All Quotes

"What! Will you submit to give your country a master taken from a race, of origin so ignominious that the Romans disdained to employ them as slaves?"

"I have always been the victim of my attachment to him. He only loves you by fits and starts, that is, when he has need of you."

"A dîner, il nous disait qu'il se trouvait beaucoup mieux, et nous lui avons fait observer, à ce sujet, que, depuis quelque temps néanmoins, il ne sortait plus, et travaillat huit, dix, douze heures par jour. «C'est cela même,» disait-il: «le travail est mon élément; je suis né et construit pour le travail. J'ai connu les limites de mes jambes, j'ai connu les limites de mes yeux; je n'ai jamais pu connaître celles de mon travail.»"

"He was also much impressed with the idea of deriving the origin of supreme authority from the Divinity. He said to me one day at Compiègne, shortly after his marriage with the Archduchess, "I see that the Empress, in writing to her father, addresses her letter to His Sacred and Imperial Majesty. Is this title customary with you?" I told him that it was, from the tradition of the old German Empire, which bore the title of the Holy Empire, and because it was also attached to the Apostolic crown of Hungary. Napoleon then replied, in a grave tone:— "It is a fine custom, and a good expression. Power comes from God, and it is that alone which places it beyond the attacks of men. Hence I shall adopt the title some day.""

"Like a final signpost to other ways, there appeared Napoleon, the most unique and violent anachronism that ever existed, and in him the incarnate problem of the aristocratic ideal in itself—consider well what a problem it is:—Napoleon, that synthesis of Monster and Superman."

"Why, he's a man of wax."

"Although Napoleon's individual ambitions were not realised, his actions have nevertheless left the deepest impress on society. In France, the new state had not yet taken definite shape, and it was Napoleon who gave it an administrative framework that bore the marks of a master hand. The Revolution of 1789 had thrust the middle classes forward into power, but this power had then been disputed by a rising democracy. Under the protection of the emperor, the notables succeeded in recovering it, and grew in wealth and influence. Once they had got rid of the menace of the common people, they were prepared to govern and to restore liberalism. In Europe, the spread of French ideas, the influence of England, the advance of capitalism and the consequent rise of the middle classes, all tended in the same direction and resulted in a marked speeding up of evolution and the introduction of the modern order. The expansion of culture, the proclamation of the sovereignty of the people and the spread of Romanticism foreshadowed the awakening of nationalism, and Napoleon’s territorial rearrangements and reforms encouraged these trends. Capitalism was taking root in the West, and the blockade provided protection for its early stages. Romanticism had long been fermenting in Europe, and Napoleon provided its poets with the perfect hero. But though Napoleon’s influence was considerable, this was only in so far as it followed the currents that were already carrying European civilisation along with them. If historical determinism is to be brought into the picture, this is where its effects may be observed."

"But Palmerston likes to put his foot on their necks! Now, no statesman must triumph over an enemy that is not quite dead, because people forget a real loss, a real misfortune, but they won’t forget an insult. Napoleon made great mistakes that way; he hated Prussia, insulted it on all occasions, but still left it alive. The consequence was that in 1813 they rose to a man in Prussia, even children and women took arms, because they had been treated with contempt and insulted."

"At the battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon's cavalry had charged again and again upon the unbroken squares of British infantry, at last they were giving up the attempt, and going off in disorder, when some of the officers in mere vexation and complete despair fired their pistols at those solid squares."

"The spirit which had produced the revolution, which had changed the whole constitution of society in France, and had given battle to all the monarchies of Europe, was not wholly extinct; and, as the calamities of anarchy faded from the remembrance of the people, would probably become stronger and stronger. To destroy it utterly, to prevent it from ever reviving, to turn the minds of men into a course different from that in which they had moved during the greater part of the eighteenth century, was the chief object of the policy of Napoleon. He is said to have observed that nobody could conceive the difficulties of governing a people who read the social contract and the spirit of the laws. His whole conduct showed that he was possessed by an ambition at once the meanest and the most gigantic that ever entered into any heart. Too selfish to govern in conformity with the liberal principles of the age, he attempted to compress the spirit of the age into conformity with his maxims of government. Political science was to be forced backwards. The public mind of Europe was to sink into second childhood, lest the depraved ambition of one man should encounter a single obstacle."

"The press was placed under the most severe and watchful restraint. The jealously of the emperor was not confined to the writings of the living, but extended to works which had long been classical. Louis the Fourteenth, though a despot and a conqueror, had listened with respect to the noble discourse in which the eloquence of Massillon exposed the folly and wickedness of ambition. Bonaparte dreaded the effect which those sermons might produce on a people exhausted by taxes and conscriptions. Louis the Fourteenth, superstitious as he was, defended the Tartuffe of Molière against the hypocrites and bigots of his court. Bonaparte expressed his regret that such a piece should be in possession of the stage, and declared that, if it had been new, he would not have suffered it to be performed. Coming after a revolution produced by the force of public opinion, he was more competent than any of his predecessors to estimate that force, and was more solicitous than any of them to guard against it... Every writer of every age who had set forth the evils of despotism he regarded as his personal enemy. He spoke with bitterness of the masterly portraits of Tacitus, of those lessons of benevolence which are conveyed in the sweet and glowing language of Fénélon, and of those bold attacks on political and social abuses which form the redeeming part of the writings of Voltaire. He hated madame de Staël, and persecuted her with unmanly cruelty. Other despots were content to prescribe to their subjects what they should not write; the French emperor dictated almost the whole literature of France: he made it a crime not to flatter him."

"If the plans of Napoleon had succeeded, if he had been able to humble Russia, to drive the English from Spain, to keep down the whole continent by military force, if his life had been prolonged to the full age of man, and if his power had lasted as long as his life, it is scarcely possible to estimate the amount of evil which he would have produced. He would have renewed, perhaps for centuries, the expiring lease of tyranny... The insolence of office would have succeeded to the insolence of birth. The old aristocracy would have fallen, only that a new aristocracy, of the basest and most pernicious kind, might rise in its stead; an aristocracy of placemen, oppressing the people, and oppressed by each other. A new generation would have grown up skilfully trained and broken in to slavery, – a generation which would have derived all its political notions from books mutilated by censors, and conversations watched by spies. The government would have been like that of the Byzantine empire, or that of China, – a vast official hierarchy, rising by numerous gradations, with an oppressed people beneath and a solitary tyrant at the summit; and the human intellect would have languished as it languished under the emperors of the east, and as it has for ages languished in China."

"Surrounded by individuals who, in the midst of a world in ruins, walked at random without any fixed guidance, given up to all kinds of ambition and greed, he alone was able to form a plan, hold it fast, and conduct it to its conclusion. It was in the course of the second campaign in Italy that he conceived the one which was to carry him to the summit of power. "When I was young," he said to me; "I was revolutionary from ignorance and ambition. At the age of reason, I have followed its counsels and my own instinct, and I crushed the Revolution.""

"I used to say of him that his presence on the field made the difference of forty thousand men."

"After the first Revolution had transformed the semi-feudal peasants into freeholders, Napoleon confirmed and regulated the conditions in which they could exploit undisturbed the soil of France which they had only just acquired, and could slake their youthful passion for property. But what is now ruining the French peasant is his small holding itself, the division of the land and the soil, the property form which Napoleon consolidated in France. It is exactly these material conditions which made the feudal peasant a small-holding peasant and Napoleon an emperor. Two generations sufficed to produce the unavoidable result: progressive deterioration of agriculture and progressive indebtedness of the agriculturist. The “Napoleonic” property form, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the condition of the emancipation and enrichment of the French countryfolk, has developed in the course of this century into the law of their enslavement and their pauperism. And just this law is the first of the “Napoleonic ideas” which the second Bonaparte has to uphold. If he still shares with the peasants the illusion that the cause of their ruin is to be sought not in the small holdings themselves but outside them – in the influence of secondary circumstances – his experiments will shatter like soap bubbles when they come in contact with the relations of production."

"[I]t was not until he left the military school that he gave himself up with ardour to study. He has often told me that since that date he has constantly worked sixteen hours a day. Nevertheless he already had within him the germs of the qualities which were brought out by education, and which, under the influence of events, developed to the highest degree. These dominating qualities were pride, and a sentiment of his dignity, a warlike instinct, a genius for form, the love of order and of discipline."

"In my relations with Napoleon, relations which from the beginning I endeavoured to make frequent and confidential, what at first struck me most was the remarkable perspicuity and grand simplicity of his mind and its processes. Conversation with him always had a charm for me, difficult to define. Seizing the essential point of subjects, stripping them of useless accessories, developing his thought and never ceasing to elaborate it till he had made it perfectly clear and conclusive, always finding the fitting word for the thing, or inventing one where the usage of the language had not created it, his conversation was ever full of interest. He did not converse, he talked; by the wealth of his ideas and the facility of his elocution, he was able to lead the conversation, and one of his habitual expressions was, "I see what you want; you wish to come to such or such a point; well, let us go straight to it.""

"The turn of his mind always led him towards the positive; he disliked vague ideas, and hated equally the dreams of visionaries and the abstraction of idealists, and treated as mere nonsense everything that was not clearly and practically presented to him. He valued only those sciences which can be controlled and verified by the senses or which rest on observation and experience. He had the greatest contempt for the false philosophy and the false philanthropy of the eighteenth century. Among the chief teachers of these doctrines, Voltaire was the special object of his aversion, and he even went so far as to attack, whenever he had the opportunity, the general opinion as to his literary power."

"Napoleon was not irreligious in the ordinary sense of the word. He would not admit that there had ever existed a genuine atheist; he condemned Deism as the result of rash speculation. A Christian and a Catholic, he recognised in religion alone the right to govern human societies. He looked on Christianity as the basis of all real civilisation; and considered Catholicism as the form of worship most favourable to the maintenance of order and the true tranquillity of the moral world; Protestantism as a source of trouble and disagreements. Personally indifferent to religious practices, he respected them too much to permit the slightest ridicule of those who followed them."

"Even in the midst of war I have never neglected the establishment of useful institutions and the promotion of peace and order at home. There still remains much to be done, and I certainly shall never rest from my labours. But is not military success still more necessary to dazzle or to content our people? Remember that a First Consul bears no resemblance to those Kings by the grace of God who look on their countries as their inherited property. Their authority is supported by ancient tradition. With us ancient tradition has fallen into contempt, and carries less than no weight. The French Government of to-day bears no sort of resemblance to that of the countries which surround us. Hated by its neighbours, obliged to deal at home with large classes of enemies, we have need to impose on our friends and foes by deeds of glory gained only by war."

"A form of government that is not the result of a long sequence of shared experiences, efforts, and endeavors can never take root."

"Anarchy is the stepping stone to absolute power."

"Commerce unites men and make them; therefore it is fatal to despotic power."

"For my part, it is not the mystery of the incarnation which I discover in religion, but the mystery of social order, which associates with heaven that idea of equality which prevents the rich from destroying the poor. [Incorrect translation, should be prevents the rich from being massacred by the poor.] Religion is indeed a kind of vaccine innoculation, which, by satisfying our natural love for the marvellous, keeps us out of the hands of charlatans and conjurors. The priests are better than the Cagliostros, the Kants, and all the visionaries of Germany."

"I am the Roman Emperor."

"I will bring the nobles of this Court down so low that they shall be obliged to beg their bread."

"My intention is that the main village where the insurrection started shall be burnt, and that thirty of the ringleaders shall be shot; an impressive example is needed to contain the hatred of the peasantry and of that soldiery. If you have not yet made an example, let there be one without delay... Let not the month pass without the principal village, borough, or small town which gave the signal for the insurrection being burned, and a large number of individuals being shot... Traces must be left in the cantons which have rebelled."

"I am not satisfied with the order which is kept in Madrid; Belliard is too weak; with the Spaniards it is necessary to be severe. I have arrested here fifteen of the worst characters, and I have ordered them to be shot. Arrest thirty at Madrid... If you treat the mob with kindness, these creatures fancy themselves invulnerable; if you hang a few, they get tired of the game, and become as submissive and humble as they ought to be."

"So…Bessieres lived like Bayard; he died like Turenne. We should all be envious of his fate."

"Conscripts, for shame! It was on you that I was basing my hopes. I expected much from your young courage, and you are running away!"

"Where do you think you are going? Can’t you see that the battle is won? Come on, stand firm!"

"I have gained the battle of Lutzen like the general-in-chief of the Army of Italy and of the Army of Egypt!"

"From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step."

"Le mot impossible n'est pas français."

"If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the prey of mediocre minds.... I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest."

"All authority is in the throne; and what is the throne? This wooden frame covered with velvet? No, I am the throne."

"France is invaded; I am leaving to take command of my troops, and, with God's help and their valor, I hope soon to drive the enemy beyond the frontier."

"The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast."

"The Allied Powers having proclaimed that the Emperor Napoleon is the sole obstacle to the re-establishment of peace in Europe, he, faithful to his oath, declares that he is ready to descend from the throne, to quit France, and even to relinquish life, for the good of his country."

"England will repent of bringing the Russians so far: they will deprive her of India."

"Unite for the public safety, if you would remain an independent nation."

"Wherever wood can swim, there I am sure to find this flag of England."

"Whatever shall we do in that remote spot? Well, we will write our memoirs. Work is the scythe of time."

"I generally had to give in."

"The Princes of this house have abandoned their capital, not like soldiers of honour who cede to the circumstances and setbacks of the war, but like the perjured who are pursued by their own remorse."

"I did not usurp the crown. I picked it up from the gutter; the people placed it on my head. I was king of the people as the Bourbons are kings of the nobles"

"Who saves his country violates no law."

"There are so many laws that no one is safe from hanging."

"I may have had many projects, but I never was free to carry out any of them. It did me little good to be holding the helm; no matter how strong my hands, the sudden and numerous waves were stronger still, and I was wise enough to yield to them rather than resist them obstinately and make the ship founder. Thus I never was truly my own master but was always ruled by circumstances."

"What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon."