Nietzsche and Napoleon: The Dionysian Conspiracy

219 Pages·2014·1.287 MB·English

by  Don Dombowsky

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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY NOW
Nietzsche and Napoleon
The Dionysian Conspiracy
Don Dombowsky
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS • CARDIFF • 2014
© Don Dombowsky, 2014
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British Library Cataloguing-i n- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
ISBN 978-1-7831-6096-9
eISBN 978-1-7831-6097-6
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations viii
Introduction: The Dionysian Conspiracy 1
1 Sources, Cults and Criticism: Nietzsche’s Portrait
of Napoleon 6
2 Aristocratic Radicalism as a Species of Bonapartism 34
3 Napoleon III: ‘déshonneur’ 80
Conclusion: The Imperial European Future 118
Notes 124
Bibliography 182
Index 203

Acknowledgements
I would like to offer my special thanks first to those who assisted me
in the early stages of this project: Oleksandr Dubnov, Nathalie
Lachance and Milanka Stojadinovic. Second, for critical comments
and enlightening discussion: Thierry Choffat (Centre d’Études et de
Recherches sur le Bonapartisme), Renato Cristi and all the partici-
pants in the Nietzsche and Political Theory Workshop at the
MANCEPT Ninth Annual Conference at the University of
Manchester, UK, but specifically to Dan Conway, Hugo Drochon,
Manuel Knoll, Ayumu Okubo, Barry Stocker and Rolf Zimmermann.
I would also like to express my great appreciation to the staff at
the Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar, the Bibliothèque Martial
Lapeyre at the Fondation Napoléon in Paris and the Universität
Basel in Basel, Switzerland, as well as to Sylvie Coté, director of
Research Services at Bishop’s University and the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
An early version of chapter 1 appeared in Herman W. Siemens
and V. Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics: Rethinking
Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought (Berlin and New York:
Walter de Gruyter, 2008).
An early version of an excerpt from chapter 2 appeared in Manuel
Knoll and Barry Stocker (eds), Nietzsche as Political Philosopher
(Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2014).
List of Abbreviations
AC The Anti-C hrist
AOM Assorted Opinions and Maxims
BGE Beyond Good and Evil
BT The Birth of Tragedy
CW The Case of Wagner
D Daybreak
EH Ecce Homo
GM On the Genealogy of Morals
GS The Gay Science
HH Human, All Too Human
KSA Kritische Studienausgabe
PTG Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
TI Twilight of the Idols
UM Untimely Meditations
UW Unpublished Writings: From the Period of
Unfashionable Observations
WLN Writings From the Late Notebooks
WP The Will to Power
WS The Wanderer and His Shadow
Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Introduction: The Dionysian Conspiracy
But later, beginning with Plato, philosophers became exiles, conspiring
against their fatherland. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic
Age of the Greeks
The progress of a physical conspiracy is arrested when the hand which
holds the poignard is secured; but a moral conspiracy cannot be put
down, sooner or later it will explode like a train of gunpowder. Napoleon
Bonaparte
The main goal of this study is to establish a definitive and compre-
hensively demonstrated link between Aristocratic Radicalism, a
term that encapsulates Friedrich Nietzsche’s political thought, and
Bonapartism, the political ideology associated with the regimes of
Napoleon I and Napoleon III.
This study is comprised of three chapters. In the first chapter I will
discuss Nietzsche’s Bonapartist precursors (in particular, Goethe
and Stendhal) and explain how their readings of Napoleon informed
Nietzsche’s own. Nietzsche read extensively both Napoleonic and
anti- Napoleonic literature (including that of de Rémusat and Taine)
and on the basis of these sources formulated his ‘problem’of
Napoleon as a ‘synthesis of the inhuman and superhuman’ (GM I
16) and developed his understanding of Napoleon as a representa-
tive of pagan antiquity and Renaissance virtù, a supreme commander
type.
I will demonstrate that Nietzsche’s ‘problem’ was not, however,
simply a problem inviting an explanation of Napoleon’s personality
that would uncover the Goethean insight that ‘the higher and the
terrible man necessarily belong together’1 but that it was also about
how to summon and regenerate a structural, political moment in the
history of European culture, since Nietzsche evokes Napoleon as an
exemplar intended to capture his politics of the future that involves
the construction of durable, imperial institutions.
In the second chapter I will consider Nietzsche’s Aristocratic
Radicalism as an outgrowth of his reflections on Napoleon