Theological Essays and Other Papers v2
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Thomas de Quincey >> Theological Essays and Other Papers v2
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Napoleon Bonaparte and Charlemagne were both, in a memorable degree,
the favorites of fortune. It is true, that the latter found himself
by inheritance in possession of a throne, which the other ascended by
the fortunate use of his own military advantages. But the throne of
Charlemagne had been recently won by his family, and in a way so nearly
corresponding to that which was afterwards pursued by Napoleon, that
in effect, considering how little this usurpation had been hallowed
by time, the throne might in each case, if not won precisely on the
same terms, be considered to be held by the same tenure. Charlemagne,
not less than Napoleon, was the privileged child of revolution; he was
required by the times, and indispensable to the crisis which had arisen
for the Franks; and he was himself protected by the necessities to
which he ministered. Clouds had risen, or were rising, at that era,
on every quarter of France; from every side she was menaced by hostile
demonstrations; and, without the counsels of a Charlemagne, and with
an energy of action inferior to his, it is probable that she would
have experienced misfortunes which, whilst they depressed herself,
could not but have altered the destinies of Christendom for many ages
to come. The resources of France, it is true, were immense; and, as
regarded the positions of her enemies, they were admirably concentrated.
But to be made available in the whole extent which the times demanded,
it was essential that they should be wielded by a first-rate statesman,
supported by a first-rate soldier. The statesman and the soldier were
fortunately found united in the person of one man; and that man, by
the rarest of combinations, the same who was clothed with the supreme
power of the State. Less power, or power less harmonious, or power the
most consummate, administered with less absolute skill, would doubtless
have been found incompetent to struggle with the tempestuous assaults
which then lowered over the entire frontier of France. It was natural,
and, upon the known constitution of human nature, pretty nearly
inevitable, that, in the course of the very extended warfare which
followed, love for that glorious trade--so irritating and so
contagious--should be largely developed in a mind as aspiring as
Charlemagne's, and stirred by such generous sensibilities. Yet is it
in no one instance recorded, that these sympathies with the pomp and
circumstance of war, moved him to undertake so much as a single
campaign, or an expedition which was not otherwise demanded by his
judgment, or that they interfered even to bias or give an impulse to
his judgment, where it had previously wavered. In every case he tried
the force of negotiation before he appealed to arms; nay, sometimes
he condescended so far in his love of peace, as to attempt purchasing
with gold rights or concessions of expediency, which he knew himself
in a situation amply to extort by arms. Nor where these courses were
unavailing, and where peace was no longer to be maintained by any
sacrifices, is it ever found that Charlemagne, in adopting the course
of war, suffered himself to pursue it as an end valuable in and for
itself. And yet _that_ is a result not uncommon; for a long and
conscientious resistance to a measure originally tempting to the
feelings, once being renounced as utterly unavailing, not seldom issues
in a headlong surrender of the heart to purposes so violently thwarted
for a time. And even as a means, war was such in the eyes of Charlemagne
to something beyond the customary ends of victory and domestic security.
Of all conquerors, whose history is known sufficiently to throw light
upon their motives, Charlemagne is the only one who looked forward to
the benefit of those he conquered, as a principal element amongst the
fruits of conquest. 'Doubtless,' says his present biographer, 'to
defend his own infringed territory, and to punish the aggressors,
formed a part of his design; but, beyond that, he aimed at civilizing
a people whose barbarism had been for centuries the curse of the
neighboring countries, and at the same time communicating to the cruel
savages, who shed the blood of their enemies less in the battle than
in the sacrifice, the bland and mitigating spirit of the Christian
religion.'
This applies more particularly and circumstantially to his Saxon
campaigns; but the spirit of the remark is of general application. At
that time a weak light of literature was beginning to diffuse
improvement in Italy, in France, and in England. France, by situation,
geographically and politically speaking, by the prodigious advantage
which she enjoyed exclusively of an undivided government, and
consequently of entire unity in her counsels, was peculiarly fitted
for communicating the benefits of intellectual culture to the rest of
the European continent, and for sustaining the great mission of
civilizing conquest. Above all, as the great central depository of
Christian knowledge, she seemed specially stationed by Providence as
a martial apostle for carrying by the sword that mighty blessing,
which, even in an earthly sense, Charlemagne could not but value as
the best engine of civilization, to the potent infidel nations on her
southern and eastern frontier. A vast revolution was at hand for Europe;
all her tribes were destined to be fused in a new crucible, to be
recast in happier moulds, and to form one family of enlightened nations,
to compose one great collective brotherhood, united by the tie of a
common faith and a common hope, and hereafter to be known to the rest
of the world, and to proclaim this unity, under the comprehensive name
of _Christendom_. Baptism therefore was the indispensable condition
and forerunner of civilization; and from the peculiar ferocity and the
sanguinary superstitions which disfigured the Pagan nations in Central
Europe, of which the leaders and the nearest to France were the Saxons,
and from the bigotry and arrogant intolerance of the Mahometan nations
who menaced her Spanish frontier, it was evident that by the sword
only it was possible that baptism should be effectually propagated.
War, therefore, for the highest purposes of peace, became the present
and instant policy of France; bloodshed for the sake of a religion the
most benign; and desolation with a view to permanent security. The
Frankish Emperor was thus invited to indulge in this most captivating
of luxuries--in the royal tiger-hunt of war--as being also at this
time, and for a special purpose, the sternest of duties. He had a
special dispensation for wielding at times a barbarian and exterminating
sword--but for the extermination of barbarism; and he was privileged
to be in a single instance an Attila, in order that Attilas might no
more arise. Simply as the enemies, bitter and perfidious of France,
the Saxons were a legitimate object of war; as the standing enemies
of civilization, who would neither receive it for themselves, nor
tolerate its peaceable enjoyment in others, they and Charlemagne stood
opposed to each other as it were by hostile instincts. And this most
merciful of conquerors was fully justified in departing for once, and
in such a quarrel, from his general rule of conduct; and for a paramount
purpose of comprehensive service to all mankind, we entirely agree
with Mr. James, that Charlemagne had a sufficient plea, and that he
has been censured only by calumnious libellers, or by the feeble-
minded, for applying a Roman severity of punishment to treachery
continually repeated. The question is one purely of policy; and it may
be, as Mr. James is disposed to think, that in point of judgment the
emperor erred; but certainly the case was one of great difficulty; for
the very infirmity even of maternal indulgence, if obstinately and
continually abused, must find its ultimate limit; and we have no right
to suppose that Charlemagne made his election for the harsher course
without a violent self-conflict. His former conduct towards those
very people, his infinite forbearance, his long-suffering, his monitory
threats, all make it a duty to presume that he suffered the acutest
pangs in deciding upon a vindictive punishment; that he adopted this
course as being virtually by its consequences the least sanguinary;
and finally, that if he erred, it was not through his heart, but by
resisting its very strongest impulses.
It is remarkable that both Charlemagne and Bonaparte succeeded as by
inheritance to one great element of their enormous power; each found,
ready to his hands, that vast development of martial enthusiasm, upon
which, as its first condition, their victorious career reposed. Each
also found the great armory of resources opened, which such a spirit,
diffused over so vast a territory, must in any age ensure. Of
Charlemagne, in an age when as yet the use of infantry was but
imperfectly known, it may be said symbollically, that he found the
universal people, patrician and plebeian, chieftain and vassal, with
the left foot [Footnote 11] in the stirrup--of Napoleon, in an age
when the use of artillery was first understood, that he found every
man standing to his gun. Both, in short, found war _in pro-cinctu_--both
found the people whom they governed, willing to support the privations
and sacrifices which war imposes; hungering and thirsting for its
glories, its pomps and triumphs; entering even with lively sympathy
of pleasure into its hardships and its trials; and thus, from within
and from without, prepared for military purposes. So far both had the
same good fortune; [Footnote 12] neither had much merit. The enthusiasm
of Napoleon's days was the birth of republican sentiments, and built
on a reaction of civic and patriotic ardor. In the very plenitude of
their rage against kings, the French Republic were threatened with
attack, and with the desolation of their capital by a banded crusade
of kings; and they rose in frenzy to meet the aggressors. The Allied
Powers had themselves kindled the popular excitement which provoked
this vast development of martial power amongst the French, and first
brought their own warlike strength within their own knowledge. In the
days of Charlemagne the same martial character was the result of ancient
habits and training, encouraged and effectually organized by the energy
of the aspiring mayors of the palace, or great lieutenants of the
Merovingian kings. But agreeing in this--that they were indebted to
others for the martial spirit which they found, and that they turned
to their account a power not created by themselves, Charlemagne and
Napoleon differed, however, in the utmost possible extent as to the
final application of their borrowed advantages. Napoleon applied them
to purposes the very opposite of those which had originally given them
birth. Nothing less than patriotic ardor in defence of what had at one
time appeared to be the cause of civil liberty, could have availed to
evoke those mighty hosts which gathered in the early years of the
Revolution on the German and Italian frontiers of France. Yet were
these hosts applied, under the perfect despotism of Napoleon, to the
final extinction of liberty; and the armies of Jacobinism, who had
gone forth on a mission of liberation for Europe, were at last employed
in riveting the chains of their compatriots, and forging others for
the greater part of Christendom. Far otherwise was the conduct of
Charlemagne. The Frankish government, though we are not circumstantially
acquainted with its forms, is known to have been tempered by a large
infusion of popular influence. This is proved, as Mr. James observes,
by the deposition of Chilperic--by the grand national assemblies of
the Champ de Mars--and by other great historical facts. Now, the
situation of Charlemagne, successor to a throne already firmly
established, and in his own person a mighty amplifier of its glories,
and a leader in whom the Franks had unlimited confidence, threw into
his hands an unexampled power of modifying the popular restraints upon
himself in any degree he might desire.
--'Nunquam libertas gratior exit, Quam sub rege pio'--
is the general doctrine. But as to the Franks, in particular, if they
resembled their modern representatives in their most conspicuous moral
feature, it would be more true to say, that the bribe and the almost
magical seduction for _them_, capable of charming away their sternest
resolutions, and of relaxing the hand of the patriot when grasping his
noblest birthright, has ever lain in great military success, in the
power of bringing victory to the national standards, and in continued
offerings on the altar of public vanity. In _their_ estimate for above
a thousand years, it has been found true that the harvest of a few
splendid campaigns, reaped upon the fields of neighboring nations, far
outweighs any amount of humbler blessings in the shape of civil and
political privileges. Charlemagne as a conqueror, and by far the
greatest illustrator of the Frankish name, might easily have conciliated
their gratitude and admiration into a surrender of popular rights; or,
profiting by his high situation, and the confidence reposed in him,
he might have undermined their props; or, by a direct exertion of his
power, he might have peremptorily resumed them. Slowly and surely, or
summarily and with violence, this great emperor had the national
privileges in his power. But the beneficence of his purposes required
no such aggression on the rights of his subjects. War brought with it
naturally some extension of power; and a military jurisdiction is
necessarily armed with some discretionary license. But in the civil
exercise of his authority, the emperor was content with the powers
awarded to him by law and custom. His great schemes of policy were all
of a nature to prepare his subjects for a condition of larger political
influence; he could not in consistency be adverse to an end towards
which he so anxiously prepared the means. And it is certain, that,
although some German writers have attempted to fasten upon Charlemagne
a charge of vexatious inquisition into the minor police of domestic
life, and into petty details of economy below the majesty of his
official character, even _their_ vigilance of research--sharpened by
malice--has been unable to detect throughout his long reign, and in
the hurry of sudden exigencies natural to a state of uninterrupted
warfare and alarm, one single act of tyranny, personal revenge, or
violation of the existing laws. Charlemagne, like Napoleon, had bitter
enemies--some who were such to his government and his public purposes;
some again to his person upon motives of private revenge. Tassilo, for
example, the Duke of Bavaria, and Desiderius, the King of the Lombards,
acted against him upon the bitterest instigations of feminine
resentment; each of these princes conceiving himself concerned in a
family quarrel, pursued the cause which he had adopted in the most
ferocious spirit of revenge, and would undoubtedly have inflicted death
upon Charlemagne, had he fallen into their power. Of this he must
himself have been sensible; and yet, when the chance of war threw both
of them into his power, he forbore to exercise even those rights of
retaliation for their many provocations which the custom of that age
sanctioned universally; he neither mutilated nor deprived them of
sight. Confinement to religious seclusion was all that he inflicted;
and in the case of Tassilo, where mercy could be more safely exercised,
he pardoned him so often, that it became evident in what current his
feelings ran, wherever the cruel necessities of the public service
allowed him to indulge them.
In the conspiracy formed against him, upon the provocations offered
to the Frankish nobility by his third wife, he showed the same spirit
of excessive clemency,--a clemency which again reminds us of the first
Caesar, and which was not merely parental, but often recalls to us the
long-suffering and tenderness of spirit which belong to the infirmity
of maternal affection. Here are no Palms, executed for no real offence
known to the laws of his country, and without a trial such as any laws
in any country would have conceded. No innocent D'Enghiens murdered,
without the shadow of provocation, and purely on account of his own
reversionary rights; not for doing or meditating wrong, but because
the claims which unfortunately he inherited might by possibility become
available in his person; not, therefore, even as an enemy by intention
or premeditation; not even as an apparent competitor, but in the rare
character of a competitor presumptive; one who might become an ideal
competitor by the extinction of a whole family, and even then no
substantial competitor until after a revolution in France, which must
already have undermined the throne of Bonaparte. To his own subjects,
and his own kinsmen, never did Charlemagne forget to be, in acts, as
well as words, a parent. In his foreign relations, it is true, for one
single purpose of effectual warning Charlemagne put forth a solitary
trait of Roman harshness. This is the case which we have already noticed
and defended; and, with a view to the comparison with Napoleon,
remarkable enough it is, that the numbers sacrificed on this occasion
are pretty nearly the same as on the celebrated massacre at Jaffa,
perpetrated by Napoleon in council. [Footnote 13] In the Saxon, as in
the Syrian massacre, the numbers were between four and five thousand;
not that the numbers or the scale of the transaction can affect its
principle, but it is well to know it, because then to its author, as
now to us who sit as judges upon it, that circumstance cannot be
supposed to have failed in drawing the very keenest attention to its
previous consideration. A butchery, that was in a numerical sense so
vast, cannot be supposed to have escaped its author in a hurry, or to
be open to any of the usual palliations from precipitance or
inattention. Charlemagne and Napoleon must equally be presumed to have
regarded this act on all sides, to have weighed it in and for itself,
and to have traversed by anticipation the whole sum of its consequences.
In the one case we find a general, the leader of a _soi-disant_
Christian army, the representative of the 'most Christian' nation,
and, as amongst infidels, specially charged with the duty of supporting
the sanctity of Christian good faith, unfortunately pledged by his own
most confidential and accredited agents, officers bearing on their
persons the known ensigns of his _aides-de-camp_, to a comprehensive
promise of mercy to a large body of Turkish troops, having arms in
their hands, and otherwise well-disposed and well able to have made
a desperate defence. This promise was peculiarly embarrassing;
provisions ran short, and, to detain them as prisoners, would draw
murmurs from his own troops, now suffering hardships themselves. On
the other hand, to have turned them adrift would have insured their
speedy re-appearance as active enemies to a diminished and debilitated
army; for, as to sending them off by sea, that measure was
impracticable, as well from want of shipping as from the presence of
the English. Such was the dilemma, doubtless perplexing enough, but
not more so than in ten thousand other cases, for which their own
appropriate ten thousand remedies have been found. What was the issue?
The entire body of gallant (many, doubtless, young and innocent)
soldiers, disarmed upon the faith of a solemn guarantee from a Christian
general, standing in the very steps of the noble (and the more noble,
because bigoted) Crusaders, were all mowed down by the musketry of
their thrice accursed enemy; and, by way of crowning treachery with
treachery, some few who had swum off to a point of rock in the sea,
were lured back to destruction under a second series of promises,
violated almost at the very instant when uttered. A larger or more
damnable murder does not stain the memory of any brigand, buccaneer,
or pirate; nor has any army, Huns, Vandals, or Mogul Tartars, ever
polluted itself by so base a perfidy; for, in this memorable tragedy,
the whole army were accomplices.
Now, as to Charlemagne, he had tried the effect of forgiveness and
lenity often in vain. Clemency was misinterpreted; it had been, and
it would be, construed into conscious weakness. Under these
circumstances, with a view, undoubtedly, to the final extinction of
rebellions which involved infinite bloodshed on both sides, he permitted
one trial to be made of a severe and sanguinary chastisement. It failed;
insurrections proceeded as before, and it was not repeated. But the
main difference in the principle of the two cases is this, that
Charlemagne had exacted no penalty but one, which the laws of war in
that age conferred, and even in this age the laws of allegiance. However
bloody, therefore, this tragedy was no murder. It was a judicial
punishment, built upon known acts and admitted laws, designed in mercy,
consented to unwillingly, and finally repented. Lastly, instead of
being one in a multitude of acts bearing the same character, it stood
alone in a long career of intercourse with wild and ferocious nations,
owning no control but that of the spear and sword.
Many are the points of comparison, and some of them remarkable enough,
in the other circumstances of the two careers, separated by a thousand
years. Both effected the passage of the Great St. Bernard; [Footnote
14] but the one in an age when mechanical forces, and the aids of art,
were yet imperfectly developed; the other in an age when science had
armed the arts of war and of locomotion with the fabulous powers of
the Titans, and with the whole resources of a mighty nation at his
immediate disposal. Both, by means of this extraordinary feat, achieved
the conquest of Lombardy in a single hour; but Charlemagne, without
once risking the original impression of this _coup d'eclat_; Napoleon,
on the other hand, so entirely squandering and forfeiting his own
success, that in the battle which followed he was at first utterly
defeated, and but for the blunder of his enemy, and the sudden aid of
an accomplished friend, irretrievably. Both suffered politically by
the repudiation of a wife; but Charlemagne, under adequate provocation,
and with no final result of evil; Bonaparte under heavy aggravations
of ingratitude and indiscretion. Both assumed the character of a patron
to learning and learned men; but Napoleon, in an age when knowledge
of every kind was self-patronized--when no possible exertions of power
could avail to crush it--and yet, under these circumstances, with utter
insincerity. Charlemagne, on the other hand, at a time when the
countenance of a powerful protector made the whole difference between
revival and a long extinction--and what was still more to the purpose
of doing honor to his memory, not merely in a spirit of sincerity, but
of fervid activity. Not content with drawing counsel and aid from the
cells of Northumberland, even the short time which he passed at Rome,
he had 'collected a number of grammarians (that is _litterateurs_) and
arithmeticians, the poor remains of the orators and philosophers of
the past, and engaged them to accompany him from Italy to France.'
What resulted in each case from these great efforts and prodigious
successes? Each failed in laying the foundations of any permanent
inheritance to his own glory in his own family. But Bonaparte lived
to lay in ruins even his personal interest in this great edifice of
empire; and that entirely by his own desperate presumption,
precipitance, and absolute defect of self-command. Charlemagne, on
_his_ part, lost nothing of what he had gained: if his posterity did
not long maintain the elevation to which he had raised them, _that_
did but the more proclaim the grandeur of the mind which had reared
a colossal empire, that sunk under any powers inferior to his own. If
the empire itself lost its unity, and divided into sections, even thus
it did not lose the splendor and prosperity of its separate parts; and
the praise remains entire--let succeeding princes, as conservators,
have failed as much and as excusably as they might--that he erected
the following splendid empire:--The whole of France and Belgium, with
their natural boundaries of the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Ocean, the
Mediterranean; to the south, Spain, between the Ebro and the Pyrenees;
and to the north, the whole of Germany, up to the banks of the Elbe.
Italy, as far as the Lower Calabria, was either governed by his son,
or tributary to his crown; Dalmatia, Croatia, Liburnia, and Istria,
(with the exception of the maritime cities,) were joined to the
territories, which he had himself conquered, of Hungary and Bohemia.
As far as the conflux of the Danube with the Teyss and the Save, the
east of Europe acknowledged his power. Most of the Sclavonian tribes,
between the Elbe and the Vistula, paid tribute and professed obedience;
and Corsica, Sardinia, with the Balearic Islands, were dependent upon
his possessions in Italy and Spain.
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