Napoleon, Imposter Syndrome, and Democracy

A Review of Napoleon by Adam Zomoyski

The release of the Napoleon movie last year brought a number of Twitter threads to my attention with recommended biographies. Given I had never read about one of history’s greatest leaders, I added a modern biography by Adam Zomoyski to my reading stack. I have always liked the aesthetic of French Empire furniture and design, which reminds me of an early sort of future-facing Art Deco.

The movie, it turns out, is horrible, unless you watch it on mute. We live in a strange time where cinematography has reached incredible aesthetic heights, but dialogue has to be dumbed down for increasingly illiterate audiences. Ridley Scott’s effort is particularly bad, with actors phoning it in with goofy American accents in a Continental setting and of course the now-obligatory ahistorical casting and unnecessary nudity. It all adds up to an exercise in annoyance where it’s almost impossible for anyone historically literate at a basic level to achieve the suspension of belief necessary to enjoy a good movie.

Napoleon, the man, however, is perhaps history’s greatest actor. I can think of no individual who rose from such humble origins to become a sovereign over an empire of equivalent size, and whose legacy continues to the modern day. Napoleon was born to a middling family¹ in Corsica of tenuous, distant claims to minor nobility. Corsica was ethnically Italian, his native language. As a young man, he latched on to Corsican nationalism as his cause, and when France annexed Corsica his family managed to secure his education at a French military academy. His spoken French, his entire life, remained stilted, with a heavy accent.

Like many high-agency, energetic, and intelligent people of humble origin, Napoleon’s ambition increased as he saw opportunities before him. Almost all others, despite appearances, are relatively lazy and inert compared to a man of action. Only opportunistically interested in the French Revolution, and disgusted in its excesses, he rose from successful general to First Consul of a triumvirate as France tired of the disorder of the mob. Running laps around his peers, his undeniable competence compared to either the Bourbons or republicans brought a popular demand for the assured continuity of his governance.

With the consent of the people, he crowned himself Emperor of the French, and at the peak of his power he, his relatives, associates, and allies would either directly control or influence not only France but Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Germany, Sweden, and Austria. He held the Pope as captive and dictated terms for the return of religion to France, and served as its lawgiver in the Napoleonic code², which survives in French-influenced polities to this day.

Napoleon’s Ascent

Napoleon, no doubt, had sufficient luck; at minimum, there were many times he came close to death on a battlefield³, both earlier and later in his career. That said, he made the most of his luck. In his journey of self-discovery, he ascertained that success was surprisingly attainable by those willing to take decisive action and attend to details. In a pattern that would follow throughout his life, he recognized key bottlenecks and turning points, and would ruthlessly micromanage details to ensure success.

He learned that, compared to himself, most people were lazy and incompetent, and it was necessary to attend to key details. In peacetime, this tendency could be comical, as he, as Emperor, inspected invoices from Josephine’s dressmakers he thought were ripping him off, or regulated the recycling of spent candles in the palace. When he was at the peak of his energy, his nature was such he could no more ignore waste and incompetence than he could cease breathing.

His later decline in fortune was likely due to a decline in health sapping his otherwise energetic brain. He became the self-made Emperor of France at age 35 (!), and was 45 at Waterloo; he died at 51. During the decade of his reign, he became obese, inactive, and developed major health problems affecting his energy and mobility. At later battles, and in later political conflicts, his mind and body became less agile, more fatalistic, and less willing to attend to details. The great micromanager started to trust and overly delegate to the inferior judgment and competence of his reports, as fortune favors not only the bold but the agentive.

One wonders what an individual like Napoleon could accomplish, and for how much longer, with modern knowledge of the science of health and fitness. We rarely today, for example, see fat, old rich people, because most of those of high enough agency to become wealthy can also discipline their appetites for health since they are aware of the consequences if they do not. This may account for why so many leaders today are old — they may be older in years, but are younger functionally than the literal “fat cats” of the past, who often died of major heart attacks in their 50s.

It is very clear that early Napoleon had some difficulty with interpersonal relations and was likely very lightly on the autism spectrum. He was three hours late to his wedding with Josephine due to getting lost in studying maps for his next Italian campaign. Early in his career, people found him socially awkward and off-putting, and he had difficulty fitting in with polite society, especially with his origins in a backwater like Corsica.

Like many high-functioning autistes, however, through observation he eventually teased out the underlying principles of human relations, and wielded them more powerfully by relying on his own private science of human behavior rather than innate instinct. It was also likely easier for him to relate to others as a superior rather than a peer; his otherworldliness became a distinction of a man of destiny more than an oddity of an unaccomplished eccentric.

Peak and Fall

The standard understanding of Napoleon’s downfall, his insecurity and risk-taking, seems accurate. At the peak of his power, he had achieved a peace with consolidation of France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, much of Germany, and Switzerland, with key allies in Austria. Russia and England remained hostile but placable, and both offered peace. England, however, reinitiated hostilities after his refusal to enter into a commercial treaty.

An extreme mercantilist, his ambition to seal the European coastline proved impossible to enforce and burdensome to his allies. While it is true that free trade with superior English manufacturers would inhibit the develop of French industry, he could not see the possibility of an incremental approach. Like the Americans, he could have traded freely with the English at first, but once he had consolidated his gains and proven more of a naval threat to the English, he could have negotiated better terms and tariffs to protect key industries necessary to national security. He insisted on accomplishing everything all at once.

His paranoia, particularly with the English, was not unfounded. A smaller nation with a commercial, seafaring orientation, they had always resisted consolidated Continental power that could threaten their key advantage, naval supremacy. England had always seen itself as independent of Europe, a separate civilization.

Theodore Roosevelt, in his magisterial first chapter of The Winning of the West on the origin of the English peoples, identifies the British as a new sort of European civilization, distinct from the Continent, objectively and subjectively. According to Roosevelt, it was in the British Isles and then America that Germanic tribes, the seafaring Angles and Saxons, became sufficiently isolated from the post-Roman world to most fully de-Latinize their culture and become something of an unadulterated Nordic civilization; it was here that pre-Roman German tribal structures developed into formal self-government and German concepts of personal guilt and morality, as opposed to Latin practices of shame and hypocrisy, crystallized in the purest, most austere forms of Protestantism — the excesses of which I sometimes jokingly refer to as “Vitamin D Deficient Theology.”

Thomas Jefferson saw himself not as a radical but rather as a conservative in restoring ancient Germanic self-government, where chieftains ruled by assent and example rather than servile submission, to a Germanic people in the American Constitution. Hitler, for all his bluster about the “master race,” was probably projecting his own admiration for the world-conquering Deutsch daughters of the Anglosphere. Davy Crockett and Tommy Atkins did by instinct with their rifles and King James Bibles what Nietzsche’s LARPing pagans could only theorize about.

In seeing the Continent as alien⁴, England would never deal fairly with it, earning the nickname “perfidious Albion.” Lacking an army sufficient to achieve Continental objectives, Britain specialized in subterfuge and spy-craft. As he consolidated power in France, Napoleon was acutely aware of the assassination, assisted by British intelligence and Crown Prince Alexander, of Czar Paul I of Russia, when Paul proved unfriendly to an anti-French alliance with Britain. Alexander proved a much more useful tool to British designs and was instrumental in his downfall. Continual assassination plots were uncovered in Paris targeting Bonaparte as well.

Napoleon reached the rather fatalistic conclusion that he would never be accepted as part of the “club” of legitimate, ancient monarchs, that he would only have legitimacy to the extent he was victorious in battle. He could only be feared, never loved.

From the time of his disastrous invasion of Russia, as he suffered setback after setback, he continually rejected peace deals offered, always hoping to make peace on a high note, a victory of some sort that would enable him to again dictate terms. And even in his diminished later years, he was so good that it almost happened; his great idiomatic defeat at Waterloo was somewhat underwhelming, with French losses at 35,000 troops to the allies’ 25,000. Peace, each time, seemed to slip out of his fingers due to his negotiating tendency to see any concession as weakness and opportunity. At the very end, when he was offered abdication with the eventual accession of his infant son after a regency under his second wife, the Empress Marie Louise of Austria, he dithered and lost everything.

This insecurity proved his undoing, and it seems to be a clear mistake. He had established, through 15 years of ruling France as Consul and Emperor, clear legitimacy as a competent ruler. Francis, the Austrian sovereign, had consented to his daughter marrying Napoleon. And two of the thrones Napoleon had offered to his allies, including to the his general Bernadotte, born a commoner but placed on the throne of Sweden by Napoleon, were accepted by the allied powers as legitimate. The House of Bernadotte occupies the now entirely ceremonial throne of Sweden to the present day.

Similarly, his general Murat was another commoner Napoleon placed on the throne of Naples whose legitimacy was initially respected by the allies. Bernadotte and Murat both betrayed Napoleon, but in loyalty to their thrones, in joining the allies once it became apparent Napoleon would not accept a reasonable peace following defeat. Murat unfortunately re-allied himself with Napoleon during the grand encore of The Hundred Days, and lost his throne, but the allies remained loyal to Bernadotte.

These cases show that the ancient houses were all too aware of their own distant, common origins, and were at least somewhat open to, and largely fascinated by, the Corsican “upstart.” Any sovereign who intends to stay sovereign must be, above all, practical, and many were likely eager to reinvigorate their bloodlines by intermarrying with the energetic Bonapartes, if they could only achieve a balanced, stable peace; Napoleon, in indulging history’s most tragic case of imposter syndrome⁵, missed his chance to have his house rule much of Europe.

Napoleon, beloved by the French, remained a dangerous man to his death, despite increasing health problems. The British so feared his potential return that millions of pounds per year were spent guarding him on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena. His wife and son, Napoleon II, were taken to Austria to never see their husband and father again.

Despite controls on his communications with Europe, he managed to seduce enough of the English aristocrats who came to visit him to paint his exile as martyrdom, inspiring romantic movements demanding his release. And in his Last Will and Testament, Napoleon bequeathed much of the fortune he had acquired as Emperor to various personages of importance in France. He knew, of course, that a Bourbon king would never respect his wishes, but hoped that such provisions would encourage a future sovereign of his house to seize the throne of France again.

This, incidentally, is exactly what happened. While his son Napoleon II would die of tuberculosis at 21, a nephew, Napoleon III, would declare the Second French Empire in 1850 until France declared itself permanently — so far — a republic. The last monarch of France was not a Bourbon, but a Bonaparte.

Napoleon inspired a pride in the French that continues to the present-day. The — pun intended — gall of De Gaulle, returning to lead France after its loss in WWII, in withdrawing from NATO and ensuring the French joined the nuclear club to maintain their actual sovereignty, contrasts strongly with the English, whose loyalty was rewarded by American post-war defenestration and betrayal⁶.

Coda: Napoleon and Democracy

Napoleon can be seen as a classic Caesar figure, demanded by the people to restore order when they lacked the virtue to self-govern. France, it is clear, lacked this virtue in its Revolution, as compared to say the more conservative Americans. Most people, it must be observed, are apolitical and find democratic participation to be bothersome. They would rather a highly competent ruler that makes decisions for them.

Napoleon’s reign, endorsed by a one-time plebiscite, may be the natural end-game of democracy. Bonapartism is the ideology that demands monarchs who govern be endorsed by the people, instead of by clean succession. The problem with this is it tends, like the Caesars of Rome, to result in a lot of bloodshed and chaos in transitions.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe has done great scholarly work documenting the superiority of monarchy as a form of government. Despite democratic propaganda to the contrary, he has shown that monarchies uniformly delivered governance at a lower price as a percentage of GDP than democracies; historically, monarchies consumed something like 5 to 8% of national income.

Hoppe’s central thesis is that monarchies apply the principles of the superior nature of private property to government; just as a homeowner takes better care of property than a renter, monarchs have an interest in the long-term health of their country beyond winning the next election or catering to campaign donors. Contra John Locke, no monarch serves without the consent of the people, at least implicit, and their actions are often more guarded and respectful than democratically elected leaders. After all, the only court of appeal is assassination rather than losing an election and retiring to K-Street as a highly paid lobbyist.

If one sees government as a cost of doing business to be minimized, one would prefer monarchy, rationally. The two great low-tax havens of Europe, Monaco and Liechtenstein, are the last remaining sovereign monarchies; their highly Catholic monarchs, incidentally, also disallow most abortions⁷. But people, alas, are not rational.

Government can be seen, in a fallen world, as the necessary submission to a monopoly of violence to prevent random and unstructured violence. It is no different than paying protection money to a local mobster, often necessary in failed, semi-sovereign states. That monarchs, with their honest and straightforward exercise of power, can demand less protection money than the manufactured consent of democracy is a bug, not a feature, from the perspective of government (though a feature for the tiny minority of rational subjects).

Democracy, then, is a superior technology of government that allows greater extraction of resources from the host population by elites, through the farce of voting. The downside is that instead of an honest elite based on the honest exercise of power, it breeds a rather amoral elite who compete on the basis of propaganda and manipulation of irrational voters. Morally, it is inferior, but as an extractive technology, it is superior. Democracy is like fracking applied to elite rentier efficiency. People would rather give half of their resources in taxation if they feel they have a voice than a tenth otherwise. The advent of fiat currency, as a form of stealth taxation, represented a further technological advance in the ability to exploit the productive.

An unfortunate externality of mass democracy is that due to the manipulative nature of the elite, they never quite have total sovereignty like a monarch. Thus, when needing to manufacture consent for a war, they must resort to a “total war” orientation, ginning up a comic book style narrative of good and evil for unsophisticated voters, making war on not only the enemy military but its civilian population. Once spun up, these narratives make it difficult for rational actors to negotiate and end up killing many more people than when cool-headed monarchs could reach an early and reasonable compromise, as happened in many of the early Napoleonic wars. Monarch A loses a battle to Monarch B, and A agrees to give up a bit of territory; a peace treaty is signed, and not many people die.

By contrast, democratic wars, foreshadowed in the American Civil War and then fully realized in the horrors of the Great War, cannot bide with reasonable compromise, only unconditional surrender of the enemies they have hopelessly demonized in the public mind. Only the mutually assured destruction of the atomic bomb was sufficient to buffer the horrific wars of mass democracies.

Perceiving these problems, libertarians desire a return to smaller, more reasonable government as best for the governed. What they fail to see, however, is that people prefer lies and simplistic narratives to a more rational government.

Advocating for a return to monarchy, however romantic, is to attempt to fight a superior technology for extracting resources from foolish humans. Reactionary conservatives must accept that the universal spread of democracy in the West represents a Nash equilibrium of government; its ability to tax and spend more heavily on national defense alone ensure its dominance.

As much as Hoppe yearns for a political vision of a Europe consisting of “1,000 Liechtensteins,” actual Liechtenstein is merely tolerated, not truly sovereign without the large standing armies and propaganda-powered support base of a mass democracy. Democracy can’t be beat, and as much as it feels wrong, it is necessary to get about the business of mass manipulation and persuasion of voters to elect leaders ready to rule with power than pine for a return to the political equivalent of the horse and buggy.

Further, conservatives must use the extractive power of democracy to reward friends and punish enemies, to consolidate power like the Left by creating a clientele of its own counter-regime, rather than tilt at the windmills of “limited government” and dream of a return to the vapor of the early American republic. If the homogenous and more virtuous colonists could not maintain a “republic, if you can keep it,” it is fantasy to think we restore it again today, unless we also restore the initial conditions of an electorate consisting of a classically educated, mostly Christian landed gentry, which seems more fantastical in the domain of the “art of the possible” than convincing government clients to embrace classical liberalism. The trappings of the American republic remain, and must be used, in the mold of the Roman emperors, as a skin-suit to sell things politically, but our strategists must not believe their own propaganda.

Conservatives must use power, like the Left, to marginalize the enemies of civilization, and build coalitions with an interest in supporting our power structures, lest we bring knives to a gunfight. That elements of the New Right have moved beyond conventional conservatism and are beginning to understand the true nature of power is among the most encouraging developments of the post-Trump era. Like Napoleon, who rejected the simplistic moral narratives of both the “people’s” revolution and the divine right of the spent, decadent Bourbons, and rightly saw himself as most capable of restoring order to France, modern conservatives must be practical and willing to rule once democratic chaos reaches its fated end.

1. An interesting facet of Corsican society was its implicitly matriarchal nature. Napoleon apparently committed a major faux-pas as a Corsican in marrying his first wife, Josephine, without his mother’s permission. This great man spent much of the next years of his life begging his mother to accept her, a mother who continued to exercise strong control over the family even once he was crowned. This, of course, in a society progressives would have us believe where women were entirely oppressed. This reminds me a bit of Southern culture, where strong women run most things — including and maybe especially conservative churches where they hold no formal office — behind the scenes, but unlike explicitly bossy New England women, with a feminine touch, “a spoonful of sugar,” despite a patriarchal shell. I am reminded of Samuel Johnson’s quote, “Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.”

2. My native Louisiana remains the only Napoleonic-influenced civil law jurisdiction in the United States, necessitating its own independent bar exam and separate legal education for those practicing in the state. The biggest difference is the lack of precedent in court decisions, that laws are to be interpreted de novo as written instead of relying on historical practices. While common law favors predictability in the application of the law, it leads to absurdities in practice between the law as-written and the law as applied. It’s very dangerous in a common law jurisdiction to simply read the law and assume you know what it means and how it will be applied. Louisiana law can also be more humane, rejecting contractual concepts such as caveat emptor and requiring sellers and buyers to fully disclose all relevant information to complete a contract. A civil action, for example, can be made if a speculator defrauds a seller out of reasonable fair market value of real estate because of access to one-sided information. Sellers likewise must generally back all items sold with an implied warranty for use. Forced heirship, though weakened, means parents cannot disinherit their minor and disabled children. Further, Louisiana features civil-law notaries, a sort of vocational quasi-lawyer, educated through one year of school and an apprenticeship, who is legally authorized to transfer property, prepare wills, and give basic legal advice at a fraction of the cost of full attorneys. My mother was a Louisiana notary, advertised by a sign in the front yard; I remember all kinds of people coming to the house as a kid to have legal documents prepared on her typewriter for $10-$20 cash.

3. Most of the monarchs involved in the Napoleonic conflicts were personally present leading their troops, faced mortal danger with their men, and many were nearly captured due to Napoleon’s brash and unpredictable movements. One wonders if wars today would be more humane if the elite chickenhawks who start them had to put themselves and their children in personal danger.

4. I have to admit, I felt some of this reading the book. The French, top to bottom, Napoleon included, were total sexual degenerates compared to the English. I’m not necessarily judging harshly here — all men have committed adultery in their hearts — but to commit it in fact, by the dozens, in an age before antibiotics is just gross.

5. The solution to imposter syndrome is to acknowledge and ignore it as a universal malady of high achievement, a side effect of the extreme conscientiousness and anxiety necessary to competence. Just as the Purpose of a System Is What It Does, successful acts define the man.

6. England was effectively treated like a loser in WWII, its economy destroyed by American undermining of its empire, ironically exactly as Hitler predicted. Britain should have repudiated US wartime debt after our betrayal during the Suez crisis. Weak British leadership consented to the dismantling of their imperial possessions, which wrecked their economy, and continued dutifully paying off FDR’s ruinous debts until 2006! By contrast, West Germany, the “loser,” thrived economically with US aid and favorable trade policies.

7. When feminists attempted to overturn, through constitutional amendment, his absolute royal veto over proposed abortion legislation, Prince Alois of Liechtenstein threatened to abdicate and enjoy just being a billionaire in Switzerland. The people of Liechtenstein then overwhelmingly rejected the referendum curbing royal power. I suppose, having observed their neighbors, they appreciated living under a virtuous monarch rather than rule by politicians.