Sadly, I don't suppose now that I'll ever achieve what he did. It is a pity that the British are so ignorant about this towering figure. I am slowly plodding through War and Peace, but that doesn't really give a proper idea of who the man was. French children spend a long time studying his story. I am not sure what they learn from this, but I have a sneaky suspicion that it engenders an enthusiasm for meritocracy of a sort that we are deeply suspicious of.
Amazingly, Stuart Hall of 'Jeux Sans Frontiers' is a great Napoleon expert. He has a large collection of Napoleon memorabilia, including a hundred clocks from the period. He has had Boney as a hero since his school days, which suggests a breadth of interests wider than someone who has only seen him comment on silly games and football.
In an episode of Great Lives on R4 recently, Stuart told Matthew Parris how this physically small man, who wasn't even French, rose from nowhere to be a dominating force in Europe, a veritable proto-Jacque Delors, in fact. It is funny how the British defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, but the Napoleonic idea of a united Europe now seems to be unstoppable no matter how much the British establishment opposes it.
It seems that Napoleon's key contribution was to get control of a revolution that was spinning out of control. He was Stalin to Robespierre's Lenin, except that he left the French a somewhat less corrupt and broken society. Even so, I, like most Brits, firmly believe that the Code Napoleonique condemns continental Europe to perpetual economic underperformance.
Although we all assume that Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, according to Stuart Hall it was in fact Blucher's actions which were decisive at the battle. Well, it always was the winners who re-write history. We also think of Napoleon as physically small, whereas he was in fact of average height. He had the usual number of fingers on both hands.
"Meritocracy" is a word that is younger than I am, and, interestingly, was intended to be pejorative. It was coined by Michael Young, father of the ubiquitous, but arguably less talented, Toby Young.
I always enjoy listening to, and reading Matthew Parris. He is a mild mannered man who can be devastating in his judgement on others. I very much enjoyed his latest piece in the Spectator where he describes how he, as a fifty-nine year old man risked being arrested in Monument underground station for running the wrong way down the up escalator when the worse for drink.
