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Was Napoleon a madman driven only by an insatiable desire for conquest? End

At the end of the 18th century, they took control of the Black Sea coast (1774) and Crimea (1783) for this purpose, wrested power from the Transcaucasian kinglets, rubbed shoulders with the Persians and even the English towards the Indies. But the warm sea that interested them the most was, of course, the Mediterranean: they had always sought to establish themselves there, including during the revolutionary wars, through agreements and a military presence in Naples or in the Ionian Islands, or even an improbable protectorate of the Orthodox Tsar over the Catholic Order of Malta, for which Paul I dreamed for a time of the sponsorship of the Pope.

With such projects, the empire of the tsars disturbed the other powers: France in Germany, France and England in the Mediterranean, England in India, Sweden on the side of Finland, Austria and Prussia in Poland or in the Balkans and, of course, the Ottoman Empire, where it was known that there were cartons full of projects to conquer Constantinople in Saint Petersburg. This anxiety about Russia's expansionist ambitions was coupled with a general contempt in the West for a people that Napoleon and he was not the only one - qualified as "barbarians of the North". It was to prevent the Tsar from being the only winner of the Napoleonic wars and from aiming in turn at European domination that British diplomacy did not hesitate to clash with him, notably at the Congress of Vienna, by reaching agreements... with France.

In this panel of contradictory ambitions which shows that Europe did not need the Revolution or Napoleon to be a powder keg, the smaller powers went from one to the other but with constancies, like Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg or Spain traditional allies (by interest more than by affinity) of France, Saxony obliged to rely on Paris to counter its Prussian neighbor, Portugal always linked to England, the States of Northern Italy alternately close to Paris and Vienna, Naples at best with England and Russia, the Nordic countries with everyone. The ambitions, geopolitical and economic factors were the same as ten or twenty years earlier. After the "ideological" emotion of the early years of the Revolution, the old diplomacy regained its rights.

But was Napoleon carried away by hubris? Yes, I think so, what Napoleon achieved until 1807 is prodigious, when he learned about power, France was in economic ruin, in civil war, and at war abroad. Napoleon will restore the economic, domestic and international situation of France, and he even realized the old French ambitions, with Belgium, Holland, the left bank of the Rhine, and Northern Italy. And the apogee of all this in 1807 when Napoleon after his victory at Friedland imposed his political will on Russia which was forced to renounce all its ambitions in Europe until it accepted a Polish state which did not say its name.

Jacques Bainville writes:

"If ever a man could flatter himself that he had forced destiny and applaud himself for having arrived exactly at the result he was seeking, it was Bonaparte in June 1807. His zenith is at this summer solstice. A profound mixture, equal success of military and political combinations, arms at the service of a reasoned diplomacy, a Mazarin who would be his own Condé and a Condé who would be Mazarin, a great captain who no longer says only of his adversary: "I will beat him there", but: "We will embrace there", and who beats him and then embraces him indeed. Rarely have we seen so many calculations succeed at the same time. And never, until this maturity of genius and age, - here he is at thirty-eight, - has he had or given this feeling of fullness. This is the moment when he writes: "The honest man always fights to remain master of himself." His favorite tragedy adds "as of the universe." One can only dominate events and the world if one first dominates oneself, and Bonaparte remembers his cautious beginnings, the pains that power has cost him, the inconstancy of victory. "If great setbacks were to happen and the country were in danger..." This sentence, which recalls the anxieties of Eylau, precedes by two months the double success of Friedland and Tilsit."

Alas, the United Kingdom, which had offered him peace in 1806, Napoleon refused. Carried away by his successes, he thought that nothing could resist him.

Even though the United Kingdom had practically ceded everything, Belgium, Holland, Northern Italy.

However, to conclude, I would like to quote Bainville who writes:

"Deep down, just as his soldiers loved in him their glory and their sufferings, men admire themselves in Napoleon. Without regard to the events that had allowed him to rise so high, nor to the consummate skill with which he had seized the circumstances, they are astonished that a mortal could have succeeded in such a climb.

An artillery officer who, in a few years, acquires more power than Louis XIV and wears the crown of Charlemagne, such stages burned at full speed, this phenomenon seemed, rightly so, prodigious in the century of the Enlightenment, in a rationalist Europe, especially in France where the beginnings of the other "races" had been slow, modest, difficult, where the old dynasties had taken several generations to establish themselves. Napoleon's contemporaries were no less dazzled by the speed than by the height of his ascent. We still are. He himself, thinking about it, was a little bourgeoisly amazed, when he told Las Cases that it would take "thousands of centuries" before "reproducing the same spectacle".

The strangest thing is that we still ask him what, in his time, "the school of the possible" already reproached him for not giving. Why didn't he moderate himself? Why wasn't he reasonable? We have made, we persist in making ourselves an idea of Napoleon so superhuman that we believe that it was up to him to fix the sun, to stop the spectacle and the spectator at the best moment.

What was he himself? A man who had long since returned from everything, to whom life had dispensed everything, beyond all measure, to bruise him without mercy. The first woman was not faithful, the second abandoned him. He was separated from his son. His brothers and sisters always disappointed him. Those who owed him the most betrayed him. Of an ordinary man, one would say that he was very unhappy. There is nothing that he did not wear out prematurely, even his will. But above all, how many days, at his most brilliant time, was he able to subtract from the worry that pursued him, from the feeling that all this was fragile and that he was only granted a short time? "You grow without pleasure," Lamartine admirably tells him. Always in a hurry, devouring his tomorrows, reasoning leads him straight to the pitfalls that his imagination represents to him, he runs to meet his loss as if he were in a hurry to finish.

He knew that his reign was precarious. He saw no sure refuge but a first place in history, a star without rival among the great men. When he analyzed the causes of his fall, he always came back to the same point: "And above all, a dynasty not old enough." That was the one thing he could do nothing about. Doubting that he could keep this prodigious throne, even though he neglected nothing to make it solid, he rested his thought on other images. Daru did not admit that his vast intelligence had deceived itself: "It never seemed to me that he had any other purpose than to gather, during his ardent and rapid race on earth, more glory, greatness and power than any man had ever collected." Mme de Rémusat confirms for the religious sense what Daru said for the practical sense: "I would dare say that the immortality of his name seemed to him of far greater importance than that of his soul."

We have made a thousand psychological, intellectual, moral portraits of Napoleon, and passed as many judgments on him. He always escapes by a few lines from the pages where we try to enclose him. He is elusive, not because he is infinite, but because he has varied as the situations in which fate placed him. He has been as unstable as his successive positions. His mind, which was vast, was above all supple and plastic. Yet it had its limits.

He has been called Jupiter-Scapin, the "comedian-tragedian" has been repeated to the point of fatigue. But he said of himself that there is not far from the sublime to the ridiculous, and if we want to take him all in all, it is not yet by that side. It is not either by his Italian or Corsican origins. If he had a vendetta with the Duke of Enghien, he did not have one with Fouché or many others whom he spared, even if they were Bourbons.

Finally, if so many explanations of Napoleon are proposed, if so many are plausible, if it is allowed to conceive of him in so many ways, it is because the mobility and diversity of his mind have been equal to the variety, perhaps unprecedented, of the circumstances of his life .

Except for glory, except for "art," it probably would have been better if he hadn't existed. All things considered, his reign, which came, according to Thiers, to continue the Revolution, ends in a terrible failure. His genius prolonged, at great expense, a game that was already lost. So many victories, conquests (which he hadn't started), why? To come back behind the point from which the warlike Republic had left, where Louis XVI had left France, to abandon the natural borders, relegated to the museum of dead doctrines. It wasn't worth all the trouble, unless it was to bequeath beautiful paintings to history. "

I find these pages written by Bainville both magnificent and cruel, with this sentence

"Except for glory, except for 'art', it would probably have been better if he hadn't existed. "

Was Napoleon a madman driven only by an insatiable desire for conquest? End
Was Napoleon a madman driven only by an insatiable desire for conquest? End
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