Word: napoleonism
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...surely die. But he quickly wraps a shaving-cream bomb in a towel, wedges it against the door, sprinkles it with after-shave lotion, and touches the flame of a cigarette lighter to this ingenious subnuclear device. The blazing lotion heats the shaving cream until it explodes volcanically, and Napoleon Solo-the man in the shower-staggers out into his hotel room...
...worlds in ironic interplay. The public world reverberates with social reforms, patriotism, the trumpeted, and trumped-up, goals of nations and of wars. In Tolstoy's view, these are vampires of abstraction that suck real blood. The pinnacle of abstraction, as he sees it, is the great hero Napoleon. While the battle of Borodino is clumsily enacted onstage like a mock-up war game with wooden soldiers and generals, Tolstoy pursues the point that Napoleon did not have the foggiest idea how the battle would come out, and only a fumbling control over its course...
There is a certain intellectual arrogance in a man of letters judging a man of action, but Tolstoy was undeterred by that, and War and Peace might be called Napoleon's second Waterloo. Tolstoy's thesis was that the multitudinous whims of chance, rather than the decisive will of a great man, determine history. War and Peace thus helped to foster an antiheroic philosophy of history that has gradually depopulated the modern novel and drama of heroes. But Tolstoy's own generalship, his vast marshaling and deployment of esthetic forces, never faltered. A century after his masterpiece...
Over the next 50 years, Eugen made good his oath. He became the Habsburgs' top commander, defeated Louis' armies in the field, and frustrated Louis' territorial ambitions. A century later Napoleon, an artist in the field himself, ranked Eugen as one of the seven most brilliant generals in all history...
Tuesday, January 26 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A history of the twelve turbulent years from the meeting of the States-General in 1789 through the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, narrated by Michael Redgrave. Color...