Napoleon I 1769-1821

The Napoleonic Legend.

He had said one day, "What a romance my life has been." Napoleon knew mankind too well, he was in fact too great an artist not to realise that his captivity and his martyrdom gave him a magnificent opportunity of impressing himself upon posterity. On that lonely rock he was seized by an idea as great as were his plans • of campaign or the Code civil. He would prepare, if not for himself, at least for someone of his race, something better than a return from Elba. He foresaw the nineteenth century, and would catch its imagination. Two thou sand leagues away from France he divined the medley of senti ment and emotion forming there:— Austerlitz and Waterloo, the triumph and humiliation of the tricolor, the Revolution of 1789 ending in the return of the Bourbons, all the longings for liberty and for glory which would torture the people of France. Buried desires would rise again, resuscitated by regret and the magic of remembrance. Napoleon had always known how to appeal to the French people. He had not lost the art.

So the Memorial of Saint Helena was to become the Gospel of Saint Helena. During the hundred days he had already allied himself with the Liberals and the Republicans. The great Carnot had wept on his shoulder after the second abdication. He spent his years of exile in reviving the Napoleonic legend, in confound ing it with liberalism, in "changing the eagle's plumage." He dreamed sometimes that he was working for himself, and that the people aroused by his promises would drive out their Kings and come to deliver him. "We are martyrs to an immortal cause," he said. "We struggle against oppression and the voice of the nations is for us." In the conversations which were published to the world by his companions in captivity, he made himself the apostle of a new political doctrine, which, inspired by the principles of 1789, had the character and the fascination of a religion. It was a vast idealistic programme, a declaration of the rights and duties of the French people, a reshaping of Europe on the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity and justice. He identified his cause

with that of universal freedom. The peoples must be set free, and a holy alliance of nations substituted for a holy alliance of Kings. "There are" he said "strivings for nationhood which must be satisfied sooner or later." No people should be left under the domination of another, and different sections of the same race, which wish to unite, ought not in the future to be separated. "Though they are scattered there are in Europe more than thirty million Frenchmen, fifteen million Spaniards, fifteen million Italians and thirty million Germans. I should like to have made each of these peoples a single united nation," He re-told his own story, giving it a humanitarian and idealistic bias. He represented his dictatorship as that of a liberal, or "crowned Washington," a despot in spite of himself and for the world's good, waging war to found the United States of Europe. He called himself the Messiah of the Revolution whose name would be for the peoples "the emblem of their hopes." This lofty incarnation triumphed. Popular imagination repre sented Napoleon at Saint Helena as on a sort of Mount Sinai, Beranger's songs, Victor Hugo's poems added to the glamour. In 184o the government of Louis-Philippe obeyed the national will by sending the prince de Joinville to bring back the remains of the emperor. The "return of the ashes" was a historic day. Since then, Napoleon rests in the Invalides. Another poet, Lamartine, warned Louis-Philippe that this return foreshadowed another. And, indeed, thanks to the legend woven by his uncle, after the revolution of 1848, Louis Napoleon was elected president of the republic, and then restored the empire, accomplishing in foreign policy, by his support of Italian unity, the programme of nation alities, though the integration of Italy was not yet completed. Thus the Napoleon of Saint Helena survived.