“Corsica must reclaim all the great figures of its history, especially Napoleon,” Jean-Guy Talamoni, the pro-independence former president of the Corsican Assembly, recently wrote in Le Monde. “After all, he was a Corsican nationalist as a young man, even if he changed later. We are working on reclaiming Napoleon intellectually, historically and economically, with a view to promoting cultural tourism. It is true that Napoleon didn’t do much for Corsica during his lifetime, but his worldwide fame can do a lot for us now.”
Bonaparte might well have been a Corsican nationalist when younger. Hitler was an artist, of sorts. Stalin was a seminarian, likewise. Ho Chi Minh was a pastry cook. Mao was a fervent Buddhist. What we once were is seldom what we become: and what Hitler, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong had in common was an admiration for the man who had started out as a Corsican nationalist and in time became the inspirational monster that he remains today.
That Bonaparte was not a monster the entire time is also true. Neither were his later disciples. All of them could be charming, especially Hitler and Stalin. What such men had in common was a hypnotising charisma, plus deranged and murderous egos unaccompanied by conscience, together leading to megadeath body-counts. Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Bonaparte were each responsible for the deaths of millions of people, and whereas the first three had death-camps, gas chambers, trains and ideology to help them, Napoleon merely had heels, wheels, artillery and muskets, but all driven by the thermonuclear power of his murderous will. The American historian Victor Hanson calculates that Bonaparte was responsible for six million deaths – a million of them in the Russian campaign alone.
After the Battle of Jaffa during his “Egyptian” campaign – in reality a tour of butchery through a territory that is tragically familiar to us still – he ordered the slaughter of five thousand captured Turkish soldiers, either with the bayonet or by drowning because, well, because he could. It was from here that he enlisted a brutal mercenary army known as “Mamluks” – Circassian, Crimean, Georgian and Balkan warrior-slaves – whose wanton and rapine barbarism during the Peninsula Campaign was characterised in Goya’s paintings of May 2 and 3, 1808. At least half a million people died in that seven-year war, and the fabric and the economies of Spanish and Portuguese was irreparably sundered. What broke the Iberian Peninsula in the 19th century wasn’t the loss of South America but the frenzied and psychopathic greed of one man.
Bonaparte was the very embodiment of the militarised nationalism that had driven the French Revolution from the outset. He was, of course, the classic outsider embracing an identity that was not really his, and lacking the inhibition of ordinary souls, freely exaggerated its extremes. The French occupation and taxation of Prussia was so randomly brutal that once it was finally over, the Prussian people swore that they would never submit to French rule again. They duly created a military general staff that in time either conquered or assimilated most of the Germanic peoples north of the Alps. The catastrophic consequences of this would be fully harvested during the 20th century.
Bonapartist repression was accompanied by grotesque nepotism. Napoleon’s brothers were variously made Kings of Naples, Spain, Holland and Westphalia. One sister was made Duchess of Tuscany, another Duchess of Guastalla in Italy. His Marshals of France, merely followed his example, ruthlessly looting the countries they conquered, In modern terms, Napoleon enriched himself with some £45 million from Italy and £12 million in jewels as well as 300 paintings, some of which are still in the Louvre. All his marshals followed his example, and according to the English historian Simon Schama, their wealth vastly exceeded that of the great aristocrats of the ancien régime. He even dabbled in kidnap and murder: a party of his armed dragoons abducted the Duke of Enghien from his palace in neutral Baden, took him back to France where he was unceremoniously murdered.
This was prescient stuff for 20th century despots, so little wonder that in their time they would emulate and magnify Bonaparte’s exploits, such as bogus plebiscites. It was he who invented this “test of popular will,” the first of which, to make him consul for life, became the template not merely for himself in ensuing “consultations” with the people, but also for his 20th century heirs. His first one was as follows: in favour, three million, against 1,562. Just love that final “2.” So precise, so, well, authentic.
Thus, the blueprint for modern despotisms was his, though of course the final outcomes were signed by Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung. All of them imposed on their conquered states their own interpretation of his methodology, involving internal tyranny, secret police, a manipulated unfree press and a carefully-stoked paranoia. But it was his egomaniacal monumentalism that remains perhaps Napoleon’s greatest and most ruinous gift to the 20th century. His Arc de Triomphe in the centre of Paris, to celebrate his victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, not merely dominates the French capital today but hangs over the French political imagination like an oily cloud from a ceaselessly-active Pompeii, poisoning and re-poisoning those who live within its umbra. It is France’s greatest tragedy that this barbaric, bloodthirsty savage remains its hero.
Aside from being a calamity for France, the terror created by his rule across Europe encouraged dogmatic and obscurantist regimes to object to any liberal or enlightened reform over the coming decades. The so-called “gains” of the French revolution, primarily the metric system, were largely products of the Academy of Science under King Louis XVI. Three men – de Borda, a sailor and mathematical genius, Lagrange, an Italian, and Condorcet, who perished of disease and malnutrition in a post-Bastille prison – were the primary begetters of the system for which Napoleon is now credited. The Academy even asked the British to join their new system: but London’s Royal Academy, so addicted to yards, chains, rods and perches, did not bother to reply. That, surely, is one of the great mythic tragedies of history, that the French and British failed to agree on a single universal system – but the British were terrified of the revolution and whatever it produced. It produced Napoleon. How could one strike a lasting deal with him?
Short answer. One couldn’t.
He remains a caution to mankind, and though that term historically refers to humans generally, in this case it is to men that it especially applies: because, like at all the “great” despots, Napoleon had a magnetic appeal for the male of the species. Testosterone is not merely the complex hormone of sexual desire and aggression, it is also the endocrine that decides hierarchy and leadership, which in turn can even command suicidal submission by the lesser ranks. This is what enabled Napoleon to recruit his Imperial Guard and then for them to commit themselves to dying purposelessly in his name, even at the last throw of the dice at Waterloo.
After his defeat there, he really should have been hanged by the neck from the wooden mock-up of the Arc de Triomphe that he had erected for his second marriage (today’s Arc was not completed for another twenty years). Instead, he was sent to St Helena, and after his death there his Italian physician, François Carlo Antommarchi, removed his penis and pickled it, and it remains in existence today. Its remarkable and almost clitoral diminutiveness might be seen by Freudians as a reason why he was such an unabated megalomaniac, though happily not every man who feels under-endowed has a compensatory need to conquer the world.
It simply comes down to this: sheer badness.
Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the most dreadful men in the history of the world, and his dreadfulness endures in the curse he has cast upon France, which lives on in its DNA, in its ceremonials, in its medals and in its official political culture. Napoleon’s tomb in Les Invalides emits its malediction on the military museum there, which is a weirdly joyful celebration of the man who brought such misery to Europe and to countless millions from Madrid to Moscow, and from Palestine to Prussia.
Les Invalides is still a military hospital, and when I was there in 2000, I saw a mother visiting her son, a resident, in the gardens. Aged about twenty, this former soldier was now strapped into a wheelchair, with his head bound upright against a head-rest. He was clearly paralysed from the neck down and was weeping. His mother – aged no more than forty – was caressing his face with one hand, while with a silk handkerchief in the other she gently wiped the warm gelatine of his tears from his cheeks. There they were, a lad barely out his teens and a woman just embarking upon middle-age, now each a lifelong prisoner of that severed spine.
An appropriate monument to the Emperor of France, who left so many people, if not amongst the millions of dead, then in a roughly comparable condition.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
France is a catastrophe of corruption, decay, and cultural deadness