BOOKS.

NAPOLEON IN HIS GLORY AND FALL.*

"I DO not in the least want to know what happened in the past," said Mr. John Morley to a scholastic Birmingham audience, "except as it enables me to see my way more clearly through that which is happening to-day." Thus tested, the monumental "Modern History" planned by Lord

Acton cannot be called instructive reading. The narrative of the campaign of Assaye would not supply the India Office with a single hint as to the right way of meeting a Russian invasion of the Peninsula. Again, altogether void of lights calculated to serve in an international discussion of "the unit of disarmament" are the chapters on the negotiations of Amiens and Vienna.

The favourite Muse is now enthroned in a new fashion. Oxford and Cambridge have not set up laboratories like the Paris lcole des Charles, with its chemical methods of

research and synthesis by the aid of various " disciplines " and " sub-disciplines " such as heuristics, sphragistics, "sincerity," and so forth, but they have begun to engineer history, not by single hands, but by international syndicates. The work of the foreign auxiliaries enlisted by the editors of this volume proves that in knowledge of many matters of Continental detail they surpass Englishmen, and they are free from peculiarities of manner or sentiment calculated to disturb the unity of the story. The vast polyglot biblio- graphy will be of little use to the reader, for references to the authors utilised in the text, as well as genealogies, are systematically tabooed. The actors on the Napoleonic stage —Royal, military, Ministerial, or private—appear as ghosts rather than as speaking figures. Moved, perhaps, by the profound Tolstoy's explanation that great men have no influence on the loom of time, the syndicate has suppressed the human aspects of portraiture.

In chap. 1 the Nancy Professor of History explains with

extraordinary clearness the strategy by which Napoleon, once lodged in the Tuileries after his coup d'etat of Brumaire, manceuvred himself into the Consulate for life and the Empire, and so managed his successive moves as to convey the impression that his climb up the ladder of greatness was not of his own seeking, but was thrust upon him. Absolutely devoid of patriotic altruism, the Corsican arriviste saw in the France of his creation a mere dynastic object. Whether erecting an apparatus of centralisation more burden- some to the people than the Monarchy, or devising gags for Llinisters of doubtful loyalty like Talleyrand and Fouche, his ruling inspiration was always the same,—I'gtat c'est

Dr. Pariset's fine account of Napoleon's reconciliation of the old France and the new emphasises the rapidity with which the work of reorganisation was accomplished, and he continues :—

" The greater part of the institutions founded during the Consulate have survived to the present day ; and it is no exaggeration to state that it was Bonaparte who created con- temporary France. For this very reason, however, the Consular System weighed heavily on France during the nineteenth century. Devised by one man for his own ends, concentrating everything in Paris, leaving to the nation at large neither liberty nor initiative, and affecting a democratic guise the better to crush democracy itself, it deranged tho political balance of the country, and for a long time paralysed the national spirit. From the civil and economic point of view, Bonaparte confirmed the work of the Revolution: all Frenchmen retained their equality before the law ; and those who had become owners of national property were secured in their possessions. But, from the political point of view, Bonaparte revived the arbitrary traditions of the old monarchy; and often his institutions were mere replicas of the past And the consequence is, that although starting from the Consulate, the history of France during the nineteenth century has been, in many respects, nothing but a long and toilsome reaction against the system created by Bonaparte."

The bright, always up-to-date Professor Guinan& of Zurich, gives the campaign of Marengo, carefully explaining that Bonaparte crossed the St. Bernard "not on a fiery war-horse, as David's picture portrays him, but on a humble mule led by a peasant from Bourg St. Pierre." The marches of Lacourbe on the St. Gothard and Macdonald on the Spliigen were much more perilous operations ; but as those generals

The Cambridge Modern History. Planned by the late Lord Acton, LL.D., Regius Professor of Modern History. Edited by A. W. Ward, Litt.D., O. W. Protbero, Litt.D., and Stanley Loathes, M.A. Vol. M., Napoleon. Cambridge: at the University Press. [lCs. net.1 wanted " Bonaparte's eye for theatrical effect and his incom- parable talent for self-advertisement, their achievements

passed almost unnoticed." Moreau's defeat of the Archduke John at Hohenlinden, on the banks of " Iser flowing rapidly," called by the author "a victory more brilliant and more complete than that of Marengo," should have reminded him of the spiteful depreciation by which the First Consul privately betrayed his jealousy of the great general whose success obliged him to give an official approval. The short-lived Peace of 1802 recalls to the Swiss writer what Napoleon at St. Helena, falsifying, as usual, his past life, said of his feelings of that date : "I was honestly persuaded that both the future of France and my own were settled at Amiens?' Now, says Dr. Guilland, Napoleon's real comment on the situation as he saw it at the time was this : "Every treaty of peace means to me no more than a brief armistice; and I believe that while I fill my present office my destiny is to be fighting continually." Thereupon he set hard at work in his arsenals and dockyards, dragooning his dependencies and feebler allies into general maritime submission, and the closure of their ports against English vessels, while he was soon to enter on the series of territorial aggressions and annexations in Italy, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany, whereby he tore up the documents to which he had set his name at Luneville and Amiens.

Napoleon said at St. Helena "that his glory consisted, not in having won forty battles, but in the Civil Code and

in the deliberations of the Council of State." Mr. Fisher's

admirable handling of the Olympian's work of Codification as applied to five separate branches of law, and his creation of a new system of legal procedure, throws light upon this boast. His attitude towards Napoleon is one of highly benevolent neutrality—at times he exaggerates the adjective—but he carefully dilutes his eulogies by the severe criticisms of Savigny and Charles Austin on the preparation and contents of the Civil Code, which these great jurisconsults condemned as "a mechanical mixture

of the results of the Revolution and the old regime of Roman law and the customs," three-fourths of its contents

having been extracted by draftsmen from a printed treatise.

The Code, in a word, was not a substantive mass of law, but "an index to an immense body of jurisprudence existing outside itself." One of the dictator's objectionable hobbies was his desire for the degradation of the civil status of woman, who is treated by the Code as a "fickle, defenceless, mindless being." When asked in Committee if wifely obedience was prescribed by old French law, the First Consul sharply replied : "Do you not know that the angel told Eve to obey

her husband P Morality has written this article in all

languages." Many sections of the Five Codes, and of the Code of Procedure, show signs of "the advancing palsy of despotism." The abolition of the Grand Jury, the investment

of the juge d'instruction with drastic powers for the secret examination of the accused and the witnesses for the case (a

procedure still tolerated by our neighbours), the refusal of

the habeas corpus, the prohibitive regulations regarding bail, the fixing of the rate of interest in private money trans-

actions, the tyrannous limitation which practically nullified the right of public meeting, political agitation, and public association, the establishment of special Courts for trying

certain offences without recourse to a jury,—these rules have

been traced to Napoleon's determintion to subordinate the public interests to his own personal requirements, as happened in the case of some of the regulations for divorce and adoption, which curiously suited his own wants as the husband of the childless Josephine. As to the Civil Code, separately con- sidered, Mr. Fisher says, however, that the First Consul suggested several humanitarian and technical improvements, and furthered its recognition of the general interests of the State.

Dr. Arnold in his history lectures laid down that the destruction of the gran& armee in the retreat from Moscow

of 1812 was due "beyond all controversy," not to human power, but to "the direct and manifest interference of God." Professor Stschepkin, of Odessa, ascribes the misfortunes of the French Sennacherib, not to Providential agency, but to the peculiar circumstances of the invasion. The unpre- cedented size of the army and of the area of operations made the commissariat unequal to its duties ; the Marshals, with their habits of strict dependence on their chief, were unsuited

for detached commands; while their leader, being in decadent conditions of bodily and mental power, was unequal to the colossal weight thrown on his shoulders as Emperor, General- issimo, Chief of the Staff, and Minister of War. He bad, moreover, no distinct plan of campaign. His strategy was limited to a series of rapid offensive movements ; after the defeat of Barclay at Smolensk, the preparations for the advance on Moscow were inadequate; at the crisis of his victorious battle of Borodino he neglected to call up the Guard, with whom he might have annihilated the Russian army. Fancying that the Czar Alexander would be ready for peace, the invader remained too long in Moscow, and taking a wrong road of retreat, fell into repeated blunders, only showing himself worthy of his former self at the passage of the Beresina, which, far from being, as has been said, a French catastrophe, was in reality the one great achievement of the war. The leisure nours of Aldershot may be usefully devoted to a comparison of these opinions with the judgments of Lord Wolseley and Mr. George, and the earlier criticisms of Clausewitz, who decided that the inaction of the Guard at Borodino was prescribed by the requirements of the situation.

Dr. Ward's chapters on the Congress of Vienna are masterpieces of inquiry, arrangement, and compression ; but, shackled by the inevitable handcuffs, the Master of Pembroke ignores the idiosyncrasies of such striking figures as the pietistic Czar, the grand seigneur statesman Hardenberg, the Bismarck of the age, Stein, the grand Metternich and his corrupt secretary Gentz, and the limping ruler of the Congress, Talleyrand. Those who have assisted at an international Sanhedrim, be the object of discussion Morocco, or the cholera, or the "unspeakable Turk," know that, though officialdom is at the helm, pleasure is always at the prow. The sittings of the Vienna Congress of 1814-15 were associated with balls, banquets, concerts, masquerades, hunts, sledge parties, and other social saturnalia, at which the intimate talks of the representatives of the Powers led to arrangements whereby the labours of the seven hundred members of the august assembly were saved from stagna- tion. Of all these wheels within wheels not a word: the liistige Wien is a city of the dead. The unmatched Hyde Park equipages and horses of our Lord Stuart, alias "the golden peacock," are not rolling along the Graben ; the little King of Rome is not playing with his soldiers while his portrait is painted by Isabey; Marie Louise with her "chevalier" Neipperg are invisible; and there is no hint of the Treaty concert offered by Beethoven to the Congress, or of the hundred thousand visitors who flocked to Vienna from all parts of the Continent.

For the Peninsular War Professor Oman is, of course, an incomparable escort, but he forgets himself when be whittles down Wellesley's "astounding passage of the Douro" to five words. That great author of many of the feats of war, Sa .Majeste le Hasard, graciously placed on the south bank of the river a small boat, by help of which, strange as it may sound, our army was ferried over, and enabled to drive Soult out of Oporto. Our Professor's handling of the crambe repetita of the campaign of 1815 is worthy of Jomini, but in these days of the Yalu, battles like Ligny and Waterloo seem as anti- quated as Cressy or Agincourt. Mr. Fisher's captivating and eloquent "St. Helena" shows how, thanks to the artifices of the exiles and the sympathies of Foxite friends, "the great captive hero of adventures worthy of the Arabian Nights" was transfigured into a martyred "Prometheus, benefactor of humanity, chained to his solitary rock." Joseph Bonaparte's dictum that Napoleon's characteristic mark was " good- ness " has not prevented the writers from cataloguing in appropriate terms the murders of the Due d'Enghien, Pichegru, the bookseller Palm, Hofer, the order for the assassination of the great statesman Stein, and the rest of the Corsican's plots, piracies, kidnappings, falsehoods, and public crimes. Hampered by considerations natural, perhaps, in the authors of a University series, the Cambridge writers have absolutely ignored the whole course of the cond,ottiere's private life, banishing from their voluminous list of books the modern French publications which trace a relationship between the Bonaparte family and the dynasties of Caligula and Herod.