The worship of Napoleon has always been a French mystery. Is it spontaneous, reflecting nostalgia for empire, or something organized by the state, which has inherited from that period a matchless taste for authority? French schoolchildren are taught only the benefits of the emperor’s reign. According to our textbooks, Napoleon is supposed to have endowed France with a perfect legal system that still governs us today and to have caused the winds of freedom to blow across Europe. Each year, a dozen more books are published in France touting Napoleon’s glory. He has been represented more often than Christ on film, always as a positive hero.
Other Europeans see him very differently. While French historians amplify the myth that Napoleon himself created by dictating his idealized Memoires on St. Helena, English, German, Russian and Spanish authors count up the massacres and the destruction of their cities and their civilization.
Napoleon began shaping his reputation while he was still alive. He commonly wrote reports of his victories before the battles had even begun, which makes him the founding father of fake news. Certain disasters, such as the Battle of Eylau (now in Poland) against the Russians and Prussians, for example, are still inscribed in the walls of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris as if they were victories, since that is how they were first announced.
Since France is now part of Europe — rather than Europe becoming part of France, as Napoleon wished — what should we commemorate? French victories, such as Austerlitz, were defeats for the Russians and Austrians. Waterloo, a day of mourning for the French, is a symbol of liberation for the British, Germans, and Dutch. In any case, since the return of Napoleon’s ashes, our view of history has changed; the fate of people concerns us more than the fate of armies. Napoleon’s stature does not benefit from this change of perspective. To finance his wars, he ruined Europe, banning international commerce (only smugglers got rich), conscripting peasants, ravaging harvests, and confiscating horses. How should we commemorate the Russian and German campaigns of 1812 and 1813, when the Grand Army left in its wake not the liberation of peoples, but famine and epidemic? Worst still, how should we commemorate the restoration of slavery in the French Antilles, Guadeloupe, and Santo Domingo (Haiti), where the deputies of France’s Revolutionary Convention had abolished it in 1794?
Guy Sorman, “Which Napoleon?”, City Journal, 2021-05-14.
September 15, 2021
QotD: The cult of Napoleon
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