Who Came First? Napoleon the First
Categories: History , Poetry
First, watch and listen to this audio file. If you’re at work, depending on your office, you’ll either want to stick in the earbuds or crank it up really loud. If you’re reading this while waiting for the security guys to escort you to the bus stop, set it up as a loop. (Email me, if you have time before they find your cube, and I’ll tell you how to make the loop hard to stop.)
For all these years, I’ve thought about Gertrude Stein’s comparison between Napoleon and Picasso as having to do with a physical resemblance and with the nagging question of whether the experimental ideas of Picasso, like the Napoleonic empire, might someday come crumbling down. Then I read Anton Neumayr’s 1995 Dictators In the Mirror of Medicine, which purports to be a psychological and physical portrait of Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin.
The most interesting parts are the descriptions of the deaths of Napoleon and Stalin (the story of Hitler’s death is pretty much what you’ve heard before) and also simply the addition of Napoleon to the stories of Hitler and Stalin, given the huge advances in medicine between Napoleon’s time (1769-1821) and that the other two dictators. Given more sophisticated weaponry, the book postulates, Napoleon would have killed just as many civilians as Hitler and Stalin.
The convincing argument made me wonder whether the “Who Came First? Napoleon the First” line might relate more or less obliquely to the idea that Napoleon was in fact a direct precursor of Hitler and Stalin, whose evil she seems presciently to have picked up on in her later works.
In fact, though, no, since Stein wrote “A Completed Portrait of Picasso” in 1923.
Neumayr describes Napoleon’s decline in loving detail. (Think “the color and texture of coffee grounds.”) Afterward, six different autopsy reports concluded he died either of stomach or liver cancer. Neumayr castigates Napoleon’s physicians for their useless and painful treatments. It’s hard not to think, Well, at least they tried (or some of them did). At least they realized that the digestive system was the seat of the problem. At least after his death they recognized both the stomach and the liver as major organs.
By the time Stalin died, we had antibiotics, but they wouldn’t have helped him any more than they would have helped Napoleon. What we know of Stalin’s death mostly comes from Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs, which he revised several times. In the first version, quoted meticulously by Neumayr, four Soviet leaders watch Stalin die, apparently of a stroke, for three days without calling a doctor, and perhaps with Stalin lying on the floor much of the time. In later versions, Khrushchev claims medical help was called in sooner, and Stalin was lifted onto the sofa soon after being found.
Like Napoleon, Gertrude Stein died of stomach cancer. It’s not impossible that her surgery in 1947 could have been successful. Had surgery been attempted on Napoleon before the disease spread, however, he almost certainly would have died of infection.
