Adam Zamoyski is a British historian of Polish origin. He has written numerous highly acclaimed books, including Poland: A History, and Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871. He is also an expert on Napoleon, having written the 2019 biography Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow and its sequel, Rites of Peace.
His research and work on the movements and characters that made up European history during the late 18th century and through the 19th century have much to teach us about the ideas and images that helped shape our current sensibilities and world.
The recent release of the film Napoleon by Ridley Scott has made Zamoyski’s work even more timely. Catholic Herald contributor Anthony McCarthy, who was not impressed by the film, spoke to Zamoyski to get his views on the latest cinematic rendition of a seismic figure who still dominates the European imagination, and on much more.
McCarthy: What did you make of Ridley Scott’s film Napoleon?
Zamoyski: I was disappointed by the film, as with such a distinguished director and huge budget I was expecting something monumental and perceptive and had discussed the project with the screenwriter in its early stages. I think the fundamental problem with the film is that Ridley Scott got lost, somewhere along the line, about what kind of film he was trying to make. He set out to make a film about Napoleon himself and to present a convincing portrait of the man. At some stage he seems to have changed direction and turned it into a largely fictitious love story between Napoleon and Josephine. The film did show Napoleon the public figure but didn’t explain why he was such a good general or why certain characters in it were significant. Nor was there a word about his state-building or about his reforms. It was unsatisfactory both as a portrait of Napoleon and as the story of a love affair. I felt let down.
McCarthy: How should one go about portraying Napoleon in a way that does justice to him and his time?
Zamoyski: A fundamental problem with portraying Napoleon, and this is true of his biographers too, is that in order to begin to understand Napoleon it is not just Napoleon “the man” but Napoleon “the phenomenon” which must be considered. When we speak of Napoleon as a phenomenon, we are talking about a huge surge of energy which he partly created and partly surfed. He was a product of the 18th-century Enlightenment, which really changed the educated European man’s idea of himself and of his role in the world. The 18th century saw the manifest banishment of religion, of the Christian faith, from the political and public arena but also from everyday life, and its replacement first by a Voltairean cult of reason and rather silly notions of a Supreme Being who wasn’t the Christian God, and then by even hazier theories of Nature as a kind of pre-Gaia ruling Deity.
That was superseded in the last third of the 18th century by the early Romantics’ worship of Man as opposed to God, giving rise to a pseudo-religion of service to mankind, the community and ultimately the patrie (the fatherland). This new cult was in fact born of and modelled entirely on Christianity, with all of its basic concepts of service, self-sacrifice and redemption, but seen in terms not of service to God but rather to Man, Nation and Motherland, which had replaced Him, and with the Christian concept of Salvation in Heaven being replaced by fame in Posterity. Hence the transformation of the church of Sainte Geneviève in Paris into the Pantheon in which the saints and high priests of the new religion were entombed – the new country needed saints, just as the new world to which the French Revolution had supposedly given birth had to start with a fresh Anno Domini, and a new calendar beginning at the moment the French Republic was created. It’s a fascinating and complicated story which I have written about in my book Holy Madness, a study of how this process took over the Western mind.
Napoleon was a product of this and you cannot grasp the phenomenon of Napoleon without understanding the extraordinary way in which he and others handled language and image, falsifying the truth, in order to create a sense of exaltation which gave people the sense that they could rise above everyday reality, just as many Christian and other mystics have been able, either through prayer, contemplation or mortification, to rise above the human condition. This sense of being able to transcend limits meant that in Napoleon’s first campaigns his troops really did perform acts of extraordinary intrepidity, as they could forget themselves and almost seek death, for such a death would be a martyrdom in the sacred cause of the patrie. This kind of martyrdom was glorified not only in print, but in the paintings of the arch-propagandist Jacques-Louis David, which are veritable holy icons depicting martyrs who should be emulated. Although Napoleon had a pragmatic and almost cynical side to his character, he was stirred by such feelings and understood how to stir them in others. He always kept one foot on the ground, he was very practical, making sure his troops were fed and so on; yet he also hovered above reality, repeatedly referring to Destiny and Fortune as his mistresses – goddesses who had singled him out. On the eve of the battle of Borodino, his confidence undermined by failure and poor health, he expressed the fear that a fickle Fortune had abandoned him.
The only director who I think touched on this aspect of Napoleon is the French director Abel Gance, whose unfinished Napoléon, made in the late 1920s, conveys something of this sense of the sublime and of the possibility of achieving the impossible. He paints a highly impressionistic portrait of the young Napoleon and touches something very real about the Napoleon phenomenon, giving those who watch it a glimpse of what inspired the man himself and those around him. Films and books about him that do not take into account this pseudo-religious element in his motivation and faith in himself and in what he was doing cannot explain what made him tick.
McCarthy: The Enlightenment seems to have taken a very different form in France than in Britain. For example, a thinker like David Hume is often seen as a conservative political thinker, whereas in France the Enlightenment was much more radical. Was this partly because of religious differences between the two countries?
Zamoyski: Yes, that’s absolutely true. The Scottish/British Enlightenment was born in a place where Protestantism was the dominant faith. The Enlightenment here was scientifically based, not surprisingly, since Protestantism itself was in large measure motivated by the wish to marry the Christian faith with scientific truth and to rub out the miraculous. The Scottish/British Enlightenment did set Britain and British thought on a pragmatic and scientific path which, one could argue, was the basis of Britain’s great rise in power from the middle of the 18th century and domination of the world for many decades.
The French Enlightenment began in a similar vein of cold rationality; people like Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists violently rejected Catholicism in particular. They were intent on studying the physical world and explaining the metaphysical world in terms of it. But while the Enlightenment opened peoples’ minds, it didn’t satisfy them. Already by the 1750s one can detect in French culture a growing emphasis on the importance of sentiment. And it is sentiment, or even sentimentality, that replaces the rationalism of the early Enlightenment, and consequently subsumes rather than rejecting the despised Catholic faith. Hence the aristocrat Lafayette sets off to join the American rebels longing “to bleed for freedom”, seeking a secular martyrdom modelled on the Catholic canon – decades later, he would admit that he had been inspired throughout his life by “a kind of Holy Madness”, the title I gave to my book about this phenomenon.
This sentimental streak affects the most revolutionary elements in the Enlightenment that are aimed at destroying the existing political and social system, the religious establishment and practically all existing institutions, and which end up veering off into what can only be described as a subliminal religious revival. A revival fixated on worship of and service to the Revolution and its incarnation: the patrie (visually represented by a female figure intended to replace the Virgin in the popular imagination). All over France during the Revolution, altars to the motherland sprang up at which all sorts of bizarre perversions of Catholic liturgy were performed and bloodthirsty revolutionary songs sung to the tune of Catholic hymns such as O Salutaris Hostia. This is the world into which Napoleon and his marshals were born.
McCarthy: The terminology of the “Rights of Man” and “Human Dignity” has increasingly been used by the Catholic Church. Do you see some tension between the Enlightenment understanding of the basis for such terms and that of the Church?
Zamoyski: Yes I do. I think that it’s difficult to separate the two because they come from different sources but are inspired by the same thing. The French Revolution’s view of man as “sacred” coexisted with the idea that any man who was seen an “apostate” had to be exterminated by the guillotine. It’s a curious combination, a return to the worst forms of Catholicism and the auto-da-fé. Napoleon was undoubtedly affected this. Many British historians (and Ridley Scott) couple him with Hitler or Stalin, yet Napoleon was fundamentally benevolent, wanting all human beings to have access to the necessities and the good things in life. However, he also believed that in order to achieve his aims, which involved war and imposing order on a disordered Europe, he had to be absolutely ruthless when the occasion demanded it. There is a tension between the dignity and sacredness of human life and purely pragmatic considerations of how life should be lived. The ostensibly secular Declaration of the Rights of Man is essentially a kind of parody of the 10 Commandments, as were many “Declarations” of the revolutions that followed, using religious language and forms to promote ideas such Fraternity. Where does the idea of Fraternity come from if not from Christ’s teaching to love one’s brother as oneself?
McCarthy: The conservative political settlement of Europe after Napoleon’s defeat saw the papacy identify political survival with support for authoritarian regimes. Were there other realistic options for the Church during this time?
Zamoyski: Napoleon reinstated the Catholic Church, not as the Church of State but basically as good as that (though being a control-freak, he subjected it to his personal control). This he did in the teeth of public opinion and particularly of his army, which contained many fierce Jacobins as well as lapsed Catholics, and they deeply resented it when he forced them to attend mass. Had he been successful in establishing his dynasty, I suspect Catholicism would have returned to being the religion of State, as most of the rural population of France were devoutly Catholic. However, with the Bourbon Restoration, there came “re-Christianising” crusades, with processions and services meant to re-consecrate France to Christ or to the Virgin. Expiatory masses were said for the “crimes” of the past twenty-five years, which included the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which to most of the population were a matter of national pride. Many had fought and died in these wars and it was not a clever idea to tell their families that they had died fighting for the Devil. That, as well as the sometimes exaggerated flummery of these attempts to reconquer the soul of France, only served to divide society, and this played an acrimonious part in French politics right up to and into the Second World War.
McCarthy: How is Napoleon viewed in Poland?
Zamoyski: Napoleon has an enduring cult in Poland that has interesting roots. He treated the Poles with total cynicism and was responsible for the death of well over 100,000 of them, with no benefit for Poland. But given the country had been wiped off the map at the end of the 18th century, it was only under Napoleon that Poles were able once again to don a uniform and fight. In 1807 he created a Polish army in the grand duchy of Warsaw, which gave a humiliated people pride and hope as they watched soldiers in Polish uniforms performing feats of valour, albeit in the cause of Napoleon rather than that of Poland. When the small kingdom of Poland, re-created by the Congress of Vienna, was defeated in 1831, the Polish émigrés who hoped to restore it settled mainly in France, where they fuelled a sense of brotherhood of arms between the two nations, symbolised by the Napoleonic wars, and that epos has survived in the Polish psyche.
McCarthy: What are your views concerning the recent election in Poland?
Zamoyski: Well, this ties in to some extent with what I was saying about re-Christianisation in France after 1815. The Law and Justice party, which lost the recent election, exploited the Church in the most cynical manner to gain votes. It did so with the full support of the hierarchy, hosing it down with money and corrupting it in the process. Whenever you saw any public function with the president and the prime minister you always saw a couple of bishops at their side, if not a dozen. This has done incalculable harm to the Church in Poland. Young people have been leaving it in droves and an astonishing number have gone to the length of signing acts of apostasy, most of them alienated by the clergy’s all too obvious association with the Law and Justice party and its increasingly un-Christian behaviour. But I’ve seen church attendance drop in all age groups. This is less evident in the larger cities, where in Jesuit or Dominican churches they can hear less politicised sermons. But in the provinces, even devout Catholics are not going to Church as much. I hope that the results of the election, in which young people turned out in larger numbers than before, will bring the clergy to their senses and back to their pastoral, as opposed to assumed political, duties. But the prospects are not good.
Photo: An illustration of the Polish State flag. (Credit: Nazlisart; iStock by Getty Images.)
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