LANFREY'S NAPOLEON I.
"NAPOLEON has for the most part had no judgment passed upon him but that either of profound hatred or of profound attach- ment." With these words M. Lanfrey opens a work which would be remarkable in itself, but is especially remarkable as coming from a Frenchman. Throughout his book he bears steadily in mind the rule he has laid down that a historian ought not to be national in the narrow sense of the word, but should represent the interests of humanity. Neither blinded by the glories, nor soured by the disastrous results of the First Empire, the author traces calmly and critically Napoleon's progress from a lieutenancy in the French army to the dictatorship of Europe. If at times we detect some slight bias, if M. Lanfrey seems to us to dwell by pre- ference on the faults and blemishes in Napoleon's character, we must remember the difficulty of dealing with one who has long been a popular idol, and who has been admired even when he was detested. M. Lanfrey never fails to recognise the genius which was shown in Napoleon's battles, and even when he points out the mistake into which earlier historians have fallen in ascrib- ing to a sudden inspiration the abandonment of the invasion of England for the march upon Germany that began with Ulm and culminated at Austerlitz, he gives Napoleon full credit for the vastness of the conception. But while allowing for all that fills the minds of most observers with wonder, he brings forcibly before us the cynicism, the rapacity, the dissimulation, the falsehood, the petty jealousies, and the petty furies which were inconsistent with true greatness. One of the most damaging features of the present work is the constant recurrence of the accusation against Napoleon—an accusation for which there is so much ground—of having contributed to falsify his own history. The blackness of such crimes as the murder of the Due d'Enghien, and of such deeds of ingratitude as the proscription of Moreau, is intensified by the attempts of the chief actor to relieve himself of all responsibility. Nor was it only in such cases as these, where the wish to soften down guilt might prove too powerful for the voice of truth, that Napoleon pursued a policy of suppression. Wherever his own fame was concerned, wherever he came in contact with a possible rival, wherever one of his plans had failed, he sedulously perverted the true facts for his own advantage. His description of the battle of Marengo, his criticisms on the battle of Hohenlinden, his censures of the Admirals who could not cope with the English, his assignment of reasons for the destruction of Venetian liberty, are all marked by the sa-ne spirit. We cannot wonder if the general effect of a work which has to expose so many of these inaccuracies is far from being favourable, and if the impression left on our minds by the character presented to us is one of meanness combined with power and grandeur of intellect marred by pettiness of nature.
One aspect of Napoleon's character which is not new to us, but which is brought out with great clearness by M. L tufrey, is the tendency he invariably showed for playing a part. We see this, of course, most strongly in the instances given in this book of Napoleon's duplicity in his intercourse with the Pope and other ecclesiastics. While addressing the Pope to his face as "Very Holy Father," and writing to him, "I send my aide-de-camp to express to your Holiness all the esteem and deep veneration which I entertain for your person, and I entreat your Holiness to believe
that my desire is to give proof on all occasions of my respect and veneration," Napoleon, in letters to his familiars, talked of the Pope as an old fox, and as one of the pritraille upon whom he was about to impose ignominious terms. Again, in public, • The Ifislory of Napoleon the First. By P. Lanfrey. Vols. 1 and 2. London Macmillan and Co. 1871 and 1872.
Napoleon spoke with edifying compunction of the "exemplary life and pure morality" of the Italian prelates, adding, "I have some- times felt in talking with these good men as if we were back again in the first centuries of the Church." But when he was alone with his intimates, for "venerable prelates" he substituted such names as "the black coats" or "twaddling, imbecile dotards." The result of this studied dissimulation appeared almost openly on the con- clusion of the Concordat and at Napoleon's coronation. On the first of these occasions there was stifled laughter in the Council of State at the reading of the brief in which Pius VII. "restored to civil life his very dear son Talleyrand." The purely theatrical character of the coronation was shown by previous rehearsals of the entire ceremony, in which the courtiers were represented by little wooden dolls ; yet, as M. Lanfrey observes, "in spite of the natural facility of courtiers for imitating wooden dolls," the whole thing was a failure. Half the assembly yawned, the other half with difficulty kept from laughter. "If a single laugh," wrote the Archbishop of Mechlin, "had given the signal, we should all have been seized with the irrepressible laughter of the gods of Homer." Napoleon himself fell into such convulsions of laughter when Consalvi, decked in the Roman purple, presented him with the copy of the treaty, that the whole assembly was confused. This was the natural penalty for over-acting, but we should have thought Napoleon's long prac- tice would have made him proof. Everything about him, from his outward appearance, "the sickly thinness of his frail body, which seemed consumed by the fire of genius, and was in reality made of muscles of steel," to the studied indiscretion of his lan- guage, his simulated passion, his assumed generosity, had an air of insincerity. Sometimes, no doubt, there was real temper in the outbursts with which Napoleon relieved his diplomatic in- trigues, but with such a thorough dissembler it is difficult to tell when he is in earnest. M. Laufrey says there were instances of Napoleon's forfeiting, by his ungovernable impatience, the advant- ages he had gained through his consummate skill in deception ; an admission which is a little inconsistent with the later remark that "he calculated everything, even his imprudence in lan- guage." We can hardly think there was any deep-laid scheme in the passionate words in which the conqueror by land inveighed against the more fickle element that baffled him,— " senseless outbursts," as M. Lanfrey says, in describing these fits of passion, "which cost the life of Villeneuve and so many other intrepid sailors, and were only worthy of that Asiatic King who caused the sea to be flogged for its indocility." Again, the picture given us by M. Lanfrey of Napoleon's share in the preparation of that Code which is associated with his name and reflects such lustre upon it, while bringing before us a finished actor, lets us also see the childish petulance of his character :—
"He joined in the debates by sallies of vehement and original language, of which it would be unjust to deny the force and oratorical effect ; but their success was more especially due to the contrast that they formed to the grave and measured style of the jurisconsults. Initiated into a knowledge of these matters, as he had been into those of the canon law, by a few books hastily read, and by long conversations with Cambacdres and Portalis, addressing a public composed of his adherents or his familiars, contradicted only so far as to excite and give effect to his eloquence, sometimes he seemed to lead the debates that in reality he only followed, at others he interposed in the discus- sion by trenchant and sententious remarks ; his derision, like the reserved blows in a tournament, of which the honour was offered to sovereigns, often turned the balance, though on secondary points they sometimes ventured to oppose him, which completed the illusion, and he left his simple auditors astonished at his newly-discovered erudition and pene- trated by his omniscience. The next day Locre dressed up those impro- visations before they were presented to the public in the Moniteur. Thibaudean assures us that the alterations weakened them ; it is very possible that they destroyed the picturesque energy of certain expres- sions, but on the other hand, Looné gave them a correctness that Bonaparte never possessed in our language, and he struck out the eccentricities that would have betrayed the ignorance of the legislator."
If M. Lanfrey's careful analysis of the nominal author's contri- butions to the Code tend to diminish that which hitherto has been Napoleon's most undisputed glory, some of his other achievements are similarly depreciated. We are told of the battle of Marengo that it marks the point at which the adventurer begins to injure the Head of the State. Of Austerlitz we read that "one thing alone has the privilege of purifying and ennobling a field of battle, and that is the triumph of a great idea ; here it was not a principle that was involved, but a man." The passage of the St. Bernard, which has been so much extolled, and which M. Thiers calls a prodigy greater than that of Hannibal, is reduced to its proper level by a consideration of the abundant resources possessed by the French troops, who were on their own frontier, and traversed a road frequented for ages ; while the Carthaginians were five hundred leagues away from home, in a wild and unknown region, contend- ing with a climate for which they were unsuited, and surrounded' by countless difficulties. But the severest criticism which this book contains on one whom we cannot in strictness call its hero' is to be found in the following passage, where M. Lanfrey 8111121, up, with damaging effect, the conclusions to which he is led by his close study of Napoleon's character :— " In- all times the true and distinctive mark of political genius has- been aptitude for founding a solid and durable work, adapting it to the deep needs of a people and an epoch. The incomparable elements that Bonaparte possessed to realise such a work he only employs to astonish and to dazzle men. He tries to strike their imagination, not to satisfy their reason or their .interests. The fate of his country is only a secondary object in comparison with the apotheosis which he dreams of for himself. Beyond this purely personal ideal of glorification, we fail to discover in him any persistent or definite spring of action. It is almost impossible for him to stop at a determined end ; he has no sooner advanced a step than he goes farther still, again still farther, without ever waiting till the ground is firm under his feet. For him, a conquest is a stepping-stone for a fresh conquest. Hence the hasty, feverish, impromptu character of his political creations, at home as well as abroad-. All that he does in this respect, with the impatience and rapidity of an ambition greedy enough to devour a world, is in his mind only a transi- tion, a beginning capable of an indefinite extension. Consequently,. everything remains unfinished, in a state of outline and experiment. He never acts with the idea of the definite, he wishes to retain to the last the power of changing everything according to opportunity, and' above all things, according to the humour of his insatiable cravings. Ho never aims at stability, but at size, at splendour ; grandeur does not. satisfy him, he must have the immeasurable, the gigantic ; and beyond thisperilous domain, something else attracts him still more ; it is the unknown and the marvellous. Under the sting of this irresistible dis- quietude, he forgets the road to follow and the end to attain in the- movement itself. Ile cares less about the final result than about the means that he will display, and the prodigious effect that he will pro- duce. It matters little to him whether the work is ephemeral, providec? he finds in it more activity, more noise, more glory. The task to ac- complish and the means necessary to insure success are trifles beside. the grand adventures for which they furnish him the opportunity or the pretext. This infatuation was so much the more terrible that it had taken possession of a cold and positive mind, whose most chimerical dreams clothed forms of mathematical rigour, and had at their service a military genius without equal. With enthusiastic temperaments exaltation is only temporary ; but the studied frenzy of a calculating mind is without remedy, because it does not depend on a sentiment, but on the very form of the intellect itself."
The reader of one such passage, isolated, as it is here, from so many of the facts on which it is based, may think that M. Lanfrey has fallen into one of those excesses to which the open- ing of his work alluded. But those who read the whole book with the care which it deserves will accept its author's judgment.- They will sympathise with his generous indignation against the "shameless cupidity which directed the first occupation of Italy," and will rejoice to find a Frenchman proclaiming that "to rob' the Italians of their works of genius was in some sense to despoil, them of their past and of their glory." The conqueror who sent for artists from Paris to select the best pictures for removal to the Louvre has hitherto found poets to lament the restoration of these treasures to their true owners. M. Lanfrey takes a higher ground, and teaches some of his countrymen a valuable lesson; It may be that they will be slow to learn it from him, and we must not expect his book to be altogether popular in France. People cannot quite shut their eyes to the blaze of glory which so many and such brilliant victories threw over the name of Napoleon, and there are some who will always turn from the spectacle of the subtle, crafty, over-bearing, and over-reaching usurper, to the hero of the bridge of Arcola and of the plateau of. Rivoli.
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