The essence of megalomania
Collect a full colour set and then build triumphal arches, just like Napoleon did
Image: The Triumphal Arch, Paris, France, circa 1920. By Publisher: Lévy et Neurdein réunis. Paris. - Own collection., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52051508
When I was a lad, I studied History, which was split between two schoolmasters, one of whom taught British history, from the Vienna Convention to the Second World War, and the other of whom taught European history: Italian and German unifications, Russian revolutions (1905 and 1917), Austria under Metternich, and, of course, the French revolution.
One guy figured pretty heavily in both syllabuses: Nap One. It is a sobering thought that, if Napoleon Bonaparte had been born only a few months earlier, he wouldn’t even have been French, but Italian, because France and what would become Italy swapped the islands of Sardinia and Corsica in 1769, making the Corsican-born emperor French, and not Genoese.
Napoleon attended the military academy in Paris, which is still there, at one end of the Field of Mars (the Roman god of war), on which the young student soldiers would carry out exercises. (Only much later would the other end become home to the emblematic Eiffel Tower.)
He was by all accounts a brilliant military student and quickly rose through the ranks, excelling in the Revolutionary Wars that France engaged in after the July 1789 revolution. Of course France had been brewing in revolution since long before the storming of the Bastille; in some ways it still is. But it was what would become known as the 18th of Brumaire that set Napoleon on his audacious path to glory, when he overthrew the Directory and installed himself, initially, as First Consul, only subsequently to be crowned emperor, for which he commanded the presence of the Pope, only to remove the crown from His Holiness’s hands at the last second and crown himself. If, for King Louis XIV, l’état, c’est moi, for Napoleon, Dieu, c’est moi.
The wars that Napoleon would fight over the ensuing 16 years, bar the time during which he was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba, hardly need any introduction. Anyone who has visited Paris and seen the triumphal arch he had built at the top of the Elysian Fields can read ream after ream of victories ascribed to his genius as a commander in the field. Of course, it is well known that he met his Waterloo at a hamlet in the United Kingdom called Mont-Saint-Jean. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands, it must be understood; and very quickly, the defeat he suffered at what was then called the Battle of Mont-Saint-Jean came to be known by the name of the nearby town of Waterloo. He met his Waterloo at Waterloo. It isn’t listed on the arch, as you might guess.
Image: this is just one of the plaques listing Napoleon’s victories on the Triumphal Arch in Paris. By Jules D. Thierry - J. D. Thierry: Arc de triomphe de l’Étoile, Paris 1845, pl. 24 Inscriptions sous le grand arc, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2686468
The substance of my ‘A’-level studies on the subject of Nap One focused on how this brilliant soldier had, as a corporal in the Revolutionary Army, managed to rise to such heady heights of power, influence and charisma.
In 1970, a film was made about the Battle of Waterloo, directed by the Soviet film director Sergei Bondarchuk. In those far-off days, long before computer-generated animations, if you wanted to recreate a battle scene set in 1815 with 17,000 men in full uniform, then you needed 17,000 men in full uniform. The film holds a record that is, with the advent of CGI, now unlikely ever to be broken: the highest number of costumed extras ever in a motion picture. The film was made in the then Ukrainian SSR, near to Uzhhorod, close to the border with the present-day Republic of Slovakia. The extras were drawn from the Red Army and it is instructive to know that the men were roused from their billets of a morning, washed and breakfasted and ready to be bussed to the costumes department in 15 minutes flat. It was said at the time that Bondarchuk had under his command the second largest army in the world.
If you know Brussels, you may be interested to know that the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, which is where the officers of the British army were being entertained the night before the battle and from where they were summoned to mount up and set off to meet the French, was held in a workshop on which the present-day Hôpital Saint-Jean is located, just off Place Rogier. The workshop was hired and suitably embellished for the event because the Duchess’s own premises were too small to accommodate all the guests. It belonged to a company that is one of the most important undertakings in Belgium today: D’Ieteren, the sole importer into the country of Volkswagen-Audi group motor vehicles (they come in by the trainload to its dedicated sidings in Kortenberg). At the time, the venue was the original premises of the D’Ieteren brothers, whose business was constructing horse-drawn carriages.
If we had to identify the traits that foretold Napoleon’s success, there surely was an element of natural genius. But the story of the Hundred Days, the period after his escape from Elba, and the manner in which he raised his army to face Blücher and Wellington at Mont-Saint-Jean is one of a charisma that was grounded in faith, in belief, in loyalty and in devotion. The troops who fought for the glory of France on the field of Waterloo did not kiss the hem of their general out of some form of false flattery: they held him in the esteem in which a loving son holds his honoured father. A soldier’s morale is worth thrice his weaponry, Napoleon once said. He can count himself lucky that he was absolutely right on that score.
He was played in the movie by Rod Steiger. In the clip, which is from the start of the film, we are at Fontainebleau on 20 April 1814, prior to his exile, when Marshal Ney is beseeching the Emperor to abdicate. This film is over two hours long: it isn’t some crash-bang action movie. It takes its time. And in this first scene you can feel the tension mounting. Be sure not to be holding anything fragile as you watch: when Steiger acts, he acts with passion.
Two of Napoleon’s campaigns contributed to his downfall more than any others. Spain was a catastrophe. The rivers in Spain flow west-east; he had to cross them with his army, and the Spanish destroyed the bridges. Moscow was another story: there he was defeated by snow and scorched earth. How could he ever have hoped to reign supreme over an empire that stretched from Iberia to the Urals? Well, one commonly held theory is that he suffered from megalomania: a mental derangement that drove him on and on and on to conquer more and more territory. Perhaps Alexander the Great also suffered from this illness. Perhaps also Adolf Hitler. But what is megalomania? “What stuff is it made of, whereof is it born?” Shakespeare might well have asked.
The one thing that prevented Napoleon from trying to take England was the English Channel. England had learned a much better kind of defence since the days in 1066 when its moat had been breached. The Pyrenees could be marched around (with the same consummate ease as that with which they were retreated around). And in Russia, it was weather that defeated the French, and bare, empty fields. His great failures were directly dictated not by a lack of military skill, but by simple accidents of topography. Failing them, each time that Napoleon reached a point of victory, he became tormented. Like a drug addict cannot content himself with one fix, but needs to go on to another, until he is so far into oblivion that another desire takes over from his lust for the drug itself. A sugar addict likewise, cannot be satisfied with a single sweetmeat. One might even say the same of those who collect tattoos.
Megalomania is not where you have an insatiable desire to acquire more and more power. Rather, it is the inability to quench your curiosity for what other power you might still be capable of acquiring. It sounds like the same thing, but it’s not. It goes hand in hand with a sense of vulnerability, about not controlling what is on the other side of the boundary you have just created. You take your conquest up to a point at which the cartographer will draw a line, declaring your side to be yours, and the other side to be theirs. “Theirs? How come, theirs? What if they come back at me?” you will ask yourself. “What if I pushed on a little farther and made that extra bit mine as well?” Your generals tell you: “Sire, there is nothing stopping you.” And so you gather up your army and off you set to see what more you can conquer, buoyed by the conquests that already lie behind you. And each time you win, you wonder what’s on the other side of that frontier.
So, megalomania is not an unquenchable thirst for power to the point of gluttony. It is the empty, rather than replete, feeling that comes with achievement. An inability to rest back on one’s laurels and contemplate what ought to be satisfaction, because of the niggling thought that the unknown territory on the other side … is unknown.
Do you ever play the board game Monopoly? What’s the first thing you do when you collect all the properties of a certain colour? You look to see how much it costs to put a house on each of them, and then you look to see how much money you have available, and what the rent is when your fellow players land on your colour set. You could content yourself with adding one house on each property, but you don’t, do you? You calculate your risk appetite and max out on houses and hotels to the greatest extent possible. Ah, you will say, but that is the whole point of Monopoly: to bankrupt the others as fast as you can. Well, yes; and that’s the point of warfare, if you have a megalomaniacal emperor leading your army: to wipe out everyone else as fast as you can.
Nowadays, we analyse Napoleon as having indulged in overreach. That is to be kind: but overreach is a planning error, not the product of mental illness; that is megalomania. Do we not need to be sure what it is we are talking about?
For all his army was impressive, and loyal, and devoted, Napoleon engaged in two battles in two days (Quatre-Bras, then Waterloo). And he did so against too many armies: it was the Prussians under Blücher who ultimately saved Wellington, who ended up taking all the credit. If Quatre-Bras had not been fought with Blücher the day before, and if Blücher had not played with Grouchy’s feet by leading him a merry dance around half of Belgium, Napoleon would have won, and I’d be writing this in French: my first language.
Megalomania: a drive to acquire victory after victory. The clip shows Napoleon scouring a map and manically strategising, and it’s a scene almost identical to a scene in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film Der Untergang, in which Hitler orders non-existent battalions to defeat the Soviets from the pathetic position of his bunker, from where he could not even see a battlefield. When a commander in chief gives orders based on maps and diagrams instead of the reality on the ground, then warfare becomes a video game. And just as video games can become addictive, so can warfare: the drive for the next victory.
The pundits are trying to assess how likely it is that Venezuela will be followed by Colombia, and Mexico. One thing looks sure: the Essequibo dispute with Guyana looks now to be settled: and perhaps Guyana might well be a future dish on Trump’s expansionist menu. Donald Trump is now recognised for his honesty: if he says he will attack somewhere, he attacks. But that is not to discount his potential for feint. One such is surely his plea for a peace prize, another his concerns for his grass-roots support. He seems almost as consummately good at the feint as he is consummately crass at the strike. No matter: he has lost whatever trust the world was prepared to place in him in the hopes of being assured his grace. He will never win a peace prize. Not one worthy of the name.
So what do you think will spell the downfall of Donald Trump? Maybe you think he will never fall, that his Trumpdom will last a thousand years. Perhaps. But if he does falter, will that be because of overreach—trying to vanquish a foe for which he has not the spirit or the support or the troops? Or because of megalomania: a drive to build a triumphal arch in every capital city in the world? And, whichever it is, will it make a difference?
So, to brass tacks: Greenland, Denmark, where next? Stephen Miller says the US can take Greenland without firing a shot. He’s right. Just rolling up will send the Danes scurrying. So, we’re in Munich and it’s 1938. Are we going to stop the military strikes, or is it already too late for peace in our time?
The order in which the US’s targets will fall to Trump’s voracious appetite isn’t really set in tablets of stone, like Napoleon’s are in Paris. But his megalomania could be. Where do you suppose he will meet his Waterloo? Because I hope it’s not at Waterloo.