THE ARMY RESTORES THE EMPEROR. B CHAPTER I. NAPOLEON AGAINST ALL EUROPE. § 1. Napoleon's Relation to Europe in 1815. EFORE undertaking to describe the campaign of 1815, the historian is bound to show why, when Napoleon returned from Elba to the Tuileries, the Governments of Europe did not recognize him as sovereign of France, and sit down in peace beside him; why the startling words "Napoleon has quitted Elba," followed in succession by the more startling words, " Napoleon has landed at Cannes," "Napoleon is in the Tuileries," were sufficient to produce instantaneously a vast league of nations and kings who vowed his destruction; and why, when conquered at Waterloo, and caught in the Basque Roads, the Powers, by common consent, transported him to St. Helena. The reason is on the very surface of his history. Napoleon, far more than any French sovereign, was the living embodiment of certain passions and propensities of the French people. He was something more. Loving glory for glory's sake, even more than they loved it; thirsting for conquest, greedy of domination, in a greater degree than they; more rapid, more impetuous, more unscrupulous. In addition to all these passions and qualities, he possessed an Italian intellect, fertile, almost beyond example, in grand designs, and facile in devising original and effective modes of executing them. In him. the military population of France found an idol to worship and a master to obey. He fed them with glory and plunder; they repaid him, for fourteen years, with unexampled devotion. He has been called the Sword of Democracy, and so he may have appeared to the vain multitudes whom he led, over the wrecks of armies and the necks of kings, into all the great cities of continental Europe. But it was an illusion, unless democracy mean the sacrifice of the many to exalt the grandeur of one, the degradation of Europe, and the exaltation of France. " For fourteen years Napoleon, as First Consul and as Emperor, had played a part which developed every phase of his character. To found, upon a military basis, a gigantic continental empire, an "Empire of the West,' and to control from the summit of his power the policy of nations unsubdued, was the ever present object which he bent all the energies of his vast genius to attain. It has been contended that this was not French, but Italian; that France never identified herself with his stupendous, but insane ambition. In its grandeur, the design of Napoleon was Italian; but it was also French, because the greater includes the less, and Napoleon only worked out, on a Roman scale, the projects of the smaller French mind of Louis XIV. To say that France did not identify herself with Napoleon so long as he furnished glory, territory, and plunder, is simply to assert what history contradicts. That exhausted France wearied of the burden laid upon her is true, but only when "le grand entrepreneur," as the workmen called him, had buried her armies in the snows of Russia and the valleys of Spain, and had drawn the armies of Europe into her fertile fields and around her capital. No; if a nation was ever identified with one man, France was and is identified with Napoleon; and that, for the reason already stated-he was a colossal embodiment, for good and evil, of her distinctive passions and propensities; her greatest "representative man," although he was not a Frenchman. Experience has shown that the diverse races of Europe will not bear the domination of one man, or one nation, nor even the menace of that domination. Napoleon more nearly reached that dazzling height than any man of modern times. Had he committed no faults, had he perpetrated no crimes, he could not have retained the territory he occupied, nor the power he sought to grasp. But his career was not merely an exemplification of strength, nor of strength and beneficence. In the pursuit of selfaggrandisement he did not hesitate to violate every principle that binds society together. He was not content with conquering and ruling; he went further, he insulted and oppressed. Not a nation in Europe, save one, escaped the burden of his heavy oppression; not one escaped his insults. Every country but one furnished to his generals not only titles but fortunes. Even when at peace with his neighbours, those neighbours were not safe, for he sometimes openly annexed a State to the Empire, and sometimes sought in secret intrigues a pretext for spoliation. That he desired a kingdom or a republic to round his frontiers, or give effect to the policy he put in force against England, was a sufficient reason for him to take it. Spain, Holland, Liguria, the cities of the Elbe and the Baltic, furnish conspicuous examples of what he would do, and what he would permit to be done. He never entered into |