Napoleon, Kissinger, and World History

What the film, Napoleon, and the death of Kissinger tell us about history

Dec 01, 2023

The way you tell the story of Napoleon reveals how the historian imagines the plot of world history. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon awkwardly straddles comedy and farce, but never gets to the tragic heart of the French Republican European Empire.

The way you tell the story of Henry Kissinger reveals how statecraft imagines world order. The death of the grand old man of American diplomacy this week ushers in the collapse of American world leadership and its fancies of a world order based only on Western rules.

This week in Fragments of the Burning Archive:

🎙️On YouTube I reviewed Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, and on the podcast I improvised an episode on Kissinger, reflecting on how we tell stories of great people in history.

💭My world history view explores what the film of Napoleon and the death of Kissinger show us about how we tell stories of world history and order.

➕ I observe the rival empires of China and USA, political disorder caused by Western beliefs in superiority, fragmented societies expressed in the condition of exile, and cultural renewal in a Commonwealth of Letters.

🌏I highlight Adveevka, 2024 elections and Australia’s voting record at the UN as three world events to follow over the next three months

Let’s explore Fragments of the Burning Archive, my live journal of historical writing to make sense of this time of crisis, war, peace, ruin and fragile hope.

🎥Napoleon the Movie: Epic Fail

Last week I watched Ridley Scott’s much touted historical epic biopic, Napoleon. No spoilers, but I was disappointed. But why sit alone in resentment when you have a channel to share your thoughts with readers and viewers? So I made a video movie review on my YouTube channel, Napoleon Movie Review and the book I read to get over the let down.

Much to my delight it went “viral for me”, with over 26,000 views. It was a breakthrough video for me. If you have joined the Substack as a result, a very special welcome to you.

The video explains what I liked and what I did not like about the film. I also share some ideas on books that can offer a fresh perspective on Napoleon. Both are written by the distinguished historian of imperial Russia, Dominic Lieven:

In the Shadows of Gods: the Emperor in World History (2022)
Russia against Napoleon: the Battle for Europe, 1807-1814 (2009)

I also have gathered a pile of books on Napoleon, and am considering doing a live stream on YouTube in the next week or so. Would you be interested to join me?

💭Napoleon, Kissinger and genre in world history

““The genres were Romance in Michelet, Comedy in Ranke, Tragedy in Tocqueville, and Satire in Burckhardt.”

Hayden White, Metahistory

Romance, comedy, satire and tragedy are four story structures or genres of narrative. There are many debates about how many basic stories the human mind narrates, but little doubt that all stories are generated and constrained by such genres.

Even film. Even history. Even ‘grand strategy’, as practised by that former historian of international relations, Henry Kissinger.

The historian and literary philosopher of history, Hayden White, propounded a theory of how all historians more or less unwittingly perceive their stories through such story-telling modes. Nothing is, but thinking makes it so, even in history.

White studied the plots of the seminal historians of the nineteenth century, many of whose world views were formed in response to the events of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the conservative reaction after the Congress of Vienna. He found in those plots clear preferences. Michelet wrote of the romance of the revolution. Ranke wrote of the comedy of governing institutions. Tocqueville wrote of the tragedy and fatal flaws of France and America. Burckhardt acidly wrote satire of the great men of the civilization of the Renaissance. They could all work beyond the boundaries of genre, at times, but their histories emerged from a dialogue between the real materials of past experience and the mental models of their minds.

The same might be said of Ridley Scott’s film, Napoleon. It emerged from the story-telling preferences of Scott’s team as they had a dialogue with the real traces of Napoleon’s biography and the historical record. The trouble was that Scott and his script-writer showed little interest in having dialogue with the real past, dismissing historians as “not being there, so what would they know.” Instead, they chose familiar propaganda memes and Anglo-American prejudices.

Moreover, the Director did not impose a clear narrative vision on his material. As a result, the film is a series of ill-fitted scenes, jammed into 2.5 hours. The length of the film and the enormity of the subject, Napoleon in world history, do not alone explain the difficulty Scott had in telling Napoleon’s story faithfully. He could not get his story right. He did not bother with historical reality. And he did not control the genre of story-telling in the film. What was it? Romance, comedy, satire and tragedy… or an epic fail?

Many critics said Ridley Scott had a better film about the romance of the relationship between Napoleon and Josephine. But it was buried in his epic battle scenes and inept portraits of real politics. Perhaps he should have stuck to romance.

The British producers prevailed upon Scott to make the people laugh with the standard propaganda tropes of evil dictators (Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Putin, Xi), and present the comedy of another victory by merry England over a tyrant at Waterloo.

The American scriptwriter told the satire of a Revolution without the good fortune to be made in the USA, and another emperor with no clothes and no charm.

The French, Russians and most of Europe see the story of Napoleon as a tragedy. After all, they lived it. Most of the dead counted in the film were from those states. Like the great wars of the 20th and 21st century the Anglo-Americans profiteered, while the citizens of the world ‘over there’ died. But regrettably, they did not get a say over the film. Unsurprisingly, many of them, or those of us who think beyond the cultures of the Anglo-American nations, left this film disappointed with this film and its genre of history.

It was not an historical biopic. It was an epic fail.

The death of Henry Kissinger at 100 was announced as I was composing this post. Some of the same questions that good historians ask of Napoleon may be asked of Kissinger. Did he shape events or did he float on top of events, like, as Napoleon said of his great diplomat, Talleyrand, a shit in a silk stocking? Was he a man of vision who created a new world order, or was he a cruel practitioner of power? Millions died as a result of Kissinger’s decisions to strengthen American democracy against communist tyranny, just as millions died in Napoleon’s battles to impose French republican liberty on the aristocratic old regimes of Europe. Does this make Kissinger a war criminal? Or, as his staunch acolyte Niall Fergusson argues, were his actions in “strategically insignificant countries” justified by America’s defeat of communism where it mattered? Was the true Kissinger the lofty intellectual author of World Order, or were his writings merely the silk stockings in which hid a crazed, cowardly, power-hungry shit?

How you tell the story of Henry Kissinger, and through him American empire and Western diplomacy, will be shaped by your story-telling preferences. Kissinger, like Napoleon, was a complex man who lived a big life. The best story-tellers will find romance, comedy, satire and lots and lots of tragedy there.

The way you tell the story of Henry Kissinger will also reveal how you imagine statecraft and that slippery idea, world order. I suspect the death of the grand old man of American diplomacy this week is another sign of the collapse of American world leadership and its fancies of a world order based Western rules. But then I tend to go for stories of tragedy.

🎙️ I talk about Henry Kissinger on the podcast this week. It is a bit of an unplanned podcast, because I was intending to move to a fortnightly schedule. But I hope you enjoy it.

❓ Special Question for Readers

If you have not already done so, check out my first video message on Substack. I have a special question for readers. Please let me know what you think in a comment on that post or here.

➕ Four observations of the multipolar world

Each week I search for surprising signs in the real world of changes against four dimensions: rival empires, fragmented societies, political disorder and cultural renewal.

🏹Rival Empires - China vs USA

Henry Kissinger will go down in history, I suspect, as Nixon’s emissary when Nixon went to China. In the early 1970s, the USA briefly sought to accept reality and to live at peace or at least détente with the USSR and China. Coincidentally, a few days before Kissinger’s death, I saw this brilliant talk by a scholar of peace studies, Jan Oberg, on today’s habits of American minds that makes enemies of difference.

Oberg asked in the video: how would the USA respond if China was militarising Hawaii?" Uncannily, Zhou Enlai made a similar comment to Henry Kissinger in 1972 when Kissinger visited the People’s Republic of China, the first ever US high representative to do so.

When the two lead diplomats first met, Kissinger awkwardly began to read from a prepared script. Zhou Enlai cut him short, and immediately insisted that the USA recognise there is but one legitimate government of China, and it includes Taiwan. For Kissinger’s platitudes about coexistence and friendship to be fulfilled, the United States

“must recognize the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China and not make any exceptions. Just as we recognise the United States as the sole legitimate government without considering Hawaii, the last state, an exception to your sovereignty, or still less, Long Island.”
quoted Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (2017), p. 409.

Hawaii only became a state in 1959, thirteen years before this remark in 1972. Fifty years later, the United States still cannot do this without equivocation and whining how ‘Xi is a dictator’ because the Chinese political system is different. I discuss Kissinger’s tragic failure to convince the American leadership of this simple truth in my podcast this week. Do check it out.

🤼Political Disorder - the West is no longer the best

I read a book I received as a gift a few weeks ago, Heather and Rapley Why Empires Fail: Rome, America and the Future of the West (2023). I will return to the main themes of this book another day. In brief, the authors disagree with the common analogies or distinctions between the rise and fall of Rome, and the rise and fall of the West. They present the new evidence on the complex reasons for the “fall of Rome” at the height of its prosperity. The book presents a hopeful case that “a new generation of Western leaders” can revive the fortunes of the West by recasting, for a post-colonial era,

“the bedrock institutions of the socially integrated Western nation state - a rule of law that seeks to protect all interests, properly accountable political elites, a free press, and efficient, impartial public institutions”
Peter Heather and John Rapley Why Empires Fail: Rome, America and the Future of the West (2023), p. 164

If only this hope lay on firm ground! Regrettably these bedrock institutions are broken. I won’t detail my reasons today, but so many of the controversies of the last ten years have highlighted how broken these four bedrock institutions are. The West, as a result, may need to discard the naive supremacism, expressed by Heather and Rapley, that its political order offers “a better quality of life to a much wider range of citizens than any competing state form.” It needs to face more squarely its peculiar form of political disorder, and navigate new currents in the ocean of globalisation.

🥀Social Fragmentation - the condition of exiles at home

Joseph Brodsky was an exiled Russian writer who fled to the USA, and won the Nobel Prize in 1987. In his essay, “The Condition We Call Exile”, he gently and comically challenged the tragic, grandiose pretensions of the many émigré intellectuals he found in the States.

“Life in exile, abroad, in a foreign element, is essentially a premonition of your own book-form fate, of being lost on the shelf among those with whom all you have in common is the first letter of your surname.”
Brodsky, On Grief and Reason. Essays (1996) p. 31.

He wrote at a time when exiles fled to democracies and felt like disempowered strangers. But Brodsky had a comic narrative sensibility, and never crowed with triumph about freedom. Of the condition of being an exile in a modern democratic society, he wrote

“our greater value and greater function are to be unwitting embodiments of the disheartening idea that a freed man is not a free man, that liberation is just the means of attaining freedom and is not synonymous with it… if we want to play a bigger role, the role of a free man, then we should be capable of accepting - or at least imitating - the manner in which a free man fails. A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.”
Brodsky, On Grief and Reason. Essays (1996) p. 34.

A question for my writing: what is the condition of exile in a post-democratic society?

🌾 Cultural Renewal - A new Commonwealth of Letters

I believe decentralised media, expanded education, cultural exchange and digital technologies can enable a new Commonwealth of Letters, even in our broken, post-democratic societies. This Commonwealth can detach from nations, empires and other polarised social identities. It can create institutions and spaces where culture can grow in unexpected ways. I think we are seeing such uncontrolled growth in the revitalisation of the non-Western cultures and celebration of the diverse institutions of the Global Majority.

I also believe a platform like Substack can be an important part of that Commonwealth. It may create a new ecosystem for culture, freed of some of the flaws of big media and big tech. To date, Substack is still dominated by North American or North Atlantic concerns, and that is OK, if limited. Some big names in corporate media are appearing on the platform, and I hope they do not crush renewal of other voices. I hope the new waves of non-Western globalisation and decolonisation 2.0 make their way to Substack. If so, more voices from the Global Majority, and even from this wild colonial boy, can thrive, and renew what the symphony of civilisations.

This is the theme I explored in my Pearls and Irritations piece on Patrick White, Australia’s Aborted Decolonisation, and in an earlier Substack post, Global Decolonisation 2.0.

3🌏stories to watch over the next 3 months

Adveevka

The battle for Adveevka, or Adviivka, is not going well for Ukraine. Across the entire front line, Ukrainian defences are crumbling. If this key defensive position falls, there will be growing problems for the Kiev regime and NATO. Look for a potential set of dramatic military and political moves over the next month.

2024 elections and Western media

There are many elections being held in 2024, and indeed one researcher has noted that more people will participate in elections in this coming year than ever before.

https://twitter.com/AgatheDemarais/status/1729545696791957894

Elections in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Mexico, Britain and Taiwan may not turn out well for Western elites. The elections in the USA are already promising to be a quadrennial freak show. The season will begin with Taiwan in January. Look for all sorts of narrative control in the Western virtual reality state media.

The week at the UN

Australia voted with merely seven other countries to oppose a UN resolution asking Israel to return to the 1967 boundaries on the Golan Heights. Five eyes against the world. Where are the rules of that liberal order?

❓ What big stories will emerge over the next 3 months?

Let me know what you think I should watch and comment on.

How you can delve deeper?

Check out all my content, books, articles, courses, podcast backlist and videos, at my renovated Substack homepage and at www.theburningarchive.com. You can buy my books at Amazon and other retailers.

Do check out my podcast (right here on Substack, on Spotify, Apple and other platforms) and YouTube channel. They both have quite a backlist to explore.

🙏 A big thank you to everyone who supports my writing, talks and search for a path of dialogue, diplomacy and cultural renewal. May we together find our way to peace and wisdom.

I am planning some new ways to build the discussion here. I want to offer more ways to engage with you over the best historical insights to help us all live more peacefully through these times of crisis. Feel free to throw comments in chat.

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