In Defending Napoleon, published a few weeks ago, a critique of the book Napoleon by Paul Johnson attempted to rebut his captious judgments on the life and behavior of one of the most significant historical figures in world history. After answering the charges that Napoleon 'was an opportunist incarnate' and had a 'ruthless disregard for human life', it is also necessary to correct one additional unhistorical and overzealous statement made by Mr. Johnson in his 200 page vilification of his subject..
In summing up the legacy of the course of the French Revolution and Napoleon, Johnson asserts, 'The Revolution left behind a huge engine: administrative and legal machinery to repress the individual such as the monarchs of the ancien regime never dreamed of, a centralized power to organize national resources that no previous state had ever possessed...' (my italics). This grandiose statement is baseless at the bar of history. Although Napoleon did indeed centralize economic and political power to a larger degree and control the populace through a intrusive secret police, French society was far from being an absolutist tyranny. In comparison to Sparta, a state which existed more than 2,000 years earlier in modern-day Greece, Napoleonic France would be considered a 'liberal'.
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Unlike Athens, its principle rival for Mediterranean supremacy, Sparta was oligarchic, deeply collectivist and militaristic. Excepting the ownership of landed property, the economy was run by coteries of elites. Citizens were not only prohibited from engaging in private enterprise, but they were also not allowed to own any precious metals (i.e. silver or gold). In short, trade virtually did not exist. Spartans lived agrarian lives with strict communitarian rules and without individual freedoms.
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As nearly every aspect of a person's life was determined by the 'Gerousia', a council of elders, a typical life in Sparta was a ritual of utter regimentation and conformity to the all-powerful state. Males born into the Spartan world were immediately seized by the repressive workings of the authorities. In order to determine whether or not an infant male would be capable of serving in the military, as required by all males from the age of 7 years old, mothers were told to wash their newborns in wine. If the child survived, the mother would be hopeful in her son's ability to cope with the stresses of rigorous training throughout the rest of his relatively short life. Infants born with a birth defect or judged weak by the 'Gerousia' were marked for death and thrown off the top of Mount Taygetos. As a precursor to the eugenics performed by Hitler and his T-4 program, the euphemism used to describe the disposed victims of this egregious state-sponsored program was 'deposits'.
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Upon beginning military service at age 7, the new class of warrior-children were placed in a state of near starvation to develop their ability to steal food without detection - a useful skill for hungry soldiers on foreign fields. If a boy were able to survive years of psychological and military subordination to the state, he would be allowed to take a wife and have children. However, the year of his wedding was entirely predictable as men were obligated to marry at age 30.
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The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who wrote his treatises in the early 17th century and described life in his time as 'nasty, brutish and short', could have considered himself and his countrymen quite fortunate in contrast with the suffering scores of Spartans. More to the point, Sparta, not Napoleonic France, reflects Johnson's hyperbolic summation, 'a centralized power to organize national resources that no previous state had ever possessed.' Hence, Napoleon is not the ultimate symbol of totalitarianism. Boys were not conscripted at age 7 for military service. An elite group did not decide who should live and die, and trade between citizens flourished in revolutionary France.
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Despite its shortcomings, Paul Johnson's Napoleon deserves a wide audience in order to revive the debate on the career of Napoleon Bonaparte and his place in history. However, his biography should be read with a critical eye for unfounded absolutist statements on a non-absolutist leader.
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J Roquen