#432 The Mind of Napoleon

David Senra (0:00)

This book is a selection of written and spoken utterances on a variety of subjects grouped according to broad themes and designed to give the reader an insight into the mind of a man who combined energy of thought and energy of action to an exceptional degree. Napoleon was a manipulator of things and men. For Napoleon, each thought is a step to an action. In Napoleon was a radiant power of the mind that cut through speculation, stripping all problems down to their simplest elements, discarding all obstacles to action. To his mind, inaction was unbearable.

He said, work is my element. I am born and built for work. I have known the limitations of my legs. I have known the limitations of my eyes. I have never been able to know the limitations of my working capacity. Long before he played any political role, he had discarded whatever illusions might have prevented him from playing it. He knows that men have always been the same, that nothing can change their nature. It is from the past that he will draw his lessons in order to shape the present. To Napoleon, men were weak, ineffectually selfish, and easily guided.

The strong are good, only the weak are wicked, he once wrote. This maxim was to become a cardinal principle of his politics.

As to the purpose of life, his answer was definite. We are born for the enjoyment of life. Happiness is merely the enjoyment of life in the manner that conforms best to our nature.

The question then was destiny, which is determined by the manner that conforms best to our nature.

All of my life, I have sacrificed everything, comfort, self-interest, happiness to my destiny.

Destiny must be fulfilled. That is my chief doctrine.

That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, one of my favorite books that I've ever read. It's called The Mind of Napoleon. The subtitle is a selection from his written and spoken words, edited and translated by J. Christopher Harold. What I have in my hand, this book was very hard to find. It's out of print, first published in 1955 Last time I did an episode on it was several years ago. Price of the book went up to like $1,000. I just checked. You can get it for like $100 or $200. Highly recommend buying the book immediately. Essentially what it is is just 300 pages of just Napoleon and his own words speaking directly to you. So I want to jump into some of my favorite highlights and quotes. And one of the things that will happen if you read the book is just he realized that he just had essentially unlimited ambition. He put no ceilings on what he thought he could accomplish and the levels of his ambition. So he says, a consecutive series of great actions is never the result of chance and luck. It is always the product of planning and genius. Is it because they are lucky that great men become great? No, but being great, they have been able to master luck. Then he asks, what is luck? And his definition is very interesting. He says, luck is the ability to exploit accidents. The vulgar would call this luck, but in fact, it is the characteristic of genius.

That quote to me is very similar to the one by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said that shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances, strong men believe in cause and effect. Another thing that reappears throughout the book that's really important to Napoleon, what is especially interesting about the book is all these quotes and highlights first are by subject matter, but also the year he said it. So you see the ideas are really consistent throughout his life. And one of them is take a lot of time planning what you're going to do, be excessively thorough. But once you've made your decision, no hesitation. He talks about this over and over again. He says, hesitation is fatal. Once an action is begun, it must be followed through with the utmost exertion of the will. He talks a lot about ambition. He talks a lot about destiny. This part is really interesting. Essentially, the ambition, the grandiose plans he had for his life were so innate to him, he didn't even notice them. If I had any ambition, it is so natural to me, so innate, so intimately linked with my existence, that it is like the blood that circulates in my veins, like the air that I breathe. To aim at world empire seemed to Napoleon a most natural thing. That is another reoccurring thing that will come over and over again. The fact that, of course, I wanted to rule the world. Who doesn't? Again, it was so innate. It was like the blood in his veins and the air that he breathes. He says, there is no immortality but in the memory that is left in the minds of men. To have lived without glory, without leaving a trace of one's existence is to have not lived at all. And another great thing about the book is it goes into the way he works. So there's a great line. I'll tell you what appears at the end of this, which will give you a description of what I'm about to read to you. And it says, Napoleon combined long-term objectives with his passion for immediate usefulness. His passion for immediate usefulness. It's really interesting. So to give this very interesting example, he had a curious way of making budgets. If for instance, he ordered the construction of some public work, he would make sure that it was built in stages and that at the end of each stage, it could be put to some use, no matter how many years might elapse before the whole was completed. And then they give an example. If the wing of a palace or the stretch of a road or canal could be put to use after the first year, then its costs began to be amortized in the following year and could be charged off the budget. By the time the whole was completed, it had paid for itself. And then it summarizes what I just read to you. Napoleon combined long term objectives with his passion for immediate usefulness. This extreme, extreme sense of urgency that Napoleon had is a reoccurring theme throughout the entire book. They say that Napoleon had an artist temperament, and this is what they mean by it. The artist temperament is characterized by his dissatisfaction with the disorderly nature of the world such as he finds it. He creates his own world. That's why we're talking about him almost 200 years later. We're still in the introduction, by the way, and so the introduction is really fascinating because it's a bunch of his quotes, and then obviously the author and the editor trying to explain why these are important and the way he thinks about it, and he was talking about one of Napoleon's favorite words was immensity.