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Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military officer who rose to power during the latter part of the French Revolution, eventually becoming Emperor. Renowned for his strategic and political prowess, Napoleon was a hugely influential—and controversial—figure in Europe, both in his lifetime and in subsequent historiography of the era. Napoleon’s role as a “progressive dictator” moving history forward has been noted by many philosophers, including Hegel. To Nietzsche, Napoleon is both an example of the heights of greatness that the supra-national Europeans of the future can reach, and of the disappointment of their inevitable failure to live up to their own ideals and subsequent descent into “fatherlandishness.” Nietzsche also offers Napoleon’s coming to power on the heels of a democratic revolution as proof of the egalitarian herd man’s unconscious desire for dictatorship.
Napoleon Quotes in Beyond Good and Evil
The Beyond Good and Evil quotes below are all either spoken by Napoleon or refer to Napoleon . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
8. Peoples and Fatherlands
Quotes
What Europe owes to the Jews? Many things good and bad, and above all one thing that is both of the best and of the worst: the grand style in morality, the terribleness and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and sublimity of moral questionabilities—and hence precisely the most attractive, captious, and choicest part of those plays of color and seductions to life in whose afterglow the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, is burning now—perhaps burning itself out. We artists among the spectators and philosophers are—grateful for this to the Jews.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
In all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century, the over-all direction of the mysterious workings of their soul was to prepare the way for this new synthesis and to anticipate experimentally the European of the future: only in their foregrounds or in weaker hours, say in old age, did they belong to the “fatherlandish”—they were merely taking a rest from themselves when they became “patriots.” I am thinking of such human beings as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: do not hold it against me when I include Richard Wagner, too, with them, for one should not allow oneself to be led astray about him by his own misunderstandings—geniuses of his type rarely have the right to understand themselves.
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Napoleon Quotes in Beyond Good and Evil
The Beyond Good and Evil quotes below are all either spoken by Napoleon or refer to Napoleon . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
8. Peoples and Fatherlands
Quotes
What Europe owes to the Jews? Many things good and bad, and above all one thing that is both of the best and of the worst: the grand style in morality, the terribleness and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and sublimity of moral questionabilities—and hence precisely the most attractive, captious, and choicest part of those plays of color and seductions to life in whose afterglow the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, is burning now—perhaps burning itself out. We artists among the spectators and philosophers are—grateful for this to the Jews.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
In all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century, the over-all direction of the mysterious workings of their soul was to prepare the way for this new synthesis and to anticipate experimentally the European of the future: only in their foregrounds or in weaker hours, say in old age, did they belong to the “fatherlandish”—they were merely taking a rest from themselves when they became “patriots.” I am thinking of such human beings as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: do not hold it against me when I include Richard Wagner, too, with them, for one should not allow oneself to be led astray about him by his own misunderstandings—geniuses of his type rarely have the right to understand themselves.
