The Man of the World

Je sais tout, même ce que vous n’avez ditá personne . . . tous les efforts humains ne peuventrien contre moi. I know all your thoughts, even what you have not said to a soul. . . all resistance is futile.

Napoleon to the residents of Cairo¹

Napoleon Bonaparte abdicated for the second time on 24 June 1815 and was exiled, again, to a remote island.² Elba had not proven secure enough, so this time he was imprisoned on Saint Helena, 2000 kilometers off the coast of Africa, where he died on 5 May 1821. His death did not put an end to the rumors that Napoleon was poised to return for a third time, however. Over the next decade, there were regular reports that he had escaped from his island prison and would soon reestablish the French empire. The rumors varied in content—he had been aided by US troops; he was indebted to the actions of Spanish clergy—but they alike relied on a belief, widely shared, in the emperor’s invincibility and immortality (Harzareesingh 46–47, 70). A French ballad, “Il n’est pas mort” “He is not dead,” captures this “popular superstition” (Béranger 98):

A ship at midnight carried him away; Since then, disguised, through his beloved land He wanders, lonely, hunted, day by day. That weary horseman, with his furtive glance, That poacher, hiding in the woods his head, ‘Tis he, perhaps; he comes to rescue France! It is not true, oh God! He is not dead! (Béranger 100)³

The song’s skepticism about the emperor’s mortality culminates in the assertion that disbelief is both the appropriate response to, and the necessary result of, Napoleon’s death: “For without him, we scarce believe in Thee” (101). Far from an overwrought Gallic quirk, the notion that Napoleon had survived his death was commonly held. In June 1846, for example, Margaret Fuller wrote in the New-York Daily Tribune that Napoleon’s “mind is still upon the earth.” Although the speaker in “Il n’est pas mort” imagines him wandering around France, Fuller suggests that Bonaparte’s afterlife is independent of his body for, even after 25 years, his mind is active and abroad, “working . . . through the tributary minds it fed” (1). Two decades later, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) documents the emperor’s influence on one such “tributary” mind when Raskolnikov “[gets] terribly carried away with Napoleon” (491). In the grips of his enthusiasm, Raskolnikov murders two women. And 20 years after that, Friedrich Nietzsche asserts the emperor is still at work, providing a “gesture in the other direction” (Genealogy 36). More optimistic about Napoleon’s continued influence than Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche elsewhere opines that “The history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness attained by this whole century in its most valuable men and moments” (Beyond 121).

Napoleon Bonaparte may not have succeeded in conquering the nations of Europe, but he did conquer the nineteenth century. All major, and most minor, European thinkers wrote about Napoleon, some celebrating his accomplishments, others deploring his example. The circulation of Napoleon across the century—the ceaseless repetition of his life, achievements, failings, and example—created an alternative Napoleonic empire, distinct from its political antecedent and more formative for the century’s culture. Because opinion varied widely—for Hegel, he was a “world-soul,” “astride a horse, [who] reaches out over the world and masters it” (114), while Tolstoy thought he was “predestined by Providence for the sad, unfree role of executioner of the peoples” (817)—his empire’s archive comprises much contradictory material. All of it grapples, however, with the reverberations caused by the elevation of an obscure man to “King,” and his subsequent conversion to, in Byron’s haunting formulation, a “nameless thing:/So abject—yet alive!” (253). When taken together, this archive shows that Napoleon’s overdetermined and ongoing ubiquity—one of his political aims, part of his legend, and a result of the countless appearances he makes across the nineteenth century—reveals him as the figure of and for the...