War And Peace

During the wars in Italy he finds himself several times staring death in the face, only to be saved on every occasion by some bolt from the blue. The Russian armies, the troops really capable of shattering his prestige, keep getting delayed by diplomacy and stay out of Europe while he is still there.¹⁰

On his return from Italy he finds the government in Paris in such a process of disintegration that all men entering it are being steadily wiped out and destroyed. But an escape route from this dangerous situation offers itself in the form of a pointless, totally unjustified expedition to Africa. Once again he is favoured by chance events. Impregnable Malta surrenders without a shot being fired; his most reckless schemes are now being crowned with success. The enemy navy, which later on will never miss a single rowing-boat, now lets a whole army through. In Africa a series of atrocities is perpetrated against the virtually defenceless inhabitants. Meanwhile the men perpetrating these atrocities, and especially their leader, persuade themselves that this is wonderful, this is glory, something worthy of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a good thing all round.

This ideal of glory and greatness – stemming from a belief that one’s every action is beyond reproach, and every crime a proud achievement invested with a supernatural significance beyond all understanding – this ideal, which would prove to be the guiding principle of this man and those around him, is deployed on a massive scale in Africa. Whatever he does comes off. The plague doesn’t touch him. The callous slaughtering of his prisoners is not held against him. His childishly impetuous, unwarranted and ignoble departure from Africa, leaving behind comrades in distress, redounds to his credit, and again the enemy navy lets him slip through their fingers – twice. Dizzy with the success of his crimes and ready for his new role, he arrives in Paris without any plan in mind just as the disintegration of the Republican government, which might have brought him down a year earlier, completes its course; his arrival there as a man untainted by party loyalty serves only to raise his standing.

He has no sort of plan, he is scared of his own shadow, but all parties grab at him and solicit his support.

He alone – with his ideal of glory and greatness developed in Italy and Egypt, with his maniacal self-adulation, outrageous criminality and bare-faced duplicity – he alone can justify what has to be done.

He is needed to fill the place that awaits him, and so it is that, almost independently of his own will, and in spite of his dithering, his failure to plan ahead and his proneness to error, he finds himself drawn into a conspiracy aimed at the seizure of power, and the conspiracy comes off.

He is dragged before the legislature. Thinking all is lost, he panics and tries to run away, pretends to faint and says the most outrageous things that ought to have spelt ruin for him. But the once proud and discerning rulers of France, now under the impression that their day is done, turn out to be more confused than he is, and they say anything but what needs to be said in order to maintain their own power and see him off.

Chance contingencies, millions of them, bring him to power, and all men now seem to collude in asserting his authority. It is chance that determines the personalities of those who rule France at this time, and now cringe before him; chance that determines the personality of Paul I in Russia, who recognizes his authority; chance that sets up a plot against him that enhances his power instead of bringing him down. Chance delivers the Duc d’Enghien into his hands and somehow impels him to kill him and thereby persuades the mob by the strongest of all arguments that because he has the power he also has the right. Chance determines that although he strains every fibre to launch an expedition against England, which quite clearly would have led to his downfall, he never carries out this intention; instead he falls upon Mack with the Austrians, who give in without a fight. Chance and genius bring him victory at Austerlitz, and chance determines that all men, not only the French but every country in Europe except England, which will have no involvement in the events about to unfold, set aside their former horror and repugnance at his criminality and now legitimize the power he has acquired, the title he has bestowed on himself and his ideal concept of greatness and glory, which appeals to everybody as something splendidly reasonable.