Crisis 22

Napoléon Avait Cinq Cent Soldats

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In Section IV (Vol. 1 Part 1) of War and Peace, Tolstoy gives a masterclass in the integration of theoretical politics and practical real-life individualism. In doing so he fleshes out the human feelings and the divergent sensibilities that are necessary if we’re to keep our humanity amid the stark cut and thrust of nations at war. Tolstoy also suggests a way out of dichotomy and paralyzing opposition — not just in voicing different viewpoints on war, but also in delineating the different sensibilities that can allow, initiate, and maintain the freedom of discourse which is essential to civilized politics.

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While Anna constantly tries to smooth things over at her soirée (by shifting topics and by shifting people around her drawing room), she also motivates discussion and provides insightful and deeply felt comments on the views being expressed — as we see in the debate about Napoleon in section IV. Her continual use of French is also appropriate, given the link to earlier French salon society and to turn-of-the-century figures like Madame de Staël. And of course, given that they are talking about the French emperor, who was and is a hero to some (like Byron and many Poles) and a villain to others.

In the Russian context, especially as it leads up to France’s 1812 invasion of Russia, Napoleon is first and foremost an invader. Yet there are those, like Tolstoy’s Pierre, who see him in a Romantic and revolutionary light — as Byron did, and as much of France did and still does. Back then, as today, some argue that Napoleon was a tyrant, and others argue that he was a positive revolutionary, a man who had the courage and willpower to overturn outdated, despotic, hegemonic regimes that needed to die. I should note here that Pierre’s psychological journey is central to the novel, and he’s sometimes likened to Tolstoy himself. While in the scene I’m about to analyze, Pierre defends Napoleon, he eventually imagines himself to be Napoleon’s assassin.

The debate about Napoleon in War and Peace is kicked off when Anna mocks the French emperor — in his own language to boot…

“M. Buonaparte assis sur un trône, et exauçant les voeux des nations! Adorable! Non, mais c’est à en devenir folle! On dirait, que le monde entier a perdu la tête.” [M. Buonaparte seated on a throne and granting the wishes of the nations! Adorable! No, but it could make you crazy! You’d think the whole world has lost its mind!”]

Prince Andrei grinned, looking straight into Anna Pavlovna’s face.

“‘Dieu me la donne, gare à qui la touche’ [‘God gives it to me, woe to him who touches it’],” he said (Bonaparte’s words, spoken as the crown was placed on him).

Today too the whole world appears to have lost its mind, given that the authoritarian Putin and the demagogue Trump command the two most powerful militaries on Earth. Yet keeping closer to Tolstoy’s text, and to the literary method he uses, we can appreciate the way Anna’s political idea shifts into social intercourse, and also into Prince Andrei’s dramatic, physical, satirical mockery of those who put a crown on their head and say that God put it there. Anna’s mockery, picked up and amplified by Andrei’s grin and by the parodied words of Napoleon himself, offer in one quick scene a well-rounded attack on anyone who, like Putin, gives himself extensive worldly power and then suggests that his will is in alignment with God’s.

Their communal mockery leads into the larger, more heated debate about the morality of Napoleon’s grab for power, much of which can also be applied to Putin.

The dialogue shifts from unified mockery to a multipolar take on the French emperor. In this debate, it’s not surprising that the exiled French viscount Mortemart takes a royalist position. The viscount challenges Anna’s statement — “Les souverains ne peuvent plus supporter cet homme, qui menace tout. / The sovereigns can no longer put up with this man who threatens everything.” — by countering, “Les souverains? Ils envoient des ambassadeurs complimenter l’usurpateur. / The sovereigns? They send ambassadors to compliment the usurper.” He then makes his elite position clear (he is after all a casualty of the French Revolution) when Tolstoy indicates his double sense of superiority, that is, his belief that he knows best and that his type of elite society is the best type of society:

“If Bonaparte remains on the throne of France for another year,” the viscount continued the new conversation, with the air of a man who does not listen to others, but, in matters known better to him than to anyone else, follows only the train of his own thoughts, “things will go too far. Intrigues, coercion, banishments, executions will forever destroy French society—I mean good society—and then …”

The ways in which one might apply this excerpt to the present situation are many. I’d start with the notion of a leader who stays in power too long. It is, of course, a question whether or not Putin ever had truly democratic aims, yet over time his grip on power became more authoritarian and brutal. Not to say that authoritarian brutality was anything new. For instance, the czars were brutal to the Circassians and other peoples they conquered, and they quelled opposition by sending people to northern prison camps — as they did to Dostoevsky. Putin follows in this tradition with his treatment of the Chechens and Alexei Navalny. Putin seems, like the viscount, to be following, and making his nation follow, his own train of thoughts. Yet he is ultimately more like Napoleon: intrigues, coercion, banishments, and executions follow in his wake.

Anna sees the Russian czar Alexander as a positive force, one that would fight against Napoleon’s tyrannical expansion. In this sense, he is a model which Putin might try to emulate. Her logic is a product of her times: she believes that the people, once freed, would choose a royal government. Tolstoy, however, makes it clear (at the end of the paragraph) that Anna is also trying to be politic by accommodating the feelings of the French viscount:

“The emperor Alexander,” she said, with the sadness that always accompanied her talk about the imperial family, “declared that he would leave it to the French themselves to choose their form of government. And I think there’s no doubt that the whole nation, freed of the usurper, will throw itself into the arms of the lawful king,” Anna Pavlovna said, trying to be amiable to the émigré and royalist.

This is where the debate really begins to heat up, as Prince Andrei and Pierre concur that “it would be hard to return to the old ways” and that “almost all the nobility have already gone over to Bonaparte’s side.” The viscount objects that

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