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Stick to science fiction, man.Or make one thelma and louise sequel. Leave Napoleon Bonaparte to the director.
I made this insolent complaint when I saw Ridley Scott comparing the author of the Civil Code, the great decimal maker and school builder, to Hitler and Stalin. As Scott said, Napoleon did “a lot of bad things” empire Magazine, aptly titled, preceded his biopic. But his record contained no Nazi-sized crimes. Uncle Joe had no influence on the legal system from Louisiana to the Indian Ocean.
After calming down, I discovered that Scott wasn’t the only one who was morally black and white. As Britain and much of the “Anglophone Circle” enters the liberal era relatively smoothly, people there may forget how hard-won the liberal era was elsewhere. The concept of the necessary dictator has a particular blind spot: leaders who focus on reform.
You don’t have to admit that Napoleon himself was one (he restored slavery, after all) to recognize the general type. Peter the Great of Russia: Absolute monarch, but also an Occidentalist. Frederick the Great of Prussia: Land annexer, elite ruler and lover of science. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of Turkey and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore were top-down promoters of modernization in modern times.
Japan’s Meiji Restoration was one of the most dramatic national transformations on record, but it’s hard to pin it on one leader. But again we have a combination of authoritarian means and enlightened ends: mass education, industrial development, standardized language. You can hoard energy and spread it everywhere.
Last year, Joe Biden described the modern world as “The struggle between democracies and dictatorships”. He has stopped, which is a good thing. First, many countries are difficult to place on the axis. (Where is Thailand at any given time?) Second, the West does not have the ability to confront all authoritarian states. All it can do is counter aggressor, such as Russia. In other words, examine what a country does, not what it is.
But Napoleon’s story exposes larger issues with the themes of tyranny and freedom. What if a country had to use the first model of government to get to the second model of government? The writer and strategist Edward Luttwak recalled a childhood quarrel with his father over Bonaparte. “Britain was already on the road to freedom and did not need Napoleon,” the parents’ view was, “but Europe did, and Britain took him away.”
This underestimates Britain’s legitimate anxieties. Even his fans must admit that an invasion of the Iberian Peninsula would put the cat among the pigeons. Still, the central dilemma of liberalism remains – how to achieve it in the first place, if not by fiat? –well said.
The life I sometimes advocate in this column—rational, commercial, urban modernity—did not happen naturally. Where it existed, it was often the result of central coercion and suppression of old customs, whether feudal or ecclesiastical. Totally Burkean, telling people to let history take its course is fine. But the British and American experience is not universal. Some polities cannot develop without large bodies of water shielding them from external threats. Even America had Lincoln, but his demands were not always good.
I wouldn’t push the metaphor of the enlightened authoritarian too far. This was the argument of Vladimir Putin in Western capitals at the turn of the century. (His useful idiots have only recently done that.) Also, benign dictatorship is what many educated people think they have after the fourth drink, and I can’t be seen as offering the British two of Janan Mercy Clause Great.
It’s just that Napoleon’s dilemma never goes away. Look around. Is there a world in which Saudi Arabia, under a repressive ruler, engages in domestic liberal reforms or diplomatic overtures? How do we weigh that against the creepy stuff?
Scott is a good enough artist that he gives us a more textured portrait than silly Napoleon. trailer Early interviews indicate. But besides cost, there was another reason the subject frustrates even Kubrick. Monster Liberator is such an awkward concept, especially for anglophone audiences. Those who were exposed to modernity earlier may not have been able to point the way to this place.
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