Word: napoleonism
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They may well have killed more than men, breaking up the rehearsal for one of the Red Napoleon's coveted set-piece strikes. If so, as is happening with increasing regularity to Giap's best-laid plans, another timetable must be destroyed, and all the meticulous, delicate structure of insurgency tactics be reassembled. It is General Vo Nguyen Giap's own aphorism that he may only attack when success is certain. Even more than his rice and his bullets, that certitude is in scarce supply in the new war the men from the North must endure...
Giap was an accomplished lecturer in French history who "could step to a blackboard and draw in the most minute detail every battle plan of Napoleon," one of his former students recalls. A passionate ascetic who could veer abruptly from violent emotion to icy control, he was early dubbed "The volcano and the snow" by his associates. "We were all intrigued," says one, "by his passion for Napoleon and the French Revolution. And we used to tease him when he railed against the French, by asking 'Are you sure you don't want to be Napoleon?' " Giap...
...behind, was arrested by the French, and died in prison. Under the aegis of the Chinese Communists, the Viet Minh was founded, with Giap a 1941 charter member along with Ho Chi Minh. Ho ordered the little professor to specialize in military affairs, and the career of the Red Napoleon began. His first self-education was in guerrilla operations against the Japanese who then occupied Viet Nam. The OSS supplied Giap with American weapons to that end, but Giap was looking to the future: he cached most of them for use in the resumed struggle against the French...
After that, the Bonapartes seem to have disappeared. In all branches of the family, almost all the children came up girls. The last of the American line, a descendant of Fifi and Betsy Patterson named Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, achieved some prominence as a Man of Distinction in the Calvert whisky ads, but he died in 1945 of injuries sustained in Central Park, where he tripped over the leash of his wife's dog. The only male Bonapartes alive today are a 16-year-old boy (Charles Napoleon Bonaparte) and his 52-year-old father (Napoleon Louis Jerome Victor Bonaparte...
...Louis Napoleon, son of Brother Louis, was the second and last of the Bonaparte emperors (L'Aiglon was proclaimed Emperor in 1815, but he never actually ruled). In Stacton's opinion, he was merely "a paper demagogue" who wrote lively pamphlets and had "the dignity of a toy lion." Carried into office on a flood tide of Bonapartism, he soon made it clear that his resemblance to Napoleon was merely nominal. He became a sort of Gallic Coolidge decorated with Continental charm, and he presided over an era of prosperous inanition that collapsed in the debacle...