placed on his head with his own hand, this time in Milan Cathedral) to
the imperial crown of France, just as Charlemagne had done. The
abolition of the Holy Roman Empire, whatever the political imperatives,
can also be seen as a desire, consciously or unconsciously to outdo
Charlemagne.
Any critique of Napoleon's imperial conception is bound to fasten on
the obvious point that this was the Emperor displaying delusions of
grandeur and rationalizing a much more sordid quotidian reality.
Charlemagne and Constantine had Christianity at the core of their
systems; Napoleon did not. A cynic would say that the oft-cited names of
Charlemagne, Diocletian and Constantine were simply names thrown out
to camouflage a basic lust fo r power. In any case, there was a fundamental
confusion at the heart of Napoleon's thinking. How could a man who
aspired to be a Roman emperor even pay lip-service to ideologies such as
equality or the rights of man - notions which would have been received
with stupefaction by the emperors on whom he modelled himself?
Besides, the analogy between France and Rome will not hold, no
matter which particular Roman empire we choose. Both the Western
Roman Empire and the later Byzantine variety were ruled by men who
set limits to their ambitions. These empires remained on the defensive
behind carefully circumscribed frontiers, apart fr om exceptional
moments, such as Trajan's conquest of Dacia or Justinian's invasion of
Egypt. Until these empires fe ll apart from internal implosion and external
pressure from Vandals, Huns, Saracens or Turks, their rulers pursued
circumspect aims. Above all, they made a very clear distinction between
empire and world domination. Napoleon, by contrast, had no one clear
aim, pursued several (often contradictory) objectives simultaneously and
vacillated between them. Already by 1812 he possessed an empire that
extended farther eastward in Europe than the Western Roman Empire.
Had he been successful in 1812, he would have made Russia an Asian
power, seized Constantinople, pressed on to India, occupied Persia,
conquered Spain and acquired its colonies in Latin America prior to
applying the coup de grace to England.
Yet in 1 8o8 the French Emperor was blind to all this and continued in
his 'Roman' fantasy world. The next obvious step in his imperial progress
was to bind vassal kings to him in marriage- which he did. Logically, he
would then have to downgrade Rome so as to make Paris the 'new' Rome;
it is not surprising, therefore, that in 1809 he found a pretext to annex the
Eternal City. The next step would be to destroy the tottering Ottoman
Empire and attain Constantinople; some even allege that this was the
marcin
(Marcin)
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