For the nineteenth-century philosopher Hegel as well as for the eighteenth-century philosopher Kant, Napoleon and Frederick the Great were the greatest men of their respective times. Commenting on the role Napoleon played in world history, Hegel famously spoke of the ''Weltgeist on horseback’’ he had seen riding to the battle of Jena; for Kant, the eighteenth century had been “the age of Enlightenment, the century of Frederick’’ (Kant 1970: 58). Putting the “greatness’’ of Napoleon and Frederick, and thus also the particularities of their own age, into historical perspective, contemporaries of both turned to Caesar yet again (Lefevre 1989; one example is the comparison between revolutionary France and Rome in Liebenroth 1797). The way this comparison was articulated, however, rather highlights the break represented by the French Revolution, which separates the two rulers more fundamentally than the mere 13 years separating their reigns might suggest. As a successful general bringing a revolutionary period to an end by establishing a military monarchy ruling over a huge empire, Napoleon was considered a new Caesar: his world-shaking rise to power fundamentally transformed the political structures ofFrance and the European continent.
Such a career had been hardly imaginable at all in the pre-revolutionary monarchies of continental Europe, and it had been abhorred in the “post-revolutionary” regimes of eighteenth-century Britain and America, where, following the Glorious Revolution and the War of Independence, Caesar had become a symbol of everything threatening the oligarchical rule of the land-owning elites. As radical Tory pamphlets attacking the Whig oligarchy as well as Voltaire’s writings highlight, it was throughout Europe (with the partial exception of Germany) rather opponents of the status quo, who appropriated the historical figure of Caesar to break up what they considered to be ossified political and social structures. It was to a large degree the implicit provocation that mattered here, while the actual aims of these Caesar-admirers, or perhaps rather “users,” could be quite different, ranging from another version of oligarchy in the case of Britain’s Tories to the enlightened despotism favored by some philosophes. As always when early modern writers used the panoply of figures from ancient history and mythology, it just depended on what aspect of Caesar’s character and career was chosen: his close relationship with the Roman people; his conquests; his emergence as sole victor from the civil war; or the dementia he displayed vis-a-vis his defeated opponents.
Before the French Revolution, however, such a use of Caesar as a proponent of change was always qualified and limited. When likening the hereditary monarch Frederick II to Caesar, even Voltaire only ever fully praised Caesar’s military and intellectual achievements, while discussing the issue of forceful regime change and his dictatorship much more cautiously. For Aufklarer and philosophes, who were all still writing within the context of early modern confessional states, the religious tolerance of the Prussian roi-philosophe alone seemed to open the way for mankind to proceed to a new age; this after all is what earned him Kant’s epithet. The political culture of eighteenth-century Europe was shaped by the memory of the previous two centuries of regicides and civil wars, which had been wars of religion as well as struggles for political hegemony. In Caesar’s praise or condemnation, the shadow of Caesar’s assassination as a usurper thus remained ever present; it was left to the nineteenth century to think of Caesar primarily in terms of Napoleon’s rise to power in an age of revolution.
World History
