In the US today, Napoleon is an obscure figure, Walter Russell Mead laments:
To the extent he is remembered, it is for two great blunders and his fall: Louisiana, Russia and Waterloo are the words most prominently associated with his career in the minds of those few American undergraduates today who know anything specific about him at all.
Ignorance of and indifference to Napoleon is one of the chief differences between educated Americans and educated Europeans. On this side of the Atlantic he doesn’t have much of a legacy; though as Stanley Kowalski points out in Streetcar Named Desire, Louisiana still uses the Napoleonic Code as the basis of its law, the other 49 states don’t. In Europe he is the father of the modern legal system that still underlies the laws and procedures of the European Union and the man who abolished feudalism in Germany. It was Napoleon who laid out the model of church-state relations that still governs the European approach to this issue — and Napoleon whose emancipation of the Jews solved one set of problems and created another. His vision of a united Europe able to resist Anglo-Saxon influence still resonates; his effort to reconcile the powerful state of European absolutism with democratic legitimacy in a post-revolutionary age remains an influential political idea. Americans didn’t embrace Napoleon like the French; the battle against him that became a national epic in Britain and Russia leaves us cold; his unintentional role in the birth of German nationalism and in Hegel’s proclamation of the end of history do not engage much attention over here.
In teaching Napoleon to young grand strategists, I find that the first thing I have to do is to open their eyes to Napoleon’s enormous historical importance and continuing impact on our world today; the second is to help them grasp the sheer greatness and audacity of the man. They have to feel his accomplishment: how a poor young man from Corsica, who didn’t speak French well, wasn’t particularly handsome or witty or charming, who had no connections with the powerful and the rich made himself master first of France and then of half the world. That Napoleon was a great commander when given armies to lead is one thing; that he got himself into a position to command armies at all may be the more remarkable accomplishment of his career.
The most important thing about the young Napoleon, Mead says, is the intensity of his ambition:
Most bright and ambitious Americans start out in life more like Napoleon than like Pericles; they are born and grow up far from the centers of power. They can’t rely on their parents’ money or rolodexes to boost them into contention for political power. Like Napoleon, they have to work their way in.
As students start to see the young Napoleon in this way, they begin to consider the parallels between his situation and ambitions and their own. Do students want power, influence and wealth enough to work and scheme for them? If so, how should they start? What ethical considerations, if any, should inform or limit their quest? What does success look like and how is it assessed?
Napoleon had extraordinary political and personal as well as military gifts. His genius was not limited to the ability to read a battlefield and take the right action at the right time. He had a gift for reading people, for knowing what each one most desperately wanted and needed. He then had the ambition and singleness of purpose to decide which people mattered to him, and then to give them what they wanted. Napoleon betrayed almost everyone in the end, and one can retrace his progress through life by tracking discarded friendships and betrayed collaborators much as the Grand Army’s retreat through Russia was marked by abandoned wagons, loot and artillery pieces. Nevertheless before you can betray someone you have to win them over and Napoleon was willing and able to do whatever it took. One doesn’t want to end like Napoleon, but one could do much worse than begin as he did.
As Napoleon rose, he had to judge how to keep people loyal to him. This again required an exquisite sensitivity to what others want. One man can be yours for money, another seeks dignity and honor, a third power, and someone else wants the freedom and the resources to undertake an interesting and exacting task. In Napoleon’s day, when women could only play politics indirectly, taking (or no doubt in some cases pretending to take) women seriously on intellectual matters and working through political discussions with them to give them a sense of ‘being in the game’ could take a man very far with some women. Napoleon played this game for all it was worth.
I’m trying to encourage my grand strategy students to hone their people reading and people pleasing skills. This is not, as Johnson said of Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son, to teach them ‘the manners of a dancing master and the morals of a whore’. George Washington worked very hard to ingratiate himself with powerful women and men around him; so did Alexander Hamilton. A great man and a scoundrel will need many of the same skills; I would hope my students would be as good at reading people as an accomplished scam artist, but then use those powers for good.
Napoleon stooped to conquer; it’s a skill many of us could use.
Power fascinates and disorients the academy today:
Throughout the millennia teachers have assumed that getting and keeping power was one of the chief reasons that students came to their classes. The rhetorical instructors of ancient Greece and Rome were teaching students the skills that would enable them to persuade: either to persuade jurors to acquit or convict, or to persuade voters to support a given course of action or a particular candidate.
Today we focus on introducing them to various lines of academic inquiry and on giving them ‘job skills’ that will help them earn a good living. Both of these are perfectly good things to study, but how many professors would start a class off by saying that the goal of the class is to teach students to acquire, hold and use power in society at large?
More classes should start in exactly that way. An education, among other things, should help you become adept at the power game. Few things are as deeply human as the drive for power, and ambition remains one of the great drivers of any society. Getting away from that reality and providing courses that aren’t grounded in helping young people achieve the fame, glory and power that it is natural for them to seek is getting away from an essential and vital part of the educational process.
In Abe Lincoln’s generation, they all wanted to be Napoleon. My father’s generation all wanted to be Rockefeller, LIndbergh or Babe Ruth. I can recall being a very young child and noting the seeming power and adulation going to Elvis, and thinking, “I want that”. Later, my generation all wanted to be the Beatles. The power we want today is not the power to rule nations, but the power to tell the world to “f*** off.”
What is he smoking? Democracy Legitimacy from Napoleon? Not even going how he overstate his influence or how he hides that Napoleon was a disaster for Europe and how many people despise him here… Repugnant article.
‘How a poor young man from Corsica… who had no connections to the rich and powerful’
Napoleon’s brother was a leader in the French parliament who led a powerful and desperate group of other members. Their goal was ‘not get killed’; by mobs, by Robespierre, by anyone. They invited Napoleon to take over and keep them from being killed. If he wanted power over France or the world, fine. Their plan worked. They died in bed, decades later. Died rich, mostly.
This guy doesn’t teach history well, but it sounds like a fun easy A.
While Napoleon certainly wasn’t born into a poor family, he was born into a Corsican family, in Corsica, a backwater that had only recently been transferred to France. He spoke with an embarrassing accent, and he was the first Corsican to graduate from the École Militaire.
The Corsican Ogre was a Corsican blueblood, descended from a cadet branch of Tuscan nobility stretching back to the 900s. Papa pere, lawyer Carlo Charles Buonaparte, was a champion Quisling turned lobbyist. He betrayed the Corsican independence, went over to the French, and spent the rest of his life campaigning to have the French government 1) recognize his family as French nobility 2) paying out the benefits given to nobles (like Carlo’s government jobs).
A fitting role model for today’s yuggins.