Napoleon wanted to turn Paris into Rome under the Caesars, only with louder music and more marble. And it was done. His architects... gave him the Arc de Triomphe and the Madeleine. His nephew Napoleon III wanted to turn Paris into Rome with Versailles piled on top, and it was done. His architects gave him the Paris Opera, an addition to the Louvre, and miles of new boulevards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Napoleon has not been conquered by men. He was greater than any of us. God punished him because he relied solely on his own intell...igence until that incredible instrument was so strained that it broke.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and would help himself with his hands and his head. With him is no mi...racle, and no magic. He is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money, and in troops, and a very consistent and wise master-workman. He is never weak and literary, but acts with the solidity and the precision of natural agents. He has not lost his native sense and sympathy with things. Men give way before such a man, as before natural events.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual: the position of the genitals--inter urinas et faec...es--remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. One might say here, varying a well-known saying of the great Napoleon: "Anatomy is destiny."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both Napoleon and Hitler controlled continental Europe. Neither could defeat Britain so long as she retained her mastery at sea, a...nd for that reason both abandoned their projected invasion of the British Isles. But Britain could not hope to overcome her enemy without the help of major land-powers on the Continent. Spain in the 1800s was the equivalent to North Africa in the early 1940s, sideshows where alone the enemies grappled on land. Both dictators turned to a strategy of economic stranglehold of Britain, in the 1800s by attempting to close all European ports to British, in the 1940s by unlimited submarine warfare. In both wars the dictators invaded Russia to render her powerless so that they could turn all their strength against Britain, and both campaigns had the opposite result, that Russia became a victorious ally who enabled Britain to survive. The analogy breaks only in the attitude of the United States, in the first war a temporary enemy, in the second an incomparable ally.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ultimately the two men are united by their reaction to the French Revolution, for it was Rousseau's explosive concept of the Gener...al 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Empress is Legitimist, my cousin is Republican, Morny is Orleanist, I am a socialist; the only Bonapartist is Persigny, and he... is mad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »