'Napoleon's powerful grip had welded the several factions of republican France into unity, had carried the nation off its feet by the glamor of his victories, and had contrived to stay internal discord by the clever device of skillfully mergin conflicting interests until they balanced each other, and thereby rendered them all dependent on a single factor, his nod and his decision. He was at one and the same time the support of the aristocrats and of the Jacobins, of the old nobility and of the parvenus, who all feared him, but feared their old antagonists still more. The clergy owed their continued existence to him; the trading community, security in business; the people, relief from oppression of their pettier and bigger tyrants; the nation at large, the termination of the Revolution; while the army worshipped him as a leader who had never known defeat.'

'Had this system emanated ready-made from his brain, or had a wise pilot plotted out his course, or had it been the upshot of force of circumstances? One of the other may be assumed, or perhaps the one alternative as much as the other; but what is undeniable remains, that only a genius such as his could have conceived such a method, could have grasped it even if it had been brought within its reach, to have seized shifting circumstances as he did, to carry out the gigantic task as he did.'

'His immense work had been to consolidate and remodel the State, torn from its axis by the Revolution, from within by directing its energies to without; to restore a character to a nation reverted to savagery, degenerated to serfdom by hideous discord under a succession of tyrants, and to reclaim it by slow degrees to a reign of Law and Order by investing it with sovereignty over neighboring nations. Only a man equipped with talents no less outstanding in the field than at the council table could have solved it.'

'Since his fall, people have professed to see nothing more in him than usurper and tyrant; to judge him fairly, they should not omit to cast a glance at France as it was when, in his return from Egypt, he assumed command. Would the Bourbons have been restored to the throne if he had not dared to come forward as the chief of hostile parties? If at that time it were such an easy task to calm and unite France, why did not Moreau and Pontecorvo at that juncture feel themselves called to effect the salvation of their native land? If the venture they afterwards depicted as so easy appeared to them at the time as impossible and they only discovered it to have been easy after it ha succeeded, and they themselves were marveling at its accomplishment?...People reproach him with the miseries his wars spread over part of Europe, but had this scourge devastated fewer countries before Bonaparte nominated himself First Consul and Emperor? Would those wars have ceased had other demagogues temporarily ruled France, and were not the campaigns of the sansculottes far more devastating than his? Why, the crowned heads of Europe have themselves understood and admitted that it was only then, after a stable government had been established in France, that it was possible to enter into negotiations with it with any degree of confidence.'-Ferdinand von Funck.