Simon Bainbridge

Napoleon and English Romanticism

In The Plain Speaker Hazlitt writes that 'One thing exists and has a value set upon it only as it has some foil in some other; learning is set off by ignorance, liberty by slavery, refinement by barbarism' (XII, 332). In Hazlitt's work, Napoleon exists and has a value set upon him as a foil to the absolute rule of legitimate monarchy. Crabb Robinson testifies to this in a diary entry of 1815, which, as Jones notes, is a 'valuable statement, evidently scrupulously exact, of Hazlitt's declared position at this time':

Hazlitt and myself once felt alike on politics, and now our hopes and fears are directly opposed. Hazlitt retains all his hatred of kings and bad governments, and believing them to be incorrigible, he from a principle of revenge rejoices that they are punished. I am indignant to find the man that might have been their punishcr become their imitator, and even surpassing them all in guilt. Hazlitt is angry with the friends of liberty for weakening their strength by going with the common foe against Buonaparte, by which the old governors are so much assisted, even in their attempts against the general liberty. I am not shaken by this consequence, because I think, after all, that should the governments succeed in the worst projects imputed to them, still the evil would be infinitely less than what would arise from Buonapartc's success. I say destroy him at any rate and take the consequences. Hazlitt says; 'Let the enemy of old tyrannical governments triumph, I am glad, and I do not much care how the new government turns out'. Not that either I am indifferent to the government which the successful kings of Europe may establish or that Hazlitt has lost all love for liberty. But his hatred, and my fears, predominate and absorb all weaker impressions. This I believe to be the great difference between us.

Crabb Robinson's assertion that Hazlitt's principal political motivation was a 'hatred of kings and bad governments' rather than an admiration for Napoleon, is borne out in Hazlitt's own writing. In the opening of the Preface to his Political Essays, published in 1819, Hazlitt makes his most explicit declaration of his political position, stating that 'I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party-man: but I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could' (VII, 7). For Hazlitt 'tyranny' was exemplified in the slogan 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong' (VII, 81). The vital 'question', he continues in the Preface, is 'between... natural liberty and hereditary slavery, whether men are born free or slaves, whether kings are the servants of the people, or the people the property of kings...' (VII, 7). This hatred of legitimate monarchy—'To be a true Jacobin, a man must be a good hater' Hazlitt writes elsewhere (VII, 151)-is at the centre of Hazlitt's political writing, and is something which he frequently reasserts, making it the basis of his argument in the Preface to The Life. He even uses it with a degree of self-mocking irony to define himself in 'On People with One Idea', reminiscing that 'I myself at one period took a pretty strong turn to inveighing against the Doctrine of Divine Right, and am not yet cured of my prejudice on that subject' (VII, 62).

Moreover, after Waterloo Hazlitt felt himself to be living in a culture that remorselessly reinforced this pre-revolutionary doctrine both directly and indirectly. He writes in the Preface to the Political Essays that 'kings at present tell us with their swords, and poets with their pens' that the people 'have no rights, that they are their property, their goods, their chattels, the live-stock on the estate of Legitimacy' (VII, 10). In his polemic, Hazlitt fights not only against the restored monarchs but against the coercive power of the reigning political and cultural conservatism exemplified for him by the 'righteous apostacy' of the Lake poets.