NAPOLEON THE FIRST.

 BY DE BODICHON.

 HISTORY has not represented the first Napoleon as he was in reality. Poets, private secretaries, courtiers, enthusiasts, enemies, and clamourers, have drawn the portrait. We propose to examine his character from the point of view of physiologist and positivist.
 Napoleon was neither dark nor fair. He had dark chesnut hair, eyes grey, complexion of a pale brown without any red in it, and a smooth skin. The brain was large; the skull belonged to the largest development ever known. His circulation was slow, the pulse counting forty beats a minute; he perspired little, and was insensible alike to heat and cold, hunger and thirst; his chest was prominent, and his limbs well-proportioned; his height was five feet two inches. Of a lymphatic temperament, he could support alike excess of physical and mental exertion. It was a constitution of granite. Warm baths, coffee, and strong wines restored his circulation. His intellect was vast and many-sided, applying itself to details and generalizations, made up of prodigious memory, that rapidly took account of place, number, and cause, and the bearing as of things; a genius, in fine, eminently practical and positivist. Dissimulation, an extraordinary power of generalization, and a sluggish temperament, make up this wonderful man: these qualities are the sources of all his greatness.
 He was a fatalist. Events are brought about by a power superior to human will, he said. There is neither good nor bad in the world. The morality of an action is to be judged by its expediency. Religions are human institutions, serving as a sort of vaccine to protect us against lower superstitions, to be defended, not in the interests of society, but in the interests of the priests.
 Such was his creed, and he naturally hated those who possessed a higher one. Consul, emperor, prisoner, and exile, he hated philosophy and philosophers from first to last, and accused them of the misfortune he had himself brought upon France —the failure of the Russian expedition, the sore discontent of the nation, and so on. "They believe neither in myself nor in my priests," he said, these metaphysicians, speaking of B. Constant, L. Chenier, Guigeéne, and others, who showed hostility to the Concordat, "and are good for nothing but to be thrown into a pond. Je les ai comme une vermine sur mes habits."[I have them like vermin on my clothes] It was natural that being, as he eminently was, a mystifier of the people, dazzling them with charlatanry and words, he should fear and hate the spirit of inquiry and independence.
By the multitude in France Napoleon was long considered the defender of the principles of 1789, and he used to say at St. Helena that he had imbued foreign nations with the revolutionary spirit; but after the 18th Brumaire his cause was entirely personal. What, indeed, are revolutionary principles? They are liberty, equality, sovereignty of the people, republican institutions, a nation governing itself, a free church, religious toleration, international feeling, and democracy protected against the aristocracy, the people protected against the ruler. Let us consider the cause of Buonaparte. As soon as he had seized the reins of power, he confiscated journals, destroyed republican institutions after every victory, created a legislative body that was a mere puppet in his own hands, turned the Assembly into a machine, the army into a body of irresponsible functionaries; he established a state religion, restored a kind of feudalism, created entailed estates and titles of nobility, which were distributed to renegades of the revolution like himself; the people were deprived of all right of judgment upon public affairs, the sovereign was placed above the nation; a legion of parasites was there; public education was constructed solely with a view towards forwarding the Napoleonic idea; taxation that weighed upon the rich was abolished, and that affecting the poor restored.
 He spoke of the divine right that Providence had accorded to him, and became, in fact, an oriental, delighting in pompous titles —lacqueys were glorified under the name of princes, marshals of the empire, chamberlains —most of them being adventurers without any political or religious convictions. The re-establishment of a court has been a scourge for France; a court with us Frenchmen is the ruin of morals. Before the 11th Brumaire France was surrounded by republics—Batavias, Helvetain, Roman, Cisalpine, Ligurian. All were destroyed by him. After his marriage with Marie-Louise he was heard to talk more than once of "mon oncle, Louis the Sixteenth." Napoleon, by persuading the French nation that he was the bulwark of the revolutionary ideas of 1789, shows an extraordinary aptitude for mystification, outdoing in this respect all the miracle-workers that ever lived. He drove France for sixteen years as a shepherd his sheep: and the moral standard of the nation sank by many degrees. Servile manners, the destruction of independent character, the "prestige" of a spurious glory, the desire of places and decoration, the immorality, the military coarseness, the international hate, thereby engendered, still brand France with the mark of moral inferiority. She possessed during that epoch but one heroic quality—that of courage on the battle field. "Destroy," he said to his soldiers; " tuez et allez vous faire tuir; l'Empereor vous regarde."[kill and go and be killed; the emperor looks on] To the magistrates he said, "judge and condemn that innocent person; l'Empereur vous regarde." To the priests, "priez pour l'Empereur." To the idle, "songez a l'Empereur." To the industrious, " travaillez pour l'Empereur." Every French man belonged more absolutely to the Emperor than a dog to his master, because the subjection of the Frenchmen was voluntary. The words "the Emperor is satisfied" produced new acts of devotion. Nothing like it was ever seen in a civilised society. In sacrificing 2,500,000 Frenchmen, the flower of the nation, he left the continuation of the race to the feeble, the deformed, the unhealthy; and naturally it followed that the physical condition of French subjects from 1804 to 1816 was below that of any previous or following epoch. A nation is regenerated by liberty, morality, peace, labour, economy, free thought; and Napoleon was the enemy of all these.
He loved noise, movement, martial life, drums, trumpets, and the destruction of life upon a large scale. Though circumspect in no small degree, he revealed this by one of his despatches :—"Sur une espace de lieue carree,[on a space of a square league ] 9000 a 10,000 cadavres, et 4000 a chevaux tues; tout cela avait plus de relief sur un fonds de neige."[bodies, horses killed, all this had more relief on a background of snow] The East was the land of his dreams. There life is nothing ; there, to use his own language, "on peut travailler au grand."[we can work]
 Egotism, jealousy, acquisitiveness, a passion for mystifying others, falsehood, were strongly-marked characteristics. He was also a reviler ; he insulted all whom he feared or hated. Thus this old friend of Robespierre, this whilom Jacobite and terrorist, designated the sincere republicans as "chiens enragé "[rabid dogs] and brigands; he called the King of Prussia the most complete fool of all the kings on earth; Pitt an enemy of the human race; the Spanish Bourbons a troop of sheep; Broglie, Bishop of Ghent, a reptile; the emigrants who were faithful to the monarchy and the priests who disapproved of the concordat "scum of the earth." He calumniated the Duc d'Enghien by pretending that he had preferred him his services. He accused Grouchy of the defeat of Waterloo. Bernadotte of not having come to his aid on the field of Eylau. He showed himself a true Corsican to the last. It was a boast of his that he had never committed any crimes privately. This was a lie. His Corsican enemies, Ardue and Cerrachi, fell into trap of his setting and lost their lives. Pichegru was strangled by his order; several former Jacobins were summoned before a council of war, and by his private command condemned to death. The assassination of the Duc d'Enghein made a noise in the world because he was a Bourbon. History will some day relate many analogous cases, hitherto left in obscurity. Nero and Torquemada destroyed fewer lives throughout their entire career than did Bonaparte during a single month of his reign. I believe, that from 1804 to 1815 his victims (including Frenchmen and others) numbered not less than six millions of men. It would be important to know how many deserters were shot. Each principal town of the several departments had its " place aux fusillades," and many towns of the second rank also. Probably several thousands of French subjects were shot before councils of war for mere desertion.
 France has never had such an enemy. If she perishes, it will be by the application of the Napoleonic idea; that is to say, by falsehood audacity, despotism, cunning, hypocrisy, war, luxury, corruption. The eulogists of this man have been visionaries, unscrupulous worshippers of brute force, soldiers, priests, the ignorant, and the servile, in fine, all who venerate the devil more than God, and who are incapable of resigning themselves for the good of humanity to the inconveniences of entire liberty. He has been popular in France because the French are imaginative, and have believed hitherto that their Emperor defended France and the republic against all Europe. Writers and artists have encouraged this notion. In exalting and poétisant the Emperor they have sold their works and attained a success. Next to the history of religion, the history of war has most attraction for the popular mind, and the apologists of Napoleon have followed the example of religious writers and artists, who repeat the lives of saints and martyrs in poetry, painting, and sculpture.
 To sum up the characteristics of Napoleon, he possessed one of the vastest intellects ever known, owing such superiority to his utter insensibility to impressions, his sluggish temperament, his wonderful faculty of combination and reasoning; war was to him a pastime; politics a personal affair only; he possessed neither religious, moral, nor political beliefs; he held the human race in profound contempt, and was the greatest egotist ever known; a man of prodigious aptitude for knavery and mystification, and for administrative power; an intellectual giant, who caused the retrogression of France and of all Europe, and who possessed one of the worst hearts that the history of the human race has disclosed. All lovers of progress ought to make a pilgrimage to Waterloo once in their lives: not to exult over the destruction of a French army, but to contemplate the spot where this great enemy of the human race fell a victim to his own excess.

Goulburn Herald and Chronicle (NSW : 1864 - 1881), Saturday 15 August 1874, page 2