Napoleon and the Poets: The Poetic Origins of the Concept of Charisma

Abstract

The legend of Napoleon has been widely studied by historians; however, little has been written analysing the ways in which this legend brings something new to the history of political ideas. The poets who yielded to a fascination with the dead emperor offered him ‘acceptance by his peers’, thus creating a typically Romantic new conception of the great man. But Napoleon, as presented by many of the great Romantic writers, was also the object of an extraordinary collective love and enthusiasm. He was, in the words of Balzac, ‘the god of the people’ (1935, vol. 8: 448). In other words, what is new, in the poets' idealised memory of Napoleon, is the idea of ‘extraordinary domination’ (Weber), a domination whose mainspring is radically different from that of conventional domination.