BY
IDA M. TARBELL

Author of “Short Life of Napoleon Bonaparte,” “He Knew Lincoln,” etc.

Nobody who has lived in modern times has so stirred up the world as Napoleon Bonaparte. Nobody has upset so many old things, and started so many new ones. No man ever lived who had more faith in his own powers—and less respect for those of other men. Napoleon had, too, an unusual combination of those personal qualities which excite and interest men. It is nearly a hundred years since he dropped out of active life; but his story is more rather than less thrilling as time goes on.

There was nothing in his birth or schooling or his first activities in life to lead one to expect an unusual career. His family was poor and servile; his father trading on his name and his acquaintances to feed, educate, and place his family. The most promising thing about young Bonaparte was his resentment of this servility and his own flat refusal to participate in it to help himself. Throughout his boyhood in the island of Corsica, where he was born in 1769, during the six years he spent at school in France and the eight years of intermittent military service that followed his first appointment at the age of sixteen to a second lieutenancy, he lived a tempestuous inner life. Ambition for himself, devotion to his family, love for Corsica, hatred of France, sympathy for the new ideas of human rights that were stirring Europe,—these sentiments kept the mind and heart of the young officer in tumult and made him waver between allegiance to the land in which he was born and the land that had trained him; between the career of a soldier that was his passion and a career of money making, in order to educate his brothers, settle his sisters, and put his mother into a secure position.

NAPOLEONTHEOPPORTUNIST

It is quite fair, I think, to characterize his early career as that of an adventurer. He was watching for a chance, and had determined to take it, regardless of where it offered itself. It was at a moment when he was in disgrace for having refused the orders of his superiors in the army that the chance he wanted came.

The convention in which at that moment the French government centered was attacked by the revolting Parisians. Bonaparte had no particular sympathy with the convention,—in fact, he had more with the rebels,—but when one of his friends in the government who knew his ability as an artillery officer asked him to take charge of the force protecting the Tuilleries, where the convention sat, he accepted—with hesitation; but, having accepted, he did his work with a skill and daring that earned him his first important command, that of general in chief of the French Army of the Interior. Four months later he was made commander in chief of the Army of Italy, the army that was disputing the conquest of northern Italy with Austria.

THEITALIANCAMPAIGN

It was a ragged, disgusted, and half-revolting body, this Army of Italy, one that for three years had been conspicuous mainly for inactivity. Without waiting even for shoes, the new commander started it out swiftly on a campaign that for clever strategy, for rapidity of movement, for dash and courage in attack, was unlike anything Europe had ever seen. In less than two months he drove his opponents from Lombardy and had shut up the remnant of their army in Mantua. The Austrians shortly had a new army in the field. It took eight months to defeat it and capture Mantua; but it was accomplished in that period. Austria then called her ablest general, Archduke Charles, and gave him one hundred thousand men with which to avenge her disasters. With half the number Bonaparte advanced to meet the archduke, and drove him step by step to Vienna.

After a year and seven months of campaigning General Bonaparte, now twenty-eight years old, signed his first treaty. By that treaty he formed a new republic in northern Italy and made a new eastern frontier for France. Before the treaty, however, he had filled her empty treasury, had loaded her down with works of art, and had given her a new place in Europe; a place that he had proved he could sustain.

The glory of the Italian campaign thrilled the French people; but it disturbed the politicians in power. Bonaparte saw that if the government could manage it he would have no further opportunities for distinguishing himself. It was this sense that led him to urge that England, the only nation then in arms against France, be attacked by invading Egypt. The government consented promptly. It was a way of disposing of Bonaparte. What the government did not dream, of course, was that Bonaparte with this army hoped to found an oriental kingdom of which he should be the ruler.

But nothing went as he expected. He suffered terrible reverses, which he knew the government at home was using to break his hold on the people; his supplies and information were cut off; his prestige in his own army weakened; his faith in his destiny was shaken. That the effect of this bad fortune was not more than skin deep was clear enough when he accidentally learned that things were in a very bad way in France, that much of what he had gained in Italy had been lost, and that Austria and Russia were preparing an invasion.

FIRSTCONSULOFFRANCE

Promptly and secretly Bonaparte slipped out of Egypt, and before the powers at home knew of his intention he was in France and the people were welcoming him as their deliverer. He was ready to be just that. It was no great trick for a man of his daring and sagacity, adored by the populace, to overturn a discredited and inefficient government and make himself dictator. It was done in a few weeks, and France had a new form of government, a consulate, of which the head was a first consul, and Bonaparte was the first consul.

The most brilliant and fruitful four years of Napoleon Bonaparte’s life followed; for it was then that he set out to bring order and peace to a country demoralized and exhausted by generations of plundering by privileged classes, followed by a decade of revolution against privileges. France needed new machinery of all kinds, and this Bonaparte undertook to supply. There were many people who regarded him as a great general; but to their amazement he now proved himself a remarkable statesman.

NAPOLEONTHESTATESMAN

He attacked the question of the national income like a veteran financier. The first matter was reorganizing taxation. He succeeded in distributing the burden more justly than had ever been known in France. The taxes were fixed so that each knew what he had to pay, and the inordinate graft that tax collectors and police had enjoyed was cut off. New financial institutions were devised; among them the Bank of France. The economy he instituted in the government, the army, his own household, everywhere that his power extended, was rigid and minute; as he personally examined all accounts, there was no escape. The waste and parasitism that pervaded the country began to give way for the first time since the Revolution.

Industries of all kinds had sickened in the long period of war. Bonaparte undertook their revival by one of the most severe applications ever made of the doctrine of protection,—he even attempted to make his women folk wear no goods not made in France! His interest in agriculture was as keen as in manufacturing, and his personal suggestions and interference of the same nature. The prosperity of the country was stimulated greatly by the public works Bonaparte undertook. One can go nowhere in France today without finding them. It was he who set the country at road building. Some of the most magnificent highways in Europe were laid out by him, including those over four Alpine passes. He paid great attention to improving harbors. Those now at Cherbourg, Havre, and Nice, as well as at Flushing and Antwerp, Bonaparte planned and began. As for Paris, his ambition for the city was boundless. He was responsible for some of her finest features and monuments.

His greatest civil achievement was undoubtedly the codification of the laws, and it was the one of which he was proudest. That he contributed much to the Code Napoleon besides the driving power that insisted that it be promptly put through, there is no doubt. His great contribution was the inestimable one of commonsense. He had no patience with meaningless precedents, conventions, and technicalities. He wanted laws that everybody could understand and would recognize as necessary and just.

Nothing more daring was undertaken in this period by Bonaparte than his reËstablishment of the Catholic Church and his recall of thousands of members of the old rÉgime driven out of the country by the Revolution. It was an attempt to reconcile and restore the two most powerful enemies of the Revolution, the two that the first consul knew Europe would never cease to fight to restore to power. There was of course great opposition in radical and republican circles to both ventures.

EMPEROROFTHEFRENCH

What Napoleon aimed at was to fit together all the different elements that had made France, under a government that he should direct, and then to impose upon them all peace, industry, and loyalty. Considering the character and history of the elements he was working with, the degree of his success is one of the wonders of statecraft. As time went on, however, he was subjected to more and more jealousy, criticism, and intrigue. And as he saw his power questioned his grasp tightened. He even began to employ the tactics of despots,—espionage, censorships, summary punishments. The upshot of the attacks upon him and of his determination to impose his own will was that in 1804, when he was thirty-five years old, he had himself made emperor of the French. I think there is no doubt that Napoleon believed that this was the only method by which he could make the position of France in Europe impregnable; but that he was willing to play the emperor there is no doubt. The dream of a throne where he should rule—for the welfare and happiness of everybody concerned, no doubt, but rule—brilliantly and absolutely—had never left his mind since boyhood—and now it was a fact accomplished!

The spectacle that followed is almost unbelievable. Napoleon with perfect seriousness set about to train himself, his lovable, but vain and unprincipled empress, Josephine, his selfish and vulgar family, his train of rough intimates of the battlefield, to the etiquette, ceremonies, and dignity of a court. He worked with the same energy, attention to details, and with the same insistence on complete obedience as when directing a campaign. The Napoleonic court achieved real brilliance and dignity; but to those born to the purple it was always an upstart’s court. That it was far and away more moral, economic, and orderly, as well as more serviceable to France, counted for little with those of the old rÉgime.

NAPOLEONTHECONQUEROR

The year after Napoleon was crowned emperor of the French (1804) he had himself crowned king of Italy. The territory he now governed included not only these two countries, but several Germanic states. It was an enormous power, and the old kingdoms of Europe, England, Austria, and Russia looked on in dismay. It was not only his power, backed as it was by his genius, but it was the ideas he was spreading. Everywhere he went he put his new code of laws into force, and preached, even if he did not always practise, personal liberty, equality before the law, religious tolerance,—ideas that many of his enemies feared more than they did armies.

A coalition against him was inevitable, and in 1805 he took the field again. The campaigns that followed closely in the next four years include some of his most interesting military feats,—the battle of Austerlitz, of which he was proudest himself; the campaign of Jena, by which he humbled Prussia, increased French territory largely, and won the czar of Russia as an ally; the war on Spain, which ended in his own deserved defeat (Napoleon at St. Helena characterized his attack on Spain as “unjust,” “cynical,” “villainous”); the campaign of Wagram, which finally humbled his persistent enemy Austria.

At the end of these four years Napoleon was himself the practical master of Europe; the only nation not recognizing his power being England, which was at least temporarily quiet. He had created an empire; but what was he to do with it? He had no heir. To provide for one he carried out a plan long considered,—he divorced Empress Josephine and married again. The new empress was the daughter of the old and now humbled enemy of France, the emperor of Austria. Napoleon apparently believed that on the birth of an heir France would accept him fully, and that Europe would cease to fear and resent his power. He was wrong. He had stripped too many of wealth and position, outraged too many social and religious conventions, set in motion too many ideas hostile to those that Europe as a whole lived by. His demands on subjects and allies were too heavy, and particularly the one that he had most at heart,—that no continental nation should allow a dollar’s worth of England’s goods to cross its borders. His punishment of those who displeased him and disobeyed his orders was too severe. A revolt against his monstrous assumption was inevitable.

THESETTINGSTAR

It was with his ally, Russia, that the first break came. That Napoleon was startled by the idea of war with Alexander and sought to prevent it, is certain; but Alexander refused to yield to his demand that the embargo against English goods be enforced. The embargo he had set down as the “fundamental law of the Empire.” There was nothing to do but settle it by arms, and in the summer of 1812, with an army of over half a million men, he began a reluctant and hesitating march against Russia. It was a campaign of terrible disasters. The Russians retreated before him, letting cold and hunger do the work of battles. So effectively did they work that the French army was practically destroyed. The Russian campaign is one of the most appalling in history. It was but the beginning of his overthrow. Alexander raised the cry “Deliver Europe!” Stein and other liberal minds rallied the youth of the German states into a league, pledged to fight for national freedom. His allies and dependences began to demand the return of lost territories as a price of loyalty. France revolted at the prospects of continued bloodshed. The campaigns thrust upon him by all these forces were fought; but frequently without his old genius.

It was June of 1812 when Napoleon began the Russian campaign. Twenty-one months later Paris capitulated to his allied enemies, and a few weeks later he had lost the greatest empire modern Europe had seen gathered under one man, and was an exile in the little island of Elba.

WATERLOOANDST.HELENA

His dramatic escape from Elba; the scurry out of France at news of his arrival of all who had opposed him, leaving the coast practically clear for him; the rally of the army and people to him; the immediate attack upon him by the allied powers of Europe; his defeat at Waterloo and speedy exile to St. Helena,—these make perhaps the most dramatic succession of events in all history, and it was not he who lost by the record of them, though it ended in his captivity. Napoleon a prisoner on an island six hundred miles from land was Napoleon still. He was there because of his conquerors’ fear of him. No greater tribute to one man’s power was ever paid than that of Europe when under English leadership she consented to confine Napoleon Bonaparte on the island of St. Helena. It was all that was needed to impress him forever on the world as one of heroic mold.

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SUPPLEMENTARY READING.—“Short Life of Napoleon Bonaparte,” Ida M. Tarbell; “The First Napoleon,” John C. Ropes; “Napoleon Bonaparte, First Campaign,” H.H. Sargent; “Life of Napoleon,” Las Casas; “Napoleon, the Last Phase,” Lord Rosebery; “Letters and Papers of Napoleon”; “Napoleana,” FrÉdÉric Masson.