The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
BONAPARTE, NAPOLEON / EXILED
Shall you and I last to see the course the seven-fold wonders of the
time will take? The Attila of the age dethroned, the ruthless
destroyer of ten millions of the human race, whose thirst for blood
appeared unquenchable, the great oppressor of the rights and liberties
of the world, shut up within the circle of a little island of the
Mediterranean, and dwindled to the condition of an humble and degraded
pensioner on the bounty of those he had most injured. How miserably,
how meanly, has he closed his inflated career! What a sample of the
bathos will his history present! He should have perished on the swords
of his enemies, under the walls of Paris.
But Bonaparte was a lion in the field only. In civil life, a
cold-blooded, calculating, unprincipled usurper, without a virtue; no
statesman, knowing nothing of commerce, political economy, or civil
government, and supplying ignorance by bold presumption. I had
supposed him a great man until his entrance into the Assembly
des cinq cens, eighteen Brumaire (an 8). From that date,
however, I set him down as a great scoundrel only. To the wonders of
his rise and fall, we may add that of a Czar of Muscovy, dictating, in
Paris, laws and limits to all the successors of the Czsars, and
holding even the balance in which the fortunes of this new world are
suspended.
to John Adams, 5 July 1814
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