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Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler both left bequests, principally in the form of altered maps of Europe and political testaments. France and Germany suffered the miseries of enemy occupation but recovered from it, and from Emperor and Führer, with surprising speed – though Germany has remained split in two. Each dictator left a document in which he tried to justify himself and to shape the verdict of history. Napoleon succeeded, with disastrous consequences. Fortunately Hitler failed.
The great difference between the final stages of their careers is of course that the Emperor came back from exile, reascending his throne during the Hundred Days to lead his army – strengthened by repatriated veterans from all over Europe – to final defeat at Waterloo. If he spent his last years in a miserable captivity, there was never any question of trying him and condemning him to death. Had Hitler returned in 1946 from some obscure refuge he would have found only ruins, with no army or party to welcome him home.
Napoleon’s personal will is predominantly domestic in its concern with his family and its countless small legacies – including that of his heart preserved in spirits to Marie Louise. He refers en passant to ‘the French nation I have loved so dearly’ and tells his son ‘never to forget that he was born a French prince’. Yet there are malevolent notes, such as the statement ‘I die before my time, murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assassin’, the bequest of 100,000 francs to a French sergeant who tried to murder the Duke of Wellington or the declaration that he would have the Duc d’Enghien shot all over again ‘in like circumstances’. Hitler too left a personal will, appointing Martin Bormann his executor, instructing him to ensure that his relatives, his mother-in-law and his secretaries were assured of ‘a petit-bourgeois standard of living’. [ein kleines bürgerliches Leben]. In addition, they bequeathed political testaments.
The Emperor’s was in the form of a Napoleonic legend, subtly designed to create a Bonapartist political faith which would attract supporters and place his son on the throne of France. He did so by means of a long series of apologias which he dictated to his companions in exile, the first and most influential series being the Mémorial de Sainte Hélène, which became a best-seller as soon as it appeared in 1823, and went on selling throughout the century. Dissatisfaction with restored Bourbons, memories of the days when French troops marched triumphantly into every European capital, and the Romantic movement ensured the myth’s appeal. Chained like Prometheus to his ‘abominable rock’, Napoleon became an increasingly heroic figure in French eyes. The ballads of Béranger, ‘Parlez-nous de lui, grand’ mère’ and Victor Hugo, ‘Toujours lui! lui partout’, helped to gild the story as well as spread it. In 1840 his body was brought back to France on King Louis-Philippe’s instructions and enshrined in its vast tomb at the Invalides – to which the Führer would one day go on pilgrimage. The Bonapartist message was simple enough; prosperity at home, military glory abroad.
‘I have saved the revolution as it lay dying, I have cleansed it of its crimes and have held it up to the people, shining with glory’, he boasted on St Helena. ‘I have given France and Europe new ideas which will never be forgotten.’ His wars of conquest had really been campaigns of liberation, intended to unify the peoples of Europe in a single great brotherhood. A note of self-exculpation mingled with the self-glorification. ‘However much I may be misrepresented, silenced or mutilated, my enemies will find it difficult to make me disappear. Deeds speak like the sun.’ He had ennobled nations, strengthened the throne, opened up a career for everybody with talent. ‘What can I be accused of, that some writer won’t be able to acquit me?… That I’ve been too fond of war? He’ll be able to show that I always acted to defend myself. That I tried to make myself ruler of the world? It happened by pure accident, because of circumstances and because my enemies pushed me, step by step.’ No doubt historians would find him guilty of ambition but it was the ambition to ensure that reason triumphed, to ‘consecrate’ the full flowering of all human abilities.
‘Far from achieving the aims of the revolution whose heir he happened to become, he never even caught sight of them,’ Jean-Charles Bailleul wrote of Napoleon. The extent to which he doctored the truth is illustrated by the contrast between his public and private attitudes to religion. In his will he declares, ‘I die in the Apostolic and Roman faith, in whose bosom I was born more than fifty years ago.’ He also instructed the Abbé Vignali to give him communion and extreme unction on his deathbed. Yet in August 1817 he had confided in Baron Gourgaud ‘I don’t believe Jesus ever existed’, and on 27 March 1821 (five weeks before his death) told Count Bertrand, ‘I find it a great consolation that I have no imaginary terrors, no fear of the future.’
However, the legend was widely accepted in France where the working class and petit-bourgeoisie looked back with nostalgia to the Empire’s comparative material plenty; conscription had ensured a good market for labour, while the price of bread had been kept down. In retrospect it appeared as a time of well-paid employment and cheap food when contrasted with the hardship of Restoration or Orleanist France, whose degrading poverty is preserved in Hugo’s Les Misérables. Nevertheless, the second Napoleonic empire, proclaimed in 1851, was born on St Helena.
The myth had acquired extraordinary potency. Even today it continues to fascinate. As its creator himself said, ‘What a romance my life has been!’ Nevertheless, Bonapartism proved a disaster when his nephew Napoleon III tried to put the creed into practice. Although he had genuine concern for the poor, his régime grew steadily more unpopular at home, while the aggressively nationalist foreign policy which was his uncle’s legacy proved increasingly unsuccessful, until it finally destroyed the Second Empire with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1.
Confined to his bunker in a devastated country, the Führer was in very different circumstances at the end of his life. He disinherited his original heir, Goering, together with Himmler, for intrigue, expelling them from the Party. He appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz to succeed him as Führer, while Goebbels was to be Chancellor.
His monologues on why Germany had lost the war, taken down between February and early April 1945, are generally regarded as his ‘testament’. Like the Emperor, Hitler cynically shrugs off all guilt. Neither he nor anyone else in Germany had wanted war in 1939. He blamed Britain and the ‘Jew-ridden half-American drunkard Churchill’ for not having worked to unit Europe by allying with Germany; in fighting him Britain had ensured America’s entrance into the war; otherwise she would have stayed neutral. As for invading Russia, his ‘own personal nightmare’ had been that Stalin might take the initiative. He accused his officers of failing Germany by surrendering too easily – in ironical contrast to his often voiced opinion that in 1918 Germany had failed the army. Nevertheless, the conflict ‘in spite of all the setbacks will one day go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of a people’s will to live’. After the war there would be only two great powers capable of confronting each other, the United States and the Soviet Union. ‘The laws of both history and geography will compel these two powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology’ – inevitably both would seek German support.
Unlike Napoleon – and this is surely the strongest and most merciful contrast – no legend came out of the Führer bunker. Yet there is an odd quality of mystery which is missing in Napoleon’s case. His father’s bastardy prompted wild tales of his grandfather having been a Jew from Graz called Frankenberger, even a Baron Rothschild. (At one point he himself took these tales very seriously.) The full details of his subterranean life in Vienna and Munich before 1914 will never be established; the files of the Viennese police list him as a homosexual, while it is claimed he visited Liverpool. In 1918 he is said to have contemplated joining the Spartacists. He is supposed to have promised to restore Crown Prince Rupprecht to the throne of Bavaria – Rupprecht certainly offered him a dukedom. None other than the Nuncio, the future Pope Pius XII, is rumoured to have told him monarchy was finished, that he should create his own type of state. No one has ever discovered the precise nature of the relationship with Geli Raubal, or that with Eva Braun. It was months before the story of his last days was established. Even now no one is sure the charred remains found by the Russians were his body.
Ultimately the two men are united by their reaction to the French Revolution, for it was Rousseau’s explosive concept of the General Will coupled with the breakdown of the social order which in the long run created both Emperor and Führer. The former ensured the demolition of Christian Europe, while the latter completed it. However much Goebbels might boast, ‘We have abolished 1789’, no less than Napoleonic France Nazi Germany stemmed from the Revolution. Lieutenant Bonaparte’s horror, Jacobin though he then was, at the storming of the Tuileries by the sans-culottesin 1792 was echoed by Corporal Hitler’s revulsion at the disorder which convulsed his adopted country in November 1918. Yet each claimed that he embodied the people’s will.
Napoleon saw himself as offering a via media between the ancien régime and the Terror. He claimed to have ‘cleansed’ the revolution, combining with it what was best from the past, morally regenerated by Revolutionary ideals. Yet for all his protestations, he accepted the Revolution only because it had made his career possible, and because those who had profited from it were ready to support his régime.
Similarly, Hitler argued that he was steering a middle path between capitalism and Marxism. National Socialists claimed that their political and social programme had thwarted the machinations of international finance, while at the same time defeating the evil consequences of the French Revolution as embodied in its children – liberalism and, above all, Bolshevism. The Führer regarded himself as both a conservative and a socialist. He has been described as ultra-modern in his day – a label he would not have rejected – yet he was modern only in discarding everything which had preceded him. For all its pretensions, the Brown Revolution merely served to confirm that of 1789. It was the same crowns and the same support which Emperor and Führer ‘picked up from the gutter’.
In his search for the ‘Napoleonic secret’ Clausewitz sometimes seems to suggest that the Emperor would have liked to achieve his ambitions by another means than war. (This is surely the meaning of a sibylline sentence in Vom Kriege, ‘The political goal is theend, and warfare is a means leading to it, and a means can never be thought of without a certain end.’) It has been said that a twentieth-century Bonaparte might have succeded in doing so. The Führer’s career contradicts this view – he began with politics, hoping to get what he wanted without going to war, and finished by regarding war as an end in itself.
Hitler’s dictatorship was the first dictatorship of an industrial state in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people.’ Albert Speer emphasized at Nuremberg, ‘Telephone, teletype and radio made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where because of their high authority they were executed uncritically. Thus many officers and squads received their evil commands in this direct manner.’ In the past dictators had needed the assistance of high quality at even the lower levels, men who could think and act independently, but now ‘The authoritarian system in the age of technology can do without such men … Thus the type of uncritical receiver of orders is created.’ Who can say what Napoleon might not have done with such instruments? The question underlines the difficulty of comparison.
Both men were enigmas on a vast scale. We can at least guess that each was fascinated by himself, dramatizing his own career in his imagination. Hippolyte Taine – of all Frenchmen the most critical of the Napoleonic myth – discerns a total, all-consuming egotism. The Emperor insisted on monopolizing all executive and legislative power, on ‘the annihilation of all moral authority save his own’, on the silencing of all public opinion and of every individual voice, the destruction of any initiative other than his own. He ‘loved the French people’ only in as far as they served his ambition. This book has stressed the role played by Wagnerian music and drama throughout Hitler’s life. In his early days they offered an escape from a futile existence, while later they provided an extraordinary secret background, enabling him to live out his very strange – and to him very real – dream-world of Teutonic myth, which in his mind shaded imperceptibly into German history. No doubt he saw himself not merely as Rienzi but as Lohengrin, and even on occasion as Wotan. Few people have been more intoxicated by Wagner, not even Ludwig II of Bavaria. The operas embodied the very essence of Germany for him, endowing his nationalism with a heady quality of feverish mysticism, which lasted until the last days of his life. Albert Speer said of the Third Reich, ‘It was only an opera.’
Neither man recognized any moral boundaries. Napoleon pretended to have principles, but what he dictated to Las Cases for public consumption was very different from his real opinions. Even if the Führer did infinitely greater evil, the difference in guilt is one of scale. No accurate estimate exists of the casualties which resulted from the Emperor’s career, but they must have run into millions, in a Europe far less populated than during the mid-twentieth century. Between 1804 and 1815 at least 1,700,000 French soldiers died on active service; the true figure is probably nearer two million. Certainly well over two million of Napoleon’s allies and opponents were killed. Such figures are enormous when one remembers that there was no mechanized transport – soldiers rode or marched to the front. When all is said and done, the Emperor did not leave monuments like mounds of corpses as tall as a house at Belsen or the gas ovens at Treblinka and Auschwitz.
We have a better idea of the mortality which resulted from Hitler’s ambition. According to Stalin at least seven million Russian civilians perished, many as a result of deliberately induced famine, together with three and half million Russian soldiers who died in prisoner-of-war camps. Over five million Jews were murdered, more than half the Jewry of ‘New Europe’, besides three million non-Jewish Poles.
In 1823 during his pro-Bourbon period Victor Hugo, not yet a convert to the Napoleonic legend, composed a florid ode to ‘Buonaparte’. He had seemed ‘a living plague’ [un fléau vivant], had reigned by ‘flame and iron’ as ‘a warrior without faith’ wrote the poet. ‘Crowned in blood … he made a sceptre of his sword, used his tent as a throne.’ Hugo declaims how 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.’ All this could be applied to the Führer.
In 1945, when Hitler’s Germany was deservedly ending in horror, Professor Schramm asked his wife to type out for him a chilling passage in Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit. ‘The most fearful manifestation of the demonic, however, is seen when it dominates an individual human being. In the course of my life, I have been able to observe several … 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 – the masses will be drawn to them… they can be overcome only by the universe itself, against which they have taken up arms.’ The passage ends with the proverb Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse – ‘No one can do something against God who is not God himself.’ Naturally, Schramm applied Goethe’s reflections to Adolf Hitler. Yet they had been written with Napoleon Bonaparte in mind.
Speer stresses how modern communications made possible the Führer-state. If this really is the reason why Hitler was able to do so much more evil than Napoleon – or even only one of the reasons – then technological progress should ensure that the next ‘national saviour’ on a world scale will be infinitely more terrible. Antichrist is yet to come. Perhaps the Emperor and the Führer were merely forerunners.