again engaged in 'double or quits'. On this view, his power base in France
was becoming precarious, he was at loggerheads with the notables, and
the economic crisis and continuing war in Spain had made him so
unpopular that he needed a war to distract France from its internal woes
and unite it behind a victorious Emperor.
But there is evidence of still deeper currents of irrationality and of self
destructive behaviour. It is unexpected to find, so late in his reign, the
resurgence of the 'Oriental complex' yet it is clearly on show in the
bizarre remarks made to the comte de Narbonne early in 1812 - an
eccentric piece of behaviour explicable only because Narbonne was
himself an oddity: a great noble, reputedly the illegitimate son of Louis
XV and one time (1792) war minister to Louis XVI, who had fallen
under the Bonaparte spell. This is Napoleon:The end of the road is India. Alexander was as far as from Moscow
when he marched to the Ganges. I have said this to myself ever since St
Jean d'Acre.. .. Just imagine, Moscow taken, Russia defeated, the
Czar made over or assassinated in a palace plot.. .. and then tell me
that it is impossible for a large army of Frenchmen and their allies to
leave Tiflis and reach the Ganges. Essentially all that is needed is a
swift stroke of a French sword for the entire British mercantile
apparatus in the East to collapse.Narbonne's private comment on this was: 'What a man! What ideas!
What dreams! Where is the keeper of this genius. It was half-way
between Bedlam and the Pantheon.'
The 'Oriental complex' was only one of many centrifugal fragments
indicating a core personality under great strain, suggesting perhaps that
things were falling apart and the Napoleonic centre could not hold. A
host of psychological interpretations have been offered for Napoleon's
state of mind on the eve of 1812. Those who see Bonaparte as the
existentialist defying fate and declaring that nothing is written stress the
way he liked to reinforce his identity through action and the challenge of
an impossible adventure. This is plausible given that Napoleon himself
admitted he had had a visitation from his familiar 'Red Man' who warned
him not to invade Russia; to defy the Red Man would reveal the Emperor
as a Prometheus, refusing to be bound by the iron laws of determinism.
Others see Napoleon as a self-doubting neurotic posing as a conqueror
and trying to prove that his worst fears about himself were not true. In a
similar vein Freud argued that 1812 was the ultimate self-destructive act
in which Bonaparte, guilty for jettisoning Josephine, compassed his own