The Guard Dies, It Does Not Surrender

Some mood music to get started with.

Napoleon Bonaparte was by all accounts a most exceptional man.  Indeed, such a statement seems laughably insufficient when presented with the plain facts of his biography.  One man rises from absolute obscurity in the remotest backwater of the Mediterranean to the supreme height of power, overthrows century-old dynasty, rewrites the map of Europe to his whim, makes even his brothers, sisters, in-laws, friends into glorious monarchs--and then in a reverse that could come straight from Sophocles, he dares much, loses more, and after one last grand bid for glory, is left abject on the remotest rock in the Atlantic.  




Certainly such was the impression for Bonaparte's contemporaries.  He was the muse for Beethoven's Eroica.  Emerson though him the perfect encapsulation of the rising bourgeoisie-democratic man.  Hegel himself thought he had spied the world spirit made flesh when the emperor rode past at Jena.  Even today, when Suvorov and the Archduke Charles and Blucher are forgotten, the name Napoleon is remembered, if only as a comical half-pint tyrant in cartoons.

And to be sure, Napoleon was a tyrant, and also a criminal, serial liar, and in the end responsible for many hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths, lost in pursuit of his own glory and dominion.  But there is still reason, I think, to remember Napoleon, if not as the heroic figure of his self-created mythology, then at least with more than as at least more than Corsican ogre of his opponents.  Hegel in some way had the right of it: Napoleon was completely and perfectly the man of his times.  His reign marks the intersection of two trends, the apotheosis of the individual man and his abilities in the Enlightenment and the coincident rise in organizational ability of societies and their consequent ability to direct the efforts of massive groups of people.      

On the one hand, Napoleon's personal genius played a massive role in his success.  Other figures perhaps could have done what he did, but it is hard to name a figure on the French scene at the time who combined the drive, charisma, organization and half a hundred other things that led to Napoleon's reign.  Yet at the same time, Napoleon succeeded because he could access the new power of increased bureaucracy and organization.  Brilliant strategy led the Emperor's legions to success, but without Carnot, there would have been no legions. It is this combination that makes Napoleon an unforgettable figure, at least for me. Napoleon was the perfect contradiction to embody the start of the modern world, representing both the man of individual genius and the man of the masses.  

After him, more and more history becomes the study of the populace, the party, the organization, and the dialectic.  To be sure there are individuals, good and bad, who hAVE left their mark on history since, but none, I feel, ever command the center stage of the world in the same way as Bonaparte did.  Whether this is tragic or fortunate for the human race is, of course, another question for another time.  Suffice to say for the present that the pageantry of the affair was considerably diminished in the aftermath of Waterloo 200 years ago today.