T HERE was a time when France extended to the Baltic, the Ebro and the Tiber; when the term “Frenchmen” included Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, Belgians, Dutch, Germans and even a few stray Danes, Poles and Letts; when Rome was the second city of France, and Amsterdam the third; when the Emperor of the French was also King of Italy and Mediator of Switzerland; when one of his brothers was King of Spain, another, King of Westphalia, and one of his generals King of Naples; when all Germany was ru

O F course, we all know him. He was rather short and corpulent, and he wore a cocked hat, a green coat with red facings, and white breeches. Sometimes, when the mood took him, he would appear in trailing robes, with a wreath of laurel round his forehead. Very appropriate, admittedly, but—that wreath does appear a little incongruous, does it not? Then there are times when we see him on a white horse in the midst of the battle. One or two dead men are lying near him in graceful attitudes; one or t

I T was a common saying in the Napoleonic army that every man in the ranks carried a Marshal’s bâton in his knapsack. This was correct in theory, but in actual practice it hardly proved true. Every one of the twenty-six Marshals of the First Empire had held important commands before the rank was instituted. Grouchy, the last Marshal to be created, was second-in-command of the Bantry Bay expedition in 1796, when Napoleon was just making his name; Jourdan had commanded the Army of the North as far

W E have already alluded to the intensely needy period of Napoleon’s life, which was mainly centred around the year 1795. He knew himself to be a world conqueror; he despised the shifty intriguers who controlled at that time both his own destiny and that of France; he bitterly envied the few insolent survivors of the old noblesse whom he had met, while his very bread was precariously earned. It was a maddening situation. Then circumstances suddenly took a change for the better. By a happy accide

A T the close of 1809 Napoleon was at the height of his power. Every country of Europe, except England, was his vassal or his ally, and he was about to send Masséna and a sufficient force to Spain to ensure that England also would cease from troubling. The circumstances which were to lead to the fall of his enormous empire were already well developed, but they were hardly obvious to the common eye, which was dazzled by his brilliance. The one element of weakness apparent was the lack of an heir

T HUS at the beginning of 1810 Napoleon found himself once more unmarried, and free to choose himself a new bride. There never was a choice so fraught with possibilities of disaster. It was not so much a matter of making the most advantageous selection, as of making the least dangerous. If he married a woman of inferior rank, all Europe would exultantly proclaim that it was because no royal family would admit him. If he married a princess of one of his subject kingdoms, Bavaria, Würtemberg or Sa

O NCE bitten, twice shy. Napoleon had had one wife of whom doubtful stories had circulated. He would run no risk with the new one. Marie Louise had been strictly guarded all her life. Napoleon determined that in that respect he would substitute scorpions for her father’s whips. No man was ever to be presented to his wife without his consent; under no circumstances whatever was she to be alone with a man at any time. To achieve his object he revived all the court ceremony of the Soleil Monarque;

I N the course of his military career Napoleon found he needed three different kinds of subordinate officers. First, he wanted men of supreme courage and vigour in action, whose other talents need not be more than mediocre. These he could keep under his own hand until the decisive moment arrived, and could then let loose, confident that they would complete the work which his strategic achievements had begun. Of this type, Ney, Augereau and Oudinot were examples. Then he needed a few generals who

W HEN the Marshalate was inaugurated, the first list afforded many opportunities for dissatisfaction, both among those included and those excluded. Men like Macdonald and St. Cyr, of high reputation and undoubted talents, found themselves ignored for political reasons, while giants of the Republican armies like Masséna found that Napoleon’s family feeling had given comparatively unknown men like Murat seniority over them. Masséna’s curt reply to congratulations on his new appointment was “Yes, o

N APOLEON was one of a large family, children of a shiftless father and a wonderful mother. Much the same might be said of a large number of other successful men—Moltke and Lincoln, for instance. But it is doubtful whether any importance from a eugenic point of view can be attached to this circumstance, for although some of the other Bonapartes showed undoubted talent in various directions, not one of them has ever displayed greatness comparable to the Emperor’s. Biologically, Napoleon might be

I F Napoleon’s brothers were all a generally hopeless lot, the same can by no means be said of his sisters. These stood out head and shoulders above the other women of the time; they were all distinguished by their force of character; whether they were married to nonentities or personalities they all did their best to wear the breeches—but they did not flinch from wearing nothing at all if the whim took them. They were all handsome women, and one of them, Pauline, was generally considered to be

‟B AD troops do not exist,” said Napoleon on one occasion. “There are only bad officers.” Napoleon did his best therefore to find good officers, and trusted that the rank and file would through them become good soldiers. And yet, was he successful either in his end or in his method? The army of 1796, which he did not train, was timid in retreat though terrible in advance. The men were fanatics, and similar strengths and weaknesses are typical of fanatics in large bodies. In 1800 Napoleon had an

I T would be as easy to omit all mention of Napoleon’s mistresses in a serious history as it would be difficult to omit the king’s mistresses from a history of Louis le Grand or Louis le Bien-Aimé. Napoleon was not the man to allow his policy to be influenced by women. Not one of the many with whom he came into contact could boast that she had deflected him one hairbreadth from the path he had mapped for himself. Not all Josephine’s tears could save the life of the young d’Enghien; not all Walew

P ERHAPS now we can see a little more clearly the man who was the centre of so much interest. To appreciate a man’s character it is not so much necessary to realize what he did, as to realize what he wanted to do, what he was fond of doing, and what he would have done had he been able; and on the other hand it is equally necessary to realize what it was he did not like doing. With Napoleon these matters do not bear a great deal of analysis. One is astonished at first when it is borne in upon one

O FTEN and often it has been savagely pointed out that Napoleon enjoyed greater good fortune than anyone could with reason expect. Every incident in Napoleon’s life, from his employment by Barras in 1795 to the collapse of Francis I.’s nerve in 1809, has been used to prove this, while his later misfortunes have been casually mentioned as being inevitable considering his careless taking of risks. The former criticism is undoubtedly fair, but the latter is open to serious disagreement, and has har

I T was Napoleon’s fate, during his lifetime and for some time after, to have his worst mistakes overlooked, and to have various strokes of policy violently condemned as shocking errors. Everyone has heard the execution of the Duc d’Enghien spoken of as “worse than a crime—it was a blunder.” It is difficult to see why. Perhaps Fouché, to whom the remark is attributed, did not see why either. If a man should happen to think of an epigram of that brilliancy, it is hard to condemn him for using it

W HEN Napoleon abdicated after Waterloo, for the second time, the Allies had achieved the object for which ostensibly they had made war. The Emperor had fallen, and the war they had waged had, they declared, been directed entirely against him. The immediate and burning question now arose as to what was to be done with the man against whom a million other men were on the march. Blücher wanted to catch him and shoot him; Wellington, with his usual cautious good sense, did not want to be burdened w

I T is much more than a hundred years since Napoleon lived; since his time we have witnessed cataclysms more vast than were the Napoleonic wars; the Europe of that period seems to us as unfamiliar and as profitless a study as Siam or primitive Australia. Perhaps this is so. Perhaps the lessons to be drawn from the Napoleonic era are now exhausted. Perhaps the epoch ushered in by Marengo is slight and unimportant compared to that which follows the Marne. Perhaps Englishmen will forget the men who