ABSTRACT
Napoleon had won his power in the Revolution of Brumaire as a victorious leader of the French armies, and he well knew that victory alone could maintain the position that he had won. It was a good deal later that he said to a friend, ‘I act only on the imagination of the nation. When this means fails me I shall be reduced to nothing, and another will succeed me.’ It is a sentence which gives us a clue to much of his history. He could not lay down the power that he had won; he was master, but he was also slave. If the French were not continuously dazzled by victories and glory the old ideals of the Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—would come back to their minds, or they would think again of the high place held in an admiring Europe by the old Bourbon Monarchy.
