“This adaptation was done under Napoleon’s direction with the Civil Code, or Code Napoléon, generally regarded as his most solid and lasting accomplishment. With that regulation and attendant legal reforms, he maintained he had given permanence to the essential contributions of the Revolution — national unity and civic equality. That code, Napoleon claimed, was ‘the code of the age. It not only ordains tolerance but systematizes it, and tolerance is the greatest blessing of mankind.’ Others have deemed it one of the few books that have influenced the whole world. It remains (modified and amended) the basis of civil law in large areas of the modern world, even in polities where common law generally prevails. […] By his own confession, Napoleon’s ultimate objectives were not always clear to himself. In the last analysis, it was his destiny that seemed to matter most. ‘All my life,’ he wrote, ‘I have sacrificed everything — comfort, self-interest, happiness — to my destiny.’ Exalted by his successes, he identified or confused that destiny with the destiny of civilization itself.”
[Quotations put in bold by me]
To be honest, the last part gets it somewhat backwards. It is actually evidence that Napoleon’s convictions and vision for the future were so strong that he got his own person mixed up with it. They became one and the same. It’s not that he cared more about himself than civilization. It’s that he cared about it more than himself, and in fact, put it above his interests and made it his life’s work.
Quote source: Marshall B. Davidson, France: A History
