SubscribeOn the contrary, there had been a tendency to displace the traditional popular association of the Antichrist with Rome onto Republican France (p. 76). It did not take much of a leap, once this pattern had been established, to then project the image of the Antichrist onto Napoleon. It was an image, moreover, that flourished in most parts of Europe, and certainly in Spain and in Russia after the French invasion of those countries. In Britain, one pamphleteer by the name of Lewis Mayer – who today would best be categorised as belonging to the religious loony fringe, and who was the author of texts like Bonaparte, the Emperor of the French, considered as Lucifer and Gog (1806), and The prophetic mirror or a hint of England, containing an explanation of the prophesy … proving Bonaparte to be the Beast (1806) – counted the number of emperors, popes and heads of state ‘alluded to by the horns of St John’s first Beast, Rev. 13’ and came to the conclusion that there had to date been 665 – Napoleon was the 666th (p. 83). It is a delightful example of the identification of Napoleon, or at least Napoleonic France, with the Devil, and it was not an isolated one.But in partial support of languagehat:
Napoleon left an ineradicable imprint upon nineteenth-century men of letters. Goethe, mesmerized by the Corsican as well as by Byron, thought Napoleon embodied "continual enlightenment" and in thinking about the daimonic accorded him central importance. Stendhal in his autobiographical Life of Henri Brûlard asserted that he "fell when Napoleon fell"; and in The Red and the Black Julien Sorel, worshipping Napoleon like a god, lived his version of the Napoleonic myth until his death. Balzac said he would finish with the pen what Napoleon had started with the sword, and he wrote two thousand pages a year for nineteen years to prove it. Grillparzer, self-described "enemy of the French," confessed that Napoleon fascinated him "with a magic power" and put him "under a spell as a snake does a bird." Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment enthusiastically identifies himself with Napoleon in his passionate longings for greatness, whereas in War and Peace Prince Andrei's ardor for Napoleon leads him to self-alienation. Even Nietzsche, for all his reservations, valued Napoleon's courage and viewed him as the one individual capable of bringing about European unity. Similarly, Beethoven, also battling his misgivings, could not expel Napoleon from his imagination. At first glance it might appear that the composer admired the republican Napoleon, inheritor of the French Revolution, and despised the royal Napoleon, emperor and despot. But in fact Beethoven's feelings, like Byron's, were ambivalent and fluctuated wildly over the years.But also, caricatures of Napoleon: Napoleon as the Antichrist, the beast of the Apocalypse; Napoleon the death god; the devil taking Napoleon to hell; Napoleon as the devil. As a devil, ogre; as the "Corsican Butcher".
In England, a Napoleonic cult was extensive and ardent during the Emperor's lifetime. As E. Tangye Lean has compellingly demonstrated, Whigs of such diverse backgrounds and careers as John Cam Hobhouse, Samuel Whitbread, Lord and Lady Holland, Thomas Moore, Elizabeth Inchbald, William Hazlitt, and Capel Lofft, shared Byron's unabashed yet ambivalent admiration for the French Emperor. [4] This empathetic Whig involvement with Napoleon's fortunes no less than the European image of him as a dynamic man of destiny helps us put into perspective Byron's own self-identification.
The main emphasis of [chapter 3], though, is the way Wordsworth and Coleridge began depicting Napoleon as a Miltonic character, quintessentially evil and on par with Milton's Satan.
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[But supporting languagehat:]
The focus in Chapter 4 shifts to Byron, whose ambivalent admiration of Napoleon has been well documented. Bainbridge relies most on Don Juan , Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , and letters to illustrate Byron's attempts at self-aggrandizement by retaining Napoleonic values even after Waterloo. In Don Juan , Byron identifies himself with Napoleon in no uncertain terms:
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Continuing to follow the Napoleon's career, Chapter 5 traces the literary response to Waterloo, which elicited an outpouring of verse that even Wellington observed: "I am really disgusted with and ashamed of all I have seen of the battle. The number of writings upon it would lead the world to believe that the British Army had never fought a battle before" (p. 154). Bainbridge deals with several of these responses: Walter Scott's The Field of Waterloo, Southey's The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo, Wordsworth's "Thanksgiving Ode," and sections of Byron's Childe Harold. Perhaps the most fascinating material in this chapter is Bainbridge's articulation of the way Waterloo almost instantaneously became an institutionalized tourist destination. As Poet Laureate, Southey felt himself obliged to travel to the battle field for the specific purpose of composing a poem upon the battle since so many poets of less official station had already done so. Bainbridge does a good job of showing how the "Waterloo Poem" became a genre unto itself in the years following the battle. At the same time, he shows how Waterloo provided writers like Wordsworth (who did not hurry to the battlefield) a fitting culmination to their Miltonic analogies for Napoleon. The Lake Poets now had the fulfillment of their poetic prophecy, as Napoleon's defeat confirmed their estimation of him as an egotistical Satan whose failure was inevitable. This was both a politically and poetically expedient stance.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:56 AM on September 24, 2006