A History of Napoleon Bonaparte III

When we think of the marvellous instrument that he had in his hands, and the unworthy use to which he put it for so long a time with impunity, imagination turns to those magic powers which play so important a part in Eastern tales. So long as the hero is in possession of the talisman, everything he attempts succeeds, even that which is most improbable. The principles which guide other men do not exist for him. Unheard-of prodigies are performed by his unconscionable hand. He knows neither good nor evil; he laughs at what is impossible. He makes sport of all that is just and sacred. For him madness becomes genius, want of forethought skill, iniquity justice, and the more he treads under foot all the rules of wisdom, of right, and of common sense, the more his success increases, extends, and grows brilliant. Even the laws of nature seem to be upset. Men contemplate with superstitious awe the sinister splendour of the meteor. They are ready to deify the privileged and invulnerable mortal whose astounding fortune no folly and no crime can mar. One day the talisman is lost or broken, and suddenly the god has disappeared. Nothing remains but a poor fool; and the bewildered mind, hesitating between horror and pity, asks whether this elect of destiny was not rather its victim. Such is the history of Napoleon and the grand army. — Chapter IV, The Treaty of PresburgAt many points of History, the reader is compelled to remember that Lanfrey wrote this work without knowing about the horrors that the 20th century, in most parts of the world, will experience. About Austerlitz, the battle universally praised as Napoleon’s “masterpiece,” as the most remarkable showpiece of his military genius, Lanfrey “Such were the mournful scenes upon which the sun of Austerlitz shone. These scenes had doubtless their grandeur, as have all those in which courage and genius have been displayed, but nothing could henceforth efface the horror of them, for one thing alone has the privilege of purifying and ennobling a field of battle, and that is the triumph of a great idea. Here it was not a principle that was involved, but a man. Our victories could no longer be other than massacres.”If Lanfrey had lived to see the wars, massacres, dictatorships of the 20th century, would his views of Napoleon and his era have changed? He would have seen connections, continuations, and anticipations; his judgments would not have changed. And they are Napoleon’s achievements came so often from “transitory violence done to the nature of things,” whose results were more apparent than real, bearing the “germs of dissolution” from the start; Napoleon belongs to those “privileged monsters,” those “crowned villains,” of history, whose sanguinary career unfolded upon so much bloodshed, so many sacrifices, so many crimes conceived, committed, and persisted in with cool premeditation; in an unending series of “fearful holocaust consummated in cold blood,” he sent millions of men in France and Europe to the slaughterhouse of battlefields. Treating the impact of the Napoleonic era as a moral phenomenon, Lanfrey offers early examples of critiques of colonialism. The reader is invited to contemplate on what Lanfrey calls the “avenging light of history,” what it can do and in what it consists.