What a scene, Napoleon, self-crowned and proclaimed leader of all the world crowns his Empress Josephine, resplendent in diamonds as the powers of the Church look on, scowling at the blasphemy of the thing. Triomphe! for the Corsican upstart and his Consort. Lesueur captures the moment, with pre-industrial grandeur:
Triumph indeed, but hubris met nemesis in the Iron Duke, Wellington, who put paid to Boney's scheme of a new world order with himself in charge, smashing the upstart at Waterloo. It's said that clubland in St. James was awakened to the fact of allied victory in 1815 by parades of jubilant people carrying captured French Eagles.
So much for Boney. Wellington stated, laconically, "They came on in the same old way and we beat them back, in the same old way." You can imagine the 50,000 casualties on the field of battle. Here's the Duke in older and seemingly kinder visage:
Josephine Bonaparte died in 1814, a year before her beloved husband met disaster at Waterloo.
Sic transit,
LSP
Impious and arrogant though Napoleon’s self-coronation might have been, I am increasingly of the opinion that rule by a genuinely competent man of strength is infinitely preferable to our current servitude to the whims, perversities, and generational vendettas and hatreds of unelected and unaccountable Finks and Blinkens and Nulands.
ReplyDeleteBut. As I think Heinlein once said, “The Swedes chose a Frenchman, Bernadotte, to rule them. But the problem is that the supply of Bernadottes is limited.” (Or maybe it was Piper who said that.)
If Napoleon was from Corsica, does that make him a Person of Color? It's difficult to keep all these things straight.
ReplyDeleteIn other news I see that the president of Harvard finally had enough money waved under her nose to resign, while blaming 'raycism' for clipping and copying other people's work for decades.
And so we move, Mike, from a Republican to an Augustan age, or something like that. Of course the whole edifice might just fall down through sheer ineptitude and crookery. In which case we move from Caesar to Theodoric in the space of years instead of centuries. Acceleration, eh?
ReplyDeleteAll hail Heinlein.
Now that, DOS, is an excellent question. I don't think he identified that way but perhaps I'm wrong.
ReplyDeleteThen there's Claudine. Aaaaand now she's one. Not before time. Let's see what mountebank they elect in zhir place.