s ‘artistic’
sense, that is what gives Bainville’s biography its positive content.
Lanfrey and Quinet would have rejected the book with horror.
And indeed, the author was no Bonapartist, but he also was not
in the least a liberal. He was a royalist. His leader was Maurras,
who counts Barres among his spiritual precursors, although the
French tradition, from which the Action franfaise wanted, like
Barres, to extract all its strength, was more exclusively attached
to the old royalty. In consequence it was bound to reject Napo¬
leon in so far as it had to look upon him as an interruption or a
deviation. But being little inclined to place emphasis upon moral
norms in judging political or historical phenomena, since, also,
the slogans of spiritual freedom or justice meant less to it than
those of Fatherland, power, order, it felt no qualm in surrendering
to a foible for the strong man, for the great personality. Houssaye,
Masson or Driault would not have been satisfied with Bain¬
ville’s book, but the dominant impression which the reader
receives from it is undeniably such as to range it under the heading,
for.
The Action Franfaise was too extreme, and its solution for all
the ills of France, Le Roi, too unreal, for it to influence practical
politics otherwise than by spreading suspicion and by bringing
about public disorder. Nevertheless it struck chords in certain
French prejudices and moods and was thus able to nurture a
state of mind far beyond its own small circle. For this purpose
Bainville, popular author of great intellectual and stylistic gifts,
was, next to Maurras, a force of considerable significance. Before
Napoleon he had captured an immense following with his brief
Histoire de France. Afterwards, when his Napoleon had opened the
doors of the Academie for him, in 1935, shortly before his death,
there also appeared his history of La troisiime Ripublique. This
little book is of importance for our better knowledge of the author’s
mind. In his Histoire de France he had managed to deal with
the Dreyfus affair without letting a word escape him about guilt
or innocence. The chapter La Revolution Dreyfusienne in the latest
book isr less discreet. For those acquainted with the details of
377
Vaffaire it makes amazing reading. The guilt of the Jewish officer
is implied with the help of tendentious or half true statements,
suppressions, distortions of the motives of the defenders; all this
directly against the evidence of the facts which led in 1900 to the
annulment of the sentence, strengthened as that evidence had
been by the testimony, subsequently published, of the German
military attache Schwarzkoppen. As one reads the chapter one
wonders — can this man be honest? But it is possible to put it less
bluntly and perhaps more truly. Bainville, like Barres (I have already
quoted the words in connection with the latter),* belonged to
those for whom ‘objective truth’ means less than their own
‘organic, inherited, passionate truth’. We must not forget it
when reading his Napoleon.
TRAGIC GREATNESS IN THE GRIP OF FATE
Bainville’s Napoleon has tragic grandeur. The element of

tragedy arises from the conception of a man with unflinching
energy and with unequalled talent struggling with an impossible
task, a task beyond human, even beyond his, capacity. Apparent
success, dazzling even, but unsound, and in the final account of no
value whatever, accompanies him for many years in all his
expeditions and enterprises and heightens the effect of a cruel
game which divine powers are playing on him. He must go on;
he must struggle, he vanquishes and conquers, he subjects and
cows, but throughout the spectator knows that the catastrophe is
drawing nearer and he himself, for all his display of assurance and
pride, unflagging in the performance of his incredible deeds, in his
ingenious combinations to keep ahead of fate, he, too, is haunted
by the fear that it is in vain and that it will all end in ruin.
From beginning to end the book is more a discussion supported
and illustrated by particulars and quotations than a narrative
built up from description and disquisition. What the author
wishes all the time to convey is the brittleness of Napoleon’s
position, its uncommon and excessive quality, which dooms it
to perpetual restlessness and causes it in the long run to be
untenable.
It begins immediately after Brumaire. It should not be thought,
says Bainville, with emphasis, that Bonaparte was now the master.
^ cf. above, p. 154.
378
JACQUES BAINVILLE
Much patient labour, much management and wiliness were still
necessary to achieve that consummation. When he is away on his
campaign of Marengo everything is at once unsettled. Behind his
back in Paris vast intrigues are on foot to produce another
government in case he is defeated. He is aware of it, and in the
midst of his triumphant return he has moments of bitterness and
fierce contempt for humanity. But the triumph is colossal and
grows more colossal when the following year, after Hohenlinden,
the peace for which everyone has been longing is secured. Bain-
ville contemplates the Consulate with enthusiasm and without a
single one of the reservations of which we know. On the contrary
we find in his book the familiar reasoning* by which the authori¬
tarian regime established by Bonaparte can be linked up with the
Revolution and the Revolution itself be shorn of its liberalism so
as to cease being troublesome to a conservative realist who would
rather exclude the friends of liberty and republicans from French
tradition. ‘Had not the French of 1789 mistaken their desires,
was not what they really longed for, after equality, which came
before everything, authority rather than liberty?’* It is on the
occasion of Bonaparte’s choice of Lebrun as one of his two
colleagues in the Consulate that Bainville makes this remark.
This choice, with that of Cambaceres, a man of the Convention
and a regicide, was characteristic of his programme. For Lebrun,
no longer a young man (in 1810, when he became Governor-
General of Holland, he was over seventy), had been secretary to
the Chancellor Maupeou, who had, in the reign of Louis XV,
abolished the Parlemenls, those privileged courts of law which
stood in the way of a reformist monarchy. If this ‘revolution’, as it
was called at the time, had not been unmade under Louis XVI,
if Louis XVI had had the courage and the vision to continue
along the road of enlightened despotism instead of restoring the
privileged members of the noblesse de robe to a position in which
they could sabotage all radical measures, then perhaps the Revo¬
lution of 1789 would not have taken place. Through Lebrun
Bonaparte established a link with the tradition of eighteenth-
century enlightened despotism, a tradition by no means yet
forgotten; for the ‘ideologists’ from whom Bonaparte had not yet
broken away, the intellectuals of the Institute were tired of the
whims of the masses, were drifting away from democracy and —
‘ cf. above, pp. aa6 sqq. ’ p. 158.
379
like their master Voltaire, Bainville might have added — were
advocates of enlightened despotism.
So far the personality of the First Consul could not have been
painted in more rosy colours, but that which deprived him of a
solid foundation, was, according to Bainville, the international
situation. Peace! Everything depended upon it. Bonaparte was
in the eyes of the French the giver of this peace so ardently desired.
He himself felt how much his popularity owed to this. He
wanted peace. For a moment he shared the illusion that Amiens
was meant seriously. How otherwise could one explain those
colonial enterprises: San Domingo, Louisiana, which he acquired
from Spain, but which — this particularly is significant — he sold
forthwith to the United States when the renewal of war appeared
inevitable. War was inevitable because England could not resign
herself to France’s possession of Belgium, of Antwerp; while, on
the other hand, France, though wanting peace, wanted it to be
accompanied by the natural frontiers, and no one was less in a
position to give up the natural frontiers, since it was precisely to
Bonaparte’s good sword that men looked for their preservation.
Connected with this is the sense of insecurity which never left
Napoleon concerning his internal policy as well. His experience at
the time of Marengo was never forgotten. Least of all did he trust
the generals, until recently his equals. At first he treated them
with extreme caution, notwithstanding the tone of authority he
sometimes adopted. If he took the imperial title it was not in
order to place himself above them. The ceremonial at the court
was intended for this purpose, and in particular the care with
which the civilian character of his dignity was underlined.
But even the imperial tide was by no means sufficient. ‘Never’,
Balzac has written, ‘could Napoleon quite convince of his
sovereignty those whom he had had as his superiors or his equals;
nor those for whom law took the first place. Nobody considered
himself bound by the oath taken to him.’ Napoleon himself
declared at St. Helena: ‘I had risen from the masses too suddenly.
I felt my isolation. So I kept throwing out anchors for my
salvation into the depths of the sea.* Anchors for his salvation?
This it was, more than ostentation, or pride, or megalomania;
anchors for salvation. This was to be the function of those
brother kings (only they performed it very poorly!). An anchor
for salvation, also, was the consecration by the Pope. He sought
380
JACQUES BAINVILLE
the semblance of legitimacy, but if he won the Catholics thereby
he knew very well how much he was once more hurting the
feelings of the men of the Revolution (although by the killing of
Enghien earlier in the year he had hoped to obtain an undeniable
claim to their confidence); hence those pinpricks, those insults,
which he administered to the Pope during his sojourn; it was to
restore the balance... .*
But the fatal menace comes from outside. ‘Another ten years!’
Bainville speculates, when discussing the elevation to the imperial
dignity. ‘Hardly ten years have passed since he began to rise from
obscurity, and in another ten years all will be finished. So it is
decreed by the breathless rhythm of his life’s destiny. A subaltern
at twenty-five, he is, miracle of miracles, Emperor at thirty-five.
Time has seized him by the shoulders and pushes him on. His
days are counted. They will pass with the speed of a dream,
marvellously full, broken by hardly any intervals or breathing
space, as if impatient to reach the catastrophe more speedily, and
charged at last with so many tremendous events, that his reigns,
so brief in reality, will seem to have lasted a century.’*
I give this quotation because it is characteristic; again and
again Bainville inserts into his narrative passages like this,
reminding us that only nine, only eight, only seven years are left
. . . England has time. But, ‘in London everything has already
been calculated, everything is ordered, for the moment of his
downfall’. Those famous discussions of the Russian envoy,
Novosiltsov, with Pitt* — Bainville does not even mention the
name, and does not bother about negotiations or precise details —
are woven into the narrative for the sake of effect: ‘At a distance
of nine years — for now only nine years are left, and since Senate
and people elevated him to the imperial dignity, the brief respite
allowed him by fate has shrunk once more — not only his defeat
is foreseen, not only are the terms for France laid down, but the
very method, this manoeuvre of gradual pressure, by which
Napoleon will be compelled to abdicate, the whole of this policy
has been traced beforehand so that all that remains to be done in
1813 and 1814 will be the filling in of the outline of the sketch.’*
The aim remains, as ever, to cheat France of her natural frontiers,
but by now the psychology of the French nation has been grasped.
' pp. 241, 245. • p. 239- * cf. above, p. 283 sq.
the intention is no longer proclaimed, the fight is alleged to be
against Napoleon and not against France, and all the cunning is
directed towards creating misunderstandings over the frontiers.
It will be readily understood that in this interpretation Talley¬
rand’s conduct at Erfurt is condemned. Bainville insists less upon
the treason than upon the mistake. Talleyrand considered that
he was doing a good work even for Napoleon himself by throwing
obstacles in his way that would compel him to remain within
‘the law of possibility’. As if Napoleon were free to remain
moderate, as if just as inside the country he was obliged to climb
higher and higher in order to make himself respected, he would
not abroad have to go further and further for the sake of preserving
these dear possessions of the French nation, the natural frontiers!
Talleyrand failed to realize the necessities of this unequal struggle
with England and the open or hidden determination of the
powers to throw France back once more within her old frontiers.
The game which he thought so clever, was naive. As for Napoleon,
he left Erfurt, deceived and betrayed, not quite clear in his
mind as to what had happened to him, but still depressed, silent
and pensive. ‘These accursed Spanish affairs are costing me
dear,’ he sighed.' And indeed, the Spanish mistake — Bainville
does not deny that the Emperor had made an error by judging
Spanish conditions and the Spanish people according to his
eighteenth-century French notions, as what he aptly calls a
genuine ‘ideologist’’ — this mistake had to be paid for very
heavily. But it was not only that. Nobody has been betrayed so
much and has punished so little, says Bainville. But why? ‘Not
that he was vulnerable, but his position was.’ ‘
The expedition to Moscow, as we can already guess, was
inevitable: Napoleon had no choice. But now his destiny is
nearly accomplished. How loudly we now hear Bainville’s often
repeated motif. ‘Everything I have accomplished is still very
fragile,’ he confesses in the sledge to Caulaincourt. And at the
same time with what greatness he bears himself in the disaster!
The contempt which he feels more than ever for his ministers and
for the Senate, because they hesitate, because they imagine that
concessions can avert the disaster and make England give up its
* pp- 357 *qq-

* P» 333- Note the contrast with Tainc's conception of Napoleon: above, p. 135.
* p. 368.
38a
JACQUES BAINVILLE
coveted prey, Belgium, because they believe, however shyly and
half-heartedly, in this distinction which is being made between
the Emperor and the country — Bainville clearly indicates that
he thinks it is fully deserved.'
One would expect that Bainville’s royalism, in his treatment
of the years 1814 and 1815 if anywhere, would place him in
opposition to Napoleon. In his Histoire de France this expectation
is justified. There, Bainville praises the policy of Talleyrand and
Louis XVIII, who managed to save so much from the dibdcle into
which Napoleon had led the country. The disappointment of the
public at the loss of the natural frontiers avenged itself on them
by the amazing turn of 1815. The great adventurer arrived from
Elba without any hope of reigning without a new war, and made
his last desperate bid; the result, after the hundred days, a new
and worse disaster for France. ‘All these events’, Bainville
wrote in 1924, ‘have the colour of a novel, and their character
is that of the human passions. They do not belong to the domain
of reason. A three months’ folly brought back the foreigner in
our country and jeopardized everything that had been so pain¬
fully obtained in 1814.’* He counts up the territorial losses which
were now inflicted on France and says; ‘France had brought
those disasters on herself, when, giving way to sentiment, and
moved by the memory of the days of glory, she forgot everything,
to throw herself into the arms of the Emperor.’ And yet the
legend was hardly born; it grew and throve only with the
martyrdom of St. Helena.
This is not the language of an admirer. But in his Napoleon
Bainville refrains almost entirely from passing a political judgment
on these events. ‘He had not yet had his genuine fifth act,’ he
writes, ‘there had been a false curtain at Fontainebleau.’* He
then particularly emphasizes the necessity which Napoleon felt
of flattering the revolutionaries and keeping on good terms with
the liberals, and his hopelessly false position as a constitutional
Emperor. He continues to look upon the course of affairs from
the personal side. After Waterloo when Napoleon wants to
embark upon the English vessel, Bellerophon, and a French general
asks whether he is to accompany him, the Emperor replies (‘and
how well it is put!’ says Bainville): ‘No, general. It must not be
said that France has delivered me up to the English.’ Bainville’s
' p. 469. • Histoire de France, p. 439. ’ NapoUon, p. 525.
383
comment is: ‘An actor, but one who works only in the grand
style.’*
READABLE BUT OUTSIDE THE HISTORICAL

DISCUSSION
The reader will have recognized Vandal in the interpretation

of the Consulate, but he will have been particularly reminded of
Sorel. Indeed, the whole of Bainville’s Napoleon — defender of
the natural frontiers, prisoner of a system already settled before
his time, victim of the determination of England and of Europe,
and of their astute deception of French public opinion — is the
Napoleon of Sorel. The book brings no original vision. It is a
popularization of the conceptions of others, and especially of one
other. It makes exciting reading, and in its concentrated form it
is dramatic; upon uncritical readers it exercises a high degree of
persuasion. But it can hardly be called a contribution to the
historical discussion of Napoleon.
As a matter of fact those who are aware of the literature of the
subject will be hardly less surprised at this than at the author’s
chapter about the Dreyfus affair in La troisieme Republique. I have
summarized the argument about the breach of the peace of
Amiens. It may have been wondered what Bainvillc would have
to say about Sebastiani’s report concerning Egypt and its publica¬
tion in the Moniteur. The answer is; nothing. He docs not mention
it. In this way it is not difficult to put all the guilt upon England.
And such throughout is Bainville’s method. He passes in silence
everything that does not fit into his system and he takes no notice of
the criticism aimed by the experts at his guides Vandal and Sorel.
When one reads him it is as though Guyot and Muret and Driault
had not written. The Directory is still uniformly contemptible,
Bonaparte always provides a shining contrast. He alone knew
that one should not plunder the Italian population, he alone
understood that the Vendde ought to be pacified. And so forth.
Napoleon’s pronouncements about the English peril are taken
without criticism as expressing his profoundest opinion, and no
mention is made of the hesitations and differences of the powers.
I could fill pages by adding up points which we have met in this
discussion, on which one certainly cannot demand agreement
* Op. cit., p. 556.
384
JACQUES BAINVILLE
from every subsequent author, but which Bainville brushes aside
in a manner that is really somewhat too light-hearted. It is true
that by thus placing oneself outside the discussion and by keeping
obstinately to a single leading idea one can write an exceedingly
readable book and get into the Academic as well; one can also serve
one’s own ‘organic truth’ by so doing — but as for objective
truth — no.
ARTIST AND INTELLECTUAL
Is not this last observation so crushing that I must be thought

illogical if I still give any further attention to Bainville’s writing?
It was not, however, my intention to demolish him, although I
have made most serious reservations. His slavish dependence
upon Sorel notwithstanding, one cannot deny him historical
imagination. He has seen his Napoleon, and he has seen him in
connection with a broader picture (although, again, most daringly
fashioned to fit his own particular conceptions) of the history of
France. And in any case, what I am now going to discuss is,
in greater degree than what precedes, his own invention.
Apart from this insistence on Napoleon’s subjection to fate,
there is another idea which gives life to the book. As early as
page 2, the author recalls Napoleon’s own explanation at St.
Helena: ‘What a novel, anyhow, my life has been!’ and thereby
indicates a leit-motiv of his work. The striking aspect of his
conception is not so much that he tried to bring into relief the
novel-like character of the life he describes. Every author, unless
too much absorbed by the moral or political significance of the
events to pay much attention to the appearance, will be struck
by the wonderful aspect of the career and will try to communicate
this impression to his readers. But Bainville has made Napoleon’s
capacity to be impressed by his own life into a main characteristic
of his personality. It had not escaped the attention of contem¬
poraries. Mme de Remusat notes the intense interest Napoleon
felt for his own life story. Talleyrand, once or twice, realized that
the great man was consciously at work on ‘the novel ot his life’.
Chateaubriand, his enemy, called him — though not in the
pamphlet of 1814— ‘a poet in action’.
Bainville has worked this up into the portrait of a man able to
make a dichotomy of his ego, who can see himself live the gift
M 385
I
of the artist, of the intellectual. What a different basis is estab¬
lished here for the admiration of Napoleon the man than that
presented by Arthur-L6vy, for whom he could not sufficiently
resemble a good bourgeois! A third conception was that of
Lanfrey, which though so very different from that of Arthur-L6vy
— Napoleon the cold, calculating egoist, the perfectly amoral
adventurer — was from this point of view, as will be recalled,*
the diametrical opposite of Bainville’s reading. For Lanfrey
denied to Napoleon precisely this capacity of looking without
prejudice and disinterestedly at his own personality, his own
actions. The remarkable thing about these conceptions of the
figure, however much each appears to exclude the other, is that
all three of them make the reader feel he is brought in contact
with ‘a side of the personality’. That was how I put it in discussing
MapoUon intime.* The Napoleon of Lanfrey, who calculates his
effects even when he appears to be most unselfconscious, is just as
little a pure invention. But here Bainville, in bringing out this
trait, at first sight incompatible, also carries conviction.
On the evening when he has occupied the Tuileries as First
Consul, in itself an important decision, Bonaparte is supposed to
have said to Josephine: ‘Come along, my little creole., go and lie
down in the bed of your masters.’ A famous phrase, and one
which Bainville characterizes as among the most revealing of those
that have been preserved. ‘The unforeseen, the fantastical, even
the irony of the situation, are well conveyed by it; nothing of all
that escapes this uncommonly mature young man, who can, when
time allows, see himself live, who is capable of reflections on his
destiny and on himself.’ ’ Bonaparte has become Emperor. ‘One
of his most remarkable traits,’ writes Bainville, ‘which he owes to
the predominancy in his personality of the intellect, is his capacity
for a dual vision. Nothing ever surprises him of all the incredible
things that happen to him ... He lives on a footing of equality
with his destiny. To reign comes perfectly naturally to him. It
is’ a chapter of the novel in which he is a personage. Not that he
forgets where he comes from, whence he has risen, all that had to
happen to make him possible, and how fragile is his rule. He
knows it better than anybody and without ever being troubled by
it. Nor does greatness alter his mind or even his language.
Majestic on solemn occasions, he remains what he was before in
'cf. above^ p, 87, ■Above, p. 176. ■p. 170.
386
JACQUES BAINVILLE
intimate and human intercourse, brusque, ironical, now distant
now familiar, amiable or blunt and occasionally coarse. For
himself he admits no compulsion, while he imposes on his sur¬
roundings the laws of a strict etiquette ... On the throne Napoleon
is more at his ease than if he had been born to it, for even the
traditions he revives in his court are calculated and a matter of
will.’*
Thus he remains to the very last. See him after the Russian
disaster in the sledge with Caulaincourt. ‘That perilous journey
is merely a striking new chapter in his adventurous life. Years
earlier, indeed, Bonaparte had departed from Egypt in similar
circumstances, trusting himself to fortune. Nothing amazes him.
He has always been ready for anything to happen. During that
journey he discusses himself as one would a stranger, with that
pleasure in seeing himself live by which the artist may be recog¬
nized. He has taken Caulaincourt with him as if he were anxious,
or curious, to find himself alone with the man to whose counsel he
had refused to listen . . . One would almost say that Napoleon is
having a rehearsal for the Memorial de St. Helene', his way with
Caulaincourt is already that with Las Cases later on.’*
The same day on which he addressed the ironical remark to
Josephine — the wide divergence of mood covered by that mind is
repeatedly pointed out by Bainville — Bonaparte walked with the
State Councillor Roederer through the rooms of the old royal
palace, and when Roederer, influenced by the memories it
awakened, said to him, ‘General, cela est triste’, he replied, ‘Oui,
comme la gloire’. Bainville comments: ‘The upstart gave way to
the literary man, to the poet, who felt things.’ To the romantic,
as he says elsewhere, and as Gucrard had already remarked.
But it is not only in detached utterances, it is in his whole life,
in the deeds and calculations of the statesman, that Bainville finds
this intellectual and artistic quality. In the ambitious plans of the
First Consul to begin with. The historical forms of w'hich ‘this
powerful imagination’ makes use, could only arise so naturally
with an intellectual, ‘un cerebral’. This sense of historical great¬
ness was prepared by the bold flights of mind to which the studious
little officer had abandoned himself in his rooms at Auxonne.
Greatness does not startle him nor make him ridiculous. It is a
natural action for him to choose the cardinal archbishop, de
' PP- *39 sqq. • p. 467.
387
Boisg(;fin, who twenty-five years earlier had delivered the sermon
on the occasion of the consecration of Louis XVI, that he might,
in praising the Concordat, compare its author to Pepin and
Charlemagne.'
Or take the scene in Notre Dame, on December and, 1804, when
Napoleon, notwithstanding the most positive promises made to the
Pope, forestalls him at the critical moment by taking the crown in
his own hands and placing it on his head. We have heard authors
who note above all the deceit; others in whose eyes the symbolic
meaning of the act seemed to compensate for it. Bainville forgets
it because of the fine gesture. ‘This gesture’ (with which he fore¬
stalled the mild-hearted Pius) ‘which is described to us as at the
same time imperious and calm, so studied that it looked spon¬
taneous, inspired as by an indwelling genius — perhaps the genius
of the Republic — this gesture he managed to make so noble and
so great that all those present felt it belonged to history.’*
The romantic, I said a moment ago: an unexpected combination
with thAt appearance, with that display of impeccable Roman
classicism, with that Latin clarity and precision, from which
Bourgeois and Driault deduced their otherwise so different theo¬
ries about the purpose of his foreign policy! If one has clearly
envisaged the fact that Napoleon united in himself those contra¬
dictions, this alone explains the rich possibilities of widely diver¬
gent interpretations. But Bainville points out another trait, which,
in combination with the others, strikes us as unexpected, and which
actually leads us back to the Napoleon of Arthur-Ldvy. ‘Egypt’,
he writes, ‘is in the career of the general what Atala was in that of
Chateaubriand.’ And he means the romantic pull of the exotic.
But in that famous proclamation to the soldiers about ‘the forty
centuries’ looking down upon them ‘from the top of the Pyramids’,
he is irreverent enough to discern an attempt at the sublime which
only its epic quality saves from being ridiculous. He smiles at
‘this way of speaking at once oriental and bourgeois’, these stylistic
effects which flatter the Joseph Prud’homme in the Frenchman.
Similarly of the scarcely less famous proclamation after Austerlitz
— ‘Soldats, je suis content de vous... II vous suffira de dire:
♦J’^tais k la bataille d’Austerlitz,* pour que Ton r^ponde: voil^ un
brave’ — he says: ‘Emphatic style, well suited to impress men’s
minds with the middle class and popular romanticism, with that
'p. 198. *p. 348.
388
JACQUES BAINVILLE
genre of surburban taste in ornaments for the mantelpiece of which
Bonaparte had discovered the secret.’*
Here there would still be room for a dispute about the question
to what extent this rhetoric, which was to suit Beranger so per¬
fectly, bubbled up from the depth of Napoleon’s soul, or whether
it was an expression of conscious artistry, the technique of an actor
who is master of his craft; or — a third possibility which would
bring one in agreement with Lanfrey — whether it came from a
calculating turn of mind and was directed towards aims that were
strictly practical.
1
*p. 271.
389
CHAPTER VII
LOUIS MADELIN
THE AUTHOR
Louis Madelin may be counted among the professional historians

although he has never tried to make a career in the Universite. He
is a talented writer, he professes the correct conservative, religious
and patriotic sentiments. No wonder then that, with a book about
Fouche and a highly admired and unrevolutionary history of the
French Revolution to his credit, he was elected to the Academie.
But of the many ‘immortals’ whom we have met* he seems to me,
for all his charm, learning and productiveness, to be the least
outstanding personality.
Madelin’s Fouche goes back to the beginning of the century. I
shall not enumerate his works (from one of his books I have already
given a quotation).* In 1932 and 1933 he published, in Funck
Brentano’s Histoire de France racontee d tous, in which twenty years
earlier his Revolution had appeared, two volumes about Consulat el
Empire. I shall limit myself mainly to these, although soon after¬
wards he began the publication of a much more detailed work in
which the same subject matter was to be dealt with once more,
but this tim? in twelve volumes, of which, however, only four had
appeared at the outbreak of war.
From Madelin’s somewhat sarcastic description of the self-
opinionated Napoleonic officials outside France proper, which I
have quoted, the reader may have formed the impression that his
conservative attitude of mind is likely to make him critical of the
activity and the personality of Napoleon. This is far from being
the case. It is impossible to hesitate even for a moment about him
as one can about Bainville. He is an admirer, and while Bainville
copies without further consideration from Vandal and Sorel, but
yet adds something of his own, it can be said of Madelin that his
work continues on the lines laid down by the two great Napoleonic
historians. There is less uncritical copying, but also less that is
' Chateaubriand, Mignet, Thiers, dTIaussonville, Taine, Houssaye, Vandal,
Masson, Sorel, Lavisse, France, Harris, Bainville and presently Hanotaux.
• Above, pp. 330 sqq.
390
LOUIS MADELIN
original. As a result we do not find in his work important new
points of view. On the nâin issues he treats us to an interpretation
already familiar to us, and what characterizes him is not so much
the dramatic and spirited presentation, as in the case of Bainville,
as the clear, detailed and able expose. For this reason his twelve
volumes will, when complete, form an important contribution.
However strongly one may object to his conceptions, the con¬
troversies of recent times, and the opposing views to which they
have given rise, have undeniably been utilized in his broad treat¬
ment. Moreover, the extensive annotation is highly instructive.
But we are concerned here mainly with views, and these, as
I said before, I intend to illustrate for the most part from the
two-volume textbook.
PORTRAIT OF BONAPARTE IN 1799
Shortly after the beginning of Le Consulat et VEmpire the author

gives a portrait of Bonaparte, or better of ‘le Bonaparte de Fan
Vlir.* This occupies some highly interesting pages, which
exactly reflect the spirit of the whole book.
‘Bonaparte’ (according to a phrase of Schopenhauer, who had
met him) ‘is the finest embodiment of human will power.’ This
is Madelin’s point of departure. In matters of state, this character¬
istic leads Bonaparte to an authoritarian conception. But
authority is for him merely a prerequisite for order. ‘He had order
in his blood.’ Such a character, according to Madelin, even if
directed by an ordinary spirit, would have been a blessing for the
France of 1799, with a wonderfully gifted, organized and
powerful brain applied to regulating and instructing these ten¬
dencies, the blessing became immeasurable’. A broad and
profound outlook, a mind inclined to study, well read, ever busy,
hardworking: ‘A passionate worker, Bonaparte was even more a
man of mental labour than a man of action.’ He was for ever in
search of facts, facts, facts, which he arranged and meditated upon
tirelessly. His powerful imagination did not work in a vacuum.
His dreams were not purely visionary. ‘They were transformed
immediately into concrete acts, into practical measures. The fact
is that he was extraordinarily realistic.’ This is how, with his
common sense, he was able, at the rise of the Consulate ‘to redress
’ I. 31-43-
391
the evil wrought by the crazy ideology of the Assemblies'. Thus his
policy was that of an opportunist. But it is particularly in his
execution that he displayed his realism. He was able to extract
everything possible from his collaborators and ofRcials. Some¬
times he worked them to death, but it was in the interest of ‘la
chose publique’.
As regards the ideas of this unusual man, ‘they fulfil the aspira¬
tions of the country’. They sprang ‘from his own character, from
his study of history and from the spectacle that presented itself to
his eyes over the preceding ten years’. He had been a supporter
of the Revolution, almost a Jacobin, but now he recognized,
though fully appreciating certain results of the Revolution, that
there had been much good in the ancien rigime. ‘He thought, and
rightly so, that the movement of 1789 had aimed only at equality.
“Liberty”, he used to add “was no more than its pretext.” ’ What
he saw besides in the Revolution (Madelin quotes the following
from Vandal) was ‘the military and martial side, the conquering
and Roman quality’. Madelin continues in his own words to the
following effect: ‘The natural frontiers acquired, French glory
exalted, the way prepared for French hegemony, these, with all
careers open to talent, were undoubtedly among the achievements
of the Revolution those which seemed to him most beautiful.’
Equality, the tabula rasa, made by the abolition of the old pro¬
vinces, and now the basis upon which could be constructed that
centralized state of which Colbert had dreamed, but whose realiza¬
tion had been prevented by the kings; the natural frontiers as the
concern of the people. Looked at in this way the Revolution
seemed to Bonaparte a blessing, and he was willing to pass for
‘the embodiment of the Revolution’. He wished to serve not a
party but the nation. He loved France, and he loved her past. He
felt a link between himself and his predecessors, with the Comiti de
Salut Public and with the kings. A man of authority, he disliked
‘the assemblies’ and the press equally. But this is not to say that
he wished to govern against tht people. ‘On the contrary, it was
his firm intention to base himself on la democratie against the oligar¬
chies.’ ‘For the people of Paris he wanted an assured bread
supply and amusements that would elevate the soul.' Soon he
was to grant the Legion of Honour to an honest miner while with¬
holding it from the monied men.’ ‘None of the oligarchies he
' cf. above, p. 358.
39a
LOUIS MADELIN
abhorred as much as he did that of the financiers, so influential
under the Directory.’ He did not want a military oligarchy either,
nor a domination of priests, nor the rule of lawyers. ‘A master,
a chief, a sovereign arbiter, restorer, and preserver of order, who,
freed from the pressure of social groups, was to prevent all possible
excesses of parliamentary oratory, of the press, of the electorate
(in their cornices) — such was the First Consul’s conception of
authority.’ Next: ‘The defence of the nation against Europe and
the conquest of a glorious peace. Peace is what he wants.’ But he
also wishes to retain the natural frontiers and he knows that
Europe grudges them to France.
MARGINAL NOTES TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ AND

‘realist’: napoleon and rome
The outline invites a few remarks. It will have been noticed that
there is no shading to the picture. After the evil wrought by ‘crazy
ideology’ a happy period dawns of authority, order and common
sense. Madelin, who places himself unmistakably to the right
(with Vandal and Bainville) by his interpretation of the Revolu¬
tion as indifferent to liberty, abhors parliamentarianism as much
as does his hero. For him it is the same as oligarchy, and he dis¬
credits it still further by connecting it particularly with the
moneyed oligarchy. Tabula rasa through the disappearance of the
historic division into provinces, and at the same time through
equality and the political impotence of all social groups. It is
amusing to see the author afraid that every one of these social
groups, the financiers, the lawyers, the priests, the generals, may
come to exercise domination; but that he has not a word to say on
the danger that the dictator who absorbs all these different powers
might himself at a given moment abuse his omnipotence. But why
be afraid of Bonaparte! Bonaparte wanted peace even though it
had to be a glorious peace with the natural frontiers intact (these,
by the way, ‘Europe’ was already leaving to him in 1801-02, but
about this we shall hear more from NJadelin) and he rested his
power on la dimocratie.
Need I point out that the word democracy is not used here in its
true significance? No free press, no political discussion, but the
people conciliated through bread and amusements to elevate the
soul (no serious popular education however) and through a
393
decoration for an honest miner — needless to point out to our
generation that this is not democracy.
One more point. ‘Bonaparte was eminently a realist.’ How is
it possible to assert this without reservation? I could contrast with
the statement Bainville’s sketch of a Bonaparte concerned with
artistic effects and working at the novel of his life. But let me
recall the remark made at an early date by the liberals that Bona¬
parte’s cynicism and his contempt for men (about which Madelin
keeps silent) blinded him to loftier motives, to disinterested con¬
victions and idealism, although these, too, can be realities in the
case of individuals and of groups. I recall the particular case of
his blindness concerning the Spanish people, and in general con¬
cerning the national movements which were to turn against him
in Europe at a later stage. Bainville, surely, was right when he
wrote that Napoleon’s Spanish mistake was the mistake of an
ideologist. He over-estimated the universal power of attraction of
the Revolution’s reforming slogans with which he approached the
Spaniards. He also over-estimated, as he did so frequently, the
miraculous effect of his military power and of intimidation. In
short, he acted according to general principles instead of paying
attention to the special circumstances of the Spanish affair; that
would have been realism.
But finally I should like to place over against the realistic
Napoleon of the portrait of 1932 the entirely different figure out¬
lined by Madelin in 1906 in his La Rome de Napoleon. One would
almost think that a lifelong study of Napoleon had affected the
independence of Madelin’s attitude towards the great man,
though not so seriously as in the case of Driault.
‘By an uncommonly striking atavism this Corsican army com¬
mander had Rome in the marrow of his bones. His blood was
Roman, his profile was Roman. From the ancient Roman he
derived the relish for greatness, the passion to dominate, the
extravagant imagination, at times allied with merciless realism.’
(The contrast with the later portrait is indeed striking!) ‘En¬
graved in his brain he has Roman law, the Roman manner marks
his decision, his style, his way of governing. Instinctively he feels
Rome to be his ideal centre ... In his imagination he has dwelt
for ages on the Capitol. He was fed on Rome. Many years befor?
he brought Caesar back to life, he made an impassioned study of
Livy, Tacitus and Plutarch, and of all the works which the
394
LOUIS MADELIN
eighteenth century had produced on the subject of Rome. But
his powerful intellect burst through the framework of that history,
grandiose though it was, and he preferred the Rome of the great
Corneille to that of the excellent Abbe Rollin: so great a subject
seemed to him to belong exclusively to the domain of the poet of
genius, “whom I should create a prince if he were still alive”.’^
For many pages Madelin then proceeds to show how early and
late Napoleon was ‘possessed’ by Rome. At first, in his earlier
years, it was Brutus and Scaevola, the Catos and the Gracchi.
Then it is Caesar. In 1809 he conversed with Canova, who was
modelling a statue of him. ‘What a great people were thcê
Romans, especially down to the Second Punic War. But Caesar!
Ah, Caesar! That was the great man!’ And when the sculptor
mentions Titus, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor exclaims:
‘They were all great, all, down to Constantine!’ England is
Carthage. He compares his own government (as we already
know)* with that of Diocletian. He likes to put himself in the place
of others who have been connected with Rome, of Charlemagne
and of the Emperor Charles V (for, as Madelin remarks, Napoleon
is an incorrigible dabbler in history and for him past reigns are
but the prelude to his own). But at bottom these men, even Con¬
stantine, are for him but ‘half emperors, because they have had
the weakness to hand over Rome to that brood of priests, or to leave
it to them. The figure which leaves him no rest is that of Augustus
with his crown of laurels, who instead of the Rome of bricks which
he found, leaves behind him one of marble’. The Rome of his own
time is not even of brick; he looks upon it as a ruin, he waxes
indignant at the bad government as well as at the neglect of old
monuments. He makes magnificent plans for Rome, always in
connection with himself, or with a son of his. He cannot bear to
leave it to anyone else. The difficulties with which he meets at
Rome, the unwillingness of the Romans to be made happy in his
manner, wound him profoundly.
And all this from a distance, for he has never been there. He has
never been there, because he did not wish to come unless as the
undisputed master recognized by the dethroned Pope as well as by
the population. Never was he able to renounce that dream, and
to the last he hoped to force or to over-awe him.
But, and this is the point which matters, his dreams, his idealized
* La Rome de Napoleon, p. 149. * cf. above, p. 288.
395
Rome, the Rome of his reading, and of his imagination, prevented
him from discerning or understanding the real Rome. ‘The
priests he took to be cowards and the Romans heroes, because he
had read Rousseau and Plutarch.* He shared the misconceptions
of his time and of his country about the ancient and the modern
Romans, but his personal sentiments added a particular vehemence.
No Frenchman had a mind so stocked with errors on the score
of Rome as had the Emperor.’* And this put its stamp upon
his policy towards the city and towards the Papacy. At times it
made him too impatient and too irascible, at times too yielding
and too hesitant.
In short, in a political matter of the greatest importance he
showed himself anything but a realist!
THE CONCORDAT
Is it necessary to analyse Madelin’s treatment of the Concordat?

One understands beforehand that neither' the reservations of
Quinet or d’Haussonville, nor those of Aulard, will be found in his
work. In a little volume of essays dated 1913, he had already
given his view on the Concordat in dealing with a work by
Cardinal Mathieu, which opposed to d’Haussonville the con¬
ventional Catholic conception. According to Madelin’s inter¬
pretation Bonaparte was led to take this measure against much
opposition and countermoves, simply because the French' nation
wanted it. The French nation wanted its priests, its church bells
and peace with Rome, and he had enough insight and courage
to grant it its wish. The fact that personally he had no faith,
makes his action all the more deserving in the eyes of Madelin.*
There is something naive in this way of reasoning. The modern
critics of the Concordat, and certainly those who agree with
d’Haussonville, do not begrudge the French people their priests,
their church bells and their peace with Rome. The popular joy
which greeted the proclamation is a fact, and a fact of importance.
But is it not clear that the French people had no conception of
what was the real significance of the arrangement, in Bonaparte’s
calculating and self-seeking mind, and that what they longed for,
and rejoiced at, could have been achieved in a different manner?
That at least is the point in debate, but one must not expect
Madelin to shed light upon it.
^ op. cit., p. i6i. • op. cit., p. 148. • France et Rome, p. 351.
396
LOUIS MADELIN
THE PAINFUL CASE OF VENICE
But I leave this matter and proceed to examine Madelin’s

view of the problems of the consular and imperial foreign
policy.
First a minor point which carries us back to the period of
General Bonaparte. It concerns the treatment of Venice in 1797.
We saw* how scathingly Quinet rejects as a sophism the later
assertion of Napoleon at St. Helena that he had delivered the old
Republic to Austria for the sake of strengthening the patriotism
of the Venetians and educating them for their Italian future.
Madelin sees it differently.
‘In his heart it is painful to him to deliver up that fragment of
Italy to the Austrians. We have evidence of this — slight perhaps,
but still an indication — in the letter which he wrote to the French
charge d’affaires after the consummation of the sacrifice at Campo-
Formio; he was to counsel acquiescence to the citizens of Venice,
but Bonaparte adds: “Qu’ils ne desesp^rent pas de leur patrie!” ’
One can easily imagine how Lanfrey would have interpreted this
advice had he known of it — as thoroughly characteristic of
Bonaparte, who sells the Venetians to Austria but at the same
time already prepares against the eventuality of his finding himself
once more at war with Austria when he would be glad of their
support. Thoroughly characteristic, especially on account of that
utterly unprincipled game with the national idea, which he
flatters at the very moment he treads it under foot. Madelin, on
the other hand, takes the utterance quite seriously. ‘ “Qu’ils ne
d6sesperent pas”, and on December 26th, 1805, the treaty of
Pressburg does take Venice from Austria to join it with the “king¬
dom of Italy”. It is as if, as early as 1797, Bonaparte foresaw the
future.’*
This treatment of the undeniably rather ‘painful’ case of
Venice goes to show what a benevolent judge the whole policy of
Napoleon will find in Madelin. One can also conclude from it
that he will endeavour to maintain this important component
part of the legend, the belief in Napoleon’s sincere feeling for
national aspirations, and this against all evidence from the facts of
his actual policy.
* cf, above, p. 83.

^ Histcirg du Conmlat tt de VEmpire^ II, L'Atctfîon de Bonaparte (1937)1 P* 375.
397
THE RUPTURE OF THE PEACE OF AMIENS
As regards the central problem of Napoleon’s foreign policy,

Madelin says explicitly that: ‘The thesis of Albert Sorel — whatever
Driault may have urged against it — appears to me after fresh
study still to be in accordance with the facts.’* Thus we shall not,
as I have already said, find anything new here, but it is worth while
to follow up a few points and to see how this modern writer gets
rid of objections which indeed do not all originate with Driault. In
doing this we shall once more notice an over-excited nationalism
which I am inclined to ascribe, as in the case of the later Driault,
to the influence of the first World War.
Bonaparte, to give a brief summary of Madelin’s views about
the rupture of the peace of Amiens, wanted peace. He expected
the recently concluded peace would be lasting. England, on the
other hand, envying France’s renewed prosperity, wanted war.
(This is exactly Sorel, as will be remembered.) • The assertion that
Bonaparte’s advance on the continent (Holland, Switzerland,
Piedmont) excused England’s delay in evacuating Malta, is
absurd. As Bonaparte himself observed (here I follow the large
work of 1939):’ ‘All this is not mentioned in the treaty. I see in it
only two names, Tarento, which I have evacuated, and Malta,
which you are not evacuating.’
This sounds extremely cogent, but it takes no account of the
English thesis, which, as I have already pointed out,* was un¬
doubtedly current in the international and public law of Europe
at that time, and yvhich the British Government formulated as
follows, in its instructions to Lord Whitworth: ‘H.M. is deter¬
mined never to forgo his right of interfering with the affairs of the
continent on any occasion in which the interest of his own
dominions or those of Europe in general may appear to him to
require it.’* But Bonaparte, as Madelin says himself, would never
have concluded the peace of Amiens, if it was to have tied his
hands in any way whatsoever.* Our author does not seem to
realize to what extent, by these words, he qualifies his hero as an
intractable and mischief-making element in Europe. He neverthe-
^ Consulat et VEmpire, I, 221. Note that he mentions only Driault; yet Murct’a
and Guyot's criticisms also deserve attention.
® Histoire du Consulat et de VEmpire, VI Le Consulat, p, 292.
♦ cf. above, p. 278, note. * J. Holland Rose, Life of Napoleon /, p. 403,
• Histoire du Consulat et de VEmpire, IV, 307.
398
LOUIS MADELIN
less takes the trouble to look at each of the three important con¬
tinental expansions of power of the First Consul from this point of
view. Piedmont and Switzerland are waved aside with a shrug
of the shoulder as being of no importance, or nothing new. In
the case of Holland he recognizes that it must affect England, but
he says: ‘Who was ignorant of the fact that Holland had for the
last two centuries been England’s client in time of war as well as of
peace?’ And thus the occupation of Holland by France is justified,
at any rate with a public which is as badly informed about Dutch
history as is the author himself.^
Awkward facts, like the mission of Sebastian!, and the publica¬
tion of his report about Egypt in the Moniteur, or the philippic
against Lord Whitworth, Madelin does not, as did Bainville, pass
over in silence, but he knows how to make them innocuous. He
recognizes that they were mistakes. Sebastiani’s mission, however,
he discusses as something perfectly natural; it is only the publica¬
tion which he admits was an error. Yet the mission had not
remained a secret to the English, and had inspired them with
concern about the First Consul’s intentions. But these mistakes
had been the result of provocation. It had been evil intention on
the part of the British Government which made it choose Lord
Whitworth in the autumn of 1802 to go to France. (Madelin, it
may be noted in passing, persists in calling him Withworth in both
his books.) ‘Instead of a diplomat who would have been disposed
to pour oil on the troubled waters, they sent a representative of the
English peerage, the element least inclined towards peace, a great
lord who had sworn to disturb the peace while waiting till it could
be broken, so that, as far as was possible, he could hamper the
great work of the Consul.’ Madelin, apparently, is as ignorant of
English history as of Dutch. The separation he tries to make as to
political inclination between the ‘great lords’ and the other
English an echo of those tirades against the English aristocracy
or oligarchy to which Bonaparte himself was so much given — has
no foundation in fact. The author anyhow produces no single
proof in support of his view of Lord Whitworth’s personal senti-
^ The last two centuries! In the seventeenth century therefore, in the time of
unrestrained Anglo-Dutch rivalr^^ which gave rise to three wars! Even for ê
eighteenth century (in spite of Frederick the Great’s well known remark) the assertion
is quite untenable. In 1787, not long after the fourth Anglo-Dutph war, it could
be said that Holland was in the position of a client with respect to Great Britain^
but this had lapsed, as early as 1795, owing to the creation of the Batavian Republic.
399
' THE ANTITHESIS AT THE END
ments, and it is a fact that Whitworth had been chosen for his post
at a moment when the British Government had still every hope of
preserving the peace. But in the opinion of Madelin it was the
attitude of ‘this grand seigneur’ with his phlegmatic arrogance
which first irritated the First Consul and finally caused him to lose
his self-commhnd. ‘What a Withworth [n’e] wanted, what those
who had chosen him wanted, had come to pass: the First Consul,
more and more exasperated, had committed mistakes.’*
Without hesitation I call this a striking sample of history writing
distorted by partisanship. We have repeatedly noticed how a
desire to whitewash Napoleon accompanied by anti-British senti¬
ments led French authors astray. But it strikes me doubly disagree¬
ably in a book which is presented to the world as an attempt to
summarize the whole of our modern knowledge of Napoleon, and
this by a man who is not only an academicien, but a professional
historian of long experience, working with learned and instructive
notes, thoroughly familiar with the literature of the subject, and
pretending to take part in the discussion.
‘the whole of the question’ 1814 of
One is thus left with litde inclination to give much more

attention to Madelin’s views about the problem of war and peace
in Napoleon’s career. It is always Sorel. It is always the European
coalition, aiming at her natural frontiers, against which the
Emperor has to defend France. I note in passing that Madelin
calls the dethronement of the Spanish Bourbons and the occupa¬
tion of Rome, to be followed inevitably by its annexation, and the
kidnapping of Pius VII, the cardinal errors, but also that, for the
first of these at any rate, he has found a scapegoat in Talleyrand.
It was Talleyrand who presented to the Emperor the dethrone¬
ment as a link with the tradition of Louis XIV, even though it
was the latter’s descendant who would be the victim. As our
author says: ‘Talleyrand had the knack of giving to the worst of
his transgressions — the arrest of the Due d’Enghien had been a case
in point — a colour of profound political thought.’* It is hard to
fathom the intentions of that most dangerous of Napoleon’s coun¬
cillors, but Madelin undoubtedly implies that he wanted to bring
about the Emperor’s undoing.
* Hittoire du Cotaulat et de I’Empire, IV. 308 »qq, Se? also p. *06; and HoixAin)
ftosB, I, 403,
' Le Cotmdta *t VEn^rt (1933), 1,361,
400
LOUIS MADELIN
I shall merely add a reflection about the way in which the year
1814 is dealt with.
The situation at the end of 1813 was a critical one. There was
Leipzig, and the Russian catastrophe which had preceded it, and
the protracted misery of Spain. On November 4th, 1813, all that
remained of the three hundred thousand men with whom, in the
spring, Napoleon had entered Germany, was concentrated at
Mayence. There were 60,000 men, and with these the marshals
were to try to hold the Rhine frontier, while the Emperor went to
Paris to conjure up another 300,000 men. It is true that almost
200,000 men were still dispersed in garrisons between the Vistula
and the Elbe, and Napoleon did his utmost to get them back.
But it was too late. They were cut off, and all now depended
upon the new armies which he might be able to form.
Madelin pictures to himself ‘the Emperor on his departure
from Mayence, casting a glance heavy with thought on the splendid
river, on that Rhine which the troops of the nation had crossed four
times before him’* (1793, I794> 1798 and 1799) ‘and with himself
at their head another four times’ (1805, 1806, 1809, 1812). ‘A
hundred and five years were to elapse before the troops of the
nation were once more to pass across the bridge of Kastel’
(in 1918). ‘As for Napoleon he was not to see the Rhine again'.
Nothing was further from his expectation, for this amazing man
was still confident that, supported by a nation like the French, he
would be perfectly able with his genius — for that at any rate
showed no signs of fatigue — to wrench from Fortune what she,
after so many favours, seemed for the last two years determined to
refuse him.
‘Would the country respond to the trust reposed in it by its great
leader? That was the whole question.’ Whereupon Madelin
begins to argue that the ‘exhaustion’ of France, after twenty-one
years, was by no means so profound as historians have said and
repeated. ‘Those twenty-one years had cost her fewer losses than
would four years of war a century later.’ No doubt this is true,
as is Madelin’s remark that France was exhausted because she
thought she was, in other words, that she was morally exhausted.
He looks for the cause of this in the circumstance that the war has
for so long been waged far away from the frontier and that the
people no longer had their hearts in it. He admits, further
* op. cit., II, 234.
cc 401
that the people, though attached to the Emperor, had lost all
initiative as a result of the authoritarian regime, and could no
longer, as in the days of Danton, answer with ilan when there was
a call for a levie en masse. Yet he has nothing but contfempt for the
Assemblies which after so many years of servility, suddenly dis¬
covered in themselves souls on the Brutus pattern, and for the whole
bourgeoisie which suddenly burned with the love of liberty.
For Madelin, as for Houssaye, and for so many others, ‘the
whole question’ is whether the country will once more produce
for ‘its great chief’ the necessary hundreds of thousands of young
men. There is no further mention of Napoleon’s mistakes, and
anyhow if one agrees with Sorel that he had all the time been
compelled to defend France against an envious Europe these
mistakes are of little significance. The interest of France is at this
critical hour inseparably linked up with that of Napoleon. People
were indeed made to feel it after his abdication, when the new
king had to sign the Peace of Paris. For this peace fell like a blow.
People had been sufficiently naive to imagine that by sacrificing
Napoleon they could escape from humiliating terms. Had the
allies not proclaimed three times that they were not waging war
against France? But France looked upon the natural frontiers
as her right, as a part of herself, and of these, of the whole Rhine¬
land, and of Belgium, the peace was now depriving her.
One feels in the whole description of these events by Madelin
how much he too takes to heart the loss of these territories. Talley¬
rand says of the peace; ‘It was a good and even rather a noble
peace.’ ‘The country’, comments Madelin, ‘thought the peace
neither good nor noble. It was still proud of the glory and of the
conquests acquired by La grande JSfation. If all this had to be given
up, it had not been worth while to allow the sacrifice of the
Emperor. ...’
As an indication of the frame of mind which would soon prevail,
in spite of the satisfaction created at first by the Charte and the
liberal regime which it announced, and which made possible the
expulsion of the new king and the Hundred Days, this is excellent.
But I repeat that Madelin himself thinks of the natural frontiers in
the same terms as did the most fiery supporter of the Convention’s
decree of 1794 and this colours the whole of his interpretation of
the parliamentary opposition to Napoleon, of Talleyrand, of
Napoleon’s own attitude.
402
CHAPTER VIII
GABRIEL HANOTAUX
THE WRITER
We possess only a fragment by Hanotaux about Napoleon. It is to

be found in a number of articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes in
1925 and 1926. These amount altogether to some 380 pages, but
it seems that the author’s interest or his strength failed him. He
never finished the work and it was never published as a book. This
is a pity, for Napoleon is looked upon here from unusual aspects
and the resulting picture, in spite of a certain lack of cohesion and
of smoothness, is one of the most striking in the whole gallery.
Hanotaux, who was trained as an historian, became an official
at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and was himself Minister from
1894 to 1898. In this capacity he attempted to carry through the
policy of expansion in Africa at the risk of creating friction with
England. No doubt he had the earnest intention of avoiding a
war, but he was ready, in the last instance, to play the card of
co-operation with Germany, The Fashoda incident was the result
of this policy, but it occurred just as Hanotaux was resigning.
Apart from Thiers no one among our authors played so weighty
a part in affairs of state, and at the same time left behind him such
an important body of historical work. He differs from most of the
others by not having concentrated mainly on Napoleon or the
Napoleonic age. He reached Napoleon only when he was past
seventy, after a monumental work on Richelieu, and a large-scale
history of the first ten years of the Third Republic in four large
volumes. He also wrote about Joan of Arc, and on various modern
subjects. All this is reflected in his work about Napoleon. It is
especially the man with personal experience of high matters of
state, and the man who spent many years in intimate commerce
with Richelieu, whom we find in this work.
ANTITHETICAL PRESENTATION
Hanotaux’s articles do not form a connected history. They deal

with the tendencies of the regime, and with the characteristics and
qualities of Napoleon. The first is called Du Consulat d VEmpire.
403
He accepts the Consulate as a necessary solution, and, taking
everything into consideration, salutary. As soon as one does this
the figure of Napoleon automatically takes a place among the
greatest and most fruitful rulers of France, but what distinguishes
Hanotaux from the true admirers is that he was by no means blind
to the shortcomings of the statesman, nor to the mistakes that were
inherent in the essence of his work and which must inevitably
carry their penalty with them.
From a number of pronouncements and passages of Hanotaux
an interpretation might be constructed which would lead the
reader to exclaim: ‘But this is Vandal!’ No words are too strong to
express his abhorrence of the misgovernment, the desperate con¬
fusion, the ‘muddy pool’ of the Directory. He quotes Sir James
Frazer on the lack of freedom of primitive societies. The slaves of
the past, such are the natural men whom demagogues and dreamers
have described as being free; their society is a thing of inferior
quality, marked especially by stagnation. But sometimes it happens
that an unusual man achieves supreme power and succeeds in
carrying out reforms which would otherwise have required the
work of many generations. And as soon as the tribe is no longer
governed by the timid and often contradictory counsels of the
ancients, but obeys the single direction of a powerful and deter¬
mined mind, it becomes formidable to the neighbouring tribes and
enters upon the road of expansion of power which promotes
social, industrial and intellectual progress. Hanotaux proceeds
to apply this view to Bonaparte’s appearance as First Consul.
‘C’est I’heure du commandement.’^ The great achievement of
Bonaparte has been that into stagnant affairs he introduced the
factor of decision. ‘His work consists in creating political institu¬
tions, as a result of which the decision — coming from the centre —
will be transmitted without obstacle to the outer parts and will be
obeyed without demur.’> But at the same time to what great
purposes did he not put this capacity for decision and this power!
First there was Marengo and the prospect of peace, and after that
it was nothing less than ‘miracles which administered to the cloudy
revolutionary mixture the shock that was needed to bring about a
stable and solid precipitation. It is the end of the Revolution and
the remaking {la refection) of France. Where the assemblies lost
their heads because they were absorbed in hair-splitting arguments
* Revue des Deux Mondes, 1925, XXVI, 91. * p. 92.
404
GABRIEL HANOTAUX
and in bloodshed, command sets to work. That man alone — and
precisely because he was alone — is successful.’* The Code, the
Concordat. ...
One would almost think that this is another of autocracy’s
eulogists. Yet it is only an historian who recognizes that at a
specific moment this manifestation was needed, and who can
appreciate it within its framework, and even enjoy its impressive
air. He makes at once the reservations of the kind one misses in
Vandal, and as he proceeds with his observations the dark sides of
the picture seem to oppress him more and more.
To begin with he remarks that this command must carry a
martial character. ‘This was fatal. People count on the new
ruler for the safety and for the development of the national
domain.’ After this opening one would expect the argument that
Bonaparte was not personally responsible for the wars of his
regime. Indeed Hanotaux has other remarks tending in this
direction. ‘No doubt’, he says ‘the Emperor was inclined to war
by his profession and by his genius, but in addition he was driven
towards it by a force stronger than his will. Neither he himself nor
France could stop where they were. They were on the move and
must go on to the end.’* But he never enters on an argument. If
at moments he seems, like Sorel, to see an irreconcilable antagon¬
ism between France and Europe, he views it in an entirely different
light. He sees first and foremost the contrast between the old
feudal and the new egalitarian powers; the natural frontiers he
scarcely mentions. England’s enmity was, he considers, inevitable,
for yet a number of other reasons, including, needless to say,
English imperialism. But Hanotaux also sees that Bonaparte’s
pretension to a free hand in continental Europe and to the domin¬
ation of the Mediterranean were factors in the renewal of the
struggle. A trade agreement might perhaps have saved peace, but
this was not to be expected from Bonaparte, since he lacked all
economic insight, a great weakness, as Hanotaux insists, which
made itself felt later also during the war with England.
‘Napoleon,’ he concluded, ‘was vowed to war.’* And yet he was
not without pacific impulses. ‘But unhappily the statesman, when
it came to a clash, was no match for the warrior.’ And this leads
him to the verdict that Napoleon overburdened his internal task,
an enormous liquidation, with a merciless foreign struggle, with
* p. 98. * op. cit., XXIX, 267. • op. cit., p. 275.
405
the adventitious enterprise of conquering the .world. This pro¬
nouncement, implying as it does responsibility or partial respon¬
sibility of Napoleon for the wars, would find no place in Sorel’s
rigid system, and Vandal, with his glorification of the seeker for
world peace, would also reject it.
One could point to inner contradictions in what I have quoted
so far. Sometimes Hanotaux advances the wars as an excuse for
the dictatorial character, basically military, of Napoleon’s regime.
He notes that nothing came of the guarantees for freedom promised
at Napoleon’s elevation to the imperial dignity, and admits that
this was partly th^ result of Napoleon’s nature which could brook
no contradiction: ‘He did not want to’; but he goes on to say: ‘To
be fair, one must recognize that the undeniable necessities of a
fight to the finish against Europe drove the man in the same
direction as his temperament.’* At another moment these wars
themselves are represented as having been, at any rate pardy,
brought about by this temperament. ‘The Emperor’s genius is,
and remains, military.. . With a litde less of this dangerous genius
an energetic man might, without these risks and misfortunes, have
put to much better advantage the introduction to the world’s
affairs given him by the Revolution. The problem of the general
European restoration after the Revolution might perhaps have
been solved.’* I shall not say that no more synthetic interpretation
of Napoleon’s policy is possible than this unsolved juxtaposition of
for and against. Nevertheless, even this has something satisfying for
those who have freed themselves from the powerful fascination
of a system, in appearance so cogent and strictly logical, in which
everything is deduced from impersonal international forces, or
in which, on the contrary, Napoleon appears as the autonomous
disturber of tranquillity; a system in which he is merely the
builder of a better state and a better society, or again only the
cunning contriver of his own power and advantage.
A PORTRAIT OF BONAPARTE
In any case, the personality, the temperament, has, in the view

of Hanotaux, its historical importance. So he too has tried to
sketch a portrait of Bonaparte. It is a very striking portrait,
incomparably more profound than that of Madelin, in my opinion,
and more true to life.
‘XXIX, 281. • XXIX, 278.
406
GABRIEL HANOTAUX
Only half a Frenchman, begins Hanotaux: ‘A Frenchman from
abroad,’ like Rousseau, with whom as a young man he becomes
infatuated, and in whom Hanotaux sees one of those ardent souls,
‘unable to forgive France for her moderation, her wit, her reason¬
ableness, instinctive enemies of France’s classical turn of mind . ..
In them the age of “philosophy” approaches that of romanticism.’*
With this we are already far from the energetic realist, the formula
in which Madelin thoughthe could shut up Napoleon. True, Hano¬
taux soon sees the emergence of a personality altogether different
from ‘the Werther, the Ren^’ of the beginning. ‘In his own sphere,
that of war, he displays from the beginning an unparalleled and
infallible force and exactness of mind ... We see here a different
Bonaparte indeed from the pupil of Rousseau and Raynal, a very
different man from the dreamer steeped in Ossian. Let us say at
once, however, that this original romantic inclination will never
be quite corrected. When the spring slackens it will once more
appear.’*
Bonaparte’s energy is not only a remarkable incidental. ‘In¬
cessantly he keeps his eye and compasses on the map. His imagin¬
ation is active all the time and works even in the abstract, if only
to keep himself in training and exercise the elasticity and readiness
of his reflexes. This complete immersion in his task is the ratio of
his being, it is the whole of his life. This is what distinguishes these
extraordinary natures. They obey a plan, a superior scheme of
things. They ‘act under God’s orders’, they ‘were born for this’,
as Joan of Arc expressed it. Their course has been set for them,
they follow their star. A hundred times Napoleon referred to his
dependence on a mysterious being . . and what, if that necessity is
considered, is one to call him and the others, the blood that is shed,
women, and the masses? Tools, tools of Fate ... This enjoyment
of action, this passion for its results, this hunt for an ever more
exalted and unattainable prey, this excitement felt in the mastering
of life, of the past, and of the future, of the world, with powers
infinitely extended, in short, this super-human existence, strains
the spring till it breaks. Everybody will agree that these unusual
beings are ambitious, for that is what they were bom for. But what
their nature wants to feed on is the subordination, the self-denial
and sacrifice of others, and if they do not restore to them what they
have taken, if they oppress them only to enjoy their own sense
* XXVI, 68. • XXVI, 75.
407
of power, their abuse of superiority becomes intolerable and
tyrannical.’
Hanotaux goes on to sketch Bonaparte’s ambitious dreams and
the unrest he suffered as a result of them. Richelieu was subject
in his youth to fits of weeping; so Bonaparte had his moments of
despair. He felt driven, he knew not where, the East tempted his
imagination as an escape.
‘La moderation dans les conceptions fortes’, therein the superior
quality of the mind shows itself. The coiled spring, command over
self, this is true greatnesf, this is what one should strive for above
all...’ Napoleon betrays a lack of balance in the limitless nature
of his aims. ‘In the long run his keen mind, his practical sense, his
clear intellect, become blurred, they lose themselves in an unbridled
loquacity, in explosions of wild vehemence, in chimerical schemes
which mean a return to the earlier romanticism, in that curious
reluctance to discern, or to recognize, truth, in which his im¬
perious command is to lose sight of the right track. As he lies to
others and to himself, so others will lie to him. He complains that
he is being betrayed; he has betrayed himself. This failure of the
richest natural gifts ever received by mortal man, has a moral
origin. Bonaparte’s disposition was ever personal, not perhaps so
much for himself as for his enterprise, and for his family. As a true
Corsican he never lost sight of his following, of his clan. One never
finds in his career that complete subordination to duty which is
demanded by the public interest, nor is there a trace of that care
for others, that humanity, that humility towards life, or that self-
denial, which are the only inexhaustible resources, and which
depend exclusively on man himself. He is for ever looking out for
advantage and gain, and too often calculates the immediate
interest without taking into account more distant consequences.’*
What is remarkable about this portrait is that Hanotaux, while
fully recognizing the greatness of his deeds for France, at any rate
at the beginning, yet sees in Napoleon himself the origins of his
downfall and of the partial failure of his achievement. A secondary
cause, but one which can also be referred to the faults of Napoleon’s
character, to his impatience, to his inability to wait before embark¬
ing upon the coup d'itat, Hanotaux considers to be his dependence
on the vilest relics of the period to which he was putting an end, on
Fouch^ and Talleyrand. ‘It must be admitted that the drama, le
‘XXVI, 8i sqq.
408
GABRIEL HANOTAUX
roman de sa vie, gains from this abominable complication a more
moving and a more human aspect. So he too is human after all!..
THE CONCORDAT
Nevertheless Hanotaux is full of admiration for the achievements

of the ruler, at any rate till 1807. For then there is a turn, then the
foreign task, the war effort, begin to dominate to such an extent, to
exercise such pressure upon everything, that the fruits of the
regime are squandered and his finest projects spoiled and de¬
molished by their great initiator himself.
To begin with, the Concordat. Hanotaux discusses it as a be¬
lieving Catholic. So did d’Haussonville, but Hanotaux has none
of the reserves made by the earlier author. Yet his attitude is also
not that of Madelin. That the people wanted the Concordat is not
the whole story for Hanotaux. There is also the reconciliation of
France with its past, and although Bonaparte certainly saw in the
Concordat ‘a source of power’, there were 40,000 priests who were
henceforth going to support his authority — and who in particular
were going to protect him from possible attack from the generals —
Hanotaux does not, like Madelin, take pleasure in the thought that
it was the purely political act of a man personally indifferent to
religion. On the contrary, ‘nothing is more honourable to this
superhuman man than his anxiety to find a rule which transcends
man. The restlessness about divine things possessed him till his
death’. It is when dealing with the regulation of education that
Hanotaux says this, but he sees Bonaparte, the maker of the Con¬
cordat, in the same light.
As to the significance of the Concordat, Hanotaux is prepared to
look for it in the confirmation of the revival of the religious sense
which others — d’Haussonville as well as Aulard, in their different
ways — also noticed, but which, according to their opinion, did
not need the Concordat, or was even impeded or perverted by it.
From a conception like this, notions arise which are irreconcil¬
able with those of men starting from different basic ideas. In the
opinion of Hanotaux the rationalism and sensualism- of Voltaire
and Condillac, followers of Locke, are so ‘painful’ and ‘irritating’*
that he cannot look upon them as a component of the national
spirit but only as a dissolvent. The reaction against these theories
had its origins before the Revolution: see Rousseau, Swedenborg
‘XXXIII, s6asqq.
409
arid St. Martin. In other words, it was originally not dogmatically
Catholic, but only religious, ‘mystical*. But when the time is ripe,
to continue Hanotaux’s argument, all this finds its traditional
form. ‘Religion is a policy... Man in general and the Frenchman
in particular is not a metaphysical being.’* So, when people began
to put questions about God the reply was: ‘But this is our God.
Nothing can be simpler. “I am of the religion of my fathers” — a
word of sturdy common sense.’ And thus the Concordat not only
provided Bonaparte with the support of those 40,000 priests, but
the maximum possible co-operation was obtained from all the
spiritual and material forces, that the nation might become la
grande nation. ‘Why’, sighs our author, ‘was the man who benefited
from this practical unanimity to take it upon himself to destroy it?
On the day Napoleon entered on his struggle with the Pope, he
smashed with his own hands both unity and Empire, so delicate
is the problem of faith, which is both the foundation of modern
society and the rock on which it can be shipwrecked.’’
From all this it may be gathered that Hanotaux can see national
unity realized only in Catholicism. French and Catholic are for
him inseparable terms. It is a conception which Protestants, Jews
and freethinkers will for ever reject, as being an attack on their
position in the State and in the Nation, and which will also inspire
distrust in those Catholics whose conception of their faith is some¬
what more ‘metaphysical’, and somewhat less ‘political’.
THE constitution: ‘uN HOMME EST TOUT*
Hanotaux is much more critical towards the constitution created

by Bonaparte than towards the Concordat. The essence of this
constitution is military; it is intended for war.’ Therefore there
must be unity. ‘A whole generation must be poured into the same
mould,’ as the First Consul himself expressed it in the Council of
State. Therefore there must-be obedience. ‘My government,’
Napoleon said himself at St. Helena, ‘was the most solidly con¬
densed, with the fastest circulation and the most immediate power
for action which has ever existed. Nothing less was needed in the
face of the formidable difficulties by which we were surrounded.
The prefects were litde emperors on a small scale.’ He, and he
alone, was the representative of the people, of the sovereign people.
’ XXXIII, 566. » XXXIII, 571 • XXIX, a6a sqq.
410
GABRIEL HANOTAUX
The corps Ugislatif ought really to have been called conseil legislatif:
it did not represent the nation. This constitutional explanation
was given by himself in the Moniteur in 1808 when the whirlwind
was already carrying him with it, according to Hanotaux’s inter¬
pretation, and there was no more question of moderation.
This was by no means what had been expected of him in 1799 at
the time of the coup d'etat, nor even in 1804 when the Empire was
established. The Consulate, as it had become, was a dictatorship.
Hanotaux is prepared to applaud this as contemporaries had done.'
‘Anarchy is the weed which interferes with the production of a
full harvest; every birth stands in need of authority respected and
obeyed, for its protection. Bonaparte was wise therefore to seize
authority, and he exercised it, amid applause from his contem¬
poraries, in such a way as to safeguard order by his administrative
genius and the power of his administration. However, he made
the mistake committed by the majority of dictators: he did not
know how to give a reasonable limit in time to his necessary power.
Instead of voluntarily terminating his dictatorial regime, he
followed it wherever it lured him.’
In 1804, when the dictatorship of the triumphant general was
replaced by a hereditary empire intended to last through the
centuries, political circles imagined that the intention was to
weaken the absolutism, that ‘unfrench warlike absolutism’, as
Hanotaux writes in another passage. ‘The public mind began to
conceive a return to old French traditions, that is to say to the
“tempered” monarchy of Bodin and of Montesquieu. Without being
in the least inclined to look to England for the example of par¬
liamentary monarchy, the men of sense and of experience would
have been content with a constitution which allied to authoritarian
forms serious guarantees of liberty.’ And indeed the quotations
from official declarations which at that moment the repre¬
sentatives of the State assemblies addressed to Bonaparte leave
• nothing to be desired on the score of explicitness. ‘Guarantees of
public liberty; we beg for the solemn covenant desired and
promised in 1789; a “tempered monarchy” in accordance with
what our greatest publicists have written’; even Fontanes, the
courtier par excellence, exclaimed: ‘Non, citoyen premier consul,
vous ne voulez commander qu’a un peuple libre.’* Later, at St.
Helena, Napoleon declared that a better time, and alleviation of
‘ XXIX, 838 sqq, * XXIX, 879 sqq.
4n
the pressure, would have come; but in reality he never wanted
this. ‘It is for his failure to prepare for this slackening of the
tension, for his unbridled surrender to his temperament, that
Napoleon bears, in the eyes of history, so heavy a responsibility.
We may be sure that he understood, for he understood everything,
but he looked the other way, and to speak plainly, he was un¬
willing.’
The Legislative Assembly was put definitely in the background
in 1808. Napoleon’s senatus consultes and dScrets imperiaux were
given force of law by the Court of Cassation, freedom of the press
had long since been abolished, all discussion, all debate, had been
done away with, and in conclusion: ‘un homme est tout’ — a
peevish remark which Napoleon let fall one day. ‘The empire’,
says Hanotaux, ‘is the Revolution without a constitution, although
that Revolution had been accompanied by the cry: “A constitution
or death.” ’ This is indeed a very different conception of Napoleon
and the Revolution than we have met with in Vandal or Masson!
‘The Empire is not a system, it is a fact.’ But Hanotaux under¬
stands how untenable was this state of affairs. ‘A law’, he wrote,
‘would have been needed for the very man who had deemed himself
to be above the law.’
THE administrator: ‘ un Im agIn atIf, UN

illusioniste’
‘Napoleon was the first and one might say the only, administra¬
tor of the empire. One of his ministers, Mollien, who was the
perfect Civil Servant, says: “He wanted not only to govern France
but to administer her from his army camp and during military
operations he did actually do this.” He wished to be informed
in the most methodical and precise manner. His officials were
always kept on the leash, and they had to give account of them¬
selves to their suspicious and overworked master. Even when he
was away at the head of his army and getting further and further
from Paris, he insisted on this. One realizes that in this way war
meant that civil affairs were more or less at a standstill, aivi under
the Empire there was almost always war.
Napoleon works with never failing accuracy on his data, his
statistics and his reports; if this requires nights he stays up. ‘But,
‘XXIX, 597.
412
GABRIEL HANOTAUX
the mechanism of men and of things does not always respond.
Wishing to give them a single and straight impulse the master
sometimes pushes them off the rails or makes them lose their
balance. Nothing is more fascinating than the spectacle of this
struggle between the strongest will the world has ever known, and
the hardest task ever shouldered by a human being. Incomparable
administrator though Napoleon was, at times the impossible
enterprise of fitting together two contrasting periods and two
opposing histories proves too strong for him. He was too violent,
too passionate . .. This is, to my mind, the characteristic trait. In
spite of his marvellous realistic activity, Napoleon remains un
imagimtif, un riveur du grand. He overdoes his quickness of decision,
he does not have himself in hand completely. He is essentially a
visionary and a talker about things ... He who wants to see in
Napoleon the man of action alone, and blinds himself to the
visionary and the rhetorician, will find it hard to understand his
reverses — and even his successes.’
Hanotaux here inserts a beautiful description of Bonaparte in
the Council of State, taken from the memoirs of Mole. Mole
writes about ‘the inexhaustible verve as the most characteristic
trait of his mind’, and shows him at the meeting, lost in thought,
taking pinches of snuff from his golden box, so much a man medi¬
tating in solitude that those who were present kept a profound
silence, but then again, talking, talking, and his talk was nothing
but thinking aloud. ‘Only compare this’, says Hanotaux, ‘with our
other statesmen, with that expressionless face of Louis XI, with
the impassive Richelieu, with the frozen blood of Talleyrand, and
you will be able to gauge the abyss separating this great man from
the other great men of our own soil.’ While talking, he forms
projects, takes decisions, but only too often he neglects or forgets
his projects and his decisions almost as soon as they have dropped
from him. His correspondence contains, together with his
grandiose and diverse creations, an almost equally great number
of‘false starts, impracticable schemes, and failures’.
And this not only in administrative work but also in high
politics. ‘Everyone knows how Napoleon fell under the charm of
the colonial dream, how he abandoned it after San Domingo,
ceding Louisiana to the United States; nor do I need to recall
what a gigantic conception was the plan for the invasion of Eng¬
land, based on Villeneuvc’s naval operations which ended at
413
Trafalgar; in the same way Napoleon successively put his faith in
the Prussian alliance, the Russian alliance, the Austrian alliance,
without finding a firm point d’appui anywhere, because he could
not bring himself to make the necessary sacrifices. The man of the
Concordat dragged the Pope to Fontainebleau, which was neither
logical nor pleasing to the aesthetic sense.
‘In current administration these whims multiply themselves, the
gusts of wihd swell ever more frequently to gales; his agents, never
sure whether he will be satisfied or angry, tremble. ViUeneuve had
been disconcerted by the blasts of the imperial correspondence
before Nelson’s broadsides blew him to pieces. The plans are
invariably impressive on paper. Some get carried into execution,
but how many are abandoned for lack of means! For while
Napoleon always demands of all his servants forcible and im¬
mediate execution, he generally places only moderate means at
their disposal, and those in a niggardly fashion. Meanwhile he
purposely mistakes their available resources, exaggerates them in
words, grudges them in fact, to show surprise finally when results
do not come in . .. This, the greatest defect of all that can mar a
man of action, the maladjustment between the imagination and
reality, is to ruin him ... It might be said that Napoleon’s corre¬
spondence is paved with illusions and disillusionments, and it is
this changefulness, this scenic railway of heights and depths, of
successes and failures, which explains the general fatigue, until in
the end everything topples over into the abyss.. . .
‘In a word, the great man was great everywhere, but less in civil
than in military matters. His civilian work too was of course
brilliant, since, to quote the most forceful and aptest word he ever
spoke, he cleaned up the Revolution and since out of the malodor¬
ous mud of the Directory he constructed a France of marble which
for a moment filled the world with astonishment. But the great
administrator, master illusionist, provided a plentiful crop of dis-
1 appointments and ruins in the midst of all that brilliance. His
appearance would be more harmonious and his contribution to the
history of France greater and even more beneficent than it
actually was, if with a greater indulgence for men and a better
judgment of obstacles, he had tempered his Corsican impetuosity
and his Florentine guile with a little French sense.’*
I have not interrupted Hanotaux fof quite a space. I must
• Revue des Deux Mondes, XXIX, 6oa sqq.
414
GA^BRIEL HANOTAUX
restrain myself from giving more quotations from the pages in
which he elaborates this general appreciation of Napoleon as
administrator, demonstrates the system in detail and discusses the
collaborators. I restrict myself to a single remark about what we
have just read. It seems to me to be one of the happiest sketches
of Napoleon at work which I have come across. Neither the mis¬
takes he made nor their effects are minimized. Yet an impression
is left of greatness and of unusualness. And how much more con¬
vincing, how much more truthful does this appear than the over¬
idealized sketch we were given by Madelin. It is particularly the
latter’s unconditional praise for Napoleon the realist which sounds
hollow by the side of this impressive study of the illusionist.
THE PIONEER OF THE BOURGEOIS CENTURY
The most original part of Hanotaux’s study is that about Social

Transformation.'^ I shall not try to follow the whole of his expose of
the rise of the bourgeois society in the nineteenth century. The
important part is his attempt to examine how far there arose from
the fragments of the ancien regime a new society, all in one piece,
with a visage of its own, an order, a morality and an attitude of
mind, and what was the share of Napoleon in its creation.
The great thought of the reign: fusion, these words he had
already quoted with approval.* Not only had the Revolution
been adapted to the old order, civic liberties confirmed and
religion restored to a place of honour, but the social classes were
shaken together into a new mixture. The emigres had been enticed
back and were being absorbed into the new leading class. Fashion
had abolished the old elegance and colour and had covered
everything in sober black. Money alone established distinctions
and everybody worked equally hard to acquire it. Already in
discussing the constitution Hanotaux had shown how the bour¬
geois society was being prepared. The revolutionary system of
elections had made room for one of working with notables indicated
by the government itself. The prime criterion for inclusion in the
lists in each dipartement was to be among those who paid the highest
taxes. After this the prefects had also to take into account birth,
status of the family, etc. In doing this, says Hanotaux, the
Emperor laid the foundations for ‘Philippism’.* ,
* itwwf ie* Dewe AfomfM, XXXIII. ' • XXVI, 99- * XXIX, 298.
4*5
Is it not surprising that Napoleon the hero of war, Napoleon the
romantic genius, should have been the pioneer of this rigid,
solemn middle class which esteemed property before all else and
which was to reach its full glory under Louis Philippe, with his
umbrella under his arm? Hanotaux is far from representing
Napoleon as the only, or even the main, agent of the transforma¬
tion. He sees it as the achievement of the whole nation, reacting
against the confusion, loss of balance, and disruption of the crisis.
No one of its component elements has led this development, not
even the upper middle classes, among whom there continued to
be much reserve and disapproval towards the Napoleonic regime.
Napoleon himself was able to assist the process only where he
moved with the current of his time; wherever he tried to row
against it, for instance when he established his new military
nobility, he failed. But in many respects he was in full sympathy
with the tendencies that were gaining strength and he was able
to assist them by encouragement, example and by his actions.
Towards the financiers he was always distrustful. He com¬
pletely lacked economic insight — we have seen how much
Hanotaux emphasizes this in another connection. And yet,
there was something which attracted him in the entrepreneurs, in
the creators of goods and of employment; industry owed much
to his regime, even if it was merely as the unintentional result of
the continental system, and he had a certain esteem for manu¬
facturers. For this he was repaid with interest later by the
followers of St. Simon; we have read, earlier on, the reflections of
Leroux. But there are two points where Napoleon exercised
personal influence to which Hanotaux specially draws our
attention, ‘his setting the example of hard work, and his
preoccupation with respectability’. ‘
As to his industry, about this we have heard enough already to
realize that it was impressive. Hanotaux contrasts Napoleon’s
mode of existence with that of the kings — how different it was to
be once more after his time, in the case of Louis XVIII and
Charles X! This respect for labour, this steady conscientious
consecration to the daily task, is an eminently bourgeois virtue
which was to be glorified properly only in the new age.
As regards the other point: ‘Napoleon’s personal morality was
not on a very high level; manners he had none. His numerous
iXXXIII, 95.
416
GABRIEL HANOTAUX
amours smack of the garrison. He chucks women under the chin
and throws the most peculiar remarks at them. Such sentiments,
habits and tone are the rule at his court. There is an ugly side
to all this magnificence.
‘This conceded, the master behaves himself, and it is his wish
that others shall do the same. No acknowledged mistress, no
display of scandals ... Not much is improved in men’s morals,
on the whole, but by order from on high a mask of decency and
propriety has been assumed.’
The age of prudishness, of propriety, of hypocrisy, has been
inaugurated. Here again one sees in Napoleon the union of
conflicting tendencies, of bourgeoisie and romanticism.
And the war hero, the conqueror? One can — and this again
makes him a real man of the nineteenth century — see in him
the Emperor of officials. Who worked as hard at his desk, who
was such a devourer of regularly returned reports, drawn up on a
fixed pattern? One might even call him the Emperor of professors,
hater of free thought and of ideology though he was. For the
miversiU with its rigid organization and hierarchy of the teaching
personnel has proved to be the most characteristic and the most
durable of all his creations.
l’empire de recrutement
‘The year 1807’, thus Hanotaux opens his last article, ‘is the
year of fate in the reign of Napoleon.’* 1807 is the year of Eylau,
and of Friedland, followed by the unexpected denouement of
Tilsit.
During his long absence from Paris a change took place in the
Emperor’s person. He had suddenly become stout, heavier,
slower in his movements, and also irritable. It was only in anger
that he showed his old vivacity. There was the near defeat of
Eylau, the hard work in the castle Finckenstein to avert the
sudden threat of disaster. It is true that during this sojourn in the
cold East Prussian winter he also knew love; it is the period of
the little Polish countess Walewska, the only one among his affairs
which has the flavour of romance. It is true also that he kept his
mind sufficiently free to steep himself in the affairs of peace and
that, for instance, he wrote a famous and really profound note
• XXXIV, 824.
DD 417
about education, which was never put into practice. Yet it is to
the heavy work under the threat of danger and in the conscious¬
ness of impatience and disappointment stirring in France that
Hanotaux attributes the change.
Jena, the crushing of the still glorious army of Frederick the
Great, had made him more proud than ever, and keen to venture
on the most ambitious schemes. His aim now was ‘to conquer the
sea with the might of the land’, as he wrote to Joseph. This means
that he already saw Russia overthrown, behind her the East
conquered, and England, which he declared from Berlin to be in
a state of blockade (the Continental System), brought to her knees.
Eylau, however, proved that he was facing heavier odds than ever
before in his life.
It was, as Hanotaux expresses it, a warning from Providence.
But could Napoleon harken to it? Was an interruption of the
game, was a gradual retreat towards the Rhine not more danger¬
ous even than a resumption of the struggle? Would the legend of
his invincibility be proof against it, would not the whole of his
position in Germany, and worse, in Paris, be undermined? We
catch a glimpse here of the theory of the fatality of Napoleon’s
continual further advances, but how much more acceptable is it
in this limited form than in Sorel! Hanotaux says no more, and it
seems perfectly justified, than that Napoleon, having ventured too
far after Jena had obscured his judgment, could not draw back. At
Finckenstein he prepared a new battle which was to be a victory.
But what a problem! For his losses at Eylau had been extremely
heavy. The grande armee had been used up, it hardly existed any
more. How were new troops to be obtained? This became the
compelling, torturing question. He was successful once more.
Friedland caused Alexander to decide on peace, and Tilsit.
But what was Tilsit? Taking a very different view from that of
Vandal, Hanotaux thinks the Czar never had any other object
than to gain time. And indeed, the same is true of Napoleon.
Napoleon re-entered Paris triumphant, but he clung obstinately
to his extravagant plans, and in spite of the anxieties through
which he had passed he continued to follow the line that was to
lead him from difficulty to difficulty and at last to catastrophe.
It was a line, and this is what is brought out in Hanotaux’s
account, which weighed upon, and upset, the whole of his internal
policy, and his policy towards the territories which had been
418
GABRIEL HANOTAUX
annexed, brought under his influence, or made dependent.
More than ever France v/as ‘in a state of siege’, and with France
the whole of Napoleonic Europe. Everything was subordinated
to the first and principal requisite of this dizzy policy: men,
soldiers. The empire became ‘un empire de recrutement’.
A change of personnel at the centre accompanies the new
course. ‘The Emperor has embarked upon a political enterprise
which no longer agrees with the idea which men had at first
formed of his usefulness to the national cause. Now that he is
losing himself in the colossal struggle and exceeds that moderation
so dear to Frenchmen, the shrewd foresee his fall, while the docile,
with hanging heads, follow their leader wherever he goes. The
eagle takes his flight with outstretched wings over the heads of
the little band present at his start, and in a sense this group falls
asunder of its own accord.’‘ The author now discusses Josephine,
Fouch^ and Talleyrand. He recalls the latter’s Strasbourg note
of 1805, a document ‘crammed with prophecies’ and concludes
that the separation was inevitable, since Talleyrand, in the
presence of this development into the impossible, could no
longer feel confidence in the master’s star. ‘Napoleon, knowing
what the inexorable intimate of the whole of his career means to
him, dare not strike him down at one blow . . . Talleyrand, freed
for his part from all obligations towards a system that has never
bên anything but a period in his career, could already say what
he was to write at a iter stage, with perfect sincerity and un¬
rivalled bad faith: “1 left the ministry in accordance with my
wish.” ’ Let us note tiat Hanotaux, holding the judgment we
know about Napoleo s policy and full of admiration for the
wisdom of the note ol 1805, like most French historians fails to
overcome his repugn^ ice at Talleyrand’s manoeuvres. And in
fact even now he unj es with his condemnation of Napoleon’s
far-reaching plans an admiration for the manner in which the
Emperor, supported by second-rate ministers whose sole virtue
was obedience and zeal, managed to communicate his energy to
the whole body of his empire. ‘A lesson of discipline, industry
and enthusiasm is spread to the farthest limits of greater France.’*
But the whole of his policy now turns on ‘recrutement’. Already
at Finckenstein Napoleon had decided that henceforth the vassal
states must produce their full quota. It was after all a matter of
> XXXIV, 835. * XXXIV, 841.
4«9
making real this European unity which was at the same time
benefiting from the immeasurable blessings of the French Revolu¬
tion and from what Napoleon himself called ‘le beau ideal de la
civilisation’.^ Did the world agree with him on this point? All
the kings, his own brothers, protest in the name of the national
interests which they feel called upon to defend. It is that, and not,
as Masson had tried to suggest, his personal dynastic feeling after
the birth of the King of Rome, it is this reluctance and Napoleon’s
own obstinate persistence in his grandiose plans and in demanding
ever more fresh soldiers with whom to carry them out, which is the
true reason that the federal empire must become a unified empire,
that the empire must for ever expand, and absorb the whole
continent.
When the King of Rome is born to Napoleon, according to
Hanotaux,* he imagines that he will leave this son ‘a united,
pacified world, which has been lifted to Videal de la civilisation.
But this by no means implies, as has been asserted, a new Roman
Empire. Napoleon has in mind something different from a
repetition of the past. His original genius does not lend itself to
imitation. It creates. He would certainly have looked upon it as
an unforgivable insult if one had tried to draw a parallel between
the dynasty he was creating and the very mixed lot of the suc¬
cessors of Augustus. He did not seek to model himself on
Diocletian, not even on Marcus Aurelius’.
To the last we see in Hanotaux’s essays merciless criticism
alternating with, or even united to, generous admiration. It is
rather amusing to end on a passage in which Driault is called to
order for having insulted the great man — Driault, whose convert
fervour, as we have seen, had made him into the most enthusiastic
of all admirers.
1XXXIV, 832. p. 858.
420
ANOTHER ‘UNIVERSITAIRE’
CHAPTER IX
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
THE AUTHOR AND THE WORK
In the well-known Histoire GenSrale of Halphen and Sagnac,

Peuples et civilisations, the fourteenth volume, entitled Napoleon,
was written by Georges Lefebvre, ‘maitre de conferences a la
Faculty des Lettres de Paris’. Its date is 1935. It. is not a
biography of Napoleon. It is a textbook for the history of the
world during the period 1799-1815. The author knows that he
must deal with many matters which were outside Napoleon’s
grasp or belonged to the opposite camp. The Anglo-Saxon
countries preserved their liberal tradition, capitalism was
developing, the middle class was preparing to take power,
nationalities began to revolt. The uniformity which Napoleon
imposed upon his part of the world was only outward appearance.
Beneath, is the diversity which will characterize the nineteenth
century. But during this brief period everything seemed to be
yielding to him, he was the leader of History. Therefore, con¬
cludes the preface, th^ volume appears under his name.
As a matter of fa< , one finds in it a surprisingly complete
picture of Napoleon. It is a textbook, detailed and condensed.
But wherever one 0 ens it, there is evidence of penetrating
judgment, and the at tior has even found space for the inclusion,
from time to time, oj general reflections on events.
I have said before that I considered dealing with Lefebvre
under the general he.*ding of Universitaires. He is indeed a pure
example of that class and in a certain sense one can look upon him
as being the very opposite of the typical but undistinguished
acadimicien Madelin. Thinking of my division into for and against,
I have no hesitation in placing him among the latter. ‘And yet,
just as we found in Hanotaux an academicien with a strong univer-
sitaire strain, we find in Lefebvre’s vision something which
transcends the merely professional quality as well as the party
bias of the typical universitaire. If I introduce him to wind up the
421
discussion this does not mean that it is now terminated; there is no
last word, there is no end. But it seems to me that Lefebvrc has
assimilated the discussion as it has proceeded so far, more har¬
moniously than Hanotaux, and not without a trace of the latter’s
influence.^ Lefebvre is obviously aware of the problems as
formulated in their many-coloured diversity by his predecessors.
He solves them according to his own way of thinking; his book is
far from being a series of samples from diverse conceptions, but in
its unity it is richly varied. And although the true admirers of the
Napoleonic tradition are bound to reject his interpretation, he is
free from parti pris. He has an eye for the positive achievements
and above all he can appreciate the greatness of the figure. If I
add to this that he writes vividly and to the point, and shows
himself a man of imagination, I cannot resist a feeling of regret
because the universitaire has allowed himself to be shut up in a
textbook and has left the great work in twelve volumes to the
academicien.
ANOTHER PORTRAIT
After Taine, Hanotaux and Madelin, Georges Lefebvre,

although aware of the changes which made the young general
almost unrecognizable in the megalomaniac Emperor, has
attempted to draw a portrait of Napoleon.* There are a number
of traits which by now have become very familiar to us, but the
portrait as a whole shows a remarkable tact and a fine balance.
‘His brain is among the most perfect that have ever been. His
ever ready attention seizes indefatigably upon facts and ideas
which his memory registers and classifies. His imagination plays
with them freely, and a state of incessant secret tension enables it
tirelessly to produce those political and strategic theses which
reveal themselves to him as sudden intuitions comparable to those
of the mathematician and the poet. This happens especially at
night when he wakes up suddenly. He himself speaks of “the
moral spark” and “the after-midnight presence of mind”. This
spiritual fire illumines through his glittering eyes the face, still
“sulphuric” at his rise, of the sleek haired Corsican.’* ‘This is
what makes him unsociable, not, as Taine would have us believe,
a certain brutality, as of a somewhat battered condottiere, let loose
^ It was his reference to Hanotaux’s various articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes
in his bibliography which drew my attention to the latter*8 work.
* pp. 6o-6, • See above p. 31, Auguste Barbier*s poem.
^ 422
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
upon the world in all his ferocity. He was only fair to himself
when he said: “I am not at bottom a bad sort.” He showed
generosity and even kindness to his immediate environment, but
between ordinary mortals and Napoleon Bonaparte, who was aU
effort and concentration, there could exist no common measure
nor true community. Out of this physical and intellectual
disposition arose that irresistible impulse towards action and
domination which is called his ambition. He saw clearly into
himself: “It is said that I am ambitious, but this is an error, or at
least my ambition is so intimately al’-cd to my whole being that it
cannot be separated from it.” ll cannot be better expressed.
Napoleon is before all else a temperament.’
The author then remarks how well it suited Napoleon to be an
officer. Giving orders agreed with his nature, and in Italy and in
Egypt, and even in France, he introduced the military system into
the government. He was able to consult, but never to debate or to
discuss. Hence his hatred for the ideologists, while for the
confused and undisciplined, yet formidable, masses, he had both
hatred and contempt.
But there were in him several personalities besides that of the
soldier, and it is this diversity which makes him so fascinating.
There was the victim of early neglect who lived to enjoy a fortune.
There was — a nobler trait — the man who wanted to know and
understand everything. Entering active life after his studious
youth he remained un cerebral. Even though now he wants to be
practical, he is still a typical man of the eighteenth century, a
rationalist, a philosophe. He distrusts intuition, and believes in the
power of reasoning. Tn his conception of the unitary state, made
of one piece according to a simple and symmetrical plan, he is
entirely classical. At some moments his intellectualism reveals
itself by his most marked characteristic, the dichotomy of the
personality, the power to see himself live and to meditate wistfully
on his own fate.’ There follows, among other utterances, that
noted by Roederer at the Tuileries.* ‘Thus by a strikingly round¬
about way this powerful and orderly mind slips from intellectual¬
ism into the romantic melancholia of Chateaubriand and de
Vigny. But it is never more than a flash and he pulls himself
together at once.’
A realist? In practice, in the knack of playing upon the
423
passions and the interests of men, he is one, and to the highest
degree. He has discerned very clearly what in the Revolution
touched the heart of the nation and fitted in with his despotism.
‘To win over the French he announced himself both as the man
of peace and as the god of war.’
A realist, however, only in execution! ‘A second personality
lives within him, which has some of the features of the hero. It
seems to have been born in him, as early as the days of the
Military Academy, out of his longing to dominate the world, in
which he felt himself despised, and especially to equal the semi-
legendary figures of Plutarch and Corneille. What he coveted
above all eke was glory.’ Alexander, the East; Caesar, Augustus,
Charlemagne ... He does not draw rules of conduct from these
historical memories, they merely fructify his imagination and
communicate an unutterable charm to action. ‘It is not so much
his heroes’ achievements which inflame his soul, as the sheer
spiritual fire of which these are the tokens. He is an artist, a poet
of action, for whom France and mankind were but instruments . ..
This is why it is idle to look for the limit which Napoleon put to
his policy or for the goal at which he would have stopped ...
Thus we find in a psychological form that dynamism of tempera¬
ment which struck us at the first glance. It is the romantic
Napoleon, a force which seeks free play, and for which the world
is but an occasion for acting dangerously. The realist, on the
contrary, can be recognized by his taking note of the possible,
when fixing his aim, and by his knowing where to stop.’
But circumstances too are responsible for Napoleon’s escape
from reality. He had become French at a late date, and had never
completely identified himself with the traditions and interests
of the nation. ‘There has remained in him something of the
uprooted person. Also of the man torn from his class: he is not
entirely a nobleman nor entirely of the people. He has served the
King and the Revolution without attaching himself to either.’
This is why he was able, at the beginning, to place himself so
successfully above parties, but also, ‘neither in the old nor in the
new order did he find principles which might have provided him
with a norm or a limit. Unlike Richelieu he was not curbed by
dynastic fidelity, which would have subordinated his will to the
interest of his master. Nor was he amenable to the civic virtue
which could have made him a servant of the nation.
424
‘A successful soldier, a pupil of the philosophes, he detested
feudalism, civil inequality, religious intolerance. In enlightened
despotism he saw the way to reconcile authority and social and
political reform. He became its last and most illustrious repre¬
sentative, and this is the sense in which he was the man of the
Revolution. But his impetuous individuality never accepted
democracy, so that he rejected the great expectation of the
eighfeenth century which inspired revolutionary idealism, the
hope of a future when mankind would be civilized enough to be
its own master.’
Even care for his own safety could not restrain him. He
dreamed only of stark and dangerous heroism. Was there a moral
curb? No. ‘In his spiritual life he had nothing in common with
the rest of mankind. Even though he knew their passions, which
he applied with astonishing ability to his own ends, his attention
was exclusively for those that can be used to reduce men to
dependence. He belittled everything that raises them to altitudes
of sacrifice, religious faith, patriotic enthusiasm, love of freedom,
for in all these he feared obstacles for his own schemes. In his
own youth, he had been open to those sentiments which so easily
conduce to heroic action. But circumstances gave him a different
turn, and shut him up within himself. In the splendid and
terrible isolation of the will to power, measure loses its sense.’
With the aid of this sketch it is already possible to situate
Georges Lefebvre fairly accurately. Though careful, with a
typically modern bashfulness, to avoid moral terms, he shows
traits that point to a spiritual descent from Mme de Stael. When
he points out that spiritual loneliness was the result of Napoleon’s
elevation of self, he even agrees with Taine, though guarding
against the latter’s exaggeration. He upholds the conception
that Napoleon rejected the highest ideals which had animated the
French Revolution, those of democracy and human dignity,
thereby separating himself from conservatives like Vandal and
Madelin, and even from Thiers. When he puts sueft emphasis
upon the absence of a final goal in Napoleon’s policy, upon his
lack of measure, he places himself in opposition to both Sorel and
Driault, and while, in reducing everything to temperament, he
once more displays his affinities with the old ditracteurs, from Mme
de Stael to Lanfrey and Taine, his modern attitude reveals itself
in the use he makes of the conception of romanticism. This we
425
have already met in Guerard, Bainville and Hanotaux. It helps
Lefebvre, like Gu6rard and Bainville, to discern the greatness and
beauty of the figure, to which the Barnis and the Lanfreys were
blind. But like Hanotaux, he attaches to the epithet an implica¬
tion which as far as politics are concerned is very unfavourable,
and in using it and especially in the limits he sets to Napoleon’s
‘realism’, he is clearly hitting at Madelin.
Yet when we come to look at the book more closely we shall
be able to add a number of little traits to the figure — perhaps of
Napoleon, certainly of the author.
THE DICTATORSHIP
Lefebvre’s reserved attitude towards Napoleon had revealed

itself at an even earlier stage of his book, when, in a review of the
war situation and the possibilities of peace in 1799, he discusses
the Directory. His interpretation is intended to weaken the usual
contrast which, having been indicated already by Armand
Lefebvre and Thiers, had been so strikingly worked out by Vandal.
He explains the evil reputation of the Directory by the impossible
financial situation which it had inherited from the Convention:
worthless assignats withdrawn, a state bankruptcy, all credit gone,
nothing but the receipts of taxation for financing the war. The
regime struggled manfully with these difficulties and introduced
considerable improvements in the system of taxation. In the
administrative sphere, too, there are good reforms to the credit
of this much abused government; they were soon to benefit the
First Consul. But inflation could not be avoided: the army
suffered from it, hence its resentment against the ‘lawyers’. The
disintegration of the administration, of the policy, of public
order, also resulted from it. The need for money explains why
the Directory came to practice its policy of exactions in the
occupied territories, and paid for the war out of its conquests.
Lefebvre (foes not fail to add that the generals did not forget their
own needs in applying this system.
By thus presenting matters he links up with the previous volume
in the series in which the Directory had been dealt with by
Guyot.^ At the same time he recognizes that the government
failed to find really satisfactory solutions for urgent problems, and
426
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
admits that, in consequence, in leading political circles and
among intellectuals in general there was impatience and dis¬
content, and an inclination to try a stronger government, one in
which power was concentrated, if not in the hands of a single man.
Thus the i8th Brumaire is not an accident in his view, it is not by
itself an event about which one might, as was Lanfrey for instance,
be seriously upset: ‘An inner necessity drove the Revolution to
dictatorship and not for the first time.’ (The author naturally
thinks of Robespierre.) ‘Nor was it an accident that it led to the
dictatorship of a general. But it happened that this general was
Napoleon Bonaparte, whose temperament, even more than his
genius, could not easily acquiesce in peace and in moderation.
Thus it was all the same something unpredictable that caused the
scale to topple over towards the side of the guerre etemelle.''-
But before passing to a review of Lefebvre’s conception of the
problem of war and peace — the main lines of which can already
be predicted with the help of this and previous quotations — let
us say a word about the whole of the First Consul’s constructive
work.
A moment ago I established a connection between this author
and Mme de Stael but it is necessary to observe that he takes a
very critical attitude towards the practical policy of that great
exponent of liberalism. He never fails to underline its bourgeois
class character. The Jacobins, he said, in 1799 as in 1793, wanted
a democratic dictatorship. Not so the ideologists of the salon of
Mme de StaH. They did not even want a democracy. Mme de
Stael summarized their programme and it amounted to ‘a repre¬
sentative system that would guarantee the power to the notables
of money and of talent’. In the words of Lefebvre this was nothing
but ‘a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’ and as those who were
aiming at this could only addre.ss themselves to the army, exclu¬
ding, as they did, the people, they suddenly found themselves
under an entirely different, a personal, dictatorship. This
supremely important change of regime, which introduced extreme
centralization and placed the appointment of all officials, who
had till then been elective, in the hands of the First Consul, was
possible because the Revolution had swept away all group
resistance, because the extreme decentralization on a democratic
basis introduced by the Constituante obviously weakened the coun-
* P. 58.
427
try against the danger from abroad, and because the ideologists,
liberals, well-to-do and educated bourgeois, the notables in other
words, who, though delivered from the democratic danger and in
possession of all the jobs, were still not satisfied and constantly
allowed themselves to be tamed by Bonaparte’s ‘Voulez-vous que
je vous livre aux Jacobins?’ Mme de Stael, ‘who had hoped to
govern France by means of Bonaparte or at any rate of Benjamin
Constant’, attempted opposition. On January 5th, Constant
delivered at the Tribunate the speech he had been discussing
with her. ‘At once the ruler became angry and everyone took
cover.’'
The methods of the dictator were those of a ‘terrorist’.* Lefebvre
says it without beating about the bush and we have seen that this
word ‘terrorist’ had become almost traditional among the univer-
sitaires.* He writes this with reference to the pacification of the
Vendee, but the proscription of the Jacobins after the attack with
the infernal machine and the establishment of special tribunals and
of military commissions as an ordinary means of administration
help him to complete the picture. ‘II faut du sang’, declared
Bonaparte in the Council of State, when it dealt with the Jacobins,
suspected after the attempt, but, as we know, innocent. *
When dealing with popular disturbances the First Consul was
equally harsh. There were disturbances, and for a number of
years to come, as the financial situation which had created so much
trouble for the Directory was not to be remedied overnight, and
when the harvest failed it was difficult to obtain grain from abroad.
Although Bonaparte, as we know, did his best to keep up the level
of bread distribution in Paris by organizing the bakery trade,
there were repeated periods of scarcity with the usual accompani¬
ment of unrest. If the agitation did not assume so serious a form
as in 1789 when bread was also very expensive, though not so
expensive as in 1801 and 1802, this was due, says Lefebvre, not
only to the absence of political and social troubles, but especially
to the efficient organization of repression which had just been
introduced. ‘Thus, popular excitement could only result in a still
closer attachment of the propertied class to Bonaparte. He became
the bulwark of society.’ The crisis therefore helped him not a little
in acquiring the Consulate for life in 1802.*
* pp. 39. 80 «qq- * P- 83. * See above, pp. 365, 371.
*p. 131. 'p. 119.
428
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
THE CONCORDAT
Towards the most famous constructive work of Bonaparte in his

happiest years Lefebvre also adopts an attitude more critical than ad¬
miring. Let us devote a few words to the Concordat and the Code.
What the author points out in the first place is an observation
we met for the first time in Driault.^ As he tersely expresses it,^
the application made to the Pope to dismiss the French bishops
aWunted to the administration of a mortal blow to Gallicanism.
But, he says, this old French tradition was totally alien to Bona¬
parte. How sharply an opinion like this differs from that of
Masson, who gloried in the view that his hero had imbibed this
doctrine with his extracts from Gerson.® According to Lefebvre
Bonaparte saw nothing but the mDst immediate practical advan¬
tages. He considered it the only way of getting rid of a tiresome
counter-revolutionary element. At the same time, imagining him¬
self strong enough to keep the Roman Church under control, he
wanted to use the religious renascence for the sake of winning the
counter-revolutionary aristocracy and middle class. Religion be¬
came once more de bon ton in good circles. Chateaubriand, ‘sensing
the wind that blew’, ‘proved the truth of Catholicism on its artistic
qualities’. Fontanes, with more political acumen, took a wider
view: ‘The restoration of the cult had a social significance and was
to support the new class division.’ This was the innermost
intention of Bonaparte himself.*
The tone of a page like this differs sharply from that in which
Madelin, or more especially the believing Catholic, Hanotaux,
discussed the Concordat. It indicates a general attitude of mind
on the part of the writer towards the great religious, political and
social problems which were involved in this measure. But a
different appreciation and even a different interpretation of
Bonaparte’s action is the inevitable result.
THE CODE IN FRANCE
A general attitude of mind, anti-bourgeois, socialistic, also

determines the judgment of the Code. No wonder that when one
compares it with that of conservatives like Vandal and Madelin
the accents are seen to fall very differently.
' cf* above, p. 346. • p. 120. * cf. above, p. 198.
* If the reader turns back to pp. 132, 154 sq., 360, 407 he will see how \^rious
were the interpretations of this aim and of Bonaparte’s attitude to religion.
429
The famous saying of Bonaparte in the Council of State, that the
French had been made by the Revolution into so many grains of
sand and that it was his endeavour ‘to throw upon the soil of
France a few blocks of granite in order to give a direction to the
public spirit’ is unquestioningly accepted and admired by Made-
lin. ‘Les masses de granite’ is the title of a chapter of his larger
work.' The measures with which Bonaparte wished to counteract
the excessive individualism of post-revolutionary society were the
institution of the Legion of Honour, the settlement of education,
and the Code. The storm of opposition which rose against the
Legion of Honour is described by Madelin as a curious sample of
the continued effect of the Revolution’s misconceptions. It was
looked upon as a corporation, a grouping of privileged persons.
As regards education, he first expatiates upon the deplorable
neglect in which it was found by the First Consul and out of which
he lifted it. He next cites from Napoleon’s opinions on education
his wish to enlist it in the service of national unity, his respect for
the classics (we know that this means for some of the classics),® his
preference for the sciences — all this without analysis or criticism
and in a tone of the most cordial agreement. ‘Meanwhile many
other benefits were coming: work was proceeding on the Code.’
In introducing the Code Civil Madelin speaks of nothing but the
high intentions for moral recovery which animated the First
Consul, and for the work itself he has the phrase, ‘one of the finest
portions of the building’.* He devotes to it a long and interesting
discussion; he fairly summarizes the criticism to which it has been
subjected, but only so as to lead up to the remark that every
human work was bound to draw upon itself such criticism, and
where he can, he brings out the fact that the reactionary aspects
one detects in it are due not to Bonaparte but to the lawyers. His
conclusion is that this, the most impressive of the blocks of granite,
also forms Napoleon’s highest title to fame.
Hanotaux’s view is very different. ‘The imperial policy,’ he
writes, ‘born of the policy of the Revolution, was not at its best
where the protection of the weak, the poor, the isolated, was con¬
cerned. Society is a pyramid which rests on its base, the people,
makes them feel the whole of the weight. Let them accept and
acquiesce, such is their lot. They have been guaranteed their
^ Histcire du ConnUat et de 1*Empire, IV, i66 sqq. '* cf» above, p. 141.
*op. cit., IV, 183,
430
GEORGES LEFEBVr'e
political rights, and their civil equality; this should suffice. As
regards their economic rights, their claim to live, work and enjoy
prosperity, neither the State not the nation care. Property—that
is all.’^ Hanotaux does not blame Napoleon so much as public
opinion for this; after the Revolution there was a holy terror of
disorder, submission was called for, and yet the French nation
still cherished a profound hatred for all social exception or privi¬
lege. ‘Faced with such sentiments, Napoleon, in spite of his great
plans for reconstruction and consolidation, achieved nothing of
permanent value for the masses. The age was stronger than he.
The new society, by no means welded together by the vaunted
blocks of granite, remained a dust cloud of human particles, within
the framework of a soulless administration, rigidly subdivided into
compartments. This dust could offer no resistance to imperial
absolutism.’
When later on he deals with the establishment of the imperial
nobility and has quoted the apology of St. Helena that ‘it is impos¬
sible to govern old and corrupted nations without titles, decora¬
tions, harmless toys,’ he exclaims: ‘How far we are here from the
blocks of granite!.. .’*
Let us now see what Lefebvre makes of all this. He begins by
remarking that the picturesque expression used in the Council of
State conceals the intention ‘to create bundles of interests which are
to be attached to the regime by advantage and honours and are
expected to secure to it in exchange, through the influence they
have upon wage earners, the obedience of the popular classes’.
Intermediate bodies, corporate groupings, if you like; ‘but he and
only he was to create the social body’.
‘As conceived by Bonaparte the social hierarchy rested on
wealth, nor was anything else possible, since he had seized power
in conjunction with the middle class. The ideologists, indeed, by
placing free education within the reach of all, had intended to
raise talent to the level of property in the leadership of the State.
But wealth once aquired has a natural tendency to reserve this
privilege for itself, and Bonaparte shared the distrust of the rich
for men of talent as long as they were poor: they formed a revolu¬
tionary ferment... ’ (Implied in this passage is a criticism of the
educational settlement and further on Lefebvre introduces his set
treatment of the subject with a remark which places it at once in a
‘ Revut des Deux Mondes, XXXIX, 295. * op. cit., p. 302; cf. above, p. 74.
43«
different key from that which we observed in Madelin’s work:
‘Public education as designed by Bonaparte was in accordance
with that social organization and with the authoritarian nature
of the regime.*) To continue my quotation from his analysis of
the social hierarchy: ‘When Bonaparte proclaims himself to be
the representative of the social revolution he always reduces the
great movement to the abolition of the privileges of which the
consequence was the accession to power of the bourgeoisie censitaire’
(the well to do middle class which, under the ‘census’ system after
the Revolution was in exclusive possession of the suffrage). ‘At the
decline of his despotism the social regime of the year X will be seen
to have laid the foundation for the July monarchy.’*
‘The Code Civil was the bible of that regime.’ As for Napoleon’s
personal share in it, Lefebvre remarks quite soberly that his direct
interest was confined to the clause relating to the family. ‘He was
intent on strengthening the authority of the father and the hus¬
band’ (this is expressly denied by Madelin), ‘on robbing illegiti¬
mate children, if not recognized, of their heritage, and on
minimizing that of those who have been recognized; also on
retaining divorce, not without an eye to himself.’
The Code, the author continues, possesses, like all Napoleon’s
work, a dual character. It confirms the disappearance of the
feudal aristocracy and accepts the social principles of 1789 ...
This is why Europe has seen in it the symbol of the Revolution,
and why, wherever it was introduced, it has ushered in the essen¬
tial rules of modern society. Even though today this characteristic
is out of date, not to restore its full freshness to the Code would
be to misunderstand the history of the Napoleonic period, and to
preclude oneself from realizing the full implication of French
domination. But the Code at the same time confirms the reaction
against the democratic structure of the republic. Drawn up with an
eye to the interest of the bourgeoisie, it aims before all else at con¬
secrating and sanctifying the rights of property. It looks upon this
as a natural right, anterior to society, absolute, and belonging to
the individual.
The State interest as conceived by Napoleon and his lawyers
provides them with their second directive. It is on this ground,
for instance, that expropriation is made possible. The authority
of the head of the family is strengthened but at the same time the
* NapoUon, pp. 133 sqq.; cf. the remark* of Hanotaux, above, p. 416.
432
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
right to make disjjositions after death is limited. ‘But for those who
possess nothing the Code has nothing to say except to protect their
personal freedom by forbidding the lease or hire of services for an
indefinite period. Proclaiming the freedom of labour, and the
equality of citizens before the law, it leaves in fact, as had been the
wish of the Constituent Assembly, the wage earners’ labour to all
the ups and downs of economic competition, looking upon it as a
merchandise like any other. It repudiates the notion, which had
emerged for a moment in 1793, of recognizing to the citizens the
right to live. To the detriment of the wage earners it even en¬
croaches upon the principle of legal equality, since in wage
disputes the employer only is believed upon his word....’
‘The Code then is the product of the development of French
society in so far as it has brought into being and into power the
bourgeoisie. . . .’
This, it will be noticed, is something very different from the
paean of Madelin. Both Madelin and Vandal* recognize the
bourgeois character of the famous law book and that it is, as
Lefebvre proceeds to argue, a compromise between the old law
and the new conceptions of the Revolution. But the first two are
not in the least troubled by this. If one tries to express the
difference between the views of the two Conservatives and of the
socialistically inclined Lefebvre, not in political but in historical
terms, one will have to point especially to the greater attention
which the latter, following the example of authors like Aulard,
Jaures and Mathiez, pays, not only to the libertarian tendencies
of the Revolution in its first phase (these had received full atten¬
tion since Mme de Stael from an uninterrupted line of Liberals and
Radicals) but also to the social tendencies of its second phase in
1793. It is only when these are ignored or given no more than
perfunctory attention that the Code can be depicted as a natural
and mature product of the great movement which Bonaparte took
under his wing. When on the other hand one looks into these
tendencies for an essential, important and particularly hopeful
part of the great movement, then one’s regret at the destruction
of the political and democratic aspirations is increased and one
sees still more in Bonaparte the man who deflected or arrested the
course of the Revolution, the man of the reaction.

EE 433
THE CODE OUTSIDE FRANCE
But, like Mignet before him,‘ Lefebvre makes a distinction
between the Code in France and the Code in the part of Europe
subjected to France. Here also, however, his views are far from
the uncritical enthusiasm of Driault. He places the problem right
in the centre of his account of the operation of the Napoleonic
regime in the territories outside France, an account which is
distinguished by its completeness and knowledge. A number of
monographs, of which I have mentioned a few,* by French and
foreign writers, have enabled the author to rise above the generali¬
zations and superficialities of previous generations.’ Here, if any¬
where, one feels that the argument has yielded something.
Le grand empire, Lefebvre begins,* which Napoleon was trying
more and more to make a political unit, must receive everywhere
the same institutions and the same social structure as VEmpire
franfais. Tn the first place, Napoleon meant the introduction of
his system of government to confirm his rule. He was anxious to
raise his power and that of his vassals and allies beyond dispute:
intermediate bodies, privileges, feudalism, were to disappear so
that all might be the State’s immediate subjects. It was desirable
too that the law of succession should divide the large fortunes,*
that the aristocrats should become the sovereign’s creatures and
the priests their officials. At the same time all members of le grand
empire lay under an obligation which came before everything else:
to supply money and men.’ (Hanotaux’s phrase, Vempire de
recrutement, will be remembered.) ‘The ancien regime with its chaotic
and slow administration could not mobilize the country’s resources
quickly enough; therefore there must be tabula rasa and intro¬
duction of Napoleonic bureaucracy in its place. From this point
of view the Emperor felt himself occasionally pressed to conquest
by the desire to give free play to these methods, insufficiently
appreciated, for instance, by Qharles IV of Spain.’ (We have here
a rational and unromantic interpretation of the policy of‘regenera¬
tion’, which a man like Prince Napoleon, to mention no others,
thought a sufficient excuse for the dethronement of the Spanish
Bourbons.)
Moreover, continues Lefebvre, Napoleon saw in the renovation
‘ cf. above, p. 36. ' • ef. above, pp. 333 *qq.
* See hia bibliographies, pp. 430, 440, 437, etc.
* Napoleon, p. 427. * cf. above, p. 328.
434
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
of administration and society a means of winning the bourgeoisie
and peasants and he quotes the letter of Jerome which I have
already mentioned.^ The essential part of the social policy with
which he meant to weld together the great empire, was embodied
in the Code. But ‘the jealous passion with which he tried to propa¬
gate this Code is not completely explained by realistic motives . ..
The intellectual formation which he owed to the eighteenth cen¬
tury inspired him with a sincere aversion to feudalism, intolerance,
and the muddled empiricism of the old administrations. He
resumed the reforming work of the enlightened despots, but greatly
as his task was facilitated by the tradition they had left behind, he
surpassed them all in the boldness and rapidity of his action. His
authoritarian mind, moreover, attributed to his work a character
of perfection’. To illustrate this Lefebvre quotes from yet another
letter to Jerome: ‘I think it ridiculous that you should make an
argument of the opposition of the Westphalian people ... If the
people decline their own happiness, they only show their anarchi¬
cal inclinations. They are guilty, and the ruler’s first duty is to
punish them.’ ‘The expansion of French institutions’, our author
reflects, ‘was one of the forms assumed by his lust for power.’
Nevertheless, he continues, the Emperor did frequently take
circumstances into account, a fact which did not always help the
operation of the system. The allied rulers had to be humoured;
even in Italy, which generally speaking underwent his influence
most profoundly, he allowed disruption to persist. ‘Enormous as
was the work which he achieved if one takes into account the brief
space during which Napoleon’s domination lasted, it remained
fragmentary. And what was worse, in the sphere of social reforms
too, opportunist considerations came into conflict with the
“system”. As he needed money and wanted to expand the extra¬
ordinary domain, the estates of princes who had been deposed, of
imigrSs, of the clerg)’, came in very handy. Now tithes and feudal
contributions constituted a considerable part of the importance of
these estates. It would hardly have suited his book to let them go.’
Outside France, too, it was impossible to fill all the posts in the
new administrations with suitable men of non-noble birth.* The
^ cf. above, p. 62.
* I need hardly say that this does not apply to Holland. Indeed, as I have already
pointed out (p. 337, note), the whole feudal question, the French annexation, and
indeed the French influence in general from 1795 onwards, had much less profound
signiflcance in Holland than in many other countries. Liefebvre is perhaps not
435
nobility was moreover indispensable for the courts of his kings.
‘But as a consequence -it became impossible to carry out the
agrarian reforms in the radical way which would have been
necessary to win the peasants and which had resulted in attaching
the French peasantry to the Revolution. And indeed Napoleon
everywhere discarded the “Jacobins”, who would have been fer¬
vently in favour of radical measures, he flattered the old nobility
in France, and for himself sought a dynastic alliance. In the
empire the Revolution was a fact for which he could deny responsi¬
bility; in the grand empire he had to carry that responsibility
himself. Here was a contradiction which penetrated into the
heart of the system. The peasants were sacrificed. Their contri¬
butions to the landowners, and even occasionally the tithes, were
declared redeemable’ (instead of being confiscated). ‘This proved
the great obstacle in the way of French influence as well as of
Napoleonic reforms.’
THE PROBLEM OF WAR AND PEACE
Lefebvre precedes his story of the rupture of the peace of Amiens

with a short summary of the debate of which Napoleon’s foreign
policy has been the subject. Contemporaries, and Napoleon’s
first historians, he says, spoke of his ambition as being the source
of all his wars, but afterwards this was found too simple and a
number of hypotheses have been constructed, agreeing or dis¬
agreeing with the Napoleonic legend. He indicates them all
without mentioning names, and then he continues (the names
between brackets have been added by me):
‘In each is to be found part of the truth which yet, as a whole,
transcends them all. It is true that those who helped Bonaparte
into the saddle wanted to retain the natural frontiers and that, to
defend these, one could easily be tempted to go beyond them;’
(Sorel) ‘but it is not true that this was the only means, or the
safest, to protect them, and that in expanding his conquest his sole
thought was of the interest of the nation. It is true that England
fully aware of this. When he writes, that in Holland ‘I'essentiel avait ^t^ fait par
la R^publique* (p. 441), meaning the French Republic, he tends considerably to
exaggerate the immediate French influence on internal development. In the first
place much that was ‘essential* was already present long before the French Revolu¬
tion, and again, much that was done between 1795 and 1810 was partly the work of
the Dutch. The most important exception was the unification of the laws by the
French Code, and this was carried through under Louis Bonaparte.
436
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
was his constant and persevering enemy and that by overthrowing
him she triumphed definitively over France;’ (Masson, Vandal,
again Sorel) ‘but if in accordance with a maturely considered plan
he was aiming at England alone, his continental policy would have
been greatly different;’ (same remark already made by Driault)
‘Even the blockade’ (the Continental System) ‘of which so much
is made’ (e.g. by Sorel) ‘was suggested to him by the composition
oiLe grand empire, rather than the other way about. Nothing would
have pleased the new Alexander better than an adventurous
expedition to Constantinople or to India’ (Bourgeois), ‘but the
larger part of his enterprise has only a cerebral connection with
that dream. It is a fact that he used to compare himself to Charle¬
magne and to Caesar and that he toyed with the idea of a political
federation ofthe western world’ (Driault), ‘but the intellectual desire
to restore the past was not what drove him to action. In denoun¬
cing the hatred sworn by the allies to the soldier of the Revolution,
the legend gives evidence of a keen insight, and it is curious that
so many historians should have overlooked the point.’ (We saw
that Hanotaux emphasized this and we shall see that Georges
Lefebvre himself attaches great importance to the motif.) ‘But he
did not confine himself to the defensive.
‘There is no rational explanation by which Napoleon’s foreign
policy can be reduced to unity. He pursued simultaneously aims
which were, at least for the moment, contradictory. In the last
resort we must return to his “ambition”. His contemporaries, who
had before their eyes the theatrical apparatus of a luxury oppres¬
sive and loud in its novelty, accompanied by amorous adventures,
quarrels of avaricious relatives, and thefts by servants, lowered it
all, without denial of his genius, to the common level of humanity.
Seen from a distance the picture takes on a purer aspect, and his
secret may be guessed; the heroic attraction of danger, the
magic seduction of the dream, the irresistible impulse of the
temperament.’‘
THE RUPTURE OF THE PEACE OF AMIENS
One sees how closely this interpretation is connected with the

portrait. In the conception of Lefebvre, however immediately
based upon a multiplicity of facts, there is a strong unity. It is not
surprising to find that he will have none of the reasoning which
* NapoUon, pp. 144 sqq.
437
lays the responsibility for the breach of the peace of Amiens on
the English. Yet he by no means minimizes the Anglo-French
antithesis as Napoleon found it, and his detailed explanation of
economic and social conditions in the England of the industrial
revolution, though less highly coloured than that of his namesake
of almost a century ago,^ makes one realize most vividly what a
dynamic spirit prevailed in England at that time and how it was
transmuted into imperialism. An unwillingness to leave the Low
Countries in the possession of France was, moreover, an ancient
English tradition, which was felt there in all sincerity as being
defensive. When in an earlier passage of his book,* Lefebvre
argues that it would have been possible for the First Consul upon
his accession to consolidate the peace on the basis of the existing
situation, that is to say, with the preservation of the natural
frontiers, it is from Prussia and Austria that he takes his starting
point: it might have been possible to induce these two powers to
acquiesce in the situation, the latter by giving up Italy. Without
an ally on the continent England would have had no chance. And
sure enough, after Luneville came Amiens.
There is no need to believe, says Lefebvre, ever conscious of the
contrast between the old order and the new represented by the
France of the Revolution, ‘that Europe, so intensely hostile to the
regicide republic, would have given up for ever the idea of recap¬
turing all or part of its amazing conquests. But this is not how the
question should be put. For in 1799, as always, the problem for a
statesman was not to deflect the course of history;’ (one cannot miss
the thrust at Sorel here) ‘the question was merely whether France
had a chance to secure peace for one or two decades, while keeping
the natural frontiers, so as to recover her breath in order to defend
them with even more strength than before. That the answer must
be in the affirmative is not subject to doubt.’
This amounts to saying — and immediately afterwards it is said
in so many words — that it* was Bonaparte’s inadequate states¬
manship, his ‘temperament’, by which France was dragged into
new wars and finally into disasters and the loss of the natural
frontiers. That it was Bonaparte, and not the bellicose spirit of
the French nation, is strongly emphasized. Even the attempt by
the Convention in 1794 and 1795 to fix the natural frontiers for
ever by the constitution and by decree had elicited the condemna-
^ cf. above, p, 48. • pp. 56 sqq.
438
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
tion of contemporaries; one of the ideologists who in his blindness
was to assist in preparing the i8th Brumaire, wrote in La Dkade
philosophique that this amounted to decreeing eternal war and the
annihilation of all Frenchmen. In any case no one thought of
transgressing the natural frontiers. Italy was Bonaparte’s
personal playground and, to sum up, the responsibility was
Bonaparte’s.
How brilliant was the position of the First Consul after he had
concluded the peace of Amiens! ‘The French nation longed for
peace before all else; it had received it from Bonaparte’s hands. It
was attached to the social achievements of the revolution;
Bonaparte had preserved them. Satisfied with its leader and
proud of him, it did not yet realize that he intended to abuse his
power and was pursuing objects which conflicted with its own.
But the people did not want this leader to become king and still
less that he should create a nobility, while Bonaparte, in his heart,
had broken with the republic and with equality. Pleased with
having reached the natural frontiers, the people did not in the
least desire to go beyond them, while their master had already
crossed them and was making war inevitable. They still saw in
him the national hero, at the moment when he had ceased to
answer this description.’‘
It is unnecessary after such an introduction to follow in detail
Lefebvre’s very precise narrative of the diplomatic relations which
led to Amiens and to the rupture of Amiens. I merely note, in
order to illustrate the difference from Madelin, that he says about
the publication of Sebastiani’s report: ‘One is dumbfounded by
so provocative an act.’* Nevertheless he concludes:
‘There have been passionate debates about the responsibility
for the rupture. Bonaparte’s provocations are undeniable, but it
is no less true that England broke the treaty and took the initiative
for a preventive war as soon as she could count on Russia. She
tried to justify her conduct by pleading her concern for the Euro¬
pean balance. But she would not allow this system to extend over
the ocean which had been created by the God of the Bible to be
English. As between Bonaparte and England therd was not really
anything but the clash between two imperialisms.’*
* Napoidon, p. 141. * NapoUon, p. 156; cf. above, p. 390.
•op. cit., p. 158.
439
THE empire: the third coalition; 1813
The war, through the conspiracies encouraged by England, le^
to the murder of Enghien, which in turn led to the proclamation of
the Empire and the consecration in Notre Dame. ‘The theatrical
character of the consecration painted by David might fill Napo¬
leon’s heart with delight,’ Lefebvre writes in a characteristic
passage, ‘ ‘but it added nothing to his prestige. The people watched
with a sceptical eye the strangely assorted procession and the
festivities which succeeded each other throughout the month of
December. No one believed his power to be strengthened. By
restoring monarchy and underlining the aristocratic character
of the regime he had even more emphatically separated his cause
from that of the nation .,. Among the people the spirit of the
Revolution had not succumbed. Napoleon had seduced it by
promising peace, he had made himself completely the master by
resuscitating war. Now there was nothing to prevent him from
giving way to his own nature. Imperial conquest, despotism and
aristocracy get free scope, while the nation can only watch in
astonishment and disquiet. It has no choice but to follow for dear
life the triumphal chariot of Caesar.’
One fact Lefebvre never allows us to forget; he gives it special
emphasis in his careful narrative of the diplomatic negotiations.
The wars are Napoleon’s doing, France is dragged blindly into them
and must willy-niUy follow in his wake. I shall not discuss
Lefebvre’s account of the origin of the Third Coalition and of the
outbreak of the war on land in the autumn of 1805. But here is
his conclusion, once more directed against Sorel, against the Sorel
whom Bainville and Madelin had followed so slavishly:
‘The third coalition has been represented as a deliberate
attempt to rob France of her natural frontiers. If the allies suc¬
ceeded in defeating her it goes without saying that they would take
away her newly won territories, but what really ought to be
proved is whether England in 1803, Russia in 1805, took up arms
solely with that purpose in mind, and for this proof we look in
vain even in the case of England. To begin with, the spirit of
aggression, which cannot be denied, was fed by sentiments and
interests which are left out of account entirely’ (here as elsewhere
the author means: by Sorel and his followers, who refer only to the
natural frontiers) ‘the economic preoccupations and the maritime
* op. cit., p. i6j.
440
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
imperialism of the English, the megalomania and the personal
jealousy of Alexander, the hostility of the European aristocracy, so
powerful in Vienna, and which was strengthened by causes of a
social nature.’ (I remark in passing that economic and social factors
have a prominence in Lefebvre’s mind which gives a modern touch
to his excellent and painstaking surveys of international affairs.)
‘What is even more striking is the fact that Napoleon, as if on
purpose, kept irritating this subdued ill will, caused uneasinesss
to all the powers, and exhausted the patience even of the feeble
Austrian monarchy. Leaving aside the interests of the French
nation, simply from the point of view of his own personal policy,
it was not indispensable to his authority to have the Due d’Enghien
kidnapped and to found the empire, to incite England to action
prematurely, to threaten the eastern ambitions of Russia, and
above all to irritate Austria by changing the Italian Republic
into a kingdom and annexing Genoa. Without sharing the
revolutionary enthusiasm of the Girondins, he challenged the
kings and the aristocracy in the same fashion for which it is usual
to blame them, and he continued the noisy policy of intervention
which has earned for the Directory so much contemptuous
criticism.
‘However this may be, the formation of the Third Coalition
after the rupture of the peace of Amiens gave to his destiny its
definitive direction. Not that from now on his failure was certain,
as is often suggested:’ (by Armand Lefebvre, Sorel, Bainville)
‘many more errors and unforseeable accidents are required to
bring about this ruin. But no way out was left other than the
conquest of the world.’
The beauty of Lefebvre’s book consists in the fact that he is able
to present, and continually to recall, this general vision upon
Napoleon and his regime, without neglecting the endless multi¬
plicity of facts which determine and modify each particular
instance. English imperialism, Austrian reaction, the personal
policy of Alexander, none of these is blurred in order to make
Napoleon’s responsibility stand out with more sharpness. Lanfrey
as well as Sorel becomes understandable in the interpretation of
Lefebvre, without affecting the clarity of his own presentation.
As a single example I point to the attractive page in which he
Opposes Wellington and Napoleon. In the former he underlines
‘the aristocratic morgue', he describes the high tone he adopts
441
towards his officers, and his contemptuous description of his
soldiers as ‘the scum of the earth, a troop of rascals’, and so forth.
‘At any rate’, continues the author, ‘pride of race tied him fast to
his caste and to the country of which it was in his eyes the lawful
proprietor. He never had a thought but to save it, his dry soul, bare
of imagination and affection, preserving him from the romantic
individualism which ruined Napoleon, while lending to his genius
an imperishable attraction.’‘
Equally characteristic is his treatment of the year 1813 which
is as far from the over-simplified anti-Napoleon interpretation in
Driault’s article of 1906 as from the equally over-simplified pro-
Napoleon interpretation in Driault’s book of 1927.* Mettemich
is described as working at Napoleon’s undoing. It is recognized
that Napoleon could not accept Metternich’s proposals without
fighting, but above the circumstances of the moment the author
remains mindful of Napoleon’s earlier mistakes which had led to
his then inescapable difficulty.*
SPIRITUAL life; INADEQUACY OF THE

NAPOLEONIC IDEAL
It is impossible to summarize a textbook crammed with facts,
in which the author usually indicates his conceptions, his judg¬
ment, with a mere word or an incidental clause. Before parting
from Lefebvre I wish to pick out a few passages which will give an
idea of the richness of his material as well as of the spirit in which
he deals with the phenomenon Napoleon. I choose for this
purpose the two final sections of the first chapter (La France
imperiale) in his fifth book {Le monde en 1812). They are entitled
Le Gouvernement des esprits and L’evolution sociale et I’opinion.
Together they cover more than twenty pages and we shall note
only a few main points.*
‘To lull men’s minds by forbidding all criticism, while fostering
their interests’ was Napoleon’s first method to obtain a docile
public opinion, but it was not the only one. At times he had a
clear insight into the positive power of the spirit, even above that
of the sword, and at the very beginning conceived of the Concordat
as a means towards the education of the faithful into a willing,
joyful obedience.
* Napolion, p. 424. * cf. above, p. 295 sq. ’ Nap<di<m, p. 532.
* NapoUon, pp. 396-418.
442
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
Here again the way in which Lefebvre discusses these matters
strikes one by its complete lack of sympathy towards the Church,
He goes into some detail about the advantages it saw in the
relationship, advantages in money, in favours and in influence,
and also about the struggle which was being waged in the Em¬
peror’s environment for and against the interest of the Church,
with Fontanes and the younger Portalis (who was to be snubbed
so spectacularly in the full Council of State) as its pleaders, and
Fouche as the anti-clerical who has preserved his revolutionary
point of view. Finally he warns us that ‘One must not measure the
Church’s influence upon the population by its material progress.
In many regions indifference was considerable, and in the towns
a public could always be found to applaud Oedipe^ or Tartufe.
There is reason to believe anyhow that Napoleon had no
wish to rechristianize France too profoundly; he had taken his
measure to get a hold upon that section of his subjects who
listened before all else to the priests; more than this did not
interest him.’
The success of this policy was, moreover, affected by the conflict
with the Pope. Already in his discussion of the imperial conse¬
cration it was clear that Lefebvre did not succumb to the charm
of the personality of Pius VII.® He now points out at once that the
conflict between Emperor and Pope had no religious origin, a
remark which Napoleon himself, and afterwards his apologists,
have always been fond of making. No doubt, ‘Pius VII resented
the Emperor’s Organic Articles and even more the conduct pur¬
sued with respect to the clergy of the Kingdom of Italy. But a
rupture would never have ensued if the Pope had not been a
secular ruler.’ One consequence of the conflict undoubtedly was:
‘that the clergy reverted to the royalism and counter revolution
from which Napoleon had detached it by the Concordat. But the
majority was reluctant to carry its opposition to extremes for fear
of losing the advantages obtained. As for the public, so long as
worship was not interrupted and the cure not expelled, it took
little notice. If the conflict revived the hopes of the royalists and
favoured their intrigues, this was not in itself sufficient to shake
the regime’. It is worth while to compare this estimate of the event
‘Voltaire’s first tragedy (1718), which was regarded as an attack on priestly

arrcmnce.
*NapoUon, p. 163.
443
towards his officers, and his contemptuous description of his
soldiers as ‘the scum of the earth, a troop of rascals’, and so forth.
‘At any rate’, continues the author, ‘pride of race tied him fast to
his caste and to the country of which it was in his eyes the lawful
proprietor. He never had a thought but to save it, his dry soul, bare
of imagination and affection, preserving him from the romantic
individualism which ruined Napoleon, while lending to his genius
an imperishable attraction.’*
Equally characteristic is his treatment of the year 1813 which
is as far from the over-simplified anti-Napoleon interpretation in
Driault’s article of 1906 as from the equally over-simplified pro-
Napoleon interpretation in Driault’s book of 1927.* Metternich
is described as working at Napoleon’s undoing. It is recognized
that Napoleon could not accept Mettemich’s proposals without
fighting, but above the circumstances of the moment the author
remains mindful of Napoleon’s earlier mistakes which had led to
his then inescapable difficulty.’
SPIRITUAL life; INADEQ,UACy OF THE

NAPOLEONIC IDEAL
It is impossible to summarize a textbook crammed with facts,
in which the author usually indicates his conceptions, his judg¬
ment, with a mere word or an incidental clause. Before parting
from Lefebvre I wish to pick out a few passages which will give an
idea of the richness of his material as well as of the spirit in which
he deals with the phenomenon Napoleon. I choose for this
purpose the two final sections of the first chapter (La France
impdriale) in his fifth book [Le monde en 1812). They are entitled
Le Gouvernement des esprits and L’evolution sociale et I’opinion.
Together they cover more than twenty pages and we shall note
only a few main points.*
‘To lull men’s minds by forbidding all criticism, while fostering
their interests’ was Napoleon’s first method to obtain a docile
public opinion, but it was not the only one. At times he had a
clear insight into the positive power of the spirit, even above that
of the sword, and at the very beginning conceived of the Concordat
as a means towards the education of the faithful into a willing,
joyful obedience.
^ Napoli, p. 424. ‘ cf. above, p. 295 sq. * NapoUortt p. 532.
^ NapoUoHt pp. 396-418.
442
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
Here again the way in which Lefebvre discusses these matters
strikes one by its complete lack of sympathy towards the Church.
He goes into some detail about the advantages it saw in the
relationship, advantages in money, in favours and in influence,
and also about the struggle which was being waged in the Em¬
peror’s environment for and against the interest of the Church,
with Fontanes and the younger Portalis (who was to be snubbed
so spectacularly in the full Council of State) as its pleaders, and
Fouche as the anti-clerical who has preserved his revolutionary
point of view. Finally he warns us that ‘One must not measure the
Church’s influence upon the population by its material progress.
In many regions indifference was considerable, and in the towns
a public could always be found to applaud Oedipe^ or Tartufe.
There is reason to believe anyhow that Napoleon had no
wish to rechristianize France too profoundly; he had taken his
measure to get a hold upon that section of his subjects who
listened before all else to the priests; more than this did not
interest him.’
The success of this policy was, moreover, affected by the conflict
with the Pope. Already in his discussion of the imperial conse¬
cration it was clear that Lefebvre did not succumb to the charm
of the personality of Pius VII.* He now points out at once that the
conflict between Emperor and Pope had no religious origin, a
remark which Napoleon himself, and afterwards his apologists,
have always been fond of making. No doubt, ‘Pius VII resented
the Emperor’s Organic Articles and even more the conduct pur¬
sued with respect to the clergy of the Kingdom of Italy. But a
rupture would never have ensued if the Pope had not been a
secular ruler.’ One consequence of the conflict undoubtedly was:
‘that the clergy reverted to the royalism and counter revolution
from which Napoleon had detached it by the Concordat. But the
majority was reluctant to carry its opposition to extremes for fear
of losing the advantages obtained. As for the public, so long as
worship was not interrupted and the curi not expelled, it took
little notice. If the conflict revived the hopes of the royalists and
favoured their intrigues, this was not in itself sufficient to shake
the regime’. It is worth while to compare this estimate of the event
^Voltaire’s first tragedy (1718), which was regarded as an attack on priestly

arrogance.
^râpoUon^ p. 163.
443
with that of Hanotaux to whom the rupture with the Pope, that
is with God, meant the end of Napoleon.*
In his description of the UniversiU Lefebvre places special
emphasis upon the incomplete execution and results of the great
plan. This was partly the result of lack of money, but there were
other factors. The reformer overlooked the people; from the
middle class he received through the schools what he wanted
above all, able officials; but an ideal that could have animated a
whole generation and attached it to him was not his for the giving.
This is shown not only by education, but by art and literature,
which failed to reward his encouragement by a period of activity.
As worked out by Lefebvre this idea amounts to a fairly
thorough rejection of the Napoleonic episode. He admits that
Napoleon lacked financial and technical means such as were at
the disposal of later dictatorships for organizing their propaganda.
(This remark, by the way, is a sign of the times: the parallel could
not have been left out entirely in a book of 1935, in a book by a
leftish author at any rate, for in Madelin’s even later work one
would look for it in vain.) ‘But*, he continues, ‘with his pretension
to found a dynasty and a universal domination he had nothing to
teach which could convey anything to the French. They who
continued to serve him to the end faithfully and disinterestedly,
believed they were defending in his person the nation and the
Revolution. The others could not take seriously the legitimacy of
General Vend^miaire,’ even though he had been anointed by the
Pope. Thus he was able to drug or to oppress, not to master, the
spirit of the people. Men’s thoughts remained suspended between
the two poles of tradition and the Revolution.’*
SOCIAL life: failure of the fusion

What I want to extract from the second of the sections to which
I referred is mainly a remark which supports this last item. In
his policy of social reconstruction Napoleon is shown by Lefebvre
as leaning upon two incompatibles. Fusion — we saw how highly
Vandal and after him Hanotaux thought of this slogan. Hanotaux
certainly did not fail to discern, but Lefebvre is the first to state
^ cf. above, p. 4x0.
•Thb nickname, which arose from Bonaparte’s suppression of the Royalist
Txsing against the newly formed Directory in 1795, had a particular meaning when
used by Royalists*
•p. 407.
444
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
with full emphasis, that the fusion which the ruler had most at
heart, that between the idea of the Revolution and the idea of
Legitimacy, that between the newly emerging leading class and
the ralliiSf did not really materialize.
However far Napoleon might go in his denial of the ideas of
1789 (‘nothing but weapons in the hands of malcontents, ambitious
men and ideologists’, he called them at the end in speaking to
Mold); though he fill his court with the bearers of old names and
flatter them by restoring ancient customs (since 1811 ‘the order of
precedence marked by the fauteuil, the tabouret, the number of
horses with the carosse, court dress, the curtsey he had not
really reconciled them. The two aristocracies continued to look
at each other with distrust and contempt in spite of the Emperor’s
attempt to unite them even by marriages — a means which he
indeed liked to apply all along the line: the prefects in Dutch
departements, for instance, were ordered to make out lists of girls
with a good dowry so that they might do their bit by suitable
marriages with young Frenchmen towards bringing the leading
class into the system. Himself he felt ill at ease in the midst of the
ci-devants. They were on the lookout for the fall of ‘Bonaparte’.
And the fact is that he wished nothing less than their genuine
restoration. If he had become the most powerful of enlightened
despots, it was owing solely to the complete destruction of the
French aristocracy at the moment of his appearance. In the
provinces, where the old families had to see the new men oc¬
cupying their former properties, relations were even worse. ‘The
social revolution has created an unbridgeable chasm. The old
aristocracy and the new will long remain enemies and whatever
Napoleon may say or do, in the course of the nineteenth century
democracy will profit by their dissension and triumph once more.’
It is entirely in the spirit of Hanotaux that Lefebvre goes on to
argue that Napoleon’s action has borne lasting fruit only where
he worked in the direction of the social evolution itself. This was
particularly so where he gave a chance to the bourgeoisie. Also in
agreement with Hanotaux Lefebvre pictures this bourgeoisie,
while laying hold of the jobs after i8th Brumaire, as by no means
won over in spirit. By way of reaction against despotism English
parliamentarianism once more becomes fashionable. It is in this
connection that Lefebvre, in speaking of the intellectual opposition
of Mmc de Sta6l and of Chateaubriand, makes a remark which
445
%iiE ANTITHESIS AT THE END
would almost lead me to doubt whether I was right in counting
him, even with the reservations I made, among the spiritual
descendants of Mme de Stael. ‘The significance of these cases’, he
says, ‘lies only in their value as anecdotes’, and he deems it of
greater importance to establish by a number of less known indi¬
cations, such as the audacious expression of war fatigue by the
Chamber of Commerce of Lyons, that men were waiting for things
to happen, that there was no feeling of confidence in the lasting
character of the regime.
It will have been noticed before, not only that Lefebvre under¬
lined the bourgeois character of Mme de Stael’s policy, but also
that he placed upon a low level the motives of Chateaubriand in
writing Le Ginie du Christianisme. This tendency to bring poets and
intellectuals and also, as we saw, the Pope, down a peg, and rather
to listen to Chambers of Commerce, certainly does not fit very
well in the line of liberal moralists which we can attach to Mme
de Stael.
conclusion: the significance of

NAPOLEON
Insufficiency, failure — after all we have heard about miscon¬
ceptions, mistakes, the habit of misleading, the question arises
whether Lefebvre’s judgment of Napoleon, though he finds some¬
thing irresistibly great and fascinating in the figure, is not purely
negative. Let me give, in answer and at the same time in con¬
clusion, a brief summary of his findings.
After the failure of his gigantic undertaking — so he writes in
effect — the Emperor has become, in the imagination of the poets,
a second Prometheus, whose temerity was punished by divine
power, the symbol of human genius struggling with fate. There
are some, on the other hand, who have wanted to make him the
plaything of historical determinism; wrongly so, the imperial dig¬
nity, and the conquests beyond the natural frontiers, were his
personal initiative. Even the thesis that this must fatally lead to
his undoing, a thesis which would have its uses for the teaching
of a spiring Caesars and for the good of mankind, cannot be upheld.
‘His personal ambition was not realized; but he has nevertheless
left profound traces. In France he consolidated the new State by
giving it, with a master hand, its administrative organization. The
446
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
Revolution of 1789 had raised the middle claiss to power, a position
which was subsequently contested by democracy’ (1793-94).
‘Under the Emperor’s tutelage the notables regained their power,
while their wealth and influence increased. Freed from the
menace of the people, they set themselves to govern and to restore
liberalism. In Europe the spread of French ideas, the influence of
England, the progress of capitalism, and consequendy of the
bourgeoisie, all tended to the same result. Napoleon contributed
not a little to hasten this development by destroying the ancien
regime, and by introducing the principle of the new order.’ By his
territorial rearrangements and his reforms he promoted, too, the
awakening of the nationalities which had already begun. Rising
capitalism was protected by his Continental System. Roman¬
ticism, already in a ferment, found in him the hero its poets needed.
Wherever he went in the direction of the great currents of Euro¬
pean civilization his influence was considerable. ‘If one wants to
bring in historical determinism, this is the way in which it can be
seen at work.’
Thus it also becomes intelligible that his legend has arisen so
quickly. ‘Nevertheless, there is a contradiction between his per¬
sonal endeavours and that which was lasting in his work and was
preserved by the legend. He became more and more inimical to
the Revolution, to such a degree even, that if he had had the time,
he would have ended by a partial denial of civil equality. He has
dreamed of a universal empire, yet for the French he remained the
defender of the natural frontiers while the liberals of Europe’ (in
Italy, in Poland, in Belgium, even in Western and Southern
Germany, even in Spain) ‘put him up against the Kings of the
Holy Alliance as the defender of the nationalities. He established
the sternest despotism, and it is in his name that the constitutional
Bourbons were opposed. He was the idol of the Romantics, while
the form of his thought as well as his literary and artistic taste were
purely classical. ...
‘The romantics alone were not altogether wrong, for what was
classical in him was only his culture and the forms of his intellect.
The spring of his actions, however, was the imagination, the
irresistible impulse of the temperament. This is the secret of the
charm which he will always exercise on men. If only in the passing
fervour and confusion of youth they will always be pursued by the
romantic dream of power. There will always be those who, like
447
^ THE ANTITHESIS AT THE END
the heroes of the novel of Barr^, will come to find exaltation at
the Tomb.’*
This conclusion, however broad a vision it reveals, cannot be
mine. I miss something in it. Let me, without trying to put my
own conception in its place, which would go entirely beyond the
purpose of this book, indicate what seems to me to be lacking.
In the first place I miss in it, far more than in his portrait, and in
many other passages of the book, the spirit of Mme de Stagl. I am
far from wishing back the confinement of history within the limits
of a moral trial, as we found it in Barni and Lanfrey. The modern
abhorrence of big words and easy sentiments which characterizes
Georges Lefebvre deserves appreciation, especially when, as in his
case, it goes together with such a sharply practised eye for factual
and material factors. These qualities not only guard him against
excursions into ethics, they also make him aware of the tempta¬
tions of chauvinism and of romanticism to which we have seen so
many others succumb. Of romanticism indeed he not only displays
striking understanding, but it is so close to his own heart that,
notwithstanding his entirely different political inclinations, he has
not hesitated to quote, as his final word about Napoleon, Barres
and his young men by the tomb. But although romanticism con¬
ceived in the sense in which Lefebvre uses the word, is ever so
profound a human characteristic, even though it is a merit of his
work that he has been able to do justice to it in his presentation of
the Napoleonic figure, I do believe that in the end it is given more
than its fair share.
I would also like to draw more sharply the contradiction which
the author himself notes between Napoleon’s intentions and his
achievements, and I should for instance like to see it stated more
explicitly, in regard to the awakening of the nationalities, that it
was only by oppressing them that the Emperor favoured them,
that he did not in reality understand them, and that at most he
tried intermittently to utilize them for his own purpose. Does not
the word determinism, which Lefebvre smuggles in by a round¬
about way, serve, here too, the purpose of masking personal
responsibility in the historical process?
And so I come back once more to what I miss in his conclusion.
I should like to see the eternal postulates of respect for the human
personality, of the feeling for spiritual freedom, of lofty idealism,
' cf. above, p. 154.
448
GEORGES LEFEBVRE
of truthfulness, taken into account when the final reckoning is
made. It looks sometimes as though for Lefebvre, to detect bour¬
geois class prejudice among Napqleon’s contemporary opponents
is a sufficient reason to rule them out of court. For him democracy
is to be identified only with ‘the people’, the people which, silent,
admiring even, without understanding, allowed everything to
follow its course.
We know that the argument is going merrily on. Madelin will
not be the last of his line. There will always be Frenchmen who
subordinate social and spiritual needs to power and glory, to
authority and order, or as Lefebvre would express it, to their own
class interests, or who foster a respect for the Church, either as an
important means for social preservation, or else fpom a sincere
religious conviction. And bringing such inclinations to the study
of Napoleon, they will, till the end of time, support another con¬
ception of some of bis actions and finally of the whole of his figure,
than Lefebvre. But from the point of view which I indicated, too,
even though one can accept his presentation most of the time, there
will still be a good deal to say about his appreciation and his
interpretation. The argument goes on.
FF 449
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
1769 —August 15th. Birth of Napoleon Bonaparte.
1779 —April. To the military Academy at Brienne in Cham¬
pagne.
1784 — October. To the military Academy in Paris.
1785 — September. Lieutenant. To Valence.
1786 — September-June 1788. On leave in Corsica.
1788 — June-September 1789. With his regiment at Auxonne.
1789 — September-February 1791. In Corsica; takes part in
party strife, soon in opposition to his former idol Paoli,
who arrived on the island in July 1790. Leader of francophile
and pro-Revolution party.
1791 — February-June. Again at Auxonne, with Louis.
June-Autumn. At Valence.
Autumn-May 1792. Back in Corsica.
1792—June 20th. Witnesses crowd breaking into Tuileries.
August loth. Also witnesses riot from which Louis XVI
takes refuge with Legislative Assembly.
September 21 st. Proclamation of Republic. Beginning of new
calendar.
1793 — March 3rd-April. Back in Corsica, whence escapes to
Provence.
August. Writes Le Souper de Beaucaire.
September i6th. Given command of artillery at siege of
Toulon (Royalists and British).
December 17th. Fall of Toulon. Bonaparte stays on active
service in Midi, in close co-operation with younger Robes¬
pierre.
1794 — April. Bonaparte General of Artillery.
July24th (loThermidor an II). Fall of Robespierre. Arrest of
Bonaparte; August 20th liberated and restored in his function.
August-September. British prevent expedition to Corsica.
1795 — May. Appointed for expedition to Vendee, but lingers on
in Paris.
August 22nd (30 Thermidor an III). Convention ratifies
new Constitution (of an III), which establishes 5 Directors
supported by Conseil des Cinq Cents and Conseil des Anciens.
453
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
Free elections of 5 Fructidor, however, curtailed from fear
of'readtion. Majority of 2/3 for Conventionnels assured.
October 5th (13 Venddmiaire an IV). Bonaparte em¬
powered by Convention to help Barras to subdue a Royalist
rising in Paris.
October 30th. The five Directors elected by the new Coimcils.
1796 — February 23rd. Bonaparte given command of army
destined for Italy. ,
March 9th. Bonaparte marries Josephine.
End April. Bonaparte compels King of Sardinia to conclude
armistice by threatening Turin.
May 15th. Bonaparte’s triumphal entry into Milan (after
Lodi). All Italian rulers in sphere of influence and subject
to compulsory levies.
1797 — February 2nd. Bonaparte takes Mantua after lengthy
siege, having repelled all attempts to raise siege (Castiglione,
Arcole, Rivoli).
Easter. Anti-French riot at Verona. Offers pretext to Bona¬
parte to overthrow the Venetian Republic.
April 18th. Bonaparte signs preliminaries of Leoben with
Austrians.
Summer. Bonaparte with Josephine in castle Mombello
near Milan. Cisalpine Republic founded.
September 3rd-4th. Coup d'etat of Fructidor (Augereau deputy
of Bonaparte).
October 17th. Peace of Campo-Formio, under strong
influence of Bonaparte. Austria recognizes France’s natural
frontiers, the Cisalpine and Ligurian republics, and itself
acquires Venetia. Congress of Rastadt for settling internal
German affairs.
December loth. Triumphal reception of Bonaparte by
Directory.
1798 —April 12th. The Directory decides for expedition to
Egypt, and gives command to Bonaparte.
May 19th. Sailing.
June loth. Capture of Malta.
July 1st. Disembarkation at Alexandria.
July 2ist. Victory of Pyramids.
August 1st. Nelson destroys French fleet near Aboukir.
Autumn. Increased tension between France and Austria
454
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
(German affairs, Rastadt; Italian affairs) and France and
Russia (Malta and Egypt).
December. Second Coalition, formed by Paul of Russia, with
Turkey, England, Austria and Naples.
1799 — Spring and Summer. French defeats: Archduke Charles
ejects French from Germany, Suvorov from Italy. — Royalist'
troubles in France.
February. Bonaparte enters Syria. Unsuccessful seige of St.
Jean d’Acre.
July 25th. Bonaparte back in Egypt, defeats Turks near
Aboukir.
August 22nd. Bonaparte leaves Egypt.
September 25th. Massena defeats Russians near Zurich.
October. Brune defeats British and Russians, Bergen-
Castricum.
October 9th. Bonaparte lands near Frejus.
November pth-ioth. (18-19 Brumaire an VIII) Bonaparte
overthrows the Directory and Legislative Assemblies;
. provisional triumvirate: Bonaparte, Sieyes, Roger-Ducros.
December 24th. Promulgation of new constitution (of
an VIII) drawn up by Bonaparte from concept with very
different intentions by Sieyes. All power to First Consul;
Senate, Tribunate (the only body with public debates).
Corps Lcgislatif; Council of State. Bonaparte First Consul,
his colleagues Cambaceres and Lebrun.
1800 — January. Constitution approved by plebscite.
February i8th. (28 Pluviose an VIII). Law about local
administration.
Summer. Establishment of commission for Code civil.
May-June. Moreau’s successes against Austrians in Bavaria.
May 15th. Bonaparte crosses St. Bernard.
June 14th. Marengo (in fact won by Desaix, who is killed)
gives Bonaparte command of Northern Italy. Kleber
assassinated in Egypt.
September 25th. British capture Malta.
December 3rd. Moreau destroys Austrians near Hohenlinden.
December 24th. Attempt on Bonaparte’s life near Op6ra
(infernal machine).
December 26th. Paul I of Russia forms league of neutrals
against Britain.
455
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
1801 — January 8th. Peace of Lun^ville: Austria and the German
Empire restore peace of Campo-Formio and recognize
recently formed republics. Peace with Naples follows.
February 8th. Pitt replaced by Addington.
March 23rd. Assassination of Paul I: Alexander I.
June 25th, September 2nd. French capitulations in Egypt
(Cairo, Alexandria).
July 15th. Signature of Concordat.
September loth. Ratification.
October ist. Peace preliminaries between Britain and
France; beginning of negotiations at Amiens — Alexander of
Russia soon makes peace.
1802 — January-April. Expedition to St. Domingo; overthrow of
Toussaint I’Ouverture; his capture.
January. At Lyons Bonaparte invested with presidency of
Cisalpine (henceforth Italian) Republic.
March. Notwithstanding constitution of Year VIII Bona¬
parte causes Senate to expel opposition members from
Tribunate and legislative body,
March 25th. Peace of Amiens.
April, Concordat, together with Organic Articles, approved
by Legislative body.
May 15th. Legion of Honour established.
August 2nd. Overwhelmingly favourable plebiscite about life-
Consulate. Constitution of Year X, Consul’s powers still
increased, also those of Senate towards Tribunate and
Legislative body.
September i ith. Piedmont annexed.
1803—January 30th. Sebasdani’s report about Egypt in
Moniteur.
March 13th. Bonaparte’s outburst against Lord Whitworth.
March 24th. Powers granted to German Reichstag. French
project for reorganization of German Empire: mediatizations
and secularizations (effect of peace treaties of Campo-Formio
and Lun^ville).
May 3rd. Treaty for sale of Louisiana to U.S.A.
May nth. Lord Whitworth leaves Paris.
December 2nd. Army concentrated in camp of Boulogne,
given name of armê d’Anglcterre.
456
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
1804 — February-March. Discovery of conspiracy; arrest of
Moreau, Pichegru, Cadoudal. Kidnapping of Enghien,
March 21st. Enghien shot.
March 27th. Final text of Code civil.
May 18th. Napoleon proclaimed emperor by Senate; Con¬
stitution of Year XII which imposes private sessions upon
Tribunate as well, approved by plebiscite.
August nth. Francis II adopts title of Emperor of Austria.
December. Spain (Godoy) at war with Britain.
December 2nd. Emperor crowned at Notre Dame.
1805 —March 30th-August i8th. Villeneuve, ordered to open
way to England, cruises between Cadiz and Antilles without
meeting Nelson.
April 11 th. British-Russian alliance.
May 26th. Napoleon crowns himself at Milan as King of
Italy.
June 4th. Napoleon annexes Genoa.
August 9th. Austria joins British-Russian alliance; Third
Coalition.
August 18th. Villeneuve, discouraged, runs into Cadiz.
August 24th. Boulogne camp broken up. French army enters
Germany.
October 20th. Capitulation of Ulm (Mack).
October 21st. Villeneuve, ordered to raise siege of Naples,
utterly defeated at Trafalgar by Nelson.
November. Napoleon enters Vienna.
December 2nd. Austerlitz, Emperor Alexander continues
war while Emperor Francis sues for peace.
December i8th. Convention of Schoenbrunn, in which
Napoleon buys off Prussia but also compromises it with
Hanover.
December 26th. Peace of Pressburg. Austria compelled to
cede Venice to Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy, and to recognize
his influence over the whole peninsula; Bavaria acquires inter
alia Tyrol, WUrttemburg, Austrian Swabia, Baden Breisgau;
dissolution of German empire.
1806 — March 30th. Joseph King of Naples and of Sicily, but in
Sicily, Bourbons remain under protection of British navy.
Murat Grand Duke of Cleves and Berg; in Italy dukedoms
established for ministers and marshals.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
■ June 5th. Louis King of Holland.
July 12th. Rhine Confederation established under Napo¬
leon’s protectorate.
Peace discussions with Britain (Fox) and Russia; Napoleon
hints at Hanover for England and Balearic isles for Russia.
August 6th. Francis II resigns German Emperor’s crown.
September 15th. Prussia joins British-Russian coalition:
Fourth Coalition.
October 14th. Prussian armies destroyed at Jena-Auer-
staedt.
November nth. Decree of Berlin (Continental System).
November 28th. First French troops in Warsaw.
1807 — February 8th. Eylau, sanguinary and indecisive.
Spring. Napoleon at Finckenstein; Walewska.
June 14th. Friedland; Napoleon victorious.
June 24th. Tilsit: Napoleon and Alexander meet on a raft in
the Niemen.
July 9th. Peace: Establishment of Kingdom of Westphalia
and Grand Duchy of Warsaw; Alexander promises evacuation
of Moldavia and Wallachia and cedes Corfu to Napoleon;
vague eastern and anti-British agreements.
July-September. Violation of Denmark by British navy.
September i8th. Napoleon abolishes Tribunate.
October. Alexander declares war on Britain.
October 25th. Napoleon concludes secret treaty with Spain
for division of Portugal.
November 30th. Junot occupies Lisbon.
December 17th. Decree of Milan directed against neutral
trade and intended to make blockade of England watertight.
December-March 1808. Murat’s gradual occupation of
Northern Spain.
1808 — February 2nd. Napoleon’s letter to Alexander: grandiose
plans for conquest of India.
February. Miollis occupies Rome.
March 17th. Establishment of UniversiU impiriale. Fontanes
Grand Master.
March i8th. Riots at Aranjuez: Charles IV compelled to
abdicate in favour of his son Ferdinand.
End April. Royal couple, Godoy, and Ferdinand arrive at
Bayonne to submit their quarrel to Napoleon.
458
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
May 2nd. Riots in Madrid; bloody repression by Murat
(Dos Mayos).
May loth. Charles IV and Ferdinand, the latter under
threats, cede their rights to Napoleon; Joseph appointed;
Murat becomes King of Naples.
July 20th. Joseph’s solemn entry into Madrid.
July 23rd. Dupont capitulates at Baylen to Spanish gueril-
leros.
July 30th. Joseph escapes from Madrid.
August. British gain strong foothold in Portugal.
September. Napoleon’s demand, based upon intercepted
letter, for dismissal of Stein in Prussia.
September 24th-October 24th. Meeting of Napoleon and
Alexander at Erfurt; Talleyrand warns Alexander and
encourages Austria.
Beginning November. Napoleon enters Spain.
December 4th. Recapture of Madrid,
December i6th. From Madrid Napoleon outlaws Stein.
1809 — Spring. Agreement between Austria and Britain about
new war; Fifth Coalition; Alexander remains neutral.
April i9th-23rd. Napoleon fights battle against Archduke
Charles in neighbourhood of Ratisbon.
April 28th. Schill leaves Berlin to foster rebellion in West¬
phalia.
May 13th. Napoleon occupies Vienna.
May 21 St. French troops, hard pressed near Aspern and
Essling.
May 29th. Andreas Hofer captures Innsbruck from
Bavarians.
July 6th. Napoleon restores his shaken prestige at Wagram.
July. From Schoenbrunn issues orders concerning Pope.
July 29th. British descent upon Walcheren.
October 14th. Austria concludes peace of Vienna, cedes
Illyria to Napoleon.
December. Threats of Napoleon against independence of
Holland; in France Louis receives demands for annexations.
December 15th. Jos(^phine publicly announces acceptance
of divorce; two days earlier Napoleon had ordered Cuulain-
court urgently to demand from Czar hand of his younger
sister.
459
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
1810—January-Fcbruary. French troops occupy Walchercn,
then Bergen-op-Zoom, Breda, Dordrecht.
February 8th. Napoleon organizes military administration of
Spain, which has been apparently conquered after peace
with Austria.
February gth. After evasive answer from Russia Napoleon
asks hand of Archduchess Marie-Louise. He refuses to make
promise to Alexander about future of Grand Duchy of
Warsaw.
February 21st. Andreas Hofer shot at Mantua.
March nth. Marriage by proxy at Vienna.
March i6th. Louis consents to a treaty ceding Brabant,
Zeeland and the land between Maas and Waal.
April 1st. Marriage of Napoleon and Marie-Louise solem¬
nized at St. Cloud.
July gth. Whole of Holland annexed.
August 20th. Bernadotte made Royal Prince of Sweden.
October ist. Mass^na ordered to expel British from Portugal,
occupies Coimbra; British ^trenched behind Torres Vedras.
Deceniber loth. Oldenburg (belonging to Alexander’s
brother-in-law), considerable part of Westphalia, Bremen,
Hamburg and Ltibeck, annexed.
December 31st. Alexander’s ukase favours British trade,
already tolerated for a long time.
1811 — Winter and Spring. Mass^na driven back.
February. Napoleon, angered by Bemadotte’s independent
attitude, refuses to grant him Norway.
May 3. Massena beaten near Fuentes de Onoro; Wellesley
rewarded with title of Duke of Wellington.
June. Church Council of Paris.
August 5th. Majority of Council, under pressure, issues
decree to limit papal right*of institution.
August 15th. At his birthday reception Napoleon addresses
ominous words to Russian ambassador (Oldenburg, Poland).
He begins to draw up plan of campaign against Russia.
1812 — Spring. Military and diplomatic preparations.
January. Napoleon occupies Swedish Pomerania.
February 12th. Prussia undertakes to grant Napoleon
20,000 auxiliary troops and free passage.
460
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
March 14th. Austria promises 30,000 men for flank covering
against territorial advantages.
March. Cortes at Cadiz promulgates constitution for Spain.
March-April. Bernadotte receives from Alexander promise
of Norway in exchange for Swedish help against Napoleon.
Beginning May. Napoleon at Dresden, 600,000 men against
Russia.
May 28th. Instructions for De Pradt as ambassador at
Warsaw; excite Polish enthusiasm, but at the same time
Napoleon wanted to respect Austrian sensitiveness concerning
Galicia.
July 22nd. Marmont defeated by Wellington near Salamanca.
Soult compelled to give up siege of Cadiz in order to cover
Madrid.
September 7th. Napoleon defeats Russians near Borodino,
where they try to hold up his advance.
September 14th. Entry into Moscow.
October 23rd. Failure of attempted putsch by Malet in
France.
October 25th. Beginning of retreat from Moscow.
November 26th-27th. Crossing of Beresina hotly contested
by Russians.
December 5th. 100 km. east of Vilna Napoleon leaves army
giving supreme command to Murat; Ney covers the retreat.
Disaster of Vilna.
December i8th. Napoleon reaches Paris,
December 3 ist. Prussian general, York, concludes with Russia
Convention of Tauroggen (neutralizing his troops).
1813 — January loth. Senate promises Napoleon 350,000 new
conscripts.
January 25th. At Fontainebleau Pius VII gives way to
Napoleon’s pressure and signs preliminaries for new con¬
cordat.
February 22nd. Eugene evacuates Oder line and soon
reaches Berlin.
February 28th. Prussia concludes treaty of Kalisch with
Russia. Appeal from Berlin by Russian general, Wittgenstein,
addressed to German population.
March. Engine evacuates Saxony too. French make a stand
on the Elbe.
461
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
March a4th. Pirn VII withdraws his signature, Napoleon
takes no notice.
April 7th. Narbonne sent to Vienna to offer Silesia in
exchange for help against Russia and Prussia. Instead
Metternich offers armed mediation.
April 25th. Napoleon takes over command of main army
near Erfurt.
May and. Luetzen: Saxony reconquered.
May 8th. Napoleon enters Dresden.
May 21 St. Bautzen, a less decisive victory.
June 4th. Armistice (offered by Czar and King of Prussia)
under mediation of Austria: till July 28th, prolonged till
August loth. ,
June 14th. Convention of Reichenbach: Britain undertakes
to subsidize Russia and Prussia; foundation of Sixth Coalition.
June 2ist. Joseph and Soult, Madrid being already evacuated,
defeated by Wellington near Vittoria; Joseph flees to France.
June 27th. Austria undertakes to co-operate with Russia and
Prussia if Napoleon does not accept Austrian mediation
conditions before end of armistice.
June 28th. Napoleon receives Metternich at Dresden, after
initial objections, accepts mediation and a Congress at
Prague.
July 28th. Only now can Caulaincourt appear at Prague.
August 12th. Term having elapsed Austria declares war on
Napoleon. Napoleon’s reply, containing concessions, arrives
only next day.
October i8th. After heavy engagements round Dresden,
battle of Leipzig in which Napoleon is defeated. Defection
of S. German allies. Army has to fall back upon Mayence.
Italy, N.W. Germany and Holland lost.
November. Metternich nojv informs Napoleon from Frank¬
furt: natural frontiers, Napoleon replaces Maret-Bassano by
Caulaincourt as Minister of Foreign Affairs.
December ist. The allies, made impatient, issue manifesto
which throws responsibility for failure of negotiations upon
Napoleon.
December 2 ist. Beginning of invasion of France.
1814 — February 7th. Congress of Chatillon; Metternich, uneasy
about Prussia’s plans, wants compromise. Alexander wants
462
to continue. Napoleon, however, unable to agree to new
demand of frontiers of 1792.
March i8th. Congress disperses. Meanwhile Napoleon has
achieved successes near Champaubert, Montmirail, Chateau-
Thierry, Montereau, Craonne, Rheims. ,
March aoth. Napoleon thrown across Seine, while he with¬
draws to Lorraine, allies march on Paris.
March 31st. Fall of Paris, Napoleon at Fontainebleau.
April 3rd. Senate declares Napoleon has lost throne.
April 4th. Marmont goes over to allies.
April 6th. Napoleon abdicates.
April nth. Treaty of Fontainebleau in which Napoleon
accepts Elba.
April 23rd. Artois, as lieutenant-general du royaume^ and
Talleyrand, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, sign a convention
which bring frontiers back in principle to line ofJanuary ist,
1792.
April 28th. After humiliating treatment by populace

Napoleon embarks at Fr^jus for Elba.
May 30th. Peace of Paris which confirms convention of
April 23rd.
June 4th. Louis XVIII ‘grants’ Charter. Throughout the
year increasing unrest in France owing to reactionary
tendencies of restored regime.
November ist. Official opening of Congress of Vienna;
Talleyrand has already been acting as representative of
Louis XVIII and of the principle of legitimacy.
1815 — January 3rd. Britain, Austria and France (Talleyrand)
make alliance against Russia and Prussia in Saxony Poland
affair.
March ist. Napoleon lands in neighbourhood of Antibes.
March 13th. Allies at Vienna outlaw Napoleon.
March i8th. Ney, who had promised Louis XVIII to bring
usurper back in iron cage, throws himself into Napoleon’s
arms near Auxerre.
March 20th. Napoleon occupies Tuilcries.
April 22nd. New liberal constitution drawn up by Benjamin
Constant; ‘L’acte additionnel’.
June 1st. Champ de Mai.
June 7th. New Chambers opened; strong liberal opposition.
463
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
June I2th. Napoleon leaves Paris to place himself at head of
army. His plan: to strike before arrival of Russians and
Austrians and separate British from Prussians. Latter part
fails: Quatre Bras.
June 18th. Napoleon crushed near Waterloo.
June 21st. Napoleon back in Paris. Chamber refuses to
co-operate with him.
June 22nd. Napoleon abdicates. Fouche President of
Executive Committee of Chamber which opens pour purlers
with allies.
June 25th. Napoleon leaves Paris by order of Fouch6 and
withdraws to Malmaison.
June 29th. Upon approach of Prussian troops and warned by
Fouch^, he goes to Rochefort to escape overseas. This proves
impossible.
July 8th. Louis XVIII back in Paris.
July 15th. Napoleon surrenders to British. Bellerophon carries
him to Plymouth.
August 7th. Transferred to Northumberland which must take
him to St. Helena, accompanied by Bertrand and Montholon
with their wives, Gourgaud and Las Cases.
October 17th. Steps ashore on St. Helena.
December 9th. After stay at The Briars, occupies Longwood.
1816 —April 14th. Sir Hudson Lowe, the new governor of the
island, arrives.
December 31st. Las Cases leaves St. Helena.
1821 — May 5th. Death of Napoleon.
1840 —May 12th. Government declaration (Thiers) to French
Chamber that Louis Philippe, having obtained consent of
British Government, will order removal of body from St.
Helena.
December 15th. Burial at the Invalides (Guizot now Prime
Minister).
464
INDEX
OG
INDEX
[Index of Authors separately on pp. 475 sqq,]
Addington, H., British Prime Minister, Austria, 40; A. Lefebvre on the peace
2*71 of 1801, 48-50, 236; 51; tension with
Adriatic, the, 241, 244, 245, 315 A. in 1804, 59; Venice sacrificed, 83,
Atx-la-Chapelle, peace of, 275; 313, 90, 241, 397; 107, 130, 204, 237, 243;
315 peace of Pressburg, 244; 248, 249,
Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, 40; 259, 266, 270, 271, 273, 276; origins
A.*s responsibility for the war of of the 3rd coalition, 280-6, 441;
1812, 88, 238, 291; 162, 191, 210, 292, 294, 295, 296; mediation in
236; A. in Erfurt, 238, 334; 239, 244, 1813, 296-303; 306, 313, 316, 334,
245, 246; A. in Tilsit, 247; alienated 347, 364, 438
from N., 248; 276; A. and the Auxonne, 182, 185, 387
origins of the Third Coalition, 283,
284, 441; liberator of the peoples in Bacciochi, Felix, husband of Elisa
1812, 290, 291; 293, 295; desires the Bonaparte, 189, 205
downfall of N. in 1813, 297; Sorel on Baden, grand-duchy, 60; connected
A., 303; 312, 316, 418; G. Lefebvre more closely with N. through mar¬
on A., 495, 496 riage, 191
Alexander the Great, 357, 424, 437 Balearics, the, 245
Alps, the, 41, 235, 283, 339 Barcelona, 137
Alsace, 158, 283, 353 Barras, Director, 89, 92; B. and the
America (U.S.A.), i3in, 274, 345, 380, coup d*Hat of Brumaire, 217, 220
. 4?3 Barth<^lemy, Director, 91, 92
Amiens, peace of, and rupture following Barthou, Cabinet Minister, 347
it, opinion of Mignet, 35, 47; A. Basle, 283
Lefebvre, 48, 49; Thiers, 56, 58; Batavian Republic, see the Netherlands
Bami, 75; Lanfrey, 237; Bourgeois, Bautzen, battle of, 63, 296
242; Sorel, 269 sqq,; Philippson, Bavaria, jealous of Austria, 50; 190;
270; criticism of Sorel's conception connected more closely with N.
(Muret, Coquelle), 277 sqq.; peace through marriage, 191; 338
treaty discredited in England by Baylen, capitulation of, 200
annexation of Piedmont, 281; 292; Bayonne, meeting of, deposition of the
Lenz, 304n; Bainville, 380, 384; Spanish Bourfi>ns: opinion of Big-
Madelin, 398; 436; G. Lefebvre, non, 41; A. Lefebvre, 51; Thiers, 61;
437-9; 441 Langfrey, 95-9; Prince Napoleon,
Amsterdam, 137, 332, 333 158; Joseph in B., 199, 200; opinion
Ancona, 241 of Vandal, 239; Madelin, 400
Antilles, the, 275 Becket, Thomas 185
Antwerp, 48, 266, 275, 285, 380 Belgium (Southern Netherlands), loss
Arafxjuez, 96, 98 of B. hard to accept for the French,
Arcole, battle of, 158, 169, 345 38, 304, 402; 124, 137; annexation
Arragon, 201 of B. cause of continuous war, 257,
Arras, 333 270 (Sorel), 380, 428 (Bainville);
Artois, count of, later King Charles X, England acquiesces in 1802 in the
59, bsn, 416 annexation, 270; 276, 283, 285, 290a,
Asia, 249, 276, 316, 324 292, 293, 299, 306, 309; loss of B.
Athens, 80, 91 to be imputed to N., 317; 329;
Attila, 253 French administration in B., 336; 447
Augereau, marshal, 92 Beresina, 294
Augustus, Emperor, 395, 420, 424 Berg, grand-duchy, 172,190, 200
Austerlitz, battle of, opinion of Thiers, Berlin, 246, 265, 301, 339.4*8
57,3*35; *07, 153, 158, 190, 236, 243, Bernadotte, marshal, 84, 290
2^281, 29a, 296, 313, 315; opinion Berthier, marshal, ^98, 299
of Driault, 342; 345, 347, 388 Beumonville, general, 51
467
INDEX
Btdas$oa, aoo, 33a Charles V, Emperor of Germany, 101,
Boiagelin, cardinal de» 388 395
Bologna, 119 Charles X, King of France, see Artois
Boniface VIII, 101,124, 184 Chatham, lord (the elder Pitt), 276
Bordeaux, 345 Chfltillon, congress of, 309
Bossuet, 84; catechism of B., 119, 120, Churchill, W., 8
122; 124,1*9# 346 Cisalpine Republic, 273; becomes king¬
Boulanger, general, 152 dom of Italy, 281, 282
Boulogne, 59, 237, 243, 245 Clemenceau, 352
Brindisi, 243 Clement VII, loi
Broglie, de, bishop of Ghent, 122 Cleopatra, lyon
Broglie, due de, 112 Cleves, 172, 190
Brumaire,. coup d'itat of, 1818/19 Br., Code, civil, opinion of Thiers, 56, 367,
19, 40; A. Lefebvre on Br., 46-8; 368; N.’s own opinion, 62, 198;
Qêt, 77, 78; 79, 82, 84; Lanfrey, Quinet, 78, 79; 224; Driault, 317,
90-3; Mme de Stael, 169, 170; 187; 328; 331, 339; Aulard, 358; Pariset,
Vandal, 213-19; 223, 231; Driault, Vandal, 368-70; Hanotaux, 405, 430;
308, 346; 320, 331; Aulard, 356; 378; Madelin, 430; G. Lefebvre, 431-6
G. Lefebvre, 427; 439, 445 Colbert, 392
Brune, marshal, 82, 268 Cologne, 49, 275
Brutus, 357, 395 Columbus, 261
Burgos, 200 Concordat (1801), Mignet’s opinion, 35;
Byzantium, 129 Bignon, 40; A. Lefebvre, 47; Mine de
Stagl and Bami, 75; (Quinet, 80-2;
84, 100, 106, 107, 108, III, I12;
Cadiz, 137 d’Haussonville, 113-16, 121; Thiers,
Caesar, Julius, 87, 102, 141, i7on, 56, 114-16; 128, 131, i32n, 187, 224;
261, 312, 357; N. on C,, 395; 424,437 Vandal, 228-30; 267, 271, 332, 336;
Cambac^r^s, loi; C. and the Code, Driault, 346, 347; Aulard, 359-6i;
368-9; 379 Gu6rard, 362; 368; Seignobos, 374;
Campo-Formio, peace of, 49; Bona¬ 388; Madelin, 396; Hanotaux, 405,
parte’s responsibility, 57; Lanfrey on 409, 4*0; 4*4; G. Lefebvre, 429, 442,
C.-F., 90; C.-F. cause of another war, 443
219, 231; 275, 397 Concordat of Fontainebleau, project,
Canossa, 116 III, 112, 127
Canova, 395 (Confederation of the Rhine, 244;
Caprara, cardinal, 117, 118, 119 Chateaubriand on the C., 287; 294,
Carinthia, 248 296, 200, 20iy 3i*» 3*2, 3*5, 3*6
Carnot, Director, 91 Consalvi, cardinal, 117, 118, I32n
Caroline Bonaparte, i86n, 189, 190, Constantine, Emperor, 83, 84, 86, 129,
197, 200 184, 314, 322, 326, 395
Carthage, 183, 293, 395 Constantinople, 243, 246, 247, 248, 314,
Catalonia, 201; military government in 3*5, 3*6, 323, 324, 325, 437
Catalonia, 335 Continental System, exposition of
Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 259, Bignon, 42; occasions difhculties
261, 274 with the Pope, 107; France and the
Caulaincourt, ambassador in Moscow, C.S., stimulant to industry, 289, 416;
136, 162; warns N. in 1811, 291, 292; 418; G. Lefebvre, 437, 447
295; for peace in 1813, 296, 297, Coppet, 80, 105
300-3; Sorel on C,, 302, 306; 382, 387 Corfu, 243
Cavour, 112 Corsica, 135, 173; young Bonaparte on
Chabrol, prefect, 124, 125 C., 182; 183, 192, 374
Champagny, minister, 43 Craonne, battle of, 163
Chftmpionnet, general, 267, 268 Croatia, 248
Charlemagne, Emperor, 101, iq8, no, Cromwell, O., 256, 261, 304
122, 182, 184, 286, 3»a-i5» 3*8, 3i9»
322, 323, 325, 3*6, 342, 388, 395, Dalberg, archbishop op Mainz, 287
4*4» 437 Dalmatia, 244, 248; French administra¬
Charles IV, King of Spain, dethroned, tion in D*, 335, 336; 337
95-8; 434 Dan ton, 257, 402
468
INDEX
Danube, 237, 244, 281 principal enemy of N. (Bignon, A.
Danzig, 137 Lefebvre, Thiers), 236, 237; to
David, J. L., 3*4. 44© impose peace upon E. object of
Davison, secretary of Queen Elizabeth, N.’s policy, 239-40 (Vandal), 257,
loin 280, 281 (Sorel); war with E. only
Davout, marshal, ^3 a pretext, 242, 245, 246 (Bourgeois),
Demosênes, 357 293, 294, 310, 311 (Driault); peace in
Diocletian, Emperor, 139, 288, 323, 326, 1802, 271, 272 (Sorel); rupture with
395, 420 France in 1803, 58-60 (Thiers),
Directory, the, 27; the D. and the 273, 274, 280, 281 (Sorel), 380
peace of Campo-Formio, 49; Quinet (Bainville); 398, 399 (Madelin), 437-9
on the D., 78, 79; Lanfrey, 90, 91, 92, (G. Lefebvre), 276, 277; Sorel’s
93; 114; Vandal, 213-15, 2x9, 222; attitude towards E., 279; origins of
216, 231, 241, 242; Sorel, 258, 260, the 3rd coalition, 281,283,284 (Sorel,
267, 269; Guyot and Muret, 264-8; Driault), 441 (G. Lefebvre); 297, 299,
281, 303, 305n, 310, 319, 332. 364, 304n, 312, 315, 317, 318, 319;
366; Seignobos, 373; Bainville, 384; Driault’s attitude towards E., 322,
393; Hanotaux, 404, 414; G. Le- 345; 323» 324» 342, 35L 3620, 381,
febvre, 426; 428,441, 444n 382, 384,398,399,403, 405, 411, 413,
Dresden, N. in D. in 1812, 289, 291, 418,436,437,447
295; conversation with MeVemich in Erfurt, meeting at E. in 1808, meeting
1813, 298; 301 with Goethe, loi; Alexander at E.,
Dreyfus affair, 153; Barr^s and the D., 238, 334; 248, 382
154; 178, 352; Bainville, 377, 378, 384 Essling, battle of, 222
Dumouriez, general, 290 Etruria, 190
Dupont, general, 174, 200 Eugê de Beauhamais, 75, 118, 173,
DUsseldo^, 190 i86n, 191; E. after N.’s downfall,
204
Education Policy, opinion of Bignon, Eugenie, Empress, 156
44; Taine, 140-3; Thiers, 142, 1420; Eylau, battle of, 246, 417, 418
Aulard, 361; Gu6rard, 405; Isaac,
371; Madelin, 430; G. Lefebvre, 432, Fashoda Incident, 279, 403
444 Febronius, 129
Egypt, 26, 48, 50; Sebastiani*8 report, Ferdinand, hereditary prince of Spain,
58, 278; 82; Egyptian expedition, 95-7; N.’s project for restoration of
93 (Lanfrey), 170 (L6vy), 242 F., 200, 201
(Bourgeois, The ‘MtooriaP); 114, Ffere-Champenoise, la, bat^ of, 163
183,187,216,217,231,242,245,248, Fesch, cardinal, iio, 120, 182, i86n;
258,263, 275, 277, 278, 322, 384, 387, ascent, career, 187
399, 423 Flanders, 65, 236, 306
Elba, 65, 66, 205, 251, 294, 383 Florence, no, 124
Elbe, the, 191, 247, 303, 324, 401 Foch, marshal, 56, 347
Elisa Bonaparte, i86n, 189; character, Fontainebleau, abdication of F., 27,
190; E. after the fall of N., 205 383; place of exile of the Pope,
Elizabeth, Queen of England, loin III, 112, 414; 160, 162, 174
Enghien, murder of due d’Enghien, 9; Fontaines, court poet, 17, 411; F. on
opinion of Bignon, 42; Thiers, 59-60, the Concordat, 429; 443
93; Lanfrey, loi; d*HaussonvxlIe, Fouch6, Minister of Police, 95, 100,
116; Taine, 136; Mme de Remusat, 101; treason in 1815, 166; 357, 390;
145; L^vy, 172; Bainville, 381; Hanotaux on F., 408; 419; F. anti¬
Madelin, 400; G. Lefebvre, 440, 441 clerical, 443
England, 20; admiration of Mme de Francis I, King of France, 104
Stael for E., 21; N. on E., 23, 263, Francis II, Emperor of Germany
395; 27; V. Hugo’s aversion, 30; 40, (after 1804 Francis I, Emperor of
41; Lefebvre’s and Bignon’s aversion, Austria), mediates in 1812, 295;
48, 49; 59» 88, 91, 104, 122; Pius disquieted by popular enthusiasm in
Vira downfall applauded in E., Germany, 297; 313
13 in; 184, 190; peace possibilities in Frederick the Great, King of Prussia,
1806, 194; 201; France’s hereditary 87,184, 259, 261,262, 263, 3S7» 399n,
enemy (Masson), 206, 250; 207, 219; 418
469
INDEX
Frederick William III, King of Prussia, India, 26,183.248.274.27s, 325,
163 Ionian Islands, 90; springboard td the
Friedland, battle of, 15®. *47, *9*» 4*7, East, 91; 241
Ionian Sea, 3x5
Frottd, leader of the Chouans, execution Iran, see Persia
of F., 36s Ireland, 122
Isidor, 184
OALUiNI, GENERAL, 345 Istria, 244, 248
Gambetta, 254, 312, 35a Italy, 19; significance of the French
Gaul, 257, 341 domination, 25 (Stendhal), 337; 26,
Geneva, 73 41, 48, 49; N. and the rebirth of L,
Genoa, 260; annexation of G., 281, 282, 50, 320; 55, 58, 75, 78, 83, 89, 91, 92,'
285, 441 107, 108, 125, 158, 187, 204, 217,
Germany, 20,21; the peace of Tilsit, 40; 231, 236, 239, 241, 243, 244, 251;
41; disturbed by execution of Palm, Bonaparte as a ‘proconsul* in I.,
42, 388; 48, 49, 57, 62; impression 258, 259; N.*8 opinion of I., 262; 265,
made by Spanish nasco, 98; 108, 127, 266, 268, 269, 271, 275, 278; N. King
158, 206, 236, 239, 243, 244; N. on of 1., 281; 282, 286, 292, 294, 299,
G., 262; 271, 275, 282; infused with 300, 303,306,309, 312, 313, 3i5» 316,
new life by Fr. Revol. and N., 287; 320, 324, 337, 342, 397,423.435,
incited by Alexander in 1812, 290; 443, 447
292, 293, 294; enthusiasm in 1813,
295.297; 303, 305, 306. 309, 3x3, 3x5, Jacobins, the (Jacobinism), as a bogy-
316, 324; French domination in G., man, 22, 222, 366, 428; 46; Quinet on
337-40; 342; N. layer of the founda¬ the J., 78; 92; proscription of the J.
tions of G.*8 modem greatness (1800), 93-5 (Langfrey), 172; 215,
(Driault), 343; 346, 401, 403, 418 228 (Vandal), 428 (G. Lefebvre);
Godoy, Spanish minister, 95, 96 Taine on the J. 134; Vandal, 213;
Goya, 98 dominate the Cinq Cents, 216; 219,
Greece, 91, 183 290; G. Lefebvre, 427; J. pushed
Gregory VII, 124, 130, 184 aside by N., 436
Grenoble, 108 Japan, 206
Guiana, 92, 94 Jeanne d*Arc, 403, 407
Guipuzcoa, 201 Jena, battle of, 95, 158, 292, 296, 313,
Guizot, minister, 53, 105, 256 345, 4x8
J^r6me Bonaparte, N.*s wise counsels,
Haarlem, 333 62; 156, i86n, 187; in dismee, 188;
Hague, the, 333 N.*s sentiments for J., 189; second
Haller, banker, 268 marriage, 191; King of Westphalia,
Hamburg, 137; rising at H. in 1813, 195-6, 197. X99, 204; 207, 340,435
298; 301, 302, 333 Joseph Bonaparte, 63, 164, i86n;
Hanover, electorate, 191; negotiations ând seigneur^ patron of writers and
about H. in 1806, 244, 245 intellectuals, 187; acknowledged as
Hapsburgs, the, 243, 244 successor, his presumption, relations
H4douville, general, acting in the with royalists, 188; 189; J. Grand
Vendee, 365 Electeur, 191; J.’s legend, King of
Henry IV, King of France, 104 Naples, 193-5; I* »n Spain, 97, 98,
Henry VIII, King of England, xio* 196, 199-203, 334, 335; J. after N.*s
Hesse, 172, 191 downfall, 204; 207; J. and the nego¬
Hitler, A., 7, 8, 10, 2780 tiations in Amiens, 272; offered the
Hoche, general, 84, 258; Sorcl on H., Italian royal crown, 286; 2900, 328,
263, 264 418
Hofer, Andreas, 9, 75, 172, 173 Joseph II, Eniperor of Germany, 130
Hohenlinden, battle of, 48, 364, 379 Josephine de Beauhamais, 66; marri^
Holland, Netherlands, die invalidated, 108; 173; N/s affection
Hortense de Beauhamais, i86n for J., 174; 186, 189, 191, as9, 386,
Hudson Lowe, 23 387. 4»9
Joubert, general, 84
Illyria, 248, 249, 294* 296, 298, 299, Jourdan, marshal, 202
301, 311, 320, 328 Julius II, Pope, 124
470
INDEX
Jimot, marshal, 63 Maastricht, 285
Justinian, Emperor, 80, 83 Madrid. 97, 199, 200, 202, 333, 334
Maghella, minister of Naples, 203
Kalisch, Treaty of, 295; manifesto Malta, war factor in 1803, 59, 242, 243,
of K., 295, 297 278, 398; 242, 245
Kl^ber, general, 93 Mantua, 75
/ Marat, prophesies beneficent dictator,
Lafayette, 165 359
Landau, 167 Marcus Aurelius, Emperor, 141, 395,
Lauter, river, 283 420
Laybach, 333 Marengo, battle of, 43, 48, 56, 158, 171,
Lebrun, Consul, Bainville on L., 379 222, 228, 230, 276, 296,345, 360, 364,
Leipzig, battle of, 37, 204, 274, 302, 379, 380, 404
330.339» 401 Maret, Min. of For. Aff., 296, 297, 300,
Leoben, preliminaries of, Bonaparte’s 302
s^re, £7 Marie Louise, Empress, 108, 173
Letitia Bonaparte {Madame M^re), Marienbourg, 167
i86n, dissatisfaction, avarice, 189; L. Mark, county, 190
after N.’s downfall, 205 Marmont, marshal, 65, 168, 336
Ligurian Republic, see Genoa Marne, battle of the, 347
Limburg, 236 Mary Stuart, loin
Lisbon, 137 Masses, marshal, 61, 82
Lodi, battle of, 169 Maupeou, Chancellor, 379
Lombardy, 275, 292, 313 Mayence, 49, 313, 401
London, 265, 271, 278, 283, 381 Mediterranean, the, 50, 242, 248, 263,
Longwood, 23 275, 276, 281, 292, 293; factor in
Lorraine, 158, 283, 342, 353 Roman conception, 314, 315; 324,405
Louis XI, King of France, 413 M^re, Mme, see Letitia B.
Louis XIV, King of France, 95, 104, Mettemich, indifference concerning
119,122,129,138,141,211,243,261, Pius VII’s sufferings, 130; 144; nego¬
273, 275, 346, 375, 400 tiations summer of 1813, 158 (Prince
Louis XV, King of France, 134, 211, N.), 249 (Bourgeois), 294-302 (Sorel),
379 309 (Driault), 442 (G. Lefebvre).
Louis XVI, King of France, 95, 134, Milan, 281, 313
379,388 Millerand, President, 347
Louis XVIII, King of France, 161, 257, Miollis, governor of Rome, 101
302n, 361, 383, 416 Mirabeau, 138, 261, 357
Louis Bonaparte, hardness of N., 62, Moldavia, 244
63; 1360, i86n; acknowledged as a Mol^, minister, 413, 445
successor, 188; N.’s sentiments for Mollien, minister, 412
L., 189; 194; identifies himself with Mombello, 170, 259
his people, 196; end of his kingship, Monk, general, 161
199, 203, 3290 Montenotte, 124
Louis N., see Napoleon III Montmirail, battle of, 158, 345
Louis Philippe, King of France, 53, 82, Moreau, general, 48, 84, 364
466 Moscow, 27,137,249,289, 311, 324,382
Louisiana, 48, 273, 380, 413 Munich, treaty of, 278n
LUbeck, 301 Murat, 63, M. in Spain (1808), 9fi-9»
Lucca, 189, 205 loi; 172, 189; grasping nature,
Lucien &>naparte, i86n, 187; L. duplicity, intrigues in i8o6, 190;
during the couf d'itat of Brumaire, becomes King of Naples, 197;
187, 218, 219; in disgrace, 188; 191; 199, 200; M. in Naoles, intrigues,
195, 197; L* a^ter N.’s downfall, betrayal, 203, 204
204; Vandal on L., 220
Luetzen, battle of, 63, 296 Naples, kingdom, city, left in the
Lun6ville, peace of, exposition of A, lurch after Austerlitz, .^2; 63, 95, 100,
Lefebvre, 48-50, 236, 237, 258; 191; Joseph’s kingship, 193, 194*,
Thiers on L., 56, 58; 108, 161; 197, 200, 201; Murat’s kingship, 203,
Lanfrey, 237; 243, 275, 276, 281, 28a, 204; 237» 243» 245, 267, 268, 281, 292,
286, 364 328, 329, 332, 333
471
INDEX
Napoleon III, Emperor, 54; cult of his Pitt, W. the younger, 194; peace
uncle, 71, 73n; Quinet anti-N. Ill, attempts in 179^-97, 266; P. and the
83; H3, i5i» 157, 2*3, 317. 373 peace of Amiens, 271, 277; 276* 278;
Narbonne, Fren^ envoy in Vienna, origins of the 3rd coalition,281 ;3 22,38 z
396, 300 Pius VI, 106, 114, 332
Navarre, 201 Pius VII, 40, 61, 100; Concordat,
Neckcr, 19 conflict with N., 106-30 (d’Hausson-
Nelson, 414 ville), 207, 228-30 (Vandal), 443
Nero, Emperor, 104, 341 (G. Lefebvre); 332, 388, 400
Netherlands, the (Holland), 41; occu¬ Pius IX, 113, 131, I32n
pation of the N. a factor in the Poland, N. plays wîth P., 239; 248, 249,
rupture of peace in 1803, 58, 273, 251, 259; incited by Alexander in
28on, 398, 399, 430; 82; Louis King 1812, 290; war factor in 1812, 292,
of Holland, 191, 194, *99, 239; 293; 299; partition project in 1813,
annexation of Zeeland and Nor^ 301; 302n, 306, 313, 315, 320, 324,
Brabant, 201; N.*s opinion of the 338, 447
N. 262; 292, 293, 299, 306, 3290; Portalis, councillor of state, N.’s scene
**ignificance of French annexation, with P., 109, 158; 367; pleads for
337, 435n; 364, 379 the interest of the Church, 443
Nicaea, Council of, 84 Portalis, Minister of Cults, P. and the
Niemen, 247 Concordat, 81; P. and the Imperial
North Brabant, annexation of, 201; Catechism, 120; 122
283, 304 Portugal, landing of the English, 96; 312
North Sea, 293 Potemkin, 274
Norway, 299 Pozzo di Borgo, Russian envoy, 210
Novosiltsov, Russian envoy, 281; the Prague, peace negotiations in P. in
instruction for N., 283, 284; 295, 381 1813, Thiers on P., 64, 237, 294;
Niiremburg, 42, 338 Prince N., 158, 294; Houssaye, 162;
Nymegen, peace of, 275 Bignon, A. Lefebvre, 237, 294;
Bourgeois, 249, 295; Sorel, Driault,
Oder, 246
Olden bamevelt, 129 299*303» 309» 344; Isaac, 372
Pressburg, peace of. Bourgeois on P.,
Otranto, 243
244,245; 248,397
Otto, French ambassador in Vienna, 296
Prussia, the peace of Tilsit, 40, 247;
Ottoman Empire, see Turkey
48, 50, 51; Thiers on the annihilation
Pacx:a, cardinal, ioo, 1270 of P., 57; 190, i9*» 236, 244; origin
Palm, bookseller, is shot, 9,42,172,173, of the war of 1806, 245; 246, 248,
338.340 252; hivy on P. in 1806, 252, 253;
Papal State, see Rome 259, 270, 275; uneasiness about
Paris, mood in 1813, 63; 2nd peace of annexation of Piedmont, 281; 292,
P., 167; special care for provisioning 294; defection of P., 295; P. in the
of P., 358, 428; ist peace of P., 402. summer of 1813, 297-302; 306, 312,
Further passim 3*5, 3*6, 438
Parma, 173 Pyrenees, the, 41
Pauline &naparte, i86n, 189; N.’s
sentiments for P., 190; P. after N/s RMl, Minister of Police, 122
downfall, incest calumny, 205 Reichenbach, conference of R. (18x3),
Pepin the Short, 260, 388 ♦ 298
Persia, 183, 246 Rennes, 154
Petersburg, St., 137; treaty of S.P. Rhine, the, 41, 49, 152, 235, 258, 276,
(1805), 281, 320 281, 283, 284, 292, 305, 306, 339,
Philippeville, 167 353»40i,4*8
Philip the Fair, King of France, loi Rhineland, the, loss of the R. hard to
Piacenza, 173 accept for the French, 38, 304, 402;
Picquart, colonel, 154 41, 65; annexation stumbltng-block
Piedmont, annexation of P. war factor for definitive peace (Sorel), 270, 275;
in 1803, 58^ 278, 282, 298, 299; 260, England acquiesces in the annexation
399 (1802), 270; 283, 285, 293, 306; loss
Pilnitz, 290 of the R. to be imputed to N,, 3x7;
Piombino, 189, 190 329. 339, 354
472
INDEX
Richelieu, cardinal, 138, 403, 408, 413, 97, 98, 199-202; 164, 245, 248, 265,
424 273, 290, 294, 298, 306, 309, 3x2,
Richelieu, duke of, 167 316, 320; French domination in S,,
Riga, 137 333-5, 337; 380, 401, 447
Rivoli, battle of, 275 Sparta, 91
Robespierre, 138, 218, 253, 427 Stein, baron vom und zum, 290
Rochejaquelein, de la, 65^ Stephanie de Beauhamais, 191
Roederer, councillor of state, 223, 387, Sully, 263
Sweden, 2900; supports German rising
Rome, 40, 80, 81, 100, 101; annexation in 1813, 298; 299
of R., 107, 108; 112, 113, 114, iiSf Switzerland, interference in S. war
117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 129, 141. factor in 1803, 58, 278, 298, 299; 73,
184, 230, 292; N. and ancient R., 77; Massâ’s campaign, 82; 184,
313* 322> 326, 394» 395, 39^; 314, 364, 399
3I5» 333, 342, 400 Syria, 322
Rome, the King of, 108, 122, 161, 166,
207n, 3*5, 420 Talleyrand, distinguishes between
Russia, 40; withdraws troops from France and N., 41, 257; T. and the
Naples after Austerlitz, 41; 48, 50; rupture with England in 1803, 59;
tension with R. in 1804, 59; 63, in, Bayonne (1808), 97, 400; 1'. in
123, 202, 203, 204, 207n, 237, 239, Erfurt, 102, 334, 382 (criticism of
242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 248, 259, Bainville); 145; T. in 1814, 160-3,
270, 271, 27s, 276; origin of the 3rd 166 (Houssaye), 309 (Driault), 383
coalition, 280-4, 441; 293, 295; R. in (Bainville), 400, 402 (Madelin); N.*s
the summer of 1813, 298-302; 306, long suffering with respect to T., 174;
316, 329; after effects of the French 190, 204; the coup d'etat of Brumaire,
invasion, 320, 328; 400, 418, 439, 217; T. in 1805, Strasbourg note, 243,
440 244; 246, 272, 297; Sorel on T., 306;
Ryswyk, peace of, 275 346, 382, 385, 402; Hanotaux on
T., 408, 413, 419
Saarlouis, 167 Tarento, 243; occupation of T., 281;
Saint-Cloud, 214, 216, 217, 218, 219 398
St. Helena, 23, 29, 41, 50, 56, 67,72, 83, Theodosius, Emperor, 83, 84, 86
98. 99, 136, 153, 157, 182, 252, 253, Thorbecke, J. R., 2240, 2400
274, 276, 287, 311, 3*8, 343, 3^0, Tiberius, Emperor, 41, 341
383, 385, 397, 4*<>, 4**, 431 Tilsit, peace of, opinion of Bignon, 40;
Saint-Just, 138 Thiers, 57; 60, 104, 191; Bourgeois,
San Domingo, 48, 273, 380, 413 248, 293; Sorel, 293; 309; Driault,
Sardinia, kingdom, 260 312, 316; 417; Hanotaux, 418
Savary, Minister of Police, part played Titus, Emperor, 395
in deposition of the Spanish Bour¬ Toulon, 89
bons, 96, 98; loi, 103, 136, 163 Toussaint TOuverture, 273
Save, 248 Trafalgar, battle of, 51, 237, 414
Savona, 108, 109, no, 126, 127, 130 Trajan, Emperor, 395
Savoy, 260, 270 Treves, 49
Saxony, 299, 301 Trieste, 137, 302
Scaevola, Mucius, 395 Turgot, minister, 37
Schoenbrunn, 100, 107, 245 Turkey (Ottoman Empire), 183, 239;
Schwarzkoppen, von, 378 important factor in N.*s policy
Sebastiani, report of, 58, 278, 384, 399, (Bourgeois), 241-8; 275* ^93,3*2,3 .4;
439 N.’s aspirations (Driault), 316
Selim, Sultan of Turkey, 246, 247 Tuscany, 63, 190
Servia, 320
Sicily, 194, 204» 245 Ulm, capitulation of, 243, 281
Si^>43, S. and the coup d itat of Bru- Utrecht, peace of, 275
mairc, 216, 217, 220; institution of
prefects, 224 Valence, 182
Southern Netherlands, see Belgium Vendee, the, 47, 65, 121, 224, 361;
Spain, 63; dethroning of the Bourbons, pacification of the V., 365 (Pariset),
Murat in S., 95-8; 104; Joseph in S., 384 (Bainville)> 428 (G. Lefebvre)
473
INPEX
Venice, the peace treaties of Canipo- Washington, G., 272, 357
Formio and Lun^ville, 4O; Bona¬ Waterloo, battle of, 57> 65,67, 165,208,
parte’s unscrupulous proofing, 83, 274. 322, 330, 345, 383
90, 241, 258, 259, 397; 91, 23X. 249, Weimar, 105
258, 266, 292, 302n Wellington, duke of, G. Lefebvrc on,
Verdun, treaty of, 342 441
Vienna, 130; Congress of V., 251, 297; Wes^l, 190
286, 296, 299, 339; centre of Euro¬ Westphalia, kingdom, 62, 156, 172;
pean aristocracy, 441 formation of the kinôm, 191; 195,
Villcneuve, admiral, 174, 413, 414 301, 338; opinion of Driault, 3jp
Vilna, Alotander in V. in 1812, 289, Whitworth, lord, scene with, 58, 59,
291 278; 398, 399
Vincennes, 172 William I, King of the Netherlands,
Vistula, the, 246, 294, 324, 339, 383* 401 III,130
Vittoria, aco; battle of V., 202,298 William III, King of England, 276
WUrttemberg, 291
Wagram, battle of, 100, 107, 292
Walewska, Countess M., 417
Wallachia, 244
Warsaw, 37, 137; grand-duchy of W., Zeeland, aiwexation of, 20x; 283
247, 294, 296, 30X, 3*5 Zeeland-Flanders, 236
474
INDEX OF AUTHORS
[The names of authors of whom works or utterances on Napoleon are discussed
have been marked with an asterisk]
Alison Phillips, W., 2840 •Driault, E., i7on, 1920, 249, 251;
Amelot de Houssaie, 183 contra Sorel on the 3rd coalition,
•Aulard, A., 226,228,356-61, 365, 396, 280-6; contra Sorel on the Grand
409, 433 Empire, 293; contra Sorel on the
negotiations of 1813, 295-303; im¬
♦Bainville, J., II, 160, 304. 376-89, putes loss of natural frontiers to N.,
390, 391, 394, 399, 426, 440, 44i
393, 304. 317.3*9:308-48,353, 354, 357,
^Balzac, H. de, 26-8, 29, 217, 242, 250, 365, 371, 372, 374, 377, 384. 388, 394.
344, 380 398; Hanotaux contra D., 420; 425,
•Barbier, A., 31, 35, 1360, 163, 4220 429, 434, 437, 442
•Bami, J., 73-6, 77, 86, 227, 448 Duvemet, abb6, 184, 185, 186
•Barr^, N., 154-5, 377, 378, 448
Barrow, J., 184, 185, 186 Eckermann, 105
Bartstra, Dr. J. S., ii6n, 2680 Emouf, baron, 37
•B4ranger, L., 28-9, 389
Beyle, see Stendhal
Faguet, E., 226, 227
♦Bignon, L. P. E., baron, 37-44, 45,46,
•Ferrero, G., 550
49, 50. 51, 56, 57, 94, 95, lom; B.’s •Fichte, 75, 80, 339
secular, erastian point of view, 106;
•France, Anatole, 154; F. on Houssaye,
B. on N.*8 foreign policy, 235-7, 271,
i68n; satire on N., 352; 354, 376
28on, 294; B. imputes loss of natural
Frazer, Sir J., 404
frontiers to N., 304
Fruin, R., 54n, 216, 298n
Bodin, J., 411 •Fugier, A., 335n
•Bourgeois, E., 241-9, 257, 266, 270,
Funck-Brentano, Fr., 390
277, 280, 293, 295; B, imputes loss of
natural frontiers to N., 304; 308,
criticism of Driault, 310, 312; 316, •Gautier, P., io5n, i7on, 345
Gerson, J., 184, 186,429
351, 388, 437
•Bourrienne, 144, 147, 1700, 242 •Godechot, J., 268n, 351
Goethe, meeting with N., 101,102; 105
•Carlyle, 178, 3560
•Gonnard, Ph., 99n
•Caron, P., 209n, 2520, 351 Gooch, G. P., 88n
Gorce, P. de la, 1560
Champion, E., 226, 227
•Grandmaison, G. de, N.*s intellectual
•Chaptal, i73n
formation, 185, 186; 333-5, 351
•Charl6ty, S., 2510
•Chateaubriand, F. R. de,17-19,2i,22, Grotius, 129
24, 28, 29, 56, 75; Thiers on Ch., •Gu6rard, A. L., 362-3, 387, 426
•Guyot, R., contra Sorel, 264-9; 280,
102; 103, 104, 14s, 146; Ch. on the
Confederation of the Rhine, 287; 360, 35384, 39811, 426
385. 388, 423, 429; G. Lefebvre on
Ch., 445, 446 •Hanotaux, G., i32n, i56n, 354, 376,
Chuquet, A., 250 403-20, 421,422,426, 429, 430, 43i»
•Conard, P., 335, 351 434» 437» 444» 445
Condillac, 409 Hanotaux, J., 3oon
Constant, Benjamin, 20, 43, 428 •Haussonville, comte d*, 7in, 8sn,
•Coquelle, P., 2800, 351 106-32, 133; Vandal contra H., 229,
Corneille, 2on, 106, 141, 395, 4^^ 230; 359, Aulard contra H., 359, 361;
Coxe, W., 183 396, 409
•Cr6tincau-Joly, J., 132“ Hegel, 80
Hobbes, 129
Dantb, 84 •Holland Rose, J., 207n, 398n, 40on
Diderot, 273 Houssaie, Amelot de, 183
475
INDEX OF AUTHORS
•Houssayc, H., 160-8, 169, 208, 211, Maurras, Ch., 377
212, 230, 264, 309, 344» 377i 40a Michelet, 77
•Hugo, Victor, 29-30, 31,72 •Mignct, M., 35-36, 53, 75, 93, 115,
3*7, 356,434
•Isaac, J., 371-2 •Miot de Mehto, 144, 147, 193, 26on
Montalembert, ii2
jAURis, J., 433 Montesquieu, 141, 186, 411
Montholon, lOon
Kalef, G., 3560 Motley, J. L., 216
Kant, 73» 80 •Muret, P., 2o6n, criticizes Sorel,
Krause, K. C. F., 24on 264-9, 279; 3 ion; criticizes Driault,
323-7; 351, 365, 384, 39on
•Lacour-Gaybt, G., 1700 •Musset, P. de, 26
Lamartine, 54, 73
Lamennais, 82, 112, 131 •Napoleon, Prince, presides over edi¬
•Lanfrey.P., ii, 86-105,133,143,210, tion of N.*sletters,71,72n; 95n, 1230;
211, 214, 216, 219, 220, 221; L. on contra Taine, 143-6; 156-9,162, 169,
N.*s foreign policy ,237, 238, 240; 178, 185, 294, 434
291, 362, 365; execution of Frott^,
366n; 377, 386, 389, 397, 425, 427, OssiAN, N. gushes over O., 170, 363,
441, 448 407; 259
•Lanzac de Laborie, L. de, 336
•Las Cases, marquis, 23, 98, loon, 253, •Pariset, G., 364-70
387 •Philippson, M., 270, 278, 280
•Lavisse, E., Driault contra L., 342; •Pisani, abb6, 3350
343,351,364, 373 Plutarch, 186, 394; influence on
•Lecestre, L., 7in, 1250 Bonaparte, 396; 424
•Lefebvre, A., 45-52, 54, 56; L.*s Pradt, abb6 de, 144
fatalistic view, 57, 236, 240, 257; 93, •Presser, Dr. J., i92n
95, mn; N/s foreign policy, 235-8,
240; 271, 28on, 285, 426, 441 Quack, Dr. H. P. G., 3i8n
•Lefebvre, G., L. imputes to N. loss of •Quinet, E., 75, 77-85, 86, 88, 93,103,
the natural frontiers, 304; 376, 105, 113, n6, 128, i32n, 133, 135;
421-49 admiration for England, 153; 214,
•Lcnz, M., 3040 227, 256, 356, 359, 377, 396, 397
•Leroux, P., 317, 416
•L4vy, Arthur, 169-76; Masson on L.. Racine, 2on
179; 192, 196; L. on the intervention •Rambaud, A., 620, 63n, 1720, 337-9,
in Spain, 198; L. on Pauline, 205; 35*
N.’s foreign policy, 252-3, 258; 264, •Ranke, L. von, 240, 304n
311, 344, 386, 388 Raynal, abb6 de, 183, 185, 407
Livy, 394 •R^musat, Mme de. Prince Napoleon
Locke, 409 criticizes R.’s memoirs, 144-7; A.
L6vy, 169, 170, 171; 173, 1890, 309,
Mably, 185, 186 385
Macpherson, 170 Renan, E., 152
•Madelin, L., 930, x6o; satirical de¬ •Rocquain, F., 62n, 7in
scription of French official mentality Rollin, abb6, 183, 395
under N., 33^-3; 340, 376, 390-402, Romein, Dr. J., 15
406, 407, 409, 415, 421, 422, 425, Rousseau, J.-J., breaks through classic¬
426; Education, Code Civil, 430, 432, ism, 20; Quinet on R., 79; 1320.;
433; 439, 440, 4Mf 449 influence on Bonaparte, 18a, 183,
Manger, Dr. J. B., 2400 *85, 396, 407; 273, 288, 333, 409
Marigny, abb^ de,
•Masson, F., 11,160,1^-209,2x0,211; Sacy, S. U. de, S4n
N/s foreign policy, 250-1; 264, 272n, Sainte-Beuve, Ch* A., 45n, 67, 72n
310,3»a, 3i8» 3*9, 3M, 329.344.353. Schelling, 80
371. 377.4J2.420.439.437 •Schopenhauer, 391
•Mathieu, cardinal, 131, 396 •Seeley, J. R,. 311
Mathiez, A., 226, 227, 433 •Seignobos, Ch., 373-5
476
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Smith, Adam, 187 73-6; 80, 85, 86, 88, 93; the pro¬
♦Sorel, A., 88n, i34n, 160, 16211, i7on, scription of the Jacobins, 95; 98, 99;
23811, 240, 241, 249, 250, 264-307; the abdication of Pius VII, 100, loi;
Driault contra S., 310, 311, 329; 312, N/s meeting with Goethe, 102;
318, 322, 323, 324, 331, 343, 344» literature in N.’s day, 103; secular,
3S4» 365, 372, 376, 384, 38s, 390, 398, erastian point of view, anti-clerical-
400, 402, 405, 406, 418, 425, 433, ism, 106, 129, 131; 105; the Con¬
436,437; G. Lefebvre contra S., 440, cordat, 114-16; cardinal Caprara,
117-19; the French episcopate, 121,
Spmoza, 129 122, 123, 124; project of the Fon¬
•Stafil, Mmc de, 17, 19-22; Bignon on tainebleau Concordat, 127, 128; 133;
S., 43; 56, 64, 72; S. on the Concor¬ education, the University, 142; 160,
dat, 75; admiration of Quinet, 80; 163, 164, i74n, 188, 195; Th. on
88, 89, 103, 105, I12; S. on the Joseph, 202; N.’s foreign policy,
imperial catechism, 118; 133, 145, 235-8, 257; 270, 271, 274> 28on, 294;
146, X47; admiration for England, Th. imputes loss of natural frontiers
153; L6vy*s criticism, 169-171; 173; to N., 304; 356; the Code, 367, 368;
relationship with Joseph, 193; 211; 3^9r 371,403,425,426
S. on the Jacobins, 222n, 366; Sorel Thomas, A. L., 141
on S., i7on, 255, 256; 273, 326; Tocqueville, Alexis, comte de, 74, 255
Driault on S., i7on, 345, 358; 425; •Tolstoy, count L., 55
. G. Lefebvre, 427, 428, 445, 446; 433, Tott, baron de, 183
448 •Treitschke, H. von, 216, 304n
•Stendhal, H. Beyle, 25-6, 28, 29
Suetonius, 341 •Vandal, count Albert, ii, 88n,
Swedenborg, 409 93n, 95n, 160, 207n, 210-32; N.’s
•Sybel, H. von, 3040 foreign policy, 238-40, 311; 241, 242.
247, 250, 252, 256, 258, 264, 268,
Tacitus, N.*s dislike of, 41, 102, 288n, 291, 304n, 318, 322, 329,
141; 104, 341, 394 34311, 346, 347, 354, 357, 359; the
•Taine, H., ii, 133-47, 151, 152; execution of Frotty, 365, 366, 367; the
admiration for England, 153; 155, Code, 369, 370; 376, 384, 390, 392,
156, *58; L^v>' contra T., 169, 171, 393, 404, 405, 406,412, 418,425, 426,
173-5; Masson on T’.s oeuvre, 429, 433, 437, 444
178-9; 205, 257, 254, 255; Sorel on Vaulabelle, A. T. de, 65n
T. , 256, 257; 272, 273, 326, 351, 362, Vigny, Alfred de, 423
382n, 422, 425 Voltaire, 20, 184, 185, 273, 380, 409,
Texte, J., 2on 443n
•Theiner, father, 131, 1320
Thibaudet, A., 1541^; on Masson, 208 WiELAND, C. M., 102
•Thiers, A., popularity of his work, 45,
208; 53-67, 71; Barni’s criticism. Zola, E., 152
477

Napoleon For and Against

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Pirla Centcal Itbrarj)

PlLAiMI (Jaipur Stat»>)

Class No: . CikCf.o^ n<

Translated from the Dutch hj

Spirit Sinister: *. . . My argument is that

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN THE CITY OP OXFORD

THE ANTITHESIS AT THE BEGINNING

THE FIRST CHRONICLERS

REACTION AGAINST THE LEGEND

THE PROBLEM OF FOREIGN POLICY

THE ANTITHESIS AT THE END

TO THE FIRST DUTCH EDITION

I CANNOT claim to be an expert on Napoleon. To do so rightfully

‘I always hate to compare Hitler with Napoleon’, so, listening

But, as I have said, I should not be fair to the present book if I

All I want to add to the above preface, which was written

THE ANTITHESIS AT THE BEGINNING

My aim in this book is to set forth and compare a number of

There was open war between Mme de Stael and Napoleon. In

first time it is possible to find unfavourable criticism allied to

THE NAPOLEONIC LEGEND

The first to provide a portrait in which there was nought but

POETS AND NOVELISTS

The Napoleonic legend was enriched from many sources, and it

defeat. But indeed in this story, so typical of Balzac, in whose

II me dit: ‘Bonne esp^rance!

But he fell into the abyss. There was bitter sorrow.

Bien, dit-on, qu’il nous ait nui,

‘One asks oneself’, says Chateaubriand,* ‘by what sleight of

people so cordially, has been able to obtain the popularity which

Sainte-Hd^ne, le^on! chute! exemple! agonie!

Jadis, quand vous vouliez conqucrir une ville,

Tu voulais, versant notre s^ve

Here are elements which we shall meet with in the writings of

Lc peuple perdra votre nom;

THE FIRST CHRONICLERS

3ne of the remarkable phenomena of the first generation after the

One of the remarkable phenomena of the first generation after the

muzzled, the authorities and the courts exercise arbitrary power.

The first historian who undertook a broad treatment of the subject

What approach did Bignon make to the history of Napoleon?

THE RELATIONS WITH THE POPE

Let US take as an example his account of the increasingly

In dealing with foreign policy Bignon undoubtedly shows his

^ II, 28 sqq. * I, 560.

What delighted Bignon most, apart from military conquests,

THE SPIRIT OF HIS WORK

In 1845 grtSit works began to appear. They were Armand

^ According to Sainte-Beuve in one of his Causeries du Lundiy reprinted before

DEFENCE OF i8th BRUMAIRE

Lefebvre is more consistently realistic, in a sense, than Bignon,

THE FATAL ERROR OF LUNEVILLE

This was the peace of Luneville concluded with Austria in 1801,

according to Lefebvre, to conciliate England Thus he does not

It should be noted, however, that Lefebvre does not always bear

' III, 257. ® III, 460,501, 512.

for example, ‘tough and imperious with a mouth full of threats,

THE WRITER, HIS TIMES AND HIS WORK

I HAVE already said that Thiers's Histoire du Consulat et de VEmpire