The Age of Napoleon: The Story of Civilization, Volume XI

by Will Durant

Helped by his prodding, Europe advanced half a century during the fifteen years of his rule.

Only less strong than the Industrial Revolution, but far stronger and more lasting than the “Son of the Revolution,” was the revolution that began in France in 1789 and then spread its effects through Europe in the replacement of feudal bonds and dues with individual rights, and the worldwide action of the rival hungers that found clearest voice in the French Revolution: the hunger for freedom —of movement, growth, enterprise, worship, thought, speech, and press; and the hunger for equality—of access to opportunity, education, health, and legal justice. These hostile hungers have taken their turn in dominating the history of modern man: the hunger for liberty, to the detriment of equality, was the recurrent theme of the nineteenth century in Europe and America; the hunger for equality, at the cost of liberty, has been the dominant aspect of European and American history in the twentieth century.

Napoleon provided the discipline that checked political, economic, and moral disorder in postrevolutionary France; no discipline has checked similar disorder in our times.

It is another humor of history that whereas in his lifetime Napoleon had served to embody his country’s need for order after a riot of freedom, he became again after his death—and by the power of his remodeling legend—the Son of the Revolution, the enemy of absolutism and aristocracy, the symbol of revolt, the manageable mouthpiece of the recurrent cry for liberty.

Few great men have remained, after death, what they had been during their lives.

Truth is seldom simple; often it has a right and a left hand, and moves on two feet.

It is part of the average citizen’s nature to make his God a particeps criminis in the wars of his country.

Self-preservation remains the basic law of life.

No, this fascinating man was no mere ogre of murder and destruction. He was led by his will to power, by the unchecked immensity of his dream; he was an autocrat confident that he knew better than their citizens what was good for France and Europe.

He thought we should not see his like again for five hundred years. We hope not; and yet it is good—and enough—to behold and suffer, once in a millennium, the power and limits of the human mind.