This chapter is about Napoleon’s psychology after Borodinó. Tolstoy tells how Napoleon was able to justify to himself all the horrible suffering he helped unleash on the world.
This chapter is about Napoleon’s psychology after Borodinó. Tolstoy tells how Napoleon was able to justify to himself all the horrible suffering he helped unleash on the world.
Book 10, Chapter 38
This chapter is about Napoleon’s psychology after Borodinó. Tolstoy tells how Napoleon was able to justify to himself all the horrible suffering he helped unleash on the world.
Summary:
Seeing the hundreds of thousands of people who perished, the darkened mind of Napoleon was able to glimpse, if only momentarily, all the horrible human suffering caused by the wars. This made it necessary for Napoleon to reconcile in his own mind what his eyes saw with his mental image of himself as a good person. By this point, Napoleon had become almost incapable of simple human feeling. So instead, what Napoleon did was to plunge deeper in his mind into the artificial realm of imaginary greatness, in order to rationalize to himself why he submissively fulfilled the cruel, inhuman role predestined for him. In this chapter, Tolstoy explicates in more detail these psychological processes. First of all, Tolstoy reminds us that Napoleon incorrectly believed himself such a great man as to personally be the cause of history. Then, Napoleon rationalizes that had he succeeded in unifying Europe, it would have been better for everyone. Afterall, he only wanted to make Europe a much nicer place to live. Then, Napoleon casts blame on others for not having helped him more. Finally, Napoleon retreats to the sniveling logic that, while a lot of people died, most of them were not French, (as if that made any difference). And with this, as a final salve to his ego, Napoleon intends to devote his leisure to writing an account of the great deeds he has done.
quote from the chapter:
And he fell back into that artificial realm of imaginary greatness, and again-as a horse walking a treadmill thinks it is doing something for itself-he submissively fulfilled the cruel, sad, gloomy, and inhuman role predestined for him.
And not for that day and hour alone were the mind and conscience darkened of this man on whom the responsibility for what was happening lay more than on all the others who took part in it. Never to the end of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the significance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness and truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.
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