The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (Vol. 1-4). William Milligan Sloane
with nice adaptation to some great result. Gradually and informally a kind of body-guard was organized, which, as the idea grew familiar, was skilfully developed into a picked corps, the best officers and finest soldiers being made to feel honored in its membership. The constant attendance of such men necessarily secluded the general-in-chief from those colleagues who had hitherto been familiar comrades. Something in the nature of formal etiquette once established, it was easy to extend its rules and confirm them. The generals were thus separated further and further from their superior, and before the new year they had insensibly adopted habits of address which displayed a high outward respect, and virtually terminated all comradeship with one who had so recently been merely the first among equals. Bonaparte's innate tendency to command was under such circumstances hardened into a habit of imperious dictation. In view of what had been accomplished, it would have been impossible, even for the most stubborn democrat, to check the process. Not one of Bonaparte's principles had failed to secure triumphant vindication.
In later years Napoleon himself believed, and subsequent criticism has confirmed his opinion, that the Italian campaign, taken as a whole, was his greatest. The revolution of any public system, social, political, or military, is always a gigantic task. It was nothing less than this which Bonaparte had wrought, not in one, but in all three spheres, during the summer and autumn of 1796. The changes, like those of most revolutions, were changes of emphasis and degree in the application of principles already divined. "Divide and conquer" was an old maxim; it was a novelty to see it applied in warfare and politics as Bonaparte applied it in Italy. It has been remarked that the essential difference between Napoleon and Frederick the Great was that the latter had not ten thousand men a month to kill. The notion that war should be short and terrible had, indeed, been clear to the great Prussian; Carnot and the times afforded the opportunity for its conclusive demonstration by the genius of the greater Corsican. Concentration of besiegers to breach the walls of a town was nothing new; but the triumphant application of the same principle to an opposing line of troops, though well known to Julius Cæsar, had been forgotten, and its revival was Napoleon's masterpiece. The martinets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had so exaggerated the formalities of war that the relation of armies to the fighting-ground had been little studied and well-nigh forgotten; the use of the map and the compass, the study of reliefs and profiles in topography, produced in Bonaparte's hands results that seemed to duller minds nothing short of miraculous. One of these was to oppose the old-school rigid formation of troops by any formation more or less open and irregular according to circumstances, but always the kind best suited to the character of the seat of war. The first two days at Arcola were the triumphant vindication of this concept. Finally, there was a fascination for the French soldiers in the primitive savagery of their general, which, though partly concealed, and somewhat held in by training, nevertheless was willing that the spoils of their conquest should be devoted to making the victorious contestants opulent; which scorned the limitations of human powers in himself and them, and thus accomplished feats of strength and stratagem which gratified to satiety that love for the uncommon, the ideal, and the great which is inherent in the spirit of their nation. In the successful combination and evolution of all these elements there was a grandeur which Bonaparte and every soldier of his army appreciated at its full value.
The military side of Bonaparte's genius is ordinarily considered the strongest. Judged by what is easily visible in the way of immediate consequences and permanent results, this appears to be true; and yet it was only one of many sides. Next in importance, if not equal to it, was his activity in politics and diplomacy. It is easy to call names, to stigmatize the peoples of Italy, all the nations even of western Europe, as corrupt and enervated, to laugh at their politics as antiquated, and to brand their rulers as incapable fools. An ordinary man can, by the assistance of the knowledge, education, and insight acquired by the experience of his race through an additional century, turn and show how commonplace was the person who toppled over such an old rotten structure. This is the method of Napoleon's detractors, except when, in addition, they first magnify his wickedness, and then further distort the proportion by viewing his fine powers through the other end of the glass. We all know how easy great things are when once they have been accomplished, how simple the key to a mystery when once it has been revealed. Morally considered, Bonaparte was a child of nature, born to a mean estate, buffeted by a cruel and remorseless society, driven in youth to every shift for self-preservation, compelled to fight an unregenerate world with its own weapons. He had not been changed in the flash of a gun. Elevation to reputation and power did not diminish the duplicity of his character; on the contrary, it possibly intensified it. Certainly the fierce light which began to beat upon him brought it into greater prominence. Truth, honor, unselfishness are theoretically the virtues of all philosophy; practically they are the virtues of Christian men in Christian society. Where should the scion of a Corsican stock, ignorant of moral or religious sentiment, thrown into the atmosphere and surroundings of the French Revolution, learn to practise them?
Such considerations are indispensable in the observation of Bonaparte's progress as a politician. His first settlement with the various peoples of central Italy was, as he had declared, only provisional. The uncertain status created by it was momentarily not unwelcome to the Directory. Their policy was to destroy existing institutions, and leave order to evolve itself from the chaos as best it could. Doctrinaires as they were, they meant to destroy absolute monarchy in Italy, as everywhere else, if possible, and then to stop, leaving the liberated peoples to their own devices. Some fondly believed that out of anarchy would arise, in accordance with "the law of nature," a pure democracy; while others had the same faith that the result would be constitutional monarchy. Moreover, things appear simpler in the perspective of distance than they do near at hand. The sincerity of Bonaparte's republicanism was like the sincerity of his conduct—an affair of time and place, a consistency with conditions and not with abstractions. He knew the Italian mob, and faithfully described it in his letters as dull, ignorant, and unreliable, without preparation or fitness for self-government. He was willing to establish the forms of constitutional administration; but in spite of hearty support from many disciples of the Revolution, he found those forms likely, if not certain, to crumble under their own weight, and was convinced that the real sovereignty must for years to come reside in a strong protectorate of some kind. It appeared to him a necessity of war that these peoples should relieve the destitution of the French treasury and army, a necessity of circumstances that France should be restored to vigor and health by laying tribute on their treasures of art and science, as on those of all the world, and a necessity of political science that artificial boundaries should be destroyed, as they had been in France, to produce the homogeneity of condition essential to national or administrative unity.
The Italians themselves understood neither the policy of the French executive nor that of their conqueror. The transitional position in which the latter had left them produced great uneasiness. The terrified local authorities asked nothing better than to be left as they were, with a view to profiting by the event, whatever it might be. After every Austrian success there were numerous local revolts, which the French garrison commanders suppressed with severity. Provisional governments soon come to the end of their usefulness, and the enemies of France began to take advantage of the disorder in order to undo what had been done. The English, for example, had seized Porto Ferrajo in place of Leghorn; the Pope had gone further, and, in spite of the armistice, was assembling an army for the recovery of Bologna, Ferrara, and his other lost legations. Thus it happened that in the intervals of the most laborious military operations, a political activity, both comprehensive and feverish, kept pace in Bonaparte's mind with that which was needed to regulate his campaigning.
At the very outset there was developed an antagonism between the notions of the Directory and Bonaparte's interests. The latter observed all the forms of consulting his superiors, but acted without the slightest reference to their instructions, often even before they could receive his despatches. Both he and they knew the weakness of the French government, and the inherent absurdity of the situation. The story of French conquest in Italy might be told exactly as if the invading general were acting solely on his own responsibility. In his proclamations to the Italians was one language; in his letters to the executive, another; in a few confidential family communications, still another; in his own heart, the same old idea of using each day as it came to advance his own fortunes. As far as he had any love of country, it was expended on France, and what we may call his principles were conceptions derived