Month: December 2023

Thackeray on Turner and The Fighting Temeraire

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The Fighting Téméraire is my favourite painting.  So it is for the English.  If you want to know why, read the views of William Makepeace Thackeray set out below.  The painting for me is like parts of Shakespeare or Mozart – a show stopper that renders language useless.  But they did not have to wait a century for people to get the point.

‘If you are particularly anxious to know what is the best picture in the room, not the biggest, and exactly contrary to the best, I must request you to turn your attention to a noble river-piece by J. W. M. Turner, Esquire, R.A., “The Fighting Téméraire” — as grand a painting as ever figured on the walls of any Academy, or came from the easel of any painter. The old Téméraire is dragged to her last home by a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer. A mighty red sun, amidst a host of flaring clouds, sinks to rest on one side of the picture, and illumines a river that seems interminable, and a countless navy that fades away into such a wonderful distance as never was painted before. The little demon of a steamer is belching out a volume (why do I say a volume? not a hundred volumes could express it) of foul, lurid, red-hot, malignant smoke, paddling furiously, and lashing up the water round about it; while behind it (a cold grey moon looking down on it), slow, sad, and majestic, follows the brave old ship, with death, as it were, written on her. I think we ought not, in common gratitude, to sacrifice entirely these noble old champions of ours, but that we should have somewhere a museum of their skeletons, which our children might visit, and think of the brave deeds which were done in them. The bones of the Agammemnon and the Captain, the Vanguard, the Culloden, and the Victory ought to be sacred relics, for Englishmen to worship almost. Think of them when alive, and braving the battle and the breeze, they carried Nelson and his heroes victorious by the cape of Saint Vincent, in the dark waters of Aboukir, and through the fatal conflict of Trafalgar. All these things, my dear Bricabrac, are, you will say, absurd, and not to the purpose. Be it so; but Bowbellites as we are, we Cockneys feel our hearts leap up when we recall them to memory; and every clerk in Threadneedle Street feels the strength of a Nelson, when he thinks of the mighty actions performed by him.

It is absurd, you will say (and with a great deal of reason), for Titmarsh, or any other Briton, to grow so politically enthusiastic about a four-foot canvas, representing a ship, a steamer, a river, and a sunset. But herein surely lies the power of the great artist. He makes you see and think of a great deal more than the objects before you; he knows how to soothe or intoxicate, to fire or to depress, by a few notes, or forms, or colours, of which we cannot trace the effect to the source, but only acknowledge the power. I recollect some years ago, at the theatre at Weimar, hearing Beethoven’s “Battle of Vittoria,” in which, amidst a storm of glorious music, the air of ” God save the King” was introduced. The very instant it began, every Englishman in the house was bolt upright, and so stood reverently until the air was played out. Why so? From some such thrill of excitement as makes us glow and rejoice over Mr. Turner and his “Fighting Téméraire” which I am sure, when the art of translating colours into music or poetry shall be discovered, will be found to be a magnificent national ode or piece of music.

I must tell you, however, that Mr. Turner’s performances are the most part quite incomprehensible. to me; and that his other pictures, which he is pleased to call “Cicero at his Villa,” “Agrippina with the Ashes of Germanicus,” “Pluto carrying off Proserpina,” or what you will, are not a whit more natural, or less mad, than they used to be in former years, since he has taken nature, or attempted (like your French barbers) to embellish it…. O ye gods ! why will he not stick to copying her majestical countenance, instead of daubing it with some absurd antics of his own?’

Passing Bull 375 – Nonsense about a cricketer

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Passing Bull 375 – Nonsense about a cricketer

Where we live here in Australia, it is not unlawful to say something that is unreasonable, unhinged, or likely to offend someone.  It is different in Iran, Russia, or Turkey. 

But an Australian cricketer, Usman Khawaja, as decent a national representative as we are likely to see, is being roundly castigated for making what are called ‘motherhood’ statements.  Among other things, it is said that in the context of a dreadful war, the statements are ‘political’. 

To the extent that you can give any meaning to that kind of weasel proposition, it is bloody dangerous.  The last form of speech you want to shut down is ‘political’ speech.  That is why people who want to undermine decency in public life move to stop people speaking out against them.  And war being the scourge of humanity, it is vital that people are free to say so.  The greatest crimes against humanity have been committed by people who so terrified others that they kept silent in the face of the crimes of their government.

There are two paintings that are monuments not just to Spanish art but to civilisation – and not just western civilisation.  They are The Third of May 1808 by Goya, and Guernica by Picasso.  They are and have been admired and revered throughput the world.  They are protests against, and denunciations of, the horrors of war by two of the greatest painters we have known.  And each artist obviously invested what might be called his soul into the painting.  And, if you wanted to, you might say that each painting involved a statement that might be called moral, or political, or worse – propaganda.  (For example, Guernica makes clear that the main victims of the bombing were women and children.)

Any such statement about either painting being ‘political’ would add precisely nothing to our understanding of the world, but I have not heard it said that Goya should also have also put forward the views of Napoleon and the Vatican on his subject, or that Picasso should have also put forward the views of Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and the Vatican on his subject.  (Franco saw himself as standing for Christendom and engaged the clergy in his missions of death.)

Sadly, there are times when the level of what passes for debate about the current war in the Middle East fails to rise above a squabble between seven-year-olds behind the State School shelter shed and the universal riposte – ‘Well – you started it!’ 

In the name of Heaven, you can be scolded for suggesting that people should stop killing each other – at least for a while.  The word ‘ceasefire’ is apparently fraught – very fraught.

And may I come back to art and politics or morals?  Have you ever felt like me at a place like the Uffizi Gallery – ‘If I see just one more half-naked bloke dying in agony of open wounds, I will throw up on the bloody spot, and get out of this chamber horrors forever’?  When you look at the art of what we call the Renaissance, all that stuff that Kenneth Clark moons over, how much of it was not full-on propaganda for what was then in the process of ceasing to be the one universal church?

Blessings for Christmas – if I may be permitted either of those terms.

Khawaja – Gaza - freedom of speech – offensive language,

The fog of war

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

Correspondence about the conflict in Gaza prompts the following.

What is the legal basis of this war?  As I follow it, there is no nation or entity of Gaza.  In what sense is its government recognised, either as being authorised to speak for the people of Gaza, or otherwise recognised as an identifiable entity?  In other words, what people are identifiable as the respondents to the declaration of war and the invasion?  Who has what authority to speak for the government or people of Gaza?

The commentary on either side is partisan.  The main reproach of one side for the other is that it is partisan.  This is predictable and funny in discussing a football match.  It is neither in this tragic and lethal context.  The main complaint is that the other side does not concede enough about its fault, or the suffering it has caused.  This follows necessarily from partisanship, and failing to agree at what point in history you set the clock running for past events to be counted for or against either party.

One side says the other wants to annihilate it.  The other says its enemy has stopped it being born.

This is a form of guerrilla war.  The rules of war are hard to apply.  How do you tell ‘civilians’ from those who are not?  At what ratio of casualties does defence cease to be proportionate?

On both sides ‘freedom of speech’ becomes illusory.  It is at best odd to suggest that people should not be partisan – by talking about their case rather than that of their enemy.

If truth is the first casualty of war, sense and fairness are fast in line.

As it happens, while writing the above my eye fell on what Macaulay said about religious fanatics.  The English were not sorry to see the end of the Puritans.  Their mark on the U S is indelible.  Fortunately, they missed us.  Under Cromwell, they wanted to shut the pubs.

While the majority of the Anglican clergy quitted, in one direction, the position which they had originally occupied, the majority of the Puritan body departed, in a direction diametrically opposite, from the principles and practices of their fathers. The persecution which the separatists had undergone had been severe enough to irritate, but not severe enough to destroy. They had been, not tamed into submission, but baited into savageness and stubbornness. After the fashion of oppressed sects, they mistook their own vindictive feelings for emotions of piety, encouraged in themselves by reading and meditation, a disposition to brood over their wrongs, and, when they had worked themselves up into hating their enemies, imagined that they were only hating the enemies of heaven. In the New Testament there was little indeed which, even when perverted by the most disingenuous exposition, could seem to countenance the indulgence of malevolent passions. But the Old Testament contained the history of a race selected by God to be witnesses of his unity and ministers of his vengeance, and specially commanded by him to do many things which, if done without his special command, would have been atrocious crimes. In such a history it was not difficult for fierce and gloomy spirits to find much that might be distorted to suit their wishes. The extreme Puritans therefore began to feel for the Old Testament a preference, which, perhaps, they did not distinctly avow even to themselves; but which showed itself in all their sentiments and habits. They paid to the Hebrew language a respect which they refused to that tongue in which the discourses of Jesus and the epistles of Paul have come down to us. They baptized their children by the names, not of Christian saints, but of Hebrew patriarchs and warriors. In defiance of the express and reiterated declarations of Luther and Calvin, they turned the weekly festival by which the Church had, from the primitive times, commemorated the resurrection of her Lord, into a Jewish Sabbath. They sought for principles of jurisprudence in the Mosaic law, and for precedents to guide their ordinary conduct in the books of Judges and Kings. Their thoughts and discourse ran much on acts which were assuredly not recorded as examples for our imitation. The prophet who hewed in pieces a captive king, the rebel general who gave the blood of a queen to the dogs, the matron who, in defiance of plighted faith, and of the laws of eastern hospitality, drove the nail into the brain of the fugitive ally who had just fed at her board, and who was sleeping under the shadow of her tent, were proposed as models to Christians suffering under the tyranny of princes and prelates. Morals and manners were subjected to a code resembling that of the synagogue, when the synagogue was in its worst state. The dress, the deportment, the language, the studies, the amusements of the rigid sect were regulated on principles not unlike those of the Pharisees who, proud of their washed hands and broad phylacteries, taunted the Redeemer as a sabbath-breaker and a winebibber. It was a sin to hang garlands on a Maypole, to drink a friend’s health, to fly a hawk, to hunt a stag, to play at chess, to wear love-locks, to put starch into a ruff, to touch the virginals, to read the Fairy Queen. Rules such as these, rules which would have appeared insupportable to the free and joyous spirit of Luther, and contemptible to the serene and philosophical intellect of Zwingli, threw over all life a more than monastic gloom. The learning and eloquence by which the great Reformers had been eminently distinguished, and to which they had been, in no small measure, indebted for their success, were regarded by the new school of Protestants with suspicion, if not with aversion. Some precisians had scruples about teaching the Latin grammar, because the names of Mars, Bacchus, and Apollo occurred in it. The fine arts were all but proscribed. The solemn peal of the organ was superstitious. The light music of Ben Jonson’s masques was dissolute. Half the fine paintings in England were idolatrous, and the other half indecent. The extreme Puritan was at once known from other men by his gait, his garb, his lank hair, the sour solemnity of his face, the upturned white of his eyes, the nasal twang with which he spoke, and above all, by his peculiar dialect. He employed, on every occasion, the imagery and style of Scripture. Hebraisms violently introduced into the English language, and metaphors borrowed from the boldest lyric poetry of a remote age and country, and applied to the common concerns of English life, were the most striking peculiarities of this cant, which moved, not without cause, the derision both of Prelatists and libertines.

Thus the political and religious schism which had originated in the sixteenth century was, during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, constantly widening. Theories tending to Turkish despotism were in fashion at Whitehall. Theories tending to republicanism were in favour with a large portion of the House of Commons. The violent Prelatists who were, to a man, zealous for prerogative, and the violent Puritans who were, to a man, zealous for the privileges of Parliament, regarded each other with animosity more intense than that which, in the preceding generation, had existed between Catholics and Protestants.

Passing Bull 374 – Appealing to the mob

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

According to Shakespeare, the mob went wild when Caesar refused the crown.  They loved him even more when he failed physically in front of them.  He could be one of them!

He could also be like Trump – who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his followers would not blink. 

Casca had seen it all.

Marry, before he fell down, when he perceived the common herd was glad he refused the crown, he plucked me ope his doublet and offered them his throat to cut.  An I had been a man of any occupation, if I would not have taken him at a word, I would I might go to hell among the rogues.  And so he fell.  When he came to himself again, he said, if he had done or said anything amiss, he desired their worships to think it was his infirmity.  Three or four wenches, where I stood, cried ‘Alas, good soul!’ and forgave him with all their hearts: but there’s no heed to be taken of them; if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less.  (1.2.269-275)

A learned commentator (Philip Brockbank) says:

Caesar uses his histrionic abilities to satisfy his audience’s expectations, contriving to make himself appear not only more god like but also more human than ordinary mortals.  That tense and ambivalent relationship between the public and its leader can make or unmake tyrants – it is ready to go either way – the divergence effect of catastrophe theory.  Because the people are satisfied as spectators, it seems that they acquiesce in or participate in the casual terror of Caesar’s regime.

The playwright saw it all – if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less.

Except that Trump would not have refused the crown.  He can’t help himself. 

And in the play, the crowd is about to whipped up to havoc and the dogs of war by the most duplicitous piece of mob oratory known in our letters – and then they butcher an innocent poet in the Roman gutter. 

P J Brockbank was led to conclude his paper as follows.

The play was, and remains, capable of awaking its audiences to a fuller and more sympathetic understanding of the catastrophic dynamics of human community.  But if it teaches us to distrust our rulers, it also teaches us to distrust the distrusters.

Some pairs in King Lear

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Two old men, King Lear and the Earl of Gloucester (or Gloster), drive a theme with two plot-lines.  They are both now past it, and they are out of touch with the next generation – which in their case contains predators to whom they are vulnerable.  They respond by casting out the innocent child.  If Hamlet is about angry young men, King Lear is about angry old men.

Two sisters compete for nastiness.  ‘Tigers, not daughters.’  Bradley looks to give the palm to Regan – notwithstanding that Goneril murders her, and offers to give the same medicine to her own husband in order to make room in her bed for the bastard.  Bradley remarked that Regan had ‘much less force, courage and initiative than her sister, and for that reason is less formidable and more loathsome.’  Tales of evil sisters have a long history, but these too are hard to beat.  When Regan says she is sick, Goneril, the poisoner, says, aside: ‘If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.’  The humour is very black and morbid at the end.  But Regan does have ‘Let him smell his way to Dover.’  And that is pure evil.  Perhaps Bradley had in mind that being weaker, and second in line, Regan was the crueller bully when she got her chance.

Two sons, and brothers of sorts, are very different.  The bastard lives up to the argot in his title.  Gloster’s legitimate son, Edgar, is very hardly done by, but he finishes in triumph, while taking out the bastard, and coming into power.

The two husbands of the evil sisters fall out almost immediately, we are told.  Cornwall is the archetypal villain.  Albany comes fully to understand his folly in marrying Goneril.  Cornwall gets his due from a servant – exquisite irony.  Albany is set to retire hurt.  He was not built for this sort of game.

Two members of the aristocracy – two nobles, if you prefer –react in their own way to events above them.  Kent is nothing if not forthright – and he is ferociously loyal.  He is the first out of the family to feel the wrath of the king in his descent into madness.  Gloster is appalled at what is happening, but he plays the role of the dutiful courtier.  But when civil war is started, he has to take sides, and he pays the ultimate price in the cruellest scene of this playwright outside of Titus Andronicus.

The two French wooers of Cordelia are very different.  Burgundy is naturally unsettled that the offer of wealth has been withdrawn by a cranky king of perfidious Albion.  (He takes the Macron view of commerce.)  France is curious and big hearted – but at the end, he picks a bad time to have an alternative engagement, and his wife is murdered.

Two victims stand out because they are effectively disinherited for no good reason – Cordelia and Edgar.  Cordelia is the victim of her father’s hot blood, and the evil of her sisters.  Edgar is the victim of the evil of his sibling, and the pompous rashness of his father.  Gloster commits what might be called the Othello mistake – he convicts a loved one without hearing from him first.  (The mechanics of the two frauds are very similar.)  By contrast, Lear puts some kind of test to his daughter, and then snaps when she refuses to play the game.  There is thus a symmetry of evil and rashness in the story of two of the principal victims.

Two characters are sacrificed because they are simply not up to it.  Neither Gloster nor Albany is set in anything like the heroic mould.  They are courtiers who make up the numbers and who become collateral damage.  Albany survives, but his interest in ruling has died, and it will be a while before he thinks of marrying again.  One such ‘interlude’ is enough.

Two characters are cracked in the head – the Fool by nature, and Poor Tom by design.  The first adds to the theatre; Poor Tom does not do that – at least for most audiences today.

Two are there to meet in a fight, like that at the OK corral – Edgar and Oswald.  And each is up for it.  But Kent was the more natural antagonist: ‘His [Oswald’s] countenance likes me not.’   On this form, he could become an honorary member of the Marylebone Cricket Club. 

(The spray that Kent gives Oswald at 2.2.14ff could excite the jealousy of the coach of Melbourne Storm.  He is justly famous for his sprays of his manly entourage.  One of the milder forms of abuse of Kent for Oswald is ‘the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.’  Speaking of Melbourne Storm and rugby league – which is not the upper-class version of rugby – at their first meeting, Kent labelled Oswald ‘you base football player.’  The Everyman annotation reads: ‘a low game played by idle boys to the scandal of sensible men.’  The football reference makes dating the action in the play even more difficult, but the analogy is now complete.  This play is about the heaviest of this playwright on the stage.  Kent on Oswald is the play’s one belly laugh, and it should be played for all it is worth – otherwise the audience, too, might go mad.)

And there is something of the mathematics of the western in the fugue of the finale – two of the black hats get taken out by two of the white hats. 

And, finally, there is also an element of Greek tragedy.  Lear, Gloster, and to some extent Albany, are cleansed and enlightened by their suffering – Bradley says ‘purified.’  Which is what members of the audience might aspire to as the curtain comes down, and they go out to face the world.

The purpose of the play is to answer the question: ‘Is man no more than this?’  For that purpose, we the audience take upon ourselves the mystery of things, ‘as if we were God’s spies.’  And the answer is that all that stands between us and the primal slime is about as strong as a Tallyho cigarette paper.  That is why the study of evil in the theatre of the grotesque of the ages in King Lear is seen as this author’s greatest work.

Shakespeare – theatre – drama.

Napoleon

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Mr Justice T W Smith was regarded as the leading judge on our Supreme Court in his time.  He declined a knighthood.  They were not then automatically granted to those appointed to the Supreme Court of Victoria, but were in the gift of the government.  Smith, J thought that may be seen as an inducement to judges not to offend government.  He referred to what Napoleon said when asked why he had reinstituted a titled aristocracy.  ‘Because it is by such baubles that men are governed.’

François Furet was a leading historian of France.  One of his works is Revolutionary France, 1770-1880.  It gives perspective to the events known as the French Revolution – a consummation devoutly to be desired.  It runs to 537 pages of text.  Eight of those pages are devoted to the coronation of Napoleon, and they show in detail just what Napoleon meant by the ‘baubles’ by which men are governed.

Everything was researched and rehearsed in exquisite detail so that the Corsican could place the crown on his own head – and slight the pope.  He was following in the path of the Holy Roman Empire, and Charlemagne the Great.  But he would not grant latterday homage to Charlemagne.

I have raised myself up to my actions.  He [Charlemagne] stayed at the point where birth placed him.  To reign in France, one must be born in grandeur, have been seen from childhood in a palace with guards, or else be a man who is capable of standing out from all the others….Right of inheritance, if it is to be successful, must pass to children born in the bosom of greatness.

You would be hard pressed to find a better example of megalomania.

The coronation took place in Notre Dame on 2 December, 1804.  Louis XVI had been executed on 21 January 1793.  In the history of the entire world, had there ever been such a reversal?  The Emperor claimed, and could enforce, powers the Bourbons could hardly dream of. 

But after his final defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon left five million dead, France in ruins, and the shell of an army he had abandoned twice.  He lost because he could not stop fighting, and the nation of France was fractured for the rest of the nineteenth century.  It endured appalling revolutionary schisms in 1830, 1848, and 1870.  The last led to the nation’s worst defeat in war at Sedan.  France just survived the First World War, and then participated in the mad lust for revenge that led to the Second.  And just recently, the gillets jaunes showed that the readiness to revolt can outweigh dreams about the Emperor and la gloire.

In the space of one generation, France had gone from dreaming of a whole new regime according to the philosophical gospel of Rousseau to a rampant evangelical nationalism under a foreign emperor, and the result was a tragic mess.

Writing when the fulness of this tragedy had been revealed, Hippolyte Taine was understandably bitter.  Taine completed his vitriolic history of the Revolution at an ugly time for France, in 1884, when the nation was still trying to achieve a settled state, and was still recovering from the most recent aftershock, the appalling events of 1870.  The book concludes after looking at the bequest of Napoleon by saying:

In this philosophical barracks we have lived for eighty years.  Those barracks had seen ‘the omnipotence of the State, the omnipresence of government’ – ‘Never were finer barracks constructed, more symmetrical and more decorative in aspect, more satisfactory to superficial views, more acceptable to vulgar good sense, more suited to narrow egoism….’

The great French historian Georges Lefebvre said this of Napoleon at the end of a two-volume history of his life from 1799 to 1815:

Nor was it an accident that led to the dictatorship of a general.  But it so happened that this general was Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose temperament, even more than his genius, was unable to adapt to peace and moderation.  Thus it was an unforeseeable contingency which tilted the scale in favour of ‘la guerre éternelle’ [eternal war]…

The great Napoleonic achievement – the establishment of a new dynasty and the building of a universal empire – ended in failure.  Hence the imagination of the poet has tended to see the Emperor as a second Prometheus whose daring was punished by the heavenly powers, and as a symbol of human genius at grips with fate….But a military dictatorship did not of itself necessitate the re-establishment of a hereditary monarchy, still less an aristocratic nobility.  Nor was the best means of defending the natural frontiers to be found in expanding beyond them and so giving rise to coalitions in self-defence.  Yet this was what Napoleon was personally responsible for setting in train.

….He had in fact become more and more hostile to the Revolution, to such a degree that if he had had the time, he would in the end have partly repudiated even civil equality; yet in the popular imagination, he was the hero of the Revolution….He had instituted the most rigorous despotism; yet it was in his name that the constitutional reign of the Bourbons was opposed….

Yet the Romantics were not wholly wrong about him, for his classicism was only one of culture and cast of mind.  His springs of action, his unconquerable energy of temperament, arose from the depths of his imagination.  Here lay the secret of the fascination that he will exercize for ever more on the individual person.  For men will always be haunted by romantic dreams of power, even if only in the passing fires and disturbances of youth; and there will thus never be wanting those who will come…to stand in ecstasy before the tomb.

Now, most us find it hard to be ‘romantic’ about war or death, and standing in ecstasy before the tomb might be reserved to those people in France who prefer romance to the frightful history of France after Napoleon.

I had wondered why the French celebrate Bastille Day.  I was there at the Travellers Club on the Champs Elysee when it looked like the masses might scale the fortress.  It would be idle to dream of equality at that address.  But they did start beheading people in public in Paris on 14 July 1789.

Mr Justice T W Smith was regarded as the leading judge on our Supreme Court in his time.  He declined a knighthood.  They were not then automatically granted to those appointed to the Supreme Court of Victoria, but were in the gift of the government.  Smith, J thought that may be seen as an inducement to judges not to offend government.  He referred to what Napoleon said when asked why he had reinstituted a titled aristocracy.  ‘Because it is by such baubles that men are governed.’

François Furet was a leading historian of France.  One of his works is Revolutionary France, 1770-1880.  It gives perspective to the events known as the French Revolution – a consummation devoutly to be desired.  It runs to 537 pages of text.  Eight of those pages are devoted to the coronation of Napoleon, and they show in detail just what Napoleon meant by the ‘baubles’ by which men are governed.

Everything was researched and rehearsed in exquisite detail so that the Corsican could place the crown on his own head – and slight the pope.  He was following in the path of the Holy Roman Empire, and Charlemagne the Great.  But he would not grant latterday homage to Charlemagne.

I have raised myself up to my actions.  He [Charlemagne] stayed at the point where birth placed him.  To reign in France, one must be born in grandeur, have been seen from childhood in a palace with guards, or else be a man who is capable of standing out from all the others….Right of inheritance, if it is to be successful, must pass to children born in the bosom of greatness.

You would be hard pressed to find a better example of megalomania.

The coronation took place in Notre Dame on 2 December, 1804.  Louis XVI had been executed on 21 January 1793.  In the history of the entire world, had there ever been such a reversal?  The Emperor claimed, and could enforce, powers the Bourbons could hardly dream of. 

But after his final defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon left five million dead, France in ruins, and the shell of an army he had abandoned twice.  He lost because he could not stop fighting, and the nation of France was fractured for the rest of the nineteenth century.  It endured appalling revolutionary schisms in 1830, 1848, and 1870.  The last led to the nation’s worst defeat in war at Sedan.  France just survived the First World War, and then participated in the mad lust for revenge that led to the Second.  And just recently, the gillets jaunes showed that the readiness to revolt can outweigh dreams about the Emperor and la gloire.

In the space of one generation, France had gone from dreaming of a whole new regime according to the philosophical gospel of Rousseau to a rampant evangelical nationalism under a foreign emperor, and the result was a tragic mess.

Writing when the fulness of this tragedy had been revealed, Hippolyte Taine was understandably bitter.  Taine completed his vitriolic history of the Revolution at an ugly time for France, in 1884, when the nation was still trying to achieve a settled state, and was still recovering from the most recent aftershock, the appalling events of 1870.  The book concludes after looking at the bequest of Napoleon by saying:

In this philosophical barracks we have lived for eighty years.  Those barracks had seen ‘the omnipotence of the State, the omnipresence of government’ – ‘Never were finer barracks constructed, more symmetrical and more decorative in aspect, more satisfactory to superficial views, more acceptable to vulgar good sense, more suited to narrow egoism….’

The great French historian Georges Lefebvre said this of Napoleon at the end of a two-volume history of his life from 1799 to 1815:

Nor was it an accident that led to the dictatorship of a general.  But it so happened that this general was Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose temperament, even more than his genius, was unable to adapt to peace and moderation.  Thus it was an unforeseeable contingency which tilted the scale in favour of ‘la guerre éternelle’ [eternal war]…

The great Napoleonic achievement – the establishment of a new dynasty and the building of a universal empire – ended in failure.  Hence the imagination of the poet has tended to see the Emperor as a second Prometheus whose daring was punished by the heavenly powers, and as a symbol of human genius at grips with fate….But a military dictatorship did not of itself necessitate the re-establishment of a hereditary monarchy, still less an aristocratic nobility.  Nor was the best means of defending the natural frontiers to be found in expanding beyond them and so giving rise to coalitions in self-defence.  Yet this was what Napoleon was personally responsible for setting in train.

….He had in fact become more and more hostile to the Revolution, to such a degree that if he had had the time, he would in the end have partly repudiated even civil equality; yet in the popular imagination, he was the hero of the Revolution….He had instituted the most rigorous despotism; yet it was in his name that the constitutional reign of the Bourbons was opposed….

Yet the Romantics were not wholly wrong about him, for his classicism was only one of culture and cast of mind.  His springs of action, his unconquerable energy of temperament, arose from the depths of his imagination.  Here lay the secret of the fascination that he will exercize for ever more on the individual person.  For men will always be haunted by romantic dreams of power, even if only in the passing fires and disturbances of youth; and there will thus never be wanting those who will come…to stand in ecstasy before the tomb.

Now, most us find it hard to be ‘romantic’ about war or death, and standing in ecstasy before the tomb might be reserved to those people in France who prefer romance to the frightful history of France after Napoleon.

I had wondered why the French celebrate Bastille Day.  I was there at the Travellers Club on the Champs Elysee when it looked like the masses might scale the fortress.  It would be idle to dream of equality at that address.  But they did start beheading people in public in Paris on 14 July 1789.