By the twentieth century, most educated Europeans considered Napoleon Bonaparte to be a worthy adversary at worst, so it should be unsurprising that the Fascists could take inspiration from him. The parallels between him and the leading Fascists are apparent right off the bat: they were adventurer-conquerors, they were autocratic megalomaniacs, they seized most of Europe, they failed to overtake Russia, and eventually their mighty empires crumbled. Although there were also many important differences, the similarities were so obvious that not even the heads of state theirselves could overlook them.
Quoting Jost Dülffer’s Bonapartism, Fascism and National Socialism:
It is not difficult to explain the fact that the Bonapartist model of fascism has been much less intensively discussed in the ‘bourgeois’ or pro-fascist camp, since both the Napoleonic régimes failed, making it easy to draw analogous conclusions for fascist systems, however different they might individually be.
A second factor was that references to the tradition of the ‘hereditary enemy’ (France) were not exactly popular in inter-war Germany, as a result of the Versailles treaty. There were, therefore, only isolated references to France in [the NSDAP’s] publications, and parallels between Napoleon and Hitler were in general studiously avoided.²¹
[…]
With the onset of [Fascist] military expansion from 1939 onwards, the idea of territorial acquisition and the formation of a new Empire gained ground in the ideological self-image of [Germanic Fascism]. Nevertheless, as already mentioned, comparisons with the efforts of Napoleon I were risky.
But precisely because the parallels between the war waged against Russia by Napoleon in 1812 and by Germany in 1941 were so obvious, they were made in the press. In the leading political and cultural weekly, Das Reich, Eugen Mündler on 12.7.41 celebrated the ‘Campaign without Parallel’.²⁹
Anticipating a certain military victory, he considered all the mistakes and weaknesses of Napoleon’s campaign of 1812 as having been overcome, although he gave predominantly military reasons for this. He did not, however, consider either the political system or the personality of the two dictators.
Hitler also made a remark at this time to the effect that not he but Stalin would suffer Napoleon’s fate. After the failure of the [Axis] Blitzkrieg plan outside Moscow in 1941, he found it necessary to emphasize in public speeches the invalidity of any parallel between the historical situations of 1812 and 1942: ‘We have mastered the fate which broke another man 130 years ago.’³⁰
Hitler accepted the parallel with Napoleon I’s personality in so far as it was a question of a ‘unique military genius’, who was in a position to achieve ‘world-historical victories’, but saw the reason for the latter’s failure in the petit-bourgeois tendencies (Spiessertum) of most Frenchmen.
Hitler was probably familiar with the popular psychological level of interpretation through a book by the NSDAP Reichsleiter, Philipp Bouhler, Napoleon — Kometenbahn eines Genies, on which he had shortly beforehand commented favourably.³¹ This work, surprising in its choice of theme for a leading member of the party, was later withdrawn from circulation in order to amid any embarrassing comparisons between the defeats of Napoleon I and Hitler.
Bouhler had sought to understand Napoleon from the point of view of the victories of the present; he endowed him, as well as Hitler, with the halo of genius in accordance with the slogan: ‘All great deeds are the achievement of one individual’, whose greatness manifested itself in a fusion of comprehensive capacities uniting diverse vocations. The differences between the history of the development of the Napoleonic Empire and of the [Third] Reich seemed to him to be rather peripheral.
In the end, he did discover a structural difference between the ‘iron foundation’ of [Fascism] and Napoleon’s régime in the fact that now provision had been made for ‘the unconditional execution of the commands of a leader, for the penetration of his will to the very last cells.’³² This ideological postulate which. had little to do with social and political reality became the ultimate criterion.
Quoting William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pages 860 & 868:
Now, Blumentritt remembered, the ghosts of the Grand Army, which had taken this same road to Moscow, and the memory of Napoleon’s fate began to haunt the dreams of the [Fascist] conquerors. [Axis] generals began to read, or reread, Caulaincourt’s grim account of the French conqueror’s disastrous winter in Russia in 1812.
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And yet some of the generals later reluctantly admitted that Hitler’s iron will in insisting that the armies stand and fight was his greatest accomplishment of the war in that it probably did save his armies from completely disintegrating in the snow. This view is best summed up by General Blumentritt. […] General von Tippelskirch, a corps commander, agreed [with him:]
It was Hitler’s one great achievement. At that critical moment the troops were remembering what they had heard about Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, and living under the shadow of it. If they had once begun a retreat, it might have turned into a panic flight.²³
Christian Goeschel’s Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance, page 225:
German propaganda targeted at Italian readers insisted that, unlike Napoleon in 1812, the Axis would soon win the war against Russia.
Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, page 322:
Hitler had compared the achievements of his armies with those of Frederick the Great, Napoleon and Alexander […]
Thierry Lentz, while doubting that colonial atrocities against Haitians influenced the Third Reich, concedes in Napoleon – Hitler, the improbable comparison:
It is true that, in addition to Bismarck, Hitler admired Napoleon. He paid a short visit to Les Invalides in 1940 and appeared profoundly moved before the emperor’s tomb. And in his diary, Goebbels often compares Hitler to Napoleon… although only to rank him above the French emperor.
In his heart, Hitler believed himself unique and German. Any reference to what he considered to be the decadent ideas of the Enlightenment was to be rejected; France, in his eyes, was the arch enemy of the German nation. The pages of Mein Kampf are littered with such references: the war of 1806 forms the basis for the two countries’ rivalry, the war of 1870 the first taste of revenge.
After his invasion of the Soviet Union, he considered any comparison to the emperor to be entirely inappropriate. It’s not hard to understand why. All the biographies of the Führer underline these aspects of his character; anyone still sceptical should read the section dedicated to this topic in Ian Kershaw’s monumental work on Hitler.¹⁰
Hence, while the Third Reich’s head of state did order on December 15, 1940 that Napoleon II’s ashes be transferred from Vienna to the dome of Les Invalides, Berlin also commissioned in 1945 the war drama Kolberg, a loose reenactment of the Prussian resistance to Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces in 1807. The Fascists were, after all, admirers of the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, an opponent of Napoleon, yet not even Clausewitz could deny that his adversary Napoleon was a brilliant strategist.
Benito Mussolini likewise appreciated Napoleon Bonaparte. Quoting Jules Archer’s Twentieth-Century Caesar: Benito Mussolini, chapters 8 & 12
Mussolini […] was vainly confident that he was creating an immortal niche for himself in world history and that statues of himself would stand forever side by side in museums with the Napoleons, the Roman Caesars, even the demigods of ancient Rome.
[…]
Mussolini swept aside his professional generals and admirals and directed the whole Italian war effort himself, although he had never risen higher than the rank of corporal during World War I. “Hitler was a corporal, too,” he declared defiantly. “For that matter, so was Napoleon—the Little Corporal who was the greatest military genius the world has ever known!”
Nicolas Gladstone Virtue’s Fascist Italy and the Barbarization of the Eastern Front, 1941–43, page 84:
The [Fascist] national press termed the war against the USSR a great crusade immediately following Mussolini’s declaration of war. Headlines such as “The Crusade against Bolshevism finds Italy at its Battle Station” and “Europe on the March to Bring Down Bolshevism” were printed in the Corriere della Sera during the week following the [Wehrmacht] invasion.⁵⁵
After explaining how Italians fought for Napoleon during 1812 in Russia, one article proclaimed that “if a hundred and thirty years ago the volunteers of Italy fought for the greatness of a foreign empire, today the soldiers of Mussolini are standard bearers of a European crusade that had in the Fascist Revolution, that is in Italy, its first spark.”⁵⁶
H. James Burgwyn’s Mussolini and the Salò Republic, 1943–1945: The Failure of a Puppet Regime, page 48:
Mussolini compared himself with Napoleon on the island of Elba, where the emperor held court and received the honors due to his rank but wielded no power.⁵²
A detail that many people forget is that Napoleon Bonaparte was not French, but Italian. (He even spoke French with an Italian accent.) This made it even easier for the Italian Fascists to appreciate him. Hence, Fascist Italy had a museum for him: it was in 1927 that Count Giuseppe Primoli donated the Museo Napoleonico to Rome.
In spite of all this, one should be careful not to overrate Napoleon Bonaparte’s influence on the Fascists. As Thierry Lentz noted, there were important differences, perhaps even more differences than similarities, between Napoleon and an Axis dictator, and Napoleon was only one of many influences, some of whom the Fascists mentioned more frequently, such as Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck (though, in a suspicious coincidence, Napoleon not only admired Frederick the Great as well but even visited his tomb).
Click here for other events that happened today (November 9).
1877: Enrico De Nicola, President of Fascist Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in the early 1920s, existed.
1894: Dietrich Hugo Hermann von Choltitz, Axis general, blighted the earth.
1904: Viktor Hermann Brack, Axis war criminal and SS member, joined him.
1906: Arthur Louis Hugo Rudolph, Axis rocket engineer, did as well.
1923: Ludendorff’s attempt to seize power in München ended ignominiously (but a generation of anticommunists would celebrate the putsch anyway).
1937: To the Empire of Japan’s delight, the Chinese Army withdrew from the Battle of Shanghai.
1938: The Fascists terrorised scores of Jews throughout the Third Reich in a tragedy known as Kristallnach.
1939: Berlin postponed the invasion of France again; the next date for decision was to be November 13, 1939 for a possible invasion date of November 19, 1939. Likewise, Berlin issued directive № 9 which called for Luftwaffe flightcraft and submarines to attack British shipping and port facilities, and German newspapers noted that the attempted assassination on their Chancellor, which took place on the previous day in Munich, was the work of British secret service agents. In actuality, it was a plot by the Chancellor to elevate his own standing.
1940: Sebastiano Visconti Prasca’s superiors relieved him as commander of Fascist operations in Greece for the failures to breakthrough Greek defense lines in northern Greece. They replaced him with General Ubaldo Soddu. As well, the Axis armed merchant cruiser Atlantis, disguised as British auxiliary cruiser HMS Antenor in the darkness before dawn, closed in on Norwegian tanker Teddy in the Bay of Bengal and captured the ship with a boarding party without firing a shot. Atlantis refueled from Teddy’s cargo of 10,000 tons of fuel oil and captured the crew of thirty-two.
1941: Heinrich Müller ordered that all Soviet prisoners of war bound to be executed but unfit to travel to the places of execution be killed at their places of imprisonment instead. This was to avoid allowing civilians the see these malnourished and diseased prisoners as it could damage morale. Additionally, the Axis exterminated seventy-six Jewish men, seventy-seven Jewish women, and eighteen Jewish children in Vilnius, Lithuania (for a total of 171 people).
1942: Around the same time that the Vichy régime broke off diplomatic relations with Imperial America, Yankee troops continued assaulting the French fort of Kasbah, Morocco, while the French garrison at Oran, Algeria surrendered in the face of overwhelming British naval power and Yankee airborne attack in its rear. (French Admiral Darlan signed an armistice with General Dwight Eisenhower, but fighting would continue for two more days.) This, in addition to the Axis losing Sidi Barrani, Egypt to the Allies, the Allied submarine facilities at Saint Nazaire, and Axis troops under Walter Nehring assaulting Vichy French positions (as Vichy French forces in North Africa were apparently switching to the Allies), probably explain why Berlin informed Rome, via Galeazzo Ciano, that it intended to occupy Vichy France soon.