Trump and Putin have three things in common.  Their focus on themselves means that they could not care less about others.  They have no friends, but they are surrounded by frightened sycophants who do not and could not curtail them.  And they are coming undone because their pride and stupidity led them into losing wars and their want of care for others meant that they had conscience to constrain them.  While very few foresaw the misery that Russia would endure, in a war that has gone on longer than the First World War, even fewer did not foresee how badly the aggression of the United States would cause it loss and damage.

The indifference of these two men to the fate of others led me to look back on what I wrote about two war-mongers more than ten years ago.  The subjects of that extract – in a history of the twentieth century – were of course very different men.  But perhaps we might get some assistance in looking at the mess the world is now in by reflecting on them.

The extract follows.

***

Napoleon and Hitler Compared

Many, many millions of people died because of these two men – it is hard to imagine a woman playing the part of either – yet one does, by and large, now enjoy a better reputation than the other.  What did they have in common?  How were they different?  Was one just as bad as the other?

Both of these men came from out of town.  The Emperor of France was a Corsican.  The Leader (Fuhrer) of Germany was Austrian.  No one wanted Corsica – the British took it twice and handed it back.  Bonaparte was born the year after the Genoese had sold Corsica to the French so that he became a French citizen.  Austria’s glory days as the heart of the Holy Roman Empire were well and truly spent by the time that it spawned Hitler and Vienna was giving its name to the end of an era.

They both came from unprepossessing stock.  The family of Napoleon had some claim to ancient minor nobility in Tuscany, but they had become a family of lawyers in the lawless sea town of Ajaccio on Corsica.  The Morning Post described Bonaparte, as he was then called, ‘a Mediterranean mulatto.’  Hitler was the son of a customs official born as Alois Shicklgruber whose father was the son of an illegitimate housemaid.  Adolf was the fourth child to his third wife, Klara Polzl.  The first three children died in infancy.  Hitler was born on a chilly Easter Saturday on the Austrian side of the border.  He attended a school in Linz with Ludwig Wittgenstein.  So, the fate of many millions of people turned on what year Napoleon happened to have been born in, and which children of Alois Shicklgruber and Klara Polzl happened to survive.  Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

They were both short – Napoleon was about five feet five, and Hitler five feet eight.

Napoleon attended military college and an officers’ academy, and became a professional soldier.  He was forty-second out of fifty-eight at military school.  His life was, by his lights, one of perpetual ascent.  Hitler was a drop-out and draft-dodger.  He was a slow learner and he had to repeat many subjects at school.  He was twice rejected as an artist by the Vienna Academy, and he burned with resentment about that for the rest of his life.  If asked what he would do for a living, Hitler would say that he would become a great artist. 

If Napoleon was driven by ambition, Hitler was driven by a lust for revenge.  He never held down a real job.  The highest rank of the mighty war lord was that of Corporal – only one is lower.  He was denied promotion because his superiors ‘could discover no leadership qualities in him.’  You can get an argument about whether the Leader had leadership, or just the power to hypnotize one on one, or, better, a mass audience.  He was more of a magician than a leader.  There is no doubt about the power of Napoleon to lead his generals, officers, men and people.  For better or for worse, he was a great leader.  Napoleon was however guilty of the one unforgivable crime of a commander – twice.  He abandoned his army in the sands of Egypt and in the snows of Russia.  He had no business to be in either, but he was, as Hitler would be, a very poor loser.  The general that Napoleon left in charge of the doomed army in Egypt sad that ‘he had left us avec ses culottes plein de merde’.

They were two of the worst liars that the world has known.  Truth did not matter.  Nor did their word.  They treated pacts and treaties like invitations to a ball.  Either would have had trouble being admitted as a guest in, much less being elected as a member of, a gentlemen’s club.

Neither was religious.  Neither had any room for God, and each dedicated his life to repudiating the Sermon on the Mount line by line, word by word.  Napoleon said that he had had no religion since the age of nine when he heard a preacher insist that his hero, Julius Caesar, was burning in hell.  Hitler read Nietzsche and characteristically referred to ‘the effeminate Judaeo-Christian pity ethic.’

Napoleon had the normal sexual appetite of a Latin.  Napoleon’s appetite was at least equalled by that of his Anglo-Irish nemesis, his grace, the Duke of Wellington, but according to his most recent biographer, Napoleon was notoriously as quick in bed as he was at the dinner table.  Hitler had next to no sex life.  He was involved with three women.  All were much younger than him.  Two killed themselves (one, Eva Braun, on the second attempt) and the third tried to kill herself.  But Eva Braun was not subjected to the humiliation that Josephine was – Napoleon would shoot at swans in a park to torment her.  Like Henry VIII, he would abandon his wife for a more fertile model.

Everyone who dealt with Napoleon said that he had an intellect of immense power.  Hitler may have had some rat political cunning, but no one could describe the author of Mein Kampf as having any intelligence whatsoever. 

They both impressed people who met them with the power of their personality.  Napoleon enjoyed a soldiers’ rapport with his troops.  Hitler was famous for his cool blue-eyed stare.  Eden said ‘Without doubt the man has charm.’  (Lord Halifax, on the other hand, mistook Hitler for a footman.)  Yet both were extremely nervous men.  They could both dissolve into mumbling or bawling or raving wrecks.  A man close to Hitler spoke of ‘convulsions of weeping at all emotional crises’ and made the literate observation that ‘Dostoyevsky might well have invented him, with the morbid derangement and pseudo-creativeness of his hysteria.’  Hitler said that he had seen Gotterdammerung – the final part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle – over a hundred times.  He played it constantly on the gramophone during the war.  It is The Twilight of the Gods.  It takes more than four hours and it ends in the bathos of ritual suicide after Siegfried – who talks to the birds – is finally put to sleep (to the infinite relief of at least some of the audience).

They both thought women were inferior and only good for sex and having children.  When presented with a terrified actress, the Emperor said: ‘Come in.  Undress.  Lie down.’  The idea of equality – what the Revolution was about – for women in France was as silly as equality with blacks in America.  ‘Woman is our property…. just as the fruit tree belongs to the gardener.’  Hitler said there was ‘no worse disaster than to see them grappling with ideas.’  He told Speer in the presence of Eva Braun that a ‘highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman.’  Hitler waited to the end for the one chivalrous gesture of his life.  He married Eva Braun before they killed themselves.  The marriage was not consummated.

Neither had any real friends.  Napoleon showed a Corsican clan loyalty to his family and occasionally to his wife.  (Hitler said that Corsicans were like Scots in their clan loyalties.)  Napoleon had an annoying habit of parcelling out the European cake among his family.  Napoleon’s first wife sought to match his infidelity, and he is said to have had at least sixteen mistresses.  Sex for him was like war.  Its sole purpose was to give him satisfaction.  He was equally impersonal about both.  Hitler was polite to his secretarial staff and he was good to his dog.

Both had a foul mouth and vile temper.  They could both throw the tantrums of a spoiled child.  In truth, both resembled spoiled children when they were in power.  Napoleon was far more given to acts of personal violence than Hitler.

Neither smoked.  Napoleon did not drink to excess, and Hitler was a teetotaller.  Napoleon liked a roast chicken preceded by soup washed down with Chambertin and coffee, and occasionally a Madeira.  Hitler lived on vegetable soup and nut cutlets.  He liked Wagner, pulp fiction, and movies.  The imperium made the Emperor fat.  The Fuhrer got more gaunt, and suffered badly from wind.

Hitler thought the Aryans were superior racially, and that Jews were beneath contempt and should be purged from Europe.  Napoleon was not racist.  Millions died to satisfy his ego, but he did not set out to murder a race.  Napoleon positively sought to remove disabilities and abolish ghettoes.  He was in this respect a product of the Enlightenment; the Fuhrer harked back to the worst kind of German Romanticism and what Churchill called ‘the lights of a perverted science.’  He was in truth seeking a new dark age, and his hatred must have derived from some very deep and very great fear.

Napoleon did not betray feeling inferior, but Mein Kampf is shot through with respectful nods to England?  Napoleon was much more vain personally.  He wrote to the Vatican: ‘I am Charlemagne, for like Charlemagne I join the crown of France with the crown of the Lombards…. I shall do no damage if the pope behaves.  Otherwise I shall reduce him to the status of bishop of Rome.’

Both wanted to do a deal with England to give them a free hand elsewhere.  Both sought to invade England but were thwarted by the British Navy.  Bonaparte ranted at the English ambassador for two hours, and asked him why they could not come to an arrangement.  ‘His Britannic Majesty merely wishes to protect his rights and has no wish to join in plunder and oppression.’

Both dreamed of conquering India.

The Establishment looked down on each at the beginning of his rise.  They got and retained popular support while their luck held and they were winning.  The Establishment in each case realized too late that they had a tiger by the tail.

Napoleon got to the top because there was a yawning power vacuum after the overthrow and he had the drive and military and political knowhow to seize the opportunity and fill the gap.  Hitler filled the gap and got to the top in the same way as Richard III – by seduction, deceit, terror, and murder: in roughly that order.  The only skill he had was as a magician with the public. 

It is absurd to say that Hitler came to power lawfully.  He got there by deceit and violence.  He maintained a private army to wage war on his opponents in the belief that when he got power he could kill them all.  He was correct in saying his was a revolution – it was just another lie to say that he did it constitutionally.  Hitler never got to fifty per cent of the vote in an electoral contest.  The Brumaire coup of Napoleon was superficially legitimate, but it was a coup.  Bonaparte could only get the numbers after the army had dealt with the opposition.

Because he was indifferent to truth, each could invest hugely in propaganda.  Bonaparte made Blair-like advances in the black arts.  He did not speak of propaganda but ‘management of opinion’ (direction de l’opinion).  Newspapers were left with those ‘attached’ to the Emperor and who had the ‘good sense’ not to publish material ‘damaging to the nation’.  Those who lacked that sense would be fired and, in bad cases, shot.  Not just opinion but emotions were managed.  Austerlitz did not generate much enthusiasm, and Jena even less, but Bonaparte thought he was at the top of his game.  When police reports showed enthusiasm for war was on the wane, officials were instructed to ‘facilitate the explosion of enthusiasm.’ 

This indifference to truth was matched by an indifference to the well-being of others.  Both played a game in which the pieces were living people.  As an example, when Bonaparte was champing to get at England from Boulogne, he ordered a reluctant admiral to set out an on exercise in rough weather.  Between 200 and 400 Frenchmen died needlessly as a result.  That cruel folly would be enough to bring down a government now.  Bonaparte wrote to Josephine romantically about it.  ‘The soul was between eternity, the ocean, and the night’.  He said he had lived through a ‘romantic or epic dream.’  He would get used to dealing with death by the thousand and million.

This utter indifference to others was a function of their concentration on themselves that led them to see themselves as cult figures.  Here Bonaparte may have outdone Hitler.  He instituted the Feast of Saint Napoleon, although he modestly declined Easter or Corpus Christi for the date.  He instituted an imperial catechism.  He was ‘the one sent by God’ and anyone failing in their duty to him would ‘render themselves worthy of eternal damnation.’  The Germans were not offered a Feast of Saint Adolph. 

Hitler had the same contempt for the church as Napoleon but unlike him, Hitler was less prepared overtly to proceed in concert with the church.

Each ran a police state at home to secure his personal rule, but Fouché was no Heydrich or Himmler.  Each nation was infested with informers, and no people in history has respected informers.  During the mass celebrated during his consecration, Napoleon had the French bishops swear to reveal anything that might be organised against the state in their dioceses, and so made them his informants.  The pope was made to look small in the ceremony, but he had bought in and sold out beforehand.  But after Robespierre – whom Napoleon supported in his salad days – France was not a terror state.  Nazi Germany was the paradigm terror state.

Both boosted the economy at the start but both left their nations smoking bankrupt ruins starved of manpower and treasure.  France, however, was not punished for its aggression to the same extent that Germany would be.

They both knew how to appeal to the crowd – they knew the value of symbols and parades.  The coronation of Napoleon had more costume and pantomime than Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies.  Napoleon brought back the aristocracy and made himself emperor because, he said, it was by such baubles that the French were moved.  (Wellington said Napoleon sought to distract Paris from the Russian debacle by ordering the high-kick dancers at the Opera not to wear drawers at which point the good ladies of Paris drew the line.)  Hitler murdered Rohm and downgraded the SA so that the SS and Gestapo would be supreme.  Hitler, too, went in for fantastic pantomime of the kind enjoyed by seven-year-olds.  The SS had Death’s Head insignia.  If the French had the appalling David, a regicide painter turned propagandist, the Germans had Wagner.  Both were pinnacles of Romantic Will.  Speer said that the Third Reich was ‘only an opera.’  Wagner’s music for the death of Siegfried was played at the funeral of the evil Heydrich.  It could have been written for that event.

Napoleon was a military genius, perhaps the greatest ever.  Hitler never got beyond Corporal after evading arrest as a draft dodger and being found unfit for military service.  In the war, after initial successes, Hitler became the Allies’ greatest asset.  His easy conquest of France was like the sucker-bait of a big win for a tyro gambler at the casino.

They were both thieves and robbers who exalted in plunder.  Their generals and mates all got filthy rich.  In all the blood and thunder, people forget how shockingly corrupt and venal these regimes were.  They enjoyed rapine on a scale not seen since the sacking of Rome.  The main difference was that from the first the Nazi party was led by perverts and misfits who were the scum of the earth.  The Nazis spoke openly of ‘planned corruption’.  They were hoodlums and sadists in uniform, just the sort who could only abuse any form of power – like their leader.  The shame of the Germans is not that they were seduced – that happens to all of us – but that the great nation should have been taken in and taken down by such cheap, common lowlife. 

Napoleon did not use slave labour as Hitler did, but he made laws allowing its resumption in parts of the empire, and in time almost all his armies were raised by conscription.  Very few of the millions of French soldiers who died for him had joined the army voluntarily.

Each had the perfect right to be seen as Antichrist, but the Vicar of Christ did deals with each.  Napoleon reversed revolutionary laws against the church and established the Catholic Church as the religion ‘of the majority of the French.’  Napoleon saw the church as an instrument of government and the opium of the masses.  He showed his contempt for the pope by putting the crown on himself.  A Bavarian Cardinal wrote a letter by hand to Hitler congratulating him on the Concordat: ‘May God preserve the Reich Chancellor for our people.’  Hitler replaced the cross with sword and the bible with Mein Kampf.  He had neutralized the church and vowed to destroy it.  The contempt for the church of Goebbels and Hitler knew no bounds.

Napoleon may have had some residual sense of honour and decency.  By and large he avoided grudges and vendettas.  (This was a real achievement for a Corsican – the killing of the Duke of Enghien – more of a blunder than a crime – was out of character.)  Hitler had no honour or decency.  His word meant nothing, and he murdered whoever got in his way.  The Night of the Long Knives was entirely in character.  Hitler and Stalin were near to perfection in their amorality.  But Napoleon hardly honoured one treaty that he signed, and he said that he could judge the mettle of a man by the way he lied.  And the world must never forget the war crimes perpetrated by France during the guerrilla war in Spain. 

Goya will not allow the world to forget.  We are revolted that in retaliation for the assassination of Heydrich, Hitler levelled Lidice to the ground, and shot or enslaved its inhabitants.  When the people of Spain rose up on 2 May, 1808, Murat, one of Napoleon’s best Marshalls, ordered all prisoners taken with arms to be shot, any person owning a weapon to be arrested and shot, any assembly above seven to be dispersed by gunfire, any person handing out seditious papers to be shot as an English agent, and any village in which a French soldier had been killed to be burnt to the ground.  In Madrid the French gave orders that 5000 be grabbed from anywhere and shot.  A lot of the mass murders were committed outside the Prado.  Goya’s masterpiece The Third of May stands testimony to the bestiality of France.  Marshall Ney said that it was a ‘war of cannibals.’  The French said that the ‘rebels’ were ‘terrorists’.  At Burgos, an officer stopped fifty French soldiers gang raping a woman, but no one stopped them pillaging the cemetery leaving decomposing bodies and skeletons on the footpath.  An army living off the land must be brutalised.  Like the Germans in the next century, the French would find out how brutal the Cossacks would be in revenge.  The propaganda of Hitler and Bonaparte in retreat before vengeful Russian peasants is nearly identical – and true.

Napoleon was what we now call a workaholic.  He was tireless and a natural administrator.  Although he did not like what the Revolution may have led to, he did stabilize the ship of state.  The Code Napoleon is just one lasting bequest to France.  Hitler was possibly the laziest and most inept civil servant in the history of Germany, and the Germans would want to forget who first gave them a VW or an autobahn.

Both were enslaved by their ego and ambition.  Napoleon was at least capable of a vision that some ‘Romantically’ inclined found attractive.  There was nothing ever attractive or positive about Hitler.  Each was only made possible by the self-induced collapse of the previous regime, but Napoleon could at least claim to have been defending the ‘natural borders’ of France and exporting its liberation.  He had policies for France and Europe.  Hitler had no policy – he just had the Teutonic noise of Wagner and a raging, cosmic hate.

Hitler stood for what Hannah Arendt would come to call the ‘banality of evil’.  Both men built castles in the air, but only Hitler lived in them.  Just as Goebbels said ‘We have reversed 1789’, so Napoleon may have sympathized with him.  He had left his Left side well and truly behind him.  Ultimately both wanted to rule Europe and could not come to grips with the consequences of the fact that Europe would never agree to that.  Not many nations like to be invaded; not many people enjoy watching an army live off their land while its soldiers kill their men and rape their women and rob and burn their houses as exercises in Napoleonic liberation.

Patriotism was one vice they both lacked.  Napoleon looked down on the French.  Hitler never forgave Vienna.  On the third page of Mein Kampf, Hitler says that Austria, the country that bore him, would have to be destroyed.  In the end the Fuhrer betrayed the German people just as surely as Judas betrayed Christ – but he did not surrender the thirty pieces of silver before he killed himself.  Although Bonaparte twice deserted his army, he had to be expelled from France – twice.

The hubris of each met its nemesis in Russia.  The parallels are remarkable.  Each turned on Russia after being thwarted on England.  Both welched on deals with Russia.  Both saw the Russians as inferior beings.  Napoleon invaded Russia as part of his campaign against England.  Hitler forecast the invasion of Russia in Mein Kampf.  The Master Race would kill or enslave the Slavs to get living room in their new world empire.  Both were stopped by England and Russia.  In addition, Napoleon was defeated by Spanish guerrillas.

Each was mercilessly dissected in the House of Commons by a better politician who happened to be Prime Minister of England – Napoleon by Pitt, and Hitler by Churchill.

Each seduced his followers to swear personal allegiance, thus contradicting the biblical wisdom that a servant cannot have two masters.  Napoleon used the oath as part of his legitimation of his place as Emperor.  He deliberately mimed the Roman emperors and Charlemagne.  He got his troops to ‘swear to defend, at the peril of your life, the honour of the French name, your patrie and your Emperor.’  The Wehrmacht sold out when its officers followed the same path.  After his preposterous coronation, during which Bonaparte did not bother to stifle yawns, he distributed golden eagles to his troops.  They swore to sacrifice their lives in defence of those eagles and to maintain them constantly on the road to victory.

Neither was able to contemplate permanent peace.  The fatal flaw in each was the same.  Their ambition or megalomania was insatiable.  The Oxford English Dictionary pleasingly defines egomania as ‘the insanity of self-exaltation’.  The word could have been invented for each of them.  They would never be allowed or able to stop – to be at rest, to be at peace with themselves and the world.  War for them was ontological – their continuing in power depended on military victories, and not just war.  People who cannot stand being alone are very dangerous.  These two were Ponzi schemes dealing in armies and lives rather than banks and dollars.  And no consideration of humanity could ever be suffered to stand in their way. 

Hitler had no conscience at all; Napoleon had had a conscience, but it melted before his ego.  Neither hesitated to conscript children to fight their battles.  In 1814, Napoleon gave a preview of the Gotterdammerung of the Fuhrer when he ordered that Paris had to be evacuated even if this entailed its destruction.

We have wonderful word pictures of each man from contemporaries qualified to speak.  Madame de Stael was the daughter of Jacques Necker, the Protestant banker whose dismissal preceded the fall of the Bastille.  She said this of the Corsican:

I had the disturbing feeling that no emotion of the heart could ever reach him.  He regards a human being like a fact or a thing, never as an equal person like himself.  He neither hates nor loves…The force of his will resides in the imperturbable calculations of his egotism.  He is a chess master whose opponents happen to be the rest of humanity….Neither pity nor attraction, nor religion nor attachment would ever divert him from his ends….I felt in his soul cold steel, I felt in his mind a deep irony against which nothing great or good, even his own destiny, was proof; for he despised the nation which he intended to govern, and no spark of enthusiasm was mingled with his desire to astound the human race.

It is a remarkable portrait that rings true.  At first glance, you might apply the same words to Hitler – but then you see that Napoleon did not hate, so hate could not interfere with his cold calculation.  You could never say that of Hitler – the reverse was the case.

Napoleon was prodigal with the French lives in his charge.  It is easier to be an attacking general if you do not have to worry about your casualties.  Napoleon lost more than 50,000 French troops a year.  The Duke of Wellington lost 6000 a year in his six years in Spain.  His Grace could therefore say:

I can hardly conceive of anything greater than Napoleon at the head of an army – especially a French army.  Then he had one prodigious advantage – he had no responsibility – he could do what he pleased; and no man ever lost more armies than he did.  Now with me the loss of every man told.  I could not risk so much.  I knew that if I lost 500 men without the clearest necessity, I should be brought on my knees to the bar of the House of Commons.

We cannot overstate the importance of this remark.  Napoleon was successful in part at least because he could take risks.  He could take risks because he had no real care for his troops or his adopted nation.  And he was in that position because the government of France was not as advanced in the ways of government as its major enemy. 

People who get misty about the genius of Napoleon forget this.  He said: ‘I have only one passion, one mistress, and that is France.  I make love to her and she never fails me lavishing her blood and treasure on me.  If I ask her for half a million men, she gives them.’  There you have it, a mad, heartless, over-heated Corsican who caused millions to die.

Thomas Jefferson was not taken in by Napoleon.  ‘I consider him the very worst of human beings, and as having inflicted more misery on mankind than any other who ever lived.’  Jefferson also said ‘He totally wanted the sense of right and wrong’, and had destroyed ‘millions of lives….and must have been a moral monster, against whom every hand should have been lifted to slay him.’ 

Victor Hugo was to the point.  The Emperor ‘took the path of glory, took the path of crime, and fell to disaster…like some meteor which did not follow the course of the sun.’

Sebastian Haffner was a law student when the Brownshirts came into his law library and ordered the Jews out.  He got out of Germany with his Jewish wife.  He wrote the following in 1940 – before the fall of France, the invasion of Russia, or the undertaking of the Final Solution.

He is full of a secret cowardly consciousness of inferiority that only serves to nourish a wild love of himself and a wild hatred of the world that has not allowed him to have his own way and does not love and honour his unpleasing person…He justly feels that the instant he loses the supreme power which today protects and renders him invulnerable, he will sink back again where he belongs – into the abyss, which, as he secretly knows, is always yawning for him…

He has the exact kind of courage and cowardice for suicide in despair.  Moreover, this solves another riddle, for it provides the key to his almost unbelievable love of a gamble, with high stakes at that.  Hitler is the potential suicide par excellence.  He owes no ties outside his own ‘ego’, and with its extinction he is released and absolved from all cares responsibilities and burdens.  He is in the privileged position of one who loves no one and nothing but himself.  He is completely indifferent to the fate of states, men, commonwealths, whose existence he stakes at play…So he can dare all to preserve or magnify his power, that power to which he owes the present, and which alone stands between him and speedy death…

As a whole his character, of which the basic traits are resentment and conspicuous bad taste, is uncommonly revolting, ugly, and vile.  Benevolence, generosity, chivalry, humour and even courage are completely lacking.  With no dignity, he is a poor specimen of manly bearing. True grandeur is beyond him.

To repeat, Haffner said all this in 1940.  ‘This is sufficient reason to destroy the man as a wild dog.’  When we see Hitler as a kind of mad dog, we are not basing a judgment on hindsight, since it was open to Germans to reach the same judgment that this German reached in 1940.  For various reasons, they chose not to.  But equally important is that Haffner saw in Hitler what Madame de Stael and Wellington had seen in Napoleon – his ‘success’, such as it was, came because he had no heart.  Ultimately, he did not care for those whom he led.  Napoleon and Hitler may have been the two worst traitors that the world has seen.  They were just manic gamblers who did not care about the stakes.

Their moral crime was the same.  They put themselves above everyone else and they treated others simply as means to ends.  They both sought world dominion and to found a kind of dynasty.  Who was morally the more culpable?  Even God might pause there.  But was ever a more dreadful judgment passed than that ‘He is a chess-master whose opponents happen to be the rest of humanity’?  And did it make one iota of difference to a dead or raped victim that Napoleon went east to ‘liberate’ people whereas Hitler went east to murder and enslave peoples?  If you are being killed or raped, do you inquire what moved the man who sent your killer or rapist to meet you?  Does it make any difference that the mask in front of one murderous ego might be less unattractive than the mask in front of the other?  Did the Russians think that Hitler was somehow worse than Napoleon?  (On my one visit to Moscow, I went to the Kremlin.  My guide was keen to point to the gate that he came in through and the gate that he went out through.  We were not speaking of Hitler.)  The Russia people had not forgotten the rape perpetrated on them by Napoleon.  And rape is what it is when one nation invades another.  Napoleon and Hitler were rapists of nations. 

The moral and political low point of the Weimar Republic came when its judges declined to sentence Hitler to death for his part in a botched putsch in which police were killed.  The judges purred that the corporal and his followers ‘were led in action by a pure patriotic spirit and the most noble will.’  This is just nauseating, but is the attitude of those who would lionise the Emperor completely different?  Bonaparte was not a racist or mass murderer, and he was very successful in generating a romantic aura as a liberator as well as a genius.  But millions died because of him, and, apart from the generations of strife and agony that he bequeathed to France, what is there to show for all that death and suffering?  Has any part of the empire of the French ever thanked them for giving them an emperor or even empire?

In the upshot, more than four million were killed in the Napoleonic wars, and about forty million died in the Second World War.  The arithmetic difference derives from superior engineering, not superior morals.  Bonaparte did not have the Gatling gun, tanks, U-boats, or B 52’s.

At least Hitler managed to kill himself when the game was up.  Napoleon tried but failed before his first exile.  That left him free to return.  Fifty-two thousand men were killed in the Belgian mud of Waterloo so that Boney could celebrate his last hurrah.  Even the greatest Romantic of them all, Byron, was nauseated.

Thine only gift hath been the grave

To those that worshipp’d thee….

And –

Thine evil deeds are writ in gore….

And –

Weigh’d in the balance, hero dust

Is vile as vulgar clay….

The more you think of it, the clearer it gets that the one thing that saves the Corsican emperor from universal damnation is that the Austrian corporal managed somehow to be even worse.  One thing is clear.  Bonaparte was not racist; he would never have descended to genocide by Zyclon B.  But his failure to descend to those depths does not give him immunity from criticism for what he did do.  If John commits three crimes, the fact that Bob commits five does not relieve John from liability for his three.  If John is a murderer, his crime does not diminish because Bob is a rapist as well as a murderer.  Bonaparte raised and brutalised and lost French armies.  How many millions of deaths does a man have to be responsible for before people cease to adore his memory?

The point may bear restating.  Both Bonaparte and Hitler wanted to rule Europe.  Europe did not want to be ruled by either.  War was the inevitable and fearful consequence in each case.  About four million died in Bonaparte’s wars and about forty million died in Hitler’s wars.  The principal difference between them, apart from the killing power of their weaponry, is that as well as starting wars, Hitler sought to murder one race and to enslave or murder another.  He therefore committed more moral crimes than Bonaparte.  But that fact does not relieve Bonaparte of guilt for the crimes that he did commit.  He is morally responsible for the deaths of millions of people.

The great German poet Goethe had a sense of the power of these demons.  He said ‘The most fearful manifestation of the demonic, however, is seen when it dominates an individual human being…they emanate a monstrous force and exercise incredible power over all creatures…All moral powers combined are impotent against them.  In vain do the more enlightened among men attempt to discredit them as deluded or deceptive…they can be overtaken only by the universe itself, against which they have taken up arms…No one can do something against God who is not God himself.’  Goethe was referring to Napoleon, but precisely the same went for Hitler.

There is one difference between Napoleon and Hitler in death.  The French maintain a great monument to Napoleon.  It is his tomb in Paris, and it is a major tourist attraction.  The Germans will never do that for Hitler.  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.  So, in reflecting on how so many Germans were seduced by Hitler, we need also to reflect on why so many French are still seduced by Napoleon.  Napoleon took France down the path of eternal war and was probably responsible for the deaths of more French people than Hitler, although Hitler was certainly responsible for many more German dead than Napoleon. 

Napoleon and Hitler have one deadly thing in common.  Each seduced his adopted nation out of fear for the past and hopes for the future to give them nearly absolute power to bring some kind of glory to that nation.  In each case, this could only have come at the price of aggressive war.  The romance – that is the softest word for it – lasted while the donee of the power, the Emperor, or Fuhrer, was winning, but it then began to fade.  In so acting, each of these fabled leaders brought ruin to that nation.  As it happened, France’s subsequent agony lasted much longer than that of Germany.

As each of these men first seduced, then deluded, then raped, then betrayed, and then ruined his adopted nation, each of them brought death and destruction to all Europe.  Both of them were in truth about as deadly enemies of humanity as the world has seen.

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Trump and Putin are very different, but I will leave the last word on Napoleon to Tolstoy in War and Peace.  History is, notoriously, written by the winners, and Tolstoy, just as notoriously, banged on about Napoleon is this mighty book that I am reading for the fourth time.  But these observations come after a very long account of the battle of Borodino.  Its frightful carnage prefigured that of the American Civil War and First World War.

This man, predestined by Providence for the unhappy, involuntary role of butcher of nations, actually convinced himself that the motivation behind his deeds had been the welfare of nations, and that he could control the destinies of millions, and bring them benefits by the exercise of power.

Yet some still wish to call Napoleon ‘the Great.’