by Will Durant
The publication of The Age of Napoleon concludes five decades of achievement.
*A livre or a franc in the France of 1789 was the approximate equivalent of 1.25 in the United States of 1970.
*Baron Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grâce received his nickname from a character in a then popular romance by the Abbé Barthélemy.
*Comte Auguste de La Marck (1753–1833), not the biologist Jean-Baptiste de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829).
*Rousseau and Revolution, 894–97.
*“The Marseillaise” was accepted by the Convention as the national anthem on July 14, 1795. It was rejected by Napoleon and Louis XVIII, was restored in 1830, banned by Napoleon III, and finally adopted in 1879.
*Five years later Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, sharply restricting public criticism of the government.
*Cf. John Morley, writing c. 1880: “The struggle between Hébert, Chaumette, and the Common Council of Paris on the one part, and the Committee of Public Safety and Robespierre on the other, was the concrete form of the deepest controversy that lies before modern society: can the social union subsist without a belief in a Supreme Being? Chaumette answered Yes, and Robespierre answered No … Robespierre followed Rousseau, … Chaumette followed Diderot.”94
*The word liberal, as applied to economics and politics, meant a free economy under a minimal government.
*Cf. Rousseau and Revolution, 80–84.
*Gros’s famous painting of the young commander—eyes flashing, hair blown by the wind, standard in one hand, sword in the other—crossing the bridge at Arcole was painted shortly afterward in Milan, and became the pièce de résistance at the Paris Salon of 1801.
*So the medieval order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem had come to be known from their long occupancy of Malta (1530 ff.).
*Legend has probably exaggerated the role played in these events by the exuberant courtesan Thérèse de Méricourt (1762–1817).
*The carmagnole led a double life: it was the song and jig made popular by the workers of southern France, and also the short woolen jacket worn by immigrant laborers from Italy. Carmagnola is a town in Piedmont.
*She married, in 1805, the Comte de Caraman (the future Prince de Chimay), and died in 1835.
*During the Revolution the term opéra-comique ceased to mean a musical comedy, and was applied to any opera, tragic or comic, that contained spoken dialogue.47 The Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique was henceforth allowed to compete with the Académie de Musique in producing “serious” opera. About this time, too, some composers, like Méhul in Ariodant (1799), arranged to associate certain recurring orchestral passages with corresponding personages or situations; so began the leitmotif.
*Only the difficulty of communication kept Napoleon from learning that on the same day that Desaix concluded his career his former commander, Kléber, was assassinated in Cairo. After another year of resistance to Turkish-British-Mameluke attacks, the French won the right to leave their prison (August, 1801) and return to France.
*Napoleon to Las Cases at St. Helena, August 15, 1816: “The Pope, sometime before my coronation, … consented not to place the crown on my head himself. He [also] dispensed with the ceremony of the public Communion. … ‘Napoleon,’ he observed [to the bishops who wanted Pius to insist on this], ‘is not, perhaps, a believer; the time will no doubt come in which his faith will be restored.’ “7
*Napoleon, at St. Helena, gave his version to Las Cases: “No sooner had Louis arrived in Holland than, fancying that nothing could be finer than to have it said that henceforth he was a Dutchman, he attached himself entirely to the party favorable to the English, promoted smuggling, and thus connived with our enemies…. What remained for me to do? Was I to abandon Holland to our enemies? Ought I to have given it another king? But in that case could I have expected more from him than from my own brother? Did not all the kings that I created act in nearly the same manner? I therefore united Holland to the Empire; and this act produced a most unfavorable impression in Europe, and contributed not a little to … our misfortunes.”7
*One of Napoleon’s hats, at a Paris auction on April 23, 1969, brought 30,840.6
*If Napoleon had been wise, said Anatole France, “he would have lived in an attic and written four books”; i.e., he would have been another Spinoza.33
*Grand marshal of the palace; killed at Bautzen in 1813.
*So the Concordat was explained by Louis Bignon, who was designated by Napoleon’s will to write the history of Napoleon’s diplomacy.137
*We have not read this book since 1925. Most of the following analysis borrows from Herold’s brilliant biography Mistress to an Age, pp. 205–13.
*“Primitive liberty, I recover you at last! I pass like this bird that flies before me, which guides itself by free chance, and knows no embarrassment except in the choice of shade. Here I am as the Almighty made me, sovereign of nature, carried triumphantly over the water, while the denizens of the streams accompany me in my course, and the inhabitants of the air sing their hymns to me, the beasts of the earth salute me, the forests bend their tree-tops as I pass. Is it on the forehead of the man of society, or on mine, that the immortal seal of our origin is engraved? Run, then, to shut yourself up in your cities; go subject yourself to your petty laws; gain your bread by the sweat of your brow, or devour the bread of the poor; kill one another for a word, for a master; doubt the existence of God, or worship him under superstitious forms; as for me, I shall go wandering in my solitudes; not one beat of my heart will be checked, not one of my thoughts shall be suppressed; I shall be as free as nature; I shall recognize no sovereign except him who lit the flame of the suns, and who, with one stroke of his hand, set in revolution all the worlds.”
*“His bad style,” said Taine, “has made him a great man; … if he had not been obscure we should not have believed him profound.”19
*This has been briefly described in Rousseau and Revolution, 669–82
*Samuel Adams in 1748 had called England “a creation of shopkeepers”;1 Napoleon repeated it; it was hardly true.
*In the letter of the law an atheist was an outlaw, and might be hunted down like a criminal. Blasphemy—any indignity offered to God by word, writing, or sign—could be punished by eighteen two-hour periods of standing in the pillory.18 These laws were rarely enforced.
*The Age of Voltaire, 579–81.
*To be distinguished from Sir William Sidney Smith, who foiled Napoleon at Acre.
*This chapter is, throughout, indebted to Leslie Marchand’s Byron (3V., New York: Knopf, 1957), a masterpiece of impartial scholarship.
*This name was given by the ancient Greeks to the region along the River Iberus (now Ebro), and was subsequently extended to the whole Spanish-Portuguese Peninsula.
*See Rousseau and Revolution, 300–09. That volume, thinking itself the last of its series, accompanied Goya and Goethe to their end, whereas, of course, they belonged to, and enclosed, the age of Napoleon, whom they both admired through his rise and fall.
*See Encyclopaedia Britannica, VII, 580, or The Renaissance, 352.
*The post-mortem examination of Beethoven revealed various internal disorders which Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (3d ed., I, 271b) described as “most probably the result of syphilitic affections at an early period of his life.” Thayer, biographer par excellence of Beethoven, put the matter politely: Beethoven "had not escaped the common penalties of transgressing the laws of strict purity."5 The matter is still debated.
*The four men brought to witness in this section-mostly with the help of the late George Gooch’s scholarly Germany and the French Revolution (1966)-have been dealt with in Rousseau and Revolution: Wieland (1733–1813) in pp. 553–76; Herder (1744–1803) in pp. 567–69 and 577–80; Schiller (1759–1805) in pp. 569–75 and 591–605; and Goethe (1749–1832) in pp. 555–628.
*Cf. Charles Singer, historian of science: “Consciousness is the ultimate datum, the thing taken for granted; the judge, a
s it were, before whom science must recite its narrative of experiences of phenomena. Their recital, and that alone, is the role of science.”1
*But Spinoza had already done this in three words: omnia quodammodo animata, “all things in some manner have life”—literally, “souls” (Ethics, II, 13, scholium).
*The Fourth Gospel begins with “In the beginning was the Logos.” Saint Jerome translated Logos as verbum; King James’s scholars translated it as Word; they might better have translated it as Reason.
*The First League of Armed Neutrality, founded in 1780, had collapsed in 1793.
*All dates are N.S.
*This view of Alexander, by one who knew him well and had little reason to love him, contrasts with the view of him, in some recent French histories, as insincere in his liberalism, and covering with handsome phrases a foreign policy of treachery and deceit. See Georges Lefebvre, Napoleon, I, 199–200; Louis Madelin, The Consulate and the Empire, I, 349–50. Our account accepts his early liberalism as sincere.
*This was the third wife of Francis II, Maria Ludovica of Modena; Marie Louise was the daughter of his second wife, Maria Theresa of Naples, who died in 1807.
*Themistocles, Athens’ greatest general, was exiled by the Athenian agora c. 470 B.C.; he was pursued from one Greek city after another, and finally asked and received protection and security from Athens’ greatest enemies, the Persians, whom Themistocles had defeated at Salamis in 480 B.C.
*Bertrand’s diary under April 26, 1821: “The Emperor replied [according to what Montholon told Mme. Bertrand]: ‘… I resented her refusal to become my mistress.… I shall never forgive Dr. Antommarchi for having attended a woman who refused to become my mistress.’”18 But when Napoleon said this he was within ten days of death, and may have lost track of his amours. Bertrand noted, on the same date: “He frequently appeared to have lost his memory.”
*Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire, 19v. (Paris, 1845–62).
