What They Could Not Burn

After Waterloo the French state made it a crime to own his picture, and burned imperial emblems in the public squares. Thirty years later the record it had tried to destroy elected his nephew president by five and a half million votes.

A course on the thought of Napoleon.

Philosophy · Modern

Course outline

  1. The Last Dictation — On a wet rock in the South Atlantic, with no army and no state, he did the only thing he had left. He talked, and a secretary wrote it down, and the book that came out of it outsold everything else…
  2. Sedition, Defined As Broadly As Possible — In 1815 the restored monarchy made endorsing Bonaparte a crime in words or writing, and banned any picture that could be read as a threat to the government. In 1816 it moved on to objects — public…
  3. The Kite at Besançon — A record under prohibition does not need to be transmitted accurately. It needs only to be expected. In 1820 an officer flew a green, pink and white kite over Besançon, the town read it as a…
  4. A Cult of Seditious Objects — What the police confiscated is the best surviving catalogue of what people actually wanted: Napoleon breaking his chains and leaping at Europe, escaping under Turkish protection, weeping nymphs, and…
  5. Seven Men and a Coffin — In a back room in Lyons in 1822, a branch of the Carbonari held a funeral for a dead emperor and read a eulogy that barely mentioned the Empire. What it praised him for was national liberation and…
  6. Every Plot Failed — Grenoble 1816, Lyons 1817, the French Bazaar in 1820, the Carbonari risings of 1822 — all defeated, and the one successful act made things worse. Meanwhile in Corsica a local commander with 1,700…
  7. The Prince of Liberal Ideas — In August 1840 the heir landed at Boulogne to seize France and was fished out of the sea. In December 1840 the government that had just given him life imprisonment brought his uncle's body home in…
  8. The Nephew With His Hands Behind His Back — Louis-Napoleon spent the 1830s walking about German spa towns with his hands clasped behind him in the characteristic pose, being laughed at. Hugo called him a monkey. Tocqueville put his later…
  9. One Vote for the Duke — Five and a half million people voted for a man who had been politically unknown eight months earlier, against a general who had just saved the Republic. Then, as Emperor, he published his uncle's…

Built from

A synthesis of 5 books.

Part of the Simposeum course library.