The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Napoleon now had a chance to make France the most prosperous nation in Europe and establish peace for a generation. Instead, he revealed that he was no better than all the other brainless conquerors since Alexander the Great. The conqueror must prove his greatness by making himself feared. Napoleon assembled a fleet to invade England. Nelson destroyed it at the battle of Trafalgar, losing his own life in the process. The major European powers formed an alliance against Napoleon; he revealed his military genius by luring the Austrians and Russians into a trap and defeating them at the battle of Austerlitz. Once more he had security; once more he threw it away, like a compulsive gambler. This time the enemy was Prussia; he shattered them at the battle of Jena, went on to defeat the Russians at Friedland, and signed the treaty of Tilsit in 1807. Once again he had the chance to become Europe’s greatest statesman; once again, the criminal desire to play at soldiers led him to throw it all away. And this was the pattern for the remainder of his life. There were battles against the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Austrians. In 1812, Napoleon marched into Russia with an army of half a million men. The Russian winter did him more damage than the Russian army; only eighteen thousand men staggered back to France. The enemies of France marched into Paris, and Napoleon was sent into exile on Elba.

That should have been the end of the story; but the compulsive gambler can never rest while he still has a thousand to one chance. Napoleon escaped back to France, raised another army, and made himself emperor again. And now, for the first time, he showed signs of having learned from experience and appealed to his enemies for peace. It was too late; they regarded him as a habitual offender who ought to be hanged to save further trouble. The English and the Prussians combined to defeat him at Waterloo; then they packed him off to the remotest spot they could think of – the island of St Helena, in the south Atlantic, where he died six years later, probably of poison.

Reading the story of the Revolution and the career of Napoleon, it is again difficult to avoid the feeling that some invisible spirit of history was doing its best to teach the human race commonsense. When we look back over the past eight thousand years, it is clear that the most irritating characteristic of human beings is their passivity. The mass of people accept whatever happens to them as cows accept the rain. It is true even of the great rulers and generals; we have seen how, again and again, they achieve some triumph, relax for a brief period, then begin to feel oddly bored and dissatisfied, and look around for fresh adventures. There is no evidence that Alexander the Great really wept when he had no more worlds to conquer; but whoever invented the story had a profound understanding of human psychology. So for more than seven thousand years of civilised history, the human urge to escape boredom found its way into armed aggression, while the common people huddled together and waited for the storm to pass over. Then came the crusades, which taught the upper classes of Europe that the world was not quite static after all. Luther’s revolt against the Catholic Church taught the common people the same lesson. Then a series of catastrophes – like the Thirty Years War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the wars of Frederick the Great – made Europe aware that it ought to be looking actively for peace, while the rise of science and industry showed the world that there were interesting alternatives to war. The old cow-like spirit was vanishing. The British Civil War under Cromwell and the French Revolution taught the common people that they could also influence the course of history. So when the Revolution was over, and the French became aware that this massive bloodletting was not what they wanted, they elected as first consul a young general who seemed capable of giving them what they dreamed about: peace, prosperity and justice. The Americans, with their own revolution behind them, and delighted to be at peace again, were displaying a vitality that was reminiscent of the early days of Rome. When Napoleon revealed his limitations: that he was a mere replica of so many past ‘conquerors’, and that his idea of greatness was to play chess with the lives of thousands of his fellow countrymen, all Europe shouted ‘No!’ and combined to get rid of him as a modern police force might combine to hunt down a Public Enemy Number One.

And with the nuisance finally on St Helena, everybody could sit back and take stock of this remarkably changed world. What did they really want? In China and Japan they had already made up their minds: they wanted to slow down the pace of change and stick to the old ways. India felt the same, but had no choice as the East India Company became master of Bengal, then spread across the rest of the continent. But Europe was fairly sure that it wanted to have done with war, and to share the benefits of progress and the industrial revolution. So as soon as Napoleon was safely on his way to St Helena, the major nations of Europe met together and tried to decide how peace could be maintained. What they decided was, in effect, to put back the clock. If there is really a spirit presiding over history, it must have groaned and cast its eyes up to heaven.

What happened is that England, Austria, Prussia and Russia decided to go back to the principle of the divine right of kings. They called it ‘legitimacy’, but it meant the same thing. Louis XVIII was restored to the French throne, and the remainder of the old aristocracy got out its silk dresses and embroidered waistcoats. England was inclined to go its own way – it didn’t really care about legitimacy, for its markets were undamaged, and it was still more interested in the future. But the rest of the leaders who gathered at Vienna simply wanted to go back to the past. A Quadruple Alliance soon turned into a Triple Alliance of Russia, Prussia and Austria, which they preferred to call the Holy Alliance. And they proceeded to create police states in their own countries. Louis XVIII, having been forced to flee on one occasion, was determined not to rock the boat and sat as still as possible; but he died only three years after Napoleon, and his brother, Charles X, did his best to suppress all traces of the Revolution. When the republicans resisted, he dismissed his Chamber of Deputies by royal decree and took away the freedom of the press. The result was that he had a minor revolution on his hands. The streets of Paris were barricaded for three days. Finally, Charles lost his nerve and fled to England. It was the clearest possible warning of what would happen if the aristocracy tried to turn back the tide of history. But the Holy Alliance continued as before; it would be another eighteen years before the revolutions of 1848 would teach them the same sharp lesson.

What we are now discussing is, of course, the greatest ideological conflict of modern times, and the third great ideological conflict in the history of mankind. The first was the clash between Christianity and Paganism, which ended with the victory of Christianity. The second was the clash between the Catholic Church and the various protestant movements – beginning with the Cathars – which ended in a draw between the two sides. The third is the clash between socialism and old-fashioned individualism. This continues to rage as bitterly as ever in the closing years of the twentieth century, with no sign of victory for either side. But historical perspective enables us to make one basic observation. Christianity began as an individual protest movement against state-supported paganism. Almost as soon as it achieved power, it abandoned its individualism and became another state-supported religion that persecuted individualism. Protestantism challenged it in the name of individualism, and its protest was successful. Protestantism has maintained its individualistic flavour down to our own time; but it must be admitted that in most of the countries in which it has taken root it has merely replaced Catholicism as the state-supported religion. And even in the time of Calvin, it had become merely another form of dogmatic orthodoxy. The great protest ideologies have a tendency to turn into their opposites. Socialism also began as a movement of individual protest; but even in the time of Robespierre, it showed a tendency to change into a murderous dogmatism that refused to tolerate individualism.

So it would be a mistake to follow the lead of writers such as H. G. Wells and Hendrik van Loon – who both wrote histories of mankind – and condemn the men who created the Holy Alliance – Metternich, Talleyrand and Alexander of Russia – as old fashioned reactionaries who failed to grasp the lessons of history. All three were realists, who could see that this new ideology was based upon muddled idealism. The world was not really made up of wicked tyrants and free-born men who were kept in chains. The example of America proved that. After their revolution, the Americans had quarrelled amongst themselves for a few years about whether the country should be run by the upper classes – known as Federalists -or the people, who called themselves Democratic republicans. Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury, believed that America needed a strong government supported by bankers. Thomas Jefferson believed in complete freedom of speech and a people’s democracy. In 1801, the Democrats won, and America continued to nurture individualism and to allow complete freedom of expression where politics was concerned. No one preached that the rich were wicked, or that the wealth of the country ought to be distributed equally among every man, woman and child. There was no need, since everyone had equal opportunities. So the Americans went their cheerful, materialistic way and grew prosperous. Obviously, this conflict between socialism and individualism was quite unnecessary.