Sad but true
The explosion of recantation and apostasy which attended Napoleon's decline (in 1814), is in some degree to be considered as an extravagant, almost a grotesque, reaction after an unduly prolonged confinement. The country, finding itself at liberty to renounce him whom it had lately seemed to worship, made an unseemly and violent use of this, its first moment of independence. If there is any moral to be drawn from the fact that France hailed the fall of Napoleon with joy, and accompanied his flight to Elba with menace to his person and maledictions on his name, it is that the French people will not long submit to a jealous and unrelaxing tyranny. They had welcomed the dictatorship of Napoleon, fifteen years before, as a relief from social anarchy, and as the least of two evils. As time progressed, all symptoms of disorder disappeared; absolutism, rigidly applied and enforced, had worked a speedy and radical cure. But Napoleon continued to subject the nation thus recovered of its disorder, to the same system he had employed to combat the evil; the physician persisted in administering to the convalescent patient the same remedies he had used in the crisis of the disease. Here was Napoleon's error — an error fatal and irreparable. His system was not progressive; it was sullen, stationary, inflexible. There was no graduation, no adaptation, no relaxation; iron he began and iron he ended. His despotic temper did not permit him to perceive that there are milder systems and gentler influences that may be often substituted for the ruder processes of force and compression. He chose to effect by might what another would have effected by persuasion. He seized the nation in his relentless grip, and maintained his hold till a power stronger than his own compelled him to abandon it. He had doubtless imagined that time and habit had moulded the people into a form that they would mechanically retain even when the compulsory force was withdrawn. He had sought to reduce the nation as the ship-builder bends the ash, which pliantly assumes a shape and still faithfully preserves it. But Napoleon had labored upon a very different material. France is like a Damascus blade — elastic and readily yielding to pressure, and yet ever returning to its original form. Whoever disregards its temper is sure to feel its edge. Napoleon's mistake was radical; he was always and everywhere a despot. He mastered the continent of Europe, but was himself destroyed by the recoil; he mastered France, but his overthrow was hailed by the people as a deliverance. Such is the lesson taught by the incidents attending the fall of Napoleon : that a nation — and especially the French nation — may yield transiently to tyranny and bow with apparent satisfaction to despotic control, and yet upon the day of reckoning, compensate for the servility of its submission, by the fervor of its apostasy and the vehemence of its renunciation. The descendants of Napoleon may make useful commentaries on this painful chapter in the history of the first of their race. [This American book was published during the reign of Napoleon III, in 1857.]
The Court of Napoleon by Frank Boott Goodrich
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