management. Qu ite apart from the fact that the executive was now chock
full of regicides, he saw clearly that their economic interests precluded a
return to the ancien regime as surely as the Angel barring the return to
Eden. This meant that a man could make himself a kind of king without
fear of competition from the Bourbons.
Napoleon's ready abandonment of his old friends, the Robespierres,
has seemed to some of his critics the most cynical form of realpolitik. He
distanced himself from the executed leader in a letter to Tilly on 7
August 1794 (just before he was arrested) and this explanation has often
been condemned as skin-saving doubletalk: 'I have been somewhat moved
by the catastrophe of the Younger Robes pierre whom I loved and whom I
believed to be pure, but were he my brother, I would have stabbed him
with my own hand had he aspired to tyranny.'
Yet there may be more to it than simple expediency. At the deepest
level Napoleon and Maximilien Robespierre, the 'sea-green incorrupt
ible', would always have made unlikely bedfellows. It is true that some
superficial similarities can be pointed to: both had difficult childhoods,
both were proud and aloof, both Romantic dreamers. But where
Robespierre genuinely did dream of a utopia of perfect equality, the non
existence of poverty, the triumph of morality and Rousseau's General
Will, Napoleon never paid more than lip-service to those ideals. At
bottom, Napoleon's heart was with the ancien regime, with its patterns of
hierarchy and order. He was a meritocrat, not an egalitarian: his quarrel
with the pre-1789 world was that talent was not hailed as the supreme
value, over birth and inherited wealth. Thermidor ushered in a kind of
crude entrepreneurial meritocracy, where the craftiest, the most cunning,
the most corrupt and the most manipulative were preferred to the old
aristocracy or the new would-be levellers.
There was another deep psychological factor making it easy for
Napoleon to switch horses from Robespierre and Jacobinism to Carnot
and the Thermidoreans. The core of Robespierre's thought was
Rousseau, but Napoleon was already turning his back on Rousseau long
before 27 July 1794. The reason is obvious. Rousseau was associated in
his mind with Corsica and with Paoli. Once he allowed his hatred for
native island and father-figure to come gushing out of its subterranean
caverns, it was obvious that Rousseau would be the next to go. Once
again, as so often in Napoleon's life, a dramatic event, in this case the fall
of Robespierre, crystallized a process that was already under way in his
mind.
marcin
(Marcin)
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