Napoleon built the institutions of the modern state—especially the military. This was best analyzed by Napoleon’s enemy Clausewitz, who studied war on the opposite side of the battlefield. Napoleon's armies were defeated, but his system and his spirit are still with us.
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Max: Welcome to another episode of The Students. Today, the inmates have taken over the asylum, so I’m taking over Wolf’s position. And I’ve brought on Alex because he has probably read the most about Napoleon out of all the people I know, and he has some interesting things to say about Napoleon. So today we’ll be discussing Clausewitz and Napoleon. “Soldiers, you are naked and ill-fed. The government owes you much and can give you nothing. The patience and courage you have shown in the midst of these rocks are admirable, but they gain you no renown, no glory results to you from your endurance. It is my design to lead you into the most fertile plains of the world. Rich provinces and great cities will be in your power. There you will find honor, glory, and wealth. Soldiers of Italy, will you be wanting in courage or perseverance?”
Alex: Yeah, that quote is Clausewitz quoting Napoleon on the eve of the first Italian campaign. I think he’s 26 when he says this, and this is sort of the beginning of the ascension, and one of the moments where I think Napoleon begins to recognize the magnitude of his destiny, and where he really comes to believe that he can become what he does end up becoming. And Clausewitz was a very close studier of this campaign. He’s got a work on it, and I think the kind of beginning of Napoleon’s military genius is on full display throughout the whole thing, where this thing’s been going sort of back and forth between the French and the Austrians for many years. They’re essentially at a stalemate, and the only thing that really changes is this injection of a kind of 26-year-old Corsican upstart, and that just appointment ends up changing the entire direction of European history.
Max: And I mean, Clausewitz himself, who was a Prussian officer who lived through the Revolutionary Wars and then he fought through the Napoleonic Wars too, is in large part a reaction to the figure of Napoleon, to what he does to European politics, the changes that he affects in how war is waged, how armies are organized, et cetera, and we’re going to be getting into all of this on this episode. So why don’t you talk to me a bit about Napoleon’s rise to power?
Napoleon’s improbable rise (02:35)
Alex: Napoleon’s rise to power. Well, it’s certainly an improbable one. I mean, the guy is born basically to a very minor noble family in Corsica, which is just this provincial backwater, completely unimportant and relatively unknown in the greater French Empire. And he has a kind of sort of bizarre upbringing. When he’s nine years old, he’s sent away to a French military academy, which is just sort of a crazy thing to think about from a modern perspective, to send your nine-year-old, who’s not even fully fluent in French, he’s Italian, I believe is his birth language, and to just be sent away to some academy where he’s trained 16 hours a day in war and all the other things that a French nobleman would be trained in.
So I think he learns things like dance, he learns history. And yeah, these years are very formative, I think because of his sort of background as a Corsican, an Italian, essentially. He’s sort of ostracized from his peers, and there’s this kind of introspective and sort of socially isolated nature about his youth.
Max: Likewise, Clausewitz, he enters the Prussian military as I think a 12-year-old, and he becomes an officer cadet, and he actually sees combat in the Revolutionary Wars waged by France in 1792 to 1795, especially in the Rhineland. So he’s exposed to combat himself quite early. Right.
Alex: That’s interesting. I didn’t know they were so closely in age and in location. That’s quite an interesting parallel. But yeah, no, anyway, Napoleon, I think there’s a number of factors that contribute to his rise. Probably the most obvious is the French Revolution, the kind of expulsion of aristocratic officers from the ranks of the French military, and certain kind of political factors.
Napoleon plays the political game very well in his youth. And these, coupled with great military performance at the Siege of Toulon, where he finds a way to basically fire upon the British ships that are sending supplies to the city, basically wins that battle, and through some political maneuvering, secures the appointment as the commander of the army of Italy. And that’s where that quote that you started originates from. Right.
Max: And Clausewitz, he’s a military theorist, and so he himself participates in these wars, as I’ve mentioned, and then he spends the rest of his life thinking about the various campaigns, studying different historical campaigns. And he’s struck by Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars because they fundamentally change the political map of Europe and how warfare itself is waged. And he’s in large part a reaction to this, and he’s coming back to the concept of war, and he’s trying to understand the essence of warfare. It’s like beyond all of its historical determinations, what is war, essentially? What are the various essential elements that comprise this whole, and how can you theoretically seized them.
How the Revolution radicalized war (06:03)
Max: So I think we should maybe get into Napoleon’s seizure of power, and then what he does to change the way warfare is waged.
Alex: Right. Well, there’s a number of things. I think there’s some great tactical innovations, but probably you have to take into account the sort of national nature that warfare takes on. Really, revolutionary France, there is this sort of united struggle, this sort of uniting ideology. And so—
Max: The levée en masse and transformation of—all citizens into military conscripts, essentially.
Alex: Citizen soldiers, yeah. And thus, you have a new officer class. Many of these people are from the bottom of society. I think one of Napoleon’s great aides and friends and marshals, Lannes, is the son of a leather tanner. And many of the marshals of Napoleon’s empire share similar backgrounds.
And this is born out of necessity, right? Because the old aristocracy, which previously ran the French military, has been all but excommunicated, executed—
Max: And driven to terror
Alex: exiled. Yeah, exactly. And so, France is in an existential struggle, and out of necessity, they are required to promote these people of tremendous ability, but also tremendous ambition. And I think ultimately, that’s what leads to the seizure of power. That’s what enables Napoleon’s rise to First Consul and then to emperor.
Max: Right. And just to contrast, essentially under the Ancien Régime and then all the armies that Napoleon fights, which are based on this model, draw from a relatively restricted officer class, which are all nobility. And then the men they use as infantry are still from a limited pool, and so their armies are quite small because they’re afraid that by giving weapons and military power to the people, it’ll essentially change the political dynamics within these dynastic monarchies and will disrupt them. And so they view the French Revolution as incredibly dangerous and disruptive because they’re afraid of it being exported into their own territories. And so they create counter-revolutionary coalitions to basically stop the spread of these revolutionary ideals.
But France kind of preempts and decides to attack during the revolutionary wars because they’re afraid of being essentially invaded and for Louis XVI being put back on the throne before he’s executed.
Alex: Yeah, and in order to do this, I’m sure Clausewitz speaks of this, but they have to actually emulate the reforms that the revolution makes and that Napoleon makes. They almost have to become what they’re trying to destroy. And in that sense, I think you can almost say that Napoleon is victorious, in that he, yes, he suffers an ultimate military defeat, but he puts France and thus all of Europe on the path that ultimately leads to the disintegration of European monarchy and the old regimes.
Max: Right. There’s this incredible episode during the Napoleonic Wars. This is in 1806, when Prussia gets invaded by Napoleon, and he just completely steamrolls them in, like, 30 days, which was unheard of before, because Prussia was traditionally considered to be this great military power. In the 18th century, it was said about Prussia that it was an army with a state because basically all they did was conquer all these various territories around them under Frederick the Great. He took Silesia during the Austrian War of Succession.
And then I think most of Prussia’s military renown came from the Seven Years’ War, when Frederick the Great managed to withstand basically a coalition of all of the major continental powers attacking Prussia. And so they have this incredible military prestige. They have this system, the Ancien Régime military system, which they think is the greatest and most powerful. And then in 1806 at Jena and Auerstedt, I think.
Alex: Auerstedt, yeah.
Max: Auerstedt. Napoleon just completely steamrolls them, and Clausewitz himself actually participates in this battle, and he’s taken as a prisoner to France. And then he’s released a year later, and he is involved in the reform commission, which is where the Prussians sit down, and they’re like, “Okay, well, obviously something went wrong. Our models don’t work anymore, and obviously Napoleon has unleashed something new in the military game, and we have to adapt, and we have to become a bit like him.” But their concern is the Constitution of France fundamentally changed, and they have essentially massed citizen conscripts, and they’re afraid of giving that power to the people.
So they’re also reluctant to engage in wholesale reforms.
Alex: Right. And yeah, there’s an interesting part there where I think Jena is just this incredible military victory. But Auerstedt, we have to give some credit to Napoleon’s marshals. I think it’s Masséna wins that battle with less than half the force that the Prussians field.
Max: Dumont or Dunoy?
Alex: It might be Davout.
Max: I think it’s Davout.
Alex: It might be Davout.
Max: It’s Davout, yeah.
Alex: Yes, yes. Sorry. We need to give credit where it’s due, because the marshals are also a product of this sort of revolutionary meritocracy, and it’s almost comical. This is a good example, but also in the Italian campaigns, you have this 26-year-old military genius imbued with the spirit of antiquity and incredible charisma and just an unlimited reservoir of energy. And then he’s going up against 70-year-old Austrian generals who made their distinction in the Seven Years’ War and such.
And it’s just a total mismatch. And it’s not like these people are incompetent. It’s not like they’re not brave. But they are old, and they are representing a system that is old, and war is kind of the ultimate decider. That’s the revealer of truth, and I think Napoleon forced the continent and the coalition to realize some truths that—they had to adapt to.
Max: And in contrast to how the cabinet wars of the 18th century were waged, since they had a limited military, their political objectives were usually limited to essentially conquering or reconquering small parts of territory. And this translated itself into military doctrine as being more cautious and more about maneuvers than decisive battles because they don’t want to lose their men. And so essentially they’re trying to cut off the supply lines of their enemy, or they’re trying to capture strategic locations or strategic territories to kind of force a peace agreement because both sides are sort of playing the same game and they’re both cautious. But with Napoleon, this changes because his army is two or three times the size of traditional European armies, and he can just afford to expend his men, and he constantly seeks decisive battles where his goal is to annihilate the enemy army and to also rewrite their constitution. So there’s much more ambition, which is linked to the whole revolutionary movement—of France.
I don’t know if you want to say more on that.
Alex: The political element is very real because just like it is a battle for survival in the case of France, the old regimes are also battling for the very soul of their nations. And this is why it took, what, seven coalitions to bring down Napoleon because they just would not stay down. They could not accept this new power in Europe. They just couldn’t stand it. And so they were willing to expend everything to stop him.
Max: Right. And this brings me back to Clausewitz because essentially his book is two books in one. There was a first period, and he based most of his writings on the notes he had taken from his youth from 1812 until 1827. And his first approach is seeing in Napoleon the essence of warfare itself. The way he approaches war is he goes against all of these geometric theories that had appeared around his time about the optimal angles between your base camp and then your troops and the enemy front line and trying to calculate the correct angle.
And he’s like, “No, this doesn’t get to what war is.” War fundamentally is like a duel. It is a struggle between two entities for the defeat of one another with the goal of destroying their armed forces to impose your political will on them. And in Napoleon, he saw at first this sort of supreme example of this, what the essence of warfare is, it’s maximum exertion of energy and forces to accomplish this great political goal. And eventually he realizes that, well, even in the Napoleonic Wars, there isn’t one decisive battle.
There are a series of battles, and warfare isn’t constant. You have pauses, you have changes. You also have what he calls friction, this idea of war itself being this giant machine with a lot of moving parts, which cause fundamentally unpredictability and a sort of mismatch between what you draw up on war plans and what you execute on the field. And he realizes that even the Napoleonic Wars don’t attain this ideal. And fundamentally, in about 1827, he changes his view on what war is, and he sees the Napoleonic Wars as one possible type of war, but limited wars as also being a valid type of war.
Which is, it is not a failure to live up to the ideal, it’s simply that those limited wars are constrained by the political factors which existed at the time or which provoked limited war. It’s not a failure of the commanders to not execute with all their energy or seek the decisive battle. It’s simply they’re constrained by certain factors, and then they’re playing the game that they think is the best given their circumstances.
Coup d’œil: the anatomy of genius (16:34)
Alex: It’s a very cogent and rational analysis breakdown of what war is. I wonder, does he at all talk about the kind of genius of the great general or of Napoleon in particular, the kind of spirit that elevates the performance of all his soldiers? There’s so many incredible anecdotes of just obscene bravery, on both sides, to be fair.
Max: Right. I do have a quote for that, actually, and I’d love to hear maybe an example on that. But essentially, he has a part where he talks about military genius as being essential to understanding war. And he uses genius not simply in this idea of this great person, but it’s mental aptitude that any army needs to have in their commander to be able to wage effective warfare, and I think he puts it quite well. So you have to consider what kind of mind is able to take decisions under fire, under stress, under abysmal conditions.
So he has this formulation, “If the mind is to emerge unscathed from this relentless struggle with the unforeseen, two qualities are indispensable. First, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth. And second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead. The first of these qualities is described by the French term coup d’œil, and second is determination.” And it’s very probable that he had Napoleon in mind when he was writing this, and probably Frederick the Great.
But if you have any anecdotes on Napoleon which illustrate this, I’d love to hear it.
Alex: Well, it’s very reminiscent of something that David Chandler says in his great book, “The Campaigns of Napoleon,” this sort of description of genius. And many people said of Napoleon, he had an almost uncanny ability to predict the future, and even predict unexpected behavior in his opponent’s military. He had this kind of glimpse into what would happen. And there’s many battles in which this is the case, but it seems like his kind of military genius was very singular. It was very unique.
The Duke of Wellington famously said that his presence alone on the battlefield was worth 40,000 men, and this is, of course, coming from the man who defeated him. It’s also said that at Waterloo, one of the contributing reasons to his defeat was that his body had broken down to the extent where he couldn’t actually go out and survey the battlefield on his own. He has this great quote, “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake,” or something like this. And he was just able to so quickly synthesize information and create a plan based on that information. It really is sort of incredible when you read the accounts of these battles, the absolute incredible stress he must be under, literally the fate of himself, his nation, on his shoulders, and he’s able to just be so sharp and decisive, and delegate when needed.
It is just an awe-inspiring sort of talent.
Max: I believe during the Battle of Austerlitz, there’s an example of him predicting enemy movements, if you recall it.
Alex: Yeah. I believe it’s the Pratzen Heights, I think, which is this excellent position on the battlefield that the French give up in order to lure the Russians or the Austrians.
Max: I think it’s the Austrians.
Alex: Yeah. And using this great fog cover, he’s able to basically lure them and then smash through their center, which is just this totally It’s like a brilliant chess move. He knows exactly what they’re going to do. He’s got the whole thing planned out in his mind, and to see it enacted on the battlefield as he thought it, must have been an incredible feeling. So yeah, there’s many instances of his military genius on display, and that’s probably the most infamous, at Austerlitz.
Max: Can you talk a little bit about what allows him to display this military genius? Because obviously he himself is amazing, but he also creates a bunch of military reforms which allow him to exercise his genius, and if you want to get into that a bit.
Alex: Yeah. I’m not so familiar with the exact reforms. I think he creates the first staff college or something like this to train officers. I think part of it really is he knew what he had in his marshals. Obviously, the whole thing is being orchestrated by him through one man.
He said that one bad general is better than two good ones, and that an army needs hierarchy, it needs command. But he also knew when to delegate, because he had some incredibly capable, brave and daring men under him.
Max: Well, he divides his army into corps. And he gives semi-autonomy to his various commander of these corps. And this is one of the things that allows the French troops to move so quickly, because they’re no longer obliged to move as one mass. They can take various routes to get to the same location. And so he can go twice or even three times as fast.
And I think the other thing is, essentially he, instead of using very long supply lines for food, essentially his army lives off the land. Through pillaging.
Alex: Right, or whatever, purchasing. Whatever they have access to. Yeah, no, it is true. You have to think in the time, the gap of communication to have basically a courier run between the different corps, which could be many miles apart, would be just so hazardous and difficult. You have to give some autonomy to your most capable generals, and he does a very good job of that.
I think ultimately it lets him down in the end, but that in part, I think, was because he lost many of his—greatest friends and marshals. This was an era where men led from the front. Napoleon himself was infamous for sort of standing well within the range of enemy cannonballs, and cannons are hitting the ground around him, and he’s just got his eye to his telescope, just surveying—the enemy lines. And of course, there’s some just outrageous scenes of personal courage at Lodi during the first Italian campaign where the assault on this bridge in the town of Lodi is halted, and Bonaparte single-handedly rallies his soldiers and leads the charge across the bridge, right into Austrian guns. Similarly, at Arcole later on in the campaign, where another assault on another bridge falters, and he personally goes and raises the standard, the French flag, and tries to renew the assault on the French bridge.
I think this time, his aides tackle him into a marsh, which was probably wise because he really many times came within inches of death. I think one of his close friends and aides dies at Lodi because he’s shielding Napoleon from bullets with his own body. So there’s so many scenes of outrageous heroism, not just from Napoleon, but from his marshals, from the opposing generals and armies. Goethe says of it, “Napoleon brought a kind of nobility to the age in which all men could be heroes.” And that seems very true, that the heroes produced on all sides equate anything that Rome or Athens ever produced.
There is this kind of mythic quality of the age, which I think draws in a lot of people, myself included. The narrative is just so grand and romantic and mythic that you almost can’t believe it happened, if not for the fact that there is an infinite amount of historical documentation.
Max: Famously, Napoleon was very close to his own troops. He’d walk around the various camps. He’d sit down with his men, he’d talk to them. I think he knew quite a lot of them by name, too. And this is, I think, very important and something Clausewitz also understood theoretically.
It’s like contrasted to the 18th century mode of war. There was incredible harsh hierarchy and severe punishments and discipline enforced by the officers on the infantrymen, and Napoleon, on contrary, obviously there’s still discipline, but he manages to touch them personally and kind of break down the sort of aristocratic distance between the officers and the common men. And every common man, in some way, can see himself reflected in Napoleon. And I think this is one of the things that allows Clausewitz to perceive one of the important parts of war that a lot of theorists in his age miss, which is the moral factor. It’s like the—spirit and the courage of the army, which Napoleon, through his own figure and also through his approach to war, and also the different base of his troops, is able to nourish.
And it allows for things like him defeating armies which are something like two times the size of his own and through this inspiration, through this courage. It just shows an enduring part of war, I think, which we talk about antiquity and we think about valor and courage, as you mentioned. But there’s this idea among 19th-century war theorists that those things didn’t matter, really, that what mattered was essentially how many guns you had, how many men you had, and they tried to essentially make war more calculable, more quantifiable, mathematical. And Clausewitz is looking and living through these wars, and he realizes that you’re missing something crucial to war. It’s like the material conditions of warfare can change, but there are certain enduring aspects of the human psyche and group dynamics which have a huge impact on the course of a battle.
Alex: Because materially, what he did is just totally improbable. It’s almost unbelievable. But on that note of what you said, he had an affectionate nickname, The Little Corporal, because I think at some battle, the General Bonaparte sees a cannon out of position and personally goes over and helps the artillery men move it into position, which, of course, is the job of a corporal, not of the supreme commander of the army. And yeah, so I think the morale component, the spiritual component of warfare is very, very compelling, especially in this age where you still have these grand cavalry charges. You still have last stands.
You have the last stand of the Old Guard at Waterloo, where many of them choose death rather than surrender. Likewise, when he returns from exile from Elba, and these armies are sent to stop him, and they see him and he announces himself like, “If you want to shoot your emperor, here I am,” and they join him. They must know rationally, materially, they have no chance. And yet they are so compelled—they are so motivated that they will go to war for him, even in his condition after all the tragedies of Russia and of Leipzig and all these other great disasters. Men will still follow him.
Men will still die for him.
War as the continuation of politics (28:05)
Max: This brings me to another point that Clausewitz makes also, a large part inspired by Napoleon. It’s essentially, again, a reaction to a lot of military writing from his own age and from the previous century, where they’re simply focused on battles, on tactics, on military affairs. And Clausewitz is like, you have to zoom out and realize that warfare is not simply something that emerges on its own or warfare is not this constant thing that happens all the time because you have periods of peace, and it would simply not be sustainable. But war is born from the womb of politics, he says. And this is I think one of the most important aspects of war he seizes, which is the union of politics of war as one whole.
And for him, Napoleon embodies sort of at the same time a statesman and a general, and it’s like the way the French wage war, the way Napoleon wages war, and their political objectives are also united with the material factors that they have at hand, as we mentioned a bit before. And so Clausewitz has this famous formulation which encapsulates this idea, which is a little bit misunderstood usually, but it is war is the continuation of politics by other means. And what he means essentially is that war is at the same time the tool of a statesman to get some kind of interest that he wants, so it’s a subjective part of politics as a tool, and it’s simply a means to some kind of greater political end. But at the same time, war is constrained by some objective political factors, and this is the sort of the time in which it happens, the historical circumstances, and he sees this nowhere as clear as with the French Revolution and the incredible forces that it releases, the amount of men that can be used, and then Napoleon himself as a figure.
Alex: That is interesting. I do wonder how encompassing his idea of the political is because that is certainly a component of it. I have a sense that in Napoleon’s mind, whether he actually believed this or whether it was sort of implicit, I don’t actually know if he was genuinely trying to serve the greatest fortunes for his country or if France was merely a vehicle of his own ambition. And—
Max: Well, he does make civilian reforms, too, and he’s trying to sort of change France itself and save it from whatever destruction that the Revolution has caused.
Alex: Of course, but I don’t think this is incompatible with the—point that the destiny of nations could very well be subsumed by the destiny of a man of that ambition. In fact, there’s numerous counterexamples—to the case where he is promoting French interests, to where he is promoting his own interests. Surely, the 100 Days, the return from exile, is not in France’s interest. It is almost certainly a doomed struggle, but just the scope of his ambition, his spirit, his like kind of fire cannot allow him to remain on this island seeing the world continue without him. There’s a real sense in which I think France was almost a means to an end for him.
Not that he didn’t truly love his adopted country or anything, but I think the scale of his life and the scale of his ambition actually are greater than the destiny of his nation in some sense.
Max: I don’t think it’s incompatible with what Clausewitz said, because his point isn’t that necessarily war will be used as a tool for the greater good or for the political nation, however we want to interpret that. His point is more so that the political factor will permeate all of war, and it’s like trying to conquer Silesia, as Frederick the Great was trying to do, and what Napoleon is trying to do is essentially create a continental system with different constitutions modeled on the French Empire, will mean that the means that you use to achieve that are completely different. And it’s like there will be a constant interaction between what kind of means are used, so how war is waged, and with the political objective itself, and those two will mutually modify each other. So he’s simply pointing out that war is within this broader context that you cannot isolate if you truly want to understand what is going on.
The Napoleonic type (33:00)
Alex: Right. Right, and Emerson’s critique of Napoleon is interesting, where he essentially says that Napoleon’s problem was that there was no sort of end to his ambition. There was no higher order of values that he was following, and there was actual purpose behind his like endless wars. I’m sure in his mind, there were practical considerations and purposes, but Emerson’s point would be that because his ambition was so unbounded, it was inevitable that he would eventually burn himself out. And what’s interesting is while he is militarily defeated, while he is physically in decline, his mind is still sharp.
His spirit is still ablaze. It’s almost as if there is some kind of spirit inhabiting him that is pushing him beyond what his body and his self are capable of, like he is almost sort of possessed, which is a kind of interesting frame of understanding his actions through—that he is... Sorry, go ahead.
Max: Famously, Hegel was at Jena in 1806, and he glimpsed Napoleon, and he said something along the lines that he saw the world’s soul on horseback. Like he saw in Napoleon, maybe the spirit you’re referring to, as the culmination of historical forces in this one singular person, and this force, essentially, of modernization, which forces the whole world to reckon with it, and also which changes the whole world.
Alex: I think Hegel correctly understands Napoleon as a type, as do others. I think Nietzsche and Emerson are similar, and I’ve sort of come to this understanding in my own way. I think what is interesting about Napoleon, of course, is the narrative of his life, the sort of—
Max: It’s incredibly romantic. It’s like—
Alex: It is very romantic
Max: he himself thought of himself as a novel, and I think when he’s in exile, he says something along the lines of, “What a novel my life has been.”
Alex: Right. Right. At least I’m glad he can appreciate the great artistic achievement of the life that he has lived, this incredible actualization of human potential. But what biographers tend to underplay or misunderstand is sort of the Napoleonic type, the spirit which inhabited him, and this is what Hegel is recognizing. Goethe recognizes something similar, that this man is actually kind of an anachronism.
Nietzsche calls him a resurrection of the spirit of antiquity, which I think is about right, because he is sort of a throwback to an earlier time, an earlier age, where ambition of this scale was almost more comprehensible. And so when biographers try to write the narrative of Napoleon’s life, I think they fail to really reckon with what his type was really meant for, in some sense. They focus on the institutions, the reforms. They focus on the Napoleonic Code, which is still in place in 30 or 40 countries. They focus on the military victories, but really, what is the Napoleonic type?
It is like a higher type of person, in almost all ways. Yes, it is cruel, it is calculating, but it is also creative. It is vital. It is truly romantic and mythic. There is just so much to be captivated by, and it has captivated, of course, historians, scholars, artists, and the men who fought and died under him.
There is something world historic about him that I think is lost in the pages of scholarly facts and figures.
Max: Well, Balzac said about Napoleon that essentially he energized a whole generation, and he made, I’m paraphrasing completely, but he made the possibility of dreams seem actual, in the sense that he gave the idea that basically anyone from any kind of station in life could advance, and he could achieve something great. It’s like he, as you said, inspired many artists, many writers. Stendhal probably is one of the most famous ones with his “Red and Black.” But yeah, he was just this, you could say, I guess, like a magnet or an attractor that pulls all of Europe to a higher place.
Alex: Yeah. The sort of character in “The Red and the Black,” Julien, literally cries reading the memoirs of Saint Helena. And it’s like, it is so moving to, I think, types of spirits that are similar to his, and yeah. So those characters, of course, and those novels are very good examples, and they sort of have to hide their fascination with Napoleon because they’re living during the Restoration, and this sort of hero worship is prohibited, and they’re attempting to return to a previous sort of morality. But it can’t be reverted.
The sort of changes, the world historical force that Napoleon was set into course things which were inevitable and washed away the monarchies of Europe. They washed away the sort of conservative ancient regimes and created something new, something, I think, in a real sense we are still living under. I think he really did create the modern state in a lot of ways. And many of the people who’ve kind of taken after him, the sort of archetype of the military commander, founder, lawmaker, the sort of like de Gaulles and Atatürks of the world—who have followed him all understand themselves in the lens of Napoleon and try to emulate him and admire him. And there’s something, I think, very poetic about that.
Just as Napoleon, as a child in the French Military Academy, isolated from his peers, was reading the campaigns of Caesar and Alexander. I think it is terrifying and inspiring that the type of spirit that embodied Napoleon is still alive. It has not been extinguished, and the fact is in the existence of Napoleon, who is just barely removed from us, just 200 years. You can see pictures online of soldiers who served in the Grande Armée, who served under him. It is so unbelievably recent.
Compare this to the sort of Caesars of the world from which we are 20 centuries removed. They read almost more like myth than fact, and yet the fact of Napoleon’s myths are that they are not fiction. They are true. They are extensively documented. And this, I think, in a way, sets him apart from figures of antiquity, Achilles, Odysseus, et cetera.
He is—
Max: Which are more mythical. Yeah.
Alex: They are mythical, but he proves that that sort of spirit, which you can see if you glimpse into Plutarch’s “Lives,” that spirit still inhabits humanity, and I find that quite uplifting. Or at least the part of me, the small part of my soul that perhaps contains a part of Napoleon’s soul, resonates very deeply with that, and I think his example uplifts all those people of similar disposition.
Max: You kind of answered this, but I was going to ask, what have you gotten most out of studying Napoleon? Like, why should one study his life, read his memoirs, read about him?
Alex: Well, just like on an aesthetic level, there’s just this incredible display of human potential, and it really does make you stop and consider what it is to be a human. It is so outside the sort of framework that we live in. It is so foreign and different and captivating.
Max: And yet close.
Alex: And yet close. And there is a—
Max: When you read his letters to Josephine—in that sense, he’s very human and very relatable.
Alex: It’s almost a relief that he has vices and personal foibles because it proves that he is still a man. He is not a god, and that is all the more uplifting for those of us who are also just men.
Friction, the trinity, and war as an art (41:47)
Max: Hmm. I think I should mention why Clausewitz is interesting to read, especially, as we’ve discussed, his historical context, his reaction to Napoleon. Essentially with how fundamentally unpredictable war is, and he uses the term friction for this. It’s like all of these sorts of uncertainties, the fog of war, the fact that men can fear and not want to fight or not go into battle. Instead of trying to come up with a science of war, which would be very quantifiable and mathematized, he’s trying to come up with a framework which, essentially, you can use to analyze any kind of conflict or war.
He’s trying to create an art out of war, or he says it’s closer to an art in the sense that you cannot lay down any kind of prescriptive doctrine, but you can amass the various elements which make up war, and the various elements will have different weights in different historical periods. I think he has this famous trinity where he divides it between essentially the raw passion, but also courage, hatred, and enmity, which is usually embodied in the people, but it can arise at any kind of level. He also talks about the military genius that we just mentioned, or the intelligence in warfare, and this is the more calculative reason or the great almost an artistic capability of seizing all of the elements in one look, what he calls the coup d’œil, and to make a decision. It’s like discriminate between all of the various elements, seize the ones which are the most relevant, and make a decision. And the final part of the trinity is more with relation to the political process.
So, this is war as an instrument of some kind of political machine, but the machine itself is within a broader context and influenced by whatever political factors are relevant to the day. Be it dynastic monarchies and cabinet wars, or the post-revolutionary wars with mass armies, or today now with drones, and limited demographies.
All these factors will constrain what kind of wars are waged and how they’re waged. And so he’s writing this essentially to form the mind and for one to emerge with a better, what he calls tact of judgment. So this fundamental, irreductible capability of making the right decision under conditions of uncertainty, which I think for him were, in large part, the fundamental genius of Napoleon and figures like Napoleon.
Alex: That’s very well put. I think it is interesting to reflect on why war is so captivating. There’s obviously lots of horror. There is also, I think, the examples of the Napoleonic Wars. There is the highest elevation of the human spirit.
Unbelievable courage, superhuman strength, durability. It really does make you wonder what is possible when you are in life or death combat with an opposing force. What comes out of that? What great efforts can be called upon? And so I don’t really need an explanation of why war is interesting.
I sort of inherently seek to understand it. I think many people kind of have secret fantasies of dying in war. Secret romantic fantasies.
Max: Especially young men, yes.
Alex: Yeah. I think it’s—
Max: A common one
Alex: it’s an essential part of growing up. Or perhaps not growing up.
Max: But like Napoleon, war is a very Janus-faced thing. There’s a possibility for greatness and valor and courage, but it is also incredibly disruptive. It’s cruel. It’s also a tragedy in many ways. We can think of the reaction to Napoleon in Spain, I think, starting from 1808, we get the first kind of guerrilla warfare, and it actually comes from the Spanish, guerrilla, like small war, and essentially there are no restrictions.
Everyone is considered a combatant. And the men, the women, the children fight to some extent, but are also slaughtered by the French men. And so Napoleon also unleashes this incredible cruelty and tragedy in the world, which is a large part of war, and must not be forgotten, because it’s easy to be cavalier about war and only see the courage and possibility for valor and greatness and ambition.
Alex: It is. And I think that is part of what makes it captivating, because in the same vein, in the same war even, you have one of the greatest feats of bravery at the Pass of Somosierra, where 150 Polish cavalry from Napoleon’s army charge into four batteries of Spanish cannon. Which is just an unbelievably courageous thing to do in such a kind of narrow canyon pass. And each successive battery they take, they lose half their men, they lose their commanding officers, and by the end of it, they have 12 guys remaining, and they’re being led by a 20-year-old Polish sergeant. And when they finally take the fourth battery, the 21-year-old sergeant is just covered in blood.
He’s got, like 12 bayonet wounds. He’s surely dying, and Napoleon comes over and strips the Legion of Honor cross off his own chest and gives it to this person. And so in that, I think you have this great encapsulation of the brutality of war, this kid charging into Spanish guns. And the men behind these guns are patriots. They’re defending their homeland.
And yet there is just something so moving about that scene of the Polish sergeant receiving the highest honor from the most powerful man in the world. And I think that scene captures all the aspects of war that you’re talking about now.
Max: It’s interesting because in Clausewitz, you don’t really get this impression. This is one of the interesting things with him, is because he’s writing from a very, you could say, descriptive, scientific point of view. It’s like he mentions some atrocities and stuff, but he’s not really moralizing about it, and he’s not treating it in a tragic manner. It is simply for him a fact of warfare. And so he’s trying to discover, as I mentioned, what are these elements that make up war as a whole, and how can we understand it analytically and scientifically.
And he’s also not doing this in a way that you could think of like, how do we prevent war? For him, it is an inevitable process which is born out of clashing interests, and some things are fundamentally beyond dialogue and beyond the possibility of rationally discussing and finding concessions. Some things can only be born out in bloodshed. But he has this very analytical and cold approach, which contrasts with the other two sides of warfare that we’ve just discussed.
Alex: Was it Louis XIV famously had his cannons engraved with the sentence, “The last argument of kings”?
Max: Yeah. There’s some truth to that.
Alex: The Greeks understood it, if I recall, as a kind of seasonal thing. It was like a season. It just came—it was sort of inevitable, cyclical.
Max: Yeah. Do you have anything else you’d want to add?
Alex: Oh, I’m sure I’ll think of something. We can get unhinged now, I think. We can really say whatever we want. There’s nothing stopping us.
Max: The possibilities are limitless.
Alex: Yeah.
No, I like what Nietzsche says about Napoleon. He’s the synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman. I think in some sense you can say the same thing about war. Of course, I think Nietzsche perhaps uses the superhuman in a different sense, but you see this sort of elevation of man and also this leveling, this degradation, contained within the same sort of action.
Max: And even within the same sort of man as with Napoleon—
Alex: Within a single man, yeah
Max: he achieves the greatest heights probably any human can achieve. It’s like emperor of a continental empire, and the largest empire that Europe has seen since the Roman Empire. And also, he’s reduced basically to nothing on an island, and he wastes the rest of his days there, which aren’t very long.
Alex: Right. And I really don’t think there was any way. As long as he was able, I think he would just keep fighting. It was just kind of, again, I feel like he was driven by a spirit almost outside of himself. Like his body had failed, his empire had fallen, and yet this fire in him would not let him rest.
And you see in the memoirs this man suffering great pain, both because he’s dying of stomach cancer, but also because of the sort of tragedies—
Max: But you don’t believe he was poisoned? You haven’t—
Alex: The British doctor probably poisoned him, too. Yes. No, we can do a little conspiracy hour. That would be fun. But I think there is a real Greek tragedy-type sense of his life, and that I think ties into the sort of romance.
There is a way in which tragedy gives weight to life. And I don’t like to reflect too much on the downfall of Bonaparte because it makes me very sad, but I do strongly believe that there is a real way in which Napoleon has not lost yet.
Max: Maybe he’s in you.
Alex: Maybe. But even in a literal material sense, as we’ve been discussing, the kind of reforms that he made—were adopted by the other nations of Europe and eventually led to the fall of his enemies, essentially. He set into motion events which ultimately did destroy his enemies. And then yes, of course, there’s the spiritual sense in which he is the most written about man since Jesus. Like new books, new art, new things—
Has the Napoleonic type actually been defeated? (52:04)
Max: Every year, yeah
Alex: yeah, every year. His name, even in the sort of popular biography, is grouped in with Caesar and Alexander, which can you imagine anything that would make him happier? That would’ve been his childhood dream, and it was actualized. So yes, he suffered a military defeat. It’s unclear to me whether the Napoleonic type has been defeated.
I am sort of not of the opinion that we’ve reached a true end of history in which that type is not allowed to exist, because I think that type will exist whether or not we want it to.
Max: Well, Hegel saw the end of history in Napoleon, because for him, he had sort of completed the historical process. I’m simplifying and butchering Hegel here, but he completed the historical process, which results fundamentally in the equality of all citizens before the law, and this was what part of the French Revolution was about. And Napoleon, through his conquests, was exporting these ideals to the places he conquered. And for Hegel, even if his own lifetime, the world wasn’t transformed fully, he already saw the germs of the end of this history. It’s like the fundamental political equality of all citizens before the law, it can take various forms.
We’ve seen various regimes since Napoleonic France. But it does seem, if we look at the world today, apart a few oddities, most countries have at least a formal recognition of all rights for citizens equally.
Alex: And yet the thymotic spirit of man still resides within us—still resides within some. And—
Max: One would hope
Alex: for some people, perhaps liberal democracy is not a sufficient endpoint. Perhaps there is still a Napoleonic kind of megalomania which exists in man, and maybe it is just embers now, but it might not take much. It might not even take a revolution to see those embers stirred.
Max: Mm. Well, in his “End of History,” Fukuyama did consider that history had ended. It was basically unequally distributed, but he also did concede towards the end that some men would be unsatisfied with the end of history and would essentially seek to restart it—
Alex: Just out of boredom.
Max: Basically, yeah.
Alex: Yeah.
And I don’t necessarily rejoice at this fact. I think the cost of creating Napoleons is very great. Even his own case, it’s a continent destroyed, millions dead. It is a serious undertaking to create new Napoleons. And yet, I think a culture, a civilization incapable of producing Napoleons is one that has thoroughly exhausted its most vital and important energies.
Max: Mm. Well, I think as we mentioned about Napoleon electrifying a whole generation, I think this was essentially Nietzsche’s view on Napoleon, is that he was the crown jewel of a culture, and he himself, I think one could see Nietzsche’s philosophy of history as like there are certain cultures which produce these types of men. And through them, there’s a lot of destruction, there’s a lot of pain and suffering, but they also create something higher through their own actions as lawmakers—and they bring human culture to greater heights, and without it, human culture suffocates and dies, and turns into, essentially, these herd animals who are content with proliferating and mere biological life without seeking any higher aspirations. And Napoleon had been, at least for Nietzsche, the last example of this spirit of the great lawgiver who can fundamentally change the course of history and bring it to greater heights.
Alex: Nietzsche says that the subliminal yearning of the European herd animal at the time for a true supreme commander, because, at that point, kings had to rely on things like divine right, or they had to say that they were really servants of the people, tools of the common good. And yet here we have a true commander who literally crowns himself, who picks up the crown of France with his sword, and he writes of this event as almost the higher happiness of the time. And I think it’s worth considering what that higher happiness exactly is. Is it what the soldiers who fought under him felt? Is it what Stendhal felt?
Is it what Beethoven felt when he composed the Third Symphony? Is it what we now feel discussing these events? What is this higher happiness exactly? Why was it such a relief? Why was it actually a necessity for Europe?
Emerson says of him, “Such a man was required. Such a man was created.” I think in that sense, he was inevitable, and perhaps he is still inevitable.