my blood, they are written in my sinews, my heart; indispensable to my
existence and, above all, to my happiness.'
Coursing through the essay, is the Rousseauesque conviction that
Corsica was the acme of social and moral achievement. Scholars may
dispute the fine points, but it is possible to discern for the first time a
slight ebbing in the hitherto overt Paoli-mania. One factor may have been
the snub Napoleon received from the great man while he was writing the
Lyons essay. On 14 March 1791 Napoleon sent some chapters of his
history of Corsica to Paoli and requested his help in getting access to
certain documents that would make the projected history better grounded
in unpublished sources. This was a fairly simple favour to ask, as Paoli's
word on such a matter was tantamount to a command. But Paoli rebuffed
the young man brutally, scouting the entire enterprise and writing curtly
(on 2 April): 'Youth is not the age for writing history.'
The career of the young Napoleon and his early writings alert us to
contradictory aspects of his personality that he never succeeded in
integrating. The most obvious contradiction was that between the
mathematician and the romantic dreamer. Napoleon was a devotee of
science and believed in bringing logic and mathematical clarity to bear on
problems. He also had a Gradgrind-like appetite for facts: in his early
notebooks he lists the 40,000 lettres de cachet issued by Cardinal Fleury
between 1726-43, Mohammed's seventeen wives, Suleiman's consump
tion of meat, and so on. This passion for encyclopedic knowledge and
exact science collided with a countervailing current of extreme irration
ality. As a disciple of the gathering Romantic movement, Napoleon
entertained wild and unrestrained fantasies about war, tragedy and high
adventure. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, this convergence of extreme
rationality and extreme unreason was perhaps the most striking thing
about Rousseau himself, and Rousseau at this time continued to be
Napoleon's supreme intellectual mentor.
It is probable that the romantic fantasist represented the true Napoleon
more deeply than the mathematician and man of science: the latter was
what he was, the former what he aspired to be. This is borne out by his
subsequent behaviour. Napoleon liked to cultivate a surface of calm, no
matter how grave the crisis. The calmness and unflappability were
supposed to denote a 'mathematical' rationality, but they concealed. a
volcano beneath, which would often come spewing out in the form of
violent rage. Certainty on this point is prevented only by another
characteristic of Napoleon: his thespian persona, which meant that he
often staged bogus rages to achieve certain ends or to observe their
effects.
marcin
(Marcin)
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