CHAPTER XXXIII

NAPOLEON 1

THE Austrian diplomat, Prince Metternich, at his death in 1859, left a mass of letters, documents, and personal recollections of his career. In the complete edition, prepared for publication by his son, they extend to eight volumes. No part of the work is of greater interest than that which presents his opinions of Napoleon. With the French emperor Metternich was thrown in intimate contact after 1806, when he took up his residence in Paris as ambassador. "I have seen and studied Napoleon," writes Metternich, "in the moments of his greatest success; I have seen and followed him in those of his decline; and though he may have attempted to induce me to form wrong conclusions about him it was often his interest to do - he never succeeded. I may then flatter myself with having seized the essential traits of his character, and with having formed an impartial judgment with respect to it, while the great majority of his contemporaries have seen, as it were through a prism, only the brilliant sides and the defective or evil sides of a man whom the force of circumstances and great personal qualities raised to a height of power unexampled in modern history."

160. Mental Characteristics 2

as

In my relations with Napoleon, relations which from the beginning I endeavored to make frequent and confidential,

1 Memoirs of Prince Metternich, 1773-1815, translated by Mrs. Alexander Napier. 2 vols. New York, 1880. Charles Scribner's Sons.

2 Metternich, Mémoires, vol. i, pp. 271-275.

what at first struck me most was the remarkable perspicuity and grand simplicity of his mind and its processes. Conversation with him always had a charm for me, difficult to define. Seizing the essential point of subjects, stripping them of useless accessories, developing his thought and never ceasing to elaborate it till he had made it perfectly clear and conclusive, always finding the fitting word for the thing, or inventing one where the usage of the language had not created it, his conversation was ever full of interest. He did not converse, he talked; by the wealth of his ideas and the facility of his elocution, he was able to lead the conversation, and one of his habitual expressions was, "I see what you want; you wish to come to such or such a point; well, let us go straight to it."

Yet he did not fail to listen to the remarks and objections which were addressed to him; he accepted them, questioned them, or opposed them, without losing the tone or overstepping the bounds of a business discussion, and I have never felt the least difficulty in saying to him what I believed to be the truth, even when it was not likely to please him. . . .

He had little scientific knowledge, although his partisans encouraged the belief that he was a profound mathematician. His knowledge of mathematical science would not have raised him above the level of any officer destined, as he was himself, for the artillery; but his natural abilities supplied the want of knowledge. He became a legislator and administrator, as he became a great soldier, by following his own instinct. The turn of his mind always led him toward the positive; he disliked vague ideas, and hated equally the dreams of visionaries and the abstraction of idealists, and treated as mere nonsense everything that was not clearly and practically presented to him. He valued only those sciences which can be controlled and verified by the senses or which rest on observation and experience. He had the greatest contempt for the false philosophy and the false philanthropy of the eighteenth century. Among the chief teachers of these doctrines, Voltaire was the special object of his aversion, and he even went so far as to

attack, whenever he had the opportunity, the general opinion as to Voltaire's literary power.

Napoleon was not irreligious in the ordinary sense of the word. . . . A Christian and a Catholic, he recognized in religion alone the right to govern human societies. He looked on Christianity as the basis of all real civilization; and considered Catholicism as the form of worship most favorable to the maintenance of order and the true tranquillity of the moral world; Protestantism as a source of trouble and disagreements. Personally indifferent to religious practices, he respected them too much to permit the slightest ridicule of those who followed them....

He was gifted with a particular tact for recognizing those men who could be useful to him. He discovered in them very quickly the side by which he could best attach them to his interest. . . . He had, above all, studied the national character of the French, and the history of his life proved that he had understood it rightly. He privately regarded the Parisians as children, and often compared Paris to the opera. Having reproached him one day with the palpable falsehoods which formed the chief part of his bulletins, he said to me with a smile, "They are not written for you; the Parisians believe everything, and I might tell them a great deal more which they would not refuse to accept."

161. Political Ideas 1

It frequently happened that he turned his conversation into historical discussions. These discussions generally revealed his imperfect knowledge of facts, but an extreme sagacity in appreciating causes and foreseeing consequences. He guessed more than he knew, and, while lending to persons and events the color of his own mind, he explained them in an ingenious manner. As he always made use of the same quotations, he must have drawn from a very few books, and those principally abridgments, the most salient points of ancient history and

1 Metternich, Mémoires, vol. i, pp. 275-277.

the history of France. He, however, charged his memory with a collection of names and facts sufficiently copious to impose on those whose studies had been still less thorough than his own. His heroes were Alexander, Cæsar, and, above all, Charlemagne. He was singularly occupied with his claim to be the successor of Charlemagne by right and title. He would lose himself in interminable discussions with me in endeavoring to sustain this paradox by the feeblest reasoning. . .

One thing which he always regretted extremely was, that he could not invoke the principle of Legitimacy as the basis of his power. Few men have been so profoundly conscious as he was that authority deprived of this foundation is carious, fragile, and open to attack. He never lost an opportunity of anxiously protesting against those who imagined that he occupied the throne as a usurper. "The throne of France,"

pre

he said to me once, "was vacant. Louis XVI had not been able to maintain himself. If I had been in his place, the Revolution notwithstanding the immense progress it had made in men's minds during the preceding reign — would never have been consummated. The king overthrown, the Republic was master of the soil of France. It is that which I have replaced. The old throne of France is buried under its rubbish; I had to found a new one. The Bourbons could not reign over this creation. My strength lies in my fortune: I am new, like the Empire; there is, therefore, a perfect homogeneity between the Empire and myself."

...

He was also much impressed with the idea of the divine origin of supreme authority. He said to me one day, shortly after his marriage with the archduchess, "I see that the empress, in writing to her father, addresses her letter to His Sacred and Imperial Majesty. Is this title customary with you?" I toid him that it was, from the tradition of the old German Empire, which bore the title of the Holy Empire, and because it was also attached to the Apostolic crown of Hungary. Napoleon then replied, in a grave tone, "It is a fine custom, and a good expression. Power comes from God, and it is that alone which

places it beyond the attacks of men.

Hence I shall adopt

the title some day."...

162. Personality 1

Napoleon looked upon himself as a being isolated from the rest of the world, made to govern it, and to direct every one according to his own will. He had no more regard for men than a foreman in a manufactory feels for his workpeople. The person to whom he was most attached was Duroc. "He loves me as a dog loves his master," was the expression he used in speaking to me about him. Berthier's feeling for him he compared to that of a child's nurse. These comparisons, far from being opposed to his theory of the motives which actuate men, were the natural consequence of it, for where he met with sentiments which he could not explain simply by self-interest, he attributed them to a kind of instinct.

Much has been said of Napoleon's superstition, and almost as much of his want of personal bravery. Both of these accusations rest either on false ideas or mistaken observations. Napoleon believed in fortune, and who has made the trial of it that he has? He liked to boast of his good star; he was very glad that the common herd was willing to believe him to be a privileged being; but he did not deceive himself about himself. What is more, he did not care to grant too large a share to fortune in considering his elevation. I have often heard him say, "They call me lucky, because I am able; it is weak men who accuse the strong of good fortune."

In private life, without being amiable, he was good-natured, and even carried indulgence to the point of weakness. A good son and good kinsman, with those little peculiarities that are met with more particularly in the family interiors of the Italian bourgeoisie, he allowed the extravagant courses of some of his relations without using sufficient strength of will to stop them, even when it would have been clearly to his interest to do so.

1 Metternich, Mémoires, vol. i, pp. 277-280.