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He fired Beethoven’s heart and then broke it. As much as the Civil Code or the Banque de France, what survives Napoleon two centuries later is the art he provoked. (“Inspired” does not.) There is the old tale of the Third Symphony, the Heroic, receiving his name until he went and was crowned emperor. The Romantics of England, whether pro (Byron) or anti (Wordsworth), were no less obsessed. Even Stanley Kubrick tried to make a biopic before setting out easier topics: the Vietnam War, the nature of free will.
It is therefore not capricious to awaken the meaning of the man of the bicentennial of death that has divided France. Nor will I add to it: this country and its former colonies are better placed to judge whether it was “the Enlightenment on horseback.” All I know is that if France has derived part of its identity from embroidered facts, it is in abundant company.
There are two reasons why I respond to the “globalist” insinuation, nor is it a misleading idealism. The first is the absence of choice in the matter. My country of citizenship is not the same as my country of birth, which is not the same as my country of ancestry, which is not the same as my country of residence. I could replace “continent” with “country” all four times in that sentence. Who would I fool if I played jingo or stickler for sovereignty? Even Peter Ustinov, the world government’s omnilingual and enthusiastic actor, could be said to have a continent. I find it easier to get married in South America, move to Australasia and complete the set.
The other reason – and Napoleon-gate takes her home – is that nationality requires mental contortions. (“Lies” is rude.) To induce the feeling of resemblance to people who can’t have anything in common beyond territory, there must be awakening myths. Hence the deification of complex historical figures. Hence also the pretension of uninterrupted bloodlines, the reading of singularity in features that exist everywhere, the consecration of things as random and mutable as borders.
Academic historians have a very wise phrase with this cunning. “There is no national history.” That is, dig a little, and even an “ancient” nation is based on myths hopelessly and relates to others. Yes, globalism is a thin identity, if at all. But it doesn’t require being fabulous.
Britain remains united, among other solid things, by the belief that the achievement of universal health care is scarce, an account of World War II that could raise eyebrows at Russia and a purely maritime sense of self , unlike Spain, the Netherlands and the rest of the famous landlocked continent. Winston Churchill occupies Napoleon as a single deity, ultimately problematized.
As for America, the binding myth is opportunity, regardless of parental wealth (news to scholars of comparative social mobility) or national origin. “In no other country on Earth is my story possible,” Barack Obama said when he was that great character: a member of the Illinois Senate. What he believes immigrants do most successfully in Canada, Britain, or France, is, between him and his writer.
Now, believe me when I say I’m glad I continue this kind of nonsense. “No myth, no nation,” Gore Vidal wrote. “No nation, no order,” he could have added. I am familiar with what happens when a society loses cohesion. It’s how I came to wash myself at the coldest end of the Eurasian mass. Give me the creation of myths about chaos that is your most likely alternative.
That is make myths, though. A nation seems to me an act of faith as much as a religion. And so the row over Napoleon is not history. The story is that these eruptions of doubt and dissent do not affect almost every country, almost all the time. Alongside the city state or the multiethnic empire, this is an incredibly recent mode of social organization. It is not a wet-eyed commitment to the essential unity of humanity that leaves me fresh in the nation. I just think that without a dose of imagination, there is no “there”.
Send Janan a janan.ganesh@ft.com
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