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

by Will Durant

in many ways Catholicism—so hospitable to imagination, feeling, and beauty—seemed the natural ally and fulfillment of Romantic sentiment.

OUR approach to the idealistic philosophy of Kant and his successors is obstructed by the current preemption of the word ideal for moral excellence, and by our habit, in an age of science and industry, of thinking of things perceived, and seldom of the process of perception itself. The opposite attitudes competed in Greek philosophy, where Democritus took atoms as his starting point, and Plato took ideas.

In modern philosophy Bacon stressed knowledge of the world, Descartes began with the thinking self. Hobbes reduced everything to matter, Berkeley to mind. Kant gave German philosophy its distinctive character by arguing that its prime task is the study of the process by which we form ideas. He admitted the reality of external objects, but insisted that we can never know what they objectively are, since we know them only as changed by the organs and processes of perception into our ideas.

Philosophical “idealism” is therefore the theory that nothing is known to us except ideas, and that there...

the study of a soul picking its way through the labyrinth of life is a living lesson in philosophy, an ever moving picture of experience molding character and transforming thought.

What was this metaphysics that so charmed the Romantics? Its central thesis was that the individual, self-conscious ego—whose essence is will and whose will is free—is the center and sum of all reality.

Fichte began by dividing philosophers into two groups: “dogmatists” or “realists,” who are confident that objects exist independently of the mind; and idealists, who believe that all experience and all “facts” are mental percepts, and that therefore all reality, so far as we can know, is part of the perceiving mind.

in another mood Fichte suggests Hegel: the individual self or soul is mortal,12 but it shares in the immortality of that totality of conscious selves which is the Absolute Ego, Idea, or Soul.

individualism is the snake in every socialist paradise.

He took from Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) the idea that God himself is a battleground between good and evil, so that nature oscillates between struggling for order and relaxing into chaos; and in man too there is something basically irrational.

On February 5, 1807, Christina Burkhardt, wife of Hegel’s landlord, gave birth to a boy whom the absent-minded professor recognized as one of his anonymous works.

Karl Marx, a disciple of Hegel, thought that capitalism contained the seeds of socialism; that the rival forms of economic organization must clash in a war to the death; and that socialism would prevail. A more consistent Hegelian would have predicted a union of both, as in Western Europe today.

“The nature of the universe has no power which can permanently resist the courageous effort of the intelligence; it must at last open itself up; it must reveal all its depth and riches to the spirit.”45 But long before that culmination philosophy will have perceived that the real world is not the world that we touch or see, but the relationships and regularities that give them order and nobility, the unwritten laws that move the sun and the stars, and constitute the impersonal mind of the world.

Hegel rejected democracy outright: the ordinary citizen is ill-equipped to choose competent rulers, or to determine national policy.

So despotism tried to suppress the human hunger for freedom; the hunger broke out in revolt; their synthesis was constitutional monarchy.

Hegel was still cosmopolitan enough to recognize that the French Revolution had brought substantial benefits to much of Germany—the Code Napoléon, the abolition of feudal privileges, the enlargement of freedom, the spread of property ownership…,

Marx, who knew Hegel chiefly through the master’s writings, transformed the dialectical movement of the categories into the economic interpretation of history, in which the class war superseded the Heroes as a main agent of progress; and socialism became the Marxian synthesis of capitalism and its internal contradictions.

Sismondi rejected socialism (which was then called communism); it would put both economic and political power into the same hands, and would sacrifice individual liberty to an omnipotent state.

Since states are as acquisitive as their component citizens, and send out prehensile pseudopodia, called armies, to seize delectable objects,

Greece had fallen to the Turks in 1452, and had now been so long under Ottoman rule that it had half forgotten its ancient pride. Conquest by “Franks” and immigration by Slavs mingled bloods, racial memories, and dialects until the popular “demotic” speech had substantially diverged from the Greek of Plato’s days.

Almost any Russian was at heart kind and hospitable, perhaps from seeing others as fellow sufferers in a hard world; but barbarism simmered in the soul, remembering times when one had to kill or be killed.

The Winter Palace, begun in 1755 by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, and completed in 1817 by Giacomo Quarenghi and C. J. Rossi, was the most imposing royal house in Europe, dwarfing and outshining Versailles: fifteen miles of corridors, 2,500 rooms, countless columns of marble, a thousand famous paintings; on the lowest floors, two thousand servants, and, in one wing, hens, ducks, goats, and pigs,

he caught the aging Catherine in a moment of simplicity and innocence hardly to be expected of a royal nymphomaniac;

Several of his generals advised him to camp there for the winter instead of trying to get to Moscow and back before the snows came. Napoleon answered that Vitebsk was not situated to allow successful fortification and defense; that the region was too sparsely cultivated to feed his army; that any delay before reaching Moscow, or a decisive battle, would give Russia time to form and equip more armies to harass the French en route or blockade them in Vitebsk;

The discontent of the Army was the strongest of the forces that opened a door for the return of the fascinating prodigal. Add a peasantry fearing dispossession or a restoration of feudal dues; manufacturers suffering from the influx of British goods; the discomfort of all but the orthodox Catholics under the intensifying sway of the clergy; the King’s dismissal of both chambers at the end of 1814—not to return till May; and a secret yearning of the poor for the excitement and splendor of Napoleon’s France: these were frail and uncertain winds of chance, but news of them, brought to Elba, raised the spirit of the imprisoned gladiator, wounded but not dead.

Fair women wore fortunes on their dresses or in their hair, and displayed as much of their software as a decent respect for Cardinal Consalvi would allow.

Louis XVIII, himself a reasonable man, touched with the Enlightenment, had allowed his court to be dominated by royalists who had forgiven nothing and wanted everything, including their old estates and authority, and a government unhampered by representative institutions.

the Army still cherished its memory of the Petit Caporal who had chatted with conscripts around a campfire, who had promoted them without class prejudice or bureaucratic delay, and who had made the Grande Armée the terror of kings and the pride of France. The peasants remembered that Napoleon had protected them against the demands of the nobility and the clergy; the proletariat had prospered under his rule; the middle classes had grown in wealth and social acceptance.

Millions of Frenchmen felt that with all his autocracy Napoleon had preserved the essentials of the Revolution: the end of feudalism and its toilsome tolls and dues; the opening of advancement to ability of whatever class; the equality of all before the law; the administration of justice according to explicit, written, and nationally uniform law.

within twenty years after his death, Napoleon had been reborn, and again dominated the minds and imagination of men. “The world belongs to Napoleon,” wrote Chateaubriand; “… living, h...

He was an exhausting force, a phenomenon of energy contained and explosive, a rising, burning, waning flame that consumed those who touched him intimately. We have not found in history another soul that burned so intensely and so long.

That will, at first so hesitant, fearful, and morose, discovered its weapons and resources in a piercing mind and eye; it became confident, rash, imperious, rioting in grasp and power; until the gods, seeing no measure in him, bound lesser wills in union to pursue him, corner him, seize him, and chain him to a rock until his fire should burn out.

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.

The French Revolution, and the American Revolution as interpreted by Jefferson, carried liberty to excess, freeing individualism to the point of a destructive disorder, and freeing superior ability to repeated crises of concentrated wealth.

His enemies had resolved to destroy him because he had won a kingdom by his own services and labors instead of by the accident of birth.