The Myth of the Charismatic Military Dictatorship

There is an art that conceals art, of which only the exceptional individual is capable. Napoleon I was one such person. He knew how to cultivate his own image, how to win battles and how to persuade contemporaries and posterity of his singular talents. Military success and personal magnetism win attention, but they can also conceal much. Napoleon was much more than a soldier or a romantic icon. He knew about power, not just glory, and power is often a prosaic, silent force. It must be cultivated; it rests on cooperation, on consensus and on clarity in purpose and execution. To gain power is not at all the same as to be able to wield it effectively. Perhaps it was Napoleon's real genius to understand this. His rise and fall were not brought about by the same methods as his tenure of power in Europe between 1799 and 1815. Thus, the true nature of his regime is not to be found in its rise or fall, but in the manner of its government.

Napoleon was, without doubt, the greatest and most successful military commander in European history, just as he was also the most charismatic figure of his times. His military conquests, at the strategic level, and his battlefield victories, on the tactical level, ensured his status as a soldier whose campaigns are still studied for their practical lessons in modern military academies, and they are written about in terms of their present value for serving soldiers, as much as for their historical impact. In like manner, Napoleon is the most written about figure in European history, after Hitler. His meteoric career and the enigmatic personality that drove it are, indeed, the stuff of legend, and a legend he was the first to cultivate by means of an ardent publicity machine he had created from a very early point in his career. When these two elements, military brilliance and personal greatness, are taken together, the cumulative impact is enough to mesmerise friend and foe alike.

The soberest of historians, as well as the legions of hagiographers and demonizers, have been led to see his political creation, the first Napoleonic empire, in exactly these terms. The presence of the man himself at the apex of the state had to signify charismatic leadership as the essence of the regime.