Napoleon Bonaparte, Rousseau, And Human Nature
Are humans “basically good”? Many seem to think so. And Napoleon Bonaparte was one of them. Until reality dealt him a harsh blow.
Origin
Napoleon was born on the Island of Corsica, on August 15, 1769. He would later grow up in France and speak with a foreign accent for the rest of his life. France during the second half of the 18th-century was going through a revolution. A bloody French-revolution which lasted from 1789 to 1799.
French Environment
Napoleon was busy with military campaigns that kept him, for the most part, away from the beheadings and mob violence back in Paris, France. The French people were beheading church members and people of nobility because of economic inequality and the authorities’ mishandling of domestic and foreign affairs. The targets of mob violence were seen as corrupt oppressors. And these oppressors needed to be overthrown. “Man will never be free,” Denis Diderot (1713–1784) said, “until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” Although he [Diderot] died just years before the revolution, his sentiment summed up revolutionary France that Napoleon found himself in.
Mob Violence
There was a point when Napoleon, while back in France, was stopped by a large violent mob. Napoleon recounts “Before I reached the Carrousel I encountered in the rue des Petits-Champs a group of hideous men bearing a head on the end of a pike.” Years later upon remembering that scene, he said, “Seeing me passably well dressed and looking like a gentleman, they accosted me and made me shout ‘Vive la Nation!’ (long live the nation) which I readily did, as one can imagine.”
Napoleon recounts another scene of mob violence, “I saw even quite well-dressed women commit the most extreme indecencies on the bodies of the Swiss guards.” It’s hard to imagine these scenes not affecting his view of human nature. Nonetheless, he still felt that maybe peoples’ human nature could still be perfected. And that society just needed to break away its “chains.”
Intellectual Influence: Rousseau
An 18th-century intellectual that peddled the French revolutionary ideals and influenced Napoleone’s vision of human nature was Jean Jaques-Rousseau (1712–1778). As the author of, Napoleon: A Life, Adam Zamoyski points out, “He [Napoleon]…adopted Rousseau’s thesis that religion was destructive since it was in competition with the state as it held out the promise of happiness in another world when it was for the state to provide people with the means to achieve it in this [world].” In other words, Napoleon agreed with Rousseau that society needed to break the “religious” chains.
Adam Zamoyski goes on to state, “For all his cynicism, Bonaparte was…a child of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a believer in human progress, to be achieved through the better organization of society. ‘A France with honest and strong government, that is what I want.’ ”
Napoleon felt that society could be organized in such a way as to create a utopia. Much like Rousseau, he felt that people only behaved “badly” due to society and how it is structured with things like private property. Private property compels men to become selfish. Rousseau felt that society needed to break the chains of “private property” so that men could then become benevolent with each other. “Man is born free,” Rousseau said, “but everywhere, he is in chains.” Again, the chains Rousseau meant were societies’ common “status quos.”
Wife’s Betrayal
While Napoleon was on his military campaigns he found out his wife was cheating on him constantly while he was away. He would still write passionate letters to her despite her promiscuousness. But she was so ruthless that she would read these letters out loud to her friends and laugh at his sincerity.
With his wife cheating on him (and he later cheating on her), the betrayal of those he thought were his friends, political betrayals, mobs beheading people, constant assassination attempts on his life, being exiled not once but twice, rising to the absolute height of power (and later to fall to a life of a hermit on a faraway island and die a lonely man), all these conundrums and many others, managed to make him realize that humans were not the innocent “noble savage” that people like Rousseau made him believe. He later would come to terms that humans were self-interested and evil. Every last one of us. He would even change his mind on religion. He came to see the usefulness of it.
Change of Heart
After obtaining power of France he stated, “I will re-establish religious practice, not for your sake, but for mine…we nobles have no great need of religion, but the people need it, so I shall re-establish it.”
There was another time where he spoke more in-depth of what he believed, “I do not believe in religions but in the existence of God…who created all this? Everything proclaims the existence of a God, that is beyond doubt.”
Religion in regards to a well-structured society he said, “As for me, I do not see in religion the mystery of the Incarnation, only the mystery of the Social Order…how can one have order in a state without religion. When a man is dying of hunger next to another who is gorging, he cannot possibly accept this difference if he has not had it on good authority that: ‘God wishes it so: there must be poor and rich people in the world, but afterward, and for eternity, things will be divided up differently.’ ” He felt that religion was “a vaccine for the imagination.” And in regards to atheism, he said that it was the most “destructive of all social organization, as it robs Man of every source of consolation and hope.” Rousseau must have been convulsing in his grave.
In conclusion, Napoleon is like most people today. Many grow up thinking humans are innately “good” and “pure.” And that it’s only our circumstances that make us evil. But Napoleon found out not from books and “social theories” but through hard reality and experience that humans are self-interested animals. Adam Zamoyski details a scene in his book, Napoleon: A Life, in which Napoleon goes to visit Rousseau’s grave and converses with the owner.
“It would have been better for the peace of France if that man had never existed,” he [Napoleone] said to the owner, Stanislas de Girardin. “Why do you say that, Citizen Counsul?” asked the other. “He paved the way for the French Revolution,” replied Bonaparte [and continued], “History will tell whether it would not have been better for the peace of the world if neither Rousseau nor I had been born!”
Today, just like yesterday and time immemorial, human nature is constant. It is unchanging. And our hearts most certainly bends toward evil regardless of the social structure. We, however, can overcome these evil instincts and do “good.” And in the words of the 18th-century philosopher, Edmund Burke, “In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from past errors and infirmities of mankind.” Man, in other words, is not “born free,” but rather, we are sadly born and constrained by the chains of human nature.
All quotations of Napoleon Bonaparte are from the book, Napoleon: A Life, by Adam Zamoyski.
