Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/237

Rh 1821.] NAPOLEON 225 rose from the guard. A general advance of the English decided the victory, and then the pursuit was very thoroughly accomplished by the Prussians under Gneisenau. Napoleon at first took refuge in a square. At Genappe he left this, and arrived at Charleroi about daybreak with an escort of about twenty horsemen. He lost probably more than 30,000 out of 72,000 men, but the grand army was utterly dissolved. The whole loss of the allies was somewhat more than 22,000. Had Napoleon been victorious, he would but have opened the war prosperously, for half a million soldiers, in addition to those of Wellington and Bllicher, were on the march for France ; being completely defeated, he had no resource, but was ruined at once. France was conquered, as she liad been conquered the year before ; but her second fall i appears far more humiliating and dismal than her first, when we consider how enthusiastically she had rallied to Napoleon and how instantaneously Napoleon and she had been struck down together. It was a moment of unrelieved despair for the public men who gathered round him on his return to Paris, and among these were several whose fame was of earlier date than his own. La Fayette, the man of 1789 ; Carnot, organizer of victory to the Convention ; Lucien, who had decided the revolution of Brumaire, all these met in that comfortless deliberation. Carnot was for a dictatorship of public safety, that is, for renewing his great days of 1793 ; Lucien too liked the Roman sound of the word dictator. &quot; Dare ! &quot; he said to his brother, but the spring of that terrible will was broken at last. &quot; I liave dared too much already,&quot; said Napoleon. Mean while, in the Chamber of Representatives the word was not dictatorship but liberty. Here La Fayette caused the assembly to vote itself permanent, and to declare guilty of high treason whoever should attempt to dissolve it. He hinted that, if the word abdication were not soon pro nounced on the other side, he would himself pronounce the The word &quot; deche&quot;ance.&quot; The second abdication took place on second j une 22d. &quot;I offer myself a sacrifice to the hatred of the enemies of France. My public life is finished, and I proclaim my son emperor of the French.&quot; On the 25th he retired to Malmaison, where Josephine had died the year before. He had by no means even yet ceased to hope. When his son was passed over by the Chamber of Repre sentatives, who named an executive commission of five, he protested that he had not intended to make way for a new Directory ; and, as Carnot and Caulaincourt were on this commission, the circumstances of Brumaire seem to have flashed into his memory. He saw again two Directors supporting him, and the other three (Fouche, Grenier, and Quinette a traitor and two babies, as he expressed it) might remind him of Barras, Moulin, and Gohier. On the 27th he went so far as to offer his services once more as general, &quot; regarding myself still as the first soldier of the nation.&quot; He was met by a refusal, and left Malmaison on the 29th for Rochefort. France was by this time entering upon another Reign of Terror. Massacre had begun at Marseilles as early as the 25th. What should Napoleon do 1 He had been before the enemy of every nation, and now he was the worst enemy, if not of France, yet of the triumphant faction in France. He lingered some days at Rochefort, where he had arrived on July 3d, and then, finding it impossible to escape the vigilance of the English cruisers, went on the Surren- 15th on board the &quot; Bellerophon &quot; and surrendered himself der to t Captain Maitland. It was explained to him that no ng anc. con( jitions could be accepted, but that he would be &quot; con veyed to England to be received in such manner as the prince regent should deem expedient.&quot; He had written at Rochefort the following characteristic letter to the prince regent : &quot; Royal Highness, A prey to the factions which divide my country and to the enmity of the greatest powers of Europe, I have terminated my public career, and I come, like Themistocles, to seat myself at the hearth of the British people. I place myself under the protection of its laws, which I claim from your royal highness as the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of my enemies.&quot; It was perhaps the only course open to him. In France his life could scarcely have been spared, and Bliicher talked of executing him on the spot where the Due d Enghien had fallen. He therefore could do nothing but what he did. His reference to Themistocles shows that he was conscious of being the worst enemy that England had ever had. Perhaps he remembered that at the rupture of the treaty of Amiens he had studied to envenom the con test by detaining the English residents in France. Still he might reflect, on the other hand, that England was the only country which had not been trampled down and covered with massacre by his soldiers. It would have been inexcusable if the English Government had given way to vindictive feelings, especially as they could well afford to be magnanimous, having just won the greatest of all vic tories. But it was necessary to deprive him of the power of exciting new wars, and the experiment of Elba had shown that this involved depriving him of his liberty. The frenzy which had cost the lives of millions must be checked. This was the principle laid down in the declara tion of March 15th, by which he had been excommuni cated as a public enemy. It was therefore necessary to impose some restraint upon him. He must be separated from his party and from all the revolutionary party in Europe. So long as he remained in Europe this would involve positive imprisonment. The only arrangement therefore which would allow him tolerable personal com fort and enjoyment of life was to send him out of Europe. From these considerations grew the decision of the Government to send him to St Helena. An Act of Parliament was passed &quot; for the better detaining in custody Napoleon Bonaparte,&quot; and another Act for subjecting St Helena to a special system of government. He was kept on board the &quot; Bellerophon &quot; till August Exile in 4th, when he was transferred to the &quot; Northumberland.&quot; St Helena, On October 15th he arrived at St Helena, accompanied by Counts Montholon, Las Cases, and Bertrand, with their families, General Gourgaud, and a number of servants. In April 1816 arrived Sir Hudson Lowe, an officer who had been knighted for bringing the news of the capture of Paris in 1814, as governor. The rest of his life, which continued till May 5, 1821, was occupied partly in quarrels with this governor, which have now lost their interest, partly in the task he had undertaken at the time of his first abdication, that of relating his past life. He did not himself write this narrative, nor does it appear that he even dictated it word for word. It is a report made partly by General Gourgaud, Autobio- partly by Count Montholon, of Napoleon s impassioned I g ra phy- recitals ; but they assure us that this report, as published, has been read and corrected throughout by him. It gives a tolerably complete account of the period between the siege of Toulon and the battle of Marengo. On the later periods there is little except a memoir on the campaign of 1815, to which the editors of the Correspondence have been able to add another on Elba and the Hundred Days, These memoirs have often been compared to the Com mentaries of Caesar, and their value would indeed be price less if they related to a period imperfectly known. But an age which has abundance of information, and takes history very seriously, is struck particularly by the elabor ate falsifications which they contain. A vast number of misstatements, many of them evidently intentional, have XVII. 29