BONAPARTE has only recently breathed his last. As I have just gone knocking at Washington’s door, the parallels between the founder of the United States and the emperor of France come naturally to mind, especially considering, at the moment I trace these lines, Washington himself is no more. Ercilla, singing and battling his way through Chile, halted in the middle of his journey to recount the death of Dido; so I, for my part, will halt at the beginning of my travels in Pennsylvania to compare Washington and Bonaparte.[20] I might have put off the comparison until I came to the days when I first encountered Napoleon; but if I should happen to stumble into the grave before reaching the year 1814 in my chronicle, no one would know anything of what I had to say about these two mandatories of Providence. I recall Castelnau: like me, an ambassador to England; like me, he wrote a part of his life in London. On the last page of Book Seven, he says to his son, “I will treat of this subject in Book Eight.” But Book Eight of Castelnau’s Memoirs does not exist. This reminds me to take advantage of being alive.
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Washington does not belong, like Bonaparte, to that race which surpasses ordinary human stature. There is nothing astonishing about him. He is not posed in a vast theater; he does not take on the most competent generals and the most powerful monarchs of the age; he does not rush from Memphis to Vienna, from Cádiz to Moscow. He defends himself with a handful of citizens on unheralded ground, within the narrow circle of the domestic hearth. He fights no battles that recall the triumphs of Arbela and Pharsalus; he overturns no thrones only to rebuild others from their ruins; he never says to the kings at his door: He has been kept waiting too long; now Attila is bored.[21]
Silence envelops Washington’s deeds. He moved cautiously; one could say that he felt charged with the liberty of future generations and feared compromising it. It was not his own destiny that this new species of hero carried; it was the destiny of his country. He did not permit himself to enjoy what did not belong to him, and from this profound humility, what light bursts forth! Look around the forests where Washington’s sword once gleamed, and what do you find? Tombstones? No: a world! Washington left the United States as a trophy on his battleground.
Bonaparte has nothing in common with this serious American. He wages war loudly in the Old World; the only thing he wants to create is his reputation; he is burdened by nothing but his own lot. He seems to know that his mission will be cut short, that the torrent that falls from such heights must rush swiftly down. He hurries to enjoy and abuse his glory as if it were his fleeting youth. Like one of Homer’s gods, he reaches the end of the earth in four bounds. He appears on every shore, hastily scrawls his name in every nation’s annals, and tosses crowns to his family and his soldiers. He is precipitous in his monuments, his laws, and his victories. Hunched over the world, he lays kings low with one hand, while with the other he fells the Revolutionary giant; but, as he crushes anarchy, he smothers liberty, and he ends up losing his own liberty on his last battleground.
Each one is rewarded according to his works. Washington raises a nation into independence; a magistrate at rest, he falls asleep beneath his own roof amid the laments of his countrymen and the veneration of the people. Bonaparte robs a nation of its independence; a deposed emperor, he is launched into exile, where the frightened land still does not believe that he is well enough imprisoned, even in the ocean’s custody. He dies, and the news of his death, proclaimed at the door of the palace before which the conqueror has previously announced so many funerals, neither detains nor surprises the passersby: for what do the citizens have to mourn?
Washington’s Republic survives; Bonaparte’s Empire is destroyed. Washington and Bonaparte both issued from the womb of democracy: they were both children of Liberty; but while the first was faithful, the second betrayed her.
Washington was the representative of the needs, ideas, intelligence, and opinions of his epoch. He seconded, instead of suppressed, the movements of the public mind. He longed for only what he had to long for, the very thing to which he had been called; and this is the reason for the coherence and the longevity of his work. This man who hardly strikes us at all, because he is in his just proportion, has merged his existence with that of his country. His glory is the patrimony of civilization. His reputation has risen like one of those public sanctuaries at a flourishing and inexhaustible fount.
Bonaparte, too, might have enriched the common domain; he acted on the most intelligent, the most courageous, and the most brilliant nation on earth. How would he have been ranked today, if he had added the quality of magnanimity to whatever he possessed of heroism; if, Washington and Bonaparte at the same time, he had named Liberty the universal heiress of his glory?
But that giant could never join his destiny with that of his contemporaries. His genius belonged to the modern age, but his ambition was from the old days. He could not see that the miracles of his life were worth more than a diadem, and that anyhow this Gothic ornament suited him badly. One moment he was hurrying toward the future, and the next he was recoiling toward the past; whether he rode with or against the current of the times, his prodigious strength dragged or repulsed the waves. Men were nothing in his eyes but a means to power; no sympathy linked their happiness with his. He had promised them deliverance, and he enchained them; he isolated himself from them, and they became estranged from him. The Kings of Egypt placed their funereal pyramids not among the flowering fields but amid the barren sands: Bonaparte built the monument to his fame in their image.