offered a prize of 1,2 00 livres (a year's salary) for an essay answering the
question: 'What are the most important truths and feelings to instil into
men for their happiness?' During the long periods of leisure at Auxonne
and Valence in the spring and summer of 1791, the talented young
lieutenant got down to work. Although Napoleon did not win the prize
(the Academy decided that none of the essays submitted was of sufficient
quality), Napoleon's forty-page dissertation is an invaluable source for his
political views as he passed his twenty-second birthday.
Napoleon's basic tenet that morality is a function of freedom is simply
a rechauffie of Rousseau and Raynal and it sets the tone for what is to
follow, which is eclectic when it is not being directly derivative. Napoleon
poses himself the problem of reconciling feelings and reason and, not
surprisingly, fails - not surprisingly, when we consider that Rousseau
himself had not solved the conundrum. As Bertrand Russell later
impishly remarked, Byron's Corsair, with his limitless freedom, is the
clearest manifestation of the Romantic movement inspired by Rousseau,
but the actual corsair, in Rousseau's ideal society, would find himself
behind bars.
Napoleon's essay is remarkable for four things: the paradoxical
insistence that the much trumpeted 'apostles of freedom' were the true
tyrants, while the so-called tyrants were the real patriots; a sense of sexual
confusion 'solved' by draconian prescriptions; social nostrums which, if
written in the twentieth century, would merit the epithet 'quasi-fascistic';
and a continuing Francophobia and dislike of Christianity as a religion
not of this world and hence an irrelevance in social theory. For Napoleon
magnanimity is weakness - as when in Voltaire's Azire the dying hero
forgives his assassin instead of crying out for vengeance and vendetta -
and the true hero is not the 'bleeding heart' but the statesman who
recognizes the iron dictates of necessity; hence Caesar was a great man
while Brutus is an 'ambitious madman'.
Napoleon's fulmination against adultery, as when he says that
adulterous bachelors should be denounced to the whole community,
strongly suggests that sexuality in general, and this aspect in particular,
contained some hidden menace which Napoleon dared not admit; in this
sense his essay was a continuation of the thoughts expressed in Sur
/'Amour de la Patrie. The dislike of capitalism, and preference for
traditional, medieval types of society, which is such a feature of modern
fascism, is clearly on view in Napoleon's contempt for documentary title
over customary right as the key to ownership of land: 'What! are those
the title deeds of such gentry? Mine are more sacred, more irrefutable,
more universal! They reveal themselves in my sweat, they circulate with
marcin
(Marcin)
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