Whatever name you may
choose to call it, the period between the mid-17th century and late
18th century was very significant in Europe. Great minds such Baruch
de Spinoza, Rene Descartes, Voltaire, John Locke, and many thinkers too
numerous to list, advanced new ideas that revolutionized a person’s
relationship with his fellow citizens, to his leaders (/rulers) and to his God.
The broadly accepted name for the period which offered this new beginning in
Western civilization is “The Enlightenment”. The late writer Christopher
Hitchens once described the Enlightenment as the period when humans started to
realize that “God is not going to help you and to that extent you are on your
own. There may be a God but he doesn’t care about you and you have to take your
own responsibility”. This was the period when the Western world started to make
great strides to escape the stupefying chokehold of concepts such as divine
rights of kings and the abject feudalism that had kept many societies from
operating at anything close to their full potential. Essentially, the
Enlightenment embodied a really awesome set of ideas that now sit as the
foundation of our modern lives.
However, thinking and
writing of great ideas is not sufficient to cause change in society. Ideas need their thinkers to be sure but it is
crucial that they have their “enforcers”. Enforcers provide a “sword arm” to
the quill of the writer. These enforcers (usually generals, politicians,
diplomats, or some other form of statesman) are the ones who take the ideas of
the great thinkers, codify them into laws and then ensure that society bends to
the will of the laws inspired by these ideas. History is replete with examples
of ideas that languished until enforcers showed up. Communism was little more
than an interesting governing theory advanced in the writings of Marx and
Engels until Vladimir Lenin showed up and led an uprising that threw off the
Romanovs from the Russian throne in 1917 and Mao Zedong led his men to victory
in the Chinese civil war that ended in 1949. Fabianism’s effect was also barely
felt outside of select intellectual circles in London until it became the governing
philosophy of the U.K.’s Labor Party for much of the first part of the 20th
century and until Jawaharlal Nehru essentially made it the organizing template
for India’s post-independence economy (at least until the 1990s). On the other
side of the aisle, the ideas around limited government didn’t travel much beyond
the circles of Milton Friedman’s acolytes until the transatlantic duo of Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan foisted this governing philosophy on their countries
by sheer force of personality and political savvy. In this light it is quite
safe to say that The Enlightenment needed its own enforcer before it could
affect the lives of everyday people. In many ways, Napoleon Bonaparte was the
enforcer of the Enlightenment. He identified
with many of the ideas espoused in the Enlightenment, codified them into laws and
enforced them ruthlessly across Europe with the help of his formidable Grand
Armee. The historian Andrew Roberts and author of the latest masterpiece on
Napoleon captured this essence beautifully when he said “Napoleon represented
the Enlightenment on horseback”.
Mr. Roberts’ book does
a great job of restoring some sheen to a leader whose reputation has been
sullied and distorted by deliberate misinformation of his successful
adversaries and the simplistic lens of popular culture. However, to the author’s
credit, he stops well short of penning a hagiography of the man. Many people
when asked about great villains in history are often quick to list Napoleon
alongside such certifiable monsters as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Napoleon
was no such person and this book does great justice to the man’s life by advancing
a balanced view of his actions and impact on the world stage. And there is much
that is attractive, and even admirable, about his life and the impact he had on
the world stage.
Napoleon packed a lot
into his short and productive life. At the personal level, his rise is a
testament to the heights to which ambitious and resourceful people can rise
under reasonably positive conditions. A minor nobleman from a provincial
outpost of France (Corsica), Napoleon rose to become a talented young general
in the post-revolution army, then first consul and finally emperor of an empire
fashioned out of Bourbon-era France, parts of present-day Italy, Germany,
Holland, Spain and Austria. As a statesman, he is probably unrivalled in
European history for the sheer scale of the imprint he left on the continent’s
character. As his armies swept through Europe, he liberated many Jewish
populations from the ghettos that many longstanding European monarchies had
confined them. It could also be argued that he delivered death (or at least
coma) blows to feudalism in the various regions of Europe that came under his
control or influence. He codified and streamlined the tangled affair that was
post-revolutionary France’s laws into a set of legal codes immortalized as the
Code Napoleon. The Code Napoleon was a huge first step in realizing the concept
of equality before the law and still survives as the basis / template of the
legal systems in places as diverse as the American state of Louisiana, to
Senegal, Belgium, Japan and of course modern France. He created a whole
educational system geared towards developing the best minds in France,
regardless of their social background and supported meritocracy to a level not
deemed possible in the various European monarchies of his day. For example, most
of his marshals (i.e., his most important generals) were said to come from the
working classes.
Napoleon’s life was
not, in any way, a wholly successful affair. For one, while he won the vast
majority of the battles he fought, he managed to lose a crucial number of those
that mattered the most. Not least is Waterloo: a defeat that led him to live
out the rest of his life on an island (St. Helena) that gives true meaning to
the phrase “middle of nowhere”. He also lost a lot of treasure and men in a head
scratching and ultimately futile military campaign in Spain. The Spanish resistance
to French occupation was aided by the clergy, attaining an almost religious
fervor.
Napoleon was also not
lacking in many substantial defects and the book lays many of these defects
bare. He was a misogynist, not just by modern standards but also by the
standards of his day. He was deeply disrespectful and dismissive of women in
power. A situation that could have contributed to the peculiar loathing that
powerful women (such as the Queens of Prussia, Naples and Russia) had for him. Essentially,
one will be hard pressed to find any acts taken by Napoleon to improve the
rights of women and this is particularly glaring because of the progressive
views that he held on the rights of the working classes and those of confessional
minorities. As much as he promoted excellence and meritocracy in the army and
the civil service, he was also excessively zealous in promoting the careers of
his largely mediocre (and often disloyal) siblings. He promoted his ne’er do well
brothers into really important roles in his empire and they almost all failed
abysmally in their roles and / or betrayed him when the going got tough. It may
be interesting to speculate that in both of these failings (i.e., the misogyny
and zeal in promoting his family) he may have betrayed his true roots as
essentially a middle class product of the petite noblesse from an agrarian outpost
of France. In fact on his dying bed this great man, who made the greatest
monarchs of Europe quake in their boots at the thought of his approaching army,
spent a good deal of time in his will
ensuring that his sons (legitimate and otherwise) were in a good position to
inherit some relatively minor farmland and estates in his native Corsica.
Overall, the book is an
engaging read and an excellent full portrait of a substantial man who is too
often crudely caricatured.
