It Ought To
Be Possible, Out Of The Copious Store Of Available Material Relative To
Napoleon's Era, To Form A Sound Opinion On This Fascinating Subject.
But
we had better resolve to have the material before we do formulate a
conclusion, and not jump to one regardless of evidence, or the lack of
it.
In this inquiry very little assistance is given to the student by those
classical historians of the period to whose voluminous writings reference
might naturally be made. There is not, for example, the slightest
allusion to Baudin's expedition or the Terre Napoleon incidents in
Thiers' twenty-tomed Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire; nor can the
reader get much assistance from consulting many British works on the same
epoch. An endeavour has, however, been made to set the facts in their
right perspective, by a brilliant contemporary English historian, Dr.
John Holland Rose, somewhat curtly in his Revolutionary and Napoleonic
Era, but more fully in his Life of Napoleon.* (* Life of Napoleon 1 379
to 383. Still later, in his lecture on "England's Commercial Struggle
with Napoleon," included in the Lectures on the Nineteenth Century,
edited by F.A. Kirkpatrick (1908), Dr. Holland Rose pursues the same
theme.) The present writer, after an independent study of the facts, is
unable to share Dr. Holland Rose's view, as will presently appear, but
the desire being less to urge an opinion than to present the case in its
true relations, it will be convenient to state Dr. Rose's presentment of
it before proceeding to look at it from other aspects.
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