Just finished reading Johnson's short biography of Napoleon. You can gues what led me to read it. The following extensive quotes bring out most of the main points..
Napoleon
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
7:21 PM
Napoleon / Paul Johnson.
It right, therefore, that we should study Bonaparte's spectacular career unromantically, skeptically, and searchingly. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, anxious as we are to avoid the tragic mistakes of the twentieth, we must learn from Bonaparte's life what to fear and what to avoid.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE was born on 15 August 1769
sR( ment corruption was universal in Europe, one tiny country was still capable of legislating against it, in a spirit of primitive simplicity.
.. As a boy Bonaparte was distinguished by his Gift for mathematics,
- (Paoli, leader of Corsica) was a man of the Enlightenment who believedas did Jefferson, Adams, and Washington on the far side of the Atlantic; Burke and Fox in England; and Lafayette in Francethat revolution and armed struggle were no more than the necessary prelude to creating a humanitarian republic endowed with an ideal constitution.
. He both hands the opportunity to treat Corsica, as Rousseau had envisaged, as a tabula rasa on which could be inscribed a scheme of government and code of laws that would make it, though small and weak, a world exemplar
. But the archetype of Paoli, not just conquering soldier but supreme legislator and enlightened ruler as well, became part of the furniture of Bonaparte's mind.
. ; an opportunity to impose a new order on the old corrupt and inefficient systems.
. Selves, was a mere liberator who then legislated with their consent, Bonaparte, with his overarching scheme for Europe, was not so much a liberator as a conqueror, and the violence of the conquest was incompatible wit
. I Bonaparte, having once unsheathed his sword, found it impossible to lay it down for long. He ended by being no nearer his goal, and no safer, than his last victorythus inviting inevitable nemesis.
Abstract notion of Rousseau's concept the General Will,
. His will expressed the General Will (an antidemocratic notion, in which a nation's will was embodied by one man rather than by head counting)
. . Constitutions were important in the sense that window dressing was important in a shop.
Europe in the 1780s, spurred on by constitution making in America and by autocratic reform at home, was ripe for change.
. Instance, prison and law reforms were carried through, poor relief established, land reform introduced, feudal labor services abolished, the slave trade outlawed, outmoded tariffs removed, and commerce liberated, all without the assistance of the mob and without a single riot or political execution.
. .If] and decisive, France could have followed the same pattern. The aristocracy was crowded with progressive reformers.
. And France, unlike Denmark, was tied to the chariot of its great power statusit referred to itself as "the Great Nation" and sought in the second half of the eighteenth century, almost as a duty, to engage in vastly expensive and increasingly unsuccessful wars to maintain its historical position as Europe's leading country.
U>out 100,000 words survive of his notes on the books he read. He described Cromwell thus: "Courageous, clever, deceitful, dissimulating, his early principles of lofty republicanism yielded to the devouring flames of his ambition;
Civ be
. Bonaparte had called attention to himself by writing and publishing a call for national unity, a pamphlet entitled Le Souper de Beaucaire.
In ment, the war commissioners in Paris sent him to Toulon. He arrived there on 16 September and at once reorganized the artillery of the besieging forces.
. Cannon were not merely Bonaparte's trade; they embodied the power principle that was always at the heart of his thinking. The object of power, in his view, was not only to crush opposition to his will, but more usually to inspire fear, so that power did not need to be used at all.
. Another Bonaparte principleseparating opponents and attacking them individually
. Bonaparte went to Paris, following his principle of going direct to where power lay.
. The advent of Revolutionary "justice" could be made into an opportunity to amass wealth as well as a chance to grab top positions.
. Parts of Paris were still almost entirely medieval, with narrow streets fringed by rookeries of crumbling, many-chambered houses, in which thousands of the poor lived and groaned. They could form a vast mob at short notice, capable of overawing troops without decisive commanders
. Boi decided to use artillery, the embodiment of his fear principle. That meant choosing his ground carefully and encouraging the mob to move into open spaces, near I
. Kth, mob yielded to a new era of order under fear.
. Old General de Broglie had advised King Louis XVI to use grapeshot six years before. He had been ignored, and ruin had followed. "Now," as Thomas Carlyle put it in his epic book, "the time is come for it, and the man; and behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and becomes a thing that was!"
.
Fhe in the power of evil to replace idealism, ar
. The Revolution left behind itself a huge engine: administrative and legal machinery to repress the individual such as the monarchs of the ancien regime never dreamed of; a centralized power to organize national resources that no previous state had ever possessed; an absolute concentration of authority, first in a parliament, then in a committee, finally in a single tyrant,
. And a universal teaching that such concentration expressed the general will of a united people, as laid down in due constitutional form, approved by referendum.
. I It heralds Armageddon, the giant conflict for justice and nght between angered populations, each of which thinks it is the righteous one.
. His energy was godlike. Thus, as George Meredith put it, he was "hugest of engines, a much limited man."
.By Italian conquest, Bonaparte struck a responsive chord
. His first proclamation (28 March 1796) set the tone ot his relationship with his troops: "Soldiers, you are naked, ill-fed. . . But rich provinces and great towns will soon be in your power, and in them you will find honor, glory, and wealth. Soldiers of Italy! Will you be wanting in courage and steadfastness ?"
.
His technique, adumbrating the Stalinist methods used in Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, was to encourage the formation of "patriotic" and republican committees in the main towns, then respond to their requests for independence under "French protectioin"
From first to last, the expedition to Egypt was rich in dra-*^. T plished artists like Jacques-Louis David and Antoine-Jean Gros whom Bonaparte was beginning to cultivate.
. Pid with a bazaar uprising that killed 250 of his men, exacting the deaths of 2,000 Arabs in consequence, and a fierce outbreak of bubonic plague that killed 3,000 Frenchmen. Despite this, rlprl Strno «nfl-. Methods and invaded Syria with 14,000 men, leaving only 4,500 behind in Cairo. He took Gaza, then Jaffa, where, fearing trouble from his 4,500 prisoners, he ordered them all slaughtered, which was done by bayonet thrusting or drowning, to save ammunition
.. As it happens, Bonaparte's Egyptian expedition is now remembered not so much for military defeat as for cultural suecess. Indeed, it had a huge impact in France at the time as the "discovery of the Orient,"
. Denon launched both the Egyptian Revival in Paris and the idea of Bonaparte as a cultural prince-innovator, turning him into a quasi-Renaissance figure with wide appeal not only throughout France but in the whole of Europe. In short, Denon was a propagandist of genius, and Bonaparte made increasing use ot his services, as head of the Louvre (soon renamed the Musee Jnapoleon)
.
Bonaparte was never held to account for these desertions, or indeed for his losses of French troops, which averaged more than 50,000 killed a year.
A few, Keats and Shelley among them, continued to recognize in Bonaparte the romantic hero, the man who broke into Egypt like a modern Alexander, or led his army across the Great Saint Bernard Pass like Hannibal. They fell in fact the propaganda, turned into actual images of the man by Bonaparte's well-coached teams of portrait and history painters, Gros, David, and the rest. In the twentieth century, this infatuation was to occur time and again: George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb falling for the Stalin ime, Norman Mailer and others hero-worshiping Fidel Gastro, and an entire generation, including many Frenchmen such as Jean-Paul Sartre, praising the Mao Zedong regime, under which sixty million Chinese perished by famine or in the camps. [efferson never said another word of personal admiration for Bonaparte after he made himself emperor. He said Bonaparte's policy was "so crooked it eludes conjecture."
. The United States was the power that permanently benefited most from the Bonapartist epoch.
The trouble with the Napoleonic Empire was that it had no natural or even artificial hierarchy. Fouche, who operated the world's first secret police force, and who was the prototype of Himmler or Beria, was an imionaparte's legacy of evil
.Bonaparte was by birth a quasi-Italian, but by national adoption he became a French cultural racist. He saw the appeal of French culture as a fifth column within the camps of his enemies, a force by means of which he could appeal over the heads of hostile courts to the intelligentsia, the young, the progressive, the bohemian,
.Fra ized, but its urban economy of skilled craftsmen flourished mightily under this patronage.
. Mir sions: agriculture, commerce, subsistence, population, trade balance, factones, mines, foundnes, religion, education, and an arts section involving theater, architecture, music, and literature.
. Tn Rome, in which Bonaparte had taken a particular interest since he made his infant son its king, he created the Piazza del Popolo. There were monumental schemes elsewhere in Europe, which remained for the most part visionary, like the grander projects of Mussolini and Albert Speer.
Maker, which allowed him to claim to be the Justinian of the modern world.
. He code was conservative, or rather paternalist. It reversed the progress in women's rights tha
. It enabled the French state to reimpose slavery in the West Indies, at
. And weighted the balance heavily in favor of public authority as opposed to the individual.
.
By military men, works only (if at all) in emergencies for brief periods. Madame de Stael, whose book Ten Years'Exile is an indispensable guide to the Napoleonic period
. "an equal person like himself,
. Happen to be the rest of humanity
. "
He thing new must be done every three months, to captivate >ri stands still is ruined.r he sought to distract attention from his catastrophe in Russia by ordering the highkicking dancers at the Opera to stop wearing drawersbut the girls flatly refused.
Bonaparte believed that his foreign subjects would never rise against him, for he was the victim of his own propaganda. What he did not grasp, because he did not listen to his critics, was that in trying to conquer all Europe, he was stirring up precisely the popular nationalism that had made Revolutionary France so formidable in the first place, but that was now spreading throughout the Continent.
THE DOWNFALL of Bonaparte had its origins in the unwillingness of the British to accept his conquests and legitimize them by a general peace treaty.
. This blockade had an effect on Bonaparte disproportionate to its economic importance, considerable though that was. He thought it was unfair, even morally outrageous
.. The products from the Americas and the East took back with them French wine, brandy, and silks for smuggling into Britain
Both (spain and Russia) had untamed, often unbridged rivers, poor or nonexistent roads, subsistence economies that could not support unsupplied armies,
. Placed the rest at the invader's feet. They were both eaters of armies..3ut in Spain the more troops the emthe more resistance stiffened. There were 30,000 in Madrid, under Murat, appointed military governor. An army of 25,000 under Junot in Portugal, and ) along the Tagus, 15,000 in Catalonia, and 30,000 in reserve in Castile120,000 in all. Fhe Spanish army was beaten again and again, with no perceptible change in the overall situation.
. Victory at all, was one of the many reasons that led Bonaparte to embark on a war against Russia.
. "Does not your master realize I have 800,000 troops?" He did not have that many, but he could get together 650,000.
. The great plains of Russia, in summertime, were baking hot and almost waterless.
. Tec losses on both sides were enormous: 40,000 Russians and perhaps as many as 50,000 on the French side
..calculated that defeat in battle would bring the czar to the negotiating table and, if that failed, the loss of the ancient capital, Moscow, would leave him no alternative but to capitulate. But from first to last the czar did very little, leaving his two armies to blunder about. But by now he was down to 95,000 effectives and most of his horses were dead. Metiernich, shaken by the emperor's lack of realism, asked him if he really wanted peacedid not the lives of men matter to him? Bonaparte told him that, rather than accept such dishonorable terms, he would gladly sacrifice a million."
Destroying the Holy Roman Empire seemed, to Bonaparte, no more momentous than ending the Venetian oligarchy or replacing the Knights ot iviaiia. It was just dumping a medieval relic in the dustbin of history. In fact, the Holy Roman Empire filled a role. It was a device for stressing the cultural unity of Germany while making it difficult to bring about its political and military unity.
. ,Th wanted to keep things as they were. They argued that the balance between Prussia and Austria, and the existence of other German cultural centers, was of great benefit to Europe in music and painting, education and philosophy, theology and literature. Culture was Germany's gift to Europe, not power.
Bonaparte played the detonating role in this process.
. but it was all the more powerful, when the Russian catastrophe brought it into the open, for being accompanied by a deep-rooted and overwhelmingly muscular cultural reaction. The explosion in German thought and literature at the end of the eighteenth century was a determining event in European history. Coleridge was one of the first to become aware of its importance, and brought the good news to England. He thought that the imposition of alien French culture would turn German creativity inward, with disastrous consequences, and that was one reason why he hated Bonaparte so much, saw him as an enemy of the creative human spirit. The mature Bonaparte, was increasingly seen by the intelligentsia as an old-fashioned relic of a dusty classicism whose day was done, and as an implacable opponent ot the dawning romanticism his tyranny had evoked.
Great evils of Bonapartismthe deification of force and war, the all-powerful centralized state, the use of cultural propaganda to apotheosize the autocrat, the marshaling of entire peoples in the pursuit of personal and ideological powercame to hateful urity only in the twentieth century, which will go down as the Age of Infamy. It is well to remember the truth it the man whose example gave rise to it all, to strip away 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 extremewithout a humble and a contrite heart.
