Napoleon

Napoléon Bonaparte’s large shadow had already profoundly affected
General Hamilton’s politics. As early as 1798, when Napoléon first
emerged from the chaos of the French Revolution, Hamilton called him
“that unequalled conqueror from whom it is painful to detract, in whom
one would wish to find virtues worthy of his shining talents,” When
Napoléon brushed aside the feeble five-man directory that was trying to
ru.le France and made himself consul for ten years, with absolute power,
Hamilton and his Federalist friends regarded the event with a nice mix-
ture of admiration and cynicism. “After ten years of agitation, anarchy,
proscription, murder, pillage and crimes of every degree and eight years of
the must cruel and bloody wars,” wrote one Federalist, the French were
now subject to “the despotism of one man of sense, who may find it in his
interest to govern well and in his power to govern with steadfastness. . . .
General Bonaparte’s government is for the best for France . . . and he de-
serves the thanks of the world for its establishment.”
‘President Jefferson and his fellow Republicans somewhat nervously
tried to admire Bonaparte for a different reason: They hoped he was the
savior of their beloved French Revolution, which had showed signs of im-
minent collapse under the combined assaults of the crowned heads of Eu-
rope. The Jeffersonians strained their brains and syntax to look favorably
on Napoléon’s emergence.
Jefferson piously announced he hoped it was really true that “Bonaparte
had usurped the government with the intention of making it a free one.”
When Napoleon forced Austria to sign‘ the humiliating peace of
Luneville in 1801 and the battered British signed a similar semicapitula-
tion at Amiens later in the year, leaving Napoléon master of Europe, the
Republicans gloated and cheered. They maintained that the revolution
that had begun in America had triumphed and even claimed that
Napoleon had been fighting Americas battle. If the English had beaten
Bonaparte the Republicans reasoning went, London would have restored
a king to the French throne and launched a war of annihilation against
the United States.‘
Within the year, Napoléon confounded President ]efferson’s optimism
by having himself elected first consul for life and restoring the Catholic
church to all its ancient privileges in France. General Hamilton and his
fellow Federalists lost no time in roasting the discomfited Republicans.
The editorials in the New York Evening Past, many of them dictated to
William Coleman by Hamilton at the end of his long working day, were
particularly savage: “Those who admired the French Revolution as a sys-
tem of liberty are now put into the most ridiculous, whimsical and con-
temptible situation imaginable. Their great high priest Bonaparte has left
them completely in the lurch . . . The First Consul has torn the mask
from democracy and branded its forehead with infamy forever.“
Paradoxically, the Evening Post continued to praise the “tranquility and
joy” that the elevation of Bonaparte had brought to France. The Post in-
sisted, as General Hamilton often did in his letters, that it was not Americas
business to tell the people of France what kind of government they should
choose. “A government must be fitted to a nation as much as a coat to an in-
dividual . . .What may be good at Philadelphia [the U.S. capital at the time]
may be bad in Paris and ridiculous at Peterburgh”[St. Petersbu.rg].°
II
In America, as in the rest of the world, Napoléon had become a subject of
consuming interest. His taste in architecture, furniture, clothes, women,
and food were reported in omnivorous detail. Newspapers devoted
columns to telling their readers how fresh trout were caught in Lake
Geneva and rushed to the first consul’s table. For the Federalists, there
was political capital in publicizing the new Caesar’s imperial tastes. They
were mocking Napoléon’s indifference to the Republican simplicity that
President Jefferson, his penny-pinching ally George Clinton, and their
cohorts claimed was the epitome of revolutionary virtue.
Above all, Hamilton and the Federalists were pleased by the “emanci
pation of that ill-starred country from the ravages of Jacobinism.” They
did not mourn for French liberty because in their view France had never
been free. She had been ruled by a bloodthirsty atheistic mob personified
by Maximilien de Robespierre, the leader of the Jacobin Club. (The name
derived from their original meeting place, a Dominican monastery: Ja
cobin was the French name for the religious order.) The Federalists hoped
Napoleon’s usurpation had put an end to the seductive menace of the
revolution's war cry: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity “Every pious man re-
joices at the restoration of Christianity,” the Evening Post added.’
But General Hamilton did not stop worrying about France. “The spirit
of Jacobism which has almost desolated France and threatened the
whole world is now held in chains by the power of one man . . . If the
hand of the assassin [reached] Bonaparte, the monster Jacobinism
would rage with more violence than ever,” Hamilton declared at a meet-
ing of the New York Federalists. This was the political equivalent of hav-
ing your cake and eating it too. Hamilton pointed to the awesome power
of France, Supreme in Europe, with the fleets of Spain and Holland at her
beck an call. There seemed to be no nation or combination of nations
that could prevent her from achieving “universal empire " What had
President Jefferson done to meet this potential menace? He had virtually
beached the U.S. Navy and dismantled the U.S. Army, and agreed to pay
Napoleon $15 million for Louisiana. What could the President do if
Napoleon changed his mind, or was assassinated, and France decided to
take back Louisiana? Nothing.
In the spring of 1803, this unnerving idea had become more than a mere
possibility when the two-year-old peace of Amiens collapsed. Napoleon
announced he was going to invade England and dictate peace in St.
James Palace. Newspapers told how the so—called Man of Destiny was
summoning reserves from Italy, Switzerland, and Germany to assemble an
immense host, the Army of England, in the French channel ports and
Holland. Many Americans predicted an internal revolution if Napoleon
got his army ashore and the disenfranchised English masses started listen-
ing to the French siren song of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”
Commodore Thomas Truxtun’s letter to General Hamilton, deploring
]efferson’s administration and calling for a revision of the Constitution,
enclosed a copy of a long letter Truxtun had written to Senator Timothy
Pickering, analyzing the chances of Napoléon successfully invading Eng-
land. The commodore pointed out the various parts of the English coast
where an army might land and what sort of naval support they would re-
quire. Truxtun thought Napoléon’s army would take horrendous casualties
at sea and the men who survived would be stopped on the beaches. But he
was by no means certain the Corsican-born general could not succeed: “A
Short time will make manifest Whether I have Judged correctly of the
Subject,"Truxtun wrote. At stake was nothing less than the “happiness of
Nations.”
III
Hamilton and a group of moneyed Federalist friends had established the
Evening Past late in 1801. Its fine white rag paper and clean type made it
instantly superior to most of its cash-short rivals, who struggled along
with cheap blue paper and battered fonts.

Vidal's Burr

For a large, rather ungainly man (he had the hips,
buttocks and bosom of a woman), Washington could move with brutal
swiftness. He fell upon the two men. One large hand encircled the
strangler’s throat. The other seized the matted hair of the cannibal. He
dragged the men to their feet; held them aloft; shook them like rats. All
the while a series of sky-rending oaths emerged from the broad yellow
face now brick—red beneath its powder. If he was not heard all the way to
Boston, he was certainly heard by most of the encampment.
Aides hurried to support their commander. A sergeant put the two
terrified men under arrest. The revellers even tried to come to attention
as Washington mounted his horse, affecting a serenity that wasltruly
marvellous except for someone next to him, as I was, who could see the
trembling of the hand with wluch he held the reins. He must, secretly,
have been terrified. After all, he had had no experience of modern
warfare, while his exploits as an Indian fighter were a good deal less than
glorious despite the legends that he and the Virginians used so relentlessly
‘to circulate. But no matter what his military short-comings, at least he
looked like a general.
*
Hancock went to his grave furious that it was Washington and not he
who had been chosen to command the Continental Army. Narrowly to
miss such greatness is a bitter thing; and greatness seemed inevitable that
summer. At Lexington and Bunker Hill we had held our own in the face
of the best army in the world. Also, the British were 3,000 miles from
home and forced to fight in a wild country-side where their specialty, the
fixed battle, was of no use to them against the strategy they most feared,
the constant sniping of invisible rifiemen.
*
_“You are most certain, Major, of your military gift.”
~ “No, Sir. But it is a fact that the other strategy failed. I had hoped only
to imitate the same tactic King Frederick set in motion during the siege of
Dresden.” Young and opinionated, I hoped to impress my commander
not only with my own military prowess but with my wide knowledge of
modern warfare. Like so many young officers in those days, I had studied
closely the campaigns of Frederick the Great.
 General Washington, however, did not read books; he knew as little of
Frederick as I did of tobacco farming, a business in which he had only
recently failed. The wealth of his wife notwithstanding, Washington was
in some financial difficulty when he took command of the army. He had
not done well farming despite all sorts of theories about river mud being
the best of manures (it is not), and the invention-of a plough (shades of
Jefferson!) which proved to be so heavy that two horses could not budge it
“ “even in moist earth. i
. Although Washington was always short of money, he lived grandly.
Later in the war, we were all startled and amused when his mother put it
about that son George had robbed her of everything and so, being
destitute, she was forced to apply to the Virginia Assembly for a pension.
‘lam reasonably certain‘ that Washington was innocent in this matter. He
was, apparently, a dutiful son and the mother a source of much distress to
him, When word came of her son’s “victory” at Trenton, the virago was
quoted as saying, “Here is too much flattery.” It is plain she always
disliked her son and he must, finally, have hated her. How odd not to like
one’s own mother! I always thought I would have adored mine, who saw
fit to die before we could properly meet.
*
During this time George Washington was conducting the war in his
own mysterious way. After losing the battle for bong lsland, he was
surprised at Kip’s Bay and so lost New York City to the British. He then
sustained a defeat at White Plains after which most of the Continental
Army went home. With what men remained, Washington scurried
across the North River. Yet if in August of ’76 Washington had
abandoned to the British everything east of the Hudson River, he would
have been able to keep intact his army, dig in before Philadelphia, and
hold that city. Instead he devoted nearly a year to losing New York lsland
and City, demonstrating to everyone that he had neither the resources nor
the craft to defeat the British. The Revolution was nearly over and done
with by the winter of 1777.
A number of young officers prayed for Washington to be relieved of
command. Some of us wanted Lee. Others Gates. No one but the
sycophants on His Excellency’s staff wanted another winter of Washing-
ton and failure. Had the British realized the extent of our confusion and
weakness, they might then and there have forced a peace upon us for with
each passing day Washington’s conduct of the war was creating Tories
by the thousands, including a number of powerful if secret ones in the
Congress itself. .
My task in September 1777 was to make the enemy regret that they
were not Americans. I think we succeeded. Certainly they were never
able to adapt to our Indian-style fighting which relied on darkness, stealth,
surprise. We knew the wild forests around Paramus. They did not. We
never met them in battle. Rather, we were always near by, ready to shoot
them down one by one, preferably in the dark.
In September 1777 the British out-manoeuvred Washington once
again and occupied Philadelphia (the Congress now became a burden to
the city of Baltimore). Contrary to accepted legend, the Philadelphians
did not at all mind the presence of the British army in their city; in fact,
many of them hoped that Washington would soon be caught and hanged,
putting an end to those disruptions and discomforts which had been set in
motion by the ambitions of a number of greedy and vain lawyers
shrewdly able to use as cover for their private designs Jefferson s
high-minded platitudes and cloudy political theorizings.

More from Wilson's Hitler

 At Wagner’s grave, he once said to
Diana, ‘I am unworthy to stand here. But you are worthy,
because your grandfather was one of the great early
Wagnerians.’ She was a dazzlingly attractive personality, as
well as a beauty, and it was no wonder that he was in awe of
her ~ not least because he believed that as an aristocrat, and
a cousin of Churchill’s, she was close to the heart of the polit-
ical world. ‘Lady Mitford’ — as he believed she was called -
‘and her sisters are very much in the know, thanks to their
relationship with influential people’, he once told a group of
friends.” He seemed to imagine that she was ‘in the know’
about military as well as social matters, and took it very seri-
ously when she told him airily that she did not suppose there
were more than three anti-aircraft guns in the whole of
London. It was absurd to imagine that this vague, delightful
woman would have known one end of an anti-aircraft gun
from another: his taking her word on such a matter suggested
a weakness on Hitler’s part for upper class beauties.
She would stay at the Hotel Adlon and wait for the tele-
phone in her bedroom to ring. When it did so, a voice, some-
times that of the Leader himself, but more usually an
underling, would say, ‘Gracious Lady, the Leader can see you
now.’ She would cross the Unter den Linden to the Chancellery
and pass the evening in conversation with this remarkable
man. If he was in a good humour, he could be funny, imitat-
ing Mussolini’s strutting style, or — in high camp mgde _
pretending to be one of the women who doted upon him. Or
they would discuss the music dramas of Wagner, or the inter-
national situation. A theme to which he returned over and
over again was the miraculous bloodlessness of the Nazi
revolution. To establish the Soviet system had taken a civil
war in which millions of Russians had died. The Nazi revolu-
tion had taken place with only a few hundred dead.
Presumably, when Hitler spoke of a bloodless revolution,
he was not thinking of those killed in the organized riots in
the months following the fire in the Reichstag in 1933, those
beaten up for attending concerts conducted by Fritz Busch,
for example, who was dragged off his podium by Brownshirts
because he was a Iew. He was forgetting the 500-600 probably
killed in those months when the Mayor of Dusseldorf was
attacked with a whip by a Nazi, when Iewish shops were plun-
dered, and when, apart from those killed, some 100,000 trou-
blemakers - Communists, liberals, Christians — were bundled
off to concentration camps. He was also, of course, overlook-
ing the murder of Rohm and friends, and the elimination of
political rivals. Diana Mitford, and all the others who rejoiced
in the triumph of Nazism, wanted, with at least part of them-
selves, to overlook the essential violence of the Nazi idea. The
world wanted to overlook it, which is why the world, who by
now had had time to read My Struggle, with its suggestion
that the First World War would have been avoided if
l2—15,000 Iews had been gassed, was very happy to turn up
and enjoy the Olympic Games in Berlin.
Was not modern Germany a model of everything which
the men and women in the stadium wanted for their own
country? V\Thile 3 million Englishmen languished on the dole,
and many more lived in poverty, Adolf Hitler had demon-
strated that it was possible to create full employment. More
than 1.5 million Germans were employed in the motor
industry alone. All over Germany, there was now a modern
road system — the autobahns. There was a sense, lacking in
the democratic countries, that Hitler had given a whole coun-
try the capacity to be itself. Energy had returned. As the Nazi
Woman’s Movement, presided over by ‘Reich Mother-in-
Chief’ Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, put it — in a slogan which
perhaps seemed more inspirited at the time than it does after
eighty years — ‘The German Woman is Knitting Again?“

* * *
In January 1936, Hitler summoned all his Gauleiters and
Reichsleiters to a meeting. Disputes had arisen among them.
There was disgruntlement among the old Brownshirt ranks
that National Socialism had caved in to the establishment. As
Hitler turned his eyes abroad and began to think about ways
of realizing his nationalist dreams, the last thing he wanted
was any disunity among the party faithful. His speech that
January was full of emotion, ending with the promise that if
they did not give him what he wanted, he would commit
suicide. The ever-faithful Hess, when Hitler’s extraordinary
stream of self—pitying words came to a conclusion, assured
the Leader that they would follow him wherever he led.
What Hitler had demanded was that the party leadership
should be reorganized into a single entity, with himself as the
absolute leader. He would likewise ask the leaders of the
armed forces to make him their supreme war leader. The
successes of the first three years in power had given him a
hunger for absolute power which was inexhaustible.
He cheered up the Gauleiters and Reichsleiters by telling
them that his plans for expansion could now begin. On 7
March three German battalions occupied the demilitarized
Rhineland zone, that is all territory west of the Rhine and a
thirty-mile strip east of the river taking in Cologne,
Dusseldorf and Bonn. Far from being met by French tanks, as
was feared, they were greeted by cheering crowds. Priests
waving thuribles escorted the troops into their citadels.
It had been a bold gamble on Hitler’s part. At this stage,
Hitler had spoken a lot about rearmament but he was not yet
in a position to fight a war with France. If the French chose
to retaliate, Germany would have been forced into the humili-
ation of admitting that they were not ready for war. The
British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, expressed ‘regret’
over the move. The French did not act. Hitler had called their
bluff,
In his domestic policy, Hitler had achieved what he claimed
to have been a ‘bloodless revolution’. It had certainly been a
good deal less bloody than the French or the Russian revolu-
tions, even if the end result was a police state in which
Thomas Mann’s novels were publicly burned, neighbours
were encouraged to snoop upon one another and report
suspected Iews or Communists to the secret police, and more
and more absolute power was being handed to the leadership
of one mentally unbalanced fanatic.
The stage was now set for a period of European history in
which Hitler would attempt to apply the same good luck to
foreign policy. Having brought about a Nazi revolution with
the loss of only a few hundred lives, he would proceed, as he
hoped, to conquer Europe by means of bluff, threat, histri-
onic speeches and big military displays.
Historians, economists and students of Hitler’s remarkable
personality debate a number of issues. One is whether the
success of his economic and political revolution at home had,
from the very beginning, depended upon putting Germany
on a war economy — whether the economic miracle would
have been possible if he had not all along been planning the
war which would take millions of lives.
That is one issue. Another is whether hindsight shows us
that war could have been avoided. If, at any one stage of his
diplomatic master-strokes, he had been told that Britain,
France and their allies would not allow what Hitler demanded,
would he have retreated? Could peace in fact have been main-
tained had the Western Allies been braver in their resistance
to Hitler? V
A third question, which is of more immediate interest to
his biographers, is the state of Hitler’s health, and in particu-
lar of his mental health. By 1938, Sir Nevile Henderson, the
British Ambassador in Germany, was expressing the view that
the Leader was ‘on the borderline of madness’?
The answers to the first two sets of questions are, in the
popular sense, academic, since all that matters is not what
could have happened, but what did in fact happen. Hitler did,
against the advice of his generals, deliberately advance
Germany to a full-scale war footing by the end of the 1930s
through military conscription and a covert programme of
rearmament. The exact point at which he chose to do so, and
whether he did so as a result of a long-hatched, plan, as writ-
ten about in My Struggle, or whether he did so inch by inch,
scarcely aware of what he was doing, is irrelevant. So, too, is
it irrelevant to ask whether peace could have been preserved
if the British or the French had not followed the policy known
as appeasement, allowing Hitler to dismantle Czechoslovakia
in 1938-9. Events unfolded as they did. To ask whether things
could have happened otherwise is the task not of history but
of the parlour game.
\/Vhether Hitler’s medical condition affected events is,
however, of direct relevance. Here the biographer must make
a judgement. In 1944, only six years after Ambassador
Henderson expressed the view that Hitler was mad, there was
a famous plot to assassinate Hitler. It included many of the
military top brass, and was supported by the brilliant young
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The pastor’s father, Dr Karl
Bonhoeffer, the psychiatric director of Berlin’s Charity
Hospital, favoured a medical putsch, in which a team of
doctors simply declared the Leader to be insane.
The medical profession is constantly revising what is, and
is not, sanity, but there would surely be a case for suggesting
that Hitler was at the very least mentally unbalanced, and that
the imbalance from 1936 onwards became ever more
pronounced, the temper-tantrums more extreme, the self-
aggrandizement and self-pity taken to ever more operatic
heights. And there is no doubt that Hitler’s rages and exces-
sive demands were so intolerable to those who came into his
presence that they were prepared to do anything to appease
them. How far he manipulated his ‘madness’ to achieve his
political ends it is difficult to say.
From now onwards in his life, Hitler’s medical history
must be read alongside that of his political and military
triumphs and disasters. His mother, Klara, had died just
before Christmas 1907 aged only forty-seven. It was a death
which obsessed him. Christmas was nearly always a gloomy
time for him as he contemplated it.
When Hitler himself turned forty-seven, his health obses-
sions, which had always been acute, rose to levels of hypo-
chondriacal paranoia. It is a paradoxical fact about human
beings that they agonize about trivia and then make the big
decisions on impulse — when choosing a wife or a house to
live in. One would have expected so health-conscious an indi-
vidual as Hitler to select a doctor of high reputation, perhaps
from one of the best teaching hospitals in Berlin. But an
essential ingredient in Hitler’s nature was the con man’s fear
of being found out. \/Vhen discussing military matters, he
instinctively disliked the company of nearly all his generals.
His lower—middle-class edginess made him ill at ease in the
company of gentlemen — Nevile Henderson, for example,
filled him with unease. One suspects that some self-protective
instinct prevented him from choosing a medical adviser who
might at some stage prescribe the sedative syringe or even the
strait-jacket.
At Christmas 1936, after his annus mi-rabilis, Hitler was
uncharacteristically cheerful. The woeful recollections of
Klara Hitler’s pathetic demise in Linz at Christmas-time 1907
could not altogether diminish the joy he felt at the list of his
triumphs: the reoccupation of the Rhineland with not one
casualty; the Olympic_Games; the party and the armed forces
now firmly under his absolute power. Only one conqueror
could not be resisted and that was death itself. In 1935, he had
become hoarse. A tiny polyp was removed from his larynx
and he had been terrified that it would turn out to be a malig-
nant tumour. Now, as he reached the age which had been his
mother’s when she died, he engaged a new medical adviser
— one who would be with him until the end.
Dr Theo Morell was recommended not by another doctor
but by the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, a friend since
the early 1920s. Dr Morell was a skin specialist with a wealthy
practice in Berlin’s Kurftirstendamm. His client list, perhaps
appropriately, included actors and film stars worried about
moles, lumps, spots or warts. He was fat and unprepossessing
in appearance. His large hands were hairy and the nails were
often dirty. He once wiped a table with a bandage before
tying it around a patient’s arm. Like Hitler himself, Morell
was a fantasist and liar of advanced degree. When he was
taken into American custody after the war, for example, he
claimed to be the true discoverer of penicillin. The secret had
been stolen by the British Secret Intelligence Service?
' Hoffmann was a procurer of more than just a doctor. It
was in his photographic studio that Hitler had met Eva
Braun, a seventeen-year-old convent-educated girl who
would eventually become his wife. Her devotion to him
became intense very early, and she found the demands of his
popularity and his political life all but impossible to endure.
As his career took him away from her on speaking engage-
ments and made its meteoric swoops upwards, she had many
outbursts, and made suicide attempts.
When Hitler first consulted Dr Morell, he was himself
suffering from a number of nervous complaints. He had
eczema on his feet and legs so sore that he was often unable
to wear boots. He had an interrupted sleep pattern. He had
gastric problems: pains and cramps in the epigastric region.
And, an embarrassing complaint for a man who had been
described in the Volkischer Beobachter as standing like a
statue, beyond the measure of earthly man,3 Hitler suffered
acutely from meteorism: perhaps he did not suffer so acutely
as those around him, since meteorism is uncontrolled fart-
ing, a condition exacerbated by Hitler’s strictly vegetarian
diet.
Dr Morell prescribed Dr Koster’s Anti-Gas pills, a formula
which contained nux vomica, a tiny portion of strychnine.
Morell also gave intravenous vitamin injections to supple-
ment Hitler’s diet. The treatment appeared to increase his
tendency, already pronounced, to bursts of preternatural
energy. Morell was an extremely bad doctor. He can perhaps
not be blamed for the next miserable nine years of European
history, but his contribution did not help.

^^^^^^
After two years of war with Britain
he saw Japan primarily as a way of undermining Britain. He
did not see that Japan would be a useful ally against Russia,
and that, had Japan attacked Siberia at the moment he
launched his Barbarossa campaign, there would have been a
real chance of defeating the Soviet Union. With his typical
deviousness, Hitler did not even mention his Russian inva-
sion plans when Matsuoka visited him days before the
Barbarossa offensive. Matsuoka resigned as Foreign Minister
not long after in protest over ]apan’s refusal to engage on the
Siberian front.
The Iapanese were in the war for what they could get out
of it. They did not want a long, drawn-out conflict, still less a
mutually assured plan of world-destruction. As early as 1942,
Emperor Hirohito was instructing his Prime Minister, Tojo,
‘not to miss any opportunity to terminate the war’.”
But it was the Iapanese who had made the war a truly
global conflict some months earlier. On 7 December 1941
they bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, destroying a sizeable
proportion of the American fleet. Had more ships been in
harbour that morning, the Iapanese might have had some
chance, eventually, of winning a war against the United States
in the Far East. As it was, they brought into the war a rich,
huge enemy, who had now finally been forced to side with
Britain and its empire against Hitler. The Iapanese thereby
released Stalin from any fear that he would be attacked on his
eastern front.
Hitler, unable to appreciate the blow which the Iapanese
had unwittingly struck against their own side, was exultant.
‘We cannot lose this war! Now we have a partner who has not
been defeated in three thousand years!’ On the basis of this
flimsy piece of history, Hitler proceeded to compound the
blunder of invading Russia. Having allowed his anti-Iewish
mania to blind him to the extreme anti-Semitism of the
American establishment, the strength of isolationism in the
United States Senate and the unwillingness of the American
public to engage in a world war, he decided that Roosevelt
was being manipulated by a gang of Iews. For this ridiculous
and inaccurate reason, he declared war on the United States
of America, and thereby sealed his own doom.

Hitler by A.N. Wilson

What both Goebbels and Hitler did probably learn from
their Catholic upbringing was a system of control. In the
years when they were growing up, the Catholic Church
throughout Europe had seen a catastrophic decline in
numbers. Its leadership felt itself threatened by what was
called Modernism, the attempt to reconcile scientific learn-
ing, modern Biblical scholarship and modern philosophy
with the evolving teaching of Christianity. In 1906, the Pope,
Pius X, had issued a savage attack on the Modernists and
instituted what was in effect a purge of the Church. Catholics
were encouraged to tell tales on any priest or religious figure
who seemed to be tainted with Modernism. There were
extraordinary cases of stray conversations overheard on rail-
way journeys being reported to the authorities, and careers in
the Church being ruined in consequence. The Church
displayed what was in effect thought-policing. Its techniques
were eagerly copied by the extremist politicians of Left and
Right in subsequent generations.
When someone begged the Pope to have mercy on a
suspected Modernist, Pius X replied, ‘Kindness is for fools.’
Hitler hated Catholicism and in time came to persecute it.
But he learnt much from watching its system of power. He
told Heinrich Himmler (who had been there from the time
of the Munich putsch and who would become the chief
implementer of the Final Solution, the massacre of Europe’s
Iews) and SS General Reinhard Heydrich one evening in 1941
how much he had admired, as a youth, the way in which the
Pope and his henchmen had put down Modernism in 1905-
6.3 He admired the dedication of its celibate clergy. He
admired, too, the fact that it was classless. ‘A simple cowherd
can become a cardinal. That’s why the Church remains mili-
tant."‘ He admired its unchanging teachings. He admired its
ability to intrude and snoop into private lives. He admired its
lack of kindness. Above all, he admired its organizational
skills. Always and everywhere, Catholic parishes, schools and
dioceses, academies, and youth groups, guaranteed that the
faith was propagated in each area. And it was always the same
faith, rigidly controlled by the bosses of the hierarchy. More,
even, than the Communists, it was the Catholics who had
control over the minds of their adherents. Hitler and
Goebbels, the two Catholic renegades, recreated a political
organization which was comparable to a Church, with its
own youth movement, its own simple educational programme
or catechism, its own thought police, even the equivalent of
the Iesuit order in the elite paramilitary guard, the SS. S0
superbly well organized had the National Socialist Party

###
All this lay a little in the future. Before the years of militar-
istic triumph, there were the years of a seemingly miraculous
economic recovery. Gone were the strikes. Gone were the
unemployment queues. The miracle had been accomplished
by vast schemes of public works, the building of the motor-
ways (autobahns), the improvement of the nation’s infra-
structure, and by putting Germany on a war economy
(surreptitiously manufacturing parts for aircraft and tanks)
while superficially celebrating the prosperity of peace. Iohn
Maynard Keynes was vainly urging the democratic govern-
ments of Europe to ‘prime the pump’ and inject money arti-
ficially into their flagging economies. Hitler, like President
Roosevelt in America, put Keynesianism into action. In
Roosevelt’s case, it was Keynes with ‘fireside chats’ delivered
by radio to the grateful recipients of his ‘New Deal’. With
Hitler, it was Keynes set to a lurid Wagnerian music.
The economic recovery was played out against a repeated
programme of public spectacles. Hitler the architect and
stage—designer, Hitler the would-be operatic impresario,
made the story of Germany’s recovery into a vulgar pageant
of forward-looking nationalism. At Nuremberg, he staged
rallies which were breathtakingly spectacular. He engaged
the services of a young architect named Albert Speer, who
erected a twentieth-century equivalent of pagan games in
the world of ancient Sparta or Pergamum. It was in fact the
altars of Pergamum which were the inspiration for Speer’s
huge tribune structure in the stadium at Nuremberg, which
was eighty feet high and crowned by an eagle with a wing-
span of 100 ‘feet. At 40-feet intervals were anti-aircraft
archlights with a range of 25 000 feet. At the 1934 Parteitag
— Party Day — over 200,000 National Socialists marched into
the stadium’s Zeppelin Field, with 20,000 unfurled banners,
with lights, with torches, and, as a symbol of their return
both to work and to military strength, tools of toil and
weapons of war held aloft. Never in the history of the world
had there been political displays on quite this scale. The
effects on the huge crowds of the special lighting, of the
punctiliously choreographed marches and gymnastic
displays, of the songs and the lights were ecstatically excit-
ing. Others in the world watched, and sought to imitate, the
effect. For example, when the old librarian of the Vatican,
Pius XI, died and was replaced by a former Papal Nuncio to
Berlin, Eugenio Pacelli, he was crowned with a greater
public display, and with more outdoor special effects, than
had ever been used before by a Pope. It was directly inspired
by the Nuremberg rallies, as were the great march-pasts of
tanks and weaponry on Red Square which became a regular
feature of life in the Soviet Union. Sir Eric Phipps’s succes-
sor as British ambassador to Berlin was overwhelmed by the
Nazi pageantry. He recalled, ‘I spent six years in St Petersburg
before the war in the best days of the old Russian ballet, but

From Duel

In 1804, the idea of secession was not as heinous as Americans have
come to regard it as a result of the Civil War, when it became entangled
with the abolitionist crusade against slavery. In spite of George Washing-
ton’s perception of the Union’s importance, people’s chief allegiance re-
mained to their home states or regions. The Constitution and its
assertions of federal power were still regarded as an experiment.
As early as 1792, Secretary of State Jefferson had warned President
George Washington that the South was likely to secede because of south-
ern dissatisfaction with Hamilton’s financial system.“

Betsy Bonaparte

There was little evidence of this political uproar in Burr’s letters to his
daughter, Theodosia. On January 3rd, he scotched the rumor that he had
fought a duel with Senator Jackson of Georgia: “I am in perfect health . . .
General ]ackson is my good friend . . . I have had no duel or quarrel with
anybody,” he assured her.”
Of his visit to Annapolis, he wrote almost nothing. “I find the newspa-
pers have anticipated me. They will tell you where I dined and supped
and whom I saw.” Cf Mrs. Merry, whom Iefferson was now calling “a vi-
rago,” the vice president wrote: “Tall, fair, fat—pas trop, however. No
more than a desirable embonpoint. Much of grace and dignity, ease and
sprightliness; full of intelligence. An English-woman who has lived much
in Paris, and has all that could be wished of the manners of both coun-
tries. An amiable and interesting companion.”“°
Theodosia had also asked about another woman who was very much in
the news. Auburn—haired Betsy Patterson, daughter of a wealthy Mary-
lander, had just married Jerome Bonaparte, youngest brother of France's
first consul. Archbishop John Carroll, titular head of the Roman Catholic
church in America, had officiated. The vice president liked Betsy too: “A
charming little woman; just the size and nearly the figure of Theodosia
Burr Alston; by some thought a little like her; perhaps not so well in the
shoulders; dresses with taste and simplicity (by some thought too free);
has sense and spirit and sprightliness.”‘"
Betsy was a bit more than sprightly She later said she married Jerome
Bonaparte because he represented her one hope of getting out of Balti-
more. The thought of spending her life there had several times caused her
to consider suicide. Warned by the French charge, Louis Pichon, that the
marriage was illegal under French law and Napoleon was certain to op-
pose it, Betsy replied, “I would rather be the wife of Jerome Bonaparte for
an hour than any other man for life.”
During her stay in the federal district, swarms of oglers followed Betsy
everywhere. They came, one acerbic commentator wrote, “to see a naked
woman.” Perhaps to please Jerome, who had a boyish nostalgia for the
way women dressed (or undressed) in the early frenzy of the French Rev-
olution, Betsy’s outfits revealed almost everything. She disdained petti-
coats, so the outline of the little that remained covered was delightfully
visible. At her wedding, a guest said: “Whatever clothes worn by the bride
could have been put in my pocket.”
A lieutenant in the French navy, Jerome had been serving in the West
Indies when England and France Went to war again in the spring of 1803.
The British devoted a squadron of ships to capturing him, foreseeing that
he would make a valuable hostage. He had come to United States in the
hope of getting back to France incognito on an American ship. Neverthe-
less Federalists and their Wives saw ominous portents in this appearance
of Napoléon’s brother in America. Betsy’s revolutionary nakedness only
added to their dudgeon. Rumors swirled that Jerome was going to be-
come the first consul’s ambassador to the United States and his mission
was the negotiation of a new treaty of alliance This only fueled Federalist
anxiety about the Louisiana Purchase and the transfer of 15 million
American dollars to Napoléon’s war machine.
Virtually Confirming these rumors, President Jefferson, petulant over
Ambassador Merry's umbrage invited Betsy and Jerome Bonaparte to
dinner at the palace. When dinner was served Jefferson offered his arm
to the scantily clad Mrs. Bonaparte and led her to the place of honor at
the dinner table. What were already hostile Federalizts to think of such
behavior? The rumors of a sellout to France multiplied.

From Duel

Napoléon Bonaparte’s large shadow had already profoundly affected
General Hamilton’s politics. As early as 1798, when Napoleon first
emerged from the chaos of the French Revolution, Hamilton called him
“that unequalled conqueror from whom it is painful to detract, in whom
one would wish to find virtues worthy of his shining talents.” When
Napoléon brushed aside the feeble five—man directory that was trying to
rule France and made himself consul for ten years, with absolute power,
Hamilton and his Federalist friends regarded the event with a nice mix-
ture of admiration and cynicism. “After ten years of agitation, anarchy,
proscription, murder, pillage and crimes of every degree and eight years of
the must cruel and bloody wars,” wrote one Federalist, the French were
now subject to “the despotism of one man of sense, who may find it in his
interest to govern well and in his power to govern with steadfastness. . . .
General Bonaparte’s government is for the best for France . . . and he de-
serves the thanks of the world for its establishment.”
President Jefferson and his fellow Republicans somewhat nervously
tried to admire Bonaparte for a different reason: They hoped he was the
savior of their beloved French Revolution, which had showed signs of im-
minent collapse under the combined assaults of the crowned heads of Eu-
rope. The Jeffersonians strained their brains and syntax to look favorably
on Napoléon's emergence.
Jefferson piously announced he hoped it was really true that “Bonaparte
had usurped the government with the intention of making it a free one.”
When Napoléon forced Austria to sign the humiliating peace of
Lunéville in 1801 and the battered British signed a similar semicapitula-
tion at Arniens later in the year, leaving Napoléon master of Europe, the
Republicans gloated and cheered. They maintained that the revolution
that had begun in America had triumphed and even claimed that
Napoléon had been fighting America’s battle. If the English had beaten
Bonaparte, the Republicans’ reasoning went, London would have restored
a king to the French throne and launched a war of annihilation against
the United States.‘
Within the year, Napoleon confounded President ]efferson’s optimism
by having himself elected first consul for life and restoring the Catholic
church to all its ancient privileges in France. General Hamilton and his
fellow Federalists lost no time in roasting the discomfited Republicans.
The editorials in the New-York Evening Post, many of them dictated to
William Coleman by Hamilton at the end of his long working day, were
particularly savage: “Those who admired the French Revolution as a sys-
tem of liberty are now put into the most ridiculous, whimsical and con-
temptible situation imaginable. Their great high priest Bonaparte has left
them completely in the lurch . . . The First Consul has torn the mask
from democracy and branded its forehead with infamy forever.“
Paradoxically, the Evening Post continued to praise the “tranquility and
joy” that the elevation of Bonaparte had brought to France. The Post in-
sisted, as General Hamilton often did in his letters, that it was not America’s
business to tell the people of France what kind of government they should
choose. “A government must be fitted to a nation as much as a coat to an in-
dividual . . .What may be good at Philadelphia [the U.S. capital at the time]
may be bad in Paris and ridiculous at Peterburgh”[St. Petersburg]?
II
In America, as in the rest of the world, Napoleon had become a subject of
consuming interest. His taste in architecture, furniture, clothes, women,
and food were reported in omnivorous detail. Newspapers devoted
columns to telling their readers how fresh trout were caught in Lake
Geneva and rushed to the first consul’s table. For the Federalists, there
was political capital in publicizing the new Caesar’s imperial tastes. They
were mocking Napoléon’s indifference to the Republican simplicity that
President Jefferson, his penny—pinching ally George Clinton, and their
cohorts claimed was the epitome of revolutionary virtue.
Above all, Hamilton and the Federalists were pleased by the “emanci-
pation of that ill—starred country from the ravages of Jacobinism.” They
did not mourn for French liberty because in their view, France had never
been free. She had been ruled by a bloodthirsty atheistic mob, personified
by Maximilien de Robespierre, the leader of the Iacobin Club. (The name
derived from their original meeting place, a Dominican monastery; ]a—
cobin was the French name for the religious order.) The Federalists hoped
Napoléon’s usurpation had put anend to the seductive menace of the
Revolution’s war cry: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. “Every pious man re-
joices at the restoration of Christianity,” the ‘Evening Post added.’
But General Hamilton did not stop worrying about France. “The spirit
of Jacobinism which has almost desolated France and threatened the
whole world [is] now held in chains by the power of one man . . . If the
hand of the assassin [reached] Bonaparte, the monster [jacobinism]
would rage with more violence than ever,” Hamilton declared at a meet-
ing of the New York Federalists. This was the political equivalent of hav-
ing your cake and eating it too. Hamilton pointed to the awesome power
of France, supreme in Europe, with the fleets of Spain and Holland at her
beck and call. There seemed to be no nation or combination of nations
that could prevent her from achieving “universal empire.“ What had
President ]efferson done to meet this potential menace? He had virtually
beached the U.S. Navy and dismantled the U.S. Army, and agreed to pay
Napoléon $15 million for Louisiana. What could the President do if
Napoleon changed his mind, or was assassinated, and France decided to
take back Louisiana? Nothing.
In the spring of 1803, this unnerving idea had become more than a mere
possibility when the two—yea_r—oId peace of Amiens collapsed. Napoléon
announced he was going to invade England and dictate peace in St.
]ames’s Palace. Newspapers told how the so—called Man of Destiny was
summoning reserves from Italy, Switzerland, and Germany to assemble an
immense host, the Army of England, in the French channel ports and
Holland. Many Americans predicted an internal revolution if Napoléon
got his army ashore and the disenfranchised English masses started listen-
ing to the French siren song of ”Liberty, Equality, and Fratemity.i'
Commodore Thomas Truxtun’s letter to General Hamilton, deploring
]effelrson’s administration and calling for a revision of the Constitution,
enclosed a copy of a long letter Truxtun had written to Senator Timothy
Pickering, analyzing the chances of Napoleon successfully invading Eng-
land. The commodore pointed out the various parts of the English coast
where an army might land and what sort of naval support they would re-
quire. Truxtun thought Napoléon’s army would take horrendous casualties
at sea and the men who survived would be stopped on the beaches. But he
was by no means certain the Corsican—born general could not succeed: “A
Short time will make manifest Whether I have Judged correctly of the
Subject,” Tnixtun wrote. At stake was nothing less than the “happiness of
Nations.”

During the Directory:

The Incroyables ("incredibles") and their female counterparts, the Merveilleuses ("marvelous women", roughly equivalent to "fabulous divas"), were members of a fashionable aristocratic subculture in Paris during the French Directory (1795–1799). Whether as catharsis or in a need to reconnect with other survivors of the Reign of Terror, they greeted the new regime with an outbreak of luxury, decadence, and even silliness. They held hundreds of balls and started fashion trends in clothing and mannerisms that today seem exaggerated, affected, or even effete (decadent, self-indulgent). Some devotees of the trend preferred to be called "incoyable" or "meveilleuse", thus avoiding the letter R, as in "révolution." When this period ended, society took a more sober and modest turn.

Many Incroyables were "nouveaux riches" who had gained their wealth from selling arms and money lending. Members of the ruling classes were also among the movement's leading figures, and the group heavily influenced the politics, clothing, and arts of the period. They emerged from the muscadins, a term for dandyish anti-Jacobin street gangs in Paris from 1793 ^{[n 1]} who were important politically for some two years; the terms are often used interchangeably, though the muscadins were of a lower social background, being largely middle-class.

Ornate carriages reappeared on the streets of Paris the day after the execution (28 July 1794) of Maximilien Robespierre, which brought an end to the Reign of Terror and signalled the commencement of the Thermidorian Reaction. There were masters and servants once more in Paris, and the city erupted in a furor of pleasure-seeking and entertainment. Theaters thrived, and popular music satirized the excesses of the Revolution. One popular song of the period called on the French people to "share my horror" and to send "these drinkers of human blood" back amongst the monsters from which they had sprung. Its lyrics rejoiced that "your tormentors finally grow pale at the tardy dawn of vengeance".^[1]

Many public balls were bals des victimes at which young aristocrats who had lost loved ones to the guillotine danced in mourning dress or wore black armbands, greeting one another with violent movements of the head as if in decapitation.^{[n 2]} A ball held at the Hôtel Thellusson on the rue de Provence in the 9th arrondissement of Paris restricted its guest-list to the grown children of the guillotined.^[2]

The Merveilleuses scandalized Paris with dresses and tunics modeled after the ancient Greeks and Romans, cut of light or even transparent linen and gauze. Sometimes so revealing they were termed "woven air", many gowns displayed cleavage and were too tight to allow pockets. To carry even a handkerchief, the ladies had to use small bags known as reticules.^[3] They were fond of wigs, often choosing blonde because the Paris Commune had banned blond wigs, but they also wore them in black, blue, and green. Enormous hats, short curls like those on Roman busts, and Greek-style sandals were the rage. The sandals were tied above the ankle with crossed ribbons or strings of pearls. Exotic and expensive scents fabricated by perfume houses like Parfums Lubin were worn as both for style and as indicators of social station. Thérésa Tallien, known as "Our Lady of Thermidor", wore expensive rings on the toes of her bare feet and gold circlets on her legs.

Thérésa Tallien, a leadingMerveilleuse

The Incroyables wore eccentric outfits: large earrings, green jackets, wide trousers, huge neckties, thick glasses, and hats topped by "dog ears", their hair falling on their ears. Their musk-based fragrances earned them too the derogatory nickname muscadins among the lower classes, already applied to a wide group of anti-jacobins (see above). They wore bicorne hats and carried bludgeons, which they referred to as their "executive power." Hair was often shoulder-length, sometimes pulled up in the back with a comb to imitate the hairstyles of the condemned. Some sported large monocles, and they frequently affected a lisp and sometimes a stooped hunchbacked posture.

More from Explosive Acts

 Renoir°s Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre, which he paint-
ed in 1876, two years after the first Impressionist exhibition. What he shows,
are the wide open-air gardens filled with dancing couples, surrounded by
trees hung with lanterns. In the foreground a group of young friends have
red round a table to drink and talk, an enchanting evocation of a sunny
Sunday afternoon passed in good company, a carefree idyll on a par with the
artist’s scenes of boating parties on the Seine, of hot, lazy summer days by
river, those expressions of youthful charm that have nurtured a vision of
Paris, as a world of innocence, lost for ever with the outbreak
the First World War and the brutal arrival of the modern age.
Renoir's Impressionist technique reinforces such a mood; its soft, fluid
colors add to the dreamlike quality, an effect imitated by countless photo—
graphers and film cameramen smearing Vaseline on their lenses to replicate
that sun—drenched, wine—hazy feel for fashion shoots and television com-
mercials. Not for Renoir the sad-eyed tarts and their hard—faced pimps, the
sallow butcher’s boy with his ill-fitting jacket and his bad teeth, the old hag
who has drunk too much and who probably has not washed in a month.
Indeed not for Renoir any of the real characters who regularly attended the
weekend dances — most of the people concentrated at the front of his paint-
ing were friends who had been persuaded to go with him, so that they could
take up the same positions over the several weekends that it took to finish so
large a work. They were used to it — Renoir often asked them to pose in the
large abandoned garden behind his house near the moulin, a house he had
chosen when the idea of the painting first came to him, a time recalled by
friend, Georges Riviere, who remembered days
". . . spent happily between the old lodging in the rue Cortot
and the Moulin, where Renoir worked in the afternoons at his
great canvas of the Ball. We carried this canvas from the rue
Cortot to the Moulin every day because the picture was paint-
  ed entirely on the spot. This was not always very easy-going
-  when there was a wind blowing and the big stretcher threat-
ened to fly away like a kite above the Butte."
We can identify some of the friends in the painting, Riviere sitting with the
  painter Henri Chervex at the table and a dancer called Estelle on a bench, but
  this use of models makes the scene as artificially conceived and executed as
 any academic work, with none of that spontaneity that was thought to be so
 important to the Impressionists. Such a painting has less to do with realism
 than with the old idealism, the notion that art should be a begetter of well-
being and joy, rather than the vehicle for portraying the truth about con-
temporary life that Baudelaire had proposed.
From this perspective Princeteau was more of a Realist than Renoir — his
hunting scenes might exist within a sealed—off aristocratic enclave, but they
represented what was there, not some parallel fantasy of what ought to be
there. Of course Renoir and the other Impressionists had gone much further
in their use of colour and light than Princeteau whose brighter palette and
sketchy brush—strokes were due to the rapid way he worked rather than to
any deep interest in luminosity. But to someone like Henri, the difference
would not have seemed as great as it did to those students working in the
ateliers of the grand masters of history painting, where dark tones and heavy
shadows were the rule, and where Impressionism appeared a dangerous
revolutionary force. To Henri, there was little incentive to rebel against
someone who was quite so easy-going. Unlike the strict disciplinarians of the
Ecole de Beaux-Arts or the little dictators who ruled over their private
ateliers, insisting that their pupils mould themselves into the ‘house’ style by
imitating the masterls works, Princeteau saw nothing wrong in Henri trying
out the styles of the other occupants of the Cite, some of whom were pro-
ducing work quite different from his animalier interests and who, at a
personal level, did not share the social milieu that Adele assumed to be that
of the entire block. Indeed, Henri had discovered that there was another
friend of Alphls working in the Cite des Artistes, though not one that Adele
would ever have chosen as a tutor for her son.
Jean-Louis Forain was hardly the sort of man anyone would have associ~
ated with Alph. A character straight out of some scurrilous story of the
Bohemian underworld, Forain was a working—class boy from Reims who had
taught himself to paint by copying pictures in the Louvre after his family
moved to Paris. True, he had been spotted by Carpeaux, the most fashion-
able sculptor of the Second Empire, and offered free lessons, but Carpeaux
was a drunk and for some unspecified reason threw the young man out, as
did his parents, whereupon he became a vagrant, forced to live and sleep on
the streets of the capital. All told, Forain had led a bizarre existence up to
1884 when he took a studio near Princeteau, an odd decision given his
origins and the fact that he was never an animalier or a peintre sportzf. He
occasionally painted racecourses but it was the fashionable crowd that inter-
ested him rather than the splendid horseflesh, and even then he was more
likely to offer a somewhat sarcastic view of the follies of the rich rather than
a portrait of the beau monde in all its glory, an approach that reflects the two
streams in his art.
*****
The new illustrated journalism
was about to transform society as much as radio, cinema and television
would do in the coming century. The popular illustrated press would be 3
crucial element in the social and cultural changes that make the fin de siécle
so fascinating — an upheaval that would touch everything from politics to art
and would, as he correctly saw, be the forerunner of a much larger revolu-
tion that was already percolating in and around Montmartre.
What Salis and Bruant and their many imitators were unwittingly
unleashing was a phenomenon that would dominate almost every aspect of
life in the newly industrialised world: mass popular culture. Not the old,
slowly evolving folk culture of earlier ages, not the ‘High Culture’ of a
ruling élite, but something entirely new, growing so rapidly and with such
broad influence that nothing would remain immune to its pervasive appeal.
The first manifestation of this revolution was the sudden appearance of a
widely circulated illustrated press whose growth matched the earlier explo-
sion of newspaper and magazine publishing and whose influence was to
prove equally far—reaching and unpredictable. Again, this was largely a
result of technical innovations. Various photographic processes, most
notably photogravure, replaced the old laborious wood-block engravings.
The use of zinc plates, instead of stones, for lithography provided flexible
sheets that could be bent into cylinders, which meant that illustrations could
be run off on the same high—speed circular printing presses as the rest of the
publication. The most spectacular result of these innovations was undoubt-
edly the Petit ]0urnal’s Sunday colour supplement, and its subsequent
imitators, but there were also illustrated equivalents of the small literary
magazines, produced for artistic or political reasons, whose influence was far
greater than their limited circulation. The earliest artists who interested
themselves in these new developments were inevitably those already
working in the field of commercial illustration - Forain, Caran d’Ach
Henri-Gabriel Ibels and Steinlen were already producing black-and-white
drawings with a distinct social or political message in the Daumier tradition
and easily made the transition to colour. Allied to the new print journalism,
the new illustrated press also involved itself with politics and scandal, using
the naturalist style to depict the underworld of crime and vice, a preoccupa-
tion with the sordid and the decadent that would make Forajn, for a time at
least, the most popular artist in France, a household name, when those who he
himself adlnired, like Degas, languished in obscurity.

The evolution of art

From Explosive Acts:
When Pons joined the Garde de Monsieur in 1814 he found that both his
patron the Duc d’Artois and his brother the King had surrounded themselves
with writers and artists, much as their ancestors had done. Before the
Revolution and during the years of exile, Artois had been the centre of
English influence at court. This had nothing to do with politics, England
remained the eternal enemy, but was more a question of style — of English
clothes, dogs, guns, of anything to do with hunting and riding. And this in
turn was- to have a key influence on artistic taste, for the English had devel-
oped a form of art closely linked to these outdoor pleasures, which crossed
the Channel in the form of the sporting prints that were to become highly
fashionable in French aristocratic circles. The century-old tradition of paint-
ing hunting scenes in France had tended to concentrate on the royal hunt as
a part of courtly ceremonial whereas in England a more popular tradition
had flourished, from humble scenes of coursing to the more elevated images
of horse-racing by major artists such as Stubbs. This was an art that
appealed directly to those like Artois who lived for the hunt and it was not
the great names of the official art world, men such as Ingres and the Baron
Gros, who were part of his entourage but the altogether more humble figure
of Carle Vernet, a painter of horses and hunting much influenced by the
English style.
Son of Joseph, the famous marine artist, father of Horace the history
painter,Carle was best known for prints of his ‘lively swan-necked’ horses
taken directly from studies of the living animal rather than from the antique
originals that were the usual objects of study. Before the Revolution, Carle
was a primary exponent in France of the English tradition of sporting and
animal art, much admired by Artois with whom he hunted, sketching him in
action and painting the scene later in a manner that still seems extraordi-
narily fresh and lively when compared to the static Classicism then coming
into fashion. For Vernet it was the dramatic, living moment that mattered —
his painting of a horse startled by lightning still shocks when set beside the
primly trottingchariot horses then in vogue.
This newly established Classicism was rigidly opposed to any art that was
not studio based. Nature was, by definition, not art and while it was just
possible to begin with sketches from the motif, antique originals were
preferable, and in either case the final result had to be worked up, indoors,
according to clearly defined principles. Subjects, too, were to be drawn from
antiquity or mythology, while anything contemporary, whether a landscape
or a recent event, was shunned. It was not unknown for a leading Classicist
to leave a gap in his canvas where a glimpse of landscape would be filled in
by a hack specialist hired to carry out so menial a task, and not surprisingly,
paintings of anything connected with real life — portraits, seascapes,
battles, animals — were considered mere genre, on a level far below the high
Classicism of the great masters. A landscape was just about acceptable if
some hint of antiquity was included — a temple on a hilltop, a satyr in the
glade. But the greatest suspicion was reserved for artists such as Carle Vernet
who persisted in painting horses in motion, fiery forces of untrammelled
nature, so worryingly popular with the ignorant public. And they were right
to be suspicious, for it would be the painters of animal and sporting scenes
who would lead the way out of the studio in what, as the nineteenth century
progressed, became a mass exodus to the countryside and the move to paint
directly from nature, unregulated, in the raw.
Vernet was followed by another friend Pons made during his service at
court, the artist Theodore Géricault, who had joined the King’s Guard,
whose members also hunted with Artois” troops. When Pons first met
Céricault, he was just finishing The Wounded Cuirassier Leaving the Field of
Battle, in which a defeated rider leads his nervous mount out of the fray, a
dark image of the collapse of Empire, that disturbed, even irritated, many of
the visitors to the first Salon of the Restauration. Géricault had been a pupil
of Vernet and was always keen to emphasise that he shared his teacher°s love
of the fleeting moment. He recounted how he was once out
riding to Saint~Cloud when he saw a dappled grey carthorse suddenly panic
and bolt into the sunshine — and just like Vernet and his horse startled by
lightning, so too this escaping beast was hastily sketched and used for
Géricaults first major work, The Charging Chasseur. By lifting Vernet’s
embryonic realism out of the obscure world of the sporting print and thrust-
ing it into the mainstream of high art, Géricault had taken a huge stride
down that road that would one day lead to an art of modern life, drawn
directly from nature. And one of his earliest followers, if only on a modest

The Rock Pool

by Cyril Connolly

And after all—why should he
write it? It is part of the happiness of youth that
the sense of power, like the mystical apprehension
of goodness, can be enjoyed to the full without the
necessity of projecting it into the tainted realm of
action. As with those public-school men who
advertise in the newspapers: ‘Go anywhere. Do
anything,’ the formula does justice for both will
and deed. This conviction of intense disponibilite
is known as promise and whom the gods wish to
destroy they first call promising.
‘Oh. Ah. Yes.’
Jimmy did not pay much attention to the spurts
and silences of N aylor’s explanation. It appeared
he too was writing a book. ‘just a sensible little
thing about myself. It’s called "Ah, me! The
Mallows" I think you’ll like it. It begins: “There
are only two poisons: success and failure. I prefer
the alkaline”. ’ He tittered expectantly. Evidently
the book had begun like that before. He ended
by asking Naylor to tea the next day, at Eddie’s-
from-the-top. ‘I see you’re a boy after my own
heart, effete, noctambulous, perfervid. After tea
you will come and see my books ——all the literature
of detumescence, and who knows, we may have
supper in some delicious night-box!’
and
With the silvery heave of a dolphin out of the
water, the force, the beauty of the present moment
seemed to flash into something almost visible and
then sink back into the natural current of the
afternoon.
and
He felt old and miserable, going through life
trying to peddle a personality of which people
would not even accept a free sample. He remem-
bered the parties he had frequented in London.
F iddling about with the bookshelves or the plates
of biscuits while everybody turned their back or
seemed to recognize him only at the last possible
moment. There are times when the fear of
life is greater than the fear of death, when the
remaining years, forty or fifty of them, stretch
out ahead like the steps of an infinitely tiring stair-
case. Sonia took one look at his long empty face.
She felt for the first time the proximity of some
ancient enemy of youth and spirit, and moved
quietly away.
and
Whew! He remembered their friendship at
school. They had sat next each other and held
hands over a copy of Latin verses.
‘Little brown brother, little brown brother,
Are you awake in the dark?
Here we lie cosily close to each other,
Hark to the song of the lark! ’ _
a
(Ecce carmen
It had given them a sentimental erotic thrill,
though from the rest of the poem it had turned
out to be a potato talking.

The Ionian Mission

Patrick O'Brian

On

deck Gill, the officer of the watch, had everything well in

hand: in the cabin below Killick had arranged cushions in

the Oriental manner under Professor Graham’s direction,

and had lit the hubblebubble laid in for the purpose at

Valetta — tobacco-smoke rose from the cabin-skylight, and

the afterguard breathed it in greedily.

The caique upset all natural calculations by suddenly

darting round to the larboard mainchains at the last

moment; but the Navy, accustomed to the wild vagaries

of foreigners, dealt with the situation directly, facing about

and providing a mirror-image of the proper ceremonies,

bringing the old gentleman aboard without a feather of

the splendid aigrette in his turban being ruffled.

He was led to the cabin, where Jack welcomed him,

Graham acting as the interpreter: his only function was

to invite Captain Aubrey to dine with the Bey, and to

apologize for the lateness of the invitation — the Bey

had been hunting in the marshes and the news of the

frigate’s arrival had not reached him for a great while:

he was desolated; he lay in ashes.

‘What was the Bey hunting?’ asked Jack, who was

interested in these things and who in any case felt that

some polite conversation might compensate for Killick’s

lukewarm version of sherbet and the plain Navy twist in

the hubblebubble, neither of which seemed quite to the

company’s taste.

‘Jews,’ said Graham, relaying the question and the

answer.

Impressionism and

From Explosive Acts:
The younger crowd went to Tanguy’s little shop, then at 14 rue
Clauzel, not least because the kindly old Breton was willing to exchange
colours and brushes for paintings no matter how wild and unsellable they
might prove. His generosity was especially needed in the early years follow-
ing the upheaval, when the official art world, taking its tone from a highly
conservative government, closed its doors more firmly than before against
any form of experiment or deviation from the established ethos set down by
the Académie and the Salon, once again pre—eminent as the guardians of
approved culture. The problem for these defenders of the status quo was the
age-old allure of the new and the irrepressible desire of the young to contra-
dict their elders.
All over Paris, in schools and studios, art students bored with the daily
grind of learning the academic disciplines, gossiped and joked and passed on
news of the outrageous things that were being done by artists who were
openly in defiance of the rules. The best known of these outrageous icono-
clasts were called Impressionists, a name which seemed to say it all, sug-
gesting something intriguingly unclear and ambiguous where the great
history painters were solid, bold and straightforward. No wonder the word
itself was enough to evoke ideas of mystery and romance in those who had
 never seen any of their works. Even Henri, safely immurged so Adéle hoped,
 Princeteau°s studio, heard the whispers and longed to know more about
these painters who were said to daub pigment like children and who made
their canvases so bright they hurt the eyes.
Things had moved on from the days when Monet had been content to
work alongside Courbet, admiring the older man's instinctive attempts to
lighten his palette. Since then the technique had become far more self-
conscious with Monet and a group of like-minded friends studying the work
of optical scientists like Chevreul, Helmholtz and Rood in an attempt to
understand the fundamental laws that govern colour and light. What Monet
and his friends discovered were often practices they had been edging towards
while painting outside, direct from nature, but which were now reinforced
and carried out to a more confident degree. The scientists showed how
colours tend to tinge the space around them, which to Monet and his friends
meant that shadows should cease to be nothing more than dark patches and
Jshould reflect colour from the surrounding areas. The resulting brightness
was further enhanced by the use of complementary colours — red and green,
blue. and orange — side by side, which made the canvas shimmer, and this
brilliance was further enhanced by the technique of ‘optical mixing’ where-
by short dabs of pure colour were set down beside each other so that at a
distance they appeared to combine, yet without the lifelessness that often
resulted when the pigment was mixed on the palette before being spread on
 a canvas. Taken a stage further, allowing some of the white underpainting
appear between the dabs of pure colour and the result was, in the vocab-
ulary of the time, ‘luminous’, especially when set against the heavy, deliber-
ately sombre canvases approved by the Salon. Indeed that was the problem- 
the Salon was having none of it, rejecting automatically any of these
impertinent sunny canvases that were not only glaringly bright but which
dared to depict scenes of ordinary life such as people having picnics or boat-
ing on the Seine.
Yet despite this implacabe opposition, by the time Henri began his stud-
ies, there was hardly an art student in the city who was not aware that the
new school existed. Even Princeteau must have learned about them as far
back as 1874 when Monet and his colleagues decided to organise their own
exhibition in what had been the studios of the photographer Nadar on the 
Boulevard de Capucines. It ran for a month, from 15 April to 15 May 1874.
Thirty artists took part, lesser names clustered round the central group of the
movement that the exhibition gave birth to: Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste
Renoir, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro. Auguste Renoir and his brother
Edmond seem to have done most of the hard work. Auguste chose a back-
ground of reddish—brown wallpaper and organised the hanging while
Edmond dealt with the catalogue, doing his best to persuade the participants
to buck up the affair by choosing more exciting titles. Monet was the least
helpful in this regard, tediously dubbing his canvases exactly what they
were, a railway station or a street name. Under Edmondls influence he
renamed a hazy river view, painted near Le I-lavre in 1872, Impression:
Sunrise and when an irate critic seized on this passing invention and
launched an attack on these mere ‘Impressionists’, what had been a loose
gathering of young painters coalesced into a group.
Five further exhibitions were held by the new Impressionists up to 1881,
the year after I-Ienri’s studies began, and while there is no record that he
attended the last show, it is hard to believe that he could have avoided all
knowledge of it. Though some of the more diehard critics continued to rant
about this impertinent new art, a surprising number had already been won
over and while the great names of the Académie fought a tough rearguard
action to ban such stuff from their studios, it was not long before hints of the
Impressionist technique, the short little dabs of pure bright colour, were
spreading across the canvases of the capital’s art students at a speed that was
clearly unstoppable.
Today, we tend to assume that something so radical and so rapid must
have shocked everyone but what the Impressionists were doing only seems
so revolutionary if their small, light, bright scenes of people dancing and
boating are placed beside the great dark ponderous episodes from ancient
Greece, Imperial Rome and the Courts of the Middle Ages that dominated
the Salon. If one moves away from that David and Goliath contest, compar-
ing the new art to other sorts of work that was also painted from direct con-
tact with nature, the shock is far less brutal. Monet and his band were only
one of several groups that had branched out from the line that links Vernet,
Céricault, Delacroix and Courbet, and however and whenever Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec first came across the new school it would be safe to assume
that it would hardly have horrified him. Accustomed as he was to Princeteau
and those like him, whose studies of animals were done from the motif with
quick sharp brush-strokes and a notable lack of Academic ‘finish’, neither
the Impressionists’ open—air practice nor their tiny strokes of colour would
have seemed especially unusual. Discovering this new school was less likely
to have radicalised Henri°s technique than to have simply confirmed what
was already standard practice. To the question Was Toulouse-Lautrec an
Impressionist, the answer has to be no, though his style was certainly impres-
sionistic, which is not quite the same thing.
Even the subjects normally chosen by the Impressionists would not have
seemed strange to Henri. Following Manet, the Impressionists had taken up
Baudelaire’s challenge to be painters of modern life, but their depictions of
the pleasures of the rising urban bourgeoisie, the dances and picnics and the
bustling boulevards and busy railway termini that were central to their lives,
was hardly very radical. Monet may have worked alongside Courbet in
Normandy but his subsequent art reflects little of the older man’s political
concerns. None of the Impressionists joined Courbet when the Commune was
declared and far from being as offensively revolutionary as their first critics
claimed, scenes like their Sunday-afternoon boating parties, hazy under the
sun-dappled surface of their canvases, only create the illusion that life under
the new Republic was very pleasant indeed. Even Pissarro, who held gen-
uinely radical political views, only later expressed them in his art, and while
l\./Ionet and Renoir might express radical opinions, as most artists did at the
time, such things were not allowed to seep into their paintings. Theirs is a
dreamy, unblemished view of fin-de-siécle life that found its sweetest expres-
sion in the work Renoir was doing in the 18'/Os when he lived in
Montinartre, work that shows not a hint of the political sentiments that are
usually associated with the home of the Commune and the heartland of rev-
olutionary theory.
Far from sympathising with Courbet's activities during the siege, Renoir
did everything possible to avoid joining in. Finding himself trapped in Paris
when the Commune was declared and threatened with compulsory enlist-
ment in its defence forces, Renoir persuaded an old friend, who had been ele-
vated to police commissioner under the new regime, to issue him yvith a pass
that would get him through the lines and out ‘to his mother s house in
Louve where he spent the rest of the conflict painting the surround-
mg countryside as if nothing were happening. ‘They were madmen,’ he said
somewhat ruefully, ‘but they had about them the little flame that never dies.’
With peace restored Renoir and his wife to moved into the outskirts of Montmartre
where they stayed for over forty years — at one point with a studio in the
Batueau Lavoir, the disused laundry where Picasso would later work.
Every weekend Renoir would climb to the summit of the Butte where
one of the surviving windmills, the Moulin de la Galette, still stood. Far from
milling flour for the little flat cakes after which it was named, the windmill
and the area around it had long been transf ormed into a ginguette, an open_
air bar which in turn had evolved into a large dance area, outside under the trees.