Ridley Scott’s Napoleon promises to be the highlight of the cinematic season. Scott has already proven he is a master of the historical epic with Gladiator. Both the lavish trailers and reviews suggest the new film would have all the ingredients of a blockbuster: cavalry charges, military parades, cannon fire, hand-to-hand conflict and blood-thirsty revolutionary crowds. Who could ask for more at Thanksgiving?
The two-and-half-hour extravaganza also provides people with an excuse to revisit one of the thorniest of all historical questions: What is the role of great men and women in history? Is history made by unique individuals pursuing their dreams? Or is it the product of vast impersonal forces? This is more than just an idle question. The answer people give shapes the sort of history taught in schools and universities. It also influences people’s approach to civic life: The more people emphasize the role of human agency, the more they would be inclined to be active citizens.
The question of Napoleon’s role in history divided two of the greatest writers of the 19th century. Thomas Carlyle used Napoleon to illustrate his contention that “the history of the world” is essentially “the biography of great men.” Leo Tolstoy, by contrast, presented him as a silly little man who was swept along by the majestic forces of history. Carlyle the historian thought the proper attitude to the past was to marvel at the way great spirits shape events. Tolstoy the novelist thought the proper attitude was to look beneath individuals and events to see more profound currents at work.
Illustration: Mountain People
Since then, the public has tended to side with Carlyle and the historical profession with Tolstoy. Napoleon is reputedly the subject of more biographies than anybody other than Jesus (the first full-scale biography was written before his 30th birthday). He is also the subject of numerous previous films, starting with one of the first films ever made, Louis Lumiere’s 1897 short, and including one of the masterpieces of silent cinema, Abel Gance’s Napoleon.
However, most historians have generally turned away from Napoleon the man, not to mention Napoleon the lover, and focused instead on the deeper currents of history: the mood of the masses, the price of grain or the logic of imperialism.
Edward Hallett Carr’s classic What is History? — a set-text for generation upon generation of Oxbridge history candidates — provides a sense of the contempt that serious historians have for the “great man” theory. Carr described this view of history as “the Bad King John and Good Queen Bess view” and argued that it belonged to the view of historiography adopted by primitive peoples and children. It might just about be fit for the nursery, but it was certainly unfit for the seminar room where serious historians discussed social forces and economic trends.
Carr devoted most of his professional life to producing a 14-volume favorable history of Soviet Russia, an opus that combined credulity and dullness in equal measures.
Carr’s disdain for the “great man” theory was reinforced by interlocking historiographical fashions. Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Palmer Thompson promoted “history from below” — that is, the history of ordinary people rather than namby-pamby elites. French historians such as Fernand Braudel focused on “anonymous, profound and silent history” rather than that of mere events. Braudel’s two-volume The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II had a great deal to say about the sea and almost nothing about Philip.
It was also reinforced by seemingly discordant intellectual tendencies. Political scientists downplayed the role of individuals because they wanted to prove that their subjects were predictive sciences. What is the point of all that tedious quantification if fate can be changed by the whim of any one person? And post-structuralist theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault tried to write individuals out of history in their pursuit of the deeper structures of power.
The historians made a substantial point — that individuals do not make history just as they please but do so in the context of established power relations. Alexander the Great could not have conquered the known world if his father had not been the most powerful king in Greece. Napoleon would not have been able to seize control of France if a popular revolution had not swept aside the old regime and plunged the country into anarchy, but structural determinism can go too far by emptying history entirely of agency and personality.
Consider a few questions. Would Britain have stood firm against Nazi Germany if Lord Halifax had become prime minister rather than Winston Churchill, as many leading Conservatives wanted? Would the 1980s have gone as they did in Britain if Ted Heath had continued to lead the Conservative Party? Or would Singapore be the economic powerhouse that it is today if Lee Kuan Yew (李光耀) had not taken it in hand?
There are certain moments in history — when wars break out, when regimes break down — that make room for great individuals. Paradoxically, many great men and women feel that they are nothing more than agents of something bigger than themselves: Churchill talked about walking hand-in-hand with destiny, and Bismark about grasping the hem of history’s cloak and walking with him a few steps, but in fact, they can also change the direction of events.
Great leaders are change-makers precisely because they mobilize human qualities that cannot be reduced to a social “force” or an “economic” factor: determination, charisma, vision, imagination, even deceit. Churchill inspired faith because he refused to acknowledge the possibility of defeat despite Britain’s parlous position. Charles de Gaulle restored France’s postwar position because he revived the country’s belief in itself by spinning a tale of glory. Lee Kuan Yew turned Singapore into a hub of the global economy through sheer force of will and vision. “What seems inevitable becomes so by human agency,” as Henry Kissinger remarks in Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy.
Napoleon remains the perfect example of the ability of a single individual to change the course of history, so much so that, to this day, ambitious young MBA students dream of becoming the Napoleon of finance or retailing. He certainly came along at the right time — when the revolution was running out of control and people craved order and national reunification, but his idiosyncratic decisions also shaped events in ways that could not have been predicted. If Napoleon’s remarkable military talent turned an obscure Corsican into the master of Europe, his disastrous vanity also drove him to embark on a doomed campaign to conquer Russia.
He is also the perfect example of the mixture of good and bad that resides in the souls of the most famous leaders. There are plenty who have been wholly bad: Adolf Hitler most obviously, but also Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and many others.
However, nobody qualifies as wholly good. Napoleon the Great justifies both Goethe’s description of him as being “in a permanent state of enlightenment” and Madame de Stael’s as being “an oriental despot, a new Attila, a warrior who knows only how to corrupt and annihilate.”
The new historians who now control what history is taught in universities and schools have done much good. They have rescued the history of regular people from obscurity. They have revealed many of the hidden structures of power and influence that drive day-to-day events, but they have gone too far in downplaying the role of individuals or denouncing the exercise of moral judgement. It is time to push back.
Putting the great individual back at the heart of history teaching is not only good for our collective education in citizenship, it also teaches us that history is a matter of choices rather than a fait accompli, and that those are moral, not just technical, choices. It is also good for exciting young people’s interest in the past: Just try contemplating Napoleon’s rise from the periphery of French civilization to the summit of European power, and fail to be enthralled.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Taiwan’s semiconductor industry gives it a strategic advantage, but that advantage would be threatened as the US seeks to end Taiwan’s monopoly in the industry and as China grows more assertive, analysts said at a security dialogue last week. While the semiconductor industry is Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” its dominance has been seen by some in the US as “a monopoly,” South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University academic Kwon Seok-joon said at an event held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In addition, Taiwan lacks sufficient energy sources and is vulnerable to natural disasters and geopolitical threats from China, he said.
After reading the article by Hideki Nagayama [English version on same page] published in the Liberty Times (sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) on Wednesday, I decided to write this article in hopes of ever so slightly easing my depression. In August, I visited the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, to attend a seminar. While there, I had the chance to look at the museum’s collections. I felt extreme annoyance at seeing that the museum had classified Taiwanese indigenous peoples as part of China’s ethnic minorities. I kept thinking about how I could make this known, but after returning
What value does the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hold in Taiwan? One might say that it is to defend — or at the very least, maintain — truly “blue” qualities. To be truly “blue” — without impurities, rejecting any “red” influence — is to uphold the ideology consistent with that on which the Republic of China (ROC) was established. The KMT would likely not object to this notion. However, if the current generation of KMT political elites do not understand what it means to be “blue” — or even light blue — their knowledge and bravery are far too lacking
Taipei’s population is estimated to drop below 2.5 million by the end of this month — the only city among the nation’s six special municipalities that has more people moving out than moving in this year. A city that is classified as a special municipality can have three deputy mayors if it has a population of more than 2.5 million people, Article 55 of the Local Government Act (地方制度法) states. To counter the capital’s shrinking population, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) held a cross-departmental population policy committee meeting on Wednesday last week to discuss possible solutions. According to Taipei City Government data, Taipei’s