The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (Vol. 1-4). William Milligan Sloane
revolutionary novelty; emotional yearnings for some vague Utopia—all fell into fruitful soil and produced a rank harvest, mostly of straw and stalks, although there was some sound grain. The thought of the time was a powerful factor in determining the course and the quality of events throughout all Europe. No nation was altogether unmoved. The center of agitation was in France, although the little Calvinistic state of Geneva brought forth the prophet and writer of the times.
Rousseau was a man of small learning but great insight. Originating almost nothing, he set forth the ideas of others with incisive distinctness, often modifying them to their hurt, but giving to the form in which he wrote them an air of seductive practicability and reality which alone threw them into the sphere of action. Examining Europe at large, he found its social and political institutions so hardened and so unresponsive that he declared it incapable of movement without an antecedent general crash and breaking up. No laws, he reasoned, could be made because there were no means by which the general will could express itself, such was the rigidity of absolutism and feudalism. The splendid studies of Montesquieu, which revealed to the French the eternal truths underlying the constitutional changes in England, had enlightened and captivated the best minds of his country, but they were too serious, too cold, too dry to move the quick, bright temperament of the people at large. This was the work of Rousseau. Consummate in his literary power, he laid the ax at the root of the tree in his fierce attack on the prevailing education, sought a new basis for government in his peculiar modification of the contract theory, and constructed a substitute system of sentimental morals to supplant the old authoritative one which was believed to underlie all the prevalent iniquities in religion, politics, and society.
His entire structure lacked a foundation either in history or in reason. But the popular fancy was fascinated. The whole flimsy furniture in the chambers of the general mind vanished. New emotions, new purposes, new sanctions appeared in its stead. There was a sad lack of ethical definitions, an over-zealous iconoclasm as to religion, but there were many high conceptions of regenerating society, of liberty, of brotherhood, of equality. The influence of this movement was literally ubiquitous; it was felt wherever men read or thought or talked, and were connected, however remotely, with the great central movement of civilization.
No land and no family could to all outward appearance be further aside from the main channel of European history in the eighteenth century than the island of Corsica and an obscure family by the name of Buonaparte which had dwelt there since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Yet that isolated land and that unknown family were not merely to be drawn into the movement, they were to illustrate its most characteristic phases. Rousseau, though mistakenly, forecast a great destiny for Corsica, declaring in his letters on Poland that it was the only European land capable of movement, of law-making, of peaceful renovation. It was small and remote, but it came near to being an actual exemplification of his favorite and fundamental dogma concerning man in a state of nature, of order as arising from conflict, of government as resting on general consent and mutual agreement among the governed. Toward Corsica, therefore, the eyes of all Europe had long been directed. There, more than elsewhere, the setting of the world-drama seemed complete in miniature, and, in the closing quarter of the eighteenth century, the action was rapidly unfolding a plot of universal interest.
A lofty mountain-ridge divides the island into eastern and western districts. The former is gentler in its slopes, and more fertile. Looking, as it does, toward Italy, it was during the middle ages closely bound in intercourse with that peninsula; richer in its resources than the other part, it was more open to outside influences, and for this reason freer in its institutions. The rugged western division had come more completely under the yoke of feudalism, having close affinity in sympathy, and some relation in blood, with the Greek, Roman, Saracenic, and Teutonic race-elements in France and Spain. The communal administration of the eastern slope, however, prevailed eventually in the western as well, and the differences of origin, wealth, and occupation, though at times the occasion of intestine discord, were as nothing compared with the common characteristics which knit the population of the entire island into one national organization, as much a unit as their insular territory.
The people of this small commonwealth were in the main of Italian blood. Some slight connection with the motherland they still maintained in the relations of commerce, and by the education of their professional men at Italian schools. While a small minority supported themselves as tradesmen or seafarers, the mass of the population was dependent for a livelihood upon agriculture. As a nation they had long ceased to follow the course of general European development. They had been successively the subjects of Greece, Rome, and the Califate, of the German-Roman emperors, and of the republic of Pisa. Their latest ruler was Genoa, which had now degenerated into an untrustworthy oligarchy. United to that state originally by terms which gave the island a "speaker" or advocate in the Genoese senate, and recognized the most cherished habits of a hardy, natural-minded, and primitive people, they had little by little been left a prey to their own faults in order that their unworthy mistress might plead their disorders as an excuse for her tyranny. Agriculture languished, and the minute subdivision of arable land finally rendered its tillage almost profitless.
Among a people who are isolated not only as islanders, but also as mountaineers, old institutions are particularly tenacious of life: that of the vendetta, or blood revenge, with the clanship it accompanies, never disappeared from Corsica. In the centuries of Genoese rule the carrying of arms was winked at, quarrels became rife, and often family confederations, embracing a considerable part of the country, were arrayed one against the other in lawless violence. The feudal nobility, few in number, were unrecognized, and failed to cultivate the industrial arts in the security of costly strongholds as their class did elsewhere, while the fairest portions of land not held by them were gradually absorbed by the monasteries, a process favored by Genoa as likely to render easier the government of a turbulent people. The human animal, however, throve. Rudely clad in homespun, men and women alike cultivated a simplicity of dress surpassed only by their plain living. There was no wealth except that of fields and flocks, their money consequently was debased and almost worthless. The social distinctions of noble and peasant survived only in tradition, and all classes intermingled without any sense of superiority or inferiority. Elegance of manner, polish, grace, were unsought and existed only by natural refinement, which was rare among a people who were on the whole simple to boorishness. Physically they were, however, admirable. All visitors were struck by the repose and self-reliance of their countenances. The women were neither beautiful, stylish, nor neat. Yet they were considered modest and attractive. The men were more striking in appearance and character. Of medium stature and powerful mold, with black hair, fine teeth, and piercing eyes; with well-formed, agile, and sinewy limbs; sober, brave, trustworthy, and endowed with many other primitive virtues as well, the Corsican was everywhere sought as a soldier, and could be found in all the armies of the southern continental states.
In their periodic struggles against Genoese encroachments and tyranny, the Corsicans had produced a line of national heroes. Sampiero, one of these, had in the sixteenth century incorporated Corsica for a brief hour with the dominions of the French crown, and was regarded as the typical Corsican. Dark, warlike, and revengeful, he had displayed a keen intellect and a fine judgment. Simple in his dress and habits, untainted by the luxury then prevalent in the courts of Florence and Paris, at both of which he resided for considerable periods, he could kill his wife without a shudder when she put herself and child into the hands of his enemies to betray him. Hospitable and generous, but untamed and terrible; brusque, dictatorial, and without consideration or compassion; the offspring of his times and his people, he stands the embodiment of primeval energy, physical and mental.
The submission of a people like this to a superior force was sullen, and in the long century which followed, the energies generally displayed in a well-ordered life seemed among them to be not quenched but directed into the channels of their passions and their bodily powers, which were ready on occasion to break forth in devastating violence. In 1729 began a succession of revolutionary outbursts, and at last in 1730 the communal assemblies united in a national convention, choosing two chiefs, Colonna-Ceccaldi and Giafferi, to lead in the attempt to rouse the nation to action and throw off the unendurable yoke. English philanthropists furnished the munitions of war. The Genoese were beaten in successive battles, even after they brought into the field eight thousand German mercenaries purchased from the Emperor Charles