Napoleon: A Classic Dictator?
Laurent Joffrin looks at the paradoxes surrounding a man who has fascinated the French for two hundred years.
The more closely you look at the myth, the more the paradoxes mount. Napoleon was heir to the Age of the Enlightenment yet held his people in an iron grip; he was the guardian of the Revolution yet founded a dynasty. He was a despot who remains a hero to republican France.
Napoleon regarded the whole world as a theatre in which he was simultaneously playwright, actor, director – even financial backer. To him, Europe was a building site in which he was demolition expert, architect and stonemason. He saw other people as instruments of his visions – and the higher he rose, the greater those visions became.
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