Taine's Estimate of Napolean Bonaparte [pp. 384-397]

1887.] TAINE'S ESTIMATE OF NAPOLEON BONAAPARTE. 387
order that he might build himself an Eastern empire, or, failing
that, send back to Europe trumpet-blasts of victories spectacularly won on Egypt's parched sands, by the banks of the venerable Nile, and under the shadow of the Pyramids, to herald his
approach with garnered sheaves of new laurels.
When he became consul and then emperor his theory that
men were made to obey him obtained fresh verification. At his
first gesture all Frenchmen flung themselves at his feet-the conmmon people and soldiers with brute fidelity, the state dignitaries
and army officers with Oriental servility. Among the Republicans he found his chief worshippers, and he readily fashioned
them into his instruments. From the start he saw beneath their
gilded oratory and detected the desire to rule among their platitudes about equality. Every man, he thought, desired to rule as
first fiddle in even minor pieces, and he was inclined to gratify
them, provided they acknowledged his domination over all. Disinterested sentiment, devotion to a cause or an idea, he could not
even understand. If rigid Republicans like Cambon, Baudot,
Lecourbe, and Delmas growl, he disposes of them by calling
them hide-bound ignoramuses stuck in a rut. Those intelligent
and self-sacrificing Liberals of I789 he dubs "ideologists, drawing-room statesmen, theorists." "Lafayette is a political tomfool,
the dupe of men and things." He disputes to their faces men
who declare they were disinterested advocates of liberty in promoting the Revolution, and argues down General Dumas' throat
that he was either inspired with Massena's ignoble greed for
money or Murat's thirst for a princely title. The most competent eye-witnesses agree in saying that Bonaparte's conviction
of universal venality among men was so firm that nothing could
shake it. "His opinions about men," says Metternich, "had
been distilled into a conception which, unluckily for him, had
acquired to his mind the force of an axiom; he was persuaded
that no man called upon to play a part on the public stage, or
merely busied in the active pursuits of life, ever was controlled,
or could be controlled, by anything but self-interest." "According to him," adds M. Taine, "you get hold on a man through his
selfish passions-fear, greed, sensuality, self love, emulation
those are his springs of action when he is in his right senses and
can reason. It is easy enough, moreover, to make of him a madman, for man is imaginative, credulous, prone to be carried away;
puff up his pride and vanity, instill in him an overwhelming and
false notion of himself and other people, and you can launch him
headforemost where you like."