Horizon

The Little Corporal

A worthwhile review of Steven Englund's Napoleon: A Political Life:

"Napoleon locked up relatively few political opponents, and he remained genuinely popular for much of his rule. He was not a totalitarian so much as the last of the great Enlightened despots, with newly efficient systems of censorship and internal espionage. But to say, as Englund does, that Napoleon "only" faced resistance to his rule "under special conditions in Calabria, Spain, and the Tyrol" is rather like saying that Lyndon Johnson "only" faced resistance to his foreign policy in Vietnam. Spain in particular, as Napoleon himself acknowledged, was his empire's bleeding ulcer ... in desperation, he and his colleagues turned to increasingly cruel means of repression: forcing Spanish peasants into towns, taking and executing hostages, even wiping out whole villages in reprisal for attacks.

Napoleon succeeded because, embodying a modern novelistic sensibility, he managed to create a personal, intimate bond between mass politics and ordinary citizens. He put a human face on mass politics in a way that the French Revolutionaries, with their cold and high abstractions, had failed to do. As Madame de Staël justly remarked, "The only new proper noun to come out of the Revolution is Bonaparte." He did not rise above politics so much as incarnate politics, the state, and the nation in a personality with which ordinary French people could identify. Unfortunately, for all his state-building talent, he built his regime on police repression rather than democratic institutions, and he legitimized it through the promise of conquest rather than free elections and the guarantee of human rights. When his conquests finally faltered, his regime blew away like dust, and his country resumed the wild and violent dance of political instability that had begun in 1789 and would last until well into the late nineteenth century (with echoes in the twentieth). This makes Napoleon's story criminal. But, as Englund shows, the story is also tragic--all the more so because it comes across to modern readers as so intensely human."