Ultimately the two men are united by their reaction to the French Revolution, for it was Rousseau's explosive concept of the General Will coupled with the breakdown of the social order which in the long run created both Emperor and Fuhrer. The former ensured the demolition of Christian Europe, while the latter completed it.... Napoleon saw himself as offering a via media between the ancien regime and the Terror. He claimed to have "cleansed" the revolution, combining with it what was best from the past, morally regenerated by Revolutionary ideals. Yet for all his protestations, he accepted the Revolution only because it made his career possible, and because those who had profited from it were ready to support his regime. Similarly, Hitler argued that he was steering a middle path between capitalism and Marxism. National Socialists claimed that their political and social programme had thwarted the machinations of international finance, while at the same time defeating the evil consequences of the French Revolution as embodied in its children—liberalism and, above all, Bolshevism.
