"Napoléon' at the National Constitution Center

In his 1943 work, The Hero in History, Sidney Hook famously contended that virtually all of history's supposedly "great" people had merely occupied roles that, had they never been born, would have been filled by someone else. That is, if the little Dutch boy hadn't stuck his finger in the dike to save his town, some other passerby would have done the same thing. If Columbus hadn't discovered America, some other European explorer would have. If Jefferson hadn't written the Declaration of Independence, some other Enlightenment thinker would have. If the Roman Emperor Constantine hadn't embraced Christianity in the Fourth Century, some other politically astute Roman emperor would have. And so on.

Only a handful of "event-making men," Hook argued— Alexander the Great, say, or Caesar, Muhammad, Napoléon or Lenin— had changed history in such a manner that the world would have been a different place had they never existed.

This is surely an arguable point. As I suggested in my 2001 biography of Anthony Drexel, The Man Who Made Wall Street, some people (like Drexel) change the world in extraordinary ways without attracting much attention.

The gunfighter who saved the Union

Conversely, sometimes it takes a uniquely talented kid to plug a dike. Consider the wagonmaster and stagecoach superintendent Joseph Alfred Slade (the subject of my latest book, Death of a Gunfighter), without whom, I would argue, the American nation you and I know and love might not exist today.

Slade was hired in 1859 to clean up the most dangerous division of the Central Overland, a struggling stagecoach and mail line that represented the federal government's sole northern link to California at the very moment the U.S. was breaking apart and California itself, and all its gold wealth, was threatening to secede. By maintaining order along a 500-mile stretch for the next three years, Slade played a critical role in keeping California in the Union and then assuring the steady flow of gold to the East that financed the Union cause once the Civil War began. Had the U.S. fragmented then into two or three countries, it might never have inspired the growth of democracy worldwide, might never have attracted its invigorating waves of immigrants, and might never have developed the power to stand up to Hitler, Hirohito and the Soviet Union.

Could the Central Overland in 1859 have found someone else with the unique combination of courage, integrity, audacity and persistence— not to mention prosaic business management skills— that Slade brought to that job? I wonder.

Edmund Burke's prophecy

Slade, one could argue, was irreplaceable. But was Napoléon Bonaparte irreplaceable? In the early 1790s Edmund Burke observed the French Revolution from across the English Channel and predicted, "It will end in a military dictatorship." That is, Burke foresaw the inevitable rise of someone like Napoléon before Burke or anyone else had ever heard of Napoléon.

At the very least there is grist for a lively philosophical argument here. All it needs is a proper venue, which the National Constitution Center, of all places, has provided with its current exhibit tracing Napoléon's rise and fall.

I say "Of all places" because the Center's mission, according to its website, is "to instill the idea of liberty in the hearts of men and women, girls and boys," by "showing the struggles that Americans have endured over the decades to widen the circle of liberty." Napoléon was a military dictator and French to boot, but what the hell— his career is always worthy of our attention; it contains important lessons that his would-be imitators ignore at their peril (Hitler, like Napoléon, invaded Russia; Bush, like Napoléon, tried to impose democracy by force of arms); and of course it includes American connections, which the exhibit's curator has gone to great contortions to find (Napoléon, who had himself crowned emperor to legitimize his government, nevertheless revered Washington, who deliberately designed a presidency devoid of aristocratic trappings).

Uncorrupted by power

The exhibit, assembled from the collection of the First Empire authority Pierre-Jean Chalençon, includes more than 300 objects, among them Napoléon's collapsible campaign bed, the imperial bed of Napoléon's youngest brother, Jérome, and the fragment of a cloak worn by Napoléon at the Battle of Marengo. For the most part the material is skillfully woven together to trace the career of an enigmatic figure whose contradictory qualities continue to inspire and repulse us.

For all his imperial trappings, Napoléon was one of the few men in history who was uncorrupted by power: Whatever his personal flaws, they were no greater as emperor than when he was a schoolboy. Even as emperor he maintained his Spartan regimen, "driving himself and those around him tirelessly," the exhibit observes, "accomplishing a phenomenal amount in just a few years." Unlike most men in powerful positions, Napoléon appointed his aides on merit rather than on their personal loyalty to him, in some cases to his eventual regret. Yet this posture generated remarkable loyalty among most of his colleagues, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of French soldiers who followed him into battle and often death.

Not so short

Even a Napoléonic-era groupie like me learned a few things here that I hadn't known before. For example, Napoléon actually stood five-foot-six— a normal height for his time— not five-two, as his English enemies claimed. Despite their mutual attachment, Napoléon's second wife, Marie-Louise of Austria, returned to Vienna with their son after his downfall and never saw Napoléon again. Napoléon's grave on St. Helena remained unmarked for nearly 20 years after his death rather than comply with the British governor's refusal to allow the word "Emperor" on his stone. Nor was I aware that Napoléon's great-nephew Charles Joseph Bonaparte served as U.S. attorney general under Teddy Roosevelt and created the predecessor of today's FBI.

The exhibit tells us little about what is, to me, one of the most remarkable events in history: Napoléon's escape from exile on Elba and his subsequent return to power with just a few hundred men and without the firing of a shot.

But enough quibbling. Philadelphians should be grateful that, when Chalençon's remarkable Napoléon collection became available, the National Constitution Center was available and hungry to seize the moment. Sidney Hook might argue that, had the Center not existed, some other Philadelphia institution would have displayed Chalençon's holdings. But I'm hard put to imagine who else would have had the space, the resources and the inclination to pull it off.