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What might Beethoven, when he began the Eroica in 1803, have known of Napoleon? In December 1793 he might have heard about a young captain of artillery whose skill in deploying cannon enabled French forces to recapture Toulon from the British. Two years later, on October 5,1795, this same individual, now a Général de division, dispersed an unruly pro-Royalist mob before the Church of Saint-Roch in Paris with what Carlyle, in a famous phrase, called a “whiff of grapeshot.” (23) That cannonade guaranteed that the gains of the Revolution would be preserved. On March 2, 1796, Paul Barras, one of the five directors who ruled France, bestowed the command of l'armée d'Italie, the weakest and worst-equipped of revolutionary France's five armies, upon young General Buonaparte. The Directory planned to attack Austria on three fronts. Napoleon would command the southernmost one. Rapidly traversing the Alpes Maritimes, Napoleon and his rag-tag army entered the fertile Po valley.
Already we hear the characteristic Napoléonic voice. “Soldiers, you are naked, malnourished; we are owed much, nothing can be given us,” he exhorted his troops. “I have come to take you to the most fertile plains in the world … There, you will have riches, honors and glory”. (24) Albert Thibaudet, a distinguished French literary historian of an earlier generation, considered this proclamation “the inauguration of what we might call Napoleonic rhetoric – most powerful of the century.” (25)
Which leads to an interesting question: who – Napoleon or Beethoven – will command the more durable rhetoric in the twenty-first century? Napoleon through his words, deeds, and image? Or Beethoven through his relentlessly, ineluctably coursing onwards music, music that moves “the listener along as does the earth itself”? (26) But need we establish such a dichotomy? Might we not join Beethoven and Napoleon with the far-seeing political vision of Napoleon, so admired by Nietzsche: a vision that looked to achieve a united Europe and , within a twenty-first century context, a united mankind.
And Byron? What does he have to offer the new century? On the evidence of new biographies that have appeared, sexual titillation would appear the main draw. Recent full-length lives reveal in copious detail, some of it imaginary, Byron's amours with old and young, male and female. (27) Aside from sex, these accounts have little to say about why we should value Byron today. Neglected are Byron's impressive achievements as a writer, or the myriad ways he influenced for nearly two centuries imaginative life in Britain, Europe, America, Japan and elsewhere. Music and art and now drama, television, and popular fiction bear witness to Byron's powerful impact. Mass-Marketed by film and popular culture, Byron today may be more “present” in our consciousness than ever before. Yet the enduring roots of his greatness derive not from his ambiguous sexuality or even his appeal as a pop icon, however mesmerizing both may be at times, but from the brilliance, drama, and wit of his writings. That Byron's words may be as compelling for our time as Beethoven's music or Napoleon's forceful being and stirring deeds has been inadequately recognized, even by Byronists.
It was at Lodi, a battle fought against the Austrians on May 10, 1796, that Napoleon first awoke the imagination of Europe . (28) The Adda flows before Lodi, and to capture Milan Napoleon had to cross the bridge to the other side. Napoleon exhorted his troops to charge the Austrian cannon head-on. To the drums and fifes of La Marseillaise and Les Héros morts pour la liberté, Napoleon's main force hurled itself across the bridge. The charge succeeded – just. The Austrian troops broke and ran. The battle was over. It was a stunning victory. Five days later, General Buonaparte entered Milan, the queen city of Lombardy, in triumph.
A Lodi Napoleon first fully demonstrated his military genius. Lodi impressed him upon the European consciousness. Before 1796 only a few attentive observers had heard of the man with the unusual name. After Lodi, it was on every one's lips. The battle quickly became the stuff of myth. Walter Scott, no admirer of Napoleon, commemorated in The Field of Waterloo (1815) “He of Lodi's bridge.” When a contemporary spoke of Napoleon's Italian campaign as “son Iliade,” he implied its epic nature. (29) After Lodi and the triumphal entrance into Milan, “a whole nation became aware,” Stendhal wrote in The Charterhouse of Parma saw that … they must love their country with genuine affection and seek to perform heroic actions”. (30)
For Byron and schoolboy in faraway Aberdeen, Lodi marked the beginning of the Napoleonic epic. Lodi became for him both the quintessential Napoleonic battle and the quintessential Napoleonic moment: one of courage, brilliance, daring – and luck. He followed with enthusiasm the young general's tumultuous progress across northern Italy. Beethoven, aged twenty-seven, in a Vienna now precariously close to Napoleon's advancing army, no doubt also pondered what that campaign might mean for him. After liberating northern Italy, would the young conqueror liberate other oppressed peoples from tyrannical government and royalist privilege? How powerful was the revolutionary spirit now sweeping Europe? How long would it last?
The next major Napoleonic event to stir the European imagination was the Egyptian campaign. The expedition's vast flotilla led by forty-five ships of the line left Toulon on May, 19, 1798. napoleon quickly won a spectacular victory under the shadow of the Pyramids, outside Cairo. Again, the famous rhetoric came into play: “Soldiers, rememver that from the height of these pyramids forty centuries look down upon you.”(31) Poor Byron! Impressed by Napoleon's deeds, how he did resent those words! Hearing of Napoleon's exhortation to his troops in Egipt put Byron, recalled Stendhal, “quite out of humor.”(32)
Napoleon had originally intended to press on to India, but his failed attempt to besiege Acre and the deteriorating political situation in France led him, he claimed, to abandon the idea. Leaving his army to its fate, he returned post-haste to Paris.
The expedition to Egypt was thus in military terms a failure. Nelson destroyed napoleon's fleet, and the army, unable to return to France, eventually surrendered. But it was a failure that somehow emerged as a success, for it had opened the way for Napoleon to rule France. Without the momentum of Egypt, the virtual coup d'état of 18 Brumaire, Novembre 9, 1799, which took place a month after his return, would not have happened. Napoleon, named First Consul, quickly took into his hands the reins of power.
Once First Consul, napoleon wished to recapture northern Italy retaken by the Austrians in his absence, and in the late spring of 1800 he led a French army over the Alps into Italy. By all the rules napoleon should have failed: the risks posed by terrain, weather, logistics were simply too great. But he succeeded, and his unexpected triumph at Marengo in June, after having seemingly lost the battle, won him that campaign. By all the rules of warfare Napoleon should not have won at Lodi either. “There was no historical precedent for storming a bridge under heavy fire,” comments his best English biographer Vincent Cronin, “and his generals said it was madness.”(33) What was napoleon to do? He sent cavalry, delayed in finding a ford, came down upon the Austrian flank. The troops chose that moment to charge across the bridge. A likely defeat became a victory. Such a strategy was extremely risky, but in this instance it succeeded. What seized the imagination of a generation, the mature Beethoven no less than the young Byron, was the sheer audacity of Napoleon's genius.
In Paris this brilliant, extraordinarily handsome young man, only a year older than Beethoven, held sway over France. Out of the chaos spawned by the Revolution, Napoleon had within a few years' time established political order. From the most disorganized state in Europe in the 1790s France emerged, as its revolutionary calendar implied, a new nation: vigorous, self-confident, audacious. That it came to have the most efficient and best-organized government in Europe was largely Napoleon's doing. In 1801 he signed with the Vatican the Concordat, which re-established Catholicism in France, a settlement that appealed to the conservative majority; he allowed the royalist refugees to return, many of whom would work with the new regime. In 1802Napoleon established lycées, to educate the young, and a few weeks later, the Légion d'honneur, to reward great actions. He founded the Bank of France and had even, by 1802, balanced the budget. In 1804 he instituted the Code Napoleon, or Code Civile, the work of commissions appointed earlier on which he had sat and whose deliberations he influenced. The Code Civile, with adjustments, governs France to this day. (34) Liberty, equality, fraternity seemed for a time distinctly realizable possibilities to many.
We think of Napoleon as a man of war, but when Beethoven began the Eroica in 1803, many contemporaries saw him as a reconciler, a man of peace. He had freed most of northern Italy from Hapsburg control; he spread beyond France's borders the principles if not always the practice of republican government. He made, after Marengo in 1800, an uneasy peace with Austria; a treaty signed at Amiens two years later on March 25, 1802, established an equally uneasy peace with Britain. After a decade of war lasting European had fulfilled almost every expectation. Who could resist a man who had achieved so much, to whom anything seemed possible?. (35)
Napoleon-Watching during these first years of gloire aroused intense feelings. Like many of his fellow artists, William Hazlitt went over to Paris in 1802, during the year of peace, to see the art treasures brought together by Napoleon. “I am in the Louvre once more,” recalled Hazlitt shortly after Napoleon's death. “The sun of Austerlitz has not set. It still shines here – in my heart; and he, the sun of glory, is not dead, nor ever shall, to me.” (36) Like Beethoven, Hazlitt valued Napoleon as the heir of the French Revolution, the man who offered hope for a new era. Hazlitt never wavered in his faith in Napoleon. His was an extreme form of ardour. It refused to be disillusioned. To his dying day the flam of admiration for Napoleon burned bright for him.
That flame burned equally brightly in the United States. The young Nicholas Biddle early acknowledged Napoleon as a model of greatness. Napoleon may indeed have obsessed Biddle as much as he obsessed Beethoven and Byron. Arriving in Paris on November 7, 1804, Biddle, aged eighteen, found everyone talking of Napoleon, already recognized as one of the most brilliant leaders in history. He first glimpsed the great man at a military review.
“What a sight!!” he exclaimed in his journal:
Not fifteen yards from me I beheld “the man before whom the world had trembled,” the hero whose name has sounded in every quarter of the globe & who has rivalled if not excelled all that antiquity can produce of hardy valour and successful enterprise. I did not neglect this rare opportunity of seeing so wonderful a man & for upwards of an hour while 12,000 men passed before him my eyes scarcely for a moment left him. (37)
Biddle, a young patrician of unquestioned brilliance, was also a convinced believer in the virtues and potential of the American republic whose interests in Paris he represented. And he was mesmerized by Napoleon.
On December 2, 1804, the Pope, summoned from Rome, was to crown Napoleon emperor at Notre-Dame. David's great painting in the Louvre captures the moment in the sacre, or consecration, when Napoleon places the crown on Josephine's head. Biddle attended that brilliantly-staged event. Even when awed by the proceedings he did not miss their deeper significance: “What a sight was this for a philosopher. A little second lieutenant now wielded the Bourbon sceptre, a woman now occupied the place of Antoinette.” (38) In the 1820s and 1830s, Biddle, as president of the Second Bank of the United States, was the nation's financial arbiter. Like other self-made men in America of his era and indeed after, identified almost malgré lui with the man whose initials he shared.
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In 1804, The year Biddle gaped at Napoleon's coronation ceremony, the thirty-three year old Beethoven crossed out the Eroica's initial dedication to Napoleon. The year before, a fifteen-year old schoolboy named Byron had defended against his fellow Harrovians his sculpted bust of Napoleon. The Peace of Amiens between Napoleon's France and Pitt's Britain had ended inconclusively after fifteen months. Hostilities were expected to break out openly and soon. Fearful of an invasion, Britain went on a war alert. Coastal defenses were strengthened, troops called up. It was in the midst of this warhysteria that Byron fought off those who sought to destroy his treasured bust of Napoleon. “Rascally time-servers,” he called his schoolmates.” (39) The words suggest Byron's perspective on events: Britain had financed coalition after coalition to topple the French leader, and France, the underdog, was isolated and surrounded, just as Byron was by his patriotic schoolmates. From that time onwards Napoleon became for Byron a “Héros de Roman.” His defiant defense of his Napoleon at Harrow would be the first of many defenses.
Beethoven's wish to dedicate the Eroica to the upstart Napoleon in 1803 was a move which, for him at least, had potentially vast political consequences. Though a tenuous peace existed between Austria and France in 1803, the Hapsburgs regarded Napoleon as their most dangerous enemy. Within the past four years they had lost two campaigns to armies led by him. The defeats rankled, and war would erupt again in 1805. As Byron defended his bust of Napoleon during a time when the threat of renewed war loomed, so Beethoven wrote and dedicated his symphony to Napoleon under this same threat. Each act took tremendous courage. But courage was a virtue neither Byron nor Beethoven lacked.
The next year, 1804, Byron told a correspondent his favourite song was “The Maid of Lodi”. (40) Napoleon's triumph in 1796 in Italy continued to reverberate in Byron's imagination. On April 9th, 1814, shocked at the news that Napoleon had “abdicated the throne of the world,” he recalled that dazzling victory: “Yet to outlive Lodi for this!!!” (41) In Greece in 1823 he looked back upon Napoleon's first campaign in Italy against the Austrians that had begun so gloriously with Lodi. Upon that campaign he intended to model his own in Greece. (42) Until death took Byron, Napoleon remained the most important figure in his imagination, a constant stimulus, a torment even, but more often than not, an inspiration, for his poetry no less than in his personal life. Like Rossini with whom we began, we can say of Napoleon for Byron, that is was “always he, he everywhere.”