Napoleon - Vincent Cronin

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Man experiences the most exquisitely pleasant feelings when he is alone at night, meditating on the origin of Nature. Sentiments such as this would be his most precious gift had he not also received love of country, love of wife and ‘divine friendship’. ‘A wife and children! A father and mother, brothers and sisters, a friend! Yet some people find fault with Nature and ask why they were ever born!’

      Feeling makes us love what is beautiful and just, but it also makes us rebel against tyranny and evil. It is the second aspect we must try to develop and protect from perversion. The good legislator must therefore guide feeling by reason. At the same time he must allow complete and absolute freedom of thought, and freedom to speak and write except where this would damage the social order. Tenderness, for instance, must not degenerate into flabbiness, and we must never stage Voltaire’s Alzire, in which the dying hero instead of execrating his assassin pities and pardons him. It is reason that distinguishes genuine feeling from violent passion, reason that keeps society going, reason that develops a natural feeling and makes it great. To love one’s country is an elementary feeling, but to love it above everything else is ‘the love of beauty in all its energy, the pleasure of helping to make a whole nation happy’.

      But there is a perverted kind of patriotism, engendered by ambition. Napoleon saves his most cutting language in order to denounce ambition, ‘with its pale complexion, wild eyes, hurried footsteps, jerky gestures and sardonic laugh’. Elsewhere, in his notebooks, he returns to the same theme: Brutus he calls an ambitious madman, and as for the fanatical Arab prophet Hakim who preached civil war and, having been blinded by an illness, hid his sightless eyes with a mask of silver, explaining that he wore it in order to prevent men being dazzled by the light radiating from his face, Napoleon scornfully comments: ‘To what lengths can a man be driven by his passion for fame!’

      Napoleon concludes his essay by contrasting with the ambitious egoist the genuine patriot, the man who lives in order to help others. Through courage and manly strength the patriot attains happiness. To live happily and to work for others’ happiness is the only religion worthy of God. What pleasure to die surrounded by one’s children and able to say: ‘I have ensured the happiness of a hundred families: I have had a hard life, but the State will benefit from it; through my worries my fellow citizens live calmly, through my perplexities they are happy, through my sorrows they are gay.’

      Such is the essay written by Second Lieutenant Buonaparte in his cramped billet in Auxonne between parades and sentry duty. He was doubtless disappointed when it did not win the prize: in fact none of the essays was deemed prizeworthy. But the essay had been well worth writing, for it is in some respects a life’s programme. The patriot is clearly Napoleon himself. His aim in life is to work for others’ happiness. The heroism and chivalry he had prized as a cadet are now eclipsed by patriotism of a more workaday kind. He has lost his admiration for the Cornelian hero standing on his rights; instead he sees himself as a member of a community, working for ‘a hundred families’. And he is not now a soldier, but a civilian.

      Napoleon does not include Christianity as a factor in happiness, and in this respect is typical of his age. As he wrote in his notebook, Christianity ‘declares that its kingdom is not of this world; how then can it stimulate affection for one’s native land, how can it inspire any feelings but scepticism, indifference and coldness for human affairs and government?’

      Napoleon’s trust in feeling was also typical of his age, beginning to weary of cynicism and masks. Where Napoleon is original is in recognizing that a dangerous confusion may arise between true feeling – virtue – and passion masquerading as sentiment. He is original in making reason, not the intensity of the feeling, the judge of the feeling’s worth. If pressed to list the criteria whereby reason acts, Napoleon would doubtless have named patriotism and values like truthfulness and generosity (but not forgiveness) learned from his parents, in other words some at least of the values of Christianity excluded from his essay.

      While Second Lieutenant Buonaparte in a small garrison town studied, planned reforms and envisaged the life he would like to lead, the larger world of France was moving towards a crisis. Perhaps the root trouble was that no one any longer possessed the power to act. The well-meaning, still popular Louis XVI tried to make much-needed tax reforms, but the lawyers who composed the Parlements consistently refused to register them. As one young Counsellor in the Paris Parlement explained to a visitor: ‘You must know, sir, that in France the job of a consellour is to oppose everything the King wants to do, even the good things.’ At every level France consisted of groups ossified in opposition, and the strong French critical spirit ridiculed any proposed reform. Lack of confidence crept over the nation, hitting trade hard in 1788. Then came an exceptionally severe winter in 1788–9. The Seine and other rivers froze; trade was impeded; cattle and sheep died. After many years of stability the price of bread, meat and goods rose sharply, and this at a time when many workshops were laying off men. Across France swept the fear of hunger.

      At the end of March 1789 in the small town of Seurre a barge was being loaded with wheat. The wheat had been bought by a Verdun businessman and was to be shipped to that town. The people of Seurre, convinced that their food was being bought up, rioted and prevented the barge sailing. The 64th was then stationed in Auxonne, twenty miles from Seurre, and its colonel, Baron Du Teil, sent a detachment of one hundred soldiers, with Napoleon among the officers, to restore order.

      In Seurre Napoleon came to know at first hand the mood of the French people, frightened and angry, as they clamoured not only for food but for social justice. What Napoleon thought and felt in 1789 is much less well documented than what he was reading and writing, but we do know that he believed every Frenchman had a right to subsistence, and sympathized with them over the high price of bread. On the other hand, he hated riots and mob action. When men of the 64th broke into headquarters and seized regimental funds; when Baron Du Teil’s country house was set on fire, Napoleon certainly disapproved. Lawyer’s son that he was, he wanted this popular movement to express itself constitutionally within the States-General.

      This in time happened. In February 1789 a certain Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, an ex-priest from Fréjus, published a pamphlet which swept the country. ‘What is the Third Estate?’ Sieyès asked. ‘Everything. What has it been in the political order up to now? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.’ The common people had found a pen, and presently found a voice, that of Mirabeau. Mirabeau was a nobleman with southern blood in his veins, and, like Napoleon, steeped in English history. Rejected by his fellow noblemen, he had been elected by the Third Estate of Aix, and it was in their name that Mirabeau spoke, ‘the defender,’ he said, ‘of a monarchy limited by law and the apostle of liberty guaranteed by a monarchy’.

      On 14 July 1789 a group of Parisians stormed the Bastille, but to Napoleon, far from Paris, this would have been an event comparable to the riots in Seurre. What interested him were the decrees of the Constituent Assembly, as the States-General now called itself. The Assembly abolished certain of the privileges of nobles and clergy, gave the vote to more than four and a half million men who possessed at least a little land or property, and in 1791 presented France with her first Constitution, thought up by Mirabeau, prefaced by a ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, of which the two key articles are the first and fourth: ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be based only upon public utility …;’ ‘Liberty consists in the power to do anything that does not injure others.’

      What was Napoleon’s reaction to these laws? He was a French nobleman. His friends and fellow officers were also French noblemen, and their brothers as likely as not on their way to becoming bishops or even cardinals. Because, as nobles, they shed, or were ready to shed, their blood for the King, they paid no taxes. They belonged to an élite, perhaps half a million among twenty-five million. Napoleon as a nobleman could rise to be marshal of France, and the fact that commoners could not, vastly increased his chances of getting to the top. Now these privileges were suddenly swept away, and many resented it. More than half of Napoleon’s fellow officers refused to accept the new situation and many, including his best friend, Alexandre des Mazis, decided to emigrate.

      Napoleon did not see the situation in terms of self-interest. What he saw was a Constitution which limited the monarchy by law. This was something he had been hoping

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