NAPOLEON THE MAN-GOD What was it about Napoleon that caused Charles James Fox to adore him as “the most stupendous monument of human wisdom”?! That Napoleon was a man of astonishing energy who from a secular point of view achieved great things – and not only on the battlefield – is undeniable. Indeed, Napoleon’s primary significance may be seen in his having spread the ideas of the Enlightenment throughout Continental Europe and even as far as Egypt. Andrew Roberts writes: “Goethe himself said that Napoleon was ‘always enlightened by reason… He was in a permanent state of enlightenment’. A child of the Enlightenment who became an exponent of the rationalism of Rousseau and Voltaire as a youth, Napoleon believed that Europeans were on the cusp of the most important scientific and cultural developments since the Renaissance. His correspondence with astronomers, chemists, mathematicians and biologists expressed a respect for their work to be expected from a member of the Institut, the headquarters of the French Enlightenment of which he was so proud to have been elected a member.” 1 As Andrew Marr writes, his greatest civil achievement “was the French legal code, or Code Napoléon, a radical simplification and rationalization of old laws, producing a single coherent system, it reshaped France and was influential across the continent. At its height the Napoleonic Empire would reach as far as the Duchy of Warsaw, the tip of Italy and the Balkans, stripping away old aristocratic rights, ending religious discrimination – including against the Jews – and spreading its new laws and the metric system.” 2 But what good he may have done was far outweighed by the evil – the evil of a true forerunner of the Antichrist… The Holy Fathers teach that the Antichrist will come at a time of anarchy, which he will use in order to consolidate his power, presenting himself to the world as its saviour. Napoleon, as “the forerunner of the Antichrist”, as the Russian Holy Synod proclaimed him in 1806, came to power at just such a period… Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the French revolution appeared to have lost its way, consumed by poverty, corruption and both civil and international war. It was saved, as Edmund Burke had predicted, by a “popular general” - Napoleon Bonaparte. He was as sincerely faithful to the spirit of the French revolution as Cromwell had been to the spirit of the English revolution. Madame de Stael called him Robespierre on horseback. After all, he came from Corsica, which in 1 Roberts, “Why Napoleon Merits the Title ‘the Great’”, BBC History Magazine, November, 2014, pp. 36-38. 2 Marr, A History of the World, London: Pan, 2012, p. 370.