This moral power became fatal to him,
because he strove to avail himself of it even against the ascendancy of
material force, and because it led him to despise positive rules, the
long violation of which will not remain unpunished. When pride was
bringing 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 France 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 reaction, proportioned to the violence of the
action, must burst forth at once both within and without. But Napoleon
saw, without illusion, to the bottom of things. The nation, wholly
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.
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