In the quality, as well as in the quantity, of his performance we may trace the working of circumstances. By circumstances he was shaped as well as favoured.
    In general, it is easy to over-estimate the importance of personality, the part which is played in human affairs by free-will. Those who have taken the most favourable, and those who have taken the most unfavourable view of Napoleon's character, seem alike to ascribe to that character a greater share in the events than it really had or could have. That he was scarcely governed at all by ordinary moral considerations lies on the surface of his career, and those who try to defend his actions on accepted moral principles claim more for him than he ever claimed for himself, for he frequently repeated that morality was not intended for the class of men to which he belonged. Was he then above morality or below it? That is, was he a great genius in morals as in military science, flinging aside conventions only in order to be more faithful to great principles, doing more good, and accomplishing more for mankind by his audacious acts, apparently so lawless, than a timid morality could accomplish in ten times as many years? Or was he, on the other hand, a kind of incarnation of evil, a Satan such as Milton describes, solitary in the universe? Both views seem to attribute to him too much originality. He was a great soldier and a most powerful ruler, --that is, he had a great genius for action, but it is an error to attribute to him either the virtues or the vices of a philosopher. He neither had nor valued original ideas, but was a virtuoso in the art of availing himself of the new ideas which he found current. Especially when we consider his crimes and lawless acts, it becomes gradually clear that in his public morality Napoleon represents a peculiar demoralisation, which had been gaining ground in Europe through the whole of the eighteenth century.
    The partition of Poland is cited as one of the greatest of international crimes, and it may fairly be said that Napoleon's whole career consists if a series of such crimes. From the partition of Venice and the invasion of Turkey at the beginning of it, to the seizure of Spain, the spoliation of Prussia, and the invasion of Russia at a later time, we trace throughout the same lawless determination to make the utmost use of a military force such as had never been seen before and was not likely soon to appear again. Unrestrained spoliation is the rule, and it is cloaked with the most transparent pretexts. But the very name of the partition of Poland ought to warn us against regarding Napoleon as an inventor or originator of international lawlessness. the example had been given when he was a child. Nor was that example by any means isolated, nor was he the first to follow it. This is sufficiently shown by the fact that the second and third partitions of Poland, as well as the first, took place before the appearance of Napoleon, or by the fact that there was as much lawless violence in the revolutionary war between 1792 and 1796 as in the years that followed Napoleon's first campaign.
    Personality exerts a fascinating influence upon us.  We perceive far more distinctly, as it were, the deeds we can attribute to a single notable person, than similar deeds of which the responsibility is divided among many persons, of whom some may be obscure and some quite unknown.  The enormous character of Napoleon's deeds would not strike us so much if the same deeds had been done by a succession of ordinary French ministeries during the same space of time.  The best proof of this is that we seldom remark how the same lawless principles had been gathering head for a very long time in Europe, how many similar acts had been done before in the eighteenth century, how slight is the difference in moral principle, however great the difference in power and opportunity, between Napoleon and other rulers of that age.  When we attend to this general character of the age, we come to see that the Napoleonic wars are only the fatal catastrophe towards which Europe had long been madly hurrying, the last paroxysm of the possessed before the evil spirit, which was the spirit of international cynicism, went out to him.  We talk of the partition of Poland, but that deed was really not so exceptional, nor should we speak of it as the cause of the demoralisation of Europe, but rather as one among several proofs that Europe was already demoralised.
    Professor Stubbs has remarked that in the Middle Ages wars were waged for rights, but in modern times for interests.  Till near the end of the seventeenth century, or as long as religion continued to be a leading international influence, it may be said that though there was much disorder and crime, sheer naked cynicism did not yet prevail in the intercourse of nations.  But from the war of the Spanish Succession throughout the eighteenth century it may be said that, though there were some improvement in the manner in which war was conducted, it was undertaken on more unblushingly immoral grounds than either before or since.  The old European system founded on the unity of religion had passed away, and the later system, founded on the struggle of two rival religions, had almost passed away too.  On the other hand, the modern system, founded on nationality, only began to show itself at the French Revolution.  Hence, whereas our nineteenth century wars are inspired by national patriotism, and the wars of the seventeenth century, even those of Louis XIV, have at least some, if only superficial, varnish of religion, those of the intermediate period – I speak of the Continental wars – are scarcely coloured by any kind of moral pretext.  It is the iron age of international relations, the age in which wars are waged simply to round off a territory, to give compactness to a state.  The ominous word Partition, pronounced a little earlier in reference to the Spanish Empire, when it was hoped to accomplish by treaty between William III and Louis XIV the settlement which afterwards cost Europe a war, seems to govern the whole century.  It would appear that the precedent set in the case of the Spanish Empire demoralised all the politicians of Europe.  They saw on the one hand the Bourbon family gain a kingdom in spite of a solemn renunciation; on the other hand, a re-arrangement of the map of Europe accomplished by force of arms.  Henceforward every great royal demise became the signal for a war on the model of that of the Spanish Succession.  Had Louis XV died in childhood, as was expected, there would certainly have been in the twenties a war of the French Succession; there was a war of the Polish Succession in the thirties, and a war of the Austrian Succession in the forties, which last led to a second terrible struggle in the fifties; the seventies witnessed a partition of Poland, and a war of the Bavarian Succession; a partition of Turkey was attempted in the eighties.  In the course of these wars kings and ministers accustomed themselves to contemplate rearrangements as large as those made at Utrecht, and to break engagements as sacred as that which had been broken by Louis XIV.  This was seen in the eager haste with which so many sovereigns set aside the treaties in which they had pledged themselves to the Pragmatic Sanction.  The spectacle then presented by Europe ought to show us that no partition of Poland, occurring thirty years later, was needed to demoralise statesmen.
    It is easy to show that the French Revolution and Napoleon proceeded upon lines laid down in the former age.  Their partitions and annexations were scarcely ever of their own imagining; for the most part they did but take up schemes which had long been discussed, and had been attempted by other Governments.  If they annexed Belgium, and gave Austria an indemnity in Italy, what was this but a modification of the grand scheme of Joseph II, which had so long occupied Europe, the scheme of exchanging Belgium against Bavaria?  It is to be observed that the same Joseph II had also contemplated the acquisition of Venice.  The partition of Poland is of course frequently referred to by the French diplomatists of the time as justifying, and even necessitating, a proportional aggrandisement of France; and in like manner the Egyptian expedition was certainly undertaken by the French Government in emulation of the acts by which Russia and England had aggrandised themselves in the Oriental World.
    The peculiar nature of this demoralisation is best seen in the career of the Emperor Joseph II.  It was Frederick who avowed it with the most cynical frankness, but for this very reason Frederick strikes us rather as personally an unprincipled man than as reflecting a special obliquity of the age.  But of all sovereigns of modern Austria, Joseph appears as the most devoted to the public good, the most energetic reformer, the most indefatigable enemy of abuses; and yet this Emperor's foreign policy turns almost exclusively on partitions and lawless annexations, so that, had he been as successful as Napoleon, he would have been chargeable with almost as many international crimes.  In general it may be remarked that in this period the sovereigns who are most enlightened and energetic, and open their minds most freely to the culture of the age, those to whom Continental Liberalism now looks back as to its founders, are specially lawless in acts of partition.  The three great Liberal politicians of their time, Frederick, Joseph, and Catherine, combined to execute the partition of Poland.  It is therefore the less surprising that when all the enlightenment of the age came to a head in the French Revolution, the principle of partition should have smuggled itself in with the principles of 1789, and that Bonaparte later, piquing himself upon being the successor of Frederick the Great in Europe, should have emulated not only Frederick's code, not only his vigorous domestic administration, but also the seizure of Silesia and the partition of Poland.
    In international lawlessness, then, Bonaparte is not to be regarded as original.  He is not precisely on this point to be considered more unprincipled than the other leading politicians.  He can be charged only with going beyond them all in the ruthless energy with which he put the fashionable principle in practice, with committing crimes of the same kind, but in far greater number.
    In short, it was inevitable, if the maxims preached in the earlier half of the century by Belleisle and Frederick, and enthusiastically adopted thirty years later by Joseph and Catherine, should come to be generally adopted, as at the time of the French Revolution they actually were, and if in the course of time some one European state should acquire a great military superiority to the others, that the consequence should be a sort of unlimited application of the principle of partition.  This took place, and the result was the universal empire of Napoleon.
    While his lawlessness in foreign policy is to be explained in this way, the violent acts he occasionally committed at home, the murder of D'Enghien and Palm, and some other deeds of violence, appear in like manner less original and unusual when they are taken in their place in French history.  For if international politics had been demoralised gradually during the eighteenth century, the domestic politics of France had fallen into still wilder disorder through the Reign of Terror and the whole stormy course of the first republic.  Deeds which, done is the name of a civilised government, shocked all Europe, were after all not so abnormal in the country which had lately witnessed the storming of the Tuileries, the September massacres, the dictatorship and fall of Robespierre, and still more recently the cruel violence of Fructidor.

Thus he lawlessness and violence are to be regarded less as inherent personal vices than as characteristics of the revolutionary age, which were borrowed by him.  It is true that there was a certain original correspondence between his Corsican nature and the revolutionary way of thinking.  Rousseau had introduced the fashion of primitive antique characters, and had actually pointed to Corsica as the home of such characters.  There is evidence that in the early part of his career Bonaparte impressed the Parisian mind as realising more genuinely than others the conception of Rousseau.  His fierce energy and decision, his grave and stern demeanour, suited the age, as they would have seemed hopelessly incongruous in the time of Fleury or Bernis.  But he owed far more to the suppleness, the ready knack of imitation and assimilation, which was concealed under that demeanour.  He had a marvellous trick of adopting, parading, and profiting by, the ideas which prevailed around him.  Hence he was a cynic in foreign policy, and at home a Terrorist under Robespierre, an Anti-Jacobin at Brumaire, and soon afterwards actually a Catholic.  But it was in his Eastern campaign that he displayed most strikingly this turn for masquerading in strange intellectual costumes.  In his fancy that the Deism of the French Revolution could be made to pass in the East for Mohammedanism he pushed it to an extreme, but in the reign of terror which he established in Egypt, and in the massacre at Jaffa, we recognise the same man, who could be a Frederick in Europe and a Jacobin or an Anti-Jacobin, as occasion might serve, at Paris.  He has considered the manners of the East, assimilated them, and perceived that in Oriental war it is customary to massacre prisoners!
    That he was in an eminent degree the child of circumstances, that while he appeared to control his age, he was in reality controlled and moulded by it, he acknowledged himself when he said of some one who had written upon his career, ‘He speaks of me as if I were a person!  I am not a person, I am a thing.'
    It is involved in this that he can have been no more than a prodigy of goodness than a prodigy of evil.  The fancy that in his perpetual wars and rearrangements of the map of Europe he had in view some grand regeneration of humanity, perhaps some federation of Europe which should finally close the age of wars, has seldom been formally stated, but it has haunted many writers as at least partially or possibly true.  What really actuated him will be discussed below, but he has no ideas peculiar to himself, only a talent for using and converting into force the ideas of his time.

In this respect then he resembles a great party leader.  But to what party did Napoleon belong?  Was he a Liberal?  Was he first a Liberal, and then a renegade?  Or was he a Liberal who saw the necessity in an exceptional crisis of arming the Liberal cause with irresistible power, and so created a dictatorship in his own favour?  Or was he no Liberal at all, but a reactionary, or even a tyrant and a mere selfish adventurer?  I have myself laid little stress upon his hostility to liberty, nor have I been able to discover that, after having begun as an enthusiastic and glorious champion of freedom, he was gradually corrupted by power so as to become a tyrant.  His rule was from the beginning despotic, and just as much so when he was called First Consul as when he was called Emperor.  If he varied at all, it was only in dropping a few republican phrases, which had never been intended but as a blind for public opinion.  But in despotism, too, he was not original.  He invented nothing, but was the creature of circumstances.  For before his advent, France had known since 1792 no other form of government but an extreme despotism.  The Jacobinical party, which had been supreme in the main during the whole period, advocated a far stronger and severer form of government than had been known before even in the despotic states of Europe.  It was this iron system that Bonaparte inherited; he made it more systematic, less violent, and much more endurable to the majority of the people.  Assuredly he did not dream of abolishing it, and introducing in its pace a system of liberty.  But he destroyed no liberty, for there was none to destroy; and, indeed, if it may be asserted of certain nations in certain circumstances that they are unfit for liberty, perhaps this may be asserted of the French in 1800, demoralised as they were by eight years of the most furious internal discord.  It has often been pointed out that the Revolution did not achieve, nor indeed seriously aim at, political liberty.  As to the social liberties, the civil equality, which had been the fruit of the first Revolution (that of 1789), this was maintained on the whole by Napoleon.  His system seemed on the whole a return to the first Revolution, and an abandonment of the second or Jacobinical Revolution (that of 1792).  As compared with the old monarchies of Europe, Napoleonic France still seemed Liberal, and Napoleon himself ranked in Europe as a great Liberal ruler, as a successor of the Josephs and Catherines.
    To some extent no doubt he abandoned even the principles of the first Revolution.  He abandoned the civil constitution of the clergy, and restored by the Concordat the ancient connection of the Church in its ancient Papal form with the State.  It is to be remembered, however, that the Church so restored was a disendowed and humbled Church, from which the State might be thought to have little to fear.  Again, at a later time he violated the principles of the Revolution by creating a nobility.  But this was at a time when the conquest of Germany had modified the French State in its very foundations, and when the French Revolution itself seemed to have been superseded by a new, or European revolution.
    The second or Jacobinical Revolution he did indeed renounce wholly.  But he did so at once and avowedly at the moment of assuming power, and in doing so recanted little.  Before that time he had not been properly a politician; that is, he had no politics but foreign politics.  It would be unreasonable to call him a renegade for now abandoning Jacobinism, on the ground that he had been a Jacobin at Vendemiaire, and had often talked Jacobinism since; in those days h had talked without responsibility, not as a politician but as a soldier.

Since, then, circumstances had so great a share in moulding Napoleon, how came they in this instance to mould a figure so colossal?  In other words, what does he represent?  Or is it possible that such a mighty display of power can be ascribed to no single and simple cause, but only to a multitude of secondary causes accidentally combined?  In some sense surely he represents the spirit of the Revolution; and it is difficult no to think – however plainly the facts may seem to refute it – that that spirit was in some sense a spirit of liberty.  Assuredly a new feeling of ardour, a new sense of health and power, had taken possession of the nation, and found expression, first, in the enthusiasm of the soldiers who conquered Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine before Napoleon's name was heard; and later, in the absorbing enthusiasm with which the hosts of France regarded him.  But great confusion is produced by using the word ‘liberty' to express any kind of enthusiasm which may inspire a community, even when that community remains under the yoke of an iron government.  Some more precise and appropriate term is needed.  It was not the personal idea of liberty, but rather a sense of the greatness of France that inspired those armies.  The principles of '89 had, as it were, made all Frenchmen feel themselves citizens – that is, not so much free, as having an interest in the State.  It is not in liberty that the subjects of the Convention or of Napoleon differ from the subjects of Louis XIV, but in the feeling that the Government, however absolute, was their Government.  So distinct is this from liberty, that in the period when the feeling was fresh it gave a new energy to despotism.  For the people took a pride in the strength and severity of the Government which was their own.
    Not less great in the history of a people is the moment when it acquires this sense of membership in the State than the moment when it asserts its liberty; not less great, and wholly distinct.  Then it ceases to regard Government with sullen dread as an enemy, or with resignation as an incomprehensible superior power, and begins to conceive it as a representative of itself as the champion of its interests.  In no civilised country had the superstitious view prevailed more absolutely than in the France of Louis XIV; all the more inspiring was the change when now the rational view dawned upon the French mind, and the State appeared before their minds as a living organism.  We may, perhaps, say that the effect of the Revolution was to make France not free, but organic.  Parallel cases have occurred in our own age.  Italy and Germany in like manner became organic by the abolition of petty, artificial, or foreign Governments, and by the establishment of a harmony between the State and the nation.  In both cases the movement appeared to be at the moment rather unfavourable than favourable to the progress of liberty.  In both cases the strongest form of government attainable was adopted.
    Now it is instructive to observe that in both these cases, also, the earliest instinct of the State thus endowed with organic life was to extend its territory and make war upon its neighbours.  The first step towards German unity was marked by an unsuccessful was for Schleswig-Holstein, the second step by a successful one, and the consummation of German unity was, as it were, attested by the conquest of Alsace and Lorraine.  The kingdom of Italy could not be content without Rome and Venice, and still raises a wild cry of ‘Italia Irredenta.'
    In France the same instinct was at work when foreign war arose by a kind of necessity out of the Revolution.  The speeches of Brissot de Warville, who inspired Dumouriez and prophesied of Napoleon, witness to the connection between the awakening sense of organic national life and the military ambition of revolutionary France.  ‘We are a hundred times as strong as we were,' he exclaims; ‘now is the time to urge our ancient territorial claims.'  Much has been said of the ambitious, unscrupulous character of the French nation; but in truth a false history had suggested to them unbounded pretensions, which no spirited nation, convinced of their justice, could renounce.  They believed that they had a right to the frontiers of ancient Gaul, to the kingdom of Austrasia, which had been ruled by Charles the Great, and what not?  Such illusions were in that age unavoidable, and they formed the basis of the foreign policy of the Revolution.  Hence it is that as the German Revolution of our own age led directly to wars with Denmark, Austria, and France, so the French Revolution inevitably kindled war on the Rhine and in Belgium.  But it is the notable peculiarity of the French Revolution that it was lost in the foreign wars which grew out of it.  It alone therefore has its Napoleon.
    This result was brought about in the following way: -

1. At the opening of the war France was invaded, threatened with dismemberment, and with a counter-revolution to be accomplished by force.  This would at any time have called out a great movement of patriotism; at that moment of the new birth of the nation it kindled a patriotic ardour such as had never been witnessed before in one of the large states of modern Europe.  An immense national army sprang into existence, to which no army of earlier times was at all comparable.  Insensibly from an army of patriotic defence this became an army of conquest, and a professional army from an army of citizens; but the old heroic spirit long survived the causes that had produced it, and the soldiers of Napoleon scarcely perceived till 1808 or 1809 (when Lannes in his dying moments reproached Napoleon with his ambition) that they had ceased to be patriots, and had become the tools of a conqueror.

2. The beginning of organic life in France was accompanied by the downfall of the ancient Government.  In Italy and Germany, on the other hand, we have seen the King direct the movement and increase his power by means of it; and indeed had Louis XVI been an energetic ruler, he might have acquired for himself much of the glory and power of Napoleon.  But when the throne fell at the moment of the commencement of the war, the Revolution was drawn into another course, and this circumstance gave a new impulse to the warlike tendency.  We have seen Germany put restraint upon herself, and deliberately pause in her career of victory.  She has been able to do so because the military party has not been suffered to become supreme.  A contrary result was witnessed in France, because there, the Government having fallen, the military party itself was called upon to make a Government.  Imperialism was established, and this is the form of government which, by the law of its nature, is most disposed to war, and conducts war most efficiently.  We remember the brilliant foreign policy of Cromwell; the leader of French imperialism gave France a foreign policy as much more brilliant than Cromwell's as his army was greater and his authority more unquestioned.

3. The warlike policy gathered strength from success. It was itself in harmony with the tradition that had come down from Louis XIV and Richelieu. It consoled the nation for the military humiliations of the last thirty years of Bourbon rule. And now Europe saw that the old barriers which had been set up at Utrecht against French aggression would not withstand for a moment the attack of the new national army.  Now came to light the prodigious military advantage of an organic nation-state, with its inexhaustible supply of patriotic warriors, over inorganic artificial states such as those of Germany and Italy.  Even in 1798, Napoleon himself being inactive or absent, France had a triumphant feeling of superiority to all Europe.  Government after Government, Switzerland, the Papal State, Naples, went down before her reckless attacks, made almost in wantonness.  And what gratified her ambitious instincts seemed justifiable to almost all French parties alike on one ground or other.  To revolutionists conquest appeared as the diffusion of truth and liberty; to old-fashioned politicians it was a revival of the policy of Louis XIV, and an abandonment of the pernicious Austrian alliance; while theorists, if they followed an historical method, applauded the restoration of the empire of Charlemagne or of the ancient limits of Gaul; and if they reasoned a priori, and worshipped nature after the example of Rousseau, argued that a state founded on true natural principles should have natural frontiers.