During the captivity at St. Helena much attention was given by Napoleon to the dictation of his memoirs. These, however, cover only a short portion of his career and are confessedly apologetic in character. They are shrewdly constructed, often with a gross disregard of accuracy, in order to influence public opinion in his favor. In his conversations also he made good use of his interlocutors, to build up that legend of Napoleonic infallibility and good faith that soon found a receptive atmosphere in the prevalent romanticism of European society. He was convinced to the end of his life that Bourbon rule in France could not last, and he looked forward to a time when his son would be restored. In summing up his own career, he claimed that his dictatorship was a necessity. “Should I be accused of having loved war too much, the historian will demonstrate that I was never the aggressor. Should I be censured for desiring universal empire for myself, he will show that that was the product of circumstances, and how my enemies drove me to it, step by step.”
In many passages in the same strain Napoleon curiously manifests his adhesion to the principles and phrases of the idealogues, on whom as a ruler he heaped so much scorn. It may be doubted whether the base metal of his rhetoric would have become current, if the Powers who participated in the Congress of Vienna had not introduced as their maxims of political morality the inflated and transparently insincere professions of the Holy Alliance. Indeed, from the beginning to the end of the Napoleonic period, the point of view that the coalitions against him were fighting in behalf of nationalism and liberty is little short of absurd. At almost any time France under Napoleon might have arranged an alliance with England by offering her the bait of commercial concessions; and even more unsubstantial than the Napoleonic legend is its antithesis, that the Tory oligarchy of England were spending hundreds of millions of pounds of their good money for the benefit of the peoples and states on the Continent.
Napoleon’s inferiority cannot be discovered in his lack of morality as a ruler, if morality be determined according to the standards of the allied Powers; his chief opponents were trained and acted according to the principles adopted in the partition of Poland. His lack of scruples carried him farther, simply because of the immeasurable distance between his own genius and the commonplace characteristics of any of his antagonists. He built up his personal rule on his military skill by consistent and well-directed effort. France was made the instrument of his ambition; it was in his interest, not in the interest of the country he ruled, that Germany, Italy, and Spain were made dependent states. France would have been more solidly established, if, in spite of all military success abroad, her ruler had been satisfied with her natural frontiers.
Under Napoleon the divorce of national from personal aims is seen in the changed character of the French army; there was no longer a general levy as in the time of the Revolution, for in 1800-1804, service was regulated by lot and by permission to provide substitutes. Middle-class families as a rule took advantage of this permission, and there were plenty of opportunities, because old soldiers were anxious to re-engage for the service. War had become a profession. The mass of the troops were made up of children of the people, while the officers were mostly scions of well-to-do families. As time went on, owing to the exhausting character of the wars, one year’s conscription was not enough. Sometimes there was an anticipated enrollment of the conscripts of the two following years. Then came the turn of the National Guard, made up of men from forty to sixty years, and of those from twenty to twenty-six who had been relieved from regular army service, because of their poor physique or because their families were dependent on their work; these, too, were placed on the active list.
Altogether 3,153,000 French soldiers were called upon for military duty from 1800 to 1815. The losses from wounds and disease, apart from the fatalities on the battlefield, were enormous. In all, the victims of these wars are reckoned at 1,750,000 men. Oftentimes, those who desired to escape military duty had to buy themselves off as many as three times, and yet, even after spending $4000, they were obliged to take part in the campaigns of 1813 and 1814. Finally, owing to the scarcity of officers, requisition by force was resorted to. Lists were made of special families in Paris and the departments, whose children between the ages of sixteen and eighteen were constrained to prepare themselves for service at the military school at St. Cyr.
In the complicated system of the Napoleonic army, a place had to be made for the various national elements and groups, who served in it. But the characteristic feature was the Imperial Guard. In itself it was a replica on a small scale of the whole force, because the various arms of the service all found a place within it. It grew out of the consular guard, first numbering 7000 men, then increased to 50,000, until it was finally brought to 92,000 in 1813. The Guard was always with the Emperor in a campaign, it fought under his eye, and was ordinarily kept in reserve for a critical point of the battle. The section of the Guard which was closest to the Emperor, was the mounted scouts or “guides,” who wore a green uniform, the imperial color, and were first commanded by his son-in-law, Eugène, and then by another member of the Beauharnais house, Lefebre-Desnouettes. Napoleon described them as a body of brave men who had always seen the enemies’ cavalry flee before them. A part of this division was a corp of Mamelouks, recruited in the Eastern campaign, from the Coptic and Syrian volunteers, a picturesque body of men that still continued to wear Oriental dress, though later on many Frenchmen were added to their number.
In the infantry divisions of the army little change was made; there were grenadier regiments composed of the tallest and best proportioned soldiers, and companies of slight, undersized men intended for the kind of work done in the present Italian army by the bersaglieri. Experiments with dismounted dragoons proved a failure. Napoleon’s special work was the reorganization of the cavalry, an arm of the service which had almost altogether disappeared at the time of the Revolution, because large numbers of the cavalry officers went into exile on account of their monarchical sympathies. The most conspicuous branch of the cavalry was the hussars, who gained a reputation for dare-devil bravery, and whose charges with drawn sabers were the dramatic feature of an engagement. They were led by generals of the type of Murat, Marbot, and Ségur.
As to the French artillery and engineers, their already high reputation among European armies was fully maintained. In many of Napoleon’s hardest contested battles, such as Eylau, Friedland, and Wagram, the cannonading of the French played a decisive part. In the later campaigns troops of the allied states came to be a more important element, and they gave the army a cosmopolitan character. There were German, Swiss, Italian, Spanish, Polish auxiliaries; even Albanians, Greeks, and Tartars were represented in the enormous masses of men drawn about the Emperor, in his final efforts to subjugate the European continent.
The weapons used by the army showed no technical advance on those employed in the last half of the eighteenth century. The guns were flint-locks of the model of 1777, and the cannon were of the type employed in 1765, most of them pieces of 12 and 6 with mortars that had a carrying power of between 800 and 1900 feet.
Owing to the years of incessant warfare, the administration of the army was the chief care of the government. It was under the supervision of the Emperor himself, who was untiring in attending even to the most minute details. He made frequent inspections, kept in personal touch with his soldiers, and looked out for their comfort. In preparing for a campaign he knew with accuracy all matters relating to the equipment of his troops, the actual resources of the arsenals, and the amount of military stores. But the army in the field was expected to provide its own rations. “I made eight campaigns under the empire,” De Brack said, “and always at the front; I never saw during this whole time a single army commissary. I never touched a single ration from the army stores. The soldiers depended on requisitions from the inhabitants or on pillage.”
It was the Emperor’s maxim that war must support war. When in Spain he wrote to Dijeon, the administrative director of war in Paris: “Send back the reserves of cattle; I don’t want any foodstuffs, I have an abundance of everything. What I need are caissons, military transports, hats, and shoes; I have never seen a cavalry in which the troops had as much to eat.” The requisitions that had been found so profitable in the Italian campaign were continued without any regard for their effect on the conquered country. Enormous stores of money were accumulated in this way. After the treaty of Tilsit the treasury of the army was credited with about $70,000,000, and Napoleon reckoned that he could continue to make war for five years without increasing French taxation or asking for a fresh loan.
As companions in arms Napoleon had under him a large number of able generals, formed just as he had been, in the wars of the Revolution. When the empire was constituted many became marshals. These were selected from all classes of society: Davout, MacDonald, Marmont, Grouchy, Clarke, from the old nobility; Monery, Bernadotte, Soult, Mortier, Gouvion, Suchet, Brun-Junot, from the middle classes; Jourdan, Masséna, Augereau, Murat, Bessières, Ney, Lannes, Victor, Oudinot, Lecourbe, Sebastian, Driant were all children of the people. It was the policy of the Emperor to have young men in command of his troops; by 1813 there were forty-one cavalry generals alone, who, though less than fifty years old, were on the retired list. The life of an officer was so strenuous that there was little chance of resisting for long the tremendous demands made on the constitution by the long marches and frequent battles. Advancement was speedy and the rewards were munificent; many of the marshals received princely titles with pay suitable to their rank. For example, Berthier’s annual income was over $250,000. Masséna, Davout, and Ney were almost as well provided for. After the battle of Eylau each guest at the Emperor’s table found under his plate a 1000-franc bill. But these personal rewards were not at all confined to those in high command. The Emperor was careful to retain the devoted loyalty of his men by words and acts of personal note, which by their spontaneity kept the army from being turned into a mere mechanical organism. He went among the men, rewarding those who had distinguished themselves on the field of battle, and showing consideration to the wounded and the weary. The weak spot in the army was the practice of pillage. The soldiers were forced to it and regarded it as their right. Their exactions, too, were imitated on a large scale by the commanders and marshals. Masséna made millions by selling trade permits during the blockade against England. Soult despoiled Spain of works of art and exacted large contributions from rich monasteries.
In his economic policy, Napoleon followed the principles of the Bourbon princes; he was a thorough-going disciple of the mercantilist school. It was his purpose to ruin England; hence the severest enactments were promulgated against colonial products and cotton, both prime articles of English trade. Vessels touching English ports were excluded; not only were high duties imposed on coffee, sugar, and cocoa, but cotton fabrics were entirely prohibited. In 1806, when the English government declared all the French ports from Brest to the mouth of the Elbe closed, and subjected neutral vessels to search, Napoleon issued the decree of Berlin by which the British Isles were declared to be blockaded. All commerce with England was prohibited and no ship which touched the English shores was admitted to a French port. Then came from London the so-called Orders in Council by which neutral ships were required to go to London, Malta, and other places subject to England, to have their cargoes examined and to get permits to trade which had to be paid for at high rates. The next stage in this economic war was Napoleon’s decree of Milan, 1807 (December 7), which declared that every ship which had been visited by English officials or had touched at an English port should lose its nationality and be regarded as a lawful prize.
These drastic measures were never rigidly applied, for there grew up a system of exemption by special permits excepting certain articles. Smuggling, practised on a large scale, acted also as an ameliorating factor; indeed, after 1810 colonial products were admitted into France, though at a high rate of duty, but the war against cotton continued. Everywhere it was found, it was seized, and confiscated or burnt. The result of this system for France was worse than for England, for by her mastery of the sea the latter power was able to maintain both her industries and her credit, while France had to pay more for raw products and, the export of her goods being hampered, the price in the home market was artificially lowered. In 1802, foreign commerce reached a sum total of 790,000,000 francs, of which exports accounted for 325,000,000; ten years later the figures were 640,000,000 and 383,000,000, respectively.
In finance the Napoleonic régime showed no disposition to make innovations; only in details was the fiscal system altered. There was no regular budget in the modern sense of the term; the accounts for each year were kept open, and in order to make the yearly balance, the resources of other years were drawn upon. Apart from these financial irregularities, which, in the absence of any real legislative representative system, were not criticised or counted, the administration of the finances of the empire was carefully directed. The officials were required to do their work well; there was no red tape, and full value was received for every franc expended. Napoleon was vigilant in defending the interests of the treasury, and he treated it as his own patrimony.
In no phase do his gifts as a ruler shine more conspicuously than in his refusal to increase the public debt to any considerable extent. At the fall of the Directory there were 46,000,000 francs of Rentes in French government bonds; his government added only 17,000,000 to this amount. He did not trust to credit to carry on his wars, the bankruptcy of the Revolution being too fresh in the minds of French bondholders. We have noticed before how he expected the extraordinary expenses of warfare to be supplied. His forethought in raising contributions, hard as it was for the conquered countries, was a blessing to French investors.
This care for a sound financial position sustained confidence in the Napoleonic régime, even when its master was engaged in the most hazardous military adventures. In the autumn of 1799 government five per cents. were quoted at seven francs. In 1800 the lowest quotation was 17.37, the highest 44. Each year the rise continued until it attained its extreme limit in May, 1808, when it marked 88.15 francs. Then there was a gradual fall. In March, 1814, the quotation was 45 francs, a year later it had risen to 81.65. Napoleon gave as much and as watchful attention to the maintenance of public credit as he did to the details of army administration. At the beginning of the Consulate he proceeded to restore public confidence by abolishing forced loans and by introducing specie payments. His only questionable financial operation was the employment of the money allotted to the sinking fund, to sustain artificially, at critical periods, the price of government securities, in order to deceive public opinion as to the importance of French defeats.
One of the first steps taken by Napoleon on his attainment of the supreme executive power was to make peace with the Church. Under the anti-religious legislation of the Revolution, in which most of the clergy and bishops had been declared outlaws, the social order had added to its other ills religious chaos. After the battle of Marengo in 1800, Napoleon, in an address to the clergy of Milan, laid down the following principles for his church policy: “No society can exist without morality, and there can be no good morality without religion. Religion alone gives the state a firm and stable support. A society without religion is like a vessel without a compass; France, taught by her misfortunes, has finally opened her eyes; she has recognized that the Catholic religion is, as it were, an anchor, that alone can keep her steady, in her time of stress.”
He had no purpose, however, to allow the Church to secure for itself an organization, that might appeal to the people, apart from or contrary to the government. His ideal was an ecclesiastical machine which could be controlled exactly as if it were a government department. Under such assumptions a concordat was arranged with the Papacy, whose power Napoleon respected. He ordered his agent at Rome, who conducted the negotiations, to treat the Pope as if he had 200,000 men. For some time the discussion dragged, because Pius VII refused to accept certain reforms which seemed to threaten the independence of the hierarchy. Finally, the terms were arranged under which the First Consul gained his two chief points: the introduction of an entirely new episcopate with a reduction of dioceses and the recognition of the alienation of church property during the Revolution.
Among the most important features of this instrument was the declaration that the Catholic religion should be freely exercised in France, but that it was to conform itself to such police regulations as the government should judge necessary for public tranquillity. The new bishops were to be presented by the state and instituted by the Pope. Parish priests were to be appointed by the bishops, but the appointment could be vetoed by the state, and the payment of the bishops and priests was undertaken by the government. A number of the former constitutional bishops, who had been in schism with Rome, were appointed in the new hierarchy which now numbered sixty members. The introduction of the clause mentioned above relating to the police powers of the state was used as a ground for a whole series of “organic articles” by which the French Church was bound hand and foot to the Napoleonic system; they were but a revival of the Gallican principles adopted by Louis XIV to help him to become the supreme administrator of the Church in France. Rome naturally protested, for these articles interfered with the autocratic system of the Curia. Acts of the Holy See and decrees of councils were not legalized in France unless they were verified by the government. Bishops could not consult together without a license from the government, or retire from their dioceses temporarily, without a permit. In many other details episcopal jurisdiction and church autonomy were interfered with. But all protests were in vain, and Pius VII conformed reluctantly to the will of the master of Western Europe, hoping that the slow-going diplomacy of his Secretary of State, Consalvi, would secure future concessions.
The first friction between the Emperor and the Pope occurred over the introduction of religious orders. None were authorized except certain orders for women, engaged in charitable or relief work. On December 2, 1804, after much hesitation, the Pope agreed to come to Paris to participate in the imperial coronation. He was treated with respect, but during the ceremony, when he was about to place the crown on Napoleon’s head, the Emperor with a show of displeasure took it out of his hands and crowned himself. On one ground or another Pius was kept in France for several months, as Napoleon was glad to have the head of the Church placed in a subordinate position before the world as a kind of Grand Almoner to the Emperor of the French.
New difficulties arose over the Pope’s refusal to annul the marriage of Jerome Bonaparte with Miss Patterson, an American, who had been married to Napoleon’s youngest brother in Baltimore in 1803 by the Roman Catholic bishop of that city. There were fresh grounds of alienation when, in 1806, Napoleon wrote to the Pope, who wished to be neutral, to close his ports to English vessels and to expel from his court English, Russians, and Swedes. “You are,” he said, “the sovereign of Rome, but I am the Emperor; my enemies should be yours.” As the Pope still proclaimed his neutrality, Napoleon seized the Papal States, and finally occupied Rome in February, 1808. For fourteen months the Pope was kept a virtual prisoner in the Quirinal under a guard of honor; he was not allowed to communicate with the cardinals, twenty-four of whom had been, by Napoleon’s orders, deported. Finally, in May, 1809, a decree was issued by which the States of the Church were annexed to the French Empire. Rome was proclaimed a free imperial city, the Pope being allowed to keep only his palace and his estates with an income of 2,000,000 francs.
Napoleon spoke of himself as revoking the Donation of Constantine; his intention was to make of Paris the religious head of the world with himself the director of its religion as well as of its secular affairs. Pius VII’s reply was a bull of excommunication against the Emperor, who, however, was not mentioned by name in the document. It only spoke in general terms of those who were guilty of deeds of violence in the States of the Church. Napoleon affected to pay little attention to the Papal protest, but he acted promptly, first by appealing to the old principle of the Gallican Church, that denied the right of the Pope to excommunicate a sovereign of a state. Then he had the person of the Pope seized by the commander of the Roman gendarmerie. No resistance was offered, and Pius was conducted as a prisoner, in a closed carriage with drawn shades, to Savona on the western Riviera near Genoa. Here he was kept carefully guarded, but he refused all terms of settlement that insisted on his surrender of the temporal power. No one was allowed to see him except in the presence of his guards. When Napoleon desired canonical institution for some newly appointed bishops, the Pope refused, on the ground that he was deprived of the advice of his cardinals. The situation was embarrassing, for there were, in August, 1809, twenty-seven vacant sees in France. Efforts were made to find a solution by calling a council at Paris; but the ecclesiastics, on assembling there, declared that the Pope’s consent was necessary. Napoleon then ordered the bishops to take charge of their dioceses without institution from the Pope. But a brief came from Savona to Cardinal Maury, the archbishop designate of Paris, enjoining him from administering his diocese without the Pope’s consent. The Emperor now treated the prisoner of Savona with even more rigor, put in prison the clergy whom he suspected of bringing the Papal brief, and deprived Pius of all means of corresponding with the outside world.
At this time the divorce of Napoleon from Josephine took place. The difficulties of the civil law were got over easily, although the Emperor had to violate the provisions of his own code, and the ecclesiastical committee of the diocese of Paris showed itself equally obliging, by recognizing the two imperial claims, that there had been an absence of consent to his religious marriage of 1804, and that there were defects of form in the ceremony itself. When the marriage with the Austrian archduchess was celebrated on April 2, 1810, thirteen of the twenty-six cardinals present in Paris refused to be present at the religious ceremony. This behavior excited Napoleon to an act of personal revenge, by which the recalcitrant princes of the Church were deprived of the insignia of their office, were placed under police supervision, and had to forego their allowance.
In 1811, a council was held in Paris to decide on the question as to the rights of the Pope in the matter of institution. Some of the bishops showed independence, urging the Emperor to restore Pius to liberty. There was a general agreement that Papal consent was necessary. In the meantime the Pope had been cajoled or bullied into accepting a clause, to be added to the Concordat, that canonical institution should be given within a fixed period, and if it were not given, it might be granted by the metropolitan or oldest bishop of the province. Just before the invasion of Russia the aged Pope was brought incognito from Savona to Fontainebleau. During the trip, though he was seriously ill, no consideration was shown him, and for many months after his arrival he was confined to his bed. Only cardinals and prelates who were partisans of Napoleon were allowed to see him. The defeat in Russia brought about a radical change; Napoleon now saw the advantage of arranging some terms of peace, because the harsh treatment of the venerable head of the greatest Christian communion was being used against his persecutor, both at home and abroad. Negotiations were resumed, and under personal pressure from Napoleon, Pius, on condition that the domains of the Holy See were restored to him, made large concessions. He gave Napoleon the right to fill all the bishoprics of France and Italy, except those in the vicinity of Rome, and he allowed metropolitan institution. Afterwards, on consulting with his advisers, the Pope published a retraction of his consent, by which the provisions he had made were annulled. No attention was paid by the Emperor to this change of attitude except that he ordered the imprisonment of the Cardinal de Pietro, who he thought had persuaded Pius to change his mind.
In 1814, before the last campaign on French territory, Napoleon gave the Pope permission to leave Fontainebleau, and shortly before the final defeat he restored the Papal States. There were no further relations between the two, the restored Pope and dethroned Emperor, except that Pius VII, after the Hundred Days and Waterloo, magnanimously offered the Bonaparte family an asylum in Rome, and later on made representations to the English government with a view to reduce the severity of Napoleon’s captivity at St. Helena.
It is customary to ascribe to Napoleon creative originality as a lawgiver. This is a part of the Napoleonic legend that has been upset by the industrious investigations of the partisans of the French Revolution, working under a famous professor at the Sorbonne. In many ways these scholars have rescued from obscurity the positive achievements of the Revolutionary statesmen, and it is now certain that the various codes of Napoleon carry out the principles of procedure and justice foreshadowed in the preliminary work done by the Constituent Assembly and the Convention. Napoleon’s own temperament is seen in the influence he brought to bear upon his lawyers to provide for rapidity in procedure and in execution of judgment, and in the increase of tribunals in which business men played an important rôle.
In education the Emperor’s influence was not so beneficial. He had little sympathy with any type of training that was not practical, and he had no sympathy at all with professorial free speech. Indeed, he expected the teaching profession to take its model from the Grand Army. There was to be little chance for personal development, each man marched in an appropriate rank under orders from a superior. The result of the iron-clad educational régime is acknowledged to have been most unsatisfactory, and it has been one of the most brilliant and most arduous achievements of the Third Republic to abolish the Napoleonic ideals of university teaching, and to substitute for them a system which encourages local and personal freedom. The change has already justified itself, for France is now close to Germany as the home of erudition in many fields of research in which Germany for years justly claimed an uncontested primacy.
The supreme position of Napoleon as a military commander has often led his admirers to affirm that he was infallible in his strategy. He encouraged this tendency at St. Helena, for, when he was composing his Memoirs, he invariably shifted the responsibility for errors in his battles to the shoulders of his lieutenants. He was an expert in manipulating figures, and he had such a good memory that he could always compose a most plausible lie. For years people supposed that the Russian expedition failed because of the extreme cold, and that the defeat at Waterloo might have been turned into a victory if the Emperor’s orders had been strictly carried out by Grouchy and if Ney had advanced more rapidly, as he was bidden to do by his commander-in-chief. These are misrepresentations—are the efforts of a man who wished to manipulate history for his own benefit. When, however, he was not dictating as an exile, Napoleon often enough expressed the truth about himself spontaneously. He allowed, for example, that he had been repeatedly defeated, and on more than one occasion he conceded to his marshals the possession of military talent superior to his own. One year after the Russian disaster he owned that the invasion had been ruined by blunders of his own. He was just as sweeping, too, in condemning various critical phases of his policy. He condemned the attack upon Spain not only as a wholesale blunder, but as a series of blunders in detail, and he characterized the invasion of Russia, while the Spanish War was unfinished, as a hopeless undertaking. Once, speaking to Talleyrand, he said, “I have made so many mistakes in my life that I am not ashamed of them.” It was a characteristic trait of his outlook on his own career that he imagined himself carried on as the instrument of deeds and acts which he could not justify. “I am not,” he once exclaimed, “a man, but a thing.”
Napoleon’s lack of appreciation of moral standards both in public and in private life is notorious, but he was no hypocrite. The one pleasing side of his character was his devotion to his family. Here the clear light of his intellect could not reach. It is true he made grotesque mistakes in putting his brothers into positions for which they were manifestly unfitted, but this sign of weakness shows that, after all, Napoleon was not entirely selfish. He seems to have had little actual patriotism. He was not a Frenchman either by descent or by sympathy, and what he accomplished was done at the expense of the French people. He understood some of their characteristics, but his own point of view was so practical that there were whole fields of achievement signalized in the records of French genius that he never appreciated. On lower planes of action, however, his driving power was immense, and the very terror he created by the success of his concentrated individualism prepared the way for that progressive acknowledgment of public justice and social righteousness which characterized the civilization of the nineteenth century. In spite of all his limitations, it seems impossible to point to a more marvelous career in the annals of humanity.