Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I

Napoleon I (1769-1821), emperor of France. He was the second of five sons. The father, Charles Bonaparte, was a Corsican lawyer of an old Italian family prominent in camp and court for six centuries. A Bonaparte was banished from Florence as early as 1120. Charles, the father, seeing resistance useless, became reconciled to the French seizure of Corsica and stood well at the French court. He resided at Paris for several years as the head of a delegation of his countrymen. He had but small means, it would appear, but he had sufficient influence to place his children in the best schools of France. Napoleon, the second son, entered a military school at Brienne, where he was noted for ability in mathematics. He had a fondness for the lives of great men and for military tactics, with little liking for anything else. He was not popular. He spoke French with difficulty, Italian being his native language.

As a natural consequence of a military education, he received an appointment in 1785 as a second lieutenant in the French army. When the French Revolution broke out he shrewdly took the side of the people against the monarchy. He soon rose by reason of his military ability and showed himself a masterly hand both in conducting a siege and in handling the mobs of Paris.

In the wars that the young French republic found on its hands Napoleon was made commander-in-chief of the army. He conducted a brilliant campaign against the Austrians in Italy in 1796-7; carried the French arms into Egypt and Syria in 1798-9; and in 1799, under the forms of a new constitution, he made himself first consul, virtually supreme ruler of France. In 1802 he became consul for life, and in 1804 he assumed the title of emperor, and settled into the role of military despot.

We cannot go into the history of the Napoleonic wars. They are still the wonder of military history. In the earlier part of these wars Austria was the most determined opponent. Napoleon led an army over the Great St. Bernard in the spring of 1800, dragging his cannon in the trunks of trees hollowed out to contain them. The battles of Marengo and Hohenlinden prostrated the house of Austria, and made Napoleon dictator of continental Europe. This assumption of power was by no means agreeable to Europe. In 1803 Russia, Austria, England, and Sweden formed a coalition against Napoleon. Napoleon defeated Austria and Russia at Austerlitz, December 2, 1805, and seemed to entrench himself all the more firmly.

Of course such a career could not go unchecked. If boys roll a snowball large enough it breaks finally of its own weight. France could not become Europe. In 1812 the beginning of the end came. Napoleon invaded Russia with 400,000 troops and seemingly drove the Russians before him to Moscow where he proposed to winter. Suddenly fires broke out in every direction, the city was in flames, and Napoleon with his thinly clad army was left without shelter or supplies. Winter fell, a retreat was ordered. What with bitter frost, snowstorms, treacherous ice and rivers, burning bridges, starvation, fatigue, and the harassing assaults of legions of active, warmly clad, well fed, and well mounted Cossacks, swarming like hornets, only 20,000 men of that vast army reached the frontiers of Poland. Now that disaster had come, the nations rose against him. Napoleon took the field the next summer at the head of 600,000 men but was defeated at the battle of Leipsic October 16-19, 1813. The troops of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, joined by those of the Rhine principalities, marched on Paris and occupied that city. Meanwhile the English under Wellington had assisted the Spanish in driving the French over the Pyrenees.

Napoleon was stripped of his territory and power, yet was permitted to retire to the little island of Elba, which was assigned him as an empire, and he was still allowed to retain the title of emperor. A year later, while the powers were in conference at Vienna endeavoring to rearrange the map of Europe, their deliberations were disturbed by the ill news that the emperor of Elba had landed on the coast of France and that his old soldiers had flocked to his standard. All in vain, however. Napoleon had tried too much. Had he been content to remain within the natural borders of France he might have been eminently successful, but it was too late to play the role of Alexander the Great and obtain worldwide power. The battle of Waterloo fought June 18, 1815, went against him. Napoleon was sent to St. Helena, England's prisoner of war, where he lived for six years quarreling with the commandant and writing his memoirs. May 8, 1821, he was buried at St. Helena, but in 1840 his remains were removed to Paris, where they lie beneath the dome of the Hotel des Invalides. His sarcophagus is a single polished stone of red Finnish granite, thirteen feet long, six and one-half wide, and fourteen and one-half high. The circular crypt in which the sarcophagus stands is of polished granite adorned with sculpture commemorative of Napoleon's work. On the pavement are recorded the names of his battles.

There is no reason to say that Napoleon had any love for the common people or that he tried to make life easier for them; but in carrying out his selfish schemes to obtain power for himself we may say that he did much for the popular cause. Himself an unscrupulous aristocrat and despot, he destroyed many a stronghold of aristocracy and pulled down many aristocratic families. He reformed the laws of France, abolishing many an injustice. The Code of Napoleon is still used in France, Rhenish Prussia, Bavaria, Baden, Holland, Belgium, and Italy, and is the basis of legal procedure in our own state of Louisiana. He threw magnificent bridges over the Seine, straightened out the streets of Paris, especially in the poor quarters, laying out boulevards radiating from a common center from which cannon could be used to suppress uprisings. He built roads, second only to those of the Romans, encouraged manufactures, granted religious liberty, restored Sunday formerly abolished by the Revolutionary authorities, and declared a general amnesty for past political offenses. Forty thousand royalists banished by the Revolution returned to France.

In a way, Americans have a special interest in the Bonaparte family. In 1803 Jerome, the youngest brother of Napoleon, visited Baltimore in command of a French frigate. He was received with enthusiasm by the exclusive society of the city. On the eve before Christmas he was married by Bishop John Carroll to Miss Elizabeth Patterson, the beautiful young daughter of a wealthy merchant. When Jerome and his wife sailed for France she was forbidden to land and sought refuge in London. Napoleon desired Jerome to marry a European princess and sit on a European throne. Jerome tried, we may believe, to change the emperor's mind, but, failing in this, abandoned his wife to her father's care. Descendants of the marriage have borne themselves creditably in the world and are still living.

All this is a piece of the same treatment that Napoleon accorded his own faithful wife. In 1797 he married the beautiful Josephine, who was the companion of his years of struggle. She stood by his side when he was crowned. They had no children. He was ambitious to be the head of a new royal family. The French officials granted him a divorce. In 1810 he married an Austrian archduchess, a member of the famous Hapsburg family. They had one son, but he died young. Writers have not failed to note that Napoleon's star seemed to set from the day when he discarded Josephine. A book in which Napoleon kept notes when a schoolboy has been preserved. Strangely enough, the last entry closed with the words: "St. Helena, a small island."

See Corsica; Elba; Josephine; French Revolution; Waterloo; Murat

The ship is over the bar, then; free she bounds shoreward, amid shouting and vivats! Citoyen Buonaparte is "named general of the interior, by acclamation;" quelled sections have to disarm in such humor as they may; sacred right of insurrection is gone forever! The Sieyes constitution can disembark itself, and begin marching. The miraculous convention ship has got to land; and is there, shall we figuratively say, changed, as epic ships are wont, into a kind of Sea Nymph, never to sail more; to roam the waste azure, a miracle in history!

"It is false," says Napoleon, "that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that." Most false: the firing was with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch church show splintered by it to this hour. Singular: in old Broglie's time, six years ago, this whiff of grapeshot was promised; but it could not be given then; could not have profited then. Now, however, the time is come for it, and the man; and, behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and become a thing that was!--Carlyle, French Revolution.

Napoleon III (1808-1873), emperor of France. He was a nephew of the first Napoleon, being the son of Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland. Napoleon's only son, who died young, was called Napoleon II by the Bonaparte family. The subject of the present sketch is usually called Louis Napoleon. After the downfall of his uncle, Louis was recognized by the family and the old party as the Bonaparte heir. He lived abroad necessarily. He landed twice on French territory to incite a revolt against the Bourbon family, once in 1836 at Strasburg, and again in 1840 at Boulogne; but was treated leniently. When the French republic of 1848 was proclaimed he was elected to the French legislature. He commenced an active canvass for the presidency, and such was the glamour of the Napoleonic name that in December of the same year he was elected president of the republic by an overwhelming majority. As a matter of fact, French pride in the family name laid aside, Louis Napoleon was a dirty, lowdown trickster, utterly unworthy of the position he acquired. He was a man without principle or statesmanship. He was vain, self-important, and fond of making a show. He was precisely the kind of man whom unscrupulous politicians put forward. They led Napoleon to consider himself great, that they might gather the plunder of place under him. Although he took the oath to support the constitution and pledged himself repeatedly to stand by a popular form of government, there is no question that he plotted from the first to overthrow the republic and reinstate a despotic form of government.

The radical party, the Reds of Paris, played into the hands of the monarchists. They rose in arms and were not only put down by force, but the Assembly passed a reactionary suffrage act depriving the greater part of the workingmen of the right to vote. Here the hypocritical Louis Napoleon made a vast pretense of being on the side of the artisans, and led them to regard him, demagogue that he was, as their leader. The Assembly was made unpopular, the body of middle class citizens feared another revolution and looked to the "brilliant, able young statesman," now president, as the one man whom the populace would accept. Napoleon's term was nearing an end; the constitution forbade reelection; the Assembly refused to change the constitution; so this great and good man, rather than deprive France of his services at so critical a juncture, arrested some eighty generals, journalists, and leaders of the Assembly after nightfall, closed all the printing offices, placarded the streets with warning handbills to the effect that the Assembly had been dissolved, and that Napoleon had placed himself at the head of a new government and would appeal to the popular vote--no one disfranchised--for a ratification of his course. Tools were placed in command of the army, the Assembly tried to get together, but the members were dispersed or put under arrest; the radicals rose and barred the streets, but the soldiers marching in the name of the law, and carrying the tricolor of France, charged the barricades and violated the laws of honorable warfare by butchering whole batches of defenseless prisoners whose views of popular government were at fault and needed a little amendment. Martial law was declared in districts considered dangerous to the plans of the conspirators. Thousands of the most determined men were hurried off to the penal colonies without trial.

It can hardly be deemed strange that a few days later, under the combined influence of the peasants, the gentry, the officeholders, and military officers, with here and there a military escort, the French "people" voted by 7,500,000 out of 8,000,000 votes not to let so good a chance of securing Louis Napoleon's services go by. In November of the next year, a second vote obtained in a similar manner confirmed this shameless adventurer emperor of the French, Napoleon III. As a matter of fact, France was stolen bodily in the broad daylight of the nineteenth century, and the world acquiesced.

Historians consider the early years of the empire, 1852-60, a period of oppressive despotism. Spies were sent over the land. Servants were bribed systematically to betray their masters. "Suspects" guilty of talking at their own firesides or at an inn over a bottle of wine were whisked away to penal colonies, quite in Russian fashion. Newspapers were subsidized brazenly, or were suppressed. Official candidates were presented for election to local offices. Opposing candidates were forbidden the use of halls; their mail was not safe from being tampered with; their placards were torn down or covered with official announcements. There was neither free speech nor a free press; but through it all Napoleon seems to have flattered himself that he was a democratic sort of a leader, and during the latter part of his reign a far less degree of tyranny was exercised.

In the meantime material prosperity was to be seen on every hand. Manufactures were encouraged. Paris was rebuilt largely. Other cities followed the example of the capital, and made extensive improvements. France, naturally a rich nation, established schools, opened libraries, and undertook projects of internal improvement. The empire of Napoleon III was preeminently a period of a full dinner pail for artisans and workmen. A showy foreign policy was pursued. In 1854 Napoleon joined England in the Crimean War. In 1859 he aided Victor Emmanuel in the unification of Italy. During our Civil War he aimed to place a European prince, Maximilian, on the throne of Mexico. He concurred in the opening of the Suez Canal, invited the nations to a "World's Exposition," and did much to entertain the French and to beautify Paris.

Napoleon III was a weak, pretentious man who depended largely on the fame of his uncle. Unfortunately for his prestige, he "forced" Prussia into a war in 1870 for which that country had been a score of years making preparation. The Franco-Prussian war showed the rotten condition of French politics. Dishonest contractors and inefficient commanders rendered the French unable to cope with their adversaries. The German forces proved so superior in the battle of Sedan that Napoleon threw himself upon the generosity of King William rather than face the people of Paris. The present French republic was declared. Napoleon was held prisoner until the close of the war, when he was permitted to join his wife and son at Chisel-hurst, England, where he resided until his death. His only son entered the British army and was killed in a petty skirmish in Zululand, Africa.