Thursday 16 February 2012

This bizarre item in today's Guardian about a Napoleon theme park near Paris <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/15/napoleon-theme-park> got me thinking about the nature of Napoleon's dictatorship. In so many ways he became "the model of the modern major general", or rather the modern military dictator, who uses his prestige as a successful general to seize power, and then is able to combine the strong nationalist sentiments of the people, the occasional "plebiscite" to show a veneer of continued popular support, and the crack down on dissent by a secret police, and you have what is called "bonapartism" as a political form. Note Mubarak, Chavez, and many others. here is what Madame de Staël had to say about the kind of person who becomes a "Napoleon" </quote/345>:

"I had a confused feeling that no emotion of the heart could act upon him. He regards a human being as an action or a thing, not as a fellow-creature. He does not hate more than he loves; for him nothing exists but himself; all other creatures are ciphers. The force of his will consists in the impossibility of disturbing the calculations of his egoism; he is an able chess-player, and the human race is the opponent to whom he proposes to give checkmate."