The first Europeanist

An immigrant son of the Mediterranean whose family is fleeing the civil war and poverty arrives in France at the age of 9. They mock him as a "foreigner". He manages to attend an excellent school, where he learns many things. He makes his way thanks to merit. He became the Frenchman, or rather the most famous European in the world. How many books have been written about Napoleon? More than two hundred thousand as I have read elsewhere? But I think there are at least twice as many books about Napoleon. Of course, he is by far the most illustrious of the French: even though his mother carried him in her arms when he ran away from the French who fought the Corsican revolt, and as an adult, his opponents always treated him with the contempt reserved for Corsican foreigners.

He is still the most painted Frenchman, who has made more films, on which they have written more novels. Napoleon is a character who finds himself in his acts, in the things he does. He was born as the son of the Revolution, a sort of Robespierre on horseback. The reforms he brought to the rest of Europe, starting with the Civil Code, were undoubtedly democratic for the time, a monarchic continent. But then he too was crowned by the Pope. He preached the absolute ethics of action, the triumph of the will over reality: "I want and therefore I can". And if you can, you must". But at the same time it is also the genius of political compromise. He is keen to present himself as neither right-wing nor left-wing. "Neither red cap in the red heel", he says, that is, neither with revolutionaries nor with aristocrats. But he himself realised the contradiction, the difficulty of reconciling opposites and his own limits, when he confided to Metternich in 1813: "I wanted to unite present and past, medieval prejudices and the institutions of our century. I was wrong!". Indeed, the idea of a united Europe can be traced back to Napoleon, even though he was a Europe of French hegemony. In a way, it is precise since the 19th century that two contradictory tendencies tend to branch out, the idea of a single European civilisation, from the Vistula to the Atlantic, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, and, at the same time, nationalisms. As long as there is a balance between these two opposing trends, things are fine. Instead, it ends in catastrophe every time one or the other of these tendencies tries to prevail over the other. As in the case of Europeanist forcing. I would not take it for granted that there is another Europe, neither that of Napoleon nor that united Europe founded on the German model - central bank plus federalism.