Napoleon Bonaparte
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 254th anniversary of the birth of Napoleon Bonaparte (born Napoleone di Buonaparte; 15 August 1769–05 May 1821), who was born in the city of Ajaccio on the island of Corsica on this date in 1769.
Vive L’Empereur!
Given that men like Napoleon shape history, any philosophy of history ought to take account of such men in some way or another. Bertrand Russell, in the Preface to his A History of Western Philosophy, noted the importance of political and military figures like Napoleon for the history of philosophy no less than history simpliciter:
“My purpose is to exhibit philosophy as an integral part of social and political life: not as the isolated speculations of remarkable individuals, but as both an effect and a cause of the character of the various communities in which different systems flourished… Even pure men of action are sometimes of great importance in this respect; very few philosophers have influenced philosophy as much as Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, or Napoleon. Lycurgus, if only be had existed, would have been a still more notable example.”
Francis Paker Yockey frequently invoked Napoleon, as in the following passage I have previously quoted, which Yockey claims that what makes a figure like Napoleon significant and symbolic is that during the Napoleonic Wars men fell in the struggle over ideas:
“The difference between the history of man as a species and the history of man in the service of High Culture is that the first is devoid of grand meaning, and that only the second is the vessel of high significance. In high history, men risk all and die for an Idea; in primitivity there are no superpersonal ideas of this force, but only personal strivings, crude lust for booty or formless power. Consequently it would be an error to regard the difference as merely quantitative. The example of Genghis Khan shows this: the events he let loose were considerable in size, but in the cultural sense they have no significance whatever. There was no Idea in this sweeping descent of the followers of an adventurer. His conquests were fatal to hundreds of thousands, the empire he erected lasted generations beyond him, but it was simply there — it stood for nothing, represented nothing beyond itself. Napoleon’s empire on the other hand, brief though it was, was laden with symbolic meaning that is still at work in the minds of Western men, and that is, as we shall see, pregnant with the Future of the West. High Cultures create the greatest wars, but their significance is not merely that they open rivers of blood, but that these men fall in a struggle of ideas.”
If this were true it would be especially significant to the philosophy of history, but Yockey is a bit vague about exactly what it is that Napoleon symbolized, and what ideas he fought for. Hegel, by contrast, could have given a clear and unambiguous account of the ideas and ideals that Napoleon symbolized, as he did in the following account:
“Before Napoleon departed Jena, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ‘saw the Emperor — this world-soul — riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it’. So complete was the victory and the rout of the Prussians that such deeds ‘are only possible for this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire’. Hegel even forgave the French for trashing his rooms and scattering his manuscripts. The chance encounter, a moment unnoticed by history at the time, would have far-reaching consequences. Hegel’s philosophy of history, the most influential and profound of the age, was inspired by the French Revolution and Napoleon. He became the first contemporary of the extraordinary events of the age to put them into a vast philosophical context whose impact, both in Hegel’s version and in its Marxist elaboration, is still alive. His is also the most searching appraisal ever made of Napoleon’s historical significance and his complex relationship to the French Revolution. Hegel’s Napoleon, stripped of anecdote, physical details, and personal description is the embodiment of the French Revolution, its unwitting agent, and by inference its savior.” (David P. Jordan, Napoleon and the Revolution, 2012, pp. 112–113)
Hegel sprinkled references to Napoleon throughout his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, eventually sketching an abstract portrait of the man and his leadership — stripped of anecdote, physical details, and personal description, as David Jordon wrote above — following his account of Robespierre and The Terror just a few pages before the end of the work:
“This tyranny could not last; for all inclinations, all interests, reason itself revolted against this terribly consistent Liberty, which in its concentrated intensity exhibited so fanatical a shape. An organized government is introduced, analogous to the one that had been displaced; only that its chief and monarch is now a mutable Directory of Five, who may form a moral, but have not an individual unity; under them also suspicion was in the ascendant, and the government was in the hands of the legislative assemblies; this constitution therefore experienced the same fate as its predecessor, for it had proved to itself the absolute necessity of a governmental power. Napoleon restored it as a military power, and followed up this step by establishing himself as an individual will at the head of the State: he knew how to rule, and soon settled the internal affairs of France. The avocats, idealogues and abstract-principle men who ventured to show themselves he sent ‘to the right about,’ and the sway of mistrust was exchanged for that of respect and fear. He then, with the vast might of his character turned his attention to foreign relations, subjected all Europe, and diffused his liberal institutions in every quarter. Greater victories were never gained, expeditions displaying greater genius were never conducted: but never was the powerlessness of Victory exhibited in a clearer light than then. The disposition of the peoples, i.e. their religious disposition and that of their nationality, ultimately precipitated this colossus; and in France constitutional monarchy, with the ‘Charte’ as its basis, was restored.”
Hegel’s lectures were first delivered in 1822–1823, a year after Napoleon had died, and seven years after Napoleon had been effectively removed from European history by being exiled to the Atlantic island of St. Helena, and after all this the spell of Napoleon remained strong for Hegel.
Some weeks before Hegel’s sighting of Napoleon at Jena (sometime on the 13th, 14th, or 15th of October, 1806; Napoleon arrived in Jena on the 13th, the Battle of Jena was on the 14th, and he left Jena for Weimar on the 15th), a bookseller in Braunau, Johann Philipp Palm, had been executed on Napoleon’s order on 25 August 1806 (some sources give the date as 26 August 1806), for having forwarded a package that included a pamphlet critical of the French occupation of Bavaria. It isn’t clear if Hegel knew about the execution — if he read the newspapers it is likely that he did know about it, as the execution was widely publicized for political purposes — but, if he did, the incident did not detract from Hegel’s appreciation of the world-historical importance of Napoleon.
A year later, on 13 December 1807, when Fichte began his series of lectures in French-occupied Berlin, later published as Addresses to a German Nation, he made it clear that he knew what the stakes were, and that actual events had overtaken the ideals of the French Revolution. Fichte, like Hegel, had admired the ideals Napoleon symbolized, but events had forced him to reassess what the French were about under the leadership of Napoleon:
“I know very well what I risk; I know that a bullet may kill me, like Palm; but it is not this that I fear, and for my cause I would gladly die.”
Fichte was not, in fact, shot as a consequence of his public lectures, but he was right to recognize this as a possible outcome; too many philosophers have been oblivious to the ground shifting below their feet, as the ground of European politics shifted repeatedly during the Napoleonic wars. The campaigns of Napoleon and the Grande Armée led to the collapse of many traditional dynasties, which contributed to a sense of uncertainly and anxiety throughout Europe. Those who were not initially enamored by the ideals of the French Revolution, as were Fichte and Hegel, saw in the conquests of revolutionary France a force sweeping across Europe that could bring revolution and terror to their countries, and so it was that many traditional enemies in Europe were able to unite to form a common front against Napoleon.
It was during the Napoleonic Wars that Carl von Clausewitz experienced his baptism by fire, so that On War is an account of war during the Napoleonic wars, and it is from On War that a mature conception of war has evolved. Clausewitz was the first to bring the attitude to the Enlightenment to war, and to seek to understand war as a rational process. One could argue that Hegel was doing something like this from a philosophical perspective, but Clausewitz was a soldier with intellectual interests, while Hegel was a philosopher with an interest in history. The results were bound to be very different, and they were.
Clausewitz was in the thick of things, serving as aide-de-camp to Prince Augustus Ferdinand of Prussia at the Battle of Jena, where Hegel had glimpsed Napoleon, and after the utter defeat of the Prussians he was taken prisoner of war along with 25,000 others and spent two years as a prisoner of war in France. Clausewitz, then, knew the bitterness of total defeat, and, like Fichte, he believed that his people could rally and eventually regain their political autonomy. Machiavelli, too, had known defeat and had seen his people humiliated by an occupying force, and Fichte wrote an essay about Machiavelli, which, after Clausewitz read it, he sent a letter to Fichte about his Machiavelli essay.
In a document Clausewitz wrote in 1812 (“Political Declaration,” published in Carl Von Clausewitz: Historical and Political Writings) we get a rather different portrait of Napoleon than that given by Hegel. Clausewitz writes in the present tense, as a participant in historical events whose outcome was unknown as he wrote this account:
“The hatred that Napoleon bears toward the House of Hohenzollern is of course not obvious to everyone and not at all easy to explain. For some, however, it will be enough to know that at Tilsit a contemptuous coldness, indeed a suppressed hatred, could not be missed in the emperor’s personal conduct toward Frederick William III and his family, while the royal family’s conduct toward Napoleon (thanks to a sense of dignity undiminished by politics!) had a more worthy and dignified bearing, which can of course enrage a vain and passionate man even more. There are also specific facts whose significance cannot be mistaken. The basis of Napoleon’s enmity probably lies above all in the liberality that characterizes the Prussian regime, which has attracted attention throughout Germany. Prussia, and particularly her ruling house, has public opinion on her side more than other states, and Napoleon is deeply hostile to this. The south German princes may be weary of French domination, but they have never been independent, they fear the vengeance of outsiders, and are without pride and self-esteem, half admirers and half flatterers of the French emperor. This is not the case with Frederick William III. This king, as everyone knows, is above all an upright man, incapable of hypocrisy: hatred of the French emperor is natural to him, and since he is sensitive and easily offended, his feelings are constantly inflamed by Napoleon’s abuses and can never grow numb. If he has refrained from expressing those feelings for political reasons (great self-possession being natural to him in any case), if he has admirably sacrificed his own dignity and that of his people in this regard, his reticence could never deceive the French emperor, and nothing is more natural than that Napoleon should have seen more deeply into the king’s heart than the king has into his.”
Here Napoleon is the upstart emperor who lacks the depth of dignity that the ancient family of the Hohenzollern possessed; Napoleon knows this, and he is seething because of it. The Hohenzollern represent the traditional aristocratic privilege that the French Revolution was to overturn, and yet Napoleon and the Hohenzollerns found themselves forced into this diplomatic accommodation that both no doubt found to be distasteful. Napoleon is drawn into these ancient tradition that the Revolution was to sweep away (and, indeed, in having himself crowned emperor, he was effectively giving new life to these institutions), and the Hohenzollerns were drawn into paying their respects to a representative of the Revolution that would have done with them. For Clausewitz, the Hohenzollerns were an ancient aristocratic family reforming themselves and their kingdom along liberal lines, while Napoleon was the symbol of revolutionary change that threatened the established order of Europe.
We know, more than two centuries later, that Napoleon, too, would experience utter defeat — like Clausewitz, like Machiavelli, like Fichte… but this was not known to Clausewitz when he wrote the above declaration, though Clausewitz, like Hegel and unlike Fichte, did live to see Napoleon’s defeat.
Further Resources
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https://archive.org/details/addressestogerma0000fich
