Who, Napoleon?

Or, return of the dictators.

Being very busy still, I have this week adapted a piece from my personal blog at Wordpress. This was inspired by the shitstorm currently happening in America.

Many people, especially online, when thinking about Donald Trump and Elon Musk, refer to them as new Nazis. I think we should leave Hitler out of those discussions and concentrate instead of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Erich Fromm wrote of narcissism:

The narcissistic orientation is one in which a person experiences as real only that which exists within themself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous.

The clearest aspect of Napoleon’s character was his narcissism, which was intense right from the beginning. Its chief manifestation was his insatiable lust for power and dominance – he exhibited a driving need to impose his will on others. His narcissism meant the world was not a real place with existence of its own, rather it was a mental construction, a place he had created from twisted and distorted perceptions of reality. Because of this, other people, with needs, desires and lives of their own, could not be accepted. Napoleon had to dominate them so as to keep the real world in accordance with the one he had created. If he let dominance slip, the self he had created would fall to pieces; he would annihilate himself. Thus, Napoleon’s ruthless acquisition of power was essential if he was to live with sanity. The domination of others, by which his fantasy world (which of course seemed perfectly real to him) could be validated, was central to his survival as a human being. And the particular conditions of society at the time – patriarchal, hierarchical and militaristic – allowed him vast scope for domination.

By cultivating contacts, making friends, lying and acting, he took the opportunist route into power. His personal career took precedence over all other considerations. On more than one occasion he effectively abandoned his army in bad situations to return home with a sheaf of excuses; this happened at the end of the Egyptian debacle. Notions of duty were considered only within the framework of whatever situation he happened to be in, the final arbiter of action being his own safety and career.

But in 1799, during Sieyes’ coup de etat when Napoleon insisted there be a single First Consul, he was unable to hide the real reasons for his actions. At this point dictatorship was only a breath away. Instead of lying and manipulating, the lure of dominion was so close it made him desperate enough to reveal his real reasons for creating a First Consul. He threatened parliament that if he did not get his own way there would be bloodshed up to their knees…

A sense of omnipotence and omniscience stayed with him in various measures throughout his life. As a child he would throw tantrums and boss other children, success in these operations confirming that he was the master of his world. But as he grew, his mental model of reality became increasingly distorted in order to keep him placed centrally, controlling and seeing all around him. Yet in his teens, when it was still apparent that he might not be the centre of all things, he took the easy route away from recognising the obvious; he withdrew from reality into an isolating world of books.

When events in Paris conspired to push him into power he became convinced that a ‘lucky star’ was guiding him, one which would guarantee him dominion in the near future. This invented notion of the lucky star, through which he explained to himself the fact that he was doing so well, was a device intended to create personal meaning from real events. The lucky star, the Destiny which he had felt even as a child, was a symbol of the overwhelming importance which he had given himself, a selfish manifestation applying meaning to reality without acknowledging that reality operates by chance. In this way, Napoleon continued to think that reality revolved around him.

Later the sense of omnipotence was deepened by his military victories, and in the end by becoming First Consul and then Emperor. By this time mere conquest could not appease the lust for power; what seemed a lack of human fallibility was metamorphosed into a belief that he was a deity. Part of the Imperial Catechism ran:

Q. Why are we bound to show these duties {love, obedience, fidelity, service, &c.} to the Emperor?

A. Because God has established him as our Sovereign, and has rendered him His image here on earth, overwhelming him with gifts in peace and war. To honour and serve our Emperor is, therefore, to honour and serve God himself…

That Napoleon created a unique mental world of his own rather than developing an authentic self within reality (the independent reality which most people sense) left him with no authentic character. This meant he faced impossible identity problems, with the inability to form an authentic identity having many symptoms. When young he was a fervent Corsican patriot; the framework of patriotism allowed him to use Corsica-ness as if it were Napoleon-ness. Later, when that was useless, he became a obsessive revolutionary for precisely the same reason. At length French-ness was the essence of Napoleon. At no time did he draw on inner resources to form a sense of identity, since there were almost no such resources. His younger brother Lucien remarked on how he discerned a void in Napoloeon where human character and integrity should have been.

This emptiness meant sincerity was unknown to Napoleon. He lied, except in situations where he had no need to lie. In addition he was a superb actor, able to put on any mask to serve his needs. Wearing a mask was an essential part of his life, a symbol of his fundamental insincerity, and it came naturally to him. As a schoolboy in Corsica he would shamelessly manipulate the teaching nuns to get what he wanted, his acting good enough to convince them of his merit.

Much of Napoleon’s restlessness came from this inner void. When in exile at Elba, the commissioner Sir Neil Campbell noted his “restless perseverence” and “pleasure in perpetual movement.” In Bonaparte Correlli Barnett writes:

Action disguised the essential emptiness of his existence, the void in the heart.

Then again, action provided an answer to the most haunting of questions, that of identity: “I act, therefore I am.”

Napoleon also used others to create his identity. Domination not only served to make people do what he wanted, they confirmed to him an equivalence – other people in some way were him. Thus Napoleon could not bear the slightest intimation of independence in his minions. His secretary Meneval wrote that the price of Napoleon’s favour was high, even to the extent of self-negation.

Napoleon’s attitude to the real world was typical of the narcissist. He forged it into the shape he wanted yet remained divorced from it, since, to him, it had no independent existence. When he was in power society was transformed into the shape he desired, and so was the apparatus of government, the army, even of political and moral thought amongst his subjects. Becoming First Consul allowed him to indulge his most profound wishes without denial, increasing the horizons of domination until every aspect of the world was twisted according to his personal views. Eventually the internal world he had created became alike to the real one, closing the reality gap which had so driven him, to the enormous detriment of the real world… But this sense of self had to coincide with what existed in the external world, else the numerous defences and constructions of his mind collapse, and he with it. And thus do all narcissists operate, like malignant sculptors.

Napoleon’s lack of realism was sometimes gross. His campaigns were often hastily prepared and ill-timed, and he took risks on many occasions. When these risks came off they confirmed his sense of infallibility; when they failed he ignored them, or ran away from them into his romantic, fantasy world. There was slapdash under-estimation of potential difficulties. When Napoleon considered some problem he simply ignored anything which might thwart him, assuming that the operation would succeed. Excluding the unknown was standard procedure. In considering the operation to attack England, he simply assumed that the British Navy would not fight him and that he would sail through – it did not occur to him that they might want to stop his advance. In battle he similarly operated in a world of his own. The standard Bonaparte ploy was to swoop, fight one quick and decisive battle, make peace on his own terms then return to Parisian glory. It never occurred to him during the planning of the Russian campaign that such a ploy was pure fantasy. Actual considerations of terrain, geography and logistics were alien to his method of planning, which, although often brilliant, were brilliant only on their own terms.

When reality finally did intrude into Napoleon’s world there were two distinct responses. Usually he would slip away from the scene of the disaster and pretend to himself and to others that it had never happened, or that some force other than himself had been responsible. On other occasions he would retreat into his fantasy world and simply ignore what was happening.

But on at least three occasions the convergence of reality and fantasy was so intense that Napoleon’s inner world – his laboriously constructed self – was placed in jeopardy. When Napoleon was at the Champagne ecole militaire he was punished for an offence by being forced to eat his dinner upon his knees at the door of the refectory. The power wielded over him and the humiliation were so intense that he suffered a kind of fit; reality and his internal world became violently incompatible. A similar occurence took place in the weeks before Napoleon’s creation of the First Consul. Sieyes’ coup de etat involved much chicanery, and at one point the parliamentary opposition became heated, questioning Napoleon about the army surrounding Paris and the general state of leadership. Questions about personal ambitions and current events Napoleon deflected, but at one point the opposition’s hatred of him became obvious, and it seemed the plan might fail. Then Napoleon panicked: he stuttered answers, his face white, his powers of manipulation and self-deception departed. A third occasion was the Battle of Waterloo. When it became obvious that Wellington and Blucher were going to take the day Napoleon did not stay to see the result, instead riding from the scene weeping, terrified and speechless.

Napoleon’s sense of confidence was central to his character. He addressed the Palestinians in 1799:

It is well that you realise that all human efforts are useless against me, because everything I undertake must succeed.

Only at the end of his reign, after abdication, the subsequent escape from custody on Elba and attempted hijacking of French government, and then the Battle of Waterloo, did he consider failure, and even then, as he fretted in exile, he re-wrote his own past and his predicament, so that he was not at fault and never had been.

Another aspect of Napoleon’s narcissism was his thirst for revenge. In Corsica the vendetta had been an institution – one closely followed by him. Revenge for any slight was a way of retaining his sense of self-worth, which was desperately fragile. Revenge was a kind of therapy for any damage done to his over-inflated sense of self-importance. Like all narcissists, Napoleon was acutely sensitive to personal ridicule, and could not bear to be made a fool of. Summary shooting, imprisonment without trial and deportation were all forms of revenge, pursued with no regard for rights of liberty, equality or fraternity.

Napoleon also exhibited two other important, and related, narcissistic symptoms: self-sufficiency and atrophied emotions. The human connection which could have been his through emotion was denied even more than is usual for men; only on exceptional occasions, as when defeat at Wateroo shattered his illusions, did he weep. On almost all occasions he repressed emotion, though there remained the bursts of infantile anger. Self-sufficiency was also a characteristic, dependence hateful to him since that would mean relying on some other person.

Narcissism too powered his need for glory and worship, these being ways of convincing himself that he was wonderful and the centre of the world. As Emperor, his sense of grandiosity reached absurd dimensions, in coins, statues, buildings, in every kind of abject worship. He propagated his own legend wherever he could, in painting, report, book and rumour. His vanity was immeasurable. It was not enough merely to be Emperor, he had to have constant proof of his glory, and thus constant expansion. Sheer numbers had a heady effect upon him in whatever context. He wrote, “What is grand is always beautiful.”

And Napoleon, like all irredeemable narcissists, was also destructive. This was apparent at a very young age, and it stayed with him until death. Unable to find any sort of human creativity, he was led inexorably to destruction. As a youngster he wanted to be a soldier; war attracted him. But because he felt so separated from the world the only available response – a response he had to find because of the human need for meaning – was destruction. He could never act creatively in union within the world because of his intense narcissism, and so his only option was to destroy it, since it was usually so hateful to him. Destruction became his personal meaning. In his late teens he wrote with enormous perception:

Life is a burden to me because I feel no pleasure and because everything is affliction to me. It is a burden to me because the men with whom I have to live and will probably always live have ways as different from mine as the light of the moon from that of the sun. I cannot then pursue the only manner of living which could enable me to put up with existence, whence follows a disgust for everything.

Correlli Barnett quotes the memoirs of Marshal Marmont:

I have never understood his curiosity to see the dead and dying so cover the ground. He stopped in front of one officer grievously wounded in the knee, and had the strange idea of having the amputation performed before him by his surgeon Yvan.

Thus war was essential to the destructive and voyeuristic Bonaparte. When in conflict with other nations he rarely talked of surrender; more of perishing. No grey existed between the white of total victory and the black of total annihilation.

Yet even his very self was an object of possible destruction, which would have to go if the world could not:

What madness makes me desire my own destruction? Without doubt the problem of what to do in this world.

And:

Always alone among other men, I come home to dream by myself and to give myself over to all the force of my melancholy. In what direction is it bent today? Towards death? If I must die, would it not be as well to kill myself?

Suicide was contemplated at those times when reality and fantasy were in their most severe conflict – in his teens at the Champagne ecole militaire, when he was penniless and rejected at the age of twenty-six, and after Waterloo (as reported by the government official Caulaincourt) on two separate occasions. He took poison, a substance he had kept on his person ever since the disaster in Russia. It failed – but the idea had been considered and executed.

“Weakness alone is inhumanity,” Napoleon declared. By this he meant that living in the world through the laws of nature was impossible for him, since they were not his laws. Only domination or destruction was acceptable.

One aspect of Napoleon’s character little remarked upon is his extraordinary memory. Baron Meneval, Napoleon’s secretary, wrote in his memoirs that Napoleon’s memory was described as “astonishing.” Various biographers describe his memory as “very retentive,” “near-photographic,” “prodigious” and “phenomenal.” This memory was particularly keen on statistics.

Napoleon’s thinking too had a particular character. As a child he was outstanding at mathematics, and in youth was a voracious reader, but for Napoleon it was facts which were delightful – and only facts. He was able to take in immense amounts of detail, particularly in the field of mathematics, science, and military logistics, then remember and use them all. He thrived on the rational application of his knowledge.

When young he had the particular gift of summarising detail, a gift which made him a brilliant though unrealistic tactician. Rationality and logic were deeply attractive to him. But this type of thinking had the disadvantage of atrophied imagination. General ideas, theories and relationships were on the whole alien to him. Intuition was impossible. But it was Napoleon himself who gave the most significant insight into the workings of his own mind. He wrote:

Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard. When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am – asleep.

Here Napoleon describes the quality of unconnected detail which characterised his mind. Napoleon could never have been a holist. All things were separate entities, lacking connection, considered alone and in the abstract. But because his memory also had this quality (like Thatcher’s and Hitler’s too) there exists a tantalising link to the comment of Extraordinary People author Darold Treffert, that the inability to forget is crucial in the understanding of the autistic mind. If Napoleon found his myriad of individual memories hard to ignore he simply ‘closed all the drawers’ as a last resort, thereby turning his back on his own mind. Neurophysician Alexander Luria, treating his patient ‘S’, described a procedure of striking similarity. To take himself away from his world, which was dominated by perfectly remembered visual imagery, ‘S’ would bring to mind the image of a white wall which he had not seen, to which he could for a while turn away. Similarly Jorge Luis Borges’ fictional character Ireneo Funes found it very difficult to sleep, since he could not turn his back on the world; he tried to imagine a series of homogenous, black houses which he had never seen in order to escape his perfectly remembered world; or he tried to imagine himself rocked by the current at the bottom of a river.

Society Napoleon envisaged as a machine, constructed with perfectly rational precision and founded on absolute data. For Napoleon, society had no organic feel, no sense of relationship, no real groups other than a few clans in the Corsican mode. Within it he imagined a huge number of solitary competing egos – “there is no such thing as society,” to use Thatcher’s phrase. Napoleon’s view of society was deadly rational, blinkered, and lacking any sense of a connected whole.

We are seeing this right now in America.