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.
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.
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