THE TRIUMPH OF THE WILL

-REVIEW: of Napoleon by Paul Johnson (Victor Davis Hanson, Claremont Review of Books)

[J]ohnson tries to explain the pass given Napoleon by artists and intellectuals—the fawning by Shelley, Keats, Hegel, Carlyle, Belloc, Chesterton, Hardy, and Shaw—as the precursor of the Left's modern-day worship of odious tyrants. Attraction to a brute was not compelled, as Johnson points out, by the alternative of a decadent and corrupt French monarchy. For all his loud embrace of "the popular will," Napoleon impoverished and got more Frenchmen killed than did half-a-dozen Bourbons, and he removed republicans only to install family hacks in their place. He certainly was as dictatorial as any monarch, and aped the worst excesses—both material and cultural—of the Old Regime.

So what accounts for those who professed beauty but worshipped evil? It was not merely the romantic naivete of artists and men of letters; a wide array of them from Beethoven to Coleridge quickly sized up Napoleon's atrocities in Spain and Switzerland. Here Johnson is not so explicit in his diagnosis, but implies something more deliberate: some intellectuals, cut off as they are from the practical life, are impatient with the clumsiness of republican government. They yearn for the enlightened autocrat, the philosopher-king who can by fiat do le peuple "good." As Napoleon put it, "The people must not be judge of its own rights." We still see this leftist attraction for the military in aspects of modern-day Clintonism, which, when thwarted by Congress, looked to implement its social agenda among the military, where it could be imposed rather than ratified.

Add also a warped system of values that puts a higher premium on artistic and literary sensitivity--brilliantly and cynically exploited by the mostly ignorant Napoleon--than on mundane and unheralded morality. A Shelley no more knew or cared about typhus in Cairo, frostbite at Moscow, or mass executions of Swiss farmers than does a Noam Chomsky about the thousands murdered in Cuba, or Dominque de Villepin about the one million victims of Saddam Hussein's three-decade reign of terror. For the armchair idealist it is the grand gesture alone that matters.

Is not the reason that intellectuals worship tyrants that they can imagine that the world would be a better place if they themselves got to impose their ideas upon it. So they envy those men who got to do so, in the same way that they are jealous of those who get MacArthur grants. What after all are the Napoleonic wars, the Holocaust and the Gulag but rationalist experiments on a "heroic" scale? When a Joseph Stalin and his intellectual boosters say that "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs", we can be appalled at the belittling language with which they're dismissing the murder of millions in the Ukranian famine, but let's not lose track of the assertion that they are the cooks and the rest of us mere ingredients in their recipes. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 16, 2003 9:10 AM