When William Hazlitt heard the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo, it plunged the greatest English prose writer of his age into such despair that he went on a drunken bender. His revenge was an unreadable multi-volume hagiography of Napoleon that entombed the Emperor more completely than would the sepulchre at the Invalides. Even among those who detested the reactionary victors as much as the imperial despot, Hazlitt was in a minority.
For the radical republican Shelley, the revolutionary Napoleon had become just another tawdry monarch. When Beethoven heard that Napoleon had declared himself emperor, he tore off the title page of Eroica, which had been dedicated to “Buonaparte”, saying: “So he is no more than a common mortal. Now he too will trample underfoot the rights of man, indulge only his ambition.”
Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador to the UK, recently had the brass to claim that political co-operation between Britain and France comes “within the context of the united Europe which was the Emperor’s dream” — although today, she added, this unity is forged by democracy.And yet however many stakes have been put through the heart of the Napoleonic legend, it refuses to lie down. The image of the military genius, the great administrator who reshaped Europe, making it fit for the modern age, lives on. He is the subject of glowing television tributes, and championed as the type of leader so lacking in a Europe ravaged by crises.
Well, yes — if your idea of a united Europe is the wholly owned subsidiary of a militarist dynasty, with its brothers and sundry marshals on its thrones; a vast autocratic empire run by bureaucrats and from barracks, all financed by “indemnities” laid on the conquered as the bill for their own “liberation”; your masterpieces — Rubens, Veronese, Titian — hauled off to the Louvre in Paris, the only city fit to be the culture capital of the world; your manpower marched off to some godforsaken calamity in the Russian snows or the burning uplands of Spain at the snap of imperial fingers.
Habits such as centralisation and the unquestioned superiority of elites do indeed die hard
That Napoleon, the supposed deliverer of liberty and equality, all wrapped up in the tricolour, was the mortal enemy of freedom there can be no argument. When in 1799, the 30-year-old general came to power through the coup of 18th Brumaire, there were 70 newspapers in Paris. Bonaparte said there was need for but one — the Moniteur, the official tool of his propaganda — and closed down all but a handful of lickspittle flatterers.
His police and spies were everywhere, deadening cultural life in Paris. Theatres were shut the minute they dared to perform anything that could be construed as critical of the regime. Napoleonic Paris was a showplace for grandiose architecture but the cemetery of independently conceived art and ideas.
Ah, sigh the Napoleonomanes wringing their hands and dabbing their eyes, liberty had to die so that equality might live. Unless, that is you were black or a woman. In 1802 Napoleon reinstated slavery; two years later he liquidated one of the Revolution’s most precious achievements: divorce by mutual consent. The Civil Code made wives more the prisoners of their husbands than in the old regime. They no longer had any right to their property in marriage and had to ask their husbands’ permission to take the stand in legal proceedings.
The empire was socially reactionary. It re-established the Catholic Church and fawned on any of the old aristocracy willing to “rally” to its autocracy. It kept careers open to talent, but the acme of everything — fortune, status, honour — was the army. Napoleon set the tone on the eve of his first campaign in Italy when he sounded like a pirate chief, promising booty: “Soldiers, you are ill clad, ill paid, I am going to lead you into the richest plains of the world where lie all of your glory and fortune.”
Militarisation spread like poison through French society. Education which had been inspiringly modernised by the Revolution surrendered to absolute uniformity of curriculum and the cult of uniform. Students were summoned to classes by the drum roll.
So when the French ambassador imagined that Napoleon and his regime were some sort of template for the EU she inadvertently put her finger on the problem. For the habits of bureaucratic centralisation, uniformity of regulation, the unquestioned superiority of administrative elites do indeed die hard.
Napoleon moved through Europe, shuffling boundaries and states as he went, oblivious to the histories, traditions, languages, customs and sentiments which were and are the warm pulse of national community.
Nationalism of course has the potential to be every bit as dangerous as bureaucratic despotism when it turns tribal, narrow and xenophobic.
But there has to be some sort of breathing space for national sentiment within the cage of capitalist management which is all that institutional Europe has become. Appeals to this other Europe, the one of a family of nations — sometimes harmonious, often discordant — would have left Napoleon cold. He would have greeted someone else’s financial problem and the spectacle of immigrant boat people with a shrug of the shoulders. But then there was something inhuman about his brilliance, expended as it ultimately was entirely on himself.
Perhaps Chateaubriand put it most humanely when, despising the romance of the despot, he lamented that “gone are the sufferers, and the victims’ curses, their cries of pain”. Which is why it is right to raise a cheer and a glass 200 years on from Waterloo.
The writer is an FT contributing editor
This article has been amended since publication to reflect the remarks of Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador to the UK, more accurately. She did not say, as an earlier version stated, that Napoleon would have fought for the preservation of the EU.
