Word: napoleonism
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Collectors and souvenir hunters have always been inspired by strange and esoteric impulses. A lock of Napoleon's hair, which even Josephine would not have given a sou for, can today fetch upwards of $200. A frying pan used by Britain's "Great Train Robbers" when they were hiding out in a Midlands farmhouse in 1963 recently went for $120. Even so, the mania for Hitleriana is an especially puzzling phenomenon. In the past year, sales of Third Reich mementos have begun to rise sharply. A few of the collectors are old diehard Nazis like a former...
...years, four gilded bronze horses have majestically guarded St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice. The horses survived Napoleon's looting armies and two world wars, but not the dirty air generated by petrochemical plants on Venice's mainland. The bronze is now so pitted and weakened that the horses must be removed from St. Mark's Square. Humans are removing themselves as well. The young in particular are fleeing, and Venice may soon resemble a crumbling geriatric ward...
Died. Fernandel, 67, elastic-featured French comedian who mugged his way to international cinema fame in The Little World of Don Camilla (1951); of cancer; in Paris. His real name was Fernand Contandin, but he preferred "just one name. Like Napoleon." He won an amateur singing contest in 1928, eleven years later was voted the most popular screen personality in France. His lantern jaw and Grand Canyon grin once prompted Actor Sacha Guitry to inquire with impeccable Gallic politeness: "Has anyone ever told you, monsieur-how odd-that you look like a horse...
...better plays is a kind of psychosocial profile of a man with a raging obsession, a feverishly disordered imagination. He may be a hypocrite, a miser, a misanthrope. In Molière's view, such a man is as mad as a man who claims to be Napoleon; the only cure is a cascade of laughter and the bracing tonic of common sense...
...future. There are, after all, lessons in history, aren't there? Not always. Looking back to the English Civil War of the 17th century and the Restoration of Charles II, French royalists, for example, expected an early return of the Bourbons after their own revolution. They got Napoleon instead. Some social prophets today have suggested that the sexual permissiveness of the 1960s will be followed by a puritanical reaction during the '70s. That, after all, is what happened in England after the licentiousness of the Restoration, and in the U.S. after the giddiness of the '20s. Perhaps...