Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Ames's fear of Napoleon was wrong, said Mr. Hoover last week, and so were modern interventionists. Hitler will be defeated, as was Napoleon, not by the Russian winter but by the hate he has kindled: "The hate of Hitler will be more terrible than the blizzard was to Napoleon." The U.S. should consequently aid Britain, build its own defenses, spread its ideas by its example and not try "to impose the four freedoms upon Europe and Asia...
...last week summoned up a ghost: the ghost of Fisher Ames (1758-1808). The only living ex-President was making a speech to warn the U.S. against entry into the war. To show how wrought-up earlier interventionists had been, he quoted some of Ames's sentences on Napoleon which sounded exactly like Walter Lippmann's sentences on Hitler. Said Ames: "If Bonaparte prevails [in Europe], we will be his vassals. . . . Britain fights our battles. . . . One single hope of security is the British Navy. ... If Russia is disarmed, how long will it be before England will be done...
...Soviet composer, joined Leningrad's defenders digging trenches. Said he: "I am also writing my seventh symphony. It will attempt to depict the Battle of Leningrad and tell the story of the city's Home Guards." Last great Russian battle piece: Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, depicting Napoleon's retreat from Moscow...
During the Crimean War, the royal Britons visited their French ally, Napoleon III. "When Bertie knelt, in kilts, before the tomb of Napoleon I, the Parisian sky produced an authentic clap of thunder, and all the French generals burst into tears." It was the beginning of a life-long love for Bertie, but not for his father. Napoleon III "was simply not a respectable ally." For one thing, there had been that "rather dreadful féte champétre . . . when the Emperor disappeared all evening with Madame Castiglione in the shrubbery, and the Empress fainted with mortification...
...doubt not he sees and knows this, and that it is one of his rewards." But "like a mayfly the Prince of Wales danced idly in the sun." He also danced under the gas lights of questionable houses in Second Empire Paris, until Bismarck, having discovered the riddle of Napoleon III (he was "the sphinx without a secret"), destroyed France at Sedan and created the Second Reich at Versailles. Then "from these flames there stepped a slightly discredited phoenix, the portentous phenomenon of modern Europe...