While Napoleon’s armies were advancing toward Russia, an acrimonious war broke out between the Rebbes. The Rebbe of Lublin much preferred the oppressive rule of Alexander I to the enlightened ideas that Napoleon was supposed to be exporting. It is said that Napoleon one day saw the face of the Rebbe of Lublin appear before him: he was on the Russian front line pondering the strategy to eliminate the invaders. The Rebbe Rimanover, on the other hand, saw Napoleon as heralding the final battle before the advent of the Messiah. His thoughts turned once more to a possible acceleration of time. And he wanted to aid Napoleon’s victory with kabbalistic practices: he equated the baking of unleavened bread with the destruction of the Russian troops, ignoring the pleas of many Jewish mothers whose sons had enlisted. It is said that Napoleon described the Rebbe Rimanover as his strategist and presented him with a cloth to cover the Torah. But the last sign of Napoleon’s impending defeat came during one Sabbath prayer, when the Rebbe of Kozhenits misread the words nafol tippol (“you will certainly fall”) in Esther 6:13 as Napol tippol (“Napoleon will fall”).
Faded by légende, funerary ornament of every glory, unnamable because too often named, his victims are still seated on the “finest systematic laws” proclaimed at the Luxembourg, imperatoria brevitas, evocation of a larval nature. “Fatigue, the camps, the night watches have made me fat,” he wrote to Joséphine with his atrocious spelling, in his “badly formed” handwriting. “Horrible and impressive” were a good pair of adjectives: he used them in recalling the spectacle of that “miserable city”—Mantua—in flames.
“A very shrewd observer, very calm, despite his fits of anger, which are mere subterfuges; a man of wit, if by wit we mean he understands the ignoble side of the heart; indifferent to good and bad, so that, in his impartiality, he would perhaps have preferred the first to the second, insomuch as more safe; he had moreover studied all the principles of tyranny, and it would have flattered his amour propre to have shown some sort of moderation as proof of his ability.”
Napoleon’s legacy: the cult of will and the urge for control: a self-generated tension, a wind-up toy with a long spring. Control is illusory from the very start, but the machine it operates has nevertheless a majesty that encourages veneration.
Talleyrand’s legacy: in the final touch given to things, in the comma that decides meaning (a precept of the Duc of Choiseul), in the almost imperceptible mark that style leaves behind, in the conviction that, generally speaking, little can be done, and this littleness might be due, if anything, to transient gifts such as the ear, the sense of kairòs, lightness, agility in breasting the waters of metamorphosis.
“His repugnance and scorn for those who call themselves philosophers are apparent on every occasion. When he came to hear that events in Naples were going badly, that people were dying of hunger, that the new Court had no money, he said coldly: ‘That’s their business; see what happens to countries governed by philosophers.’—There’s nothing more amusing than the way he treats Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, his ex-colleague at the Consulate. ‘So, Monsieur Sieyès, how’s the metaphysics going?’—‘What do philosophers have to say about all this, Monsieur Sieyès?’—that’s the tone he uses with him. Sieyès, for his part, withdraws into an impenetrable silence.” These quips about metaphysics, reported by Gentz, were among the more subtle pleasures that power gave to Napoleon. And there was one man who escaped such mockery: Talleyrand, a metaphysician disguised to everyone, including himself.
We are always somebody’s metaphysicians. The ideologist Sieyès was ridiculous in the eyes of Napoleon, but Napoleon appeared awkwardly archaic in the eyes of the financier Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard, since he had failed to recognize the power that would soon overshadow every empire—credit.
“Napoleon knew no sources of revenue other than taxation and conquest. Credit for him was an abstraction; he saw in it only the dreams of ideology and the empty ideas of economists,” wrote Ouvrard. And once he even had the impudence to suggest to Napoleon what it was that would one day take his place: “He rose from his chair and, drawing me across to the window recess, he said: ‘Monsieur Ouvrard, you have lowered royalty to the level of commerce.’—‘Sire, commerce is the accomplishment of states; it can do very well without royalty, whereas royalty cannot do without it.’”
The figure of Napoleon puts us in a quandary from the very outset: not just for the légende and for his excessive fame, of a kind that is entirely new and no longer Plutarchan, but because at a certain point we are compelled to recognize that, in the drama that is taking shape, he is indeed the historical incarnation of the principle of will, of the grand illusion that everything can be built up from zero. That zero point is the Revolution, and the Will is the Subject who speaks after it. Talleyrand is the other pole: from the very beginning he had recognized the mechanism of the unprecedented historical moment as something that was acting by itself. He concealed himself within it, content to tighten or loosen a screw here or there. Small “finishing touches” in which he recognized the last kind of action that was still possible. Chateaubriand, convinced that he was being highly critical, wrote of Talleyrand: “He put his signature to events, he wasn’t doing them.” This urge to “do,” which is part of the more bombastic legacy of the nineteenth century, is something that Chateaubriand shares with his detested Napoleon. As for Talleyrand, it is certainly true that he claimed at most that he was “putting his signature” to events, but this didn’t make him feel any inferior to someone else who was supposedly “doing them.” Nor did he adapt to that role out of pride, or through calculation, but for reasons of ceremonial expedience, since he was by unquestionable vocation the Grand Chamberlain of history. But that signature, which was indeed a small “finishing touch,” had no lesser weight than other more clamorous deeds, if we view the dusty cloud of events from a certain distance.
Napoleonic pomp, that imperial geometry that sought to divide the land into administrative quadrangles, has a subtle weakness from the very beginning: it is tainted by ghosts of the past. In a painting by Anne-Louis Girodet, the empty spaces of the sky begin to fill with psychic substances that have the face of death; their feet no longer rest on the ground but on the arms and fingers of dismembered souls. This to celebrate The Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for Their Country During the War for Freedom, painted in 1802 (at a cost of 12,000 francs) to decorate the Salon Doré at Malmaison. But François Gérard evoked the same milky, opalescent substances with Ossian’s harp, which ended up once again in the Salon Doré at Malmaison. And Jean-Pierre Franque let the pyramids exude a mist from which once again the ghosts of wide-eyed maidens emerged, barely able to carry the weight of their allegorical duty.
Talleyrand saw the prospects for Napoleon’s political future from the time of the Battle of Marengo. He told the financier Ouvrard at that time: “Two paths open up for him: the federal system, which, after the conquest, leaves every prince as master of his own house, on terms favorable to the victor: so that today the First Consul could reinstate the King of Sardinia, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and so forth. But what if, on the other hand, he wants to bring together, to incorporate? Then he takes a path that has no end to it.” Talleyrand, through his innate wisdom, possesses a talent, the perception of limit, but he knows that the new political world is compelled toward the limitless. He knows also that by now “all the mechanisms controlling the old political system are broken or about to break.” And yet Talleyrand’s destiny is to move among les affaires, the metaphysical name for politics. He will have no hesitation therefore in choosing the path with no limit, that error spiced with novelty. The small courts of emigrants hold no attraction for him: they are a mistake that has already gone stale. Whereas it will be thrilling, and splendidly ephemeral, to create a coexistence between limit and the government of that person whose mission it was to cancel it. The relationship between Napoleon and Talleyrand is a fetish bristling with mirrors and nails. But in the obscurity of their relationship, one single point is obvious: the immense curiosity that attracted each to the other. For years they were seen trying not to make it apparent, like two stately beasts, brought from remote and incompatible climates and locked together in the same cage.
Who did Napoleon have to fear after the Battle of Austerlitz? On the evening of his victory he was staying, by fortunate coincidence, at the house of Prince Kaunitz, who had so humiliated the French ambassador during the Seven Years War and used to clean his teeth at table (Metternich would never have done such a thing). He had chosen to establish himself in Kaunitz’s own room, into which there was a constant flow of “Austrian flags, Russian flags, messages from archdukes, messages from the Emperor of Austria, prisoners who bore the names of all the great families of the Empire.” The courier arrived with the post, “an event that, in war, is most pleasurable.” Napoleon asked Talleyrand to glance through it in his presence. Coded letters from foreign ambassadors in Paris, deciphered; police reports, banking matters. But there was also a long report from Madame de Genlis (“no one has been such a determined écriveuse”), who reported various pointed comments heard “in the houses that were then called the faubourg Saint-Germain.” Various indomitable old ladies had once again been looking down on him. The letter and those remarks threw Napoleon “into a state of unimaginable rage. He cursed, he railed against the faubourg Saint-Germain. ‘Oh! They think they’re stronger than me,’ he said, ‘Messieurs du faubourg Saint-Germain. We shall see! We shall see!’” To remain steadfast to that challenge, years of military campaigning had to follow; and around a century later, for Proust, years of reclusion in a cork-lined cell.
The conqueror’s footsteps echoed through the Tuileries on the day he took possession of the palace, in the company of Pierre Louis Roederer, a counselor of state at the time. “Come, my little Creole,” he had said to Joséphine, “lie down on the bed of your masters.” Roederer looked at the “old and somber tapestries and the darkness of the apartments.” “General,” he said, “this is dismal.” And Bonaparte, knowing it would be immediately recorded among the counselor’s papers, replied: “Yes, like glory.”
Education has this paradox: that it consists above all of things that cannot be learned—or of things that represent what cannot be learned. Napoleon wanted to be surrounded by it, since he knew that nothing existed without it: but he wanted it to be present in one single person, on whom, at the right moment, he could easily direct all his hatred. For Napoleon, Talleyrand was education insofar as he represented the past: the Rosetta Stone under the eyes of the conqueror. Everyone else in the imperial cortege was a desperate masquerader—but stiff, righteous, pompous, since they all feared ridicule. Napoleon’s hidden wound was legitimacy, and so—with the false reasoning of sovereigns—he wanted to surround himself only with legitimate couples. He even forced Talleyrand, a bishop and a libertine, to marry. This brought an end to the carefree and bittersweet years in which “spouses in good society used to rarely see each other and never quarreled. Since the time of Napoleon, husbands give themselves airs of self-importance, their pride has been reawakened by the whim of a despot who ‘took the decision to adopt good manners’ and ordered women never to appear in public without their husbands.” Stendhal explained the reasons for all this to the incredulous English: “In establishing a new Court, this despot feared more than anything else the effects of ridicule, which in France is fatal for all it touches and would have arisen without doubt if its fledgling nobility had aped the follies and vices of the ancient nobility. Desirous of avoiding the inconveniences that the frivolities and scandals of a licentious Court would have caused him in the midst of his important occupations, he therefore commanded, with his iron will, that orderliness and decency should be the order of the day.”
But among these ladies now silenced, among these opportunists whose feet ached in their new shoes, there was one person who moved easily, nonchalantly, and alongside the heavy and dignified steps of the others he let that light, sardonic sound of his lame leg be heard. Talleyrand was the only person who could strike Napoleon with the weapon against which the great strategist was defenseless: the weapon of persiflage. He was the only one who could address him tongue-in-cheek. Right to the end, when Talleyrand was in disgrace and many felt entitled to insult him without fear, Napoleon knew that the Prince was still the man who had once invited him, during the days of the Consulate, to go hunting at Auteuil. Stendhal, the most sympathetic of Napoleon’s chroniclers, tells the story: “Talleyrand had a country house at Auteuil, a small village between the Seine and the Bois de Boulogne. ‘I’ll come and eat with you one of these days,’ said Napoleon. ‘I’d be most delighted, mon général,’ replied Talleyrand, ‘and since my house is just by the Bois de Boulogne, you could enjoy a little shooting in the afternoon.’ ‘I don’t like shooting,’ answered Bonaparte, ‘but I do love hunting. Are there any wild boar in the Bois de Boulogne?’ Bonaparte was still a young man and, having lived in Paris for only a short time, he didn’t know that the Bois de Boulogne, like your Hyde Park, is just a place for walking and horse riding. It was obviously quite impossible to find wild boar there. But a Frenchman can never resist the idea of a joke, even at the expense of those to whom he pays the most servile court. Talleyrand, who prided himself on his nobility, could hardly avoid a certain feeling of displeasure at the sight of a humble artillery lieutenant rising to popularity and power, not through the influence of noble birth but by the vulgar means of intelligence and merit. His scurrilous nature therefore prompted him to play a mean trick on Napoleon; and when he asked if there were wild boar in the Bois de Boulogne, Talleyrand answered: ‘Very few, mon général, but I dare say you’ll manage to find one.’ The meal and the hunting expedition were fixed for the next day and it was arranged that Bonaparte would arrive at Auteuil at seven in the morning. Talleyrand, fighting back his tears of laughter, had two large black pigs brought from the Paris markets. They were transported straight to the Bois de Boulogne by two servants who had orders to set them free and let them run about. Bonaparte reached Auteuil at the appointed time, accompanied by an aide-de-camp who was already most amused, since the general kept using hunting terms in the oddest way. After they had eaten, the company set off toward the Bois de Boulogne, with various hunting dogs borrowed from neighboring peasants. One of the pigs was at last set free and Bonaparte exclaimed in great delight: ‘I see the wild boar!’ Talleyrand, well aware that the animal wouldn’t run immediately away from its pursuers, ordered a servant mounted on a small Spanish horse and armed with a long whip to follow it. But Bonaparte was too intent on the hunt to notice this detail. And so he set off at a furious gallop in pursuit of the so-called wild boar, which, after a half-hour chase, ended up being taken by the hunters. The aide-de-camp, who by this point was beginning to work it all out and feared the story would be exposed to public ridicule, decided to undeceive the general and, stopping him, he said: ‘Of course, sir, you do realize this is not a wild boar but a pig.’
“Bonaparte had a violent fit of rage. He galloped straight off toward Auteuil. He was no doubt preparing himself for a bitter exchange with Talleyrand, and words would probably have turned to action if he hadn’t remembered that Talleyrand was intimately connected with Paris high society, which would have laughed at him if he had taken the story too seriously. Having reached Auteuil, he therefore decided to laugh it off and show he was amused by the joke, though he could barely conceal his anger. Incredible though it might seem, Talleyrand, who was in an excellent mood, immediately thought up the idea of making fun of him once again. ‘Never mind, mon général, it’s true the wild boar hunt was a disappointment. But it is still early. You needn’t go back to Paris yet. There are plenty of rabbits in the Bois de Boulogne: Louis XVI often hunted them. Door locks and rabbits were that poor man’s favorite pastimes! You well know he was an excellent shot.’ ‘Yes, but I’m a very poor shot,’ said Bonaparte, whose good humor had not yet revived. ‘Your ride must have given you an appetite,’ continued Talleyrand. ‘While you sit down and have something to eat, I’ll have my guns fetched from Paris. They belonged to Louis XVI.’
“They remained at table for two hours, during which Talleyrand plied the future emperor with those elegant words of flattery that he was so skilled at dishing out. Servants were meanwhile sent to Paris with instructions to buy all the rabbits they could find. They gathered up at least five or six hundred and transported them to the Bois de Boulogne in various hired carriages. Bonaparte set off, armed with his gun, and accompanied once again by his aide-de-camp. ‘I’m no Louis the Sixteenth,’ he said. ‘I’m certainly not going to kill a single rabbit.’ Nonetheless he soon killed a fair number. The aide-de-camp, on seeing how seriously Napoleon was slaughtering the poor animals and continually talking about Louis XVI, could no longer restrain himself and burst out laughing. The fiftieth rabbit had at last been killed and Bonaparte seemed pleased with his success. The aide-de-camp could no longer hold back and, approaching his master, he whispered in his ear: ‘In truth, mon général, I’m beginning to think they’re not wild rabbits. I have a nasty feeling that scoundrel of a priest has tricked us again.’
“Bonaparte, gripped by a violent fury, galloped back to Paris. Six months passed before he made his peace with Talleyrand, and he probably threatened to take his revenge if Talleyrand had ever dared to mention the rabbit shoot or the wild boar hunt in the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Indeed, it is certain that these two stories never circulated in Paris.” Even while he gazed at Moscow in flames, Napoleon knew that one eye saw him as a ferocious rabbit hunter.
Léon Bloy explained the link between Napoleon and Hitler in the plainest terms at a time when Hitler had not yet invented Nazism (it was 1912): “For anyone who sees into the Absolute, war has no sense unless it exterminates, and the very near future will prove it. It is a folly or a hypocrisy to take prisoners. Napoleon was certainly neither a fool nor a hypocrite, but this supposed butcher was sentimental, always ready to forgive, magnanimous, and despite everything he believed in the magnanimity of others, and we know what price he paid for this incomprehensible illusion … He was not therefore the monster who would be needed for total, apocalyptic war, with all its consequences—the abyss of war invoked by the abyss of turpitude. And it seems obvious that he will not be the forerunner of this demon.”
More than the Russian campaign (the scenario for a continuing contest between powers), it is the war in Spain that holds the key (still only partially understood) to Napoleon’s secret, and prefigures the events that wait still to devastate the next chapter of history. The war in Spain is the first, victorious vendetta of weakness against strength. The grim mountain folk, “proud and filthy beggars,” who cruelly bleed the French troops and were the first “to dare to fight as irregulars against the first modern regular armies,” are not only the forebears of those Partisans (later guerrillas, then terrorists) who wreak havoc in every strategic and legal ambit, as Carl Schmitt has shown, but they are the precursors of a dark and terrible figure whose face is beginning to appear only now: ethnic revolt, the rejection of the West as a soft epidermis that covers all lands and is suffocating them. At ever closer intervals, that epidermis is slashed, as happened in Iran with the ousting of the Shah and the murderous fury of the mostazafin, the dispossessed urban poor, who take us back to the Partisans. Behind the Partisan is the Poor Man. And it is the overlapping of these two figures that creates their irresistible capacity to penetrate—as well as their self-deception: because the Partisan will tend (has always tended, without realizing it) to serve a “third interest,” which in the end subtly undermines the rebels, reducing them to its meek agents (but will it always be like this?); whereas the Poor Man will tend (has always tended) to seize the arms of the Rich so as to be tyrannized even more severely by other Poor Men. That venomous revolt, that rejection of the West, carried out by exploiting all the detritus of the West, all its words broken down into sharp fragments, is a belated, angry response to the project that Léon Bloy’s theological sarcasm described as “the lofty idea of a general immolation of the destitute.” Modernity, in its pure form, seeks to wipe out the Poor. Indeed, at its most brazen, it wants the Poor to be wiped out by the Poor themselves. So it seems appropriate that the worst massacres have taken place in Soviet Russia, where, for many years, the Poor have persecuted themselves. But in history this phenomenon—whose rumblings we are only just beginning to recognize today from every point of the horizon and which will soon invade us from within and from without—first emerged during the war in Spain. Napoleon understood the military significance of the Partisan (if only in the words “It is necessary to operate like partisans wherever there are partisans”), but he refused to accept the new power heralded by the merger between Poor Man and Partisan. And this was also why the war in Spain was such a disaster. Napoleon, in that case, was neither able nor willing to understand. He was not willing to understand because he was under the illusion suffered by those who actually know human horror: the belief that such horror is the same everywhere, and therefore that the same cold strategies that had already worked well in Italy and elsewhere should have worked in Spain. As Madame de Rémusat observed: “one of Bonaparte’s great faults … was to mix all men together, holding an equal view of them, and failing to understand the differences that ways and customs bring in their characters.” He failed to understand because he was himself the extension of something that, from then on, would continually spread its invulnerable gloss over the earth. The Poor Man who wants to remain as such, the Poor Man who wants just to continue to exist, who prefers his land as it is, rather than having his land developed, the “ungrateful beggar” who insults the hand that is ready to give the money: these people are the scandal, the obstacle (for Napoleon, for the world that followed him); they are the most insolent image of material resistance (therefore of “human material,” which is now the subject par excellence), of opaqueness, of impenetrability, heralding the savage revolt of the land against its swift, impatient surveyor. Napoleon can be accused of one single crime, observed Bloy, who had no fear of risking the blasphemous mixture of Légende and Vulgate: he introduced “a famous code where it is taken for granted that the poor do not exist.” Not only that: he had dared to say: “I consider it of great importance and a great idea of glory to destroy beggary.” The bloody repercussions of that act have not yet ended: “Beggary is forbidden. He had canceled out the Poor Man and that was his crime—which was then perpetuated.”