Military Leaders From France

"Yes, it’s true. It’s true that Joan of Arc was my dream as a little girl. I discovered her toward the age of ten or twelve, when I went to France. I don’t remember where I read about her, but I recall that she immediately took on a definite importance for me. I wanted to sacrifice my life for my country. It seems like foolishness and yet ... what happens when we’re children is engraved forever in our lives."

"Joan was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years. She embodied the natural goodness and valour of the human race in unexampled perfection. Unconquerable courage, infinite compassion, the virtue of the simple, the wisdom of the just, shone forth in her. She glorifies as she freed the soil from which she sprang."

"The tide turned and the war began to go against the English. This was due in great part to the influence of a young French peasant girl, Joan of Arc. Inspired by the belief that she had been given a mission by God to deliver France from its invaders and to place the Dauphin on the throne of his fathers, she appeared before him, secured his reluctant consent to allow her to lead some troops, inspired them with her own enthusiasm and confidence, and won a great success by driving away the English who were besieging Orleans. The Dauphin himself was then stirred to greater activity and under the persuasion of the Maid of Orleans, as she came to be called, made his way to Rheims, the ancient coronation city of the French kings, and was there crowned king of France. Joan now felt that she had fulfilled her mission and asked to be allowed to return to her home, but the Dauphin insisted that she should remain with the army. Some time after this she was captured by the English. After a trial which was planned to end in but one way she was burned as a witch in the market place of Rouen. Even one of the persecutors of the innocent French patriot girl wavered and turned away, crying, "God have mercy upon us, we have burned a saint." The movement of success which Joan had begun continued, and although the French frequently wasted their opportunities, yet on the whole the reconquest of their native land went steadily on. The English were driven out of one province after another; their expeditions from England were more poorly equipped and more unsuccessful. Finally the long war came to a close in 1453 by the defeat of an English army near Bordeaux, and the loss of all their territory in France except Calais."

"My Joan is that of a boy who loved parish cinemas and those in the suburbs – the only ones he could afford – between the 1940s and 1950s. For this reason, she will forever have the face of Ingrid Bergman, discovered shortly after 1952 in Fleming's Technicolour blockbuster – admired, moreover, in a cut-up third version – and then seen again, in a completely different interpretation and with a very different intensity, in Roberto Rossellini's 1954 film, which, through the text of Paul Claudel, reinterpreted the allegories of medieval sacred representations. (p. 4"

"Joanni, Joanni wears a golden cross And she looks so beautiful in her armour Joanni, Joanni blows a kiss to God And she never wears a ring on her finger..."

"If I were Joan of Arc I would become governor of Puerto Rico and make my island a state — and then become president of the United States of Banana — and head south to conquer all of Latin America and the Caribbean — and swoop back north to take over Canada. I could do all that — if only I could decide between three options: Wishy, Wishy-Washy, and Washy."

"[O]ne of the great ideas of her whom Villon calls "the good lass of Lorraine" had been the reconciliation of the French people. Thanks to the national movement which her intervention set on foot, the widespread horror at her martyrdom brought her wish to fulfillment. The domination of England was more and more detested."

"Not infrequently even the soldiers and politicians who were fondest of Joan did not wish to listen to her. Nearly always she was right, her presentiments were verified, and she gave forth such a spirit of quiet certainty that people did without effort what she told them."

"From the most matter-of-fact point of view, that of politics, what is most astonishing about this Maid of Orléans is her comprehension of the situation, her good sense, and the correctness of her judgment. She understood that the fate of France was one with that of her kings and that it was necessary to revive the royal power."

"God forgive us: we have burned a saint."

"Do not think that he will restore Poland: he thinks only of himself. He hates every great nationality and still more the spirit of independence. He is a tyrant, and his only aim is to satisfy his own ambition. I am sure he will create nothing durable."

"If there is one characteristic and striking trait in the innumerable conversations noted down by those who could approach him most intimately, it is the absence of all unforced utterances. He is always seen concerned, either to gauge the intentions of the other person, or to make an impression on his mind so as to lead him towards a certain conclusion; it would be trouble wasted to look for a moment of abandon, of enthusiasm, of sincere outpouring, be it about himself or others. Even when he allows himself to be carried away in these coquetries of cat-like grace, the charm of which contemporaries have so repeatedly described, he does not lose sight of the effect that he is aiming at; even his rash words are calculated. He is impenetrable to those near to him as well as to strangers. It would even be impossible to point out, in the whole of his life, a single one of those sayings of philosophic self-mockery which delight us in Caesar or in Frederick, because they show us the man rising above his role, commenting on himself with a judgment unclouded by his own success... Napoleon is always on the stage, always concerned about the impression he is making... He is lacking in that final human greatness which consists in estimating one's self at its true value, and as a result of his incurable self-conceit he remains on the level of small minds."

"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.»"

"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."

"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."

"His opinions of men were concentrated in one idea which, unhappily for him, had in his mind gained the force of an axiom. He was persuaded that no man, called to appear in public life, or even only engaged in the active pursuits of life, was guided or could be guided by any other motive than that of interest. He did not deny the existence of virtue and honour; but he maintained that neither of these sentiments had ever been the chief guide of any but those whom he called dreamers, and to whom, by this title, he, in his own mind, denied the existence of the requisite faculty for taking a successful part in the affairs of society."

"He was gifted with a particular tact for recognising those men who could be useful to him. He discovered in them very quickly the side by which he could best attach them to his interest. Never forgetting, however, to seek the guarantee of their fidelity in a calculation of interest, he took care to join their fortune to his own, involving them in such a way as to cut off the possibility of retreat to other engagements. He had, above all, studied the national character of the French, and the history of his life proved that he had understood it rightly. He privately regarded the Parisians as children, and often compared Paris to the opera. Having reproached him one day with the palpable falsehoods which formed the chief part of his bulletins, he said to me with a smile, "They are not written for you; the Parisians believe everything, and I might tell them a great deal more which they would not refuse to accept.""

"His heroes were Alexander, Cæsar, and, above all, Charlemagne. He was singularly occupied with his claim to be the successor of Charlemagne by right and title. He would lose himself in interminable discussions with me in endeavouring to sustain this paradox by the feeblest reasoning."

"One thing which he always regretted extremely was, that he could not invoke the principle of Legitimacy as the basis of his power. Few men have been so profoundly conscious as he was that authority deprived of this foundation is precarious and fragile, and open to attack. He never lost an opportunity of anxiously protesting against those who imagined that he occupied the throne as a usurper. "The throne of France," he said to me once, "was vacant. Louis XVI. had not been able to maintain himself. If I had been in his place, the Revolution—notwithstanding the immense progress it had made in men's minds in the preceding reign—would never have been consummated. The King overthrown, the Republic was master of the soil of France. It is that which I have replaced. The old throne of France is buried under its rubbish; I had to found a new one. The Bourbons could not reign over this creation. My strength lies in my fortune: I am new, like the Empire; there is, therefore, a perfect homogeneity between the Empire and myself.""

"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.""

"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.""

"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."

"You Frenchmen, not content with having robbed us of everything we held dear, have also corrupted our character. The actual condition of my country, and the impossibility of changing it, is another reason for escaping from an earth, where I am obliged to praise men from a sense of duty, whom I must hate from a sense of virtue. When I arrive in my fatherland, what attitude am I to hold—what language am I to use? A good patriot ought to die when his fatherland has ceased to exist. If the deliverance of my fellow-countrymen depended upon the death of a single man, I would go immediately and plunge the sword which would avenge my country and its violated laws into the breast of tyrants."

"The completest charlatan that ever existed."

"Bonaparte was a man of iron energy and was remorseless in the pursuit of his goal. But in those days there were not a few energetic, talented, and ambitious egoists besides him. The place Bonaparte succeeded in occupying would not have remained vacant."

"As long as there had been a civilian government, and a constitution, and a republic, there were at least the roots from which liberty might still spring, to blossom once more; now there came, with the sword, a regime on principle opposed to liberty."

"The ideal of Napoleon was the Empire of Constantine, and of Theodosius. He inherited this tradition as did all the Italian Ghibellines, from his ancestors... Instead of assisting the liberation of the individual conscience, he always postulated a Pope, of whom he would be the Emperor and master. It is a conception which takes its origins from the idea of the Ghibellines and the medieval commentators. When he dreams of the future it is always of the submissive world of a Justinian or a Theodosius, as imagined by the medieval imperialist thinkers. In the midst of such concepts modern freedom seemed an anachronism; worse, to him it could appear only as the people's whim, as a snare for his power."

"Messieurs, nous avons un maître, ce jeune homme fait tout, peut tout, et veut tout."

"From the early days of the French Revolution political prophets had been foretelling that this revolution would find its embodiment in a man, who, through it, would subdue France and govern her with a power greater than that which had been Louis XIV's. Bonaparte saw it, as it had been divined by Mirabeau and Catherine, but with his Roman vision of history he had a clearer conception of it than the others. He more particularly feels it, since this history, which is revealed to his intellect, lives in him and seems to be living for his sake. He does not analyse it, he finds no subtle delectation in it; he goes for it, clearing away one obstacle after another; he sets out for the Empire after the fashion of Columbus, who reached the new world while imagining that he was encircling the old. The others are fearing, expecting or blindly seeking the predicted and inevitable "Man". He knows him, for he will be that man. He reveals to himself his ambition, as his destiny finds its explanation in history."

"Condottiere without manners, without fatherland, without morality, an oriental despot, a new Attila, a warrior who knew only how to corrupt and annihilate."

"Napoleon, far more Italian than French, Italian by race, by instinct, imagination, and souvenir, considers in his plan the future of Italy, and, on casting up the final accounts of his reign, we find that the net profit is for Italy and the net loss is for France. Since Theodoric and the Lombard kings, the Pope, in preserving his temporal sovereignty and spiritual omnipotence, has maintained the sub-divisions of Italy; let this obstacle be removed and Italy will once more become a nation. Napoleon prepares the way, and constitutes it beforehand by restoring the Pope to his primitive condition, by withdrawing from him his temporal sovereignty and limiting his spiritual omnipotence, by reducing him to the position of managing director of Catholic consciences and head minister of the principal cult authorized in the empire."

"That illustrious war chief became the pacifier of France: he restored the country's national cohesion; that is his glory, his incontestable glory, against which nothing will prevail. Could he have achieved through liberty that pacification which he accomplished by authority? Supposing that this great winner of victories had been able to triumph over himself, could he at least have granted to the French certain political rights, have allowed some control, have called the nation to exercise certain liberties, have prepared her for a more intimate knowledge of affairs, thus helping her on the way to a more normal destiny? Did such an attempt hold out any prospect of success, could it even be undertaken, on the morrow of unheard-of convulsions, at a time when the parties of violence were under control, rather than exterminated, when so few Frenchmen had acquired any feeling and any taste for legality; at a time especially when France, triumphant though she was, within her extended frontiers and in the wide development of her offensive and defensive fronts, nevertheless remained a vast fortress besieged by Europe? If Bonaparte in that crisis had made a beginning with the founding of liberty, he would have proved himself superior to his age, superior to himself. It is impossible to say whether the undertaking would have surpassed his genius; it was certainly above the reach of his character. But while not attempting this, he devoted the respite left him by his truce with Europe to proceeding with his work of interior reconstruction and to reinfusing order and greatness into all parts of the Commonwealth."

"A quarter of an hour later came Napoleon. I received him with Countess Tauenzien at the foot of the staircase. He is excessively ugly, with a flat, swollen, sallow face; he is very corpulent besides, short, and entirely without figure; his great round eyes roll gloomily about, the expression of his features is severe, he looks like the incarnation of fate. Only his mouth is well shaped, and his teeth are good also."

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

"In early life he may have been a sincere republican; but he hated anarchy and disorder, and, before his campaign in Italy was over, he had begun to plan to make himself ruler of France. He worked systematically to transform the people's earlier ardor for liberty into a passion for military glory and plunder."

"That monster, choked out of hell, formed by Beelzebub, formed to be the scorching of the earth"

"The cannibal has left his lair."

"The Corsican ogre has just landed at the Juan Gulf."

"The tiger has arrived at Gap."