Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [73]
Napoleon, then, was genuinely enthusiastic in his new role of ‘chief magistrate’. As the years of fighting petered out, so a certain change of atmosphere became apparent. The First Consul began to represent himself as a civilian ruler - ‘Why, there is not a man in France’, he thundered, ‘who is more of a civilian than I am’4 - to appear in public in civilian dress and to have painters such as Ingres and Gros depict him not in the blue uniform of a general but rather in the red costume that had been accorded him in his capacity as head of the French state. General Bonaparte, too, was as often as not ‘Citizen Bonaparte’, and the French ruler spent much time patronizing the arts and visiting factories and workshops. ‘During the autumn of 1802,’ wrote Bourrienne, ‘there was held at the Louvre . . . an exhibition of the products of industry which was highly gratifying to the First Consul. He seemed proud of the high degree of perfection the industrial arts had attained in France.’5
The idea that Napoleon had been reborn as a man of peace is wide of the mark, however. In reality, a number of factors combined to ensure that, if he was not actually bent on war, then he was at the very least prepared to take serious risks. In the first place, there were the pressures generated by his own character. The First Consul, as we have seen, was obsessed with the concept of power. As Mathieu Molé, a young nobleman who in became one of the Council of State’s secretaries, put it, ‘The more I saw of him, the greater was my conviction that he . . . thought only of satisfying his own desires and adding incessantly to his own . . . greatness.’6 At the same time, Napoleon was a man of both immense vanity and immense ambition. While they certainly reflect a hostile view, the words of the erstwhile Director, Gohier, are most interesting:
Behind a façade of simplicity that was used to impose on the multitude, he hid an excessive vanity, an amour propre without limits. If he habitually disdained finery in a court that was more richly adorned than ever before, it was in order to fix everyone’s gaze upon him . . . In effect, by affecting an appearance that was more than modest while at the same time insisting that nobody could appear before him without being covered in gold, embroidery, ribbons and gems of every sort, Bonaparte was saying: ‘Although I am the only one who merits it, I am the only person here who has no need of ornament. As far as everyone else is concerned, they owe their lustre solely to the light that I cast on all those who surround me.’ The glory . . . that is often taken to have been his dominant passion, was in fact itself dominated by his insatiable desire to achieve. The renown to which all our greatest captains have aspired was for him his point of departure rather than the goal which he hoped to attain. The base of his character was a reflex audacity whose object was the satisfaction of an ambition without limits.7
And, if the goal was supremacy, war was the means - at times the only means - by which it could be attained and safeguarded. War, however, did not just fulfil a basic need in Napoleon’s character. At the same time, the First Consul always realized that military glory was bound up with his political survival, just as war had been inseparably linked with his rise to prominence. As he said on one occasion in 1803, ‘The First Consul does not resemble those kings by the grace of God who consider their states as a heritage. He needs brilliant actions and therefore war.’8 And in 1802 Napoleon was quite explicit as to his intentions: ‘Victories which are past soon cease to strike the imagination . . . My intention certainly is to multiply the works of peace. It may be that in the future I shall be better known by them than by my victories,