Page:The Hero in History.djvu/89

Rh Varennes, foiled the attempt of Louis XVI. to flee Paris. The king was in sight of safety when his coach was halted. Hilaire Belloc asks what would have happened if Drouet’s cart had stuck and the king had escaped. He blithely answers that the whole history of Europe would have been different, culminating at last in our own day in a “Golden Age of Christendom.” Even for Belloc, whose historical excursions have been one long vendetta against post-Reformation Europe, such a judgment lacks sobriety. He is led to it by the ungrounded assumption that, had he escaped, Louis XVI. could have defeated the armies of the Revolution, out-generalled Napoleon, stopped the consequences of the industrial revolution, and changed not only the leopard spots of capitalism but its very mode of functioning. “Drouet’s cart it was that did the trick!” he laments. “Through it the monarchy fell, the Revolution survived, the modern world, its mechanical development and social insecurity became possible.” Yet the whole weight of evidence compiled by generations of historians testifies that neither Drouet nor Louis XVI. had anything to do with the industrial expansion of Europe in the late eighteenth century and its vast ramification of social effects. Belloc places too great a weight of historical interrelatedness on two inconsequential pivots, royal and common.

A much more topical “if” question is provided by the situation of Napoleon poised on the English Channel ready to strike at England. What would have happened if, on a day that the English fleet was becalmed, Napoleon had steamed across the Channel and realized his long-unfulfilled dream of invading England? Would Napoleon have avoided his Waterloo, and would England have been transformed into a French province?

The following excerpts from two communications prove that the possibility of Napoleon’s steaming across the Channel was not far-fetched, but hung on a thread of bureaucratic red tape. The first is from a letter of Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, to Napoleon: “I can remove the obstacles—wind and storm—which protect your enemies, and, notwithstanding his fleet, transport your armies to his territory at any time, and within a few hours.” The second is from a letter of Napoleon to his Minister of the Interior on July 21, 1804. The date is significant because it indicates the years Napoleon had before