The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5

H >> Hippolyte A. Taine >> The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36

[65] Bourrienne, II., 281, 342: "It pained me to write official
statements under his dictation, of which each was an imposture." He
always answered: "My dear sir, you are a simpleton - you understand
nothing!" - Madame de Rémusat, II., 205, 209.

[66] See especially the campaign bulletins for 1807, so insulting to
the king and queen of Prussia, but, owing to that fact, so well
calculated to excite the contemptuous laughter and jeers of the
soldiers.

[67] In "La Correspondance de Napoleon," published in thirty-two
volumes, the letters are arranged under dates. - In his
'"Correspondance avec Eugène, vice-roi d'Italie," they are arranged
under chapters; also with Joseph, King of Naples and afterwards King
of Spain. It is easy to select other chapters not less instructive:
one on foreign affairs (letters to M. de Champagny, M de Talleyrand,
and M. de Bassano); another on the finances (letters to M. Gaudin and
to M. Mollien); another on the navy (letters to Admiral Decrès);
another on military administration (letters to General Clarke);
another on the affairs of the Church (letters to M. Portalis and to M.
Bigot de Préameneu); another on the Police (letters to Fouché), etc.
- Finally, by dividing and distributing his letters according as they
relate to this or that grand enterprise, especially to this or that
military campaign, a third classification could be made. - In this
way we can form a concept of the vastness of his positive knowledge,
also of the scope of his intellect and talents. Cf. especially the
following letters to Prince Eugène, June II, 1806 (on the supplies and
expenses of the Italian army); June 1st and 18th, 1806 (on the
occupation of Dalmatia, and on the military situation, offensive and
defensive). To Gen. Dejean, April 28, 1806 (on the war supplies);
June 27, 1806 (on the fortifications of Peschiera) July 20, 1806 (on
the fortifications of Wesel and of Juliers). - "Mes souvenirs sur
Napoleon", p. 353 by the Count Chaptal: "One day, the Emperor said to
me that he would like to organize a military school at Fontainebleau;
he then explained to me the principal features of the establishment,
and ordered me to draw up the necessary articles and bring them to him
the next day. I worked all night and they were ready at the appointed
hour. He read them over and pronounced them correct, but not
complete. He bade me take a seat and then dictated to me for two or
three hours a plan which consisted of five hundred and seventeen
articles. Nothing more perfect, in my opinion, ever issued from a
man's brain. - At another time, the Empress Josephine was to take the
waters at Aix-la-Chapelle, and the Emperor summoned me. 'The
Empress,' said he, 'is to leave to-morrow morning. She is a good-
natured, easy-going woman and must have her route and behavior marked
out for her. Write it down.' He then dictated instructions to me on
twenty-one large sheets of paper, in which everything she was to say
and to do was designated, even the questions and replies she was to
make to the authorities on the way."

[68] One French league equals approximately 4 km. 70,000 square
leagues then equal 1,120,000 km.2, or 400,000 square miles or 11% of
the United States but 5 times the size of Great Britain. (SR.)

[69] Cf. in the "Correspondance" the letters dated at Schoenbrunn
near Vienna, during August and September, 1809, and especially:

the great number of letters and orders relating to the English
expeditions to Walcheren;
the letters to chief-judge Régnier and to the arch-chancellor
Cambacérès on expropriations for public benefit (Aug. 21, Sept. 7
and 29);
the letters and orders to M. de Champagny to treat with Austria (Aug.
19, and Sept. 10, 15, 18, 22, and 23);
the letters to Admirable Decrès, to despatch naval expeditions to the
colonies (Aug.17 and Sept. 26);
the letter to Mollien on the budget of expenditure (Aug. 8);
the letter to Clarke on the statement of guns in store throughout the
empire (Sept. 14).
Other letters, ordering the preparation of two treatises on military
art (Oct. 1), two works on the history and encroachments of the Holy
See (Oct. 3), prohibiting conferences at Saint-Sulpice (Sept. 15),
and forbidding priests to preach outside the churches (Sept. 24).-
From Schoenbrunn, he watches the details of public works in France and
Italy; for instance, the letters to M. le Montalivet (Sept.30), to
send an auditor post to Parma, to have a dyke repaired at once, and
(Oct. 8) to hasten the building of several bridges and quays at
Lyons.

[70] He says himself; "I always transpose my theme in many ways."

[71] Madame de Rémusat, I., 117, 120. "1 heard M. de Talleyrand
exclaim one day, some what out of humor, 'This devil of a man misleads
you in all directions. Even his passions escape you, for he finds
some way to counterfeit them, although they really exist.'" - For
example, immediately prior to the violent confrontation with Lord
Whitworth, which was to put an end to the treaty of Amiens, he was
chatting and amusing himself with the women and the infant Napoleon,
his nephew, in the gayest and most unconcerned manner: "He is suddenly
told that the company had assembled. His countenance changes like
that of an actor when the scene shifts. He seems to turn pale at will
and his features contract"; he rises, steps up precipitately to the
English ambassador, and fulminates for two hours before two hundred
persons. (Hansard's Parliamentary History, vol. XXVI, dispatches of
Lord Whitworth, pp. 1798, 1302, 1310.) - "He often observes that the
politician should calculate every advantage that could be gained by
his defects." One day, after an explosion he says to Abbé de Pradt:
"You thought me angry! you are mistaken. Anger with me never mounts
higher than here (pointing to his neck)."

[72] Roederer, III. (The first days of Brumaire, year VIII.)

[73] Bourrienne, III., 114.

[74] Bourrienne, II., 228. (Conversation with Bourrienne in the park
at Passeriano.)

[75] Ibid., II., 331. (Written down by Bourrienne the same evening.)

[76] Madame de Rémusat, I., 274. - De Ségur, II., 459. (Napoleon's
own words on the eve of the battle of Austerlitz): "Yes, if I had
taken Acre, I would have assumed the turban, I would have put the army
in loose breeches; I would no longer have exposed it, except at the
last extremity; I would have made it my sacred battalion, my
immortals. It is with Arabs, Greeks, and Armenians that I would have
ended the war against the Turks. Instead of one battle in Moravia I
would have gained a battle of Issus; I would have made myself emperor
of the East, and returned to Paris by the way of Constantinople." - De
Pradt, p.19 (Napoleon's own words at Mayence, September, 1804): "Since
two hundred years there is nothing more to do in Europe; it is only in
the East that things can be carried out on a grand scale."

[77] Madame de Rémusat, I., 407. - Miot de Melito, II., 214 (a few
weeks after his coronation): "There will be no repose in Europe until
it is under one head, under an Emperor, whose officers would be kings,
who would distribute kingdoms to his lieutenants, who would make one
of them King of Italy, another King of Bavaria, here a landmann of
Switzerland, and here a stadtholder of Holland, etc."

[78] "Correspondance de Napoleon I.," vol. XXX., 550, 558. (Memoirs
dictated by Napoleon at Saint Hélène.) - Miot de Melito, II., 290. -
D'Hausonvillc, "l'Église Romaine et le Premier Empire," passiM. -"
Mémorial." "Paris would become the capital of the Christian world, and
I would have governed the religious world as well as the political
world."

[79] De Pradt, 23.

[80] "Mémoires et Mémorial." "It was essential that Paris should
become the unique capital, not to be compared with other capitals.
The masterpieces of science and of art, the museums, all that had
illustrated past centuries, were to be collected there. Napoleon
regretted that he could not transport St. Peter's to Paris; the
meanness of Notre Dame dissatisfied him."

[81] Villemain, "Souvenir contemporaines," I., 175. Napoleon's
statement to M. de Narbonne early in March, 1812, and repeated by him
to Villemain an hour afterwards. The wording is at second hand and
merely a very good imitation, while the ideas are substantially
Napoleon's. Cf. his fantasies about Italy and the Mediterranean,
equally exaggerated ("Correspondence," XXX., 548), and an admirable
improvisation on Spain and the colonies at Bayonne. - De Pradt.
"Mémoires sur les revolutions d'Espagne," p.130: "Therefore Napoleon
talked, or rather poetised; he Ossianized for a long time . . .
like a man full of a sentiment which oppressed him, in an animated,
picturesque style, and with the impetuosity, imagery, and originality
which were familiar to him, . . . on the vast throne of Mexico and
Peru, on the greatness of the sovereigns who should possess them . .
. . and on the results which these great foundations would have on
the universe. I had often heard him, but under no circumstances had I
ever heard him develop such a wealth and compass of imagination.
Whether it was the richness of his subject, or whether his faculties
had become excited by the scene he conjured up, and all the chords of
the instrument vibrated at once, he was sublime."

[82] Roederer, III., 541 (February 2, 1809): "I love power. But I
love it as an artist. . . . I love it as a musician loves his
violin, for the tones, chords, and harmonies he can get out of it."

CHAPTER II. His Ideas, Passions and Intelligence.

I. Intense Passions.

Personality and character during the Italian Renaissance and during
the present time. - Intensity of the passions in Bonaparte. - His
excessive touchiness. - His immediate violence. - His impatience,
rapidity, and need of talking. - His temperament, tension, and faults.

On taking a near view of the contemporaries of Dante and Michael
Angelo, we find that they differ from us more in character than in
intellect.[1] With us, three hundred years of police and of courts of
justice, of social discipline and peaceful habits, of hereditary
civilization, have diminished the force and violence of the passions
natural to Man. In Italy, in the Renaissance epoch, they were still
intact; human emotions at that time were keener and more profound than
at the present day; the appetites were ardent and more unbridled;
man's will was more impetuous and more tenacious; whatever motive
inspired, whether pride, ambition, jealousy, hatred, love, envy, or
sensuality, the inward spring strained with an energy and relaxed with
a violence that has now disappeared. All these energies reappear in
this great survivor of the fifteenth century; in him the play of the
nervous machine is the same as with his Italian ancestors; never was
there, even with the Malatestas and the Borgias, a more sensitive and
more impulsive intellect, one capable of such electric shocks and
explosions, in which the roar and flashes of tempest lasted longer and
of which the effects were more irresistible. In his mind no idea
remains speculative and pure; none is a simple transcript of the real,
or a simple picture of the possible; each is an internal eruption,
which suddenly and spontaneously spends itself in action; each darts
forth to its goal and would reach it without stopping were it not kept
back and restrained by force[2] Sometimes, the eruption is so sudden,
that the restraint does not come soon enough. One day, in Egypt,[3]
on entertaining a number of French ladies at dinner, he has one of
them, who was very pretty and whose husband he had just sent off to
France, placed alongside of him; suddenly, as if accidentally, he
overturns a pitcher of water on her, and, under the pretence of
enabling her to rearrange her wet dress, he leads her into another
room where he remains with her a long time, too long, while the other
guests seated at the table wait quietly and exchange glances. Another
day, at Paris, toward the epoch of the Concordat,[4] he says to
Senator Volney: "France wants a religion." Volney replies in a frank,
sententious way, "France wants the Bourbons." Whereupon he gives
Volney a kick in the stomach and he falls unconscious; on being moved
to a friend's house, he remains there ill in bed for several days. -
No man is more irritable, so soon in a passion; and all the more
because he purposely gives way to his irritation; for, doing this just
at the right moment, and especially before witnesses, it strikes
terror; it enables him to extort concessions and maintain obedience.
His explosions of anger, half-calculated, half-involuntary, serve him
quite as much as they relieve him, in public as well as in private,
with strangers as with intimates, before constituted bodies, with the
Pope, with cardinals, with ambassadors, with Talleyrand, with Beugnot,
with anybody that comes along,[5] whenever he wishes to set an example
or "keep the people around him on the alert." The public and the army
regard him as impassible; but, apart from the battles in which he
wears a mask of bronze, apart from the official ceremonies in which he
assumes a necessarily dignified air, impression and expression with
him are almost always confounded, the inward overflowing in the
outward, the action, like a blow, getting the better of him. At Saint
Cloud, caught by Josephine in the arms of another woman, he runs after
the unlucky interrupter in such a way that "she barely has time to
escape";[6] and again, that evening, keeping up his fury so as to put
her down completely, "he treats her in the most outrageous manner,
smashing every piece of furniture that comes in his way." A little
before the Empire, Talleyrand, a great mystifier, tells Berthier that
the First Consul wanted to assume the title of king. Berthier, in
eager haste, crosses the drawing-room full of company, accosts the
master of the house and, with a beaming smile, "congratulates him."[7]
At the word king, Bonaparte's eyes flash. Grasping Berthier by the
throat, he pushes him back against the wall, exclaiming, "You fool!
who told you to come here and stir up my bile in this way? Another
time don't come on such errands." - Such is the first impulse, the
instinctive action, to pounce on people and seize them by the throat;
we divine under each sentence, and on every page he writes, out-bursts
and assaults of this description, the physiognomy and intonation of a
man who rushes forward and knocks people down. Accordingly, when
dictating in his cabinet, "he strides up and down the room," and, " if
excited," which is often the case, " his language consists of violent
imprecations, and even of oaths, which are suppressed in what is
written."[8] But these are not always suppressed, for those who have
seen the original minutes of his correspondence on ecclesiastical
affairs find dozens of them, the b..., the p... and the swearwords of
the coarsest kind.[9]

Never was there such impatient touchiness. "When dressing
himself,[10] he throws on the floor or into the fire any part of his
attire which does not suit him. . . . On gala-days and on grand
ceremonial occasions his valets are obliged to agree together when
they shall seize the right moment to put some thing on him. . . He
tears off or breaks whatever causes him the slightest discomfort,
while the poor valet who has been the means of it meets with a violent
and positive proof of his anger. No thought was ever more carried
away by its own speed. "His handwriting, when he tries to write, "is
a mass of disconnected and undecipherable signs;[11] the words lack
one-half of their letters." On reading it over himself, he cannot tell
what it means. At last, he becomes almost incapable of producing a
handwritten letter, while his signature is a mere scrawl. He
accordingly dictates, but so fast that his secretaries can scarcely
keep pace with him: on their first attempt the perspiration flows
freely and they succeed in noting down only the half of what he says.
Bourrienne, de Meneval, and Maret invent a stenography of their own,
for he never repeats any of his phrases; so much the worse for the pen
if it lags behind, and so much the better if a volley of exclamations
or of oaths gives it a chance to catch up. - Never did speech flow and
overflow in such torrents, often without either discretion or
prudence, even when the outburst is neither useful nor creditable the
reason is that both spirit and intellect are charged to excess subject
to this inward pressure the improvisator and polemic, under full
headway,[12] take the place of the man of business and the statesman.

"With him," says a good observer,[13] "talking is a prime necessity,
and, assuredly, among the prerogatives of high rank, he ranks first
that of speaking without interruption."

Even at the Council of State he allows himself to run on, forgetting
the business on hand; he starts off right and left with some
digression or demonstration, some invective or other, for two or three
hours at a stretch,[14] insisting over and over again, bent on
convincing or prevailing, and ending in demanding of the others if he
is not right, "and, in this case, never failing to find that all have
yielded to the force of his arguments." On reflection, he knows the
value of an assent thus obtained, and, pointing to his chair, he
observes:

"It must be admitted that it is easy to be brilliant when one is in
that seat!"

Nevertheless he has enjoyed his intellectual exercise and given way to
his passion, which controls him far more than he controls it.

"My nerves are very irritable," he said of himself, "and when in this
state were my pulse not always regular I should risk going crazy."[15]

The tension of accumulated impressions is often too great, and it ends
in a physical break-down. Strangely enough in so great a warrior and
with such a statesman, "it is not infrequent, when excited, to see him
shed tears." He who has looked upon thousands of dying men, and who
has had thousands of men slaughtered, "sobs," after Wagram and after
Bautzen,[16] at the couch of a dying comrade. "I saw him," says his
valet, "weep while eating his breakfast, after coming from Marshal
Lannes's bedside; big tears rolled down his cheeks and fell on his
plate." It is not alone the physical sensation, the sight of a
bleeding, mangled body, which thus moves him acutely and deeply; for a
word, a simple idea, stings and penetrates almost as far. Before the
emotion of Dandolo, who pleads for Venice his country, which is sold
to Austria, he is agitated and his eyes moisten.[17] Speaking of the
capitulation of Baylen, at a full meeting of the Council of State,[18]
his voice trembles, and "he gives way to his grief, his eyes even
filling with tears." In 1806, setting out for the army and on taking
leave of Josephine, he has a nervous attack which is so severe as to
bring on vomiting.[19] "We had to make him sit down," says an eye-
witness, "and swallow some orange water; he shed tears, and this
lasted a quarter of an hour." The same nervous and stomachic crisis
came on in 1808, on deciding on the divorce; he tosses about a whole
night, and laments like a woman; he melts, and embraces Josephine; he
is weaker than she is: "My poor Josephine, I can never leave you!"
Folding her in his arms, he declares that she shall not quit him; he
abandons himself wholly to the sensation of the moment; she must
undress at once, sleep alongside of him, and he weeps over her ;
"literally," she says, " he soaked the bed with his tears." -
Evidently, in such an organism, however powerful the superimposed
regulator, there is a risk of the equilibrium being destroyed. He is
aware of this, for he knows himself well; he is afraid of his own
nervous sensibility, the same as of an easily frightened horse; at
critical moments, at Berezina, he refuses to receive the bad news
which might excite this, and, on the informer's insisting on it, he
asks him again,[20] "Why, sir, do you want to disturb me?" -
Nevertheless, in spite of his precautions, he is twice taken unawares,
at times when the peril was alarming and of a new kind; he, so clear
headed and so cool under fire, the boldest of military heroes and the
most audacious of political adventurers, quails twice in a
parliamentary storm and again in a popular crisis. On the 18th of
Brumaire, in the Corps Législatif, "he turned pale, trembled, and
seemed to lose his head at the shouts of outlawry . . . . they had to
drag him out . . . . they even thought for a moment that he was going
to faint."[21] After the abdication at Fontainebleau, on encountering
the rage and imprecations which greeted him in Provence, he seemed for
some days to be morally shattered; the animal instincts assert their
supremacy; he is afraid and makes no attempt at concealment.[22] After
borrowing the uniform of an Austrian colonel, the helmet of a Prussian
quartermaster, and the cloak of the Russian quartermaster, he still
considers that he is not sufficiently disguised. In the inn at
Calade, "he starts and changes color at the slightest noise"; the
commissaries, who repeatedly enter his room, "find him always in
tears." "He wearies them with his anxieties and irresolution"; he says
that the French government would like to have him assassinated on the
road, refuses to eat for fear of poison, and thinks that he might
escape by jumping out of the window. And yet he gives vent to his
feelings and lets his tongue run on about himself without stopping,
concerning his past, his character, unreservedly, indelicately,
trivially; like a cynic and one who is half-crazy; his ideas run loose
and crowd each other like the anarchical gatherings of a tumultuous
mob; he does not recover his mastery of them until he reaches Fréjus,
the end of his journey, where he feels himself safe and protected from
any highway assault; then only do they return within ordinary limits
and fall back in regular line under the control of the sovereign
intellect which, after sinking for a time, revives and resumes its
ascendancy. - There is nothing in him so extraordinary as this almost
perpetual domination of the lucid, calculating reason; his willpower
is still more formidable than his intelligence; before it can obtain
the mastery of others it must be master at home. To measure its
power, it does not suffice to note its fascinations; to enumerate the
millions of souls it captivates, to estimate the vastness of the
obstacles it overcomes: we must again, and especially, represent to
ourselves the energy and depth of the passions it keeps in check and
urges on like a team of prancing, rearing horses - it is the driver
who, bracing his arms, constantly restrains the almost ungovernable
steeds, who controls their excitement, who regulates their bounds, who
takes advantage even of their viciousness to guide his noisy vehicle
over precipices as it rushes on with thundering speed. If the pure
ideas of the reasoning brain thus maintain their daily supremacy it is
due to the vital flow which nourishes them; their roots are deep in
his heart and temperament, and those roots which give them their
vigorous sap constitute a primordial instinct more powerful than
intellect, more powerful even than his will, the instinct which leads
him to center everything on himself, in other words egoism.[23]

II. Will and Egoism.

Bonaparte's dominant passion. - His lucid, calculating mind. - Source
and power of the Will. - Early evidences of an active, absorbing
egoism. - His education derived from the lessons of things. - In
Corsica. - In France during the Revolution. - In Italy. - In Egypt. -
His idea of Society and of Right. - Maturing after the 18th of
Brumaire. - His idea of Man. - It conforms to his character

It is egoism, not a passive, but an active and intrusive egoism,
proportional to the energy and extension of his faculties developed by
his education and circumstances, exaggerated by his success and his
omnipotence to such a degree that a monstrous colossal I has been
erected in society. It expands unceasingly the circle of a tenacious
and rapacious grasp, which regards all resistance as offensive, which
all independence annoys, and which, on the boundless domain it assigns
to itself, is intolerant of anybody that does not become either an
appendix or a tool. - The germ of this absorbing personality is
already apparent in the youth and even in the infant.

"Character: dominating, imperious, and stubborn,"

says the record at Brienne.[24] And the notes of the Military
Academy add;[25]

"Extremely inclined to egoism," - "proud, ambitious, aspiring in all
directions, fond of solitude,"

undoubtedly because he is not master in a group of equals and is ill
at ease when he cannot rule.

"I lived apart from my comrades," he says at a later date.[26] - "I
had selected a little corner in the playgrounds, where I used to go
and sit down and indulge my fancies. When my comrades were disposed
to drive me out of this corner I defended it with all my might . My
instinct already told me that my will should prevail against other
wills, and that whatever pleased me ought to belong to me."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36