Nietzsche and Napoleon: The Dionysian Conspiracy

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY NOW

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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY NOW

Nietzsche and Napoleon

The Dionysian Conspiracy

Don Dombowsky

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS • CARDIFF • 2014

© Don Dombowsky, 2014

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Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Dionysian Conspiracy

1  Sources, Cults and Criticism: Nietzsche’s Portrait of Napoleon

2  Aristocratic Radicalism as a Species of Bonapartism

3  Napoleon III: ‘déshonneur’

Conclusion: The Imperial European Future

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

I would like to offer my special thanks first to those who assisted me in the early stages of this project: Oleksandr Dubnov, Nathalie Lachance and Milanka Stojadinovic. Second, for critical comments and enlightening discussion: Thierry Choffat (Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur le Bonapartisme), Renato Cristi and all the participants in the Nietzsche and Political Theory Workshop at the MANCEPT Ninth Annual Conference at the University of Manchester, UK, but specifically to Dan Conway, Hugo Drochon, Manuel Knoll, Ayumu Okubo, Barry Stocker and Rolf Zimmermann.

I would also like to express my great appreciation to the staff at the Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar, the Bibliothèque Martial Lapeyre at the Fondation Napoléon in Paris and the Universität Basel in Basel, Switzerland, as well as to Sylvie Coté, director of Research Services at Bishop’s University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

An early version of chapter 1 appeared in Herman W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics: Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008).

An early version of an excerpt from chapter 2 appeared in Manuel Knoll and Barry Stocker (eds), Nietzsche as Political Philosopher (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2014).

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Dionysian Conspiracy

But later, beginning with Plato, philosophers became exiles, conspiring against their fatherland. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

The progress of a physical conspiracy is arrested when the hand which holds the poignard is secured; but a moral conspiracy cannot be put down, sooner or later it will explode like a train of gunpowder. Napoleon Bonaparte

The main goal of this study is to establish a definitive and comprehensively demonstrated link between Aristocratic Radicalism, a term that encapsulates Friedrich Nietzsche’s political thought, and Bonapartism, the political ideology associated with the regimes of Napoleon I and Napoleon III.

This study is comprised of three chapters. In the first chapter I will discuss Nietzsche’s Bonapartist precursors (in particular, Goethe and Stendhal) and explain how their readings of Napoleon informed Nietzsche’s own. Nietzsche read extensively both Napoleonic and anti-Napoleonic literature (including that of de Rémusat and Taine) and on the basis of these sources formulated his ‘problem’of Napoleon as a ‘synthesis of the inhuman and superhuman’ (GM I 16) and developed his understanding of Napoleon as a representative of pagan antiquity and Renaissance virtù, a supreme commander type.

I will demonstrate that Nietzsche’s ‘problem’ was not, however, simply a problem inviting an explanation of Napoleon’s personality that would uncover the Goethean insight that ‘the higher and the terrible man necessarily belong together’¹ but that it was also about how to summon and regenerate a structural, political moment in the history of European culture, since Nietzsche evokes Napoleon as an exemplar intended to capture his politics of the future that involves the construction of durable, imperial institutions.

In the second chapter I will consider Nietzsche’s Aristocratic Radicalism as an outgrowth of his reflections on Napoleon Bonaparte’s personality, political reign and method of governance. These reflections begin cautiously in the early 1870s but assume full affirmative force by the early 1880s when Nietzsche exalts Napoleon as the embodiment of the state of exception (cf. GS 23). Nietzsche begins to think about Napoleon in more coherently political terms in the period 1884–5 as he begins to cultivate his ideas regarding the philosopher-legislator and the necessity of a new European ruling caste in opposition to the crisis presented by the social question and the steady advance of international socialism. Through invoking Napoleon in the context of this crisis Nietzsche is proposing a theory of leadership and a political solution to combat the ideological forces that produced the Paris Commune; in Nietzsche’s mind a minuscule event compared to what was on the horizon.

Nietzsche may be implicated in the Napoleonic historiography that formed a cult around the personality of the emperor as he was no doubt fascinated by Napoleon’s character and charismatic authority. But beyond this fascination, Nietzsche justified Napoleon on social and political grounds. Napoleon’s appearance, for instance, promised the political and economic unification of Europe and the defeat of the democratic spirit of ressentiment that had sparked the French Revolution (cf. EH CW 2; GM I 16).

My thesis is that Nietzsche’s political thought, his Aristocratic Radicalism, is a species of Bonapartism; that the link to Napoleon produces the only truly coherent reading of Nietzsche’s political thought. Napoleon is the model for the Nietzschean philosopher-legislator who knows how to command; not only in terms of his Renaissance virtù or his martial ethos but also in terms of his political institutions and, I think most importantly, his dissimulative techniques of power. Nietzsche admired Napoleon because of the psychological control he was able to exert over the masses and social and political classes and institutions hostile to his rule.

Nietzsche recognized that Napoleon manipulated the democratic process, abandoned the concept of popular sovereignty and undermined the principle of equality, that he was opposed to parliamentary politics but maintained their simulacra, a manoeuvre Nietzsche admired in respect of tactics. Nietzsche postulated a revaluation of all values that sanctioned many aspects of the Bonapartist regime. We may consider Nietzsche then as not merely implicated in the Napoleonic cult of personality but also implicated ideologically in terms of Napoleonic political policy and theory of government, in so far as he affirms certain underlying political structures of the Bonapartist Empire. Thus, borrowing the terminology of Napoleon studies, Nietzsche makes the transition from ‘Napoleonism … the sentimental identification with the Emperor’ to ‘Bonapartism … the belief in a political system governed by Napoleonic ideas and institutions’.² So it may be said that Nietzsche’s Aristocratic Radicalism remains a prisoner of Caesarism and that the ‘new possibilities’ and ‘tasks’ Nietzsche frequently speaks about are, on a political level, not so new. I will argue, however, that they follow the constructive path made by Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘transition-type to the Übermensch’,³ with latitude for consideration of the fact that Nietzsche also performs an immanent critique of the Bonapartist system – particularly of hereditary legitimation and the device of universal suffrage – that does not compromise his Bonapartist allegiances because such criticisms were made within the Bonapartist movement itself.

In advocating Napoleon I and the underlying structures of the Bonapartist Empire, Nietzsche is making an appeal to a ‘new Caesar’ to employ democratically representative institutions as an instrument of suppression or to destroy them altogether; to restrict the tide of class war in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. This constitutes the first phase of the Dionysian conspiracy.

In the final chapter I will discuss Nietzsche’s relation to Napoleon III and to the subsequent Napoleonic pretenders and successors to the throne who emerged in 1879 after the death of the Prince Imperial (Napoleon IV) and fractured the Bonapartist movement into Jéromists and Victoriens, while compelling many Bonapartists to join the camp of General Boulanger.

In 1862 Nietzsche wrote a short essay entitled ‘Napoleon III as president’ in which he defended the illegal actions of Bonaparte’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon, during his coup d’état of 1851. He did so on the grounds that Napoleon III was a ‘political genius’ and thus not subject to common moral codes. In this early essay, Nietzsche endorsed a political realism that justified the extra-legal acts of the political genius, the ‘monarchical principle’ and the systematic destruction of representative institutions or parliamentary democracy.⁴

The coup of Napoleon III re-established autocracy in France. The first systematic use of the term ‘Caesarism’ was employed to describe this regime, based as it was on coup d’état and plebiscitary acclamation. Even though Nietzsche does not participate directly in nineteenth-century debates concerning Caesarism, he should be implicated in the constellation of these debates from the moment he takes the side of Caesarism advocating in the name of a new European ruling caste the tactical, dissimulative manipulation of democracy.

The regime of Napoleon III (the Second Empire), however, was transformed from the authoritarian government that Nietzsche enthusiastically supported in 1862 into the liberal government with the Christian and socialistic overtones Nietzsche despised. I will contend that Nietzsche rejected Napoleon III for essentially the same reason he will reject the rule of Bismarck in Germany where the ‘herd’ was progressively becoming the master. For Nietzsche, both Napoleon III and Bismarck are symptoms of the degeneracy and decadence afflicting the European ruling classes. The degeneracy and decadence that characterized the regimes of Napoleon III and Bismarck lies in the tendency these regimes manifested towards a ‘leveling mediocrity’ (BT Attempt 6) through their respective concessions to the democratic process and the increasingly humanitarian position they adopted towards the democratic movement.

Napoleon III was simply not ‘evil’ or immoralistic enough,⁵ and as much as he may have wanted to manipulate parliamentary and democratic processes – just as Bismarck had expediently introduced universal suffrage – he lost control of appearances; the fiction of democracy became the reality as Ernest Renan sagely observed.⁶ As such his regime represents a deviation from the Bonapartist system admired by Nietzsche; a deviation from gloire to déshonneur.⁷

Nietzsche is glorifying Napoleon I during a period in which he is also condemning Germany’s transition to mediocrity and democracy which implies that he sees the pure Bonapartist system as practically at odds with the democratic developments that were taking place in the Bismarckian Reich in the 1880s. Nietzsche increasingly demonstrates interest in and fidelity to the underlying structures of the Bonapartist Empire. This represents a moral and political conspiracy designed to ignite and nourish a new Bonapartist movement or to support or regenerate one already in existence.

It is evident that when Nietzsche signals to that group of Bonapartist, neo-Bonapartist and Boulangist intellectual mercenaries in Paris as he does in Ecce Homo, those ‘delicate [crowd] psychologists’ (EH Clever 3), he is deploying his political allegiances along an authoritarian Bonapartist axis, one that becomes radical with his rejection of universal suffrage. Nietzsche is related to the figures he names – Bourget, Maupassant and Gyp among them – because he shares their political ideology. Nietzsche is a radical, authoritarian Bonapartist who rejects the artifice of universal suffrage (and the plebiscite or any appeal to the people) in favour of elections from within the circles of the ‘aristocrats of the spirit’ who ‘struggle against … ochlocratic’ political structures (HH 261).

I will claim that in fortifying the mythical image of Napoleon I and associating him with a set of specific political ideas, as well as promoting political ideas that may be identified as Bonapartist, Nietzsche is both supporting and purifying the Bonapartist movement that degenerated under Napoleon III; purifying it of its imported Christian, socialist and liberal elements. This is the second phase of the Dionysian conspiracy.

If there is a third phase to the Dionysian conspiracy, it lies in Nietzsche’s further disclosure of his political alliances in 1888, that also finds expression in the letters of his madness. While Nietzsche is independently forming alliances with luminaries of the right in France he is also poetically glorifying the aristocracies of Turin and St Petersburg,⁸ romanticizing his father as a teacher of princesses in the castle of Altenburg, identifying his own ancestry with Polish nobility (cf. EH Wise 3). In claiming his own nobility and in aligning himself with princesses and princes, along with the House of Savoy and members of the Bonaparte lineage,⁹ Nietzsche is imagining a political alliance in which immoralism is mixed with the blood of select European Royal Houses, communicating a transparent diagram for the criminalization of the European ruling class.

1 • Sources, Cults and Criticism: Nietzsche’s Portrait of Napoleon

Those who have prepared me … the ideal artists, the very offspring of the Napoleonic movement.¹

1. In the Gilded Orbit of the ‘Ideal Artists’

It has been suggested that Nietzsche represents the current in Napoleonic historiography that constitutes a cult of personality or genius, viewing ‘Napoleon as a sort of metaphysical force’.² It is not an empty assertion, as Nietzsche’s image of Napoleon was largely derived from his readings of the Memorial of St Helena by Las Cases (1823),³ that ‘did much to establish the positive aspect of the superman image of Napoleon’,⁴ as well as Goethe’s Talks with Napoleon (1808) and Conversations with Eckermann (1824). Goethe met Napoleon at the Congress of Erfurt, convened by Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I in the autumn of 1808, and regarded him as ‘the most extraordinary phenomenon history could have produced’. Geoffrey Ellis writes that Goethe

never ceased to view the emperor as a figure of supernatural power, as the embodiment of a sort of Manichean force in history which, for good or ill, could not be judged by the standards of ordinary men. More than once he excused, or at least tried to minimize, Napoleon’s worst atrocities as necessary acts of state.⁵

For a lurid example of this observation, Goethe justified the execution of 800 Turkish prisoners captured in Jaffa by Napoleon’s forces in 1799.⁶ Friedenthal writes that Goethe ‘saw in Napoleon the great creator of order … a living Ur-pflanze’.⁷ Williams states that Goethe saw in Napoleon a ‘daemonic man of destiny who had saved France from the worst excesses of the Revolution’.⁸ Nietzsche, drawing from Goethe’s Talks with Napoleon, combining the cult of personality with the cult of virility, comments on Goethe’s fateful meeting with Napoleon – ‘for Nietzsche one of the most fascinating, symbol-laden moments of world intellectual history’⁹ – and interprets the event in the following way, along anti-German lines:

At long last we ought to understand deeply enough Napoleon’s surprise when he came to see Goethe: it shows what people had associated with the ‘German spirit’ for centuries. ‘Voilà un homme!’ – that meant: ‘But this is a man! And I had merely expected a German’ (BGE 209).¹⁰

The adulatory feelings were mutual. In his Conversations with Eckermann, Goethe exclaimed:

Napoleon was the man! Always illuminated, always clear and decided, and endowed at every hour with energy enough to carry out whatever he considered necessary. His life was the stride of a demigod, from battle to battle, and from victory to victory. It might well be said that he was in a state of continual illumination. On this account, his destiny was more brilliant than any the world had seen before him, or perhaps will ever see after him … that was a fellow we cannot imitate!¹¹

Nietzsche was profoundly immersed in Napoleonic literature, particularly from the beginning of the 1880s and aside from the Memorial of St Helena and Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann (Goethes Gespräche mit Eckermann) – ‘two good books that will survive this century … whose branches will reach beyond this century as trees that do not have their roots in it’¹² – he also read the anti-Napoleonic writings of Madame de Rémusat,¹³ whose perspicacious observations he occasionally quotes or paraphrases in his notebooks,¹⁴ and Hippolyte Taine, whose arresting article on Napoleon published in the Revue des deux mondes in 1887 made a dramatic impression upon Nietzsche, confirming and supplementing his already acquired insights.¹⁵ These two authors were ignominiously displayed along with other ‘detractors’ in Prince Napoleon’s Napoleon and His Detractors (1887), a publication Nietzsche was aware of as he refers to its author in a letter in which he chastizes his friend Erwin Rohde for his crass opinions regarding Taine.¹⁶ Nietzsche also read the Bonapartist, Stendhal’s second Vie de Napoléon¹⁷ and many others impressed by the Napoleonic legend such as Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Heinrich Heine, Christian Dietrich Grabbe and Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly.¹⁸ Peter Bergmann writes that in the 1880s, ‘Stimulated by Stendhal, Nietzsche plunged into the latest Napoleonic literature which the Bonapartist revival was offering the public. Nietzsche’s walks on the quays of Nice revived the Napoleonic legend his grandmother had recounted in his childhood.’¹⁹ Nietzsche read or was intensively thinking about Las Cases, Goethe and Stendhal on Napoleon during the summer and autumn of 1884, as his Nachlass notes indicate, no doubt highly stimulated by the monumental subject.²⁰ His reflections on Napoleon are intensified and personally deepened from this period to late 1888 where we can hear Taine and even Dostoevsky’s criminal character Raskolnikov tinting his sweeping perceptions. Nietzsche’s writing on Napoleon becomes so focused on its ‘problem’ that it becomes ‘Napoleonic literature’, a glorifying, venerating weapon of the ‘Bonapartist revival’.²¹

As Bergmann suggests, the Napoleonic legend was impressed upon Nietzsche from a young age, as his paternal grandmother, Erdmuthe Krause, who Nietzsche claims had ‘some connection with the circle of Goethe’ in Weimar (EH Wise 3), was of ‘thoroughly Napoleonic sympathies’²² and educated him accordingly. In Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (1888), Nietzsche fondly recalls that as ‘a Saxon’, she ‘was a great admirer of Napoleon’ and provocatively adds, ‘it could be that I still am, too’. Nietzsche ascribes a mythical stature to his grandmother who gave birth to Nietzsche’s father on 10 October 1813 – ‘on the day Napoleon entered Eilenburg with his general staff’ (EH Wise 3), intimating a perhaps mysterious connection between the two events.

Nietzsche’s evaluation of Napoleon is thus typically quite positive. He rarely criticizes Napoleon and when he does it is to address, primarily, Napoleon’s personal and psychological failings, mostly a variation on one or two themes such as delusion or the inability to admit defeat²³ and which agrees with the verdict of de Rémusat and Taine²⁴ (and even Stendhal) but he leaves Napoleon’s political vision essentially uninjured and, like Goethe, is not ultimately critical of Napoleon’s cruelty or inhumanity, or his tragic demand for total sacrifice,²⁵ a position which reflects ‘Goethe’s paganism with a good conscience’ (GS 356).

Nietzsche accepts the negative descriptions of Napoleon’s detractors, such as Germaine de Staël and Taine²⁶ – Bonaparte as egoist, as immoralist, as anti-civilization – but mostly recasts them in a positive light.²⁷ Everything that offends Taine about Napoleon, though he marvels too, Nietzsche admires: that Napoleon ‘subordinated the State to his personality’ (autocratic), that he was ‘not bewildered by democratic illusions’ and felt ‘disgust for the [French] revolution and the sovereignty of the populace’ (anti-democratic), that he made ‘playthings of ideas, people, religions, and governments’, (that he was like Nietzsche’s higher man) ‘managing mankind with incomparable dexterity and brutality … a superior artist’.²⁸

Nietzsche categorically rejects those writers, like Hegel, who interpret the phenomenon of Napoleon – the ‘soul of the world’ – as a strictly liberalizing force, spreading the heritage of the French Revolution, equal opportunity, freedom, the ‘Rights of Man’ and the termination of feudalism.²⁹ With equal energy he rejects those, like Fichte, who were viciously opposed to Napoleonic rule (the Roman Empire reincarnated) for nationalist, religious and economic reasons and advocated the German Wars of Liberation (1813–15), the war of the German people, that led ultimately to the collapse of the Napoleonic system and French hegemony.³⁰ In 1808, Fichte appeals to the German people to resist the ‘Rome of today’ and ‘annihilate the rule of brute physical force in the world’.³¹ For the militant Heinrich von Kleist, inspired by the asymmetrical warfare against Napoleonic forces in Spain, Napoleon is an ‘evil spirit’ and ‘sinner’ who instigated the war with Germany, a ‘patricide-spirit who escaped from hell, who creeps in the temple of nature and shakes all the pillars holding it’.³² Nietzsche was born in Röcken near the village of Lützen where the first battle of 1813 was fought. In Ecce Homo, he bitterly remarks that

the Germans with their ‘Wars of Liberation’ did Europe out of the meaning, the miracle of meaning in the existence of Napoleon; hence they have on their conscience all that followed, that is with us today – this most anti-cultural sickness and unreason there is, nationalism … petty politics. (EH CW 2)

It was the Germans who devastated the Napoleonic idea of ‘Europe as an association of states’.³³

Nietzsche greatly appreciated Taine’s ‘incomparably strong and simple characterisation of Napoleon’ published in the Revue des deux mondes in 1887.³⁴ He praised Stendhal ‘who ran with a Napoleonic tempo … through several centuries of the European soul … as France’s last great psychologist’ (BGE 254), no doubt profoundly engaged by Stendhal’s remarks on Napoleon in his second Vie de Napoléon, certain of which stimulate reflection on the ‘problem of the mask’.³⁵ Stendhal, who served under Napoleon during the second Italian campaign in 1800 and during the catastrophic Russian campaign of 1812–13, was, for Nietzsche, ‘reminiscent of the greatest of factual men (ex ungue Napoleonem)’ (EH Clever 3).³⁶ But it was Goethe whose ‘heart opened up at the phenomenon Napoleon’ (TI Germans 4), ‘the event on whose account he rethought his Faust, indeed the whole problem of man’ (BGE 244). In On the Genealogy of Morals: A