for him many years of happiness and life, as long as it would have been
far fr om me.'
Given that all Napoleon's most deadly enemies - Wellington,
Talleyrand, Metternich and Bernadotte - lived well into their eighties,
the case for Napoleon as an ill-starred individual would seem to be
clinched. But the man who died almost fr iendless on a rocky island in the
South Atlantic won a final victory in death. The power of the myth he
had created on St Helena affected most of the greatest writers of the
period immediately after his demise - Balzac, Stendhal, Vigny, Victor
Hugo, Chateaubriand, Byron, Hazlitt, Walter Scott. In the r84os, after
the Emperor's body was brought back to Paris and entombed in Les
Invalides, a veritable Bonaparte craze developed, which was the most
important factor in Louis-Napoleon (supposedly Louis's son)'s accession
to power in the Second Empire.
If Napoleon became a mythical figure, this was because for once the
cliche was true, and the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. If
aspects of Napoleon's career and personality are scrutinized one by one, it
is possible to mount a devastating critique. But what remains overall
defies such a reductive analysis. Even Talleyrand, no fr iend of the
Emperor, conceded this in a famous assessment made to the pro
Bonaparte Lord Holland: 'His career is the most extraordinary that has
occurred for one thousand years... He was certainly a great, an
extraordinary man, nearly as extraordinary in his qualities as in his career
... He was clearly the most extraordinary man I ever saw, and I believe
the most extraordinary that has lived in our age, or for many ages.'
Another harsh critic, Chateaubriand, summed him up as 'the mightiest
breath of life which ever quickened human clay'.
The greatness of Napoleon was that he tried to transcend human
limitations and nearly succeeded; this is why his real magic is in the
mythical realm rather than actuality. At a mundane level it is easy to tear
Bonaparte to pieces. The pretence he made on St Helena - that his life's
work was directed towards the unification of Europe - has been taken
seriously by enthusiasts for a European Union who should know better.
He claimed that, but for his own (admitted) mistakes in Poland, Italy and
above all Spain, he would have solved the problem of nationalities and
cultural differences: 'Europe thus divided into nationalities freely formed
and free internally, peace between States would have become easier: the
United States of Europe would become a possibility... I wished to
found a European system, a European Code of Laws, a European
judiciary; there would be but one people in Europe.'
This is cunningly devised ex post facto rationalization. There is nothing
marcin
(Marcin)
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