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.