-> COVER -> VICTORIA'S SECRETS
 |
But the revolution soon produced the Terror, and when all the original idealists had been swept away, Napoleon came to power.
Napoleon was the giant of his age in the popular imagination of the time and for generations to come. Even in the 1950s, growing up in an obscure and isolated corner of Australia, we sang the song the soldiers sang at Waterloo: "Boney was A Warrior" Madmen, by convention, believed they were Napoleon.
Today, Napoleon's just a name in the history books, but even thirty years ago, he represented something else in the public mind.
To the historical facts.
Napoleon was a nobody who rose through sheer ability.He found himself at the head of a nation where all power relations had been swept away or severely weakened. He proceeded to organise France along his view of rational lines, and imposed this rational system of control on the territories he conquered. He raised huge armies, spent the lives of his soldiers like the high stakes gambler he was, and finally over-reached himself trying to conquer Russia. (I have heard it said, anecdotally, that the average French soldier of the First World War was six inches shorter than the average French soldier of the Napoleonic wars, such was Napoleon's rumored effect on the gene pool).
Napoleon was defeated. The aristocracy he had threatened to replace clamped down a repressive control on Europe which attempted to set the clock back to the pre-revolutionary period. The system they imposed lasted more or less until the First World War destroyed it.
It could thus be argued that Napoleon tapped a kind of popular enthusiasm which hadn't been seen since the Crusades. He lost army after army, but still found young men to follow him. To the traditional ruling class he was the Devil himself, able to appeal (helped by control over the media) directly to the people. His taste was quite crude, but he understood theatre and spectacle. He was an actor. The existing cultural accessories he treated the way advertising men of today treat classical music. He snapped his fingers to summon the Pope to his coronation as Emperor. He got rid of his wife Josephine and replaced her with an eighteen year old Austrian princess.
All that really mattered was what he willed, and it seemed for a while that what he willed he got. Millions of people gave away their lives to help him along. He tapped the energies released by the collapse of tradition all across Europe.
Napoleon wasn't just a soldier, he was a thoroughly modern person, interested in science and history. When he conquered Egypt, he took academics with him to study the antiquities.
He was a glamorous figure, even to his enemies. During the Peace of Amiens (a short period of truce during the conflict with Britain) English men and women travellers flocked to Paris, hoping to get a glimpse of the First Consul, as he was then termed. How did an amoral tyrant have such wide appeal?
There are many reasons, but a major one is surely that he captured the spirit of the times. That spirit can be traced in the music of the era.
Listen to Hayden, the court employee. Setting aside any judgment of its quality, you hear music that is good natured, impersonal, without any inner turmoil. It is extrovert, though not in a demonstrative noisy sense, and meant to be enjoyed for itself. It reflects the power structure of the day, where the court composer was like the court cook.
Move on to Mozart and you begin to encounter a person in the music, not just the distinctive Mozartian style but a consciousness of self, and the revolutionary content of operas such as the "Magic Fluteí" is quite explicit. The individual spirit, fenced in for centuries by custom and the institutions of aristocratic and church control, was starting to break free.
Beethoven follows and completes the transition.
But while the idea of freedom may have been common currency, the ability of people to exercise that freedom was still circumscribed by poverty, or location or lack of opportunity. Napoleon appeared to escape these common limitations and also seemed to promise to take others with him on his adventures. He was the Free Will made manifest, promising to be Triumphant: the embodiment of the fairy tale of peasant become ruler.
Napoleon fell, but the idea of Napoleon and the Triumphant Will continued to fascinate and appall.
The aristocracy, coming back into power, found it necessary to use nationalism as a social glue to replace the bonds which had been irretrievably broken due to the changes which had already taken place, and those being produced by the Industrial Revolution.
The artificiality of nationalism isn't so obvious to us now, but it was a conscious invention, with national traditions being cooked up by propagandists. Adventurism of the Napoleonic type became attached to the nation instead of to individuals. With nationalist sentiment went racism, and relations between nations began to be governed by a crude social Darwinism. Europe moved inexorably towards the First World War.
A clue to the mentality which made the First World War possible, and perhaps inevitable, is found in prewar literature. Read The Riddle of the Sandsí by Erskine Childers (it's a good read, too, especially if you like sailing!) and the naval short stories of Bartimeus. These stories are beautifully written and, in view of what they foreshadowed, terribly poignant.
The events which led up to WW1 were banal and, in a sense, mechanical. They were simply not a sufficient justification for the unforeseen scale of the slaughter which followed. So the victors found it necessary to heap all the blame on Germany, and thus the Treaty of Versailles set the scene for the next tragedy.
"So we had a little election, kinda, sorta And the next thing you know, hello, New Order" -- Mel Brooks, Hitler Rap
Hitler and Stalin were the products of the chaos in their respective countries. Both took on the Napoleonic mantle in their own way. Hitler really believed he was a great general, which made him easier to beat, because he made lots of mistakes. Stalin learned to let his generals run things during WW2, so long as he took all the credit for victory.
Both consciously promoted themselves as embodying the National Will. Both tried to limit as far as possible the freedom of will of those in their power, as neither could tolerate rival aims and loyalties; hence the inevitable conflict between the two dictators. But the people followed them, coerced but also hopeful.
Napoleon had been amoral, and indifferent to the suffering of others, but his crimes, such as the execution of the Duc D'Enghien to discourage royalist plots, or the abandoning his injured soldiers to die in Syria when transporting them home was too difficult, were usually the result of cold calculation.
The dictators of the 20th century operated on an altogether different level. The scale of Stalin's brutality and cruelty were without apparent limit, while Hitler revelled in sadistic and cruel acts for their own sake. Stalin attempted to justify his acts by cloaking them in Communist theory, whereas Hitler's rule was that of gangsters, perverts and opportunists, with the theory of National Socialism being a very thin garment.
When enemies fight, they gradually become more like each other.The defeat of Hitler and his allies, and the Cold war which followed, involved a moral brutalisation and centralising of power in the victorious Allies.
Before WW2, an American president (I think it was Woodrow Wilson) on being asked if Japanese diplomatic correspondence could be intercepted said, "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail."
Even as late as 1945, Roosevelt failed to appreciate, as one of his aides at the Yalta conference recently said, how deeply iniquitous Stalin really was.
All this naivete was to change as America slid into the paranoiac over-reaction of McCarthyism. Small, relatively open government became big, secretive government. It was not an arena for the Napoleonic personality.
Despite the catastrophes of the first half of the century, in the confusions and anxieties of the nineteenfifties and -sixties, the desire for strong leadership remained a latent theme in most Western countries. The assassination of US President Kennedy was mourned world-wide because a lot of this desire and hope had attached to him, and he wasn't long enough in office to disappoint many people.
Institutions often prosper for a while under a strong leader, but other problems manifest.
One of my favourite quotes is from one of Prime Minister Nehru of India's Ministers, who -- on being questioned about Nehru's likely successor -- replied, "Who can say? The Prime Minister is like the great banyan tree. Thousands shelter beneath it, but nothing grows."
The more overbearing or overawing the leader is, the more likely are his mistakes to go unquestioned and uncorrected. This is widely understood these days, and the style of leadership in most endeavours is changing.
In the past, positions of leadership have had a tendency to become more ceremonial and less functional over time, but this is not the case with our current institutions.
We regard leaders more as functionaries, and our political masters tend to ape the manner of chief executives of large corporations, rather than appearing as exemplars of the national spirit.Clinton offers a clear example of this; many people were prepared to ignore his moral shortcomings while he was competently (in their opinion) running the show.
My Dad was a manager and company director during the sixties and seventies. The ethos in those days was still that of the Strong Leader. The idea was to impose your will on those under you; wills which wished to go another way had to be realigned or forced out. It was a paternal rule and it was precisely against this style of rule that the counterculture of the 'sixties and 'seventies was directed.
A better educated population was less impressed by style, and more by expertise. The old management system depended an awful lot on a certain gravitas, a commanding tone. The counterculture had a social vision of what may be termed "voluntary tribalism," which in many ways the ad-hocracies of modern organisations resemble.
The rule of Ruling these days is to do it by committee. The techniques for managing countries or businesses have largely converged, being based on many inter-linked expertises. The idea of loyalty to a particular organisation has died, too. Our careers are portable. Loyalty to nation or creed has weakened. The new breed of spy does it for the money, not ideology.
We have gone in two hundred years from the idea of the Titanic Will, godlike and Promethean, acting on a large scale with the "bungled and the botchedí" (as Nietzsche so charmingly called us ordinary folk) acting as the spear carriers to the mighty, to a nominal meritocracy with each individual supposedly motivated largely by self interest."There is no society," according to Margaret Thatcher. We are supposed to each have enough space to seek our own salvation, and if we fail, we can't blame anyone but ourselves.
Meritocracies are internally stable. Hinduism, with its doctrine of Karma, demonstrates this kind of stability. The society which depends on a mighty leader is highly unstable, in fact any society depending on coercion where the coerced don't truly believe in the right to be coerced, is unstable.
We are moving towards a system where the less fortunate will tend to believe their situation is their own fault. Occasionally, a populist politician will tap the inevitable resentment of those at the bottom. In Australia, we have an exemplary specimen of the type, named Pauline Hanson. Her policies are nutty and constantly undermine her through their sheer stupidity. Her appeal is very simple at bottom, though. She is attractive, and her voice is remarkable. No matter what she is talking about, it is always in a tone of deep resentment and suspicion, trembling on the edge of tears. But she's only a partial personality, not even a pocket Napoleon, and no threat to the order of a stable society.
I may have come to bury the Triumphant Will, but there are some aspects of it where praise is due. Certain enterprises can only be carried through successfully by unusual single-mindedness and a large ego.
I'm typing this on a Mac, so Steve Jobs springs to mind. Then there is Korolev, the leader of the Soviet space effort until the mid-sixties, who accomplished colossal things with far fewer resources than were available to the US space program.
Certain endeavours, especially ones with very long term or unquantifiable payoffs, such as the human exploration of other planets, can't be willed into being by committees of rational people, and are way too large to be carried out by small groups of enthusiasts.
It may be that we are moving into a time as sterile as the Roman Empire following the rule of the Caesars. Increasing complexity and inter-relatedness could mean there won't be much room for individual initiative. Even in a perfect meritocracy, the energies of the elites can become entirely devoted to maintaining the system, or their own privileges, rather than extending human possibilities.
But the wildness, the recklessness, the creative and the destructive sides of our nature are always there, maybe lying dormant, but waiting for the next big idea to release them.
QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? Why not e-mail Lloyd?