entirely the victim of circumstances. He failed to see that the brilliance
and originality of his mind was such that it could never be happy in
peacetime administration; there was a sense in which Napoleon's great
intellect required war for its satisfaction, just as the Church Fathers used
to speculate that God needed to create Man to be complete. The short
termism did not denote, as might be expected, the art of the possible but
a quasi-existentialist mode of living dangerously.
Yet the propensity to improvise and to opt for short-term solutions,
combined with the impatience and boredom, explains many things
otherwise inexplicable. For a man so gifted, it is surprising how many
failures, impracticable schemes and false starts there were in his career. A
great decision-maker, who however seemed to forget so many of his own
decisions, Napoleon took up and dropped a bewildering variety of plans
which at the time he declal'ed to be indispensable for the future of
France. First he dreamed of an empire in the western hemisphere, then
abruptly abandoned the idea and sold Louisiana to the U.S.A. He signed
the Concordat to ensure permanent peace with the Catholic Church then
engaged in a running battle with the Papacy. From 1803-05 he was busy
on a dozen different schemes for the invasion of England, which he
promptly dropped after Trafalgar as if any such idea had never entered
his head. This tendency never to concentrate on any one objective but
also to go for the ad hoc explains his proneness to motifs unintegrated into
a general world-picture - the 'Oriental complex', for example. It would
also increase the general mental and psychic overload that would finally
exhaust Napoleon.
The answer to those, like Sorel, who see Bonaparte purely as a creature
of historical inevitability is that they have concentrated solely on the
rational side of the man. His unitary state is the product of a classical
sensibility: in this sense Napoleon is the heir of the philosophes; he is the
cerebrate who wishes to possess all knowledge. But the Promethean
energy, the voluntarism, the fatalism and superstition, the gloom and
melancholia, the risks he took, his love of Ossian, his hankering after the
glittering and mysterious East, all this comes from the Romantic
imagination which the Sorels have neglected. In Napoleon a cynicism
about human nature and a pessimistic assessment of human motivations
coexists with a countervailing desire to change human nature and to
master the woodenheaded world; this after all was what the heroes of
Plutarch and Corneille appeared to have done.
Historians have always divided as between those like Thiers, who saw
Napoleon as the epitome of France, and those who consider that the key
to his personality and career is that he was an outsider. It is certainly true
marcin
(Marcin)
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