Napoleon Is A Veteran Who Tried

Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” is to hit movie screens & already triggered yea & nay screams from critics. The Emperor STILL has that AC-DC effect on people for trying to shepherd his adopted country into the modern world. If only WE had leaders with such guts.

Case in point: The WSJ ran an op ed by Princeton Prof. David Bell, in which he concedes the Corsican-turned soldier-turned (ELECTED) French Emperor accomplished super-human feats in defending, then, expanding across Europe the Rights of Man introduced during the French Revolution. But, then as many historians do today, Mr. Bell indirectly explains all that away by listing Napoleon’s personal & policy imperfections while trying to unseat the utterly decadent aristocracy of his time. He mentions “the many dark chapters of Napoleon’s career” as if he never heard of “the many bright chapters” in that same mercurial rise & fall. Is it worth mentioning that many of the Napoleonic short comings were fabricated by the enemies he constantly whipped in battle for more than a decade? An historian might know better?

It was Vincent Cronin who authored way back in 1972 an intimate biography of Napoleon that would finally explain, rather than reduce to caricature, the military genius’ failed attempt to reconcile the then new concept of democracy with old fart European royalty. Unlike America’s Washington a handful of years earlier, Napoleon (as Mr. Cronin suggested) just couldn’t see the ancienne regime accepting ANYTHING IN FRANCE that resembled the crazies he actually admired in a then fledgling USA. He wrongly thought the time in Europe had come to meld an unbending royalty with some form of democracy. How ironic that Napoleon was impressed with Great Britain, which had pulled it off via a “constitutional monarchy” whilst alas he could not. Democracy in any form wouldn’t be permanently re-established in France for many years. But, do today’s critics have to keep dumping on the man in the arena who tried? Mr. Scott, what say you? We’ll see.

Davd Soul