What Would Napoleon Do?: Historical, Fictional, and Counterfactual Characters

The Emperor—this world soul—I saw riding through the city to a review of his troops; it is indeed a wonderful feeling to see such an individual who, here concentrated in a single point, sitting on a horse, reaches out over the world and dominates it.

—G. W. F. Hegel to Friedrich Niethammer (13 October 1806)

Napoleon, predestined by Providence for the gloomy role of executioner of the peoples, assured himself that the aim of his actions had been the peoples’ welfare, and that he could control the fate of millions . . .

—Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

So the Emperor, refusing to waste time and wishing to take advantage of the still favorable season, ordered a departure on 20 September [1812]. After assembling his staff, he decided on a bold march north on St. Petersburg.

—Louis Geoffroy-Château, Napoléon et la conquête du monde¹

I will begin with what might sound like an uncontroversial claim: each of these three quotations is about Napoleon Bonaparte. When I say this to a general audience or to an audience of historians, I encounter few objections; but when I say it to literary critics, they tend to regard it as a provocation. They object that it is specious to say that all the passages refer to one entity when, in the first place, the quotations from Hegel and Tolstoy construct completely different, even opposite, concepts of Napoleon, and, in the second place, they are framed by dissimilar contexts, the first excerpted from a nonfictional personal letter and the second from a fictional work of art. In the third place, they might go on to object, the idea of Napoleon in the third quotation diverges not only from that of the other two but also from every known historical account of Napoleon’s behavior after the burning of Moscow in September of 1812. How can I say it refers to Napoleon Bonaparte at all when we know that the historical person of that name never made or carried out any such decision? I acknowledge these objections at the outset because, in attempting to answer them, I hope to clarify the existence of some basic distinctions between historical, fictional, and counterfactual characters. Clarifying the distinction will serve as a preliminary step toward defining the peculiar nature of the third category: the counterfactual character. This type of character has been making increasingly frequent appearances across a range of narrative genres in the last several decades, and gaining a clearer idea of what it is might eventually help us to understand both why the category is becoming so commonplace and how it differs from normal fictional characters. Since 1960, over five hundred narratives organized around such characters have been published in English alone, but in this article I won’t be analyzing this recent explosion. Instead, in an effort to uncover the origins and the simplest expressions of the phenomenon, I will illustrate the nature of counterfactual characters by looking at a few nineteenth-century examples and comparing them to the kinds of characterization we encounter in the nineteenth-century historical novel.

I’ll now turn to the defense of my provocative statement: all of these quotations are about Napoleon Bonaparte. To the objection that the meaning of Napoleon varies too greatly across these quotations for the referent to remain stable, I should clarify that I’m assuming a difference between a meaning and a referent; far from suggesting that the quotations convey similar ideas about Napoleon, I’m only saying that Napoleon is the person whom they all convey ideas about. You’ll recognize this distinction as a version of the standard (but somewhat old-fashioned) semiotic differentiation of “referent” from “signified.” The discrepancies among the signified ideas of Napoleon, far from calling the shared referent into question, are the very things that demonstrate its unity. Because we understand that the quotations share a referent, we can measure the distance between the significance of Napoleon in Hegel’s letter and his significance in Tolstoy’s novel. If there were no commonality of referent in the two quotations, we...