The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  … Wherever there is a chance for fortune there is no heroism in trying it; magnanimous actions are those whose foreseeable result is adversity and death. After all, what do reverses matter if our name, pronounced by posterity, makes a single generous heart beat two thousand years after we have lived?123

  On his return from Tilsit Napoleon ordered the new Tacitus to leave Paris. The Mercure was warned to take no further articles from his pen; Chateaubriand became a passionate defender of a free press. He retired to a property that he had bought in the Vallée-aux-Loups at Châtenay, and devoted himself to preparing Les Martyrs for publication. He deleted from the manuscript such passages as might be interpreted as derogatory of Napoleon. In that year (1809) his brother Armand was arrested for having transmitted dispatches from the émigré Bourbon princes to their agents in France. René wrote to Napoleon asking mercy for Armand; Napoleon found the letter too proud, and threw it into the fire; Armand was tried and found guilty, and was shot on March 31. René arrived a few moments after the execution. He never forgot the scene: Armand lying dead, his face and skull shattered by bullets, “a butcher’s dog licking up his blood and his brains.”124 It was Good Friday, 1809.

  Chateaubriand buried his grief in his valley solitude and in preparing his Mémoires d’outre-tombe. He began these reminiscences in 1811; he worked on them intermittently as a sedative from travel, liaisons, and politics; he wrote their last page in 1841, and forbade their publication till after his death; hence he called them Memoirs from the Tomb. They are bold in thought, childish in sentiment, brilliant in style. Here, for example, the parade of Napoleon’s appointees hurrying to swear their eternal loyalty to Louis XVIII after Napoleon’s collapse: “Vice entered leaning on the arm of crime [le vice appuyé sur le bras du crime]—Monsieur de Talleyrand walked in, supported by Monsieur Fouché.”125 In those leisurely pages are descriptions of nature rivaling those in Atala and René; and colorful episodes like the burning of Moscow.126 Pages of sentiment abound:

  The earth is a charming mother; we come forth from her womb; in childhood she holds us to her breasts, which are swollen with milk and honey; in youth and manhood she lavishes upon us cool waters, her harvests and her fruits;… when we die she opens her bosom to us again, and throws a coverlet of grass and flowers over our remains while she secretly transforms us into her own substance, to be reproduced in some new and graceful shape.127

  And now and then a flash of philosophy, usually somber: “History is only a repetition of the same facts applied to diverse men and times.”128 These Mémoires d’outre-tombe are Chateaubriand’s most enduring book.

  He remained rurally quiet until 1814, when the successes of the Allied armies brought them to the frontiers of France. Would their advance, as in 1792, arouse the French people to heroic resistance? On the fifth anniversary of Armand’s execution Chateaubriand issued a powerful pamphlet, De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, which was scattered through France as Napoleon retreated, fighting for life. The author assured the nation that “God himself marches openly at the head of the [Allied] armies, and sits in the Council of the Kings.”129 He reviewed the offenses of Napoleon—the execution of Enghien and Cadoudal, the “torture and assassination of Pichegru,” the imprisonment of the Pope …; these “reveal in Buonaparte” (spelled in the Italian way) “a nature foreign to France”;130 his crimes must not be charged to the French people. Many rulers had suppressed freedom of print and speech, but Napoleon had gone further, and had commanded the press to praise him at whatever cost to truth. The tributes to him as an administrator are undeserved; he merely reduced despotism to a science, turned taxation into confiscation, and conscription into massacre. In the Russian campaign alone 243,610 men died after experiencing every manner of suffering, while their leader, well sheltered and well fed, deserted his army to flee to Paris.131 How noble and humane, by comparison, had Louis XVI been! As Napoleon had asked of the Directory in 1799, “What have you done with the France that was so brilliant when I left you?,” so now the whole human race

  accuses you, calls for vengeance in the name of religion, morality, freedom. Where have you not spread desolation? In what corner of the world is there a family so obscure as to have escaped your ravages? Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Russia demand of you the sons that you have slaughtered, the tents, cabins, châteaux, temples that you have put to flame… The voice of the world declares you the greatest criminal that has ever appeared on the earth,… you who in the heart of civilization, in an age of enlightenment, wished to rule by the sword of Attila and the maxims of Nero. Surrender now your scepter of iron, descend from that mound of ruins of which you have made a throne! We cast you out as you cast out the Directory. Go, if you can, as your only punishment, to be witness of the joy that your fall brings to France, and contemplate, as you shed tears of rage, the spectacle of the people’s happiness.

  How now replace him? With the King who comes sanctified by his birth, a noble by his character—Louis XVIII, “a prince known for his enlightenment, his freedom from prejudice, his repudiation of revenge.” He comes bearing in his hand a pledge of pardon to all his enemies. “How sweet it will be, after so many agitations and misfortunes, to rest under the paternal authority of our legitimate sovereign!… Frenchmen, friends, companions in misfortune, let us forget our quarrels, our hates, our errors, to save the fatherland; let us embrace over the ruins of our dear country, and call to our help the heir of Henry IV and Louis XIV… Vive le roi!”132 Is it any wonder that Louis XVIII later said that those fifty pages had been worth to him 100,000 troops?133

  Let us leave Chateaubriand here for a while. He was by no means finished; he still had thirty-four years of life in him. He was to play an active role in Restoration politics, was still to gather mistresses, ending at last in the arms of a Récamier who was graduating from beauty to benevolence. He spent more and more of his time on his Mémoires; and now that his enemy was immured in a distant island, itself imprisoned by the sea, he could write of him—as he did for 456 pages—in a mood made milder by time and victory. He lived till 1848, having seen three French Revolutions.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Science and Philosophy under Napoleon

  I. MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICS

  IN science the age of Napoleon was one of the most fruitful in history. He himself was the first modern ruler with a scientific education; and probably Aristotle’s Alexander had not received so thorough a grounding. The Franciscan friars who taught him in the military school at Brienne knew that science is more helpful than theology in winning wars; they gave the young Corsican all the mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, and geography that they knew. Arrived at power, he restored Louis XIV’s practice of awarding substantial prizes for cultural achievements, and he revealed his background by giving most awards to scientists. Again following precedent, he extended his gifts to foreigners; so, in 1801, he and the Institute invited Alessandro Volta to come to Paris and demonstrate his theories of the electric current; Volta came; Napoleon attended three of his lectures, and moved the award of a gold medal to the Italian physicist.1 In 1808 the prize for electrochemical discoveries was given to Humphry Davy, who came to Paris to receive it, though France and England were at war.2 Periodically Napoleon invited the scientists of the Institute to meet with him and report on work done or in progress in their respective fields. At such a conference, on February 26, 1808, Cuvier spoke as the Institute’s secretary, with almost the classic eloquence of a Buffon, and Napoleon could feel that the Golden Age of French prose had been restored.

  The French excelled in pure science, and made France the most intellectual and skeptical of nations; the English encouraged applied science, and developed the industry, commerce, and wealth that made them the protagonists of world history during the nineteenth century. In the first decade of that century Lagrange, Legendre, Laplace, and Monge set the pace in mathematics. Monge developed with Napoleon a warm friendship that lasted till death. He regretted the deterioration of the consul i
nto an emperor, but bore it with indulgence, and even consented to be made Comte de Péluse; perhaps it was a secret between them that Pelusium was an ancient ruin in Egypt. He mourned when Napoleon was banished to Elba, and openly rejoiced over the exile’s dramatic return. The restored Bourbon ordered the Institute to expel Monge; it obeyed. When Monge died (1818) his students at the École Polytechnique (which he had helped to establish) wished to attend his funeral, but were forbidden; the day after his funeral they marched in a body to the cemetery, and laid a wreath upon his grave.

  Lazare Carnot came under the influence of Monge when studying in the military academy at Mézières. After serving as “organizer of victory” on the Committee of Public Safety, and escaping with his life from the radical coup d’état of September 4, 1797, he found safety and sanity in mathematics. In 1803 he published Réflexions sur la métaphysique du calcul infinitésimal; and two later essays founded synthetic geometry. —In 1806 François Mollien made a revolution of his own by introducing double-entry bookkeeping in the Bank of France. —In 1812 Jean-Victor Poncelet, a pupil of Monge, joined the Grand Army in the invading of Russia, was captured, and adorned his imprisonment by formulating, at the age of twenty-four, the basic theorems of projective geometry.

  Mathematics is both the mother and the model of the sciences: they begin with counting, and aspire to equations. Through such quantitative statements physics and chemistry guide the engineer in remaking the world; and sometimes, as in a temple or a bridge, they may flower into art. Joseph Fourier was not content with administering the département of Isère (1801); he wished also to reduce the conduction of heat to precise mathematical formulations. In epochal experiments at Grenoble he developed and used what are now the “Fourier Series” of differential equations—still vital to mathematics and a mystery to historians. He announced his discoveries in 1807, but gave a formal exposition of his methods and results in Théorie analytique de la chaleur (1822), which has been called “one of the most important books published in the nineteenth century.”3 Wrote Fourier:

  The effects of heat are subject to constant laws which cannot be discovered without the aid of mathematical analysis. The object of the theory which we are to explain is to demonstrate these laws; it reduces all physical researches on the propagation of heat to problems of the integral calculus whose elements are given by experiment…. These considerations present a singular example of the relations which exist between the abstract science of numbers and natural causes.4

  More spectacular were the experiments that Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac made to measure the effects of altitude on terrestrial magnetism and the expansion of gases. On September 16, 1804, he rose in a balloon to a height of 23,012 feet. His findings, reported to the Institute in 1805–09, placed him among the founders of meteorology; and his later studies of potassium, chlorine, and cyanogen continued the work of Lavoisier and Berthollet in bringing theoretical chemistry to the service of industry and daily life.

  The most impressive figure in the physical sciences of Napoleon’s reign was Pierre-Simon Laplace. It was not unknown to him that he was the handsomest man in the Senate, to which he had been appointed after his failure as minister of the interior. In 1796 he had presented in popular form but brilliant style (Exposition du système du monde) his mechanical theory of the universe, and, in a casual note, his nebular hypothesis of cosmic origins. More leisurely, in the five volumes of his Traité de mécanique céleste (1799–1825), he summoned the developments of mathematics and physics to the task of subjecting the solar system—and, by implication, all other heavenly bodies—to the laws of motion and the principle of gravitation.

  Newton had admitted that some seeming irregularities in the movements of the planets had defied all his attempts to explain them. For example, the orbit of Saturn was continually, however leisurely, expanding, so that, if unchecked, it must, in the course of a few billion years, be lost in the infinity of space; and the orbits of Jupiter and the moon were slowly shrinking, so that, in the amplitude of time, the great planet must be absorbed into the sun, and the modest moon must be catastrophically received into the earth. Newton had concluded that God himself must intervene, now and then, to correct such absurdities; but many astronomers had rejected this desperate hypothesis as outlawed by the nature and principles of science. Laplace proposed to show that these irregularities were due to influences that corrected themselves periodically, and that a little patience—in Jupiter’s case, 929 years—would see everything automatically returning to order. He concluded that there was no reason why the solar and stellar systems should not continue to operate on the laws of Newton and Laplace to the end of time.

  It was a majestic and dismal conception—that the world is a machine, doomed to go on tracing the same diagrams in the sky forever. It had immense influence in promoting a mechanistic view of mind as well as matter, and shared with the kindly Darwin in undermining Christian theology; God, as Laplace told Napoleon, wasn’t necessary after all. Napoleon thought the hypothesis somewhat nebulous, and Laplace himself came at times to doubt Laplace. Midway in his stellar enterprise he stopped to write a Théorie analytique des probabilités (1812–20) and an Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (1814). Nearing his term, he reminded his fellow scientists: “That which we know is a little thing; that which we do not know is immense.”5

  II. MEDICINE

  The doctors might have said the same, with Napoleon’s hearty consent. He never gave up hope of convincing his physicians that their drugs had done more harm than good, and that they would have more deaths to answer for, at the Last Judgment, than the generals. Dr. Corvisart, who loved him, heard his banter patiently; Dr. Antommarchi avenged and deserved Napoleon’s taunts by giving him—then approaching death—one enema after another. That Napoleon appreciated the work of devoted and competent physicians is evident from his bequest of 100,000 francs to Dominique Larrey (1766–1842), the “virtuous” surgeon who accompanied the French army in Egypt, Russia, and at Waterloo, introduced the “flying ambulance” to give quick aid to the wounded, performed two hundred amputations in one day at Borodino, and left four volumes of Mémoires de chirurgie militaire et campagnes (1812–17).5a

  The Emperor was not mistaken when he chose Jean-Nicolas Corvisart as his personal physician. The professor of practical medicine at the Collège de France was as careful in his diagnoses as he was skeptical of his treatments. He was the first French doctor to adopt percussion—chest tapping—as a diagnostic aid in ailments of the heart or lungs. He had found this method proposed in Inventum novum ex Percussione (1760) of Leopold Auenbrugger of Vienna; he translated the 95-page monograph, added to it from his own experience, and expanded it into a textbook of 440 pages.6 His Essai sur les maladies et les lésions organiques du coeur et des gros vaisseaux (1806) established him as one of the founders of pathological anatomy. A year later he joined the imperial household as its resident physician. His difficult employer used to say that he had no faith in medicine, but full faith in Corvisart.7 When Napoleon went to St. Helena Corvisart withdrew into rural obscurity, and he died faithfully in the year of his master’s death (1821).

  His pupil René-Théophile Laënnec carried further the experiments in auscultation (literally, listening), which, in his first attempt, consisted of two cylinders, each placed one end on the patient’s body, the other end at the ear of the doctor, who was thereby “seeing the chest” (stethos) with his ears; so the sounds made by the internal organs—as in breathing, coughing, and digestion—could be heard unconfused by irrelevant noise. Helped by this instrument, Laënnec proceeded with investigations whose results he summarized in a Traité de F auscultation médiate (1819); its second edition (1826) has been described as “the most important treatise on the thoracic organs ever written.”8 Its description of pneumonia remained an authoritative classic till the twentieth century.9

  The outstanding achievement of French medicine in this period was in humanizing the treatment of the insane. When, in 1792, Phil
ippe Pinel was appointed medical director of the famous asylum that Richelieu had founded at suburban Bicêtre, he was shocked to find that the rights of man so confidently declared by the Revolution had not been extended to the mentally deranged who were confined there or at a similar institution, the Salpêtrière. Many of the inmates were kept in chains lest they injure others or themselves; many more were quieted by frequent bloodletting or by stupefying drugs; any new arrival—not necessarily demented, but perhaps a nuisance to relatives or the government—was flung into the bedlam and left to deteriorate, by contagion, in body and mind. The result was a mess of maniacs whose antics, dull stares, or desperate appeals were occasionally exhibited to the public for a modest admission fee. Pinel went in person to the Convention to ask authority for trying a gentler regimen. He removed the chains, reduced to a minimum the bloodletting and the drugs, released the patients into the invigorating air, and ordered the guards to treat the insane not as secret criminals cursed by God but as invalids often amenable to improvement by patient care. He formulated his views and regimen in an enduring Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale (1801). The title was one more sign that Pinel had achieved, or aimed for, the Hippocratic ideal of the physician as combining the learning of the scientist with the sympathetic understanding of the philosopher. “A physician who is a lover of wisdom,” Hippocrates had said, “is the equal of God.”10

  III. BIOLOGY

  1. Cuvier (1769–1832)

  The great Cuvier reached the top of his kind despite being a Protestant in a Catholic land. Like so many other scientists in Napoleon’s France, he was raised to high political office, even to membership in the Council of State (1814); he kept that place under the restored Bourbons, and was made president of the Council, and a peer of France, in 1830. When he died (1832) he was honored throughout Europe as the man who had founded paleontology and comparative anatomy, and had prepared biology to transform the mind of Europe.