Napoleon Mania is Back!

Don’t be surprised if you find yourself face to face with Napoléon Bonaparte almost everywhere you turn these days in France.

It isn’t an anniversary of his birth in 1769, his death in 1821, his military victory at Austerlitz in 1805 or his defeats at Trafalgar or Waterloo.

It isn’t even the blockbuster 200-year mark since he received on December 2, 1804, his crown as Emperor of France from Pope Pius VII- a major step on his path toward his eventual de facto leadership of most of Europe by 1811.

But France, at the moment, is undergoing an outburst of Napoléon mania, an almost hypnotic fascination for the life and times of the legendary Corsican who, for more than 10 tempestuous years from 1804 to 1815, radically altered the face and the history not only of his own country, but of virtually the entire European continent.

It has produced in recent months a popular new play about him, a widely distributed feature film and a glorifying four-part television series about Napoléon that ran up record audiences to the millions.

Libraries and bookstores abound with a succession of newly published historical analyses and biographies devoted to the Emperor.  One of the most popular was written by none other than  France’s current Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin. Newsstands bulge with special edition magazines about Napoléon. Toy stores display battalions of dashingly dressed lead soldiers portraying the Emperor with his trademark white horse, white vest and bicorne, cocked hat at the head of various units of his legendary Grande Armée. At its mightiest, before it was virtually cut in half by a disastrous winter campaign on the plains of Russia in 1812, that army numbered some 700,000 soldiers; 26 marshals and more than 2,000 generals.

It isn’t the interest in Napoléon that is new. His record and the panache with which he established it long has been a prime subject of study, debate and controversy both inside and outside of France. His tomb at Les Invalides ranks as Paris’ third most-visited tourist site. Museums of all shapes and sizes devoted to some aspect of his career can be found virtually throughout France and commemorative full-dress reenactments of his most famous battles are staged almost annually by societies of Napoléonic history buffs both in France and abroad.

Even in countries such as Germany; Austria, Russia and England, which frequently were his adversaries; Napoléon has remained an admired figure, even if sometimes grudgingly. In Belgium, at the site of the battle of Waterloo, the defeat from which he never recovered, emphasis on Napoléon is so great that it is easy to assume he was the victor there not the vanquished.
What then has caused the new Napoléonic upsurge?

The most likely triggering event, lacking an evident contender, is the approaching bicentennial of his 1804 ascent to the Emperor’s throne even though it is still nearly two years away.

There is much justification for the endurance of the Napoléonic legend. He was, without argument; a brilliant military tactician, diplomatic strategist and an exemplary alliance-maker, by conquest or marriage, of great will and wile. He was also a magnificent communicator, an expert at burnishing his image as a hero of the people and champion of the most noble aspirations of the French revolution.

In 1811. At the height of his power and popularity, his empire ruled directly or through alliances, many of them cemented by the placement of his family and friends as rulers of the nations he had beaten in battle, stretched out across the length and breadth of Europe from Russia to the Atlantic coast. Only a few fringe states and Britain, his arch-and unforgiving enemy, managed to withstand him.

Probably better than anyone, however, Napoléon himself understood that his success was built and held together mostly by boots, cannons and muskets and was always subject to treasons and defections. It collapsed quickly, as did his popular support, when victory on the battlefields escaped him.

Exiled to the lonely mid-Atlantic island of St. Helena by the British after his defeat at Waterloo and subsequent abdication, he remained for six isolated years there before his death on May 5, 1821.

He spent that time of banishment moodily but systematically recapitulating, reconstructing, re-writing and justifying the history of his reign. Those writings played a large role in building and safeguarding his grandiose historical image.

That image remains essentially positive although it has monumental down sides.

Although he once dominated Europe, the cost was devastating. Some three million soldiers and civilians died on his innumerable battlefields.  Some 700,000 of his own countrymen perished fighting in his name and, after his departure, France was left with imposed boundaries that made it even smaller than when he came to power.

He came to power as an ardent defender of the popular republican values that inspired the French revolution and the overthrow of French monarchy but then, in essence, replaced them with a new sort of monarchy dedicated to the stature of France but also to his own glory.

Even his critics acknowledge, however, that he created a romantic legend of majestic conquest unequaled on the world stage since the days of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar.

To that one must add a Napoléonic legal, educational and architectural heritage that marks France to this day.

The French legal system remains based upon the Code Napoléon, covering most areas of civil law. French education, heavily oriented to state-run “elite” schools of higher learning designed to turn out a class of hand-picked future national leaders, is a Napoléonic-era inheritance.

Some of the French capital’s most respected institutions, such as the Légion d’Honneur, and its most familiar landmarks–the Arch de Triomphe, the pillared facades of the National Assembly and the Madeleine church, the colonnaded rue de Rivoli and the needle-like obelisk on the Place de la Concorde, a prize brought back from his campaigns in Egypt, all stem from Napoléon’s reign.  So do the Pont des Arts and the Pont d’Iéna linking the two banks of the Seine in the center of the city.

An inveterate experimenter and organizer, Napoléon personally devised the Parisian system of numbering streets with even figures on one side and odd ones on the other and the city’s first sidewalks, previously non-existent, appeared during his reign.

There are a myriad of hotels, bars, restaurants, cognacs and all kinds of other commercial ventures in France that have adopted Napoléon’s name. Numerous boulevards in Paris honor his Grande Armée marshals. Train and metro stations in Paris such as Austerlitz evoke his most famous battle victories. He has a rue Bonaparte named after him in the Latin Quarter on the left bank of the Seine and his statue, garbed as a laurel-wreath-bedecked Roman emperor, stands atop the giant column on the Place Vendome that was constructed with the metal of Austrian and Russian cannons captured by his Grande Armée at the battle of Austerlitz.

Looking down the line, the current resurgence of Napoléonic frenzy may only be the beginning. The upcoming anniversary of his ascension to the Emperor’s throne is an opening cannon shot. Opportunities galore remain, however for a long succession of Napoléonic bicentennial celebrations to come

There are, after all, still 18 years and countless Napoléon-linked events to commemorate between now and the 200th anniversary of his death in 2021.