In The Little Tyrant, Victor Davis Hanson reviews Paul Johnson’s Napoleon: A Penguin Life and comments on how we excuse “great” men’s atrocities:
Why do so many western intellectuals excuse thuggery and whitewash the crimes of megalomaniacs? I have received more angry mail, for example, over a brief article I published a few years ago called “Alexander the Killer” than about anything I have ever written. And the myth of Napoleon, like that of Alexander the Great, is also deeply enshrined in our collective romance — to question either risks real outrage.Both dictators were eerily similar in ways that go beyond being military geniuses who ruled entire continents by their early 30s. In each case ghastly records of slaughter were carefully masked by a professed concern for the arts and sciences — e.g., silly tales of Alexander sleeping with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow and his real efforts to bring a legion of Greek natural scientists with him eastward; or Napoleon’s patronage of Vivant Denon (author of the monumental 24-volume Description de l’Egypte) and his gifts of Egyptian booty to a generation of French scholars. Like Hitler’s Speer and de Gaulle’s Malraux, Denon was one of a long line of gifted toadies dating back to Alexander’s Callisthenes, court intellectuals who simultaneously worshiped and loathed the powers that be, who at least noticed them.
This particular excerpt from Johnson’s Napoleon biography made me cringe; it describes Napoleon’s autopsy:
The teeth were healthy but stained black by the chewing of licorice. The left kidney was one-third larger than the right. The urinary bladder was small and it contained gravel; the mucosa was thickened with numerous red patches. Had the urethra been sectioned (or so runs the theory) it would probably have demonstrated a small circular scar, too tight to allow the passing of even small stones. That would have been the key to the slow decline in health and performance that started when Bonaparte was in his late thirties. The body was what doctors call “feminized” — that is, covered by a deep layer of fat, with scarcely any hair and well-developed breasts and mons veneris. The shoulders were narrow, hips broad, and genitals small. We can all make up our minds about these findings, their significance and reliability.