S t e v e n E ng l u n d
Napoleon and Hitler
The resemblances [between Napoleon and Hitler] are too striking . . .
[yet]—and I want to state this with unmistakable emphasis—the differences, the contrasts, are no less obvious. History does not repeat
itself. Between noticing a parallel and establishing an identity there is
a wide gap . . . [O]ne almost feels as if one should ask the pardon of
[Napoleon’s] shade for mentioning his name in one breath with that of
the other.
—Pieter Geyl, Napoleon For and Against
With so complete a difference between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the political figures
produced by them can likewise have no more in common with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High Priest
Samuel.
—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte
When I was a boy growing up in Los Angeles, much mirth was
made among thirteen-year-old males of a clever doggerel that “described”
your first time having sex. Everything was as we knew it must be: the perfect
day, the excitement and tension, her soft brown eyes and voluptuous breasts,
your groping hands and fumbling fingers, her sighs of contentment, and
The Journal of The Historical Society VI:1 March 2006
151
Th e J ou r na l
so forth—right down to the glorious climax, with its eruptions of viscous
creamy liquid, etc., etc., etc.
There was only one minor catch: the event depicted in the poem is a boy’s
first time at milking a cow, not making love to a woman.
I have no doubt that the same clever wordsmith who wrote these verses
could, some years later, have turned out a veritable epic poem about a resplendent coronation of a soldier (a famous “corporal”) who, wearing ermine robes bedizened with imperial bees, crowned himself emperor of a vast
polity he himself had fashioned. And just at the place where the reader expects to find the familiar name of “Napoleon I,” he encounters instead that
of “Bokassa I.” Such an epic would doubtless have sold many copies, for
this sort of facility, like the comparison linking copulation and lactation, are
shocking, riveting, and clever—even if, much sooner than the end of the day,
they are fallacious, futile, and fraught with hidden agendas. Not to mention,
wrong.
Nevertheless, in recent years, such heady talent has been deployed on
dubious assimilations of Gaullism and Bonapartism, Bonapartism and
Jacobinism, or Stalinism and Nazism.1 Such telescopings are long on casuistry, short on analytic power, and do not hold up under serious scrutiny,
but the topic I wish to deal with here is the facile comparison between the
first Emperor of the French and the first Fuehrer of the Reich, between
Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. It is a trope much (ab)used since the
war, and it is time to take a close—and ideally, a last—look at it.
“I always hate to compare Hitler with Napoleon, but . . . .” It ever begins
thus; the speaker (in the event, Churchill, in 1947) is usually aware of his bad
faith, but he just cannot stop himself. He is generally speaking English, but
not necessarily; it can also be in French, or another language.2 Undoubtedly
the greatest proponent of the Napoleon-Hitler simile wrote in Dutch: I refer,
of course, to Pieter Geyl, whose Napoleon For and Against (1947) is a classic
of European historiography. The book is a 477-page, virtuoso display of
sustained analysis of the great French writers on Napoleon, and only in the
four-page preface does the writer say one word about Hitler and Napoleon.
But that has sufficed to put off the righteous French reader ever since, so that,
sadly, Geyl’s opus magnum remains untranslated into French, unrefuted,
152
Napoleon and Hitler
and nearly unremarked upon in the French scholarly literature. Then again,
would a book that dealt even a glancing blow to “fascistic elements in the
leadership of President Teddy Roosevelt” draw serious consideration from
American historians? Probably not.
Geyl wrote this book as a prisoner of the Nazis, in an occupied country
during a war to the knife. The general topic of Napoleon, pro and con,
however, had fascinated him for many years (“. . . I found a good deal more
than the parallel [between Napoleon and Hitler] to attract me. Napoleon
had his own fascination, and French historiography a charm of its own.”).
Still, the wartime circumstances had their effect on Geyl, as it struck him as
useful to reflect back upon the previous conqueror to have held Europe in a
vise (there haven’t been that many): “[H]ow could it be otherwise?—I had
been struck by the [Napoleon-Hitler] parallel no less than had my readers
or hearers, and in this book, too, it has undoubtedly remained an element,
even though I have alluded to it only very occasionally and have nowhere
worked it out.”3
Let us make the best case possible for the Napoleon-Hitler thesis, and see
what it looks like. In doing so, we shall use Geyl, as well as some of the
opinions and analyses of Paul Schroeder, an American historian of foreign
affairs whose The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 traffics
in a more extensive (but far from systematic) deployment of the simile at
issue.
At the height of the French Empire—say, from the marriage to MarieLouise until the retreat from Moscow—Europe may well be said to merit
the description of “lost.”4 Certainly it felt that way to the governing elites
and the keepers of the loaves and fishes in a host of countries from Northern
Europe (Denmark, England, Germany, Prussia) to Central Europe (Austria)
to the East (Russia), the South (Naples), and throughout much of the West
(Iberia). The Continent groaned under the French heel: taxes and subsidies
were extracted (at times, extorted) from unwilling taxpayers—the “one-way
common market,” or the “uncommon market,” as scholars have put it.
Manufacturing was destroyed in the duchy of Berg, while the Trianon tariff kept out (not in) the Italian and German departments of the Empire
itself.
153
Th e J ou r na l
Then there was the infamous “blood tax”: unwilling young men and their
families resisted, sometimes violently, conscription into the French armed
forces. Foreign-owned pieces of art were still liable to being seized and
sent off to Paris, while French soldiers and administrators frequently displayed arrogance and highhandedness, as well as (albeit rarely) gratuitous
cruelty and arbitrariness. The strict, sometimes irrational, and arbitrarily
enforced sumptuary regulations (forbidding importation of deeply desired
British-controlled products like sugar and dyes) proved hugely frustrating
and infuriating to millions of consumers.
In sum, where, for decades in the past, large sections of the Continent had concurred with French propaganda in maintaining that this
war of “All against England” was justified by infamous British highhandedness and selfishness (felt as more hateful than the French variety throughout the eighteenth century), the recent French crackdowns in
Hamburg (where large supplies of deeply desired contraband were burned
in the city square), Calabria, and the Tyrol, not to mention the sanguinary civil war in Spain—memorialized by Goya in “Los Dos Mayos”
and “Europa”—had turned the tide of public opinion against the French.
War and repression were no longer seen as incidental, but fundamental, to
the Napoleonic regime. The virtually never-ending conflict since the collapse of the Peace of Amiens (1803), together with the high casualty count,
were now seen as principally attributable to Napoleon’s ambition, even
megalomania, in much the same way that 1939 would be seen as Hitler’s
war.
Then, too, post-Tilsit French diplomacy was increasingly stripped of its
glosses and seen for the “crude bullying and crude seduction”5 it was, seen as
“counter-productive” (“Napoleon’s treatment of Prussia has few equals . . . .
[His] main service to the Prussian State was to reverse its natural francophilia”);6 “Napoleon waged diplomacy like war and treated allies as enemies, and thus should scotch the persistent notion that he started out as
a normal politician and only later went to extremes . . . his inability to see a
jugular without going for it, to forego short-run opportunities for long-range
goods.” Finally, it is even (perhaps) true to write that “no higher purpose
lay behind the bullying and exploitation. Napoleon’s goal may be fairly
154
Napoleon and Hitler
described as universal domination, and his Empire at this time pictured as
more like Rome’s.”7
Inside France (as of course outside), public opinion was closely controlled;
journalism was greatly reduced in its sources and hedged about with regulations, and, along with literature, was censored; the arts and letters (especially
history) were pressed into official service. Political parties were virtually outlawed, and the vibrant, foaming political life of society and regime, as the
1790s had known it, had come to a halt, replaced by cults of “gloire” and
“the leader” (l’Empereur), by centralized administration and by show—by
uniforms and soldiers. The parades took place in venues of much new architecture and public works, often more monumental than beautiful, and the
new imperial state was manned by a mournful service nobility and a restored
court that were stifling. The arrival of the new empress in 1810 represented
a step backward in history; her rank and (Hapsburg) pedigree permitted her
imperial consort to speak of “our uncle, the late king [Louis XVI].”
The man who said such a disconcerting thing (apparently without irony)
was by now a pear-shaped, dwarfish figure, of dour personality, famous
for his unchecked ambition and mock (and real) rages; famous, too, for
the hopelessness of ever having his imperious will satisfied, short of total
submission. In sum, Napoleon I at the high tide of the First Empire was a
close fit to Caesar, for remorselessness, and to Alexander, for restlessness. If
early in his career, Bonaparte had perhaps deserved Nietzsche’s description
of Caesar—“one of the greatest examples of a man with powerful and irreconcilable drives . . . a genius of self-control and self-outwitting”—by 1810,
the Emperor had surely succumbed to bad faith and self-indulgence, that is,
the absence of “self-control and self-outwitting.”8
And it got worse. Consider the fortnight after Waterloo. One must surely
reject Dominique de Villepin’s characterization of Napoleon as animated by
“the spirit of sacrifice.” Aren’t other words more appropriate, like “an act
of monumental egotism,” to quote the judgment of a Roman historian on
Caesar crossing the Rubicon?9 Truly, in the Hundred Days, Napoleon was
reminiscent of Caesar, in preferring to plunge Europe into war rather than
accept limits to his rule. In short, by the end of the Empire, the ruler was
the perfect model for L. Frank Baum’s spluttering, splenetic Gnome King
155
Th e J ou r na l
(The Land of Oz). Or if you prefer your references higher-brow, he exemplified Lord Acton’s more famous dictum about absolute power corrupting
absolutely.
Well fine, but what common measure has any of this with the utterance
of Der Fuehrer that the entire German people deserved to go to their death
with him for having failed him, in the first place? Is the Hitler name—“the
H-Bomb,” as some French scholars refer to the simile—a good heuristic
simile able to bring out hidden qualities or dimensions which we would not
otherwise perceive? At the end of the day, was Hannah Arendt wrong to
explicitly repudiate the notion that Napoleon was comparable to Hitler?10
Let us take a more systematic look.
Contrasting Genesis
The origin of the First Empire lay in the French Revolution of 1789; the origin of the Third Reich lay in the German counterrevolution of 1917–1919,
against the effects of defeat and the Bolshevik Revolution.11 The fact that
l’Empereur halted the headlong course of the Revolution, or turned some
of it against other parts of it, does not make him a counterrevolutionary,
any more than the fact that Hitler “radically” altered the German polity and
society make him a revolutionary. In our own day, we have seen an entity
far larger than any empire undergo a reaction against its own recent “revolution” that yet sustains the latter. The “restoration” in the Roman Catholic
Church effected by John Paul II, a man with a force of will not far short of
Napoleonic, represents a consolidation of the reforms of the Second Vatican
Council. No one disputes either the Pope’s sincere attachment to the Council
or the Council’s enduring role as the plinth of modern Catholicism. Similarly, Napoleon’s adversaries—Francis I, Frederick-William III, Alexander
I, etc.—all agreed with the counterrevolutionary theorist, Friedrich Gentz,
that the Emperor’s coronation in 1804 saw “the French Revolution being
sanctioned and sanctified.”
The changes wrought in their own or neighboring lands by the French
presence—however disagreeable and draining, in many regards—confirmed
this judgment. Whether in equality before the law (including, for example,
156
Napoleon and Hitler
for Jews) or enforced degrees of economic modernizing, the French Imperial
hand could be, among other things, lastingly progressive.
Doctrines, Goals, Structures, Carriers
Scholars as diverse in approach as Hannah Arendt and Ian Kershaw agree
that the Nazi regime turned at its core on ideology, specifically on racial
doctrines: the supremacy of “Aryan” man; the necessity of eliminating the
Jews and the gypsies; the desirability of eliminating homosexuals, the insane,
the chronically ill, and the handicapped; and the fostering of experimental
eugenics. The French Empire, of course, had very different doctrines; on the
contrary, its occupation by and large improved the chances for long-term
equality of human beings before the law. Napoleon, personally, may have
been some variety of anti-Semite, whatever that can mean in an era where all
reigning “Christian” monarchs would have shared this sentiment (or much
worse),12 but his policies tore down the ghetto in Rome, and pressured the
Poles and Bavarians into emancipating the Jews.
Scholars also agree that there was an inherent fluidity at the center of
Nazism: as the historical sociologist, Michael Mann, writes, “What was common to the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, and to no others, was their persistent
rejection of institutional compromise in favor of the frontal violent assault
of continuous revolution.”13 No single facet of totalitarianism could more
sharply contrast with the Napoleonic Empire’s steady, indeed heavy, march
toward the sedimentation of routine and institutions. The Reich, all concur,
had “no goal but to keep moving and no motive except hatred of all stable
institutions”—a tendency that, at bottom, made (and kept) it “anti-State” in
its mentality. Perhaps nothing offers a stronger contrast to the Napoleonic
regime, which deified the state (or l’Etat, as the French write it, using a capital). In Nazism, the party stood in as a substitute for institutions, while in
the French Empire, Napoleon notoriously refused to found a party. In brief,
Nazism had “no final goal, no purpose, except to continue without end”; the
party embodied the “radicalizing, dynamic, and structure-destroying inbuilt
characteristics of Nazism.” The Reich could not “in the long run reproduce
itself. [It was] destroyed by the contradiction between institutionalizing party
rule and achieving the party’s goal, continuous revolution.”14
157
Th e J ou r na l
The Reich relied on “the masses characterized by their isolation” and by
their “‘selflessness’ in the sense of a weird disregard for ordinary utilitarian
self-interest that comes from the experience of being entirely expendable.”
Bonapartism, Napoleonic style, on the other hand, relied upon the Emperor’s
“masses of granite” (that is, his created nobility and notability), which were
deeply wed in their economic and social self-interest to a regime that courted
them. For l’Empereur to serve as a precursor of Hitler’s, in this crucial regard,
he would have had to found, foster, and rely on, say, the Fédérés—that is,
allow these street radicals to conduct their “nights of the long knives” (or
Terror of the Year II) among their own, and the regime’s, enemies. And this,
of course, Napoleon notably did not do; on the contrary, he held the Fédérés
at bay, more often than not ignoring, containing, and frustrating them.
Then, too, doubtless one of Napoleon’s best moves—and another regard
in which he strikingly differs from Hitler—was to attract large numbers
of the revolutionary left (Jacobin, Hebertist) into the service of his empire,
usually in the police and the gendarmerie.
Napoleonic France was a state of law wherein illegal intervention by the
sovereign into the political process, due to a stated “emergency,” was rare,
not the common case, as in Nazism.15 In sum, if neither Nazism nor the
Napoleonic form of Bonapartism is readily amenable to clear, incisive definition (few regimes are, by intention), the foregoing contrasts with Nazism
amount to differences in principle far more than just in degree. The Reich
was an unstable regime of movement and conquest fostered by racial hatred;
the Empire was perhaps no less efficient as a war-making machine, but it
deployed a mixed bag of evolving tricks, ever seeking a legitimacy that it actually enjoyed (“that game which was always being won, yet went on being
played,” as Chateaubriand put it16 ) and attaining a form of hegemony based
on reform and the search for stabilization, as well as power and threat.17
Policies and Instruments of Repression
In Germany, by the late 1930s, tens of thousands of police operations—
arrests, seizures of arms and pamphlets, closures—occurred weekly, aimed at
opponents of the Reich and at its racial enemies. While we do not have exact
data on the activity of Napoleonic police, we know that at the height of the
158
Napoleon and Hitler
Empire (1810–1812), they did not carry out anything remotely approaching
this level of repression. Not only was there not sufficient state bureaucracy,
nor an “official” party to undertake such action, the will for it did not exist
at the top. Imperial political prisoners numbered in the hundreds; Nazi, in
the hundreds of thousands. Then, too, Fouché and his operatives could not
simply shrug off public law and administrative officials within France or in
the Empire, as could Hitler’s SS. Nor was Napoleon’s entourage terrorized, as
was Stalin’s; and if l’Empereur surely wished to wield an Orwellian apparatus
of information control, systematic lying, the rewriting of history, etc., the fact
was, he came nowhere close to doing so, and had to be content, rather, with
deploying in the arena of public discussion his own versions of events.
In short, as Frederick Kagan writes in the Introduction to his upcoming revisionist study of Napoleonic war and diplomacy, “A ruler does not
have to be a monster, it seems, to pursue a wildly ambitious, opportunistic foreign policy, to seek conquest, or to find glory in war . . . . He need
not destroy morality and government ethics within his states even as he
tramples international law abroad. These are important lessons to learn in
an age when it has become common to demonize any opponent and to
identify ambition, opportunism, and militarism with immorality, imperialism, and tyranny. Napoleon shows that these are sometimes separable
traits.”18
Personality and Leadership
Let us stipulate that Hitler and Napoleon were both deeply cynical, opportunistic men, that both manipulated people without an ounce of apparent
bad conscience, that both took criticism badly (or not at all) and ended up
listening to almost nobody except themselves. Finally, each brought disaster
upon himself and his country.
This said, they were emotionally very different beings. Hitler did not have
a true friend or even a single significant emotional attachment, beyond one
woman. Napoleon was quite human, at home. He deeply (for a time, wildly)
loved Josephine and, later, he adored his second wife, Marie-Louise and their
son, the King of Rome. At different times, he had genuine attachments to
many: some school chums (for example, Hughes Nardon), his brothers, and
159
Th e J ou r na l
various officers (Junot, Berthier, etc.). This is not a minor point, though it
should not be overstated (we know, after all, a number of leading Nazis were
“family guys”).
And yet each was as different from the other as it is possible for two dictators to be, as were their styles of leadership. Nazism was Hitler (Mommsen);
he was not the servant, or even the leader, of the state, he was the state,
which became increasingly privatized into his hands. The Fuehrer’s mercurial will could and did nullify policies and decisions from one day to the
next. And yet curiously, he may also be seen as simply the personification of
a mass movement, “nothing more or less than the functionary of the masses
he leads.” He and his regime were, as Baehr and Richter put it, a regime of
“permanent revolution and transgression.”19
French Imperial authority, on the other hand, rested only in part in the
Emperor—it also rested with the Council of State, the Senate, and even, to a
degree, in the people, in the form of plebiscites. In a very real sense, Napoleon
was a servant of his state. If Hitler was an indolent man who found rule and
administration a bore, the Emperor famously feasted on work; his work
style was bureaucratic in a way Hitler’s never was. If both were at ease with
war, Hitler made a poor military leader who did not trust his generals, while
Napoleon was a brilliant general who remained loyal to his top officers (and
politicians) far longer than he ought to have in many cases. Even in the midst
of misery and defeat, Napoleon “camped out in the midst of his army like
hope in the human breast” (Ségur), something that was never said of Hitler’s
reception by the Reich’s soldiery, even the SS.
In sum, Napoleon deployed a complicated and changeable mix of power
and authority as well as intimidation and fear, and at the end of his political
road, in the Hundred Days, he ruled mainly through his personal qualities,
evoking respect and admiration, not infrequently in his adversaries. Hitler,
for his part, was genuinely feared and hated, and, as time went on, he ruled
with terror through a small passel of Nibelungentreue (blood-confidants).
(Max Weber does not consider terror to be a tool of a truly charismatic
leader, of which he considered Napoleon to be an archetype.)
Then, too: Adolf Hitler was a mediocre painter, Napoleon Bonaparte, a
formidable writer.
160
Napoleon and Hitler
Reception by His Own People
In July of 1944, less than a year before the fall, Hitler was very nearly done
in by a member of his own General Staff, who left a bomb at headquarters. Napoleon, two years before the fall of his Empire, was the object of
a coup d’Etat, but the perpetrator—a general officer—had to pretend that
the Emperor had been killed in Russia during the current campaign. There
is a difference in “legitimacy” here. As even Paul Schroeder points out, who
of Napoleon’s contemporaries could have faced the Russian defeat without
trembling for his own and his heirs’ position on the throne? The preceding
two decades had seen Paul I murdered, Louis XVI executed, and Charles IV,
Ferdinand VII, and Gustav IV deposed; it had seen Frederick William III’s
and Francis I’s holds on their realms profoundly shaken from within as well
as from without. By contrast, Napoleon was faring quite well, thank you,
given that Egypt had been lost, things were going wretchedly in Spain, and
the Russian theater had just blossomed in disaster. The French did little more
than murmur (if that) at any of this, or at their loss of freedoms, and not
even at the increased taxes and conscription.
In short, if the French experience a form of the German malady, Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (difficulty in facing up to a moment in the national
past), it is not on the account of their first emperor, but rather, for other
episodes, such as Vichy or Algeria. L’Empereur, for his part, remains a towering figure reminiscent of classical heroes, and elicits awe, fascination, and
ambiguity, far more often than repellence and disgust. One of his fiercest
critics, Tocqueville, puts it in this way, in words that could never be spoken
of Hitler: “Napoleon was as great as a man without virtue can be.”20
Reception by Peoples and History
The great European literatures of the nineteenth century (not just the French)
owe much of their existence to their writers’ fascination with Napoleon and
his epic. Nor did the fascination diminish in the next century, especially when
one looks at the filmology of Napoleon. The datum that struck this author
the hardest was this: in a recent documentary film depicting Russian soldiers’
reenactment of the Battle of the Moskowa (1812), the officers compete
among themselves to see who will get to play the role of “the Emperor,”
161
Th e J ou r na l
by whom they do not mean Tsar Alexander I, but rather the conqueror
(Napoleon) who subjected their country to six months of devastation. One
does not see present-day Poles, Czechs, Dutch, or even Austrians enacting
(or shooting) scenes in which the locals vie with one another to play Der
Fuehrer or his generals.
Pieter Geyl, in the course of reproaching those French historians (often
the best) who “lick[ed] the hand [Napoleon’s] that had chastised them,”
worried that “later generations of Germans [would throw up] apologists
and admirers of the man who was our oppressor and who led them to
their ruin.” We now know that this concern was groundless, and that Geyl’s
reproach of the French was even, perhaps, mean-spirited. In the sixty years
since Hitler’s suicide, no serious German (or any other) scholar or writer has
raised his voice on Schickelgruber’s behalf. Even a desultory viewing of two
current films of quality—the German Das Untergang (The Downfall) and
the French Monsieur N—suffices to show that posterity’s fascination with
Napoleon and its horror of Hitler continues unabated. (Not to mention how
many films—scores of them—there are about Napoleon, and how few in
which Hitler appears as a key character.)
Finally, scholarly colloquia have been held in the past decade in Egypt,
Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, and Germany (among other places) to debate
both the “pros and cons” of the French occupation during the First Empire.
No one discusses the “merits” of the Nazi invasion.
Instead, Hitler is the subject of studies wherein it is common to hear an
author comment on the “incongruity” of treating “this non-person to the
undeserved honor of definitive biographies.” Another confesses that studying this perpetrator of vast inhumanity “has an emotional and psychological
cost. It is not like studying” other figures in history. With Hitler, “‘interpretation’ consists of the attempt to find a rationale for actions which scarcely
seem to warrant the term. Hence there remains the need to master the irrational, the illogical, and the psychologically deranged in order to explain
the level of pathological debauchery accepted, approved of, and sustained
by masses of people . . .”21
In Napoleon’s case, scholarly ratiocination focuses on ferreting out the
progressive from the regressive lines in the Emperor’s accomplishments; it
162
Napoleon and Hitler
requires of the author that he become masterly at palpating ambiguity, and
it may sadden him or her (as it did the present writer) that a man of such
titanic gifts as Napoleon could betray himself and his people so tragically.
The wonderment with Hitler is, rather, that so unattractive and “faceless” a
person could have attracted so many millions of Germans for so long.
War and Expansion
French policy was tough-minded and harshly executed, but the French did
not arrive in conquered lands the way Mussolini’s army later marched into
Ethiopia, or Hitler’s troops took Poland. Rather, they arrived trailing the
prestige, and bringing many of the reforms, of the French Revolution. And
they arrived to the satisfaction of some of the local population, as well as
that—admittedly, more mixed—of thinkers and writers of the stature of
Hegel, Goethe, and Herder. And even when these men came to disapprove
of French rule, they lived, often quite safely, to tell their ambiguous tale.
French rule came to be loathed by large sections of the indigenous populations, but they were not slaughtered or imprisoned in large numbers for their
loathing.
Byron, the young Stendhal, and many others were less ambivalent in their
admiration, even of the warrior in Napoleon. None of this renders the Emperor any the less bellicose. Napoleon was largely (if by no means entirely)
responsible for bloody conflicts that cost the lives of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of human beings, nearly a million of them French. And
at the end of his public career, as at the beginning, he was caught up in
war, albeit (unlike Caesar, who always went to war with alacrity) with great
reluctance and regret.
This said, Napoleon, in his relentless application of reason-of-state for the
purposes of geopolitical expansion, did not differ qualitatively from Louis
XIV or Frederick the Great, or from his brother sovereigns of his own era. He
differed only in the success he enjoyed (for a time), due to his own political
and military skills, and to the power and motivation of the French nation.
Even the Spanish expedition was traditional French policy, as Talleyrand,
often a Napoleonic critic in foreign aggression, pointed out (and Sorel has
analyzed).
163
Th e J ou r na l
Nor were atrocities primarily a characteristic of the French war effort, but
of all sides in these wars and conflicts. Michael Mann speaks of the “extermination” of Slav soldiers and civilians on the eastern front, in 1941–44, and of
“barbarized” German armies. Nothing like this can be sustained (though the
“black legend” has maintained it) about Napoleon. Paul Schroeder trashes
the Emperor for treating his allies and subject states like so many “colonies,”
which is why, in his opinion, the Empire could never have long endured, even
if it had won its external wars.22 But even if French dominion did to some
degree “colonize” its European territories—it certainly subordinated and exploited them—it also advanced them. Thus, Napoleon’s “doing something”
for Poland (and his sustained interest in doing more), despite the heavy
geopolitical cost to France in her relationship with Russia, is more than a
mere fig leaf of progressivism in foreign policy. Nazi Germany’s imperium,
on the other hand, is a different, far less complex story. As Hans Mommsen
writes, “the assumption that the Thousand-Year Reich was anything more
than a façade of modernity, that it achieved a real modernization of Germany,
takes the results of destruction as positive values and overlooks the regime’s
basic political sterility.”23
The Continental System, however, is not simply evidence of the “colonization” of Europe by the French. For one thing, the British highhandedness,
including seizure of private property on the high seas, to which it responded
(doubtless, overreacted) was not widely regarded as preferable by European
powers before 1810—on the contrary.24 The System did stave off for a time
the deluge of cheap British goods that would come later, and permitted the
founding and fostering of important fledgling industry, in France and elsewhere. Then, too, as François Crouzet points out, many of the commercial businesses and regions harmed by the Berlin and Milan Decrees and
the British Blockade were economically doomed, and would probably have
passed away in any case. As I argue in my own book, the Emperor’s decision
to go all out for the development of France along alternative (industrial, not
commercial) lines was a thought-out, interesting, and defensible gamble. In
sum, there are valid reasons, as Crouzet and I argue, for regarding the Continental System as a kind of precursor of the European Union—which is a
thesis not widely argued on behalf of the Third Reich.25
164
Napoleon and Hitler
Anachronism
The most insuperable problem of the Napoleon-Hitler simile is that it is
anachronistic. The Emperor, though an eighteenth-century man in many
ways (for example, his taste in literature and architecture), was indeed
“modern” in the way he staged a “legal” (or parliamentary) coup d’Etat; in
the way he organized state power and established his charisma in a desacralized world; and, above all, in the way he founded a regime based on the
appearance of popular consent. But his modernity, as we postmoderns tend
to forget, was of the nineteenth-, not the twentieth-century variety, and the
leaders he might sustain comparison with, or more properly be considered
the precursor of—and who invoked or admired him (as Hitler and Stalin
did not)—carried names like Cavour, Mehmet Ali, Bismarck, Rosebery, and
Napoleon III.
Napoleon, in short, may ultimately be seen as a liberal, in one crucial
sense: he sought, via a regime of law and institutions, to elude profound
political conflict. Unlike Hitler, his use of nation-talk was not irrational
(anti-intellectual) or group-ethnic. It did not draw its sources from “us
against them” but rather from the Roman-universalist perspective: “us”
absorbing (acculturating, modernizing) “them.” At bottom, the French dictator sought to unite peoples under one European system and tear down
the barriers of invidious distinctions based on race and creed, while Hitler’s
methods were the extreme result of centuries of prejudice, of separating the
world into castes and races, based on spurious systems of gradation.
The first Emperor of the French thus sought to escape, not to bask in, the
“primacy of the political,” in Carl Schmitt’s phrase for the Nazi era. Where, if
anywhere, we may discern something of the late-modern (twentieth-century)
about the Late Empire lies in the rising degrees of animosity that Napoleon
unintentionally sparked off among his opponents: the counterrevolutionaries both within and without France, the states endlessly thrashed by the
French, and the societies (nations) increasingly burdened by French taxmen
and recruiters. These were the entities that discovered and embraced their
modern political identity via the experience of being Napoleon’s enemy.26
Fortunately, one does not have to be a Nietzschean in order to discern in
Napoleon a remarkable instance of the “will-to-power.” The philosopher’s
165
Th e J ou r na l
proximity in time (born in 1844) to Napoleon and his oft-quoted admiration for him (“The Revolution made Napoleon possible. That is its justification.”) make Nietzsche, not Hitler, a more suitable modern invocation for
Napoleon. The common comparison of Napoleon to a Renaissance prince
(or to a condottiere) is a product of what Nietzsche saw as the Emperor’s
“antique” qualities (“the ancient world’s face of granite”), that is, his singlemindedness in the pursuit of policy, but mostly of his personal traits: his wit,
his intellectual “style” and brilliance, his ability to dissimulate, his abrupt
and judgmental manner with people.
Then, too, Nietzsche’s philosophical view on supposed objective moral
judgments—that is, that they are but the disguised expression of a subjective will-to-power—is a viewpoint one could imagine Napoleon adopting,
albeit not publicly. In the Emperor’s refusal to accept equals or depend on
anyone emotionally or politically, and his identification of French national
interest with his own will, he gave rise to what we consider “Nietzschean”
myths about himself, as god or devil, as Prometheus, in a world with an
“empty” sky (“God is dead”).27 If these myths still abide about Napoleon—
and they do—it is because, in English Prime Minister Lord Rosebery’s words,
“Mankind will always delight to scrutinize something that indefinitely raises
its conception of its own powers and possibilities.”28
None of this could be said of Hitler.
Conclusion: The Purpose and the Consequences
of the Napoleon-Hitler Trope
The central purpose of the Napoleon-Hitler trope is undoubtedly an ideological one: namely, to promulgate the thesis that the French Revolution—and
its successor revolutions in 1830, 1848, and 1871, as well as its wide gamut
of latter-day ideological opponents in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries—was the progenitor, first, of the Russian Revolution, and then, of
fascism and Nazism, all of it lumped together as “totalitarianism.”29 This is
an extremely well-known case in our time; it has been stated and attacked, restated and attacked anew, and this is not the place to take on another frontal
assault. Suffice to say from the foregoing, it is surely clear to the reader that
166
Napoleon and Hitler
this author does not share the Furet–Sternhell opinion, but rather concurs
with Arno J. Mayer, among others, that a distinct and continuous difference
can (and should) be drawn between the forces of modern revolution and
counterrevolution in the last two centuries of European history.
I will be content here to point out one significant consequence of the use of
the Napoleon-Hitler simile by Anglo-American scholars of the First Empire,
which is that it will continue to ensure that their French colleagues will go
on ignoring their work, and that both sides will talk past one another. This
is a situation that will ultimately cost the French more heavily, for there
are many more scholars working on the First Empire in English than in the
language of Napoleon’s regime.
Despite the insulting nature of the Nazi simile, works such as those cited
above by Geyl, Schroeder, and Isser Woloch, among others, do need to be
read (and in many cases translated) by French scholars, who cannot afford to
indulge the luxury of offended pride that the Napoleon-Hitler simile entails,
for that inaccurate comparison notwithstanding, the works cited contain
much useful research, and insightful and important analysis.30 Even if the
goal includes refutation, it must pass by assimilation.
Anglo-American scholars, in turn, should stop seeing “the French view”
of Napoleon as if it were one large unified bloc, emanating mainly from
swollen or injured collective pride, and instead see that the French responses
to the First Empire—including the subtle views expressed by some of France’s
current leading scholars—for the variegated things they are. They are not
evidence for the existence of some encompassing entity called “French nationalism,” as certain writers, including even fine scholars, claim.31
NOTES
This essay was published in a French translation in the Revue des Deux Mondes (April 2005).
We offer our readers the original essay, slightly adapted. For their helpful comments on this
paper, the author wishes to thank Michael Broers, Sudhir Hazareesingh, David Bell, Robert
Tombs, Stuart Semmel, Robert Kagan, and Eric Rudderow.
1. Francis Choisel, Bonapartisme et gaullisme (Paris: Albatros, 1987); Francois Furet, Le passé
d’une illusion. Essai sur l’idée communiste au XXe siècle (Paris: Laffont/Calmann-Lévy, 1995);
etc.
2. For example, Desmond Seward, Napoleon and Hitler (London: Harrap, 1988); Pieter Geyl,
Napoleon, For and Against (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947); Paul Schroeder, The
Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
167
Th e J ou r na l
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
168
Roger Caratini, Napoleon, une imposture (Paris: M. Lafon, 2002), Paul Johnson, Napoleon
(New York: Lipper/Viking Book, 2002), Alastair Horne, How Far from Austerlitz? Napoleon,
1805–1815 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). See also Isser Woloch, Napoleon and His
Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), toward the
end of which the author, a professor at Columbia and a respected historian of the later French
Revolution and the nineteenth century, dilates upon the similarities between Napoleon’s associates and the men of Vichy or in the Pentagon during the war in Vietnam.
“Certainly it has been a constant surprise to me, while reading and writing, to find the parallel
presenting itself to my mind again and again at ever fresh points. The idea that the course
of Revolution and of Dictators is predestined, or subject to some law, repeatedly forced itself
upon my mind.” Geyl, Napoleon, For and Against, 10.
Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 441. Schroeder’s 900-page volume includes
sources and secondary works in five languages, and can hold its head high in a scholarly series
(The Oxford History of Europe) that includes names such as A.J.P. Taylor, James Sheehan,
and Raymond Carr.
Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 241.
T.C.W. Blanning, “The Bonapartes and Germany,” in Peter Baehr and Melvin Richter, eds.,
Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2004), 57, 61.
Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 224–25, 291.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Walter Kauffmann, trans. (New York: Vintage,
1966), 197.
Arthur Eckstein, “From Historical Caesar to the Spectre of Caesarism: The Imperial Administrator as Internal Threat,” in Peter Baehr & Melvin Richter, eds., Dictatorship in History
and Theory.
Essays in Understanding, 108, cited in Canovan, in Baehr & Richter, op. cit., 249.
See the elaboration of this point of view in three works of Arno J. Mayer: The Politics of
Counterrevolution (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The
“Final Solution” in History (London: Verso, 1990); and The Furies: Violence and Terror in the
French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). For Napoleon
as a son of the Revolution, see Martyn Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the
French Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
Simon Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews, and the Sanhedrin (New York: Littman Library of
Jewish Books, 1984).
Michael Mann, “The Contradictions of Continuous Revolution,” in Ian Kershaw and Moshe
Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 155.
In this paragraph, the first quotation is from Canovan, 254; the second is from Kershaw, 257;
the third is from Mann, 155, 136. All are from essays in Baehr and Richter.
To quote Carl Schmitt, the “exception” in political theory should be like the miracle (the
intervention of God into the course of nature) in theology: that is, occurring for the purpose of
shoring up the normal order. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Theory of Sovereignty
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 [orig. pub. 1922]), 36–37.
Memoires, I, 869.
“Bonapartism” is not easy to define, either, but less by intention than because of the great diversity of its historical incarnations. But see Frederic Bluche, Le Bonapartisme (Paris: Presses
Universitaire de France, 1995), as well as J. Rothney, Bonapartism before Sedan (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1974), and Bernard Menager, Les Napoleon du Peuple (Paris:
Aubier, 1988). For Arendt’s procés d’intention as to totalitarianism’s intentional difficulty to
grasp, see Margaret Canovan in Baehr and Richter, eds., Dictatorship in History and Theory,
245.
Frederick Kagan, in his upcoming opus magnum on the Napoleonic wars and diplomacy.
Baehr and Richter, eds., Dictatorship in History and Theory, 20.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres Complètes, XVI (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 263. Goethe, at
the news of Napoleon’s death, imagined a dialogue between God and the Devil, wherein the
former challenges the latter thus: “If you have the courage to lay a hand on this mortal, then
Napoleon and Hitler
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
you may haul him through your hellish portal.” Again, not the sort of words readily applied
to Adolf Hitler.
Kershaw and Lewin, op. cit., “Introduction,” 25.
But he contradicts himself. For example, on 394, he writes, “[T]here was no way to achieve
a stabilization of the Napoleonic Empire within the European international system; because
the only relationship allowed by Napoleonic France was colonial dependency . . . . What was
impossible, for structural reasons of international politics, was to construct an integrated
Continental economy on the basis of a French colonial empire in Europe.” But eleven pages
later (405) he writes, “Could France have stopped in 1810 or 1811? That is, could France,
given other leadership than Napoleon’s or some miraculous change in Napoleon, have tacitly
given up trying to destroy Britain by direct economic warfare (as Napoleon actually did), and
have silently accepted Russia’s defection from the Continental System (which he may briefly
have contemplated), and still have maintained the Empire in Europe for an indefinite period?
The answer is ‘Yes’.”
In Kershaw and Lewin, op. cit., 86–87.
It would not really be until 1813 that Britain and the Continental great powers could
truly work together, and moderate their own deep-seated expansionist impulses. Even at the
Congress of Vienna, it was a near thing whether geopolitical and personal greed, and national
rivalry and vanity, would not set the former Allies back at one another’s throats.
The classic work is François Crouzet, L’Économie Britannique et le Blocus Continental,
1806–1813 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958). But see also his De la superiorite
de l’Angleterre sur la France: l’économique et l’imaginaire, XVIIe-XXe Siècles (Paris: Perin,
1999). Englund, Napoléon (2004), 294–297; 365–368.
In other words, it is in the counterimperial, rather than in the imperial, historical experience,
per se, that we come upon the relevance of the “friend-enemy distinction” as the source of
“the political,” so dear to the heart of its theoretician-coiner, Carl Schmitt, who for a time
served Hitler. Schmitt, we should not forget, originated many of his most profound insights
about political man in studying the German partisans who rose up against Napoleon.
Curiously it was Napoleon’s exploitation of myth and superstition (notably in his reestablishment of official Catholicism) that put Nietzsche off. In the German philosopher’s view,
Napoleon, to be consistent with (read: worthy of) himself, should not have attributed his successes to anything other than his own talent and will. It was a failure in Napoleon’s capacity
for self-understanding that led him to invoke his “fate,” and thus brought his ruin.
Archibold Philip Primrose, Earl of Rosebery, Napoleon: The Last Phase (London: Harper and
Brothers, 1900).
See François Furet, Le Passé d’une Illusion, as well as Zeev Sternhell, La Droite
Révolutionnaire (Paris: Fayard, 2004 [orig. Pub. 1984]) and Ni Droite ni Gauche (Paris:
Fayard, 2004 [orig. pub. 1997]).
This said, Seward, Paul Johnson, and Roger Caratini are simply polemic, while Schom, Asprey,
and Horne repeat the well-known narrative, so all may be ignored by scholars.
For an example of a telescoped and magnified notion of French nationalism, see the last
chapter of David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2001), an otherwise fine study. For a critique of this aspect of Bell, see Englund, upcoming in
the Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine.
169