Napoleon: A Biography

total deaths caused by Bonaparte's campaigns must be fo ur million at the
very least, and this is likely to be a considerable underestimate.
Everything about Napoleon generates its own paradox. On the one
hand, he can be viewed as the man who set back European economic life
for a generation by the dislocating impact of his wars; on the other, he can
be seen as the man who secured the final triumph of capitalism over
feudalism and who protected nascent French industry from the
devastating competition of the British. On the one hand, he can be seen
as the most titanic figure in the long line of 'Caesarism' that disfigures
French history, beginning perhaps with Louis XIV and stretching
beyond Napoleon to include Louis-Napoleon, Thiers, Clemenceau,
Poincare, Petain and De Gaulle. On the other, he can be viewed as a mere
plaything of historical inevitability, a puppet of ineluctable social and
economic forces- the version portrayed in Tolstoy's War and Peace. He
is an inspiration to both the Right and the Left in their detestation of
liberalism and the simple pieties of pluralistic democracy. Napoleon was
the hero of Hegel and Nietzsche; he is also the patron of Irishmen
struggling under the yoke of England and the inspiration of all who are
'agin' things.
Both these groups perceive what it is that makes Napoleon great: his
Promethean ambitions and abilities. He was an astonishing phenomenon,
a man often compared to Stalin and Hitler but one who, unlike them, had
no party machine or mass movement to back him. If ever a man lived on
his wits, it was Bonaparte. He detested the French Revolution but was in
many ways the greatest revolutionary voluntarist of them all: in this sense
his true twentieth-century heirs are Mao and Castro rather than Hitler
and Stalin. The deepest paradox about Napoleon was that this deeply
superstitious man, who professed an almost Oriental belief in Fate, again
and again tried to prove that nothing is written. Dreaming the impossible
dream, he attempted to fulfil it, and for a time the impossible was granted
him.
An introvert by nature, Napoleon turned into an extravert in the
Jungian sense, where the world of objects and the external world is the
only true reality; this is why critics say that the mature Napoleon
possessed almost no inner life. The age-old debating question - did
Napoleon represent the triumph of the Classical or the Romantic- could
be answered if we embrace this view, for the implication would be that
Napoleon spurned Romanticism's elevation of the individual ego and its
thoughts and feelings in favour of the project of mastering the
woodenheaded world. Another gloss on this is that Napoleon could no
longer be a Romantic figure once he had broken with Paoli and Corsica