the tale of the Red Man points to a huge weight of guilt bearing down on
Napoleon.
The supersitition may possibly be connected with the salient 'Oriental
complex', for which so much evidence exists. He always hankered after
Egypt as a 'lost domain' and told Madame de Remusat that the years
1798-99 were the best of his life: 'I saw myself marching into Asia ...
riding an elephant, a turban on my head, attacking the power of England
in India.' On St Helena he recalled his entry into Cairo: 'I felt the earth
flee from beneath me, as if I were being carried to the sky.'
Other writers on Napoleon like to stress that his ancestors were Italian
and that it is to Italy rather than Corsica or the Orient that we should
look for the key to his personality. Those who speak of Napoleon as a
Cesare Borgia like to add that in his mature political thought he most
resembles Borgia's admirer, Machiavelli. All are agreed that he aban
doned his early idol Rousseau and some allege that his later switch of
fa vour from the notables to the old nobility shows, in terms of political
theory, the passage from Rousseau through Montesquieu to Machiavelli.
The historian Edgar Q!.Iinet considered that Napoleon was a uniquely
Italian figure, that he had inherited the Ghibelline tradition from his
ancestors, and that his true idols were not Charlemagne but Constantine
and Theodosius. Q!.Iinet writes: 'When he dreams of the future, it is
always of the submissive world of a Justinian or a Theodosius, as
imagined by the medieval imperialist thinkers. In the midst of such
concepts, modern freedom seemed an anachronism; worse, to him it
could appear only as a people's whim, as a snare for his power.'
What is certain is that, as he himself moved closer to imperial power,
his fa scination with the Roman Empire increased. In his early career it
was the Republic, its heroes and its writers that he was most interested in
-Brutus, the Catos, the Gracchi, Livy, Plutarch- but he came to believe
that history repeated itself. Just as the Bolsheviks after 1917 looked back
to the French Revolution and saw parallels everywhere with their own
experience, so Napoleon looked back to the chaos of the last days of the
Roman Republic and saw history taking a cyclical course. The Pompey I
Caesar struggles ended with the rule of a strong man: Augustus. In the
same way historical inevitability seemed to suggest that the Robespierre/
Danton struggle must logically end with the rule of a dictator; so now it
was Caesar, Tacitus and the Julio-Claudian emperors who obsessed him.
Napoleon never visited Rome, perhaps because he felt that the Rome
of reality could never match the Eternal City of his reading and
imagination. In psychoanalysis, not to visit a place that obsesses one is the
classic sign of a 'complex'. It is fascinating that by r 804 we can see the
marcin
(Marcin)
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