A sadly common feature of human beings is our ability to take something great and reduce it to something tawdry. Think of the wonder of air travel and our typical experience of airports. Think of the incomparable sacrifice of the Catholic Mass and the tawdry and commonplace ways in which it is all too often celebrated.
When it comes to the arts, opera-goers have for years had to suffer “demythologising” accounts of heroic figures – making them wonder why they are paying high prices to see the elevated brought down to size while mockery is made of the very beliefs which explain the motivations and emotions of the characters they have come to see.
Ridley Scott’s new film Napoleon manages the impressive feat of turning a “great man” of history into an entirely uninteresting character, missing out just about everything that makes him and his time significant. Even the expensive battle scenes – the film cost 200 million dollars – are not a patch on Bondarchuk’s 1970 film Waterloo. (We should, I suppose, be grateful that Napoleon does not contain the heights of absurdity of Scott’s earlier effort 1492: Conquest of Paradise which claimed the world was generally viewed as flat at the time: an old and laughably obvious lie popularised by the anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish Washington Irving).
Napoleon was a man whom Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called the “world-spirit” on horseback and whom Friedrich Nietzsche referred to, more perceptively, as “a man more unique and late-born for his times than ever a man has been before, and in him, the problem of the noble ideal was itself made flesh – just think what a problem that is: Napoleon, this synthesis of Unmensch (brute) and Ubermensch (overman).”
As a very young man, Napoleon supported the French Revolution, including the Jacobin dictatorship, and survived the demise of Maximilien Robespierre. The Revolution had looked to classical republics as its model, failing to see that there is all the difference in the world between the mental landscape that gave rise to a pagan constitution and that of a people that was aware of the Incarnation and had the opportunity to accept or reject the demands that went with it. The Revolution had thrown into doubt many of the old certainties in the name of popular sovereignty. That idea was not alien to Catholic thought, as readers of the great St Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) would know, but it was liable to the worst kinds of corruption, especially when orthodox theology was contemptuously cast aside. Jean-Jaques Rousseau (1712-1778), a major influence on revolutionary thinking and on Napoleon himself, was to talk of popular sovereignty, equality and the sanctity of conscience. But what does this amount to if the doctrine of Original Sin has been discarded and conscience has become an idealisation of one’s subjective wants from which no higher appeal can be made in a world which has lost both faith in a Divine Person and the reason faith protects?
Resentment of the supernatural proved disastrous, for as Jacques Maritain once pointed out, “It is clear that the Gospel, rendered purely natural (and, therefore, absolutely debased), becomes a revolutionary ferment of extraordinary virulence. For grace is a new order added to the natural order and, because it is supernatural, and its shadow retained and imposed on reality, then at once the natural order is upset by a self-styled new order which would take its place.”
It fell to the Corsican Upstart to bring a less utopian worldly order to the chaos which the Revolution wrought, not least France’s alienation from Rome and the grievous persecution which the Church had suffered. Napoleon’s achievements in bringing in a Civil Code, a Concordat with the Catholic Church and the new Banque de France are at least as astonishing as his prowess on the battlefield.
Napoleon, for all his support of the principles of the Revolution, had also seen “the mob” that it unleashed in action and detested it. Indeed, as Adam Zamoyski’s brilliant biography of the Emperor notes, he saw “atheism”, which had engulfed factions of revolutionaries, as dangerous and anarchistic – “destructive of all social organisation, as it robs Man of every source of consolation and hope.” His own views seem to have been deistic and, as a man focussed very much on the Kingdom of this World, he soon became impatient when the Church asserted Her rights – even to the point of invading the papal states and arresting the Pope when the mood took him.
Pope Pius VII had been present at Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor but the relationship was to prove an acrimonious one after the signing of the Concordat. For as the Emperor’s power grew so did the age-old desire of a “great leader” to subject the Church to secular control. In 1808 he took the extraordinary step of invading the papal states and then put the Pope under house arrest. In spite of all this, Pope Pius VII refused to give Napoleon permission to appoint his own bishops. Political messianism cannot tolerate a proper relationship between Church and State.
After his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon was exiled to the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. There this bellicose and charismatic figure, who had symbolised Enlightenment for good and ill and who had freed the Jews of Rome from their ghettoes, announced in his last will and testament that, “I die in the Apostolic and Roman faith in whose bosom I was born more than fifty years ago.” Pope Pius VII, upon hearing of Napoleon’s captivity and the condition he was in, had requested that Cardinal Consalvi plead leniency to England’s George IV. Two days before his death, on May 3 1821, Napoleon received extreme unction from Abbe-Paul Vignali, a Corsican priest who had been sent to St Helena by the same Pope whom he had once held in captivity.
Political messianism is always a temptation, especially for those who have not practised the virtues of patience and humility. Yet even Napoleon deserved a better treatment than he got from Ridley Scott.
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