Napoleon: The Myth
A.D. Harvey looks at the enduring myth surrounding one of history’s ‘Great Men’, and how he dominated the nineteenth-century imagination outside France.
Napoleon dominated the imagination of the nineteenth century to an even greater extent than Hitler has dominated that of the twentieth. ‘Is he not unparalleled in the history of the world both as a military man, and a general statesman?’ asked George Ponsonby, leader of the Whig opposition in the House of Commons, five years before the Battle of Waterloo:
I say he is the greatest man that has ever appeared on the face of the earth. I speak not of his moral character. I speak of the strength of his faculties and the energies of his mind.
In 1817, the Danish jurist and politician Tage Algreen Ussing, afterwards mayor of Copenhagen, wrote ‘So long as the world lasts there can only be one Napoleon on earth’. For Goethe, ‘His life was the stride of the demigod’.
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