Others besides Winston Churchill may think it blasphemy to compare Napoleon and Hitler. Certainly there are many differences – not least the relative duration of their careers. The Emperor was forty-four when he fell from power, the age of the Führer when he achieved it. Yet undeniably there are resemblances too; their rise from obscurity, their military domination over Europe, their tyranny and contempt for human life, their megalomania and inability to compromise, their hubris. No one can ever be really sure that a nuclear war or an economic collapse will not occur, creating just the sort of chaos from which their like might emerge again. An examination of the two men’s careers and a pinpointing of the qualities they share may provide a means of identifying future ‘saviours’, as well as casting fresh light on both, and especially upon Hitler.
In 1941 Professor Pieter Geyl of the University of Utrecht was by some miracle released from Buchenwald, returning to internment in occupied Holland. He spent the rest of the war working on his great study of Napoleon’s historians, Napoleon: For and Against. In this he says that one cannot avoid comparing the Emperor and the Führer, since the resemblances are ‘too striking’; that he had ‘hated the dictator in Napoleon long before the evil presence of Hitler began darkening our lives’, but has ‘nowhere worked it out’. He also admits that ‘one almost feels as if one should ask pardon of the Emperor for mentioning his name in one breath with that of the other’. While scarcely trying to emulate Geyl, this book is a modest attempt to work out the comparison.
No one will dispute that Hitler was more evil than the Emperor, did evil on a far greater scale. A liberal like Lord Acton could call Napoleon ‘the most splendid genius that has appeared on earth’, and he still inspires some very unlikely people. No one denies that he created modern France, while nothing remains of the Führer’s Germany save the autobahns. Hugh Trevor-Roper likens the latter’s mind to ‘some barbarian monolith, the expression of giant strength and savage genius, surrounded by a festering heap of refuse’.
Even so, the resemblances are inescapable. Each was a foreigner in an adopted country, self-made – the Emperor an uprooted squireen, the Führer a rootless petit-bourgeois. They appeared from nowhere to become ‘saviours’ of their new countries; Napoleon was not a Frenchman but a Corsican who kept an Italian accent till he was nearly thirty, while Hitler never lost his Austrian accent. Each was a loner despising the rest of humanity. The Emperor believed that any man – or woman – could be bought, while Hitler declared ‘I have come not to make men better but to make them worse.’ (Mme de Stäel described the ‘hall-mark of Bonaparte’s rule’ as ‘profound contempt for the riches of human nature’.) Napoleon and Hitler loathed intellectuals, suppressing freedom of thought by means of censorship and secret police. Emperor and Führer restored briefly their countries’ prosperity and self-confidence, and then conquered most of Europe through ruthless diplomacy and war. Both destroyed themselves by invading Russia. Hitler echoed Napoleon’s fear (voiced on St Helena) that ‘the Cossacks will rule Europe’, and was very conscious of his predecessor’s failure – after his armies had survived the winter of 1941 he boasted: ‘We mastered a destiny which broke another man 130 years ago.’
Admittedly Hitler’s hero, in so far as he ever had one, was Frederick the Great, as creator of the Preussensgeist – that terrifyingly dynamic compound of militarism and State service, of discipline and precision. In the Führer’s eyes Napoleon never achieved anything like such distinction. Yet while he sometimes looked to the old King for inspiration he must have been keenly aware how many of his problems had been those of the man whom he described to Himmler as ‘that unique military genius, the Corsican Napoleon’.
The Emperor and the Führer were gamblers who kept the game playing until the very end, whatever the cost to their peoples. ‘Conquest has made me what I am, conquest alone can maintain me,’ Napoleon told Bourrienne. ‘Small change’ was what he called the French dead at Eylau. Both conscripted relative children into their armies, Napoleon the ‘Marie Louises’ (fifteen-year-olds) in 1814, Hitler the Hitler Youth in 1945. The Emperor bragged ‘A man like me cares little about losing the lives of a million men’, the Führer ‘I can send the flower of German youth into the hell of war without the slightest pity.’ Napoleon’s threat ‘I shall bury the world beneath my ruin’ was repeated by Hitler – ‘We may be destroyed but, if we are, we’ll drag the world down with us, a world in flames.’ The former anticipated the Führer in preparing a Götterdämmerung- like fight to the death in his capital. In 1814 he ordered that Paris must never be evacuated even if this meant its destruction.
In some ways Hitler achieved more than the Emperor. Trevor-Roper calls him ‘the Rousseau, the Mirabeau, the Robespierre and the Napoleon of his revolution; he was its Marx, its Lenin, its Trotsky and its Stalin’. Of these Hitler had most in common with Napoleon. But one must agree with Geyl that the Emperor can only benefit from comparison with the Führer – the worst of his crimes cannot possibly match Adolf Hitler’s murder of the Jewish people.
There is a subtle link between the pair, which emerges only when they are compared. It is contained in the writings of that baneful genius Carl von Clausewitz, one of the brilliant group of soldiers who rebuilt the Prussian army after its humiliating defeat by Napoleon in 1806. Something of an outsider on account of bourgeois origins and spurious nobility (his father had merely assumed the ‘von’), he was never entirely at ease in the exclusively noble Prussian officer corps, although he joined it at the age of twelve, while his interest in new ideas incurred suspicions of ‘Jacobinism’. His primary concern was to produce a military science capable of meeting and overcoming the ‘nation in arms’ concept developed by the French; he foresaw further great wars, and was determined that Prussia should emerge triumphant from them. He remained essentially a Prussian expansionist, his views on Poland anticipating in some ways those of Hitler. It has been claimed that his influence in Germany was among the causes of both world wars. As a ‘military philosopher’ he tried to see both sides of every question, and since he had a mind shaped (at second hand) by Kant, his meaning is often over-subtle or ambiguous – he himself wrote that his work was ‘open to endless misconceptions’. The Führer was to be the ultimate misinterpreter of Clausewitz.
A comparison of the Emperor and Hitler reveals the enormous influence on the latter of Clausewitz’s view of Napoleon. Most of the Führer’s biographers refer to his being a disciple of the Prussian general, yet not one has sufficiently examined this aspect, let alone Hitler’s indirect debt to the Emperor through the latter’s writings. Clausewitz had had first-hand experience of Napoleonic methods – from the other side – having been on Kutuzov’s staff in 1812, at Blücher’s headquarters in 1813 and chief of staff to General Walmoden’s Russo-German corps (part of Bernadotte’s Army of the North) in 1814. He venerated Napoleon as a genius, for breaking ‘the rules of civilised warfare’. Even if he never totally understood the Emperor’s strategic method, he none the less grasped the basic ideas behind it, and has been described as ‘distilling Napoleon into theory’.
There is no doubt that the Führer studied Clausewitz – even if that passionate Clausewitzian, the late Raymond Aron, could not bear to believe it.2 Vom Kriege (‘On War’). Clausewitz’s masterpiece, was almost certainly among the ‘books on war’ which he is reported to have read before 1914. In Mein Kampf he quotes it with savage approval, and in a speech at Munich in 1934 accused his audience of never having read Clausewitz, or if they had, of not knowing how to apply him to modern circumstances. On at least one occasion he reminded his generals that he knew Clausewitz, while Keitel stated at Nuremburg that during the war Hitler had spent whole nights studying him.3 Admittedly, as Aron emphasizes, there have been many enthusiastic readers of Clausewitz, but few careful ones. It is unlikely that the Führer ever understood properly the theories of this most complex of military philosophers, which may be why historians have underestimated his influence on Hitler. Yet the Führer acknowledged Clausewitz alone as his intellectual master. It is only reasonable to suppose that he was fascinated by the many desperate situations so closely paralleling his own which are described and analysed in Vom Kriege – the 1812 campaign, and Napoleon’s last-ditch defensive battles in 1814 being the most obvious. As a man who habitually read into a situation what he wished to believe, he may very well have extracted from the book merely what he wanted. Even so, a careful study of Vom Kriege casts considerable light on Hitler’s mind and on why he reached a number of historic decisions.
It is the enigma presented by the Führer that makes him unique, not only the vast scale of his wickedness. (By contrast Mussolini was an open book.) Yet we know far more about him than about earlier tyrants. The enigma consists in his possessing so manyundeniable gifts and likeable qualities, besides those which can be immediately recognized as evil. It is this extraordinary mixture which gives the man and his career their ultimate horror. Only by appreciating Hitler’s good points can one appreciate the full extent of his savagery and depravity.
Napoleon is almost as baffling for much the same reason, and he was given time to fabricate his own legend on St Helena, shaping his own image in history. (For all that, none of the many thousand books about him agree.) Luckily, the Führer was not given the opportunity similarly to sift the facts in his own favour. However, if the Emperor possessed a surprisingly similar combination of good and evil qualities, he is less of an enigma.
There is an aspect of the two men which tends to be overlooked, their European dimension. The years from the Napoleonic wars to Hitler’s mark the height of the European hegemony over the rest of the world, a hegemony that has now vanished, perhaps for ever. Admittedly, the Emperor began the irreversible destruction of the old hierarchical, Christian Europe and the Führer completed it. Even so, the legend which Napoleon afterwards disseminated from his exile on St Helena included a vision of a united Europe of the future. It can be argued that to some extent he prepared the way for unification; his creation of a single West German state (the Confederation of the Rhine) and of a single North Italian state (the Kingdom of Italy) undoubtedly contributed. And though Hitler ruined Europe, destroying its dominance, he did at least demolish some of the obstacles which stood in the way of a united continent. Napoleon called the continent ‘a rotten old whore whom I shall treat as I please’, while in 1943 Goebbels recorded the Führer’s ‘unshakeable conviction that the Reich will be master of all Europe’ – two years later, just before his death, Hitler said of the continent, ‘I had to rape it in order to possess it.’
No doubt, as Geyl emphasizes, ‘under Napoleon, French civilisation (albeit stifled and narrowed by him) still accompanied the conquest, while the character of the conquest that it has been the lot of our generation to undergo is not compatible with any civilisation at all’. The French brought their social and legal revolution with them, so that everyone became equal before the law in much of western Europe. Even so, they imposed these benefits as conquerors. Hippolyte Taine, perhaps the most formidable intellect among all the critics of the man he called the ‘Diocletian of Ajaccio’, shudders at what might have happened had he triumphed over the Russians in 1812:
At best a European empire secretly undermined by a European resistance, an external France imposed by force on an enslaved continent, with French commissioners and military governors at St. Petersburg and Riga as at Danzig, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Barcelona and Trieste; every available Frenchman employed from Cadiz to Moscow in maintaining and administering the conquest; every available young man conscripted each year and, should he escape, reconscripted by decree, the entire male population employed in oppression; no other prospect for an educated or an uneducated man, no other career military or civil, but extended duty as soldier, excise officer or policeman in the role of spy or bully, employed to hold down the subjected and extort taxes; to confiscate and burn merchandise, to catch smugglers and crush the obstinate.
Taine wrote in the 1880s, never dreaming that a very similar German hegemony would be established sixty years later, which would offer as its highest careers those of spy and bully.4
Essentially each man was an opportunist on a colossal scale. ‘His ideas about the history of the Revolution were astonishingly superficial and defective,’ the former deputy Jean Charles Bailleul wrote of Napoleon. ‘He used just so much of it as he needed to construct a régime which was neither old nor new. This misunderstanding, whether deliberate or unintentional, of men and principles had a most disastrous effect on his career.’5 Hermann Rauschning – also a contemporary observer – said of Hitler in 1939: ‘He damped down the Socialist tendencies in the movement and brought the Nationalist ones into the foreground. He was out to gain powerful patrons and friends who could help the movement into power.’ Rauschning discerned that his movement had ‘no fixed aims, either economic or political, either in home or foreign affairs’. Both in Napoleonic France and in Hitlerian Germany, there was only one leader. Everything, whether human beings or principles, was subject to his devouring, insatiable egotism.
This book is an investigation of megalomania. In 1811 Napoleon asked an aghast Fouché: ‘How can I help it when all this power is sweeping me on to world dictatorship?’ After conquering Russia he intended to assemble an army at Tiflis, and then send it through Afghanistan into India. In 1942 Hitler told Albert Speer that after Russia’s defeat ‘a mere 20 or 30 divisions’ would be all that was necessary to conquer India. As young men the Emperor and the Führer had little in common – a Corsican soldier and a failed Austrian ‘artist’. What united them at their zenith was the demonic process of corruption by power.
(N.B. The superior numbers throughout the text refer to the Notes on pp. 304-7.)
Corsica … I have a feeling that some day that little island will astonish Europe.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social (1762)
What I dread is that Germany doesn’t know that she was licked. Had they given us another week, we’d have taught them.
General John J. Pershing, November 1918