Napoleon

by Paul Johnson

  Newspapers with titles like Le Petit Caporal and Le Redingote gris flourished. By order of Napoleon III, twenty-eight enormous volumes of Bonaparte’s correspondence, plus three volumes of his Saint Helena writings and a final volume of his will and Orders of the Day, were published in 1858-70, many distinguished French writers assisting in this vast undertaking. Some demurred. Lamartine, originally in favor that justice be done to Bonaparte, protested against what he called “this Napoleonic religion, this cult of force which is being infused into the spirit of the nation instead of the true religion of liberty.” But most bowed the knee to the legend of the man who now epitomized French greatness—a greatness that was fast fading. The collapse of the second Napoleonic Empire in the catastrophe of Sedan—recalling Marx’s epigram “History first enacts itself as tragedy, then repeats itself as farce,” which applies to the fall of both Napoleons as well as their rise—merely intensified the nostalgic urge to remember the years when the Napoleonic nation bestrode the world. So the republic of Clemençeau, the Vichy dictatorship of Pétain, the Fourth Republic of existentialist chaos, and the Fifth Republic of de Gaulle all genuflected at the tomb and venerated its occupant.

  Perhaps more seriously, in the long run, the Napoleonic cult spread and produced a monstrous progeny. The British, who might have been expected to restore sense, balance, and truth amid the uproar, in fact did the opposite. The cult in England began with O’Meara’s Saint Helena memoir of 1822, which eulogized Bonaparte and vilified Lowe. The infuriated ex-governor spent the rest of his life and his savings in vain attempts to nail O’Meara’s lies. No one read Hazlitt’s hagiography, but many thousands bought Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon, which, though critical, also uses the Stricken Giant theme to promote sympathy for fallen greatness. Others went further. Emerson, the most popular and influential American writer of the mid-nineteenth century, praised Bonaparte as “the agent or attorney of the middle classes” and cited him as the archetype of the admirable “self-made man” (a phrase then coming into vogue). Samuel Smiles, the evangelist of self-help, hailed him as the supreme exemplar; Belloc and Chesterton, Hardy and Shaw hailed the Napoleon of legend variously as “the savior of Europe,” the emperor of the people, and the true Superman.

  In retrospect, the most significant of the British Napoleonists was Thomas Carlyle, who brought Bonaparte center stage in his celebrated lectures of 1841, Heroes and Hero Worship. Like most of the other writers, Carlyle conceded that Bonaparte had had a fatal moral flaw, which had undone him; but he was, nonetheless, the “true Democrat,” “our last Great Man.” Admiration for Bonaparte led him to undertake his immense biography of Frederick II, which transfixed Germany with excitement and which Goebbels read to Hitler for mutual solace during their last days in the Berlin bunker of 1945. Thanks to the verse of Heine, the most popular of all German lyric poets, the myth of Napoleon, the strong ruler, “the Man on Horseback,” had already found a home in Germany, where the all-powerful state conceived by his old admirer Hegel became the taproot for both Marxist and Nazi totalitarianism. Mussolini, a mountebank dictator like Napoleon III, had a Napoleonic streak, down to his cult of ancient Rome and his endless colonnades. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and apprenti sorcier, was a Bonapartist, too, and his relationship to his master had strange parallels with Denon’s to the emperor. No dictator of the tragic twentieth century—from Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong to pygmy tyrants like Kim Il Sung, Castro, Perón, Mengistu, Saddam Hussein, Ceauşescu, and Gadhafi—was without distinctive echoes of the Napoleonic prototype. It is curious indeed that Bonaparte, in his lifetime, quite failed to destroy legitimist Europe. In the end, he provoked the Congress of Vienna, which refounded legitimism so firmly that it lasted another century until, in the First World War, it destroyed itself. Instead, the great evils of Bonapartism—the deification of force and war, the all-powerful centralized state, the use of cultural propaganda to apotheo size the autocrat, the marshaling of entire peoples in the pursuit of personal and ideological power—came to hateful maturity only in the twentieth century, which will go down in history as the Age of Infamy. It is well to remember the truth about the man whose example gave rise to it all, to strip away the myth and reveal the reality. We have to learn again the central lesson of history: that all forms of greatness, military and administrative, nation and empire building, are as nothing—indeed are perilous in the extreme—without a humble and a contrite heart.

  Further Reading

  THE THIRTY-TWO VOLUMES of Napoleon’s correspondence, in French, were reprinted in Paris in 1974. Two volumes were published in English in 1946, his correspondence with his brother Joseph in English in two volumes in 1855, and further official military correspondence in three volumes in English in 1913. What he wrote and said about himself is collected in various works such as J. M. Thompson (ed.), Napoleon Self-Revealed (1934), and Christopher Herrold (ed.), The Mind of Napoleon (1955). There are a number of Napoleonic dictionaries, mainly in French, such as André Palluel (ed.), Dictionnaire de l’Empéreur (1969). There are two excellent short lives of Napoleon in English: H. A. L. Fisher, Napoleon (1913), and Herbert Butterfield, Napoleon (1945). Among the pro-Napoleon biographies in English are J. Holland Rose, A Life of Napoleon (reissued in 1935), and Frank McLynn, Napoleon: A Biography (1998). J. M. Thompson, Napoleon Bonaparte: His Rise and Fall (reissued 1969), is more critical. Another critical work is Pierre Lanfrey, The History of Napoleon I, originally in French, in four volumes, in 1867-75, reprinted in English in 1973. French hagiographies of Napoleon are innumerable. For critical views by his contemporaries, see Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, available in the Pléiade series, and Germaine de Staël, Dix années d’exile (1821). There is a brilliant summation of the case against Napoleon by the great French historian Hippolyte Taine in The Origins of Contemporary France (English edition, 1974). Wellington’s views on Napoleon are to be found in Lord Stanhope, Conversations with Wellington, available in the Oxford Classics; and for a comparison of the two men see Andrew Roberts’s excellent Napoleon and Wellington (2001). For the military campaigns, the best course is to consult D. D. Horward (ed.), Napoleonic Military History: A Bibliography (1986). An excellent recent book on the Waterloo campaign is Gregor Dallas, 1815: The Roads to Waterloo (1996). I also recommend the various books by Alistair Horne on the subject, beginning with his admirable Napoleon: Master of Europe 1805-7 (1979). For Napoleon’s marriages, see Evangeline Bruce, Napoleon and Josephine (1996), and Alan Palmer, Napoleon and Marie-Louise (2000). For the medical aspects, see J. Henry Dibble, Napoleon’s Surgeon (1970); James O. Robinson, “The Failing Health of Napoleon,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, August 1979; and Frank Giles, Napoleon Bonaparte: England’s Prisoner (2001). For the Napoleon cult, see Jean Lucas-Dubreton, Le Culte de Napoléon (1960), and E. Tangye Lean, The Napoleonists (1970).