Why do people admire Napoleon? I don’t mean the French—they have reasons of their own for boosting Bonaparte, such as a dearth of more recent political heroes. But what inspires so many ordinary Anglophones in their cloying fascination for the great dictator? It’s not just the sticky puff-pastries and the Napoleon brandy (but what has that to do with Napoleon?), nor the English eccentrics who put In Memoriam notices for him on appropriate anniversaries in what these days passes for the Personal Column of the London Times.
Something more sinister runs through the websites devoted to Napoleon—dozens of them when last I looked at Google—adulation of a species of power rooted in populism, fed by violence, and dressed in glamour. It would not be fair to condemn Napoleon for his most effusive modern admirer, Bokassa I, former ruler of the Central African Empire. It is said that after he was finally ousted from power, his freezer was found filled with human flesh.
Napoleon was not that bad. But the dapper little French tyrant forms quite a contrast with his most persistent opponent, that amiable old duffer George III. Maybe “Farmer George” should have noticed sooner than he did that his North American subjects were falling out among themselves—though surely it was equally unreasonable of John Hancock to expect His Majesty to read his signature, however big it was written, from the far side of the Atlantic.
Of course there were contemporaries who saw through Napoleon. Beethoven withdrew the dedication of his Third Symphony, the Eroica, when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. Dr. Stephen Maturin’s passion for rescuing his native Catalonia from the Corsican corporal inspired him to serve as a surgeon in the Royal Navy and to star in Master and Commander (wonderful film, all those chaps getting really wet). The Duke of Wellington admitted that Napoleon’s hat on the battlefield was worth forty thousand men, but also said (with his customary damning pithiness—Earl Stanhope’s Conversations with Wellington is one of the finest collections of one-liners in the language) that Napoleon was no gentleman.
It was Wellington’s army’s long campaigns on the Iberian Peninsula (aided by indigenous guerrillas—which is how the word entered English) that slowly wore down Napoleon’s power. The battle that broke the French grip on Spain took place in July 1812 outside the city of Salamanca, halfway between Madrid and Oporto on the coast of Portugal. Skillful use of “dead ground” in the hilly terrain contributed much to Wellington’s victory, but all the same the loss of life was terrible. Seven thousand French and five thousand allies killed and wounded—ten percent of the force.
The hills near Salamanca have recently begun to produce a very pleasing red wine, which can be had around here for about $10. The makers are called Bodegas Valdeaguila and have been in business only since 2000; their wine is called (appropriately enough) Viña Salamanca. Given a little air it is ripe and fruity, with a pleasantly leafy flavor in the aftertaste. At the center there are tannins which tingle somewhat; they would battle effectively with spicy sausage or a paella laced with pepper. These effects are produced by equal quantities of two grape varieties, the Tempranillo, the grape of Ribera del Duero (north of here) and Rioja, and, less familiar, the Rufete, an endemic variety suited to the long sunny days, cool evenings and low rainfall of the hill country (the rain in Spain, you will recall, falls mainly in the plain).
Wine, olives, grain, the perennial staples of Mediterranean life—this will go onward the same, though dynasties pass, as Thomas Hardy said. No bad thing, maybe, that a winemaker’s alliance with nature can furnish distraction from man’s misuse of power.
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