Hegel, at Jena, exclaimed that Napoleon was “an idea on horseback”; being a philosopher, he did not find that antipathetic. à few days later, in a more terre à terre frame of mind, he was hurrying to secrete his valuables—manuscript pages of the Phenomenology—from the French soldiers. He had already stated in a lecture on history that “A new epoch has arisen. It seems as if the world-spirit [has] succeeded in freeing itself from all foreign objective existence and finally apprehending itself as absolute mind.” On the eve of the battle at Jena, which became a Prussian rout, he wrote admiringly of the “world-soul” of the Emperor.
Victor Hugo was harsher in Les Misérables: “ce sombre athlète du pugilat de la guerre,” he called the man. It is easier to see what Hugo meant by his curt disparagement than what Hegel meant by his praise. But, between “world-soul” and “Idea on horseback,” I suppose Hegel was saying that Napoleon carried the future in himself, and that indeed was what most people thought or feared. To many minds, Napoleon was not just the man of destiny but destiny itself in a tricorne. It was natural, therefore, that youths seeking to be his avatars would feel they bore the stamp of destiny on them, like the visible “stamp of genius” reported to be graven on the foreheads of Lucien himself and of any number of needy young literary aspirants he meets in Paris. These young men were possessed by an overriding idea of their destiny; or, to put it coarsely, they thought they had a “future” and they gambled in their futures like speculators buying next year’s wheat shares on the grain exchange.
Such notions were abhorrent to Tolstoy. I do not know how aware he was of the spread of Napoleonic daydreams to the youth of succeeding generations, but he sensed that the glorification of Napoleon was pernicious, whoever was affected by it. One of his main efforts in War and Peace is to cut the Idea on horseback down to size. This had nothing to do, I believe, with Russian patriotism—he was hard on the Russian generals too, with the exception of Kutuzov—and if he was more fiercely contemptuous of Napoleon than of, say, Prince Bagration, it was because the man in Napoleon, the parcel of common humanity, had been superseded by an enthroned Idea. The virtue Tolstoy sees in Kutuzov is that, far from claiming to embody in his stout, sleepy person an abstract notion of military genius, he has no particular ideas of strategy in warfare but proceeds by instinct, by a kind of animal cunning, like the fox’s. Tolstoy’s dislike of the French Emperor, for him inseparable from the tiresome, ridiculous “legend” that he sat for like a portrait, knows no bounds. It even makes him deride the cold Napoleon had on the day of Borodino as being even minimally responsible for the French setback there—a thought that ordinarily would have appealed to him since a cold is a little joke of Nature that can be played on a man of destiny as well as on anybody else. He will not allow Napoleon’s cold—inflated to scale by professional historians—to have had any weight at all in the affair.
Tolstoy is not interested in the mighty social forces that may or may not have swept Napoleon and his have-nots to power on a tidal wave of discontent with the status quo ante. He is too pessimistic and, I should say, too acute an observer to expect great changes for humanity in the replacement of one form of power by another. The rapid ennoblement of have-nots into haves by the gift of offices, riches, and titles was only an acceleration of a common social process—the reward system had long been practiced by monarchies. In other words, the revolutionary content of the Napoleonic idea-on-the-march left him cold; he did not believe in its reality. What one finds in Le rouge et le noir and Les illusions perdues appears to bear him out. Despite the presence of a few lofty spirits—one being an ancient curé—notions of glory and sacrifice, when they are found at all, seem inextricable in most cases from notions of self-advancement, and this cannot be wholly the dampening effect of the Restoration of the Bourbons on young and ardent temperaments.