Word: napoleonism
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...idol was Napoleon. He kept a little statue of the Emperor on his writing desk for inspiration. Balzac's opinion of his own worth was certainly Napoleonic: "I have the most extraordinary character. I am astonished by nothing more than myself." His goal was to do with his pen what Bonaparte had done with the sword. He succeeded. As V.S. Pritchett says, "His fecundity throbs, his power of documentation, his ubiquity as a novelist are extraordinary. There is the spry, pungent and pervasive sense that, in any scene, he was there and in the flesh...
...have the biggest ego since Napoleon and resort to anything in order to win his varied wagers. But he has got many men over 40 out of their easy chairs and onto a jogging track or tennis court. For this reason, and this reason alone, Bobby Riggs is the man of the hour...
...rejections. In the 1850s another French engineer, Aimé Thomé de Gamond, drew up a scheme for a railway tunnel. Queen Victoria promised De Gamond the blessing of "all the ladies of England" if he could carry it off, but the whole thing was quashed by suspicions that Napoleon III might have in mind a cross-Channel invasion...
...impressions do not carry that magic proportion of the book with which he can rest easy--he does not seem responsible for a majority of his material. He never met her. He doesn't even quite have hold of the metaphors in the book. He imagines Marilyn as a Napoleon of publicity who meets her end on a Fifth Helena Brentwood. As a starlet who made it seem easy as "ice cream." As a protean personality of opposites, sentimentality and Grand Bitchiness, soft as lamb's wool and cruel as steel; and finally Mailer has her at her core...
...speech meant agitation against the shaky government. Freedom of religion meant that the Buddhist peasants could hope to overthrow the largely Catholic middle class. Just as the French middle-class Marx wrote about found that the democracy it believed in endangered its rule and so accepted the dictatorship of Napoleon III, Vietnamese liberals found themselves accepting the dictatorship of General Diem, and refusing to hold a national election, as they had promised...