Napoleonic idolatry

Last year I looked for a book in the boxes stacked under our stairs. Although I didn't find the book I was looking for, I did find a box holding my old undergraduate essays. The box smelled musty, and the papers had begun to turn yellow. Many of the essays were hand-written, and others type-written and marred by blotches of 'white-out' that had begun to crack like old oil paintings. Some had scribbles in red pen by TA's, and sometimes by the professors themselves.

One caught my eye. It was dated 1981 (I was 19 at the time), and it had to do with Napoleon. I sat down on a box and had a read: the thesis was that we would live in a better world had Napoleon not been defeated at Waterloo in 1815.

I had made the argument that with the demise of England, her fleet, and therefore her overseas empire, France would have begun exporting the fruits of the French Revolution to the entire world. This included the hastening of a world-wide conversion to the metric system a hundred years before it was generally adopted. The Code de Napoleon, a legal code of laws, also would have been exported. I argued that this system was infinitely better than our horrible British legal system based on precedent and adversarial lawyers arguing for justice until they were blue in the face. I also argued that a unified Europe perhaps may have weathered the civil wars of the mid 19th Century, and prevented the petty rivalries, jealousies, and unabated nationalism that led directly to WWI: a Napoleonic Europe, then, would have prevented the horrors of 20th Century Europe.

After reading this essay, I sat on that box under the stairs and thought for a long time, and realized that I think about things very differently now than I did as a 19 year old. First, I tend not to idolize history’s leaders like Napoleon anymore. Napoleon was bent on attaining power and holding on to it, and nothing suggests that he was ever remorseful for the huge numbers of lives spent on his nearly constant warmongering. To Napoleon, other peoples’ lives were a necessary casualty of attaining and holding onto supreme power. As a father and husband, I guess I have much more to lose than I did at 19, and can’t imagine what it would have been like to have my son drafted into the army of a warmonger like Napoleon. If the price of bringing a new system of weights and measures and a law code to the world was even one human life, it would not have been worth it.

Further, from the Late Medieval period onwards, Europe had seen four major wars before the Napoleonic period, and there is nothing to suggest that a new empire throughout Europe would have quelled the frictions that had caused the previous wars. Perhaps it is just as likely that the conflagration that was WWI would have come much sooner than it did after a prolonged Napoleonic Europe. Presently, and apart from the Balkan war of the 1990’s, Europeans have been at peace since 1945. Such an enduring peace in a land of incessant warfare has not been brought about through the governance of an over-arching empire: rather, those ancient rivalries have been tempered by such things as a democratically governed European Union.

Finally, I suspect that at 19 I was rebelling somehow against a secondary education that had been very pro-British. Napoleon had been cast as a demon and threat to all that was good and wonderful about England and her empire. However, I had recently learned in university that Wellington was a jerk, publicly calling his troops 'the scum of the earth', and that he represented and fought for a severely class stratified society, with a tiny elite (of which he was one) who ran everything at home and across an empire of subjects and slaves. It could be that I idolized Napoleon simply because he was not British.

In my now older skin I realize two things that I did not at 19. First, our admiration ought not to be directed at history's power hungry robber barons who use peoples' lives to attain their goals. We might better learn from them how not to treat other human beings. Those far more worthy of admiration are leaders like Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr., who refused to engage in violence to get what they wanted. Second, history is very complex, and the game we play of predicting 'what might have happened had something been different' is, in the end, fruitless.