Tzvetan Todorov: In Defense of the Enlightenment. Gila Walker translation. London: Atlantic Books, 2009. [First published, 2006].

 

Todorov asks his fellow Europeans, “After the death of God and the collapse of utopias, on what moral and intellectual base do we want to build our communal life?” No base at all, reply the postmodernists, rejecting all such ‘foundational’ thinking. Having seen postmodernism follow Church establishments and regimes animated by historical determinism into authoritarian habits, Todorov answers that Europe will more readily thrive if it recurs to “the humanist dimension of the Enlightenment.” With the Enlightenment, “for the first time in history, human beings decided to take their destiny into their own hands and to set the welfare of humanity as the ultimate goal of their acts.” Europeans can do so, again. 

The Enlightenment had many dimensions. Its scientistic rationalism has attracted the most hostile scrutiny from postmodernists, but that isn’t what Todorov takes from it. He points to three principles: autonomy or free will, seen practically in the pursuit of knowledge; a telos of human benefit, as distinct from service to God or ‘state’; and universality, the acknowledgment of the human species as a whole consisting of individual rights-bearers. For the Enlighteners, that rival universalism, religion, “was the greatest target,” first and foremost as a set of sociopolitical structures claiming moral and often political authority, but second and more profoundly as theocentrism. As their name implies, humanists are anthropocentric, replacing the quest for salvation with the quest for happiness.

Humans are more readily knowable than God, and humanists worked to wrest control of the universities from the churches and their priests, who claimed to know the hardly knowable. Enlighteners also demanded an end to religious and political censorship, campaigning for freedom of thought, speech, and publication. In their publications they invented new literary genres centered on human individuals: the novel, the autobiography. Their paintings, too “turned away from the great mythological and religious subjects to show the ordinary gestures of unexceptional human beings depicted in everyday activities.” Politically, they fought for civil rights of individuals vis-à-vis the increasingly centralized modern states, along with the popular sovereignty that, they hoped, would remain vigilant in the defense of such rights. Behind civil rights, Enlighteners saw unalienable natural rights, “common to all human beings on earth.” 

Natural right found its critics, however, among the Enlighteners themselves. Dedicated to the conquest of nature for the humane end of relieving man’s solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short “estate,” and buoyed by the substantial progress toward that aim by experimental modern science, many were tempted to suppose that political science might similarly conquer the unlovelier aspects of the human ‘self,’ with which Enlighteners had largely replaced the soul. They touted the possibility of human perfectibility in a very strong sense. Others—notably Rousseau—were not so tempted, and in the aftermath of the ‘totalitarian’ debacles of the past century, “we can see today that Rousseau was right.” “Knowledge of human societies comes up against the impossibility of predicting and controlling all the wills; the individual will in turn comes up against his or her inability to know the reasons for his or her own acts.” Human societies and individuals may be more knowable than God, but they are not entirely knowable, not sufficiently knowable to enable tyrants to exert the ‘total’ mastery they seek.

This self-critique of the Enlightenment can be brought to good account as Europeans seek their own identity in this century, seeking their own way of life amidst the diverse ways of life seen in the European nations. But before addressing that quest, Todorov needs to understand critiques of the Enlightenment from outside the Enlightenment. European conservatives (not to be confused with almost anyone labeled ‘conservative’ in the United States, then or now) objected precisely in the “pride of place” the Enlightenment gave “to man, freedom and equality.” Some Enlighteners, such as Montesquieu and Rousseau, agreed that their ‘project’ (itself a term redolent of the Enlightenment atmosphere) raised serious dangers. The “excessive recourse to reason,” rationalism, could not sustain the strong social and political bonds needed for an enduring political community, and any thoroughgoing doctrine of materialism would undermine individuals’ confidence in their own freedom of will along with their loyalty to civil liberty. Enlightenment could also cloak less enlightened motives, as European imperialism sought to justify itself as a vast liberation of all humanity while in fact serving “national interests.” Insofar as it did bring ideals of moral and political liberation to the conquered peoples, it inspired them to rebel against their conquerors, but often enough it was the scientistic rather than the humanistic dimension of the Enlightenment that was seized. 

Nonetheless, the Enlightenment wasn’t as bad as its conservative critics alleged. It did not cause totalitarianism, as argued by T. S. Eliot, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Pope John Paul II. Or rather, the Enlightenment tout court did not—the scientistic and ‘statist’ sides of it did. “Scientism is dangerous, to be sure, but it cannot be deduced from the spirit of the Enlightenment because the Enlightenment…rejects the idea that the world is totally transparent to the eye of the scientist and that the ideal proceeds from a straightforward observation of the world,” deducing ‘ought’ from physical ‘is.’ Standing alone, without humanism, “scientism is a distortion of the Enlightenment, its enemy not its avatar.” Nor does the individualist dimension of the Enlightenment alone define it. Moral subjectivism, leading to moral relativism or to a moral doctrine of “egotistical self-love,” ignores the Enlighteners’ practice of consulting with one another, sharing the knowledge each one gained through the exercise of the intellectual and civil freedoms they prized. Montesquieu wrote that justice “is founded on the existence and sociability of reasonable beings, and not on the dispositions or particular wills of those beings.” Freedom, yes; arbitrariness, no. And that goes for sovereign peoples as well as for individuals.

Enlightenment freedom or ‘autonomy’ means both liberation from claims to rule “imposed from outside” and “construction of new norms of our own devising”—norms, that is, social customs and civil laws—not natural rights, which should guide such devising. Human beings were by nature and should everywhere be self-governing. No fools, Enlighteners “knew perfectly well that our species is not self-governing.” Individuals and groups are often “driven by their will and their desires, by their affections and their conscience, and also by forces over which they have no control.” But reason can “enlighten them in their search for truth and justice.” Political science cannot be all-knowing, but it can guide human beings to construct ruling institutions that moderate their irrational impulses and deploy those impulses at the service of effective but limited government. Within that framework, “Enlightenment thinking fosters the development of a critical spirit,” itself a check on fanatical misrule. Todorov ventures to say that “this principle still needs to be defended today, notably against those who treat to any criticism that displeases them by immediately taking the matter to court,” or at very least to the university dean or the head of the human resources department. He reminds postmodernists that “those who, benefiting from the freedom of expression that exists in the democratic public space, adopt an attitude of wholesale denigration, turn criticism into a pointless game that subverts their own starting point,” as “too much criticism kills criticism.” (That of course may be the point, however, as turning civil liberty against civil liberty is ever the tactic of aspiring tyrants in liberal democracies.)

Modern European history has opened civic space for the practice of reasonable criticism, in part by “strengthening the separation between public institutions and religious traditions,” vindicating “individual freedom” by distinguishing (as Beccaria did) between sins and crimes, offenses against God and offenses against men. Between the freedom of conscience of the ‘self’ and the legal obligations imposed by the state, with the consent of the many ‘selves’ it governs, Europe has established “a vast public or social area steeped in norms and values, which are not, however, binding”—the moeurs studied by Montesquieu and Tocqueville. This intermediate realm guards against statist usurpation of religious authority, against attempts “to found a new cult around the state itself, its institutions or its representatives.” It was, humanists admit, “the removal of the Christian Church from its dominant position” in Europe that “made this new religion possible.” As Condorcet ruefully observed, “Robespierre is a priest”—indeed, ordained by the Catholic Church—and “never be anything else,” even having switched from Catholicism to the Cult of the Supreme Being. “Alternating seduction and threats,” such a “political religion” will exercise “a tyranny that is in no way less efficient than those that preceded it,” and under “the mask of liberty,” at that. The political or civil religions of the Ancients had not posed such a threat, since in the small polis the citizen was unlikely to need defense “against his own representatives.” But political religion with the powers of the modern state behind it did pose such a threat. As Todorov remarks, in the past century, Eric Voegelin and Raymond Aron saw this as clearly as Condorcet. [2] He calls his readers’ attention particularly to the less well-known Waldemar Gurian, a Russian Jewish convert to Catholicism, who preferred not to sully the word ‘religion’ by attaching it to this phenomenon, preferring ‘ideocracy,’ which nicely conveys its ideological character, as distinguished from both religious and philosophic doctrines. “As Condorcet predicted, this new attack differed both from theocracy and from caesaropapism, inasmuch as the latter conflated the spiritual and the temporal and yet maintained the distinction between the two, requiring only that one yield to the other whereas the new political religions eliminated the distinction and sacralized either the political power itself, in the form of the state, the people, or the party, or the regime that it imposed, namely, fascism, Nazism or Communism.” Totalitarian ideologies “replace and supersede religion.” Europeans must never submit to them, again.

Todorov analyzes the idea of freedom as “autonomy” by distinguishing two kinds of acts and discourses it entails. “The aim of one is to promote good; the other aspires to establish truth.” The Enlighteners separated morality from science “in order to remove the knowledge of man and the world from the control of religion.” Considering education, for example, Condorcet recommended “national education,” which consisted of promoting moral and political principles, from “public instruction,” teaching empirical facts and mathematical calculation. Readers now will recognize Weber’s famous distinction between facts and values, here. Condorcet warns that government has no “right to decide where truth resides or where error is to be found” or “to decide what is to be taught in school,” in terms of scientific and mathematical instruction. “Truth is above the laws.” Republican government is the realm of deliberation, not scientific investigation. As with Weber, Condorcet demands that legislative powers, “contingent upon popular will alone” remain separate from “regulatory powers,” wielded by administrators, who do have recourse to science. Todorov follows this, even to the point of opposing natural law teachings in the moral and political realm, finding them too scientistic. But he drops off when it comes to granting authority to scientific administrators. “The temptation to rely on ‘experts’ to formulate moral norms or political objectives, as if the definition of what is good proceeds from knowledge,” leading to the attempt “to absorb the knowledge of human beings into the knowledge of nature and to ground moral and political conduct in the laws of physics and biology” should lead Europeans to reject the authority of bureaucrats. “There are other paths to knowledge than science, as Giambattista Vico insisted, even at the height of the Enlightenment. [3]

This means that “scientism and moralism are both alien to the spirit of the Enlightenment,” despite what one often hears. “Truth cannot dictate the good but neither should it be subjugated to it.” Worse still are the later attempts by totalitarian and even democratically elected rulers, at times taken up by religionists and postmodernists alike, to erase “the very distinction between truth and falsehood, between truth and fiction,” to serve moral or political ends. Todorov cites the teaching of ‘creation science’ in schools and what he takes to be the deliberately false allegation of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as examples of this, but he surely knows of the attempts to suppress free speech in the universities, as well. The abuse of Enlightenment principles threatens individual and political freedom, wherever it is practiced.

“Autonomy alone cannot suffice to characterize the Enlightenment’s ideal conception of human conduct,” however. Free will is all very well, “but to go where?” Since “all desires and all acts are not equally worthy,” and since the Enlightenment rejected the Bible as a source of moral standards, Enlighteners turned to “humanity itself” as its standard: “Whatever contributes to the welfare of human beings was deemed good,” as human happiness on earth replaced the salvation of souls in Heaven. [4] In contemporary Europe, now that the totalitarian deformation of Enlightenment principles has gone so catastrophically wrong, “people have stopped pinning their hopes of worldly happiness and self-fulfillment on political structures at all,” making the state into “a mere service provider.” This ‘privatization’ of the pursuit of happiness ignores the moral and political importance of civic engagement. Todorov continues to resist the lessons conservatives draw, rejecting the Enlightenment’s “Copernican revolution” of morals and concluding, with Dostoevsky’s character, that if God is dead, everything is permissible.” Freedom has rightful limits.

The principal limit to individual freedom is “the fact”—and notice it is a fact, not a ‘value’—that “all human beings belong to the same species and that consequently they have the same right to dignity.” That is, Todorov does not go all the way with Weber. Acknowledging the natural ‘species-being’ of man, he thinks of it not so much as the source of natural right—being nervous about deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’—but, more vaguely, from “universality.” He would meet Hume’s challenge with Kant’s reply, initially by way of Rousseau. The acknowledgment of universality leads one away from immorality, defined as selfishness, insofar as (per Rousseau) “love of the human race” brings us to consider the general interest. “It was in this spirit,” the spirit of equality, purged of its naturalism, “that Kant was to formulate his categorical imperative.” Other Enlighteners formulated the theory espoused by “the modern school of natural law,” which Todorov ascribes to both the American “Declaration of Rights [sic] in 1776 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in France in 1789.” Unlike either the Americans or the French, Todorov derives a prohibition of capital punishment from these rights. 

Because, unlike the natural rights theorists, Todorov prefers to sever morality from nature, he needs to find a counter to the fanaticism of the dogmatic assertion of ‘human rights.’ “If human rights are the sole unquestionable reference point in the public arena and the unique yardstick by which the orthodoxy of discourse and acts is judged, then we find ourselves in an arena of political correctness and media lynching, the democratic version of a witch-hunt—a sort of one-upmanship of virtue, the effect of which is to eliminate the expression of thoughts that diverge from it. This moral blackmail lurking in the background of all debates is harmful to democratic life.” To counter this, he recurs to the doctrine of consent, the limitations set by contracts and other legally recognizable forms. Although this criticism cuts into the pretensions of postmodernists, given his interest in Europe as a whole, he chooses rather to emphasize international law deriving from the Peace of Westphalia—particular the principle of non-intervention into the internal affairs of sovereign states without their consent. That is, he doubts the morality of ‘humanitarian intervention,’ just as he had set himself firmly against European colonization. “A noble end cannot be achieved by ignoble means”—and he clearly regards killing in war an ignoble means—because “the end will be lost on the way.” Europeans should “draw a clear line between proposing and imposing, influencing and forcing, peace and war; the first term does not negate our compassion for the suffering of other; the second does.” Plurality, yes, so long as “it avoids radical relativism”; universality, yes, so long as it does not override consent. 

Although the humanist element of the Enlightenment has universal validity, it originated in Europe. Why there? Elements of it can be seen in other places, other civilizations, but not the Enlightenment tout court. Todorov credits Europe’s “political autonomy,” freedom of sovereign states and of individuals. “Europe is at once one and many,” its states constituting “a kind of system…connected by commerce and politics,” underpinned “by the same general principles.” Ancient natural law traditions, along with Christianity, unified Europeans on the moral and political side, “the unity of science,” perhaps deriving from ancient philosophy, unified them on the ‘knowledge’ side. “At the same time, Europeans were equally aware of the differences between their countries and, above all, the number of those countries. “One cannot help being struck by the contrast in comparison with China, for instance, which covers about the same area: a single state on the one hand as against forty-odd independent states on the other.” (Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago when Germans alone populated thirty-seven such states.) Hume saw the significance of this: China is eminently civilized; “it might naturally be expected to ripen into something more perfect and finished, than what has yet arisen from them.” But, Hume continues, China’s advancement in science and morals has been retarded by its homogeneity—one language, one system of laws, one set of moeurs. Without contrasts to consider, without competition (except between warlords on the peripheries of the empire and the imperial center), “minds were dulled by the uncontested reign of authority, traditions and established reputations.” Although often at each other’s throats, Europeans enjoyed “the advantages of diversity,” including ” cautious attitude towards established assertions and reputations.” In this, Europe resembled ancient Greece, with its many small city-states and its contending philosophic schools. And contemporary European states have republican regimes, frameworks for plurality within unity. Todorov again recurs to Rousseau: the “will of all” is the sum of individual wills, expressed in practice by majority rule, which can incline to majority tyranny. But the “general will” limits the will of all by holding no citizen to be “inferior to others” but entitled to “equality before the law.” The general will seeks “a generality that encompasses differences.” Sidestepping Rousseau’s firm adherence to natural right, and rejecting the imposition of unity by force, Todorov would “encourage people to recognize that their perspective is partial, to detach themselves from it (to act ‘in the silence of passions,’ to borrow Diderot’s expression), and to position themselves from the standpoint of the general interest,” an act that “requires seeing thing from the point of view of our neighbor, whose opinion differs from our own.” This, he trusts, would integrate individual differences “into a superior form of unity,” first by encouraging tolerance, fostering a critical spirit, and facilitating detachment from ‘one’s own.’ 

But is this not a tepid brew? It may be “a certain European spirit that the inhabitants of the continent can be proud of,” and it is European in its origin, and many other places today share the Enlightenment heritage, precisely because Europeans conquered and colonized so much of the world. However, “This common substratum does not suffice to organize a viable political entity” in Europe itself.  As Charles de Gaulle once said, “Good luck to this federation without a federator!” And de Gaulle, who famously identified himself with France, also recognized that “Sartre, too, is France.” That is, both the world at large, with its modern but anti-humanist regimes, and Europe itself, with its latter-day Sartres, poses a threat to the humanist decency Todorov upholds. As Todorov himself recognizes, “Faith is a European tradition but so is atheism, the defense of hierarchy and that of equality, continuity and change, the expansion of the empire and the fight against imperialism, revolution as well as reform and conservatism.” These facts notwithstanding, “the ability to integrate differences without erasing them distinguishes Europe from the world’s other great political areas: from India and from China, from Russia and from the United States.” Unlike the United States, for example, Europe “not only recognizes the rights of individuals, but also those of historic, cultural and political communities that are the member states of the union.” True, but if that is a strength, why can’t European defend themselves without the assistance of the (somewhat) more coherent American Union? At least so far.

Military and political defense of the Continent of the Enlightenment will continue to be needed. “The traditional adversaries of the Enlightenment—obscurantism, arbitrary authority and fanaticism—are like the heads of the Hyra that keep growing back as they are cut,” drawing “their strength from characteristics of human beings and societies that are as ineradicable as the desire for autonomy and dialogue,” such things as security, comfort, groupishness, and the will to power. And so “the vocation of our species,” and not only of Europeans, will be “to pick up the task of enlightenment with each new day.” 

 

Notes

1. For a full discussion, see Todorov, The Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.  For a discussion of this book, see “In Defense of Humanism,” on this website under the category of “Nations.”
2. For a review of Voeglin’s Hitler and the Germans, see “Voegelin, Hitler, and the Germans” on this website under the category of “Nations.” For discussions of Aron, see Raymond Aron: Aron et De Gaulle and Liberté et Égalité on this website under “Aron and De Gaulle: Wartime and Postwar” on this website under the category of “Nations” and José Colen and Elisabeth Dutarte-Michaut, eds. The Companion to Raymond Aron on this website under “Aron Companion,” also under the category of “Nations.”
3. See Giambattista Vico: Principles of the New Science of Giambattista Vico Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. For discussion, see “What Is Vico Trying to Accomplish?” “Vico’s Periods of History,” and “Seeking Wisdom in Poetry,” on this website under the category of “Philosophers.”
4. See, for example, François-Jean de Chastellux: De la Félicité Publique, ou Considérations sur le sort des hommes dans les différente époques de l’histoire (1772). 

François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800-1815. Alex Andriesse translation. New York Review Books, 2022.

 

With Napoleon out of the way, Louis XVIII came to Paris, returning the Legitimist regime to France. Things did not look well to Chateaubriand, who saw Napoleon’s troops, a regiment of the Old Guard, lining the route to Notre Dame; “I cannot believe human faces and bodies have ever worn such menacing and terrible expressions” as these veteran soldiers, “the conquerors of Europe,” now “forced to salute an old king—enfeebled by time, not battle—while being guarded by an army of Russians, Austrians, and Prussians in Napoleon’s invaded capital.” “Never, it must be said, have men been put to such a test or suffered such torment.” 

The monarch, his foreign allies, and his advisers had “committed an irreparable error” by allowing the French troops to remain united. They should have dissolved the army temporarily, kept the top officers on the payroll, then gradually reconstituted French forces, integrating some of Napoleon’s troops with new men. As it was, defeat followed by humiliation fostered “regrets and feelings hostile to their new leader,” along with resentment toward new recruits who had been given high ranks unearned in battle.

To this moral and military error Louis added a political one, a new constitution issued by himself, a royal charter instead of a document ratified by the people. Although the Charter of 1814 guaranteed a bicameral legislature, “taxes freely consented to, public and individual liberty, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, inviolable and sacred rights of property,” and an independent judiciary—the regime institutions of pre-Jacobin France—its origin as an act of the monarch reignited “the smoldering question of royal, as opposed to popular, sovereignty.” No one was satisfied: not the Bonapartists, whose hero had been deposed; not the republicans, who objected to the implication of Bourbon resumption of the power to make constitutional law; not the royalists themselves, who disliked the Charter’s rather un-monarchic contents. Although the Charter “was sufficient to satisfy men of conscience,” how many of those are there in any society, especially when it comes to politics? “In the end, if the Charter seemed defective, it was because the Revolution wasn’t over; the principles of equality and democracy had rooted themselves in men’s minds and worked against the monarchical order.” Chateaubriand had seen three regime changes, already: old, absolutist monarchy to constitutional monarchy; constitutional monarchy into republic; republic into “military autocracy”; military autocracy back into a constitutional monarchy. “Such metamorphoses would be repugnant were they not partly attributable to the flexibility of the French spirit,” Chateaubriand offers, with a touch of irony, having already described Napoleon as similarly chameleonlike. (“A Frenchman would shout ‘Off with my head!’ if he heard his neighbor shouting it;” reasoning having fallen into habitual disuse in politics, of what use was one’s head?) “Overjoyed” by the exile of Napoleon, who had brought down such suffering upon them, the French were not really Legitimists, either, but rather “a mob who held all manner of opinions” when it came to the question of what regime France should adopt. This would remain true for the next century and a half. In the meantime, “we Legitimists, poor devils, we were not admitted anywhere and counted for nothing” in French civil society, despite the titular reign of Louis.

In response to all of this, Chateaubriand published a new book, Political Reflections, annoying the king with his insistence that monarchy could survive only if it acknowledged popular sovereignty as the only kind acceptable in contemporary France. Fortunately, he had again won the friendship of influential woman, the Duchess of Duras, who arranged his appointment to the French embassy in Sweden, headed by Louis’s brother, King Bernadotte. (“A man protects you with what he is worth, a woman with what you are worth: that is why, of these two empires, the former is so odious and the latter so sweet.”) Before leaving, Chateaubriand witnessed the exhumation and transfer of the remains of Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, preparatory to their transfer to the Saint-Denis cemetery, where French kings are properly buried. “Among the bones, I recognized the queen’s head by the smile she had given me at Versailles.” A memoir from beyond the grave thus encompasses a memoir from the grave, and while the moral lesson of such a memento mori is so obvious as to need no remark, Chateaubriand draws a less obvious moral-political lesson. On this matter, the Bourbons got something right. They “must be praised for having thought of Louis XVI from the moment they returned. They had to smear their forehead with his ashes before they put his crown on their heads,” in a gesture of humility, memory, and respect before the dignity of rule. At the time, Chateaubriand “wanted a statue of Louis XVI to be set upon the very spot where the martyr shed his blood,” but he now thinks otherwise. “At the present time it is to be feared that a monument raised with a view to remembering the terror of populist excesses may well instill a desire to imitate them,” evil being “more tempting than good.”

Still, the deaths’ head smile of the queen and the sight of the tombs of French kings raise questions not merely about “the vanity of human grandeur” but about “the nature of man.” “Is everything emptiness and absence in the region of the grave? Is there nothing in this nothing? Is there no life at all in the void, no thoughts at all to be had by dust?” And “in your eternal silence, oh, tombs, if tombs you be, does a man hear nothing but mocking laughter forever and ever? Is this laughter God, the only derisory reality, which will survive the imposture of the universe?” Chateaubriand can only answer: “I am a Christian.”

Unlike the elderly Bourbon now elevated to the throne, Napoleon in exile retained “the two sources from which his extraordinary life had sprung: democracy and royal power”—democracy in the sense of the ability to gather popular support, royal power in the sense of “his genius,” his virtù in the Machiavellian sense, which the Bourbon line and especially its entourage no longer possessed. “His ambition had been disappointed, not extinguished; misfortune and vengeance were rekindling its flames.” The same was true of his partisans in France whose ambition to act grew “as it became progressively clearer to them how weak the Bourbons’ character was.” Cartoons began to be published, showing eagles flying through the Tuileries Palace windows, “while a flock of turkeys doddered out through the gates.” All that the Bonapartists and Napoleon lacked was an opportunity, as “more traitors are made by events than by opinions.” As always, Napoleon was guided not by news from France but by “the faith he had in himself,” and in the event he was right. Eluding his captors on Elba, “he advances unhindered among those men and women who, a few months previous, had wanted to murder him.” “Alongside the wonder of a one-man invasion” Chateaubriand places “the torpor of the Legitimacy,” its cowardice, which spread throughout the state and “paralyzed France.” Louis managed to pull himself together to give a strong and noble speech to the Chamber of Deputies, a speech worthy of a “heroic dynasty on the verge of extinction”; students from the university schools of law and medicine rallied to his side, as did Chateaubriand (“one is never entitled to say all is lost if he has attempted nothing”). With his “ragtag collection of troops,” Napoleon would not have attempted to seize a Paris united behind the king. But his courtiers wavered, and the people did not rally. Exiled from France for twenty-three years, the Bourbon circle no longer understood the people, and the people felt little connection to the old monarchy. “Thus the impossibility of understanding or supporting each other. Religion, ideas, interests, language, earth, and heaven—everything was different for the people and the king, for they were separated by a quarter century equivalent to centuries,” thanks to the succession of regime changes the people had endured. Chateaubriand can only lament, “Why was I born into an era where I was so badly placed?… Why was I hurled into this horde of mediocrities, who took me for a fool when I spoke of courage and a revolutionary when I spoke of freedom?” (“And you, youthful generations of the moment, let twenty-three years go by, and when I am dead and buried, you, too, shall be asking yourselves what happened to the loves and illusions you cherish today.”)

The king fled to Ghent, where Chateaubriand joined him and was named Acting Minister of the Interior of the regime in exile. He took the appointment as an opportunity to propose an amendment to the Charter guaranteeing freedom of the press, “for this freedom is inseparable from any representative government.” But “I perceived the catastrophe of society,” taking “refuge from idlers and boors” in a cloister, the kind of place where The Genius of Christianity had granted him a lifetime passport. And he nursed his memories; “it seems no one can become my companion unless he has gone to the other side of the grave.” “I wandered around Ghent as I wander around everywhere, alone.”

As he consoled himself, the French once again began to long for the ruler they did not have. “The French enjoyed the sight of a sovereign, who, defeated, had borne the chains of a man bearing, victorious, the yoke of a dynasty,” a dynasty from whom “all the royal lines of Europe” derived. In Ghent a hostess trapped him into dining with Joseph Fouché, former Jacobin and ardent advocate of Louis XVI’s execution, former and future Minister of Police under the Directory, then Napoleon, and soon Napoleon once again. As cynical a habitual turncoat as they come, he earns Chateaubriand’s sharpest irony: “regicide was the peak of his innocence.” “Garrulous, like all revolutionaries, beating the air with empty phrases” [1] full of ‘fate,’ ‘the law of things,’ ‘progress,’ ‘the march of society,’ ‘the justice of success,’ and similar resounding general ideas brandished to impress the easily impressed. “M. Fouché never forgave me my dryness or the minimal effect he had on me….The Jacobins detest men who ignore their atrocities and deride their murders; their pride is provoked, like that of writers whose talents one contests.”

But “Ghent was merely a dressing room behind the scenes of the show being put on in Paris,” where Napoleon ruled for his One Hundred Days after his seizure of the capital. By now, “the spell was broken” since “the few moments in which the laws had reappeared” under Louis and his Charter, however dubious, “were enough to make the reestablishment of arbitrary rule unimaginable.” “Despotism seems like freedom when it takes the place of anarchy,” which Napoleon had done at the beginning of his rule, “but it remains what it truly is when it takes the place of liberty.” Napoleon now “could do nothing with victory, which had turned its back on him, and nothing for order, since it existed without him.” The factions that preceded him continued under his faltering rule; he was reduced to “proclaim[ing] the sovereignty of the people in which he did not believe.” French internal politics could not topple him, however, since “the power combating him was as exhausted as he was,” bringing on “only a battle between ghosts.” Regime changes and the timeserving prevarications of those, like Fouché (merely an exceptionally conspicuous example of the type) left Napoleon with no one to trust, a “great man” standing “alone among all those traitors, men and fate, on a reeling earth, beneath a hostile sky, face-to-face with his destiny and the judgment of God.” [2]

At the Congress of Vienna, Czar Alexander agreed to an alliance with the Bourbons, Austria, and England against Bonaparte, who no longer had anything like the military power he’d wielded during his first reign. Heading toward Waterloo, the French army consisted of only 70,000 men. Chateaubriand wondered, “Were lots being cast upon the world, as upon Christ’s vesture?” If the Allies won, wouldn’t French glory be lost? And “if Napoleon won, what would become of our liberty?” He confesses that his heart was with France and Napoleon, against the “foreign domination” that he expected to result from the victory of a coalition now led by the British and their general, Wellington (“a mind seeing nothing in the French year of 1793 but the antecedent English year of 1649”). A restoration of the Bourbons under those circumstances would de-legitimatize Legitimacy. This time, “Alexander was not there at the beginning to temper the triumph and curb the insolence of victory.”

The Allied victory (at a cost of 25,000 French soldiers, 18,000 Allied)—there “was not a family in England who did not mourn”—came after the “two armies crossed iron and fire with a bravery and ferocity animated by ten centuries of national enmity.” Napoleon “threw himself upon his horse and fled” to Paris, not before raging at the French officer who urged him to do so. There, he “abdicated so as not to be forced to abdicate,” uselessly declaring his young son his successor as Emperor Napoleon II. That wasn’t going to work, although “all the omens of the Second Restoration” were almost equally bad: “Bonaparte had returned leading four hundred Frenchmen, while Louis XVIII was returning behind four hundred thousand foreigners.” Understanding that, Chateaubriand declined the position of advisor to the king, despite also understanding that he was ceding the position to the despicable Talleyrand. “Had I remained with the king, the combination of the Talleyrand and Fouché ministry would have become almost impossible; had the Restoration begun with a moral and honorable ministry, the future might have been difference.” He can only sigh, “History is full of tangles like this one.” Soon, he would witness the arrival of both these enemies at the king’s chambers: “Vice, leaning on the arm of Crime.” “The loyal regicide,” Fouché, “on his knees, put the hands that ordered the beheading of Louis XVI into the hands of the martyred king’s brother, and the apostate bishop,” Talleyrand, “stood surety for this oath.”

While “everyone spoke of the constitution, liberty, equality, the rights of the nations,” “no one wanted these things; they were merely fashionable verbiage.” “Material interests predominated.” Royalists judged Chateaubriand too much the lover of liberty, whereas the republicans resented him for being “too contemptuous of their crimes.” When he told the king that the “monarchy is finished,” Louis admitted, “Well, Monsieur Chateaubriand, I believe you are right.” 

Napoleon would not be the one to finish it. At Malmaison, stripped of power, awaiting exile, “he could wonder whether, with a little more moderation, he might have held on to his happiness.” He would have no real companions with whom to discuss the matter. Having derived his authority from his successes, in failure those who accepted the example abandoned their teacher for the next successful set of men. “Like most despots, he was on good terms with his servants, but deep down he cared for no one. A solitary man, all he needed was himself. Misfortune did nothing but restore him to the desert that was his life.” After his presidency of the American republic, Washington returned to his home to live as a farmer among the farmers “he had freed.” Napoleon hadn’t defended the French as citizens; in exile, he could have neither equals nor subjects. On the distant island of St. Helena, he squabbled with his British captors, famous but miserable. “I, who believe in the legitimacy of good deeds and the sovereignty of misery, had I served Bonaparte, would not have left him. With my fidelity, I would have shown him the falsity of his political principles. Sharing his disgrace, I would have stayed by his side, like a living contradiction of his barren doctrines and the limited value of the rule of prosperity.” But of course Napoleon was incapable of accepting such a friendship, of any friendship; “a solitary man, all he needed was himself,” his soul a monument to self-sufficiency wrongly understood.

Writing some thirty years later, Chateaubriand appraises the long-dead tyrant. “The greatness of Napoleon’s heart did not match the greatness of his head.” [3] “A poet in action, an immense genius in war, an indefatigable, able, and intelligent mind in administration, and an industrious and rational administrator,” “as a politician he will always seem deficient in the eyes of statesmen.” His murder of the Duc d’Enghien was an act “contrary to all prudence” as well as God, and it must be understood as “the secret leaven of the discords that later arose between Alexander and Napoleon as well as between Prussia and France.” Alexander was a Christian prince, Prussia (in those days) a Christian nation. His offenses committed against Orthodox and Protestant Christians matched his offense against Catholicism; his imprisonment of the pope and annexation of the Papal States were nothing but “a tyrannical caprice, which lost him the advantage of passing himself off as the restorer of religion.” Deranged by his spectacular military successes, he lacked the moderation and prudence that would have told him to stop at the invasion of Russia; his refusal to heed the danger of the Russian winter, his hyper-modern defiance of nature itself, brought on nature’s just revenge. As a result, “he lost Europe as swiftly as he had seized it.” “He had the world at his feet, and all he got out of it was prison for himself, exile for his family, and the loss of all his conquests as well as a piece of old French territory.” 

All of these errors “originate in Bonaparte’s shortcomings as a politician.” After making an alliance, he would change its terms, “constantly showing a tendency to take back what he had given, and never letting anyone forget the oppressor for a moment.” After making a conquest, he would move on to the next one, without troubling to reform the regime of his latest nation he had acquired. By so doing, he built not stable ruling institutions but a “poetic edifice of victories, lacking a foundation and kept in the air only by his genius,” and edifice that “fell the moment his genius deserted him.” He wanted to rule the world but “never troubled his head about how to preserve what he ruled.” It is noteworthy that Chateaubriand here identifies exclusively political failures, without recapitulating Bonaparte’s moral flaws. But the moral flaws did cause the political failures: “One of the things that most contributed to rendering Napoleon so repellent in his lifetime was his penchant for debasing everything,” a penchant owing to his “monstrous pride and incessant affectation.” He was an actor, “his own mime.” 

What, then, motivated him? Libido dominandi, the vice Augustine regards as the Satanic passion. “Domination incarnate” and “dry as a bone,” Bonaparte “had nothing good-natured about him,” finding “within himself no word, only actions—and actions ready to become hostile at the slightest sign of independence.” That is, he had neither philosophic logos nor Christian Logos. He ruined Europe’s legitimate monarchs not to replace them with republics but with himself, with tyranny. True, he came to power initially on the wave of Jacobin ‘republicanism’—itself tyrannical—but to say, as some were doing in the 1840s, that he intended to act as a modern version of the Roman dictator, tyrannizing in order to found or to defend republican regimes, tyrannizing in order to restore liberty, “proves only one thing: how easily reason can be abused.” The same sort of sophistry animates those who pretend that the Terror “was a time of great humanity”; in fact, its leaders called “for the abolition of the death penalty while they were killing half the world.” The same sophism, it might be added, reappeared in the arguments of apologists for the genocidal tyrannies of the twentieth century. 

Eric Voegelin has asked how it was that the German people allowed themselves to follow Hitler. [4] Chateaubriand addresses that question respecting the French. The French, he maintains, love not freedom but authority. “Equality alone is their idol,” and as Chateaubriand’s nephew, Alexis de Tocqueville, had already seen, “equality and tyranny have secret links.” Napoleon “pleased the French” by exercising military authority and “seat[ing] common people beside him” on the imperial throne. “A proletarian king, he humiliated kings and nobles in his antechambers.” By so inflating the pride and vanity of the French, he quietly set up another aristocracy, one beholden to himself, all the while teaching “us all to worship brute force.” In this he was in truth “the mortal enemy of equality,” the equality he made a show of delivering. “The wrong that true wisdom will never forgive Bonaparte is his having habituated society to passive obedience, driven mankind back to times of moral degradation, and perhaps bastardized human character to such a degree that it is impossible to say when hearts will begin to throb with generous feelings again….Bonaparte has deranged the future.” “The despotism that Bonaparte left hanging in the air will come down and enclose us like a fortress.” 

Brute force is a false god. Bonaparte sacrificed as many as three million French soldiers to it. To say that today’s generations flourish, that such calamities “were for the salvation of all,” ignores the reality: “He did not make France. France made him.” The justification of Chateaubriand’s memoir may be seen here. “No talent, no eminence will ever induce me to consent to an authority that can, with one word, deprive me of my independence, my home, my friends.” But “without liberty, the world is nothing,” as it “makes life worthwhile.” “Even if I should find myself the last man defending it, I will never cease proclaiming its rights.” By committing “crimes against liberty,” Napoleon committed crimes “against the human race.” 

The true honor is not in Napoleonic triumphalism but in martyrdom at the hands of that triumphalism. Chateaubriand regards his defense of liberty in his memoir as likely to fail. “The world belongs to Bonaparte,” to the legend of Bonaparte. “What the ravager was unable to conquer, his fame usurps. While alive, he may have failed to win the world, but dead, he possesses it.” As the despot of our memories, reigning as a “fantastical hero” held up by “poets’ whims, soldiers’ estimations, and the people’s stories,” by the “busts and portraits of Napoleon in [French] houses, palaces, cottages.” “Today there is universal agreement we should accept the shackles he throws on us from beyond the grave,” for “how can a free government come into being, when he has corrupted the principle of liberty in the hearts of humanity”? As of the 1840s in France, even in Europe, the authoritative memoirs from beyond the grave are not Chateaubriand’s but Napoleon’s. He acted, spectacularly, allowing the artists and the people to do the rest by telling everyone, including themselves, that his greatness was also goodness, that the soul of libido dominandi must have been a soul of magnanimity, too. “Fortunately for him, he did not write his life. He would have diminished it.”

On St. Helena, Napoleon eventually “takes to bed and does not rise again.” No Christ, he nonetheless professed on his deathbed, with a crucifix on his chest, “I die in the apostolic and Roman religion, in the bosom of which I was born more than fifty years ago.” That he did not live as he was born and died may be seen in the world he left behind, a world without the Legitimist—Christian and law-governed—monarchies of pre-revolutionary Europe. “The map of the world has changed; we have had to learn a new geography,” a political geography in which, “separated from their legitimate sovereigns, nations have been thrown to rulers picked at random,” picked democratically in the manner Plato’s Socrates’ ascribes to democratic regimes, by a lottery of one sort or another. Thanks to this egalitarianism, “his will be the last of the great individual lives. From now on, nothing will dominate in our minor and equalized societies. Napoleon’s shade will stand alone at the far end of the devastated old world, like the phantom of the deluge at the edge of its abyss.” Eventually, Napoleon’s bones were transferred to Paris, but they “will not reproduce his genius, they will teach his despotism to mediocre soldiers.” Napoleon III comes to mind.

As he died in exile, Napoleon manifested a glimmer of the magnanimity that had otherwise eluded him. When Chateaubriand wrote an article, saying that “the nations have called Bonaparte a scourge, but God’s scourges retain something of the eternity and grandeur of the divine wrath from which they emanate”—the dry bones the prophet Ezekial hears God promise he will breathe life back into—Napoleon told General Montholon, who accompanied him to St. Helena, that the restored monarchy should have put Chateaubriand in charge of affairs, not Talleyrand and Fouché. “There is no question that all that is great and national must befit his genius,” Napoleon continued; “he would have indignantly rejected the shameful acts of the administration of those days.” And more: “Nature has accorded Chateaubriand a sacred fire,” a prophetic insight, as his works attest. Admitting that Bonaparte’s remarks pandered to his pride, Chateaubriand rightly ventures to remark that “many little men to whom I have rendered eminent services”—surely including Talleyrand, quite possibly Louis XVIII—have “not judged me so favorably as the giant whose power I had dared to attack.”

It is telling that Bonaparte did not reflect upon what good Chateaubriand might have done him, had the Emperor brought him into his confidence. If Louis could not, owing to his mediocrity—having dismissed Chateaubriand as a worse than useless poet—Napoleon, the embodiment of libido dominandi, perhaps distanced himself out of a need not to reflect. Napoleon restricted his thinking to vulpine calculation. On St. Helena, had he paused, speaking of Louis but thinking of himself, as well? Chateaubriand never suggests it, but it is not impossible. [5]

He has a larger consideration in mind. “Napoleon brought the era of the past to a close. He made war in such a way, on such a scale, that it no longer interests mankind. He slammed the doors to the Temple of Janus impetuously behind him, and behind those doors he piled up stacks of corpses, so that they would never be opened again.” True, but only in Europe, and only for a hundred years.

And much more than that. He recalls visiting Cannes, near where Napoleon landed upon returning from Elba. He recalls Saint Honorat, who landed on the nearby Lérins Islands in the fifth century and founded a monastery, inaugurating Christian civilization in France. “Paganism vanished and a new civilization was born in the West.” “Fourteen hundred years later, Bonaparte came to finish that civilization in the very place where the saint had started it.” “The last of an exhausted race,” Chateaubriand could not halt Christendom’s ruin. At most, he slowed it. “Ah, if only I was as carefree as one of those old waterfront Arabs I saw in Africa,” who “while away their final hours watching the beautiful flamingos fly through the azure over the ruins of Carthage.” “Lulled by the murmur of the waves,” like the waves on the beach at Cannes, “they forget their existence and, in a hushed voice, sing a song of the sea: they are going to die.”

 

Notes

1. Editor/translator Alex Andriesse marvelously cites the Biblical allusion: “So fight I, not as one that beateth the air” (I Corinthians 9:26).
2. “It is hard to be born in times of improbity, in days when two men chatting together must be on guard against using certain words for fear of causing offense or making the other man blush.” So then, and so in more recent times, in other countries.
3. De Gaulle to André Malraux: “What do you think of the Emperor?” Malraux: “A very great mind, and a rather small soul.”
4. Eric Voegelin: Hitler and the Germans (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999). Reviewed on this website; see “Voegelin, Hitler, and the Germans” in the “Philosophers” section.
5. Malraux regretted that Chateaubriand did not visit Bonaparte on St. Helena.

 

 

 

François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. Alex Andriesse translation. New York: New York Review Books, 2022.

 

Napoleon led a life parallel to Alexander the Great—the main difference being, as Chateaubriand has observed, that in modernity it is impossible to pass oneself off as a god. After his victory at Austerlitz over the allied forces of Austria and Russia, Napoleon engaged in badinage with the defeated Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II. “Were such sovereigns worth being slaughtered for?” No, but there was another Alexander, Czar Alexander I, who was worth fighting for. “After the Battle of Austerlitz, almost everything Bonaparte does is in error,” and the Russian Orthodox Christian Czar of Russia, neither a god nor a beast (no emulator of the lion or the fox) exposed those errors. “The designs of Providence were fulfilled no less surely than those of Napoleon: we can see both God and man together on the march,” the one unerring, the other not. If Hegel claimed that the arrival of Napoleon in Prussia in 1806 betokened the appearance of the Absolute Spirit, the Holy Spirit finally marched its rival right back again, a decade later. Although Napoleon reconstructed the burial vaults at the Church of Saint-Denis to house the bodies of “the princes of his race,” not even he would be entombed there. “Man digs the grave, and God fills it.” To write memoirs from beyond the grave means, among other things, to write them from the vantage point of seeing how Providence worked things out. For himself, while Berlin, “this monument of philosophy, was crumbling on the banks of the Spree, I was in Jerusalem, visiting the imperishable monument of religion.”

More immediately, Austerlitz resulted in the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, Francis II renouncing the imperial throne and becoming the founding emperor of Austria-Hungary as Francis I. With Napoleon the principal emperor of western Europe, having established the Confederation of the Rhine, Prussia would be free to unite the many German states, once Napoleon was disposed of, initiating the geopolitics of twentieth-century Europe. As early as the 1840s, Chateaubriand judged that although “Germany dreamed of political unity…it lacked the political education needed to attain liberty—just as Italy lacked the military education to attain it.” Chateaubriand considered the Confederation of the Rhine “a great unfinished work, which required a good deal of time and a special knowledge of the laws and interests of the nations” to realize, “but it fell quite suddenly to pieces in the mind of the man who had conceived it” because the triumph of Austerlitz turned Napoleon from the task of political founding toward the task of mere conquest. “All that remained of this profound scheme were a military and a fiscal machine,” as “once the genius of his early vision passed, Bonaparte thought of nothing but money and soldiers”: “the tax collector and recruiting officer took the place of the great man.” Even on that level, Providence had other ideas. By barring England from his continental system, Napoleon did help to spur the industrialization of France, Germany Switzerland, and Italy,” as intended, but it also “extended English trade to the rest of the globe,” extending the already formidable British Empire, still recovering from the loss of its North American possession.

One civil accomplishment Napoleon did undertake successfully was the integration of Jews in his new ‘confederal’ empire (not so confederal, since he selected the rulers of the several nations within it). He did this by calling for the convening of a “Grand Sanhedrin,” in imitation of the Sanhedrin of ancient Israel, consisting of prominent rabbinical and lay Jewish men, charged with establishing laws governing the legal status of Jews; these laws, promulgated in 1808, consisted of a ban on polygamy, permission to intermarry with Gentiles in civil, not religious, ceremonies, and acknowledgment of Jewish-Gentile brotherhood within the nations of the new empire (including the obligation to defend national territories alongside Gentiles). Chateaubriand is having none of this, falsely claiming that the agreement “let the finances of the world go to the stalls of the Jews, and thereby produced a fateful subversion in the social economy.” In fact, the new Sanhedrin banned usurious practices by Jews in their dealings with fellow Jews and Gentiles alike. While the actual intention of this new set of laws was to promote Jewish assimilation (thus setting many German Jews against Orthodox Jews in eastern Europe), settling the so-called ‘Jewish problem’ along Napoleonic lines, Chateaubriand takes it to have been a (failed) attempted preliminary to the empire’s extension into the Holy Land.

Napoleon and Alexander I met at the Tilsit conference in 1807. They agreed to divide Europe between them, Turkey going to Russia, along with “whatever conquests the Muscovite armies could make in Asia,” while Bonaparte was free to consolidate Italy, take Spain, Portugal, and North Africa, thereby making the Mediterranean a French mare nostrum. In the event, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain diverted troops he would need against Russia in the war he soon would undertake against the czar, whom he believed to be “a fool.” But Alexander was only playing for time, “pretend[ing] to be a conquered prince.” “The politics of the West and the politics of the East did not depart from their usual character.” 

In Italy, Napoleon attempted to dominate the papacy. “Perhaps it was the moral and religious power of the Holy See that Napoleon feared,” although by his bullying he only enhanced that power. “What drove Napoleon?” Chateaubriand asks, not for the first time. It was “the evil side of his genius, his inability to remain at rest,” the same incapacity that caused him to botch the founding of the Confederation by making it a platform for new conquests. “An eternal gambler, when he wasn’t laying bets on new empires, he was chancing fantasies.” These, Chateaubriand suggests, were fantasies spurred by libido dominandi. “All authority (even the authority of time and faith) not attached to him personally struck the emperor as usurpation.” He failed to “see that by persecuting Pius VII, and thus making himself guilty of pointless ingratitude”—the pope had participated in the ceremony crowning him Emperor—Napoleon “lost the advantage of passing, among Catholic populations, for the restorer of religion.” It is true, Chateaubriand concedes in proper Catholic fashion, that “Rome is always the world’s greatest prize.” Napoleon annexed the Papal States to the French Empire in 1809, a degradation of the papacy numbering among the “miserable outrages of sophomoric philosophy.” But “the lowering of the pontifical flag” and its replacement by the Tricolor “presaged glory and ruins” there, as it would do “in every corner of the world.” When the pope now excommunicated Napoleon, Napoleon had him arrested and imprisoned. “If the iniquitous invasion of Spain turned the political world against Bonaparte, the disagreeable occupation of Rome repulsed the moral world,” as Napoleon “alienated himself from both the nations and the churches, from both man and God.” Pius XII died in French custody. Chateaubriand reminds his readers that this was the pope he had met in the course of his ambassadorial duties in his brief diplomatic career under the Consulate. “May my remembrance of his torments pay the debt of gratitude I owe him for the torments he blessed in Rome, in 1803,” when Chateaubriand was recovering from the loss of Madame de Beaumont.

In spring of 1809, yet another coalition, this consisting of England, Austria, and Spain, declared its opposition to Napoleon. The allies still did not fully understand the new kind of warfare Napoleon had invented, although they were learning. Chateaubriand calls it “large-scale war,” a notion “inspired by the conquests of the Republic, which had requisitioned the masses.” That is, Napoleon democratized warfare. Instead of small, aristocratic armies, anchored in castles, Napoleon, the man who could not rest, led his armies out into the enemy’s country, “uninterested in retreats” but instead concentrating his troops on a single point in the enemy’s line, breaking it. “This maneuver, which was peculiar to him, was well suited to French fury, but would never have worked with less agile and impetuous soldiers.” But the result of Napoleonic action was European reaction: “When France went to war, Europe, learned to march,” as “the masses have counterbalanced the masses.” Chateaubriand hopes that Europeans will return to “civilized warfare,” warfare “that leaves populations alone while a small number of soldiers do their duty” of defending their country instead of devastating others in “fields of carnage, which ultimately bring about no results commensurate with their calamities.” Looking ahead from the 1840s, Chateaubriand forecasts that “Europe, barring unforeseen events, will be fed up with fighting for a long time to come,” as “Napoleon killed war by blowing it out of proportion.” A long time to come turned out to be a century after Napoleon’s defeat, some seventy years after Chateaubriand wrote his memoirs. Even in the twenty-first century, such restraint seems to need relearning, once a generation that has learned it passes from the scene.

By marrying the Hapsburg Archduchess Marie Louise in 1810, Bonaparte “obtained the only thing he lacked”: a link to monarchic legitimacy. “He is now, in every sense, master of the ages—if only he had wished to settle at the summit,” from which he could survey a domain of more than 85 million persons, “half the population of Christendom.” His wrongly ordered soul prevented him from so wishing. “While he has the power to stop the world, he does not have the power to stop himself. He will go on until he has conquered the last crown, which gives meaning to all the others, the crown of misfortune.” 

For “in the depths of his heart, Napoleon had retained a secret enmity for Alexander” of Russia. Russia remained formidable, a possible rival for control of Europe. The peace he had established with the czar was “a peace that Bonaparte’s character could not endure.” “By expanding the boundaries of France, Bonaparte had collided with the Russians, as Trajan, crossing the Danube, had collided with the Goths.” He formed an alliance with Austria and Prussia, while Turkey and Sweden aligned with Russia. In his new empire, “the French no longer recognized each other in the vastness of a country delimited by no natural border.” He had deranged the spirit of the city in his own country, “blinded by his hatred for the liberty of the nations”—his “hatred of constitutional governments [being] invincible.” And he failed to learn the geopolitical lesson of the Great European Plain: “that warlike people who inhabit the plains are condemned to be conquered,” as “all the various invaders of Europe have swooped down on the plains.” If Moses and Mohammad were armed prophets, Napoleon was an “armed poet.” Nero-like, “He wanted to ascend the Kremlin to sing and sign a decree on the theaters”—an allusion, Mr. Andriesse helpfully informs us, not only to Nero’s tyrannical antics but to Napoleon’s contemporaneous reorganization of the Comédie Française.

In May 1812, Napoleon headed the Conference of Dresden, whose attendees included the nominal rulers of the states composing his empire (“they are fighting over vassalage”). There, the Emperor gathered his polyglot armies for the invasion of Russia—680,000 infantry, 176,850 cavalry. Napoleon, Chateaubriand writes, “addressed himself to Destiny,” his counterpart, Alexander, addressed himself “to Providence.” 

The Russians refused to engage in the kind of war Napoleon wanted to fight. They retreated, lengthening the French supply lines. Characteristically, “Bonaparte could not restrain himself” pushing forward. “Consumed by his own existence, Bonaparte saw everything in relation to himself; Napoleon had taken possession of Napoleon: there was no longer anything in him but him.” At times, he caught up with the Russians; after the Battle of Kolodrina, “a murderous clash,” “French corpses were buried in haste, so that Napoleon could not measure the enormity of his losses.” September 1812 saw the Battle of Borodino, where Napoleon won a Pyrrhic victory in the bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars, seeing some 30,000 French imperial troops killed, wounded, or captured and more than 40,000 Russians taken in defense of their homeland. 

Russian Field Marshall Mikhail Kutuzov, surrounded himself with Orthodox priests and religious icons. His soldiers prayed before battle, impressing a French officer who witnessed them by their piety, which “reminded me that the greatest of our kings, Charlemagne, also prepared for the most perilous of his undertakings with religious ceremonies.” Many among the French troops, sons of the Revolution, mocked the Russians for doing so, but one officer recalled, “our utter annihilation,” months later, “whose glory they cannot claim, since it was the manifest work of Providence, went to prove…that they had received what they had asked for.” In the battle at hand, however, “the French troops covered themselves with glory and demonstrated their great superiority over the Russian troops,” but “cursed be victories not won in defense of the homeland, which merely serve a conqueror’s vanity!” One of Napoleon’s generals “admitted that, on that important day, he no longer saw any signs of Napoleon’s genius.” As his difficulties mounted (the Russians continued to retreat, evading any decisive battle), Napoleon struggled. “We can find no other explanation for this other than in the very nature of the man. Adversity arrived, and its first touch froze him.” Unlike a Christian, ready to sacrifice, to suffer humiliation and injury, “prosperity alone left him with his faculties intact.”

“The Russians were withdrawing in good order to Moscow.” When Bonaparte’s army entered, the city’s governor-general, Fyodor Rostopchin, ordered the evacuated capital to be burned, “a decision [that] will go down in history as a heroic decision that saved one nation’s independence and contributed to the liberation of several others.” Chateaubriand concurs with the judgment of Madame de Staël: “This religious city has perished like a martyr whose spilled blood reinvigorates the brethren who survive.” Had Bonaparte seized Moscow, he would have “wrapped the world in his despotism like a mortuary sheet.” In destroying the city before he could do that, the Russians showed that “the rights of humanity come first.” “Speaking for myself, if the earth were an explosive globe, I wouldn’t hesitate to set it on fire were it a question of delivering my country from an oppressor. However, nothing less than the supreme interests of human liberty are needed to induce a Frenchman—his head covered in mourning and his eyes full of tears—to speak of a decision that would prove fatal to so many of his countrymen,” beginning with those who choked on the smoke or were crushed by collapsing arches and buildings. Bonaparte himself could only escape ingloriously “over the coals of a neighborhood that had already been reduced to ash.”

Bonaparte railed at what he took to be the madness of Rostopchin. “He who fails to understand greatness in another will not understand what it would mean for himself, when the time for sacrifices comes.” As for the czar, “Alexander betrayed no despondency when he learned of his adversities,” instead blessing “the hand that has chosen us to be first among nations in the cause of virtue and liberty.” As always, Chateaubriand understands the way men use words. To speak of God, virtue, and liberty pleases, reassures, and consoles a people. “How superior it is to those affected phrases, sadly scrounged from pagan locutions and defined by fatalism: it was to be they had to be, destiny drags them on!—empty phraseology, which is always barren, even when it refers to the most significant acts.” A century later, Russian rulers would take up exactly such language, and Russia has systematically ruined itself, ever since.

Having conquered an empty place, Bonaparte turned to the thought of attacking St. Petersburg. “Such were the new chimeras that filled Napoleon’s head”—chimeras, since “it is not possible to subjugate a nation whose last stronghold is the North Pole.” “The man was on the brink of madness, yet his dreams were still those of a great mind.” As he drew up his new plans, he lingered at Moscow, despite the threat of the Russian winter. “By delaying these few days”—thirty-five, to be precise—he “was sentencing the 100,000 men left to him to death.” 

As he finally retreated from Moscow, the Russians counterattacked, cutting off his escape route. Passing back over one battlefield, the French saw that “the birds of the sky had not finished eating what we had sown when we passed that way again.” Kutuzov pursued, leisurely. “Just wait until the snow comes.” At Borodino, “a vast scene of butchery lay before them, with forty thousand corpses in various stages of decay.” Would they “soon be like the companions whose remains they had seen”? But Napoleon, “indifferent to the miseries of his soldiers, cared for nothing but his own interests.” One of his officers asked, “Is this the civilization we’re bringing to Russia?” Chateaubriand remarks, “When you have committed a reproachable act, Heaven imposes on you the sanction of witnesses.” With Napoleon, Chateaubriand himself is the most eloquent among them. “The Russian expedition was a true extravagance, which all the civil and military authorities of the Empire had condemned.”

And what of the Russian dead? Who remembers them? “Who thinks of the peasants left behind in Russia? Are those rustics glad to have been at ‘the great battle beneath the walls of Moscow’? Perhaps I am the only one who, on autumn evenings, watching the birds of the north wheel high in the sky remembers that they have seen our countrymen’s graves.” Now that industrial companies have taken over that land, “with their furnaces and boilers,” the bones of the French “have been converted to animal black. That is what we are doing with the dead nowadays! These are the sacred rites of the new religion!”

Concurrent with this long retreat, a coup attempt failed in Paris, a sign of Napoleon’s waning authority. “The rights that Napoleon had founded on force were being destroyed, along with his forces, by Russia, while in the capital all it took was one man to cast them into doubt. Outside of religion, justice, and freedom, there are no rights at all”—none, that is, that can be secured. As for Napoleon himself, he took care to leave his troops behind, just after declaiming that he would never do so. After all, “Can I remain at the head of a rout?” Not if I am Napoleon. His great cavalry commander, Joachim Murat, lamented, “It is no longer possible to serve a madman. We are no longer safe with him. Not a prince in Europe believes his words or his treaties.” Indeed, “the European defection had begun.”

The French Senate nonetheless ‘doubled down,’ providing another quarter of a million men under Napoleon’s command. But Napoleon could no longer overawe the Legitimists. Louis XVIII issued a proclamation “that would later be set down in a constitutional charter—the first hopes of liberty, which came to us from our ancient kings.” Czar Alexander addressed his own proclamation not to the French but to all of Europe: “May there soon be nothing left of the bloodthirsty colossus who has threatened the continent with his endless criminality but a long-abiding memory of horror and pity!” And the pope repudiated the so-called Concordat of 1813, whereby Napoleon would have increased his power over the Church, thus “giving the signal to depose the oppressor of nations.” For his part, “Bonaparte declared that he had always wanted peace and that the world was in need of it. But this world no longer had any wish to serve him.” More, it wished to overthrow him, as England’s Duke of Wellington, “the fatal man,” opened a new front in the west of France and the “Young Germany” movement, spurred by the philosophy professor Johann Gottlieb Fichte, brought Prussian forces to bear on the side of Russia, marching to patriotic verses “full of religious feeling and sincere human nature that sang of God, loyalty, and Germany.” “The man whose life was a dithyramb in action fell only when the poets of Young Germany had sung and taken up the sword against their rival, Napoleon, the poet of arms,” who had claimed that he made his battle plans out of the dreams of his sleeping soldiers. Czar Alexander “shared their lofty sentiments, and he was in a position powerful enough to make their dreams a reality,” but eventually would allow himself “to be scared by the fearful monarchs around him,” who, unlike French Legitimists, did not want liberty, that is, constitutional monarchy. The absolutists of the Holy Alliance would deny political liberty to post-Napoleonic Europe, eventually bringing on the revolutions of 1848 in the years immediately after Chateaubriand wrote these words.

Reinforced, Napoleon careened on, losing the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 and watching as Allied forces advanced across the Rhine in December. When the French legislature dared to tell him that he should restore political liberty to the country, he replied, while closing the legislature, “Do you wish to restore the sovereignty of the people? Very well, in that case, I declare myself the people, for I claim to be where sovereignty resides, now and forever.” Chateaubriand contents himself by remarking, “Never has a despot so emphatically explained his nature.” 

Not Napoleonic ‘Destiny’ but divine Providence “had changed the fortunes of the world.” Napoleon departed for the eastern front while Pius VII, now liberated, made his triumphal return to the Vatican, “making his way amid hymns and tears, to the sound of bells and cries of ‘Long live the pope! Long live the head of the Church!'” Protestants turned out, saying, “Here is the greatest man of his age,” a living martyr. “Such is the greatness of true Christian society,” Chateaubriand writes, “where God ceaselessly mingles with men. Such is the superiority of the power of the weak, sustained by religion and adversity, over the power of the sword and the scepter.” 

Chateaubriand himself had his own, literary, card to put down. He wanted the French to rise up against Napoleon before the foreign troops could defeat and overthrow him, to restore the Bourbon monarchy with institutions “modified to suit the times”—that is, institutions ensuring political liberty rather than the absolutism of Louis XIV, which Napoleon had attempted to revive. In the struggle of rival regimes that would wrack his country for a century and a half to come, Chateaubriand opposed radical, Jacobin republicanism, Napoleonic despotism, and socialism in defense of constitutional monarchy, a regime strong enough to defend France from foreign enemies (which would soon see a united Germany at the forefront) without engaging in wars of conquest, while maintaining domestic tranquility under the rule of law and of Christian, especially Catholic, moral authority. He made his argument in a pamphlet, Bonaparte et des Bourbons, but it was too late for any insurrection to stop the Allied armies. 

“The war came and installed itself outside the gates of Paris”—the first time in centuries that “Paris had seen the smoke of enemy camps.” Defeated once again, Napoleon had returned to the capital, “leaving behind him the immense inferno of his pointless conquests.” Ever-scheming Talleyrand wanted to get rid of him and to replace him with the regency of Marie-Louise which of course he would head. It was too late for his schemes, as well. Paris surrendered on March 31, 1814, “within ten days of the anniversary of the Duc d’Enghien’s death.” Recalling Napoleon’s vicious injuries to Russia, Christian Czar Alexander refused vengefulness. “I am a just man, and I know that the French people are not to blame. The French are my friends, and I want to prove to them that I come to return good for evil. Napoleon is my only enemy.” He extended his protection over Paris, respecting “all its public institutions,” quartering only so many troops there as to guarantee civil order while the French “secure for yourself a government that will give peace to France and Europe both.” Not long after, having seen that “order, peace, and moderation reigned throughout” the city, “Alexander departed, leaving us our masterworks”—unlike Napoleon, he plundered no paintings or statues from the country he had conquered—and “our liberty, set down in the charter—a liberty we owed to his intelligence as well as to his influence.” “Chief of two supreme authorities, an autocrat of the sword and the church, Alexander alone, of all the sovereigns of Europe” (very much including the deposed Napoleon) “understood that France had reached an age of civilization at which she could only be governed under a free constitution.” The Czar “considered himself merely an instrument of Providence and claimed nothing for himself.” When Louis XVIII entered Paris, Alexander kept out of sight. Most beautifully, when told by a Frenchman that his arrival had “long been waited and wished for,” he replied, “I would have come sooner, had French valor not delayed me.” In all, “he appeared to be astonished by his triumph; his almost tender gaze wandered over a population he seemed to consider superior to himself,” “as if he felt he was a barbarian in our midst, as a Roman might have felt ashamed in Athens.” 

It was at this point that the Chateaubriand’s pamphlet did have some good effect. Napoleon still had “more than forty thousand of the best soldiers on earth surround[ing] him,” and for his part, ever-scheming Talleyrand hoped to place the French crown on the four-year-old Napoleon II (as a former revolutionary, “he dreaded the Bourbons”), a policy consistent with Bonaparte’s own stated desire at the time. With the publication of Bonaparte et les Bourbons, “I flung myself headlong into the fray” in “an effort to tip the scales” in favor of Legitimacy. Later, Louis XVIII said that “my pamphlet was more advantageous than an army of a hundred thousand men,” and even Bonaparte allowed that “I have no reason to reproach Chateaubriand; he resisted me when I was still in power.” Chateaubriand courteously returns, “My admiration for Bonaparte has always been great and sincere, even when I was attacking him with all my might,” although cautioning his readers that the uncritical admiration of the Emperor among those who no longer remember the sufferings he inflicted during his years of tyranny distort the past and threaten France’s future. Like Alexander, Chateaubriand wants a life of Christian humility without personal or national humiliation, for himself and for his countrymen, and for the men of every country. 

Such a life had been impossible under the regime of Napoleon. Under it, we French “no longer mattered.” “Everything belonged to Bonaparte: I have ordered, I have won, I have spoken; my eagles, my crown, my blood, my family, my subjects.” Even under the pseudo-republican oligarchy of the Jacobins, “we did not have the shame of being the property of a man,” and no foreigner invaded us, thanks to the valor and sacrifice of our own men. “Despite his enormous acquisitions,” Napoleon “succumbed not because he was defeated, but because France no longer wanted him. An important lesson! Let it never be forgotten that there is a germ of death in everything that offends human dignity.”

The French would re-learn this lesson in the 1940s. To that generation, Chateaubriand still spoke: “God, in His patient eternity, sooner or later brings justice to bear. In those moments when Heaven appears to sleep, it is a fine thing that honest men look on with disapproval, for this disapproval remains as a rein on absolute power. May France never repudiate the noble souls who cried out against her servitude when all were prostrate, when there were so many advantages to remaining prostrate, so many graces to receive in exchange for flattery, so many persecutions to reap for sincerities sown.”

In the end, Talleyrand got what he really wanted: power for himself. He negotiated with Alexander for permission to form a provisional government with himself as its president, even as he adroitly switched to backing the Bourbon Restoration. “From that moment forward, M. de Talleyrand seemed to be the arbiter of the world; his parlors became centers of negotiation.” Chateaubriand issues his riposte. “The first acts of the Restoration were entrusted to the barren Bishop of Autun.” [1] Alluding to the likelihood that Talleyrand owed his physical condition to syphilis, Chateaubriand remarks, “He infected this Restoration with sterility and passed on to it a germ of dishonor and death.” 

Napoleon abdicated in April 1814. Departing for what would be only his first exile, at the island of Elba, Napoleon continued to hold Louis XVIII less legitimate than himself, since Louis was elected by the “lowly Senate,” while Napoleon had been chosen by “the unanimous wish of the people.” That he now departed in accordance with the nearly unanimous wish of the people he preferred not to notice. Chateaubriand, it is scarcely necessary to say, does.

Chateaubriand concludes his assessment of Napoleon’s character. “Bonaparte cannot be judged according to the rules we apply to the great geniuses, for he lacked magnanimity.” Unlike the great-souled man of Aristotle’s Ethics, Bonaparte could expand or condense his soul as conditions warranted. “Like the rebel angel, he could shrink his immeasurable mass down and fit himself into a measurable space; his ductility permitted him both salvation and rebirth,” enabling him to live in exile on an island and then return to France in a final attempt to regain his empire. “Changing his manners and costume at will, flawless in comedy and tragedy alike, he was an actor who could look natural under the tunic of a slave or the mantle of a king.” As such, he “was, in one person, all things great and miserable in man”—a consummate Machiavellian prince, waging a futile war against God and nature alike.

 

Note

1. Talleyrand, an ordained priest, had risen to the station of Bishop of Autun by the eve of the French Revolution. He quickly metamorphosed into an open scoffer at religion, earning excommunication. Reinstated as a member of the Church at the beginning of the century, he was laicized by Pius VII in 1802, an act very much in line with prudential reasoning on the Pope’s part.