The Mentor Napoleon Bonaparte 1

The Mentor Napoleon Bonaparte 1

The Mentor Napoleon Bonaparte, Serial No. 38

 

Author: Ida M. Tarbell

 

 

 

Nobody who has lived in modern times has so stirred up the world as

Napoleon Bonaparte. Nobody has upset so many old things, and started

so many new ones. No man ever lived who had more faith in his own

powers--and less respect for those of other men. Napoleon had, too,

an unusual combination of those personal qualities which excite and

interest men. It is nearly a hundred years since he dropped out of

active life; but his story is more rather than less thrilling as time

goes on.

 

There was nothing in his birth or schooling or his first activities in

life to lead one to expect an unusual career. His family was poor and

servile; his father trading on his name and his acquaintances to feed,

educate, and place his family. The most promising thing about young

Bonaparte was his resentment of this servility and his own flat refusal

to participate in it to help himself. Throughout his boyhood in the

island of Corsica, where he was born in 1769, during the six years he

spent at school in France and the eight years of intermittent military

service that followed his first appointment at the age of sixteen to

a second lieutenancy, he lived a tempestuous inner life. Ambition

for himself, devotion to his family, love for Corsica, hatred of

France, sympathy for the new ideas of human rights that were stirring

Europe,--these sentiments kept the mind and heart of the young officer

in tumult and made him waver between allegiance to the land in which

he was born and the land that had trained him; between the career of

a soldier that was his passion and a career of money making, in order

to educate his brothers, settle his sisters, and put his mother into a

secure position.

 

 

NAPOLEON THE OPPORTUNIST

 

It is quite fair, I think, to characterize his early career as that of

an adventurer. He was watching for a chance, and had determined to take

it, regardless of where it offered itself. It was at a moment when he

was in disgrace for having refused the orders of his superiors in the

army that the chance he wanted came.

 

[Illustration: LÆTITIA BONAPARTE

 

The Mother of Napoleon.]

 

The convention in which at that moment the French government centered

was attacked by the revolting Parisians. Bonaparte had no particular

sympathy with the convention,--in fact, he had more with the

rebels,--but when one of his friends in the government who knew his

ability as an artillery officer asked him to take charge of the force

protecting the Tuilleries, where the convention sat, he accepted--with

hesitation; but, having accepted, he did his work with a skill and

daring that earned him his first important command, that of general in

chief of the French Army of the Interior. Four months later he was made

commander in chief of the Army of Italy, the army that was disputing

the conquest of northern Italy with Austria.

 

 

THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN

 

[Illustration: WHERE AN EMPEROR WAS BORN

 

In this room Napoleon was born in 1769.]

 

It was a ragged, disgusted, and half-revolting body, this Army of

Italy, one that for three years had been conspicuous mainly for

inactivity. Without waiting even for shoes, the new commander started

it out swiftly on a campaign that for clever strategy, for rapidity of

movement, for dash and courage in attack, was unlike anything Europe

had ever seen. In less than two months he drove his opponents from

Lombardy and had shut up the remnant of their army in Mantua. The

Austrians shortly had a new army in the field. It took eight months to

defeat it and capture Mantua; but it was accomplished in that period.

Austria then called her ablest general, Archduke Charles, and gave him

one hundred thousand men with which to avenge her disasters. With half

the number Bonaparte advanced to meet the archduke, and drove him step

by step to Vienna.

 

After a year and seven months of campaigning General Bonaparte, now

twenty-eight years old, signed his first treaty. By that treaty he

formed a new republic in northern Italy and made a new eastern frontier

for France. Before the treaty, however, he had filled her empty

treasury, had loaded her down with works of art, and had given her a

new place in Europe; a place that he had proved he could sustain.

 

The glory of the Italian campaign thrilled the French people; but

it disturbed the politicians in power. Bonaparte saw that if the

government could manage it he would have no further opportunities for

distinguishing himself. It was this sense that led him to urge that

England, the only nation then in arms against France, be attacked by

invading Egypt. The government consented promptly. It was a way of

disposing of Bonaparte. What the government did not dream, of course,

was that Bonaparte with this army hoped to found an oriental kingdom of

which he should be the ruler.

 

But nothing went as he expected. He suffered terrible reverses, which

he knew the government at home was using to break his hold on the

people; his supplies and information were cut off; his prestige in his

own army weakened; his faith in his destiny was shaken. That the effect

of this bad fortune was not more than skin deep was clear enough when

he accidentally learned that things were in a very bad way in France,

that much of what he had gained in Italy had been lost, and that

Austria and Russia were preparing an invasion.

 

[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF NAPOLEON

 

In this house, on the little island of Corsica, the first emperor of

France spent his boyhood.]

 

 

FIRST CONSUL OF FRANCE

 

Promptly and secretly Bonaparte slipped out of Egypt, and before the

powers at home knew of his intention he was in France and the people

were welcoming him as their deliverer. He was ready to be just that. It

was no great trick for a man of his daring and sagacity, adored by the

populace, to overturn a discredited and inefficient government and make

himself dictator. It was done in a few weeks, and France had a new form

of government, a consulate, of which the head was a first consul, and

Bonaparte was the first consul.

 

The most brilliant and fruitful four years of Napoleon Bonaparte’s

life followed; for it was then that he set out to bring order and

peace to a country demoralized and exhausted by generations of

plundering by privileged classes, followed by a decade of revolution

against privileges. France needed new machinery of all kinds, and this

Bonaparte undertook to supply. There were many people who regarded him

as a great general; but to their amazement he now proved himself a

remarkable statesman.

 

 

NAPOLEON THE STATESMAN

 

He attacked the question of the national income like a veteran

financier. The first matter was reorganizing taxation. He succeeded in

distributing the burden more justly than had ever been known in France.

The taxes were fixed so that each knew what he had to pay, and the

inordinate graft that tax collectors and police had enjoyed was cut

off. New financial institutions were devised; among them the Bank of

France. The economy he instituted in the government, the army, his own

household, everywhere that his power extended, was rigid and minute; as

he personally examined all accounts, there was no escape. The waste and

parasitism that pervaded the country began to give way for the first

time since the Revolution.

 

[Illustration: EMPRESS JOSEPHINE

 

From a painting by Pierre Paul Prud’hon.]

 

Industries of all kinds had sickened in the long period of war.

Bonaparte undertook their revival by one of the most severe

applications ever made of the doctrine of protection,--he even

attempted to make his women folk wear no goods not made in France!

His interest in agriculture was as keen as in manufacturing, and

his personal suggestions and interference of the same nature. The

prosperity of the country was stimulated greatly by the public works

Bonaparte undertook. One can go nowhere in France today without finding

them. It was he who set the country at road building. Some of the most

magnificent highways in Europe were laid out by him, including those

over four Alpine passes. He paid great attention to improving harbors.

Those now at Cherbourg, Havre, and Nice, as well as at Flushing and

Antwerp, Bonaparte planned and began. As for Paris, his ambition for

the city was boundless. He was responsible for some of her finest

features and monuments.

 

His greatest civil achievement was undoubtedly the codification of the

laws, and it was the one of which he was proudest. That he contributed

much to the Code Napoleon besides the driving power that insisted that

it be promptly put through, there is no doubt. His great contribution

was the inestimable one of commonsense. He had no patience with

meaningless precedents, conventions, and technicalities. He wanted laws

that everybody could understand and would recognize as necessary and

just.

 

[Illustration: NAPOLEON AS FIRST CONSUL]

 

Nothing more daring was undertaken in this period by Bonaparte than his

reëstablishment of the Catholic Church and his recall of thousands of

members of the old régime driven out of the country by the Revolution.

It was an attempt to reconcile and restore the two most powerful

enemies of the Revolution, the two that the first consul knew Europe

would never cease to fight to restore to power. There was of course

great opposition in radical and republican circles to both ventures.