The Press. — London, England, 1856-01-19 00:00:00

such a step. There were prisons in France whose secrets none dared to reveal. But he must have been, on the whole, extremely well pleased when British bayonets put an end to the farce of the Spanish monarchy. When Napoleon returned from Russia, says the editor, " he found his armies driven across the " frontiers of France, and Joseph quietly " established as a country gentleman at " M o rte fon tain c." In some of Joseph's letters he appears iu a ridiculous aspect. In August, 1806, he wrote to congratulate Napoleon on his birthday ; I hope that you may receive with some little pleasure this expression of my affection. The glorious Emperor will never replace to me the Nap3leone whom I so much loved, and whom I hope to find again, as I knew him twenty years ago, if we are to meet in the Elysian Fields. Napoleon's reply to this sentimental effusion was happy, and not untinged with humour : My Brother,—l have received your letter of the 13th of August. lam sorry that you think that you will find your brother again only in the Elysian Fields. It is natural that at forty he should not feel towards you as he did at twelve ; but his feelings towards you have greater truth and strength ; his frieudship has the features of his mind. Probably Napoleon thought better of his brothers than he wished them to know. " Jerome," he says, in one place, "is doing well ; " there is stuff in him to make a first-rate man. "You may be sure, however, that he has no ilea " that I think so, for in my letters I do nothing " but find fault with him." Early in this cor respondence, he speaks highly also of Louis, whom he describes as a man of his own making ; hut it is observable that as his power grew he became infinitely more exacting, an' that all other feelings were swallowed up by his ambition. The only touches which re mind us that he was human towards the close of his career, are those in which he alludes to his son. When Paris was threatened, in 1814, he wrote to Joseph : As for me, I would !rather they would kill my son than see him brought up at Vienna as an Austrian prince, and I think well enough of the Empress to believe that she is of the same opinion as far as that is possible to a woman and a mother. I have never seen Androrntique acted, with. out pitying the fate of .Astyanat in surviving the rest of his house, nor without thinking that it would have been a blessing for him if he had died before his father. His fears were prophetic. His young Astyanax was brought up as an Austrian prince, but had better have died in childhood. One hardly knows whether most to admire or to condemn the next passage, written in 1814, when the Emperor was engaged in his desperate conflict with the allies for the possession of Paris, but it shows that attention to minute details which was a marked feature of his character : I have received some engravings of the King of Rome. I wish you to change the inscription, " May God watch over my father and France," to this, " I pray to God for my father and for France ;" it is simpler. I also wish some copies to be struck otf representing the King in the uniform of the National Guard. Was his thought for his son in this instance the thought of a father or of a politician ? While on the one part it is pleasing to think that Napoleon's thoughts turned from the field of battle to contemplate his boy at Paris in an attitude of prayer, it is revolting to imagine that he was ready to pervert the innocence of childhood to purposes of theatrical display. In any case the artifice had no effect. The Parisians were too thoroughly sick of Napo leonic rule to be encouraged by such devices when the enemy was at their gates. The attention to the smallest matters of military detail revealed in these volumes im presses one with wonder to reflect how capa cious must have been the mind which could at the same time entertain designs which swept over the horizon of the whole world, and attend to the most trifling particulars of arrangement,. When Joseph was King of Naples Napoleon gave him instructions to insure his personal safety : No one should enter your room during the night except your aide•de-camp, who should sleep in the chamber that recedes your bed-room. Your door should be fastened inside, and you ought not to open it till you have recog nised his voice; he himself should not knock at your door till he has locked that of the room which he is in, to make sure of being alone, and of being followed by no one. He was never weary of impressing on Joseph the necessity of attending to the smallest matters of details connected with military ad ministration. " The returns of my armies," he said " form the most agreeable portions of THE PRESS. "my library. They are the volumes which I " read with the greatest pleasure in my mo " ments of relaxation." He wrote to Joseph : St. Cloud, Juue Zit, 1800. My Brother,— I see from your letter of the 17th that, you have received some biscuit, and that 12,000 pairs of shoes have reached you from France. Take care to inform me of the arrival of each consignment of biscuit and shoes, that I may make sure of not being cheated in my accounts. Count the biscuits one by one ; their quality should be good. The shoes ought to be made of stout leather, not pasteboard ; they cost me five and a half francs a pair. It was the same with details of another kind. Joseph wanted to make Naples gay with French actresses and dancers, and had com missioned an agent to tempt some from Paris. Napoleon heard of this, and wrote : Already one or two actresses of the Opera have signified to me their wish to go to Naples; you must feel the absurd effect of such conduct. If you want opera dancers be sure that I will send you as many as you like. Itussia behaved in this way, and I was so disgusted that I ordered the Emperor of Russia to be told that I would send him, if he wanted them, all the actresses of the Opera, with the exception of Madame Garde'. He instructs Joseph how to frame decrees, what each regiment ought to cost him, where every man of his army ought to be stationed. His letters should be the text-book of men who wish to become organisers, and to under stand how the most complex affairs of a mighty machine may be administered. Yet he had bad agents to deal with. His famous generals and Ministers plundered him by wholesale. His letters are full of complaints of the dis honesty and perfidy of the men whom, on account of their sharp talents, he had raised from the dust to stations of command. One cause of his fall was the total want of moral principle in his creatures. A few honourable, high-minded men would have been of incalcu lable service to him. When commencing his Spanish campaign, he wrote to Dejean, Minis ter of War : Yon will find annexed a report of the commissary. You will see how shamefully I am treated ; I have only 1,400 coats, 7,000 great-coats instead of 50,000 ; 15,000 pairs of shoes instead of 129,000. lam in want of everything. Nothing can be worse than the clothing. My army will begin the campaign naked. It has nothing. The con scripts are not clothed. Your reports are waste paper. Among all the plunderers, Massena was the most shameless. Napoleon wrote (Paris, March 12, 1806) : Let Massena be advised to return the 6,000,000 f. To do so quickly is his only salvation. To suffer the soldiers to starve and to be unpaid, and to pretend that the sums destined for their use were a present to himself from the province, is too impudent. Such conduct would make it impossible to carry on a war. Let 8— be watched. The details of their plunderings are incredible. I learn them from the Austrians, who themselves are ashamed of them. They allowed corn to go to Venice. The evil is intolerable. The remedy I will apply. I order Ardent to be arrested. He must be in Paris or in Milan. He is an agent of S—. If he should be in Naples have him arrested, and sent under a good escort to Paris. You have seen that Flachat has been condemned to a year's impri- sonment in irons, and that his transactions have been declared void. It is a question why ho continued to employ and favour such scamps. The truth seems to be thAtt he had need of unscrupulous agents, and ruat he objected, not to their plundering the countries they invaded, but to their keeping the plunder for themselves. He was himself a robber on a grand scale. He wrote to Joseph, when ordering him to make his entry into Madrid : Denon is anxious for some pictures. I wish you to seize all that you can find in the confiscated houses and suppressed convents, and to make me a present of fifty chefs-d'univre, which I want for the museum in Paris. His generals might well have trusted their fortunes to his care, considering the magnifi cence of his rewards. It was his aim to es tablish an aristocracy round every throne he created. He shadowed out his whole scheme to Joseph. After dictating to him the creation of eight duchies in Naples, to be supported from confiscated property, he continued : Tell me what titles you would give to the duchies in your kingdom. The titles are not so important as the property attached to them; Fisch should have 200,000 f. a year. I have required also that the owners of the titles should have a residence in Paris, for the centre of the whole system is there. I intend to have in Paris one hundred fortunes, all of them having grown up with the throne, and alone preserved by entails, while all other fortunes will be split into fragments by onr law of in heritance. Establish our civil code iu Naples; by that means all the fortunes which you do not preserve bill disapear in a few years. This is th e grea t a d van t age o f our civil code. SATURDAY, A great advantage in the interest of despotism no doubt, but fatal to the establishment of constitutional freedom, which requires for its support a succession of ranks all connected with, and blending into, each other. We obtain such an insight into Napoleon's policy here as must convince every reader that no secure peace could ever have been made with him. When Joseph was on the throne of Naples, he wrote to him : I hope that, by setting to work earnestly to form a goad army and fleet, you will assist me to become master of the Mediterranean, which is the chief and perpetual aim of my policy. _ _ He never regarded any treaty of peace as more than a truce ; and it was a fortunate cir cumstance fur the repose of Europe that his presumption in 1814 prevented that negotia• tion with him before his final defeat which the allies seemed willing to commence while the issue of the great struggle was yet un certain. His confidence in his star was justified by past events. All things considered, no general ever gained such victories before. He wrote to Joseph (Oct. 27, 1805) : Before a fortnight I shall have opposed to me 100.000 Russians and 80,0 W Austrians, sent from Italy, and from the other reserves of that kingdom. I shall conquer them, but not without loss. A few weeks later he recorded the victory of Austerlitz : I had yesterday a decisive battle. I put to flight the allied army, commanded by the two Emperors of Germany and Russia in person. It consisted of 80,000 Russians and 30,000 Austrians. I have taken about 40,000 pnsoners, among whom are twenty Russian generals, forty colours, one hundred pieces of cannon, and all the standards of the Russian Imperial Guards. The whole army has covered itself with glory. The enemy has left at least from 12,000 to 15,00() men on the field. I do not yet know my own loss. 1 estimate it at 800 or 930 killed, and twice as many wounded. The next year he was equally successful against Prussia. He wrote from Berlin : lam master of all the strong places. I have taken in the campaign l40,0)0 prisoners, of whom 20po11 are cavalry. I have captured more than 800 pieces of cannon, and 27)0 standards and colours. The Prussian acme and monarchy have ceased to exist. It is a proof of the quickness with which nations recover from military disasters, and of the rapidity with which armies are recruited, that eight or nine years later Napoleon found in the Prussian army his most inveterate antagonist, and that at last it completed the overthrow of his empire on the field of Waterloo. The year 107 was as glorious to him as its two prede cessors : The battle of Friedland, which was fought on the anni versary of that of Marengo, has decided the contest. The Russian army has been destroyed This battle has been as decisive as those of Marengo, of Austerlitz, and of Jena. It is noticeable that some of his greatest cam paigns were gone through in the winter. Austerlitz was won in December. He gives a vivid picture of the fatigues of his army in the Polish campaign. In answer to Joseph, who had stated the discontent of the Neapolitan army at not being with him to share his triumphs he wrote, Osterode, March 1, 1807, three weeks after the battle of Eylan : Neither the staff, nor the colonels, nor the other zegi mental officers, have taken their clothes off for the last two months. some not for four months (I myself have been a fortnight without taking off my boots ), in the middle of snow and mud, without bread, wine, or brandy, living on potatoes and meat, makin g long marches and counter-marches, without any sort of comfort, fighting with our bayonets frequently under grapeshot ; the wounded obliged to be removed in sledges, in the open air, to a distance of fifty leagues. Napoleon introduced a new system of warfare. His victories were achieved by the decision and rapidity of his movements. To crush his foe, he braved the seasons, performed incredi ble marches, reduced his commissariat to the simplest and barest resources, and calculated on the sacrifice of a certain number of his troops. The allies learnt to beat him with his own weapons. Now we seem to have gone back to the ante-Napoleon period, when winter quarters succeeded naturally to a summer campaign ; when the motions of armies and fleets were ruled by precedent and routine; and when the fortune of events depended on the gout of the Minister who presided over the War Department. Maxims of the highest value seemed to flow naturally from this great master of warfare ■