Madame de Stael 
and Napoleon Bonaparte

MADAME DE STAEL AND NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

THE greatest compliment ever paid by a man to a woman was that which Napoleon Bonaparte, in the plenitude of his power, paid Madame De Staël, in exiling her from Paris.

Here was a man, the greatest general of his age, at the head of a warlike nation, commanding an army of many hundred thousand men, the arbiter of Europe, and the lord of the world, except that part of it which could be reached and overawed by the English navy; and here was a woman, then of no great fortune or celebrity, receiving every evening a circle of friends in a modest drawing-room at Paris. They were antagonists, those two!  Both were foreigners—he an Italian-Corsican, she a Swiss. The man was dazzling and intoxicating France, while using her for purposes of his own. The woman would not be dazzled. In a city delirious she kept her senses. In a company drunk, she remained sober. Among a people dreaming, she was awake. And, gifted as she was by nature with an excellent mind, a humane heart, and an eloquent tongue, she had power to waken and restore other minds.

Our English-speaking world will never see and vividly feel the turpitude of this man Bonaparte, as Madame De Staël saw and, felt it, until his lying bulletins and brutal despatches are translated into our language. I have spent many hours and days in examining them, for they number thirty thousand, and fill thirty-two compact volumes. Let me glean a few passages from the bulletins dictated by his own mouth, and sent from the battle-field to be published in the Moniteur at Paris. From the field of Ulm, he sent this :

"For two days the rain has fallen by pailfuls, and every one is soaked. The soldiers have had no rations, and the mud is up to their knees; but the sight of the Emperor restores their gayety, and they make the field resound with the cry of Vive l'Empereur."

Note how ingeniously he reconciles Paris to the idea of a French army floundering in the mud of a distant land :

"They report also, that when the officers expressed their surprise that the soldiers should forget their privations in the pleasure of seeing him, he replied, "They are right ; for it is to spare their blood that I make them experience such great fatigues.' . . So the soldiers often say, "The Emperor has found a new method of making war; he uses our legs, and not our bayonets.' Five-sixths of the army have not fired a shot, and sorry enough they are for it."

As we read these bulletins we cease to wonder that France should have been willing, y ear after roar, to send to these distant fields of conquest, the elite of her youth. Never was a nation so artfully flattered. Never was war exhibited in so romantic and captivating a manner. Fancy a peasant, worn with toil and privation, reading such a passage as this, or hearing it read at his village church on Sunday :

Fancy, I say, the toiling peasantry of France played upon in this way by the greatest master in the art of dazzling a susceptible people that ever lived. Can you wonder that they should have come to regard war as the proper and natural employment of man, the delight and glory of generous minds, and hold peaceful industry in contempt?  I wish there were room to insert here a translation of a. bulletin in which Napoleon communicates to France many details of the most brilliant of his victories—Austerlitz. It is artful in the highest degree, and exhibits Napoleon in a light so romantic and attractive, that it would conciliate a reader of the present day, if he were ignorant of the fact that every line of this long bulletin is of Napoleon's own composition. Here is one of its anecdotes:

"An incident which does honor to the enemy must not be omitted. The officer in command of the artillery of the Russian Imperial Guard lost his guns in the battle. Meeting the Emperor, he said, ' Sire, have me shot ; I have lost my guns ! ' The Emperor replied, 'Young man, I appreciate your tears. But one can be beaten by my army, and yet have some claims to glory!

The following passages are from the same bulletin :

Till late at night the Emperor rode over the field of battle superintending the removal of the wounded—spectacle of horror, if there ever was one: Mounted upon swift horses, he passed with the rapidity of lightning, and nothing was more touching than to see thosebrave men recognize him. Some forgot their sufferings and said, ' Any way, is the victory perfectly assured?' Others said, ' 1 have suffered for eight hours, and have had no succor since the beginning of the battle; but I have done my duty.' Others cried, ' You ought to be content with your soldiers to-day.' To every wounded soldier the Emperor left a guard, who caused him to be transported to the ambulances. Horrible to say, forty-eight hours after the battle there were still a great number of the Russian wounded who had not been attended to. All the French wounded had attention before night."

No one can coolly read this passage in the original without discerning its fictitious character. First we have the Emperor, during several hours of the night (pendant plusieurs heures de la nuit), going over the field of battle, and causing the wounded to be removed ; and at the end of the passage, we learn that all the French wounded had surgical attention before night (avant la nuit). It is in the night, too, that the Emperor " passes like a flash," and yet he hears the wounded soldiers utter the words quoted above.

He loves to exhibit himself to the Parisians as the object of the envy and the admiration of crowned heads and other distinguished persons. He puts the following words into the mouth of a Russian Prince when he con-versed with one of the French generals:

"'Tell your master,' cried this Prince, 'that I am going home; that he performed miracles yesterday; that the battle has increased my admiration for him; that he is the Predestined of Heaven; that a hundred years must pass before my army equals his."

He also reports a conversation with the Emperor of Russia and the French General Savary.

"'You were inferior to me in numbers.' said the Emperor of Russia, "and yet you were superior at every point of attack.'

"'Sire,' replied General Savary, 'that is the art of war and the fruit of fifteen years of glory. It was the fortieth battle which the Emperor has directed.'

"'That is true,' responded the Emperor of Russia; he is a great warrior. For my part, it was the first time that 1 ever saw fire. 1 have never had the pretension to measure myself with him.'

"'Sire, said Savary, when you have had his experience, you will surpass him perhaps.'

"'I am going to back my capital,' said the Emperor of Russia; 'I came to the succor of the Emperor of Germany ; he tells me he has had enough, and I have had enough too.'

How intoxicating such passages as these to national vanity!  No doubt, too, those little notes which lie took care to write to Josephine after every battle, were handed about the palace, and repeated in the drawing-rooms of Paris. "My dear," he wrote in July, 1807, "the Queen of Prussia dined with me yesterday. I had to defend myself, for she wished to induce me to make some further concessions to her husband. But I was gallant, and did not depart from my policy."

When disaster came, he knew how to communicate it in such a way that the news had the effect to rouse and inspire, rather than discourage. Nor did he hesitate, at critical moments, to deceive. His explanation of the battle of Waterloo seems to be a case in point. He says positively that " the battle was gained; we held all the positions which the enemy occupied at the commencement of the action," and " successes still greater were assured for the next day. But," he adds, " all was lost by a moment of panic terror."

Such are the famous bulletins of Napoleon Bonaparte.

He says himself that the secret of success in war is always to have the greatest force at the point of contact. Would you know how it was that Napoleon contrived to have the greatest force at the point of contact ? Read the bulletins which, with such consummate skill, he flattered, dazzled, bewildered, and maddened the people of France.

Some years ago, when the eyes of the world were turned toward Prussia and France, and many were disposed to censure the severe terms imposed by the victor, I examined these despatches to learn how Napoleon treated Prussia when that kingdom lay prostrate and helpless before him after the battle of Jena. The battle of Jena was fought October 14, 1806. On the very next day the Emperor issued a decree, imposing a heavy contribution in money upon every German state and city that had sided with Prussia in the war. Prussia herself was required to furnish one hundred millions of francs, of which Berlin was to pay ten millions; Saxony had to pay twenty-five millions ; Hesse-Cassel, six millions ; the Duke of Brunswick, five millions and a half ; Weimar, two millions two hundred thousand. From eighteen states and cities, the sum of one hundred and fifty-nine millions four hundred and twenty-five thousand francs was extorted. This to begin with. Of course, all the treasure belonging to the king of Prussia, and all the war material of the kingdom were seized at once.

Three days after the battle, the King of Prussia wrote to Napoleon, asking an armistice. The Emperor refused it, on the ground that a suspension of arms would give time for the Russian armies to arrive and renew the struggle within the Prussian territories, " which," added, Napoleon, " would be too contrary to my interests to permit."

A few days after, the students of the University of Halle made some patriotic demonstrations. The Emperor issued the following order, addressed to his chief of staff, Marshal Budder :

"My COUSIN: Give orders that the University of Halle be closed, and that the students set out for their homes within twenty-four hours. If any are found in the city to-morrow they will be imprisoned, to prevent the con-sequences of the bad spirit which has been inculcated at this University."

When the King of Prussia received the communication from Napoleon refusing the armistice, he sent a nobleman of his court upon an embassy to the Emperor. Alter mentioning this circumstance in a letter to Talley, and, the haughty conquerer adds:

I have made him wait at the outposts. and I have sent Duroc to see what he wants. I am awaiting Duroc's return. The King appears entirely willing to come to terms. I shall accommodate him, but that will not hinder me from going to Berlin."

The next order decrees that the Duchy of Brunswick" shall be treated in all respects as a conquered country" —the ducal arms taken down everywhere, the treasure seized, and the ducal officers sent into France. Nine days after the battle appeared the formal decree in which the entire kingdom of Prussia and all its allied States were divided into five departments, each under the government of a French General, and all authority to be exercised by them through French officials. Prussia was placed under military law, and held absolutely at the mercy of the conquerer. For example, in the special orders relating to the city of Dresden, the capital of Saxony, one of the allies of Prussia, we find such sentences as these:

"All the stores of salt, shoes, cloth, cavalry harness, munitions of war, and cavalry horses will belong to the French army, as war material of which the Elector has no need. . . . Use as many forms, as many ceremonies, as many politenesses, as you please; but the main point is, to take possession of everything, especially war material, under pretext that the Elector has no longer need of such things."

The only offence of the Elector of Saxony was, that in a war which threatened the independence of every German State, he had sided with the power with which he was most intimately bound. Nine days after the battle of Jena, Napoleon issued an order for taking possession of Berlin, preparatory to his own formal entry. The following passage occurs in this order:

"As his Majesty expects to make his entry into Berlin, you can provisionally receive the keys. But give the magistrates to understand, that they will not the less place them in the hands of the Emperor, when he shall make his entry. But you are to exact, that the magistrates and chief men of the city shall come to receive you at the city gates, with all suitable forms."

Prussia, in fact, was spared neither penalty nor humiliation. In relating these scenes, in the bulletins published in the Moniteur for the entertainment of Paris, the Emperor took a tone of lightness and humor ; telling comic anecdotes and describing current caricatures, very much in the style of " Our Own Correspondent," when, in the intervals of conflict, he relates the gossip of the camp. He tells the Parisians how pleasant he found the royal palaces of Prussia, particularly Potsdam; describing the apartments of the great Frederick, and making merry upon the Queen of Prussia, " who left the care of her household, and the grave business of the toilet, to mingle in affairs of state, to mislead the King, and to communicate in every direction the fire of which she was herself possessed." Nothing softened this conqueror, so gay and so stern. In one bulletin, sent from Potsdam, he holds this language:

"The Emperor has been to see the tomb of the great Frederick. The remains of that great man are inclosed in a wooden coffin, covered with copper, placed in a tomb without ornaments, without trophies, without any objects which recall the great actions which he performed. The Emperor has made a present to the Hotel des Invalides, at Paris, of Frederick's sword, his order of the Black Eagle, his general's sash, as well as of the flags borne by his guard in the Seven Years' War."

After thus despoiling Prussia of her most cherished and sacred treasures, he adds that the "old soldiers of the army will receive with a religious respect everything that belonged to one of the first captains of whom history preserves the remembrance." What a thief what an actor How much did he respect those relics? In the same bulletin he amuses the Parisians by telling a ridiculous story of Lord Morpeth, the British Ambassador, who, he says, was "near enough to the field of Jena to hear the cannons. "When news was brought him that the battle was lost, though he was eighteen miles from the scene, "he took to his heels," says Napoleon, " crying out, ' I must not be taken.' He offered as much as sixty guineas for a horse; got one at last, and saved himself."

October the twenty-seventh, the Emperor, surrounded by his marshals, his magnificent staff, and the leading officers of his court, made what he styles his entree solennelle into Berlin, followed by the Imperial foot guard, and by a splendid body of horsemen and grenadiers. Alighting at the royal palace at three o'clock in the afternoon, after having received at the gates the keys of the city, he held a grand reception. He treated the city, in all respects, as the spoil of war; paying his troops from the city treasury, taking all the wine from thecellars, public and private, for the supply of his various armies, assigning a half bottle of wine a day for each soldier of the two corps who had particularly distinguished themselves at the battle of Jena. The nobility had abandoned their houses at his approach. He ordered all the mattresses and furniture to be taken from their houses which might be required for the comfort of his officers. He ordered also, that the city should furnish, at once, the cloth for a hundred thousand uniforms, a hundred thousand pairs of shoes, and a hundred thousand caps.

"My intention is," this order concluded, "that Berlin should furnish me abundantly all that my army needs, and that nothing is to be considered except that my soldiers should have an abundance of everything they require."

At the same time he assigned the abandoned houses of the nobility to his principal officers. It is indeed difficult, in the space to which I am restricted, to convey to the reader an adequate idea of the relentless vigilance with which this conqueror despoiled the German States of all that they possessed which could be useful to him. To one General he writes:

"They tell me that there is a great deal of wine at Stettin. Take all of it, though there should be twenty millions' worth."

Another, he orders to raise a German corps for service in Italy, because, as he explains, he wants " to get rid of those soldiers." To Marshal Ney he writes, in November:

"Try your best to prevent the treasures in Magdeburg from being carried off.  Have every baggage wagon and powder cart examined. The treasure chests of he regiments are in Magdeburg; so are the army chests, and the large treasures belonging to the Prince. Lay hands upon everything."

A hundred such sentences as these could be gleaned from a single volume of his letters of this period. From the fourteenth of October, 1806, to the ninth of July, 1807, Napoleon never relaxed his clutch upon the capital and dominions of the King of Prussia.  On the ninth of July he granted peace to King Frederick William, on terms more severe, perhaps, than a conqueror has ever imposed upon a powerful state. The King was obliged to surrender more than half of his kingdom, and he was informed that the portion he retained was conceded to him only out of regard to the wishes of the Emperor of Russia. Napoleon, in fact, in the "Note" giving an out-line of the terms of peace which he was prepared to grant, expressly says that it is the "protection of the Emperor Alexander which causes the King of Prussia to reënter into the possession of a portion of his states."  Two other slices were soon after severed from the Prussian dominions—the Duchy of Warsaw and the Duchy of Danzig; and the whole amount of money contributions wrung from the prostrate kingdom was four hundred and fifty million of francs. Prussia was further compelled to engage to pay for French garrisons in some of its for-tresses, and to furnish a contingent of troops to the Emperor in all future wars.

This was the man whom Madame de Stael saw and understood in 1805, as well as we can in 1883. She had known him when he figured as a vain young soldier of the Republic, and discerned his true character even then. There was danger in such a woman. The conqueror felt it, and owned himself unable to cope with her by sending her to reside a hundred and twenty miles from Paris ! If she ventured to approach nearer, he wrote with his own hand (as we see in his published correspondence,) an order to his chief of police to make her keep her distance. " That she crow," he styles her in one of these fierce notes. "That bird of evil omen," he callsher in another. In another he says that " her approach bodes mischief," and he will not have her on French soil. In another, alluding to her father, M. Neckar, the banker and financier, he winds up an angry order by saying : " that foreign family have done mischief enough in France already." How honorable to this lady, the rancorous hostility of such a man iii such a place.

Banished from the city which she loved above all other places in the world, she flew to literature as a resource against the tedium of exile. Corinne, which contained the results of an Italian tour, made her famous. Next, she turned her long residence in Germany to account by writing a work upon that country, which has since taken its place as one of the classics of French literature. In its composition she most scrupulously avoided writing a sentence, a phrase, a word, an allusion which the police at Paris could construe in a sense hostile to the imperial government. Corinne had been allowed to appear; why not L' Allemagne?

The manuscript being complete, she sent it for publication to the house in Paris that had published her Corinne, some years before. A. few days after a decree was made public to the effect that no work could thenceforth be printed in France until it had been examined by censors. I notice in the Napoleon Correspondence that the emperor scolded the minister of police for employing in this decree the odious word censeurs, because it savored of the tyranny of the Bourbon kings. He did not like the word, but events soon showed that he approved the thing.

The work was submitted to the censors, and the author came to a place forty leagues from Paris to make alterations and read the proofs. The manuscript was read with the closest attention, but nothing was found objectionable in it except here and there a sentence or a phrase. To afford the reader an idea of the necessary timidity of despots, I will give a few of the sentences ordered to be suppressed. Speaking of the reforms instituted by the Emperor Joseph of Austria, Madame de Staël had ventured this terrible observation:

"But after his death, nothing remained of what he had established; since nothing endures except what comes progressively."

The first half of this sentence she was required to cut out. The reader will not be at a loss to guess why. It was just four years after, that the French empire, which never seemed so strong as in 1810, proved the truth of the latter half, which was allowed to stand. The sentence following excited the ire of the censors:

"A. witty woman has remarked that, of all places in the world, Paris is the one where a person can best do without happiness."

The gentleman who marked this sentence for suppression condescended to give a reason for so doing. Under the reign of the emperor, lie said, there was "so much happiness at Paris that no one need do without it." In discoursing upon Frederick the Great, she said, that a powerful man, so long as he lived, could hold together the most discordant elements; "bat at his death, they separate." The last phrase was suppressed, the emperor having just taken an important step to prevent the separation of discordant elements at his death. He had divorced Josephine, and married Marie-Louise.

She denounced the partition of Poland, and added this comment:

"It can never be expected that subjects thus obtained, will he faithful to the trickster who calls himself their sovereign."

Suppressed of course. The following also was summarily cut :

"Good taste in literature is, in some respects, like order under despotism; it concerns us to examine at what price it is purchased."

The longest passage suppressed was one in which she maintained that a public man should never retain his place for an instant, when he could no longer hold it with honor.

"Let him but begin to negotiate with circumstances and all is lost ; for there is no one who has not circumstances. Some men have a wife, children, nephews, for whom a fortune is necessary. Others need activity, occupation, and possess I know not how many virtues, which all conduce to the necessity of having a place, with money and power attached to it."

This passage, Madame De Staël records, provoked the censors to extreme ill-humor. They said that, if these remarks were true, no man could obtain, nor even ask, a place. Out with it all! The paragraph, however, that kindled their highest indignation, was a little burst of eloquence which closed the book:

"O, France! land of glory and love! if ever enthusiasm should be extinguished upon thy soil—if ever cold calculation should dispose of everything, and reasoning alone inspire contempt of peril—what would avail thy beautiful sky, thy genius so brilliant, thy nature so affluent?  An active intelligence and a wise impetuosity would indeed render thee master of the world ; but thou wouldst leave upon it only the trace of sand-torrents, terrible as the waves, arid as the desert ! "

This, too, was suppressed. The publisher having submitted to every exaction of the censors, supposed it was safe to proceed. The work was put in type, and ten thousand copies were printed. Suddenly the printing office was surrounded by soldiers, and an officer entered, who announced that he was ordered to destroy every copy. He obeyed the order, and, it is said, died of fatigue in doing it. The spoiled sheets were sold to a paper-maker, and the proceeds of the sale—about one hundred and twenty dollars—were brought to the publisher ; and this was the only compensation he ever received. The author, in the meantime, was ordered to leave France within twenty-four hours. "Twenty-four hours!" It was the time allowed to conscripts to prepare for marching. Having with her neither money nor vehicle, she wrote to the minister asking for eight days. The request was granted ; but, in granting it, the minister of police filled his letter with polite insolence. He told her that, in his opinion, the air of France did not agree with her, and that the French people were not reduced to seek for models among the people she had held up to admiration in her work upon Germany. He was sorry for the publisher's loss ; but "It was not possible to let the work appear." At the same time, he forbade her to repair to any of the northern seaports, whence she could escape into England.

It cost her nearly two years of effort before she succeeded in reaching England, so completely was Napoleon master of the continent. After the expulsion of the tyrant she hastened to Paris, where she remained during the Hundred Days unmolested. She spent the closing years of her busy life in Switzerland, her native country, where she was secretly married to a young officer. She veiled this second marriage in secrecy because she was unwilling to change a name to which her works and her persecutions had given celebrity. Her first marriage—to the Swedish ambassador, Baron de Staël-Holstein-occurred when she was twenty. It was a marriage of convenience, not of affection, and gave her little happiness. Her tombstone bears a curious inscription:

"HIC TANDEM QUETSCIT QUAKE NUNQUAM QUIEVIT.'

"Here rests one who never rested." She was among the greatest of her sex. Corinne, which has long been used in schools as a French reading book, is not excellent, nor .even tolerable, as a work of art ; but her writings abound in passages of admirable sense expressed in admirable words. Her book upon Germany, with all the suppressed passages marked, was reprinted in Paris as recently as 1867; and about the same time was completed the publication of the works of her antagonist, who held her in such well grounded terror.

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