Here’s the follow-up post to the last one, the (semi) critical reading of Napoleon Bonaparte’s name.
Today we consider the fact of Napoleon’s creation, while he was in charge of France, of new nobility, in particular the extraordinarily high, heritable royalty he bestowed on his siblings, in the context of the French Revolution having abolished the very same a decade earlier.
As the previous Napoleonic post coincided with his birthday in August, I present this post a few days behind December 2nd, which was the 219th anniversary of his crowning himself Emperor of the French in Notre Dame in Paris.
The heritability of rank and title is a huge part of what makes them problematic, such that the Revolution got rid of all that. It’s also what makes family tree charts the perfect way to track them and their implications. And what the family trees of Napoleon and his siblings show is that, despite the idea being so repugnant to the French revolutionaries as to be officially eradicated only three weeks after the storming of the Bastille, Napoleon’s resurrection of the deeply entrenched, non-merit-based aristocratic way guaranteed his family’s future success, wealth and power.
Truly Unique
It’s not easy to name any other person from history whose long, long shadow and attention grabbing impact stand as singularly occupied by little else than just the individual themselves. Sure, there are candidates: Julius Caesar, good ole Genghis. But it doesn’t take but a brief breath of time until it’s: Caesar and his antics with Marc Antony, with Cleopatra, his great-nephew Octavian, with the Senate, the Gauls, and so on.
And with Genghis, it’s like, he isn’t mentioned without his people, the Mongols…then there’s the horses, and of course his grandson, Marco Polo’s main man Kublai. But with Napoleon…it takes a good long bit of the Earth’s rotating while we sit bedazzled by the Emperor…and his cleverness, his bravado, his sheer success… until the name “Josephine” finally pops up. But she wasn’t even a muse which led him to his grandeur, nor even mother of any heirs.
Whatever your opinion of the guy—and he remains deeply divisive 200 years after he died—the uniqueness of his truly singular reputation is a little dumbfounding.
So it’s been with some relief, I guess, that after a bit of deep-diving on the guy over the last several months, I realized, and am bemused to report, that the story of Napoleon and very specifically, of his legacy which most certainly extends to right this very minute, is not just his story. It’s the bundle of stories of his family. To grasp the whole story, that is, to gain a thorough and useful handle on how he did what he did, how things unfolded as they did and why the heck it still bears on us today in our COVID, mobile-screened world, can—I will here assert—only be had through knowing about the whole Bonaparte family.
Follow the Family Money
I stumbled some months back on the fact that there were great-nephews and nieces of Emperor Napoleon here in America. I was literally, like: what? So I started digging and learning about them. As readers of this blog are aware, I organize historical information readily through assembling the family trees of folks and events of yore. Following Napoleon’s brothers with American families led me to discover Napoleon’s own kids. This was mind blowing because, here in America, even for those who are pretty well versed in history—these topics don’t really come up, and so that he had kids at all, for instance, is hardly known. Excepting, I suppose, for those who go heavy into that 4th year of high-school French, or that select brand of exceptionally sharp studious types who end up studying (& later teaching) about the French Revolution.
Un, Du, Trois
The short form of what I learned, more broadly—and also unexpectedly—from following the descendants of Napoleon and his brothers is threefold:
One: he was even worse than I knew. (Reintroduced slavery after the Revolution had abolished it. Good lord…)
Two: he was way better than I had any idea. (Vaccinated the army…)
And Three (most satisfyingly): he and his legacy are complex—as anything worth deep examination usually reveals itself to be. He and his legacy are not reducible to any simplistic pronouncement, good or bad. Real history is like that. Compelling topics, people, events, are almost always like that.
Now, that said, part of the main thrust of this posting is that indeed, at least a large part of Napoleon’s whole “thing”, a major component driving his motivation can be discerned from the fates of his progeny and that of his nephews and nieces. And you don’t even have to read into it, or between any (family) lines to apprehend what it was. Further, it’s already in literal writing in the forms of rules and laws he issued as edicts and thus encoded into the very pages of History. Historians, francophiles and -phobes, the French and we can argue (oui oui!) till the baguette’s ready about how good or bad a ruler he was or wasn’t, but what has got to be indisputable is that Napoleon was the all time best brother and uncle and son ever in the history of families. The most concrete, lasting impact of what he did as Emperor was to ensure—again, by literally writing it into the pages of French law, of history, that his mother, siblings and nieces and nephews would be Boom! Solid! 100% taken care of in perpetuity. He locked in what might be called the bags of life possibilities into which each and every one of his relatives would be henceforth born and live and die. Forever. There’s really only one way to do that: marry “up”. Not just up, like petty Rothschilds or Rockefellers. As if!
Le Definition: Irony
Take a look at this family tree showing his siblings —
Ok, so a the thing you might notice is a very serious intertwining with the highest, most aristocratic, most royal, most noble crowned heads of Europe. The very sort of state sovereignty that the French Revolution was against. !!!
I mean, you get it, right? Cuz Napoleon was only in the position that allowed him to take over France because the French Revolution had propelled him there. Which Revolution had erupted 10 years after France had helped pay for mostly English colonists in America to make a war on England so that they could be their own country, the USA. Though the French had bigger, more, u-hem, long-standing issues of actual tyranny and such on the agenda, the same spirit of change infused and was part and parcel of its history-changing momentum.
And that momentum was 100% about—full stop—ending the 1000-plus-year way of organizing society and money that was unfairly skewed known as rule by kings, nobility, and royalty. That’s the world the French Revolution (and the American Revolution) were stepping out of, away from, over the corpse of with acute self-awareness of the radical break with the past that that represented.
So then—from that heady froth one dude emerges who seizes power and…I mean, even the Medici took a handful of generations until they were intermarried with the French and German kings and had some popes. But Napoleon had his siblings IN the royal bedchambers toot sweet, made an uncle a Cardinal! and way before he stumbled into the delusion of the Russian invasion. Good damn brother!
Roots to Now 