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Why Napoleon in philosophy 2:51 So you'll say I say this every time, but I'm still really glad to see you again each time, more and more so, if you want to know. But I told you that in the meantime, I would give you—not like biscuits, but very seriously—high quality recordings, I mean high quality in content, for the rest, that's the technical setup, well, that's not me. I want to thank Amélie for calling me back, because we had great discussions during the Napoleon year. So this is the recording that's about to follow. I thank her for the choice of documents she made, especially since I remind you that Amélie is an excellent historian and documentalist.
3:37 I thank her. I thank Simon Verdun, whom most of you know well right away. He thinks of Neo-fascism, the Michel Clouscard film, and so of my preface. No, no, there it is, I'm delighted. Not that these young people find the time to entertain themselves on a rainy autumn day to come all the way to Cachan to make this recording. Yes, I thank Simon Verdun, who kindly, so, takes charge of capturing our recording this evening.
4:13 There we go. So, from there, Napoleon—why Napoleon in a philosophy lecture series? So why Napoleon? Because, I'm going to take a shortcut, I've been invited to talk about postmodernity. And so, to find one's bearings regarding postmodernity, we need to recall what's called modernity. That's how I'm introducing Napoleon. I'll tell you the outcome right away for those who get lost or lose themselves in my digressions. It's to arrive at the fact that Napoleon created the modern state. Broadly speaking, in France, we're going to get there. Whether one likes it or not is another matter.
5:02 But before there was the Ancien Régime. And there, from the moment Napoleon takes things in hand, I mean, we're in this fabulous parenthesis that I often emphasize, which is neither the old regime nor yet the new regime we live in, where the Anglo-Saxons rule the planet, the one that begins after Waterloo. Between the two, there's this parenthesis where the dice aren't yet cast. That's the Napoleonic period. Maybe the worst of Napoleon could have come out of it. We can say the best and the worst, we'll come back to that. I'm not doing hagiography here.
To understand, not to judge: what modernity? 5:39 Hagio, hagio, H-A-G-I-O. Some people asked me if I was a geographer when I talked about geography. Nor is it the demolition job either, you understand. Spinoza, Spinoza. It's neither about laughing nor crying, it's about understanding. That's what philosophy is. Philosophy deals with what is, not with what should be, with what ought to be. Marx in Capital spends his time saying how capital functions. He doesn't say here's how a communist society should function. He says that in a few rather rare lines, the Erfurt Program, the Gotha Program, it's precious, but I'd say, nine-tenths of his work is: do you like capitalism? Right?
6:18 You don't like it—if you don't like it, you'd better know how it works if you want to get rid of it. Philosophy, like science—this is what they have in common—deals with what is. They have differences, but they have that in common. So, modernity. Some say—I'm relativizing the term, doing a bit of Socratic work, otherwise we're not doing philosophy—some make modernity begin at the moment we stop hunting and gathering and sedentary life begins. The first cities…
6:48 Middle East, China, one could argue over who gets the prize, it's always within a hair's breadth, somewhere in the third or fourth millennium BC. Some say, historians say that modern times begin when the Middle Ages end and the Renaissance begins. Printing, the great discoveries, the United States—sorry, sorry, sorry, America—printing, the great... the sternpost rudder, the great discoveries, modernity. No, come on, I'm being precise, I'm trying to play it straight. I'm talking about modernity, I'm talking about yours, mine, ours, the one built on these two great upheavals that are the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution, compressed into a handkerchief-sized space called the eighteenth century.
7:33 I'm talking about that modernity which sees the countryside suddenly give way to the city—you know what follows—which sees civil bourgeois society appear. Let me remind you here that 'civil bourgeois society' is something of a pleonasm when you know a bit of German—it comes from the German political philosophy tradition, die bürgerliche Gesellschaft, that's how civil society is said in German. Word for word, that means bourgeois society, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft, but for them, Bürger means citizen. You say ein Berliner Bürger, meaning a citizen of Berlin. There, we mustn't misread it.
8:10 So it's somewhat redundant to say civil bourgeois society. Civil society, especially in our era with the majority of inhabitants living in the city rather than the countryside. Anyway, that's the modernity I'm talking about, I'm not going to go in circles. You see, starting with Baudelaire in literature for example, he says 'you know I have trouble getting sentimental about plants.' We see that Romanticism has already passed. It's the city. On the other hand, it is written...
8:40 I wrote 'Tableaux parisiens,' the second great chapter of Les Fleurs du mal. It takes place in the city. The countryside is over, the little... it's starting again now with the environmentalists. That's not modern. That's postmodern. There. Okay, I'll come back to it. The modernity I'm going to talk about, I'm serious, is the one that begins in this period we're discussing. This great intermission between the Ancien Régime and the New Regime. And I continue answering the question: why Napoleon in philosophy?
Reason is the essence, but it lacks existence 9:15 Well, precisely because I believe no one justified it as well as Hegel with his theme known as the cunning of reason. Now don't ask me for the reference, there are plenty, he doesn't talk about it just once. Even if the best-known passages are in Reason in History. But I don't like recommending this work too much. Not because it's clear—I'm not being a snob recommending unreadable stuff to prove I know my Hegel. No, no, no—the Lectures on Aesthetics, the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, in short, everything that consists of lecture courses—Hegel is a serious pedagogue. He's not posturing when he speaks to his students, he knows they're beginners.
9:54 So it's easier to read the Berlin lectures than to read, I'd say, the Jena works, the first philosophy of spirit from 1803 or 1805, with the vocabulary of German idealism. That's difficult. There, no, it's within everyone's reach. He speaks of the cunning of reason in several passages, but what matters is what he says about it. I remind you, for those who want the reference, it's in Reason in History that he speaks of it, in the first part, in the most accessible way.
10:24 But basically, here we're getting into philosophy. Reason—I'll repeat his statement—reason, if some of you are getting lost in what I'm saying, know that for Hegel, reason is freedom. It's what leads to freedom. There. If you keep that in mind, you won't get lost in what I'm going to say, because it's not obvious. For most people, the link between reason and freedom. But I'm asking you to adopt it for now as an axiom. But what is certain is that reason—and this has been known since Antiquity, since Aristotle, who knew this problem well—reason is the essence, it's the truth of what surrounds us.
10:59 There's appearance and then there's reason behind it, the rational. 'Rational' comes from ratio, which means reason in Latin. If you still studied Latin, we wouldn't waste time explaining that there's a link between rational and reason. Even though there's confusion, because the reason at work in a machine or in the sciences for example, in technology or in the sciences, that's not reason, that's understanding. But we can't complicate things tonight. I know some of you are familiar with this distinction, which we owe to Kant and which is crucial, but for now I'm keeping reason, which is more connected to freedom, the faculty of ends, than to, I don't know, a computer or an automobile.
11:41 And which are remarkable advances. I'm not snubbing all that. So, to get back to it. Reason is the essential, it's the truth, it's the essence. But here's the flaw. The flaw in everything that is essence. You see with Plato, the world of ideas is all very nice, but we don't live in the world of ideas. What essence lacks is precisely existence. It cruelly lacks existence. Right? That's what Hegel thought carefully about. So, for freedom to make its way through this magma, through this vale of tears, in Christian terms, in terms of scripture, through this vale of tears, or through this chaos, or through this permanent bloodbath—what a story! It's not getting any better with the tankies. For reason to make its way through there, it needs to use something that is already there. Otherwise freedom remains an ideal, an ought-to-be in the world of ideas. You understand what I mean? And so, here we arrive at Napoleon. Did you think I'd wandered off? Follow closely, let's follow closely. And he takes the example of Napoleon.
The strategist, Guillemin, and Hegel at Jena 12:57 Reason, at that moment, at that moment in history, seeks—things are ripe, I'll go quickly, you know the French Revolution—Hegel, Hölderlin, Beethoven were born the same year, 1770; Napoleon Bonaparte, born in Ajaccio, that's what we're celebrating, the 250th anniversary in 1769—let's not quibble over a year, we don't care, we're not doing arithmetic here. The essential thing is that this is the generation that was 20 years old at the storming of the Bastille.
13:32 You see we're talking about modernity, nothing will ever be the same again. So reason finds an opportunity with this strategic genius—no one disputes it, one can be for or against Napoleon morally, politically, but everyone, no one disputes that we hadn't seen a strategist like that since—him, the Alexanders, the Caesars, always the same names, but a bit less known, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Believe me, a great rival.
14:02 Genghis Khan, why not? No, come on, let's be serious, an immense strategist. That doesn't mean—don't think of Bonaparte at the bridge of Arcole rushing under gunfire, no, that's just imagery. There are even those who think—it's a hypothesis, I don't have confirmation, I'm not enough of a historian. The historians I consult, even the specialists, say we're not sure. That at the bridge of Arcole, not only was it not a heroic act, he wanted to die. Because he had learned that while he was at the front, there was Joséphine there, well anyway, I'm going to slip into tabloid gossip so I'll stop.
14:35 Joséphine who was renewing what Nerval calls the skepticism and the mad orgies of the Directory. There, he wanted to fall. No, a great strategist is someone who concerns himself with what his soldiers have on their feet. Real shoes—a joke from the days of military service, which you haven't known, to poke a bit of fun at the military administration, showing the questionnaire posed to officer cadets. There was a question: 'What are the soldier's feet made of?' Yes, I know, you feel like laughing. What are the soldier's feet made of? And the answer is: 'The soldier's feet are the object of his constant concern.'
15:12 That's what great strategists are, those who think about these things. Who think, like Caesar did among all the Helvetic tribes in Switzerland, of turning one of them to his side to fight the others. You see? That's a great strategist. So reason makes use of this guy who has... I'll interrupt myself because I know the antithesis of what I'm saying, of this valorization of Napoleon, is someone I respect enormously, named Guillemin. You know Guillemin, the historian? Right? In my opinion he's never been as bad as when he talks about Napoleon.
15:43 He's fantastic when he talks about Pétain, there are revelations—Pétain against income tax in 1905. In 1905! Some believe that Pétain suddenly turned coat at the time of the war. No, no, these are guys who go way back. They could never stand the 'gueuse.' Do you know what the gueuse is? That's what they called the Republic. There are reactionaries, there are counter-revolutionaries. As I should keep repeating, we don't live in revolution. We don't live in counter-revolution. We've been living, since the storming of the Bastille, in an incessant struggle between revolution and counter-revolution. That's our truth.
16:20 Well, this Napoleon, who has the merit of existing, is an opportunity to put an end to the Ancien Régime, where one had to be born noble to be noble. Napoleon never went back to that, even when he took power, even when he made setbacks compared to revolutionary advances, he has this in common with someone like De Gaulle. We'll come back to these parallels between Bonapartism and Gaullism, a rather rare phenomenon. One might perhaps look for some equivalent in Perón in Argentina too.
17:01 We never know if it's left-wing or right-wing, but it's not simply red or right-wing either. You see, that's interesting. Napoleon, like de Gaulle, knew how far back one must not go. That means every one of Napoleon's soldiers carried in his backpack, in his knapsack, what's called the marshal's baton. He had hope—if one day he achieved glory and was brave on the battlefield, he could become an officer, which was unthinkable under the Ancien Régime. There, we're in the economic-social, and therefore in the political. So, at this level, reason... because what does Guillemin say? I seem to be interrupting myself, I'll come back, I'm going back and forth.
17:42 Guillemin says he stresses his vanity, his greed, his ambition. All that is true, but that's the psychological or moral domain, we're not in the domain of logic and history. Fortunately there was this vain Corsican—I hope my Corsican compatriots won't hold it against me—ambitious and greedy, though there were others who lined their pockets more than he did, I tell you. But still, fortunately he was there to advance the modern state, because what you call the grandes écoles, the Banque de France, those are Napoleon's creations, well, it's under his reign, anyway, that these things came about.
18:19 He never went back to the Ancien Régime with the fleur-de-lis flag. No, he kept the blue-white-red. But that's important. And that's why one day a Hegel, in 1807, on the day of the battle—well, the year of the Battle of Jena, sorry—puts the final period to his first major publication, The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy—you may not remember it unless you're a specialist or preparing the agrégation from time to time. Philosophy—he puts the final period, legend has it, though it can't have been exactly at the same hour, at the moment Napoleon enters Jena.
18:56 There, Hegel is in Jena, that is to say that the philosopher who is going to create the philosophy of history puts a final period at the very moment when Napoleon, when history itself, knocks on his door with a cannon shot. There's the relationship between Hegel and Napoleon, it's important. And Hegel sends a letter to a friend saying 'It's an extraordinary feeling to see this man on horseback who dominates the world, meaning we all make wishes for the triumph of the French armies.' Because for them, the complete opposite of what Guillemin thought, it's the blue-white-red arriving, which is going to rid us of our petty lords, our counts, our duchies. Germany was divided into I don't know how many states.
19:32 There's a novel by Jean Paul, where the hero says 'after a few kilometers, he finally arrives in foreign land.' You see? No, really! It's called Siebenkäs, it's by Jean Paul, the great novelist of the Romantic era. There. So, Napoleon knows all this. That doesn't mean that his ideal, in his own mind, is freedom. But what's certain is that everything he does to advance freedom in reality—not just in the ideal. Reason makes use of it, that's the cunning of reason. It makes the individual believe he's acting for himself, for his own ambitions.
20:10 And when he has done it, the modern state, reason takes it and throws it onto Saint Helena, then onto the scrapheap of history. That's the cunning of reason. Now I'd like to turn to Amélie, for example, who has gathered relevant documentation on this subject, and who knows well the history of the passage from the Ancien Régime to the New Regime. That's why I'd like to ask what questions she'd like to focus our discussion of Napoleon on this evening.
England at the head of the counter-revolution 20:46 Exactly, can you hear me? Much louder. Exactly, I wanted you to come back to this clash, and here with Hegel, you'll see, between revolution and counter-revolution. Napoleon fits into it consciously and unconsciously, and we see it for example with his obsession with the English. Napoleon says very clearly several times that he understood that social changes, and notably English industrialization, is what enabled him to carry out his industrial revolution.
21:21 That's why he has an obsession with England, and why England becomes the spearhead of the counter-revolution in Europe. And that in the end, when they get rid of Napoleon, they'll say 'good, balance has been restored, it's us.' Absolutely. I seem to be leaving the subject, but I need to retrieve the file on Hegel's arc. We'll find it, don't worry. Through history, there's one figure that seems quite interesting to me, it's Napoleon, whom people called 'Robespierre on horseback.' That is to say, ultimately, he was—it's Madame de Staël who says this—almost the same generation, roughly the same height too.
21:55 But one succeeds because he dares to use force and captures national myths, whereas the first remains ultimately isolated in a political position and ultimately fails to seize power. Napoleon is Robespierre on horseback, and—tell that to Guillemin! There you go, that's exactly it. And so, everywhere he went, ultimately he stripped power from the clergy, at that time all the lands were seized back, moreover it's the whole bourgeoisie and part of the peasant world that we'll find in Balzac who will acquire land at that time.
22:31 And he did that everywhere. And even indeed when he becomes emperor, even the Napoleon we don't like, even when he becomes emperor—already it's he who crowns himself, the pope is under his domination. At the Coronation, on December 2, 1804, after a religious ceremony that no one took seriously, he comes to poor old Notre-Dame, let's say from Murat to Talleyrand, a fervent, animated affair, presided over by Pius VII. Once the religious part is finished, Pius VII is pushed toward the sacristy, and at that point, on the Gospels moreover, Bonaparte, having become Napoleon, takes an oath.
23:16 He swears to defend the conquests of the Revolution. He swears that the principle of equality will not be touched, even though he reinstates the nobility, the imperial nobility. Let me remind you that this nobility... the nobleman's title is not hereditary except for the majorat, and the nobleman pays taxes like everyone else. The imperial nobility does not have the privileges the old nobility had. So he maintains the principle of equality, he maintains the principle of the destruction of feudalism, of those feudal rights that weighed, more or less heavily depending on the region, on the peasants, and which had led to the revolt of August 4th.
23:54 And he consolidates the sale of national properties, that is to say the advent of a new bourgeoisie that buys up, at bargain prices like old Grandet, church properties and a few noble properties. So, the conquests of the Revolution, he clearly says he won't touch them, and he doesn't touch them. And so he doesn't want to go back on certain things, and he understood well that there were two worlds opposing each other. That's what Hegel understands very well. It's the English world. And so, in that sense, Napoleon…
24:24 And he's the first to make peace. I know I'm going to shock people or scandalize them, right? But I'll cite Tulard. I'm sure you know Tulard very well—you're a better historian than I am. But without doubt, the historian who knows the most, who has the most information on Napoleon, whatever one may think of the man. Tulard, when presented with the argument 'yes, but what a bloodbath Napoleon caused, sending men off to be slaughtered,' etc.—he wasn't sentimental either, that's not the point. But I say 'no, Napoleon never declared a single war, he only ever defended France against wars declared against France.'
25:04 And so I take up what you said, but adding precision: when you say 'England is at the origin of all the anti-revolutionary coalitions'—not just anti-French. Anti-French because counter-revolutionary. It was necessary to put an end to the revolutionary regime in France. That's why they restored Louis XVIII after the fall of the Empire. I want to tell our contemporaries, to be clear, that what England was doing at that time is what the United States is doing now. The United States—they've sent battalions to Ukraine, they finance. The English financed. And the cannon fodder was Prussian, it was Austrian, it was Russian at Austerlitz. My cat is trying to steal the show, it's annoying, honestly.
25:52 So it's very important to know, it's the financial role. In terms of numbers of men, we won't see them—only at Waterloo will we finally see. The English army—it will be at the death throes of the French army that we'll see it on the battlefield, the Iron Duke, Wellington, the inflexible. And they had also landed in Portugal. Its role was essentially financial, others provided the cannon fodder—does that remind you of anything? My generation is that of the Vietnam War—yes, it's not because I was born there that I talk about it, let's leave the anecdote aside—when the Americans started turning up their noses, I mean the American public, at the number of coffins coming back from Vietnam, the 'our boys' as they say there, the Pentagon strategists, as we'd say now, said we need to change tactics. And here I quote the expression from the time, it's in the press of the era, check it, don't just take my word for it.
26:50 'We need to yellow the corpses.' Yes, you heard right—we're going to build a South Vietnamese army under our thumb that will outplay those communist bastards in North Vietnam. Because there's no reason a state 10,000 km away from us should have a political option that doesn't please us. That's absolutely unacceptable. You'll tell me Russia doesn't hold back either, invading Ukraine, but Ukraine is on its border, with nuclear missiles in Poland.
27:25 I'm talking to you here about the Vietnam War, 'we need to yellow the corpses.' You see? We nearly 'blackened the corpses' recently in the Sahel, as Macron absolutely wanted the ECOWAS countries to wage war on Niger. You see? No, no, none of this is old, we're not talking about archives. Or in any case, we're not just consulting archives. We just need to look to the past, but to understand and illuminate our present. There, so let me get back to it. I'll sum up the essential point, the cunning of reason. Reason is essence, but it lacks existence.
Passions, dialectic and wisdom 27:58 So, to enter into reality, reason—that is, ultimately, freedom, I'll come back to its developments another time, that deserves its own place—reason makes use of what is already there, that is, of the passions. That's the term Hegel uses: nothing great has been accomplished without passion, a famous quotation. Things that are already there—and I gave you earlier the example of Marx: although Marx has disagreements with Hegel, though I refer you to his last statements on the matter, in the preface to the last edition of Capital, so I'm talking about the Marx—Althusser may say what he likes, yes, he was a bit Hegelian in his youth, but fortunately he grew out of it.
28:42 No, no, it's the opposite. He is far more Hegelian when he writes, when he puts the final point. It's a work permanently "working through," as they say in English. He spent his time being at work, at his task, Marx. He died at work. You know that "Das Kapital," the last manuscript of Marx, its title is "Social Classes" and after that he kicks the bucket. That doesn't mean we don't know what Marx thought about social classes, we still have some indications.
29:12 But there you have it. Well, this Marx of course says he is in disagreement with Hegel, that Hegel had above all the merit of bringing out the dialectical method, which is hated everywhere because precisely it shows us that nothing is permanent, that as the words of a great poet put it — because it's really much better said than what I was mumbling — Aragon: nothing is ever won for man, neither his strength.
29:43 Nor his weakness nor his heart, and when he thinks to open his arms his shadow is that of a cross, and when he wants to clasp his happiness he crushes it. His life is a strange and painful divorce. That's what we're talking about when we talk about the dialectic, to remind ourselves of that. That we have to pass through Good Friday, I say this to Christians, for there to be an Easter Sunday. That's what's missing in post-modernity, you have to screw, you have to enjoy, that's Philippe Sollers, the Deleuzians, the desiring machines.
30:15 First all our illusions must collapse so that we pass from certainty to truth, in Hegelian terms. I'd say, well, it's a bit the same thing. We're certain, solid ground, that's what it is there, I stamp my foot, solid ground doesn't move. Oh yes it doesn't move — we're moving at 30 km a second around the sun. But since everything turns at the same speed, we don't notice it. We call that immobility. It took millennia to know that we were moving, eppur si muove, like Galileo — and yet it moves.
30:48 So there's a long way from certainty to truth. But it's not a passage just like that, it's a passage that happens through tragedies. As our certainties collapse, we are unhappy. I thought she loved me. I see her on another man's arm, frankly. Yes, you have to go through that, it's called sentimental education. You're not a man if you haven't gone through that. Why women reappear, as Nerval would say. So, I'll pick up on that first, from your intervention, which is somewhat at the heart of the question. I sum up the ruse of reason: using passions, subjective things that are there, individuals, agencies, states, collectivities, it doesn't matter, as long as it makes things move forward.
31:31 And then, but it's not a providence. Freedom is not the good. That's where we see that the modern world is not Plato's world either. Plato placed the idea of the good above all ideas, which is magnificent in him. That proves that the summit in Plato is not cognitive. It is ultimately a moral notion, the good — saying moral, on condition of integrating, I think, the Nordic language, which you know well, that good and good [bien et bon] are somewhat the same, good.
32:07 And when Plato, in the sixth book of the Republic, at the end, one of the summits of Platonism, after having amazed his interlocutors by saying that the good is above being, above the ideas — Plato has a thing above the ideas which is the good. And to finish them off, he says: you will notice that the good does not only give the soul the possibility of knowing and the object of being known. It is a third term, like the light that allows the eye to see and the object to be seen. But besides that, it gives beings growth and nourishment.
32:40 Yes, I come back to what is good. So there is this connotation of the good [bien] and the good [bon] when I speak of reason. And there we are no longer in the cognitive, we are beyond understanding. Science always has as its criterion — fortunately for us, I wouldn't be alive myself if it weren't for science and progress, science and vaccines. But yes, vaccines, the true and the false, but not the good and the evil, you don't have to be an immense scholar and be a vile bastard — that's been seen in history.
33:13 What was I going to say. And conversely, there can be an ignoramus who has no idea how many satellites Jupiter has, and there are sages who know what is, who can give good advice. I mean an illiterate wise man in the depths of Africa — there are such people everywhere, I'm thinking of the continent of orality, Africa can very well give good advice about when to make war, when to make peace, whether one should ever make war.
33:53 And if I should marry Marinette, or rather Chloé instead, it's not a Nobel Prize winner in physics who is going to be more relevant in those domains than the illiterate person in question. Knowledge and wisdom, both are in Sophia, Philosophia — that's the difficulty of philosophy. It goes part of the way with science because it seeks to know, but the CNRS also seeks to know. We're not after the same domains. We want to know what allows us to become free.
34:25 You know, when there's a trial, experts are asked whether the accused is of sound mind. Because if he doesn't know what he's doing, if he doesn't have a minimum of freedom, he can't be judged. If I put a gun on the table and say "you're going to keep telling me I'm the most handsome and the best," that's not gratifying. But if someone free tells me I'm the most handsome and the best... And the initiative of union, that's already... it's more gratifying. That's the struggle for recognition. You find again familiar things that we've seen over entire cycles, which I won't dwell on too much.
The Continental Blockade and the Peace of Amiens: reading Hölderlin 34:59 So there, first summary, the ruse of reason. Second, at the time, what was opposing the revolution? The counter-revolution, it was led by England, but not through its army. I repeat, it financed the economic system. And one of... one of the mistakes, I fall back into the psychological register, but I'll say one of Napoleon's errors, worse than a crime, a fault, is the Continental Blockade.
35:29 It's the Continental Blockade that caused the Tsar to break the alliance with him, whereas he had the Tsar on his side. Can you imagine, Russia, France, we take Germany in a pincer, that's it, we're in for... I get to the most scandalous thing I've said. Napoleon was there. It's under his rule that we saw, for the first time, peace since the wars of the Revolution, then later, the Consulate and the Empire. It's called the Peace of Amiens, 1802. Look it up. I'll step out of the frame for a moment to show you a text celebrating this peace, what it represented in the world. You see, there's a magnificent hymn by Hölderlin called "Feast of Peace."
36:11 And it was made precisely on the occasion of the Peace of Amiens, right? 1802, people held their breath in Europe, that's it, we're out of the nightmare. And war started again — I'll go straight to the essential — because England couldn't tolerate it, that's well known. All historians and diplomats know that England never accepted a state — it may be right in its own interests, I'm not making a moral judgment, we must know what is, what was. England can't stand a nation becoming too powerful on the continent because it threatens it, its competition, its market — flooding Europe with the products of English industry, that was surely it, and the Continental Blockade went against that goal.
37:03 So here are the great hymns, we get to it. You'll tell me, you always give us a Hölderlin text, but listen, find me better — he was born the same year, almost the same year, as Napoleon after all. Feast of peace, from the sky where peaceful rumblings still resound, see how after a storm one still hears, turning the heart, a great war, and moving away, from the sky where peaceful rumblings still resound, as Beethoven knew how to set to music at the time, in the same year as the last one.
37:36 Peaceful rumblings that wander in silence, still full and airy, and there, the hall, since it was built, sheltering this bliss. On the greener carpets the cloud of joy exhales, and in the shimmering distances, covered with ripe fruit, and the golden crown of chalices, in good order, stand splendid in hedges, on the side here and there dominating the leveled ground, the tables. It's a metaphor of course. For coming from very far away, guests full of love feel it at the hour of evening.
38:09 Evening is the Occident, I remind you. It's very domestic, otherwise I wouldn't allow myself this. He says Hesperia, the Greek term for the West, the twilight. The West is where killing happens. "I occidi," it means I killed him, I'm not joking. Let the structuralists be aware — do I take the signifier literally? So, stand splendid on the side here and there, dominating the leveled ground, the tables, for coming from very far away, guests full of love gave themselves a rendezvous here at evening.
38:44 And, I'd say — but what does that have to do with Napoleon? And the failing eye, I believe already, that smiles from its hard day finished, I think I see him, him with a capital L, him, the prince of the feast. And though you readily deny your distant homeland, that is, Corsica, and as if exhausted from your long heroic road, you lower such a forgetful gaze that the light shadow brushes, and take on the appearance of a friend.
39:15 It's a German speaking about the power that is invading his country. And takes on the appearance of a friend, you whom the universe knows, this height nearly makes the knees bend. See the radiance? And there are French armies, arguing with the blue, white, red flag, in these places where they were suffering from a wanting that went back to the 12th century, old, a legal imbroglio of the Holy Roman Empire that Napoleon ended with a single signature. Were there also measures, measures of currency?
39:47 But I think that was commissioned by the Convention before him, no? Ah no, not for currency, because he created the Mint, but for the metric system, that's for the metric system across France. Genz, in Germany. Genz, in Germany, yes of course, but I can't, of course, it's only England that kept inches and cubits. Genz, in Corruption of the Meter, it's '94. Genz, yes there, there, and at the time it was the length of the sample kept at the Museum of Sèvres in Paris, because at the Equator it's different. Of course, of course, of course. The greatest government France ever had is the Convention, then a bit the Liberation. The periods of counter-revolution are much longer than the revolutionary periods, unfortunately. There. So, that's what I wanted to point out, that if this represents that at that moment for the most progressive Europeans, perhaps on a misunderstanding.
The Bonaparte family, Spain and Russia 40:39 Napoleon, for his part, was satisfying his own ambitions. He put — good Corsican that he was, often, as it turned out — and I say this affectionately — but his sister, his brother, well the brother-in-law Murat, who married — that was for his sister's king. Napoleon told him "she is for you, but you will be King of Naples, it's extraordinary, the Kingdom of Naples was a power, mind you!" His brother Joseph, unfortunately, he named king in Spain — the most catastrophic of his brothers, in the most delicate, most difficult country.
41:13 The only one where Napoleon suffered setbacks because... it's interesting, I open a parenthesis, Spain and Russia. The two countries where Napoleon had his greatest failures, if you look closely. Now, these are countries of guerrilla warfare. You see? In a magnificent poem, in the Legend of the Centuries, Hugo says "and Ney, Ney, Marshal Ney, disputing his watch with three Cossacks." You see, security was nowhere to be found. There, and Spain — we were looking at Goya's admirable painting of the Spanish revolutionaries, well the Spanish resisters, being shot by our soldiers. There.
41:49 There is however one fault, one fault of Napoleon, and it's the one that will bring him down, it's the Spanish affair. It's the Spanish affair where, even though this principle existed for him, the right of peoples to self-determination. This principle had been proclaimed by the Revolution. And there, Napoleon disregards it — with a stroke of the pen, he overthrows the Spanish sovereigns and puts in their place... which will provoke a national reaction from the Spanish people, with all the horrors that we know, which Goya evoked in the Disasters of War.
42:34 General René plunged into a vat of boiling oil, another general sawn between two planks, and on the other side the rapes, the hangings, etc. In short, the atrocities of war — he will acknowledge it at Saint Helena, yes, Napoleon bears an undeniable responsibility in this affair. But, but you see we never get out of it. On the other hand, by intervening in Spain, he brings...
43:05 In this kingdom absolute monarchs reigned, completely deranged, in a kingdom that was completely in decline, where the economy had completely collapsed, where the Inquisition raged atrociously, he brought the ideas of the French Revolution. He suppressed the convents, he suppressed the Inquisition, he rallied the liberals, the afrancesados. These afrancesados who are called Moratín, the heart of Hélène and de Las Lignas [sic], who is called Goya himself, who will be exiled afterward when France is forced to leave Spain, and will follow King José.
43:48 So why do I make this little digression on the Spain-Russia asymmetry? Because we find it again in dance, how curious! They're the two greatest dancing peoples of Europe. That is to say, one has the African border, the other the Asian border. And then people will say chance governs history and geography. Right? Well yes, that's how it is. There you go, Spain and Russia. But otherwise, I mean Napoleon...
44:19 Napoleon once again placed his family, with more or less success, as we've just seen — the one who lasted the longest is Jérôme, but in Westphalia — and the other one, what's his name, in Sweden? Bernadotte, right? So there, and still Bernadottes in Sweden. Well, so it's not a matter of making a moral or psychological judgment on Napoleon, it's a matter of seeing what his historical balance sheet is, his function, his side — call it whatever metaphor you like. There, yes.
The paradox of cunning and the Eroica symphony 44:53 To come back to the question of the ruse, in fact, what's interesting is that in the ruse too, there is also this notion of paradox, of something made of bits and pieces, and which in a way doesn't really function. For example, the fact that, as you said very well, in fact, the conquest of the universal, of unification really, and the passage from the old regime to the new, let's say to modernity, this universal passage happens through an individual, with the idea that history uses individual passions and individual, historical, personal revenges, to arrive at a design that is not only national, but also European or Western.
45:34 And there is also, what I find quite interesting, is the somewhat outdated character of Napoleon in a way. There's a sort of anachronism in the Napoleonic project, given that we've only just come out of the French Revolution. There's the painting, I don't know if you can see it, by Maurice... I believe Maurice... oh dang, I've forgotten his name. A painter? Yes, it's a painter, it's the painting of the storming of the Tuileries. Yes, yes, where we see the shooting of the Swiss guards.
46:04 In the building of the Tuileries Palace, and Napoleon who is in a room, in the back, among the... All right, all right. In fact, we see Napoleon looking at the crown of France on the ground. And in fact, there's this whole idea of... there, Napoleon is the one who recovered the crown of France. So what's outdated is having returned to a semblance of an old-regime court... There's that, there's the monarchy. The Roman-style imperial imagery, the triumphal arch which was supposed to be simple.
46:36 The imperial bee. So there is this side, and as you said very well, once he has accomplished his historical task, we liquidate this sort of anachronism which is somewhat ridiculous in a way, but at the same time which was a vector of a certain modernity. With English industrial capitalism beginning to emerge and which in fact constitutes, let's say, the main force that will sweep away in its path all these stories of great Napoleonic wars. Could you develop this sort of fundamental characteristic of the ruse?
47:14 You said paradox. That's it. At once we're heading toward something radically new, and at the same time we're using materials that are already there. We try to assemble them in a somewhat curious way. And this tension between the old and the radically modern. Very gladly, of course. First, your intervention would have delighted Beethoven. Because Beethoven himself saw both sides. I'm alluding to something well known.
47:44 He was among the musicians. His third symphony, called, as it happens, the Heroic Symphony, has an epic breath superior to his other symphonies, which is saying a lot. He had at first planned to dedicate it to General Bonaparte — another German, even if he's of Ch'ti origin, since Beethoven's ancestors came from the Flemish world, well he was born in Bonn, all that. And so, he was at the Austrian court. So Napoleon dreamed of dedicating — it was moreover, when you listen to this symphony, and when you also listen to the Emperor Concerto, which I also recommend, to really see almost the breath of what there is most, let's say, most...
48:31 I'm looking for an epithet, it's not ridiculous, but... but I'll say eternal, let's not exaggerate, but most magnificent — a simple word — in Bonaparte, it's the Italian campaign, I'm thinking of things like that, where he wins one, two, three, four, five, six victories, while being outnumbered four to one, I mean, well, with an army that was called at the time the army of the barefoot and the cobblers, poorly equipped and all that. So this Bonaparte, we suddenly see what he represents, as in Hölderlin's poem, the prince of the feast, the falling one, we see it in the Emperor Concerto.
49:10 I tell you, you have to listen to it to understand what I'm going to say, after that it's the music that speaks — Beethoven's fifth piano concerto, called the Emperor. And not in the most thunderous moments, on the contrary almost — there are distances, sublime ones. So Beethoven wanted to dedicate it, I pick up my thread with regard to your intervention, to Bonaparte. And then he learns in 1804 that he's had himself crowned emperor. For him it's a betrayal, so he takes up exactly what you're saying. And there, we start again, I'll say, and he tears up his dedication and rewrites a heroic symphony, composed not for General Bonaparte, but in memory of a great man.
49:51 Of course, but there you're raising, in speaking of other philosophers, I remind those who dare not to know it yet that Simon wrote an excellent book with Éditions Delga on the importance of the neo-Kantian reference in the work of Michel Clouscard. The critique of neo-Kantianism is exactly in Clouscard's thought. Neo-Kantianism is seen as a generic ideology typical of our so-called post-modern era. I'm not betraying your thought roughly. I sum up, so I simplify of course.
Freedom of emptiness and freedom of character 50:28 So between philosophers who are raising the problem, almost insoluble, because we're among philosophers precisely to untangle it — the relation between the particular and the universal, that is, the dialectic of the particular and the universal. So I'll take three terms to see things more clearly, sorry for this somewhat abstract passage, but we're in philosophy, abstract in the defensible sense, not bad abstraction. You have in Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right a paragraph, rather, three paragraphs, five, six, seven, which I ask you to read in sequence, it's readable.
51:08 Even if it's extremely dry, hard — it's the old Hegel, he no longer has anything to prove, it's alpha, beta, gamma. The idea of right — no, sorry — the philosophy of right studies the idea of right, that is, the concept of its realization, period, you see, it's a bit, well, dogmatically stated. I remind you that Marx's first important published work is precisely the critique of this work, the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. We're in these very questions that we're stirring up thanks to Simon's intervention. Now, in these five, six, seven paragraphs — it's worth remembering paragraphs because you can take any edition, the pages differ, but the paragraphs are the same.
51:52 He produces a magnificent synthesis, here we go, of the particular and the universal. It's when he opposes two conceptions of freedom, as it happens, before arriving at the particular-universal. It's the freedom of revolt as opposed to revolution. The one Rimbaud, who is the very image of the rebel, and who embodied the rebel like no one else, of whom Rimbaud says precisely at the end of A Season in Hell, for he doesn't skip over the stage, he says what foolishness that was.
52:34 That is past, I know today how to salute beauty. So, in other terms Lenin would call that the leftist conception of freedom, it amounts to about the same thing, the rebel. It's the libertarian — no, it's an extensive term, I have a lot of respect for the anarchist tradition, companion of the working class, who gets his hide pierced at the Commune, I don't mix that up with the libertarian who is on a ranch in the United States, waiting for the tax man with his rifle, who wants to owe nothing to society while swiping everything from it, right.
53:09 All historical achievements, science, technology, no, let's not mix things up. But there is nonetheless a tradition of freedom, what Hegel calls the freedom of the void. Now I'm being very precise philosophically, it's the freedom which consists in thinking that I am free insofar as I refuse all determination. I suppress in myself every determination. I am not French. Who told you, sir, that I am a man? That's been heard recently, hasn't it? I am not a man, I am not French, I am not this, I am not that. Nothing, there is no determination at all, right?
53:41 Besides, determinism is supposed to be the opposite of freedom, you see. And Hegel says that here, it goes in circles, because for there to be no determination… At the theoretical level one can stay like that, but in reality, hunger determines me to eat. And however much I eat to suppress hunger, the next day I'm hungry again. It's the object that wins there, not me. I thought I was asserting myself against all objects and in the end when I'm like that, to be precise he says, insofar as he suppresses every determination, he himself is not without determination. He is constantly making the effort to suppress what determines him.
54:20 It's exhausting. That's what he calls the freedom of the void. And there a staggering passage arises which announces the worst horrors of our times. I'm not only thinking, for once I'm not talking about the Third Reich, no, I'm thinking of what are called the Khmer Rouge, whom you know I call the Khmers Verts. Because the first great decision is to empty the city to go to the countryside. No but I'm checking, don't just take my word for it. Well, Hegel, what's the connection? Hegel, the Khmer Rouge.
54:53 He says that within this form of freedom, which believes that being free means refusing every determination, everything that limits me, right? If it remains theoretical, it's pure Hindu contemplation. You see, we're already getting close to that Buddhist country, Cambodia. But if it turns into action, then it's the fury of destruction. It's an incredible passage, isn't it? He lifts the veil on horrors that had not yet occurred.
55:23 A fury of destruction—it is only by destroying that this freedom has the feeling of its existence, the feeling like a dog at the tip of its snout, sniffing. This freedom he opposes, now I think I've said enough, I believe each of you can find your own examples to illustrate all this, he opposes it to the one who, on the contrary, accepts a determination. That's the classical world, that's the Greek world, Greece always looms as soon as one speaks of classicism, doesn't it? Look at Versailles, almost everything is Greek. The visual references, the mythology, Racine's plays.
55:56 "And from the foot of the altar you may ascend, sovereign of the seas that must bear you." Among the Greeks, they hate all that, indeterminacy, the infinite, they are not romantic. What they love is—I always use this example—if you ever go to Greece, go with your girlfriend or, ladies, bring your boyfriend, but go to Cape Sounion, 50 km east of Athens. There you have—because usually you never see the infinite, it's not the ocean, it's not Brittany.
56:28 Greece is coves, it's a peninsula, it's islands, it's a very determined, very finite world. Except there, at Cape Sounion, you have three infinities, three indeterminacies: the sky, the wind, the sea, the light. And that is where the Greeks built the temple of Poseidon. Rectangle, square, you understand, that means: we turn our back on the sea, that's not our world, that's the world of the gods, that's the indeterminate. Ours is the city, with its laws, thémis as they say, justice, the rules, there you go. This is important, what we're looking at here. So that's the antithesis. You find it again in classical theatre, I've told you that being classical always means saying that the Greeks can never be equaled. I say the word by asking the question: what is characteristic of the classical ideal? It is precisely character. That the characters of Racine, but also of Corneille, but also of Molière, are above all characters.
57:32 That is, they choose a determination. I am miserliness. I am jealousy. Hermione, isn't that so? I am a budding monster—that's Nero. Magnificent. When that sort of little fool Britannicus—I know very well, yes, this hero, what sympathy one has for him—but anyway, who says to Nero "Yes, all of Rome knows your crimes, etc." "Yes, but," as Nero replied, "Rome at least stays silent; imitate its silence."
58:02 What matters is that the crime is speaking of it, is saying it. Caesar's wife must remain above suspicion. There you go. So I recall these things to say that the antithesis of freedom as indetermination is freedom as choosing a character. I am a Roman citizen, I will not be crucified. I say this because the horrible crook named Verres, against whom Cicero pleaded, had crucified a tax inspector who came to look into his schemes in his region, as propraetor of Sicily.
58:34 And he died on the cross saying "I am a Roman citizen." Ancient man, the classical man, is entirely enclosed within a character. So, going in circles, why one rather than the other? The first—I've somewhat reversed the chronology—the first is more recent, isn't it? Indeterminate freedom is the modern world, it's romanticism, there you go. But then comes the synthesis, and here I'm really answering Simon's point, so true freedom, says Hegel, is the particular—so now we come back to the two terms—reflected upon itself and thereby raised to the universal, that is, individuality.
Individuality, synthesis of the particular and the universal 59:17 The individual as synthesis of the particular and the universal. But on condition that this particular does not remain what it is—I'm a rebel, and then suddenly, Rimbaud reflects upon himself, he says what foolishness that was. It's a journey, truth is a journey. There you go, I don't know if I've partly answered your point, but it's indeed important to show that Napoleon, like every mortal, has his personal equation. Here we come back—Guillemin is right—Corsican, somewhat ambitious, greedy, there you go, thirsty for a bit of power, very well, but at the same time the Napoleonic epic cannot be reduced to the psychology of the particular Napoleon. There you go. What matters is the sum total of his historical work.
Hugo and Balzac: from the return of the ashes to the Comédie humaine 1:00:15 And I don't want to draw this out too long, even though it is our subject tonight, but the return of the ashes was an extraordinary ceremony. Sorry? What's that? The ceremony where Napoleon's remains were brought back from Saint Helena, to be placed where they are now, at Les Invalides, in 1840-something, I have a slight doubt. So, Napoleon had already been dead for 20 years, he died in [18]21. What am I getting at? I'm getting at the fact that even Nerval, whom I know well, had a mystical delirium in which he identified with the Aiglon.
1:00:47 At the time, plenty of people identified with Napoleon. In fact, the popular image of the madman in Tintin, in comic strips, is the guy wearing Napoleon's hat. Victor Hugo wrote another text, one crucial to our subject. It's a poem entitled "Ode to the Column," the Vendôme Column. Why? Because, at one of the great social events of the Parisian civil calendar, the ball given by the Austrian embassy, some Marshals of the Empire had been refused their titles granted by Napoleon—duke of this, prince of that, etc. This caused a real scandal.
1:01:34 Victor Hugo picks up his pen and says in this poem, in substance, that the Grand Army had been insulted. Meaning, Napoleon's memory had been insulted. Napoleon's name does not appear in the poem. But everyone understood. Because everyone knows what this Vendôme Column is. Everyone knows it was made with the bronze of cannons taken from the Russians and Austrians at the Battle of Austerlitz. Victor Hugo, in the 1820s, 1820, 1821, 1822, was a resolute opponent, one, of the Revolution, two, of Napoleon. He kept writing devastating poems denouncing the tyrant, the ogre, the usurper, and worse.
1:02:24 In 1827, he switched sides. Now, since in 1827 he was the recognized head of the Romantic school, and had been for several years, well, the Romantic camp would switch over into the Napoleonic cult. The story of Victor Hugo's relationship to Napoleon is quite extraordinary because it culminates with the return of the ashes in 1840. Victor Hugo published a poem devoted to this return of the ashes, of which I'll read you the first stanza anyway.
1:02:59 "Sire, you shall return to your capital, without alarm bell, without battle, without struggle and without fury, drawn by eight horses beneath the triumphal arch, in imperial dress. Through that same gate where God accompanies you, Sire, you shall return upon a sublime chariot, glorious, crowned, holy as Charlemagne, and great as Caesar." And afterward, something quite remarkable would happen. It's Les Misérables in 1862. As you know, Les Misérables begins at Waterloo.
1:03:37 Let's be clear, the starting point of the plot of Les Misérables is Waterloo, with Sergeant Thénardier wanting to rob Colonel Pontmercy, etc. And we know what follows. And the very first line of the novel, when Jean Valjean leaves the penal colony and heads toward Digne, where he will meet Bishop Myriel, there is a date. It is 1815. That is, the novel begins the year of Waterloo.
1:04:10 Hence a possible identification between the Napoleonic trajectory, the historical trajectory of Napoleon, and the novelistic trajectory of Jean Valjean, where incidentally, as you know, Victor Hugo had gone to the Waterloo battlefield—he was in exile in Guernsey, so he travels to Belgium, arrives in Brussels, from Brussels he goes to Waterloo, and he spends a few nights in an inn right next to Waterloo, and it's there that he writes what? He writes the death of Jean Valjean. The principle of Another Study of Woman is a principle found fairly often in Balzac. You have several characters gathered in a salon and each one tells something. And so here, it's a fictional writer, Canalis, if my memory serves, who says this about Napoleon.
1:04:56 "Who will ever be able to explain, paint, or understand Napoleon? A man who is depicted with folded arms and who did everything, who was the finest power ever known, the most concentrated, the most biting, the most caustic of all powers. Singular genius who spread armed civilization everywhere without fixing it anywhere. A man who could do everything because he wanted everything. A prodigious phenomenon of will, taming an illness with a battle, and who nevertheless had to die of illness in his bed after having lived amid bullets and cannonballs."
1:05:40 "A man who had in his head a code and a sword, the word and the deed. A perceptive mind who guessed everything, except his own fall. A strange politician who spent men wholesale out of thriftiness and who spared three heads, those of Talleyrand, Pozzo di Borgo, and Metternich, diplomats whose death would have saved the French Empire and who seemed to him to weigh more than thousands of soldiers. A man to whom, by a rare privilege, nature had left a heart within his body of bronze. A man laughing and kind at midnight among women, and in the morning handling Europe like a young girl amusing herself splashing the water in her bath. Hypocritical and generous, fond of glitter yet simple, tasteless yet protecting the arts, despite his contradictions, great in everything, by instinct or by constitution. Caesar at 25, Cromwell at 30."
1:06:35 "Then, like a grocer of Père Lachaise, a good father and a good husband. In the end, he improvised monuments, empires, kings, codes, verses, a novel, and all of it with more scope than accuracy. Did he not want to make Europe into France? And after making us weigh upon the earth so as to change the laws of gravitation, he left us poorer than the day he first laid his hand upon us. And he, who had taken an empire with his name, lost his name at the edge of his empire in a sea of blood and soldiers."
Musset and Stendhal: the child of the century and Julien Sorel 1:07:08 A text that tells you everything about the mythical Napoleon of the Human Comedy. Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century, 1836. And here, this text, this novel, gives you another dimension of the Napoleonic myth, which is the connection between the Napoleonic figure, his memory, and the mal du siècle.
1:07:42 Because this is the generation that turned 30 in 1830, who was therefore 20 in 1820 and 10 in 1810, and who therefore did not take part in the Napoleonic epic. This feeling of having been frustrated, of having been deprived of something, this feeling of a world that had become flat, uninteresting, mediocre, materialistic, bourgeois—we have a word for the Romantic outlook.
1:08:13 What Balzac would call, regarding his literary production, the literature of disenchantment. Well, Alfred de Musset, in The Confession of a Child of the Century, evokes this youth to which he belongs. Let me remind you that Musset was born in 1810. He was 26 when he wrote this. "During the wars of the Empire, while husbands and brothers were in Germany, anxious mothers had brought into the world an ardent, pale, nervous generation."
1:08:47 "Conceived between two battles, raised in schools to the roll of drums, thousands of children looked at one another with a dark eye while testing their puny muscles. From time to time their blood-stained fathers would appear, lift them onto their gold-braided chests, then set them down again and remount their horses. Only one man was alive then in Europe. The rest of mankind tried to fill their lungs with the air he had breathed. Each year France made a gift to this man of 300,000 young men. It was the tax paid to Caesar. And without this flock behind him, he could not have followed his fortune."
1:09:27 "It was the escort he needed so that he could cross the world and go and fall into a small valley on a desert island, beneath a weeping willow." Napoleon's tomb at Saint Helena.
1:09:57 How can a book published in 1830 claim to be a chronicle of the 19th century? Simply because for Stendhal, the 19th century was born with Napoleon. And the hero Julien Sorel—whom does he identify with? Napoleon. Which historical figure does he constantly turn to? Napoleon. Which books does he always carry with him? The Memorial of Saint Helena and the collection of the Grand Army's bulletins.
1:10:33 How better to stage the influence of the Napoleonic myth on a young man born after Napoleon's fall? "Which is less ugly than sending him to the executioner. I know very well that I would have three heads cut off to save four. And even four to save three. A future Danton, perhaps. Less the ugliness."
1:11:06 "Have no fear, mademoiselle, there is no more Danton. What would he be today? Not even a deputy public prosecutor? He'd be sold to the Jesuits? He'd be a minister? For after all, this great Danton stole. Napoleon too stole millions in Italy. Without which he would simply have been stopped by poverty. And you, have you decided whether it is better to steal or to sell oneself?"
1:11:36 "'Mademoiselle, I believe that the man who wants to drive ignorance and crime from the earth must pass like a storm and do evil as if by chance.' 'Oh!'" There you have it for Stendhal. Stendhal, incidentally, who began as a fierce opponent of Napoleon, especially after the coronation, and who then rallied to Napoleon to the point of holding posts in the Napoleonic administration and taking part in the Russian campaign.
1:12:06 He so hated the Restoration that Napoleon, as a result, appeared to him as a reference figure. That's no coincidence! It's no coincidence, indeed. There you go, when you get resonance like that, it goes well beyond the individual particular. There, I wanted to make that point—I think I haven't praised Napoleon, nor have I put him on trial, I haven't torn him down, I haven't said "go and do likewise," no.
Waterloo and the freedom of all 1:12:37 I have shown that we have no choice. Being modern means being subsequent to the given that renewed it. Completely. Let me repeat, I'd like to conclude on this, because it's rare for me to insist on something so personal—I've already told you a thousand times that I'm not a creative person, I'm more into transmitting the creations of others, but still. Where I personally insist is on the fact that—I've said it—we are not in a revolution, we are in a counter-revolution, but in the struggle between the two, someone like Napoleon is contemporary with an era where the die had not yet been cast.
1:13:18 And so Waterloo is the beginning of the world you live in, the world we live in. That is to say, a world… I'm not racist, I have nothing against Anglo-Saxons, no more than against the Chinese or the Russians or the Chadians. No, but I note that certain values specific to the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly to free enterprise, are what Marx should be recalled as calling the freedom of the fox in the henhouse or the wolf in the sheepfold.
1:13:53 Take your pick. I don't know if that's freedom. Freedom is either shared by a people, or it isn't freedom at all. That's why we speak of the birth of democracy in Greece. Yes, for 15-20% of citizens—the slaves are excluded. Well, better treated than in Rome, but still. And so, I'll end on this, I'll end with a quotation from Hegel: "The Orientals knew that only one is free—the Emperor of China, the King of Kings in Ethiopia, Lion of the Tribe of Judah, descendant of Prester John."
1:14:25 He holds all the records for Ethiopian titles, I love that. The Tsar of Russia—the Orientals knew that only one is free; the Greeks knew—we shift to the past tense—that some are free, the citizens in question, among whom it is no longer force but the parliament, at the assembly, on the agora, where things are decided. The moderns—and for Hegel this is tied to what inaugurates the Christian era—the moderns know that all are free. There you go. Napoleon perhaps did not think every day of saying he wanted to install freedom in the world, but what he did brought us much closer to a freer world than the one that existed in the days when you had to be born noble to be noble, and so on, with everything that follows for officers.
1:15:09 I'll end here, I'll end on this detail—here I come back to the concrete individual Napoleon. When at age 9 he was torn away from his mother—as with all boys separated from their mothers, it's always painful, and especially in Corsica—to go to Champagne-Lorraine, I love those regions, I'm a perverse Corsican, I love the countries of the North and East, you know that. But still, imagine the poor lad from Ajaccio—I'm from Bastia myself, that's fine, but Ajaccio is tropical. And he finds himself at Brienne, at nine years old, a military school, and there he is mocked, ridiculed because of his accent, he barely even speaks French, by the sons of all the French nobility.
1:15:49 Napoleon will never forget that. You understand what I mean? From his path up to the moment when Barras hands him power within the Directory by putting Joséphine in his arms, or rather putting him in Joséphine's arms, throughout that whole journey, Napoleon had been a Robespierrist, as Amélie recalled earlier, and returned to Corsica after 15 years. It took him 15 years, from the moment at age 9 when he was torn from his mother.
1:16:19 It took him 15 years to return to Corsica after attending the war academy. And there, he had never been so anti-French. That is, for him, not against the French Revolution—quite the opposite! The Revolution had not yet begun. We're on the eve of it. Let's say, in 1788. But it's in [17]79 that he returns to Corsica. And there, he resents this world of privileges, of the aristocracy, of the Ancien Régime.
1:16:51 He, who was by far the best in mathematics in his class, etc., could not have been anything other than a lower-ranking officer. There you go, I'm paying attention to your interventions. I'm just going to move on—Amélie. I'll move on to another question to wrap up. Top right, go ahead. Amélie. I wrote about the imperial nobility. It was very interesting that it started that way, because it represents… it's a bit like Simon's point. I'm coming back—there, he falls back into the same rut—I'm coming back to crowns, symbols and palaces, etc.
Imperial nobility, Haiti and Paoli 1:17:29 But that's worse. The Haiti file, the retreat from Russia, the war in Spain and Haiti—that's the main negative side of Napoleon, I quite agree. "I created the imperial nobility to crush the old one, not to crush the French peasantry, and to satisfy the people from whom most of those on whom I conferred titles had come."
1:18:00 And because the simplest soldier had the right to aspire to the title of duke, which I'm glad of, Thank you Amélie, I want to illustrate what I was saying earlier about the limits of the old regime, and that it was about moving on to something else, expanding what Kant called legislation through freedom. I even think I was wrong, because it was weakening the principle of equality that the nation was so fond of. But if I had created dukes with French titles, people would have thought I wanted to revive the old titles.
1:18:37 And besides, the aristocracy of the time, if they weren't deceived, they often mocked Napoleon's court, which was somewhat the Tuileries, it wasn't Versailles, it never had that splendor. There you go. Thank you very much. And so, I'll have you follow up on that, because even slavery, we know it's complicated, because Napoleon was against it, but then for reasons… I'll interrupt you on this matter, this file on slavery, because we can't cover everything at once, I don't want to abuse our friends, and our comrades. I recommend the talks by Tulard, that's Jean, I mean Jean Tulard, the historian, who gave his latest talks this year on the occasion precisely of the 250th anniversary of the Emperor's birth, invited by the Corsicans, and who raised, who didn't skip over any of the difficulties, neither who started the wars, the slaughters, the Haitian file, wonderful, believe someone who visited poor Toussaint Louverture's cell at Pontarlier, at the fortress up there, on the peak.
1:19:57 So there you go, sorry for interrupting, but I'll say if you want to see the details of this file, I don't recommend someone from my own camp, he's neither a Marxist nor... he's a scrupulous historian at least, Jean Tulard. Yes, on this point, I don't want to go into detail, but it was... specifically for economic and strategic reasons since at first Napoleon, what Toussaint Louverture would do would be forced labor. That's what Napoleon wanted to do but he didn't do it, forced labor, which is already better than slavery, but because you couldn't switch from one economy to another on a sugar island. Yes, I'll remind you that the economy was essentially sugar cane and that requires a very abundant workforce, and that forced labor gave that up, the men could throw themselves into the water.
1:20:34 There you go, that's it. And another ruse of reason is that in the end, at first, Toussaint Louverture was Napoleon's man, and through rivalry — Jean-Bendit, is Napoleon's rival. At first, he's his man. And by ruse of reason, it turns out he develops one of the first Black republics. The first one. There you go. So that's funny. And so, I wanted to end on this point of ruse of reason, because I find it's a concept that allows us to escape, because Napoleon is one of the only figures we can't place. That is, today, at first, we'd say he's a right-wing figure.
1:21:04 That's it, like at first. The Action française hated Napoleon because he's a right... Even now, you just have to see, like de Gaulle, who was never closer to death than under the bullets of the OAS at Petit-Clamart. That's exactly it. It's this right wing that hates the right wing, what Napoleon and de Gaulle have in common. Who hates, who lost power with its wars. At first, they hate him. Today we get the impression he's become just a right-wing figure. He's a figure who divides, and I find that with the ruse of reason, we get out of these themes because the left leaves him entirely to the right because if they actually take the criterion...
1:21:36 Women, slavery, so we can no longer discuss it, whereas the concept of the ruse of reason seems good to me because we also see it in the Anglo-Saxon world, and there's a film coming out by Ridley Scott, where Napoleon is only seen as this man against freedom, military, facing England which is freedom, and it's interesting that if we take the ruse of reason, we see why the English support Paoli. I don't know if you can just finish on that. That reminds me of the commemoration of the French Revolution with Mitterrand.
1:22:14 Don't talk to me about that horror. Yes, but it repeats the same thing as with Paoli, that in the end we celebrated the Revolution, but we still said the English, their revolution is better. I think that could lead you to finish on Hegel with that. I'll start with something, I didn't want to talk about it, but because it's intra-Corsican. Someone well known in the Corsican world said to our friend François de Negroni, when the Materia Scritta editions, distributed by Delga on the mainland, when we published the draft constitution for Corsica written by Rousseau, so it remained a draft.
1:22:58 When Corsica lost its independence under the forces of Louis XVI, under the armies of Louis XVI, you don't make a constitution for a people that isn't sovereign. So this draft constitution, for which I wrote a preface, François tells me that someone well known in island politics told him 'I will never forgive you for publishing this work.' Because for us, our reference point is the English. Paoli is buried in England. Whoever wants to do research on Paoli, Paoli's archives are in London.
1:23:31 England, that's fair game — trying to drive a wedge against France by fully playing up France's main enemy in Corsica at the time, who was Paoli. He was a great man, mind you, a man of the Enlightenment and all that, but he never crossed the line, he always hated the Revolution's attitude toward the clergy in the Revolution. No, on that level, Paoli remains a man of the old world, on that point, for the rest. In the United States, there's more than one city called Paoli, you should know that.
Jaffa and Hegel's last text on England 1:24:02 There you go, so I'll answer that first. Intellectual honesty, moreover, insofar as I can show it, obliges me also to recall that there's almost worse than Haiti, well, it's Jaffa, but curiously we talk little about it, it's a Poulion mine. Napoleon, during the Egyptian campaign, goes up through what's called Palestine today, so Jaffa, the oranges of Jaffa.
1:24:32 There we are quite far, the plague-stricken of Jaffa, there's a beautiful painting. And there's a revolt of the Palestinians against the French. And Napoleon says to Berthier, wipe them out. We shouldn't forget that, Napoleon is someone who has no qualms on that level. That's what I mean, even if he put all of that to use, you see, impossible is not French, fine, very well, and even though France never had such an extension, even though it left the stage shrunken, we still have to recall that, it's neither good nor evil, it's, as he says — I have Hugo make his character in Ruy Blas say it — I am a force that goes.
1:25:20 You see where? Very well. I do want to say that what I regret about that era is not the figure of Napoleon, it's the fact that the die wasn't cast. That we weren't going to settle for the republican system, of which Napoleon took up a great inheritance — the grandes écoles, equality of birth, and a rather centralized model where the general will carries a certain weight against free enterprise. That's what matters. And so, I'll read here, reading an excerpt from Hegel's last text, when he takes up his pen before dying, alarmed by the reform project of the English Parliament. He says this, it's very short, I reassure you, but he says this, it's a quote from Hegel's last written text.
1:26:14 It is indeed a more or less unanimous opinion among pragmatic historians that if in a people — we were talking about England and the world we've lived in since England prevailed at Waterloo, the Anglo-Saxon world, even if it was the United States that took over afterward — it is indeed a more or less unanimous opinion among pragmatic historians that if in a people private interest and sordid financial advantages intrude predominantly into the election of the administrators of the state, such a situation must be considered as heralding the inevitable loss of that state's political freedom, the ruin of its constitution, and of the state itself.
1:26:58 With regard to the pride the English show for their freedom, it seemed to be understood. We Germans must make the following remarks. Although the old constitution of the German Empire was a shapeless aggregate of particular rights — I mentioned that earlier — it was only the external link of the Länder, that is the German regions, but within these, political life as regards the designation of seats and voting rights was not marked by the absurdity of English political life, at least not by that corruption which penetrates all classes of the people. I'll give an example I find in Marx, in extraordinary notes in Capital. You have to read those notes where he quotes reports from English factory inspectors — that's not opinions.
1:27:43 He says for instance... Two examples. When it came, following union struggle, to going from the 14-hour workday to the 13-hour workday. An enormous struggle to gain one hour. There were... All the English employers said 'but it's in the fourteenth hour that all the profit is made.' I'm sure you know it. That's how it went — that's where all the profit is made.
1:28:14 Now, they've never made so much profit, and it's 8 hours. First example, that this wasn't freedom. That's really how it was. Second, child labor. There too there were enormous struggles. You have to look at all the episodes, it didn't happen all at once. But mind you, your child, your kid, your boy of 6 or 7 years old is at the furnace, at the steelworks furnace there, where life is precarious. That's how it was. Well, when it was reduced, then a minimum time, then after that, then 11 years old, then 12 years old.
1:28:50 The argument of those who wanted to keep the children at work — not teenagers, children — was that at least they wouldn't become hoodlums; that's the Quakers, the people with a good conscience, the free world, the democracies against populism, already, it's abject. There you go, so this is serious, what we're witnessing. It's not... how to put it in a word? What I loved was 'free freedom.' I love that phrase! That's not free freedom, this!
Formal right and the free world 1:29:30 And since what's happening right now on the planetary level is somewhat a questioning of this model that has reigned since Waterloo, I don't know where it will lead. I'm never in the business of prophecy. But it's important to situate the real problems. China is a dictatorship, we're a democracy, but what is that? So the Uighurs, we have concentration camps. Everyone has forgotten that Uighurs slit people's throats with knives in a train station, in public, there.
1:30:02 I mean, not that long ago. And no doubt, as with everything that is Islamism — I say Islamism because Muslims are the main victims of Islamism in terms of death toll, you just have to look at Baghdad every time there's a gathering, or in Syria — the current era is excellent for reflecting, for putting back on the table this notion of what freedom, democracy, mean.
1:30:32 And because for a while people said, yes, the communists, the Marxists, they criticize formal law, that's how you end up with the worst. I take that seriously, it's important that there be formal law, it's important that there be a constitution, etc. But we understand better today what 'formal' means when it hides the worst crimes. Three million dead in Korea, that too is far away. And then bombings, everyone has forgotten. I had forgotten it too, but there were phosphorus bombs in Korea, it's appalling. There were more deaths than at Hiroshima, the bombings in Korea.
1:31:08 3 million dead in Vietnam. I'm skipping over a whole lot of... the number of wars carried out by the Union, the dictatorships in Latin America. When I was your age, people spoke Spanish, all the heads of state in Latin America spoke Spanish. My eye — yes he speaks Spanish, but what was his name? Do you know? It's Anglo-Saxon, German. German. In Brazil, the dictator was Hugo Banzer, in Paraguay it was Alfredo Stroessner.
Abel Gance's Napoléon 1:31:43 I'm not joking. And all of that was the free world, nominally speaking. There you go, I'll finish on that. I'll finish by saying 'Long live the Emperor,' I'll end on that. Long live the Republic. The world had changed and Lucien knew nothing of this world. People wanted to forget the blood of the revolution, the Terror and the wars of the Empire. France had restored the power of the old regime and the court nobility. People now aspired to success and personal enrichment. So young provincials rushed in by the thousands toward the capital, also determined to make a name for themselves.
1:32:28 But now far from the battlefields. In any case, if one had to fail in life, it was better to fail in Paris. In Abel Gance's Napoléon, of which Abel Gance himself said — I'll read you a quote from Abel Gance anyway. 'It is not to make an ordinary historical film that I attempted to resurrect, in the language of images, the prodigious figure of the one who proclaimed himself a fragment of rock hurled into space.'
1:32:58 'But because Napoleon is an abridgment of the world. He is a being whose arms are not large enough to embrace something greater than himself, the Revolution. Napoleon is a paroxysm within his era, which is itself a paroxysm within time, and cinema, for me, is the paroxysm of life.' That's Abel Gance's project. Napoleon Bonaparte, General Bonaparte, enters at night into the deserted hall of the National Convention. And the shadows of the great revolutionaries rise up, appear gradually on the seats of the Convention. The shadow of Robespierre, the shadow of Marat, the shadow of Danton, the shadow of Camille Desmoulins.
1:33:47 Of course, they are all dead. They all had each other guillotined. But they come back to life. They are the ghosts of the Revolution addressing Napoleon Bonaparte. So it's a silent film, so these are intertitles. In the original version, these are intertitles that come in and ask, and say, these leaders of the Revolution to Napoleon Bonaparte: 'Napoleon, will you take up in your hands the sword of the Revolution?' It's the transmission. It's the Revolution handing over to Napoleon Bonaparte, not simply an inheritance, but a mission to accomplish.
1:34:37 And the second line is: 'Remember, Napoleon, if you betray your oath' — the oath he's taking right there now — 'if you betray your oath, your fall will be inexorable.' That's a tremendous scene because for Abel Gance, Napoleon and the Revolution are one and the same. Why are they one? Because for Abel Gance, as he said, the Revolution is the paroxysm of history. And this paroxysm of history now belongs to a figure who is himself paroxysmal, Napoleon Bonaparte, who will then set off for the Italian campaign.
1:35:25 So in this vision — and I use 'vision' in both senses, vision as conception and at the same time as Abel Gance's visionary spirit — you have the culminating point of an entire aspect of the 19th-century Napoleonic myth.
