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“In politics, stupidity is no obstacle” – Napoleon Bonaparte
“American evils”, and our evils, are all here. If we do not respect ourselves, we cannot demand respect from others. The end of deterrence. To better understand what we are losing, jump to the original West, the product of the French Revolution. When the dramatization of history was still the alpha and omega of politics and pedagogy. “Vous êtes un homme!” This is how the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte received Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, perhaps the greatest literary genius of all time. “You are a man!” This is the song of the new Augusto’s tribute to Virgilio, sung by those who wait to be sung. It is 10 o’clock in the morning on Sunday, October 2, 1808. We are in the courtroom of the baroque rented palace in Erfurt. Erfurt is a medium-sized city in Thuringia, formerly part of Prussia, recently annexed by France. The room is 8.90 meters long, 6.45 meters wide and 3.2 meters high. The two protagonists are almost the same height. Napoleon, 1.69 meters, Goethe, two or three centimeters taller. The first, in plain imperial uniform. The poet wore a powdered wig, an elegant embroidered coat, knee-length trousers, silk stockings, a sword at his waist, and shiny buckled shoes. Napoleon was surprised. He expected someone sloppy and clumsy, which fit his stereotype of German artists.
A portly Polish page prepared breakfast for him, which he enjoyed with his right-hand man, the Duke Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who was then completing his betrayal, and some marshals. Before returning to the court, a look at the background. Napoleon had invited the young Tsar Alexander I to Erfurt to convince him to sanctify the eternal alliance that was destined to defeat Austria and Britain, and then the two emperors would divide the European continent. From September 27 to October 14, 1808, the famous Enlightenment poet Christoph Martin Wieland observed, “four German kings, and a circle of German princes, both reigning and non-reigning, together with countless German executioners and magnates, French and Russian, centered around him to end the feud once and for all, if possible.” There were envoys from Prussian princes and the Habsburgs, as well as a dozen newly appointed Napoleon marshals, and about 57,000 soldiers selected to impress.
A grand show. Strict imperial protocol, from the morning audience to noon, from the hunting party to the dinner in neighboring Weimar, followed by theatrical performances performed by the stars of the “French Theater” with original Parisian sets. Among them, the famous Talma stood out, a real Napoleon on the stage of the cult of Napoleon. The dim candlelight invites the audience to introspection. Goethe took the opportunity to spy on the emperor’s face and twitches, and he also boasted that he had participated in the Battle of Valmy, the victorious French artillery attack that defeated the counter-revolutionary army on September 20, 1792, marking the transition from the war of lace to the war of armies. On October 14, 1806, he risked his life in Jena. The theatrical schedule was set by the emperor himself, who never missed a performance, and Corneille, Racine and Voltaire were always by the tsar’s side. The rules were strict and aimed at making the congress solemn. The drums marked the arrival of the monarch, and for the emperor, the drums became triple. When the drums mistakenly presented three pieces to the King of Württemberg, the commander angrily shouted: “Shut up, he’s nothing more than a king!” The emperor was busy trying to convince Alexander of the agreement between the rulers of the East and the West.
Its magnetism seemed intact. Almost everyone who saw him for the first time fell into a swoon, rarely out of complacency. But behind the scenes, he had lost his cool. He had the luxury of rudeness, which showed that the bad news from Spain had made him nervous, and the French had overthrown the Bourbon dynasty but were still mired in anti-guerrilla warfare. The ease with which Napoleon tore up treaties and imposed his relatives on the lands he had conquered damaged his reputation and the trust of other monarchs. What was the use of agreeing with the French emperor? Then Napoleon suffered the intrigues of Talleyrand, who in the shadows destroyed what he had woven with Alexander, who had become as stubborn as a mule. One could only get a vague understanding. Talleyrand’s private formula in a semi-secret conversation with the Tsar stated that “the French people are civilized, their leaders are not; the Russian leader is civilized, but not his people. Therefore, the Tsar must make an alliance with the French people.”
This chameleon-like adviser to two emperors was convinced that the true borders of France lay between the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine. What was left? Napoleon was so crazy that he called him in one of his speeches “excrement in a stocking”. We are again in the room where Napoleon received Goethe. The first meeting between the young Corsican soldier in his prime and the wise man of a thousand men, who was the secret adviser to the Duke of Weimar, is still shrouded in mystery. The scant notes Goethe made in 1819 in the form of sketches, and the mysterious testimonies collected from friends and confidants, suggest a metaphor for the relationship between history and its dramatic realization. Napoleon, out of a double genius, was reduced to the reputation of a military strategist, a man who rewrote the world order, concerned with making himself a monument; Goethe, whose fame was so widespread that the newspapers of half of Europe immediately spread the news of his audience with Bonaparte, concerned with the emperor’s approval and certainly not anxious to give him a story of praise. Power is the field that produces self-representation. In this case, the power and the final singer are so particular that they cannot complement each other.
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