His main idea was certainly to satisfy his personal ambition.  “Ma maitresse,” he said, “c’est le pouvoir,” and in 1811, when, although he knew it not, his star was about to wane, he said to the Bavarian General Wrede, “In three years I shall be master of the universe.”  He was not deterred by any love of country, for it should never be forgotten that, as Lady Blennerhassett says, “this French Caesar was not a Frenchman.”  Whatever patriotic feelings moved in his breast were not French but Corsican.  He never even thoroughly mastered the French language, and his mother spoke not only bad French, but bad Italian.  Her natural language, Masson tells us, was the Corsican patois.  In order to gratify his ambition, all considerations based on morality were cast to the winds.  “I am not like any other man,” he told Madame de Remusat; “the laws of morality and decorum do not apply to me.”  Acting on this principle he did not hesitate to plunge the world into a series of wars. Saevit toto Mars impius orbe.

The other fundamental idea which dominated the whole of Napoleon’s conduct was based on Voltaire’s cynical dictum, “Quand les hommes s’attroupent, leurs oreilles s’allongent.”  He was a total disbeliever in the wisdom or intelligence of corporate bodies.  Therefore, as he told Sir Henry Keating at St. Helena, “It is necessary always to talk of liberty, equality, justice, and disinterestedness, and never to grant any liberty whatever.”  Low as was his opinion of human intelligence, his estimate of human honesty was still lower.  Mr. Lecky, speaking of Napoleon’s relations with Madame de Stael, says:  “A perfectly honest man was the only kind of man he could never understand.  Such a man perplexed and baffled his calculations, acting on them as the sign of the cross acts on the machinations of a demon.”  In his callow youth he had coquetted with ultra-Liberal ideas.  He had even written an essay in which he expressed warm admiration for Algernon Sidney as an “enemy to monarchies, princes, and nobles,” and added that “there are few kings who have not deserved to be dethroned.”  These ideas soon vanished.  He became the incarnation of ruthless but highly intelligent despotism.  The reputation acquired at Marengo gave him the authority which was necessary as a preliminary to decisive action, and albeit, if all accounts are true, he lost his head at the most important crisis of his career and owed success to the firmness of that Sieyes whom he scornfully called an “ideologue” and a “faiseur de constitutions,” nevertheless on the 18th Brumaire he was able to make captive a tired nation which pined for peace, and little recked that it was handing over its destinies to the most ardent devotee of the god of war that the world has ever known.