When pride was hurrying Napoleon towards his fall, he happened to say, "France has more need of me than I have of France." He spoke the truth. But why had he become necessary? Because he had committed the destiny of the French to the chances of an interminable war; because, in spite of the resources of his genius, that war, rendered daily more hazardous by his staking the whole of his force, and by the boldness of his movements, risked in every campaign, in every battle, the fruits of twenty years of triumph; because his government was so modelled that with him every thing must be swept away, and that a re-action proportioned to the violence of the action must burst forth at once both within and without. The mania of conquest had reversed the state of things in Europe; we, the eldest born of liberty and independence, were spilling our blood in the service of royal passions against the cause of nations, and outraged nations were turning round upon us, more terrible from being armed with the principles which we had forsaken.
At times, this immense mass of passions which he was accumulating against him, this multitude of avenging arms ready to be raised, filled his ambitious spirit with involuntary apprehension. Looking around him, he was alarmed to find himself solitary, and conceived the idea of strengthening his power by moderating it. Then it was that he thought of creating an hereditary peerage, and reconstructing his monarchy on more secure foundations. But Napoleon saw without illusion to the bottom of things. The nation, wholly and continually occupied in prosecuting the designs of its chief, had previously not had time to form any plans for itself. The day on which it should have ceased to be stunned by the din of arms, it would have called itself to account for its servile obedience. It is better, thought he, for an absolute prince to fight foreign armies, than to have to struggle against the energy of the citizens. Despotism had been organized for making war; war was continued to uphold despotism. The die was cast; France must either conquer Europe, or Europe subdue France.
Napoleon fell: he fell, because with the men of the nineteenth century he attempted the work of an Attila and a Genghis Khan; because he gave the reins to an imagination directly contrary to the spirit of his age, with which nevertheless his reason was perfectly acquainted; because he would not pause on the day when he felt conscious of his inability to succeed. Nature has fixed a boundary, beyond which extravagant enterprises cannot be carried with prudence. This boundary the emperor reached in Spain, and he overleaped it in Russia. Had he then escaped destruction, his inflexible presumption would have caused him to find elsewhere a Baylen and a Moscow-- _History of the War in the Peninsula, from the French of General Foy._