Note Back to Main Text — Chapter XI

Napoleon's astounding paper on this remarkable theme was finished in December. It bears the marks of carelessness, haste, and over-confidence in every direction—in style, in content, and in lack of accuracy. "Illustrious Raynal," writes the author, "the question I am about to discuss is worthy of your steel, but without assuming to be metal of the same temper, I have taken courage, saying to myself with Correggio, I, too, am a painter." Thereupon follows a long encomium upon Paoli, whose principal merit is explained to have been that he strove in his legislation to keep for every man a property sufficient with moderate exertion on his own part for the sustenance of life. Happiness consists in living conformably to the constitution of our organization. Wealth is a misfortune, primogeniture a relic of barbarism, celibacy a reprehensible practice. Our animal nature demands food, shelter, clothing, and the companionship of woman. These are the essentials of happiness; but for its perfection we require both reason and sentiment. These theses are the tolerable portions, being discussed with some coherence. But much of the essay is mere meaningless rhetoric and bombast, which sounds like the effusion of a boyish rhapsodist. "At the sound of your [reason's] voice let the enemies of nature be still, and swallow their serpents' tongues in rage." "The eyes of reason restrain mankind from the precipice of the passions, as her decrees modify likewise the feeling of their rights." Many other passages of equal absurdity could be quoted, full of far-fetched metaphor, abounding in strange terms, straining rhetorical figures to distortion.[22] And yet in spite of the bombast, certain essential Napoleonic ideas appear in the paper much as they endured to the end, namely, those on heredity, on the equal division of property, and on the nature of civil society. And there is one prophetic sentence which deserves to be quoted. "A disordered imagination! there lies the cause and source of human misfortune. It sends us wandering from sea to sea, from fancy to fancy, and when at last it grows calm, opportunity has passed, the hour strikes, and its possessor dies abhorring life." In later days the author threw what he probably supposed was the only existing manuscript of this vaporing effusion into the fire. But a copy of it had been made at Lyons, perhaps because one of the judges thought, as he said, that it "might have been written by a man otherwise gifted with common sense." Another has been found among the papers confided by Napoleon to Fesch. The proofs of authenticity are complete. It seems miraculous that its writer should have become, as he did, master of a concise and nervous style when once his words became the complement of his deeds.