Imperial Exploits and American Democracy’s Dark Other

2Napoleon is examined as a towering figure of nineteenth-century conquest, political innovation or machination and widespread (if sharply contested) affective appeal. His persona is treated as thoroughly ambivalent: both the little Corsican corporal who rose by his own efforts and the charismatic emperor, the embodiment of the values of the French Revolution and their counter-revolutionary refashioning or betrayal. It is Napoleon who “forces a confrontation” with the “unavoidable contradictions” and “pressing dangers” inherent in the structures of nineteenth-century “liberalism, capitalism, and the democratic state” (8). Duquette chooses not to distinguish between the cult of personality surrounding Napoleon and “Bonapartism” as a political orientation. Working holistically, she demonstrates the ubiquity of his presence in the United States through images, dioramas and impersonations, together with recurrent appearances in plays, essays, fiction and periodical literature. The contrived spectacle of le retours des cendres or the return of Napoleon’s remains to Paris in 1840, nineteen years after his death on Saint Helena, conferred concreteness on his spectral persistence (24–25), prompting diverse representations in visual art and literature. He even achieved a dubious reincarnation through the self-serving endeavours of his often-buffoonish nephew Louis-Napoleon or Napoleon III, whose second empire survived from 1852 until 1870.

4American Tyrannies consists of an Introduction, seven substantial chapters and a brief Coda. The chapters may simply be read consecutively, although the author also suggests an unobtrusive division into three loosely cohesive sections.

5Chapter 1 focuses on David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) as a “carefully argued and decisive” intervention in prevailing anti-slavery discourse (39). Since the ancient Greeks (and notably including the framers of the US constitution of 1787), those subjected to perceived (political) tyranny had regarded themselves as figuratively enslaved (43). Duquette, however, reverses this equation: if tyranny was construed as slavery, then chattel slavery should surely have been acknowledged as tyranny (47) in the full ugliness of its literal, dehumanizing abuses. Walker lays bare the avarice of white citizens of the United States, vividly sketching the perverse equality of misery and degradation imposed on enslaved individuals. He reaches out for reconciliation with white Americans who are prepared to own up to their expedient indifference; if redress is to be denied, though, he deems rebellion morally and practically justified.

6Chapter 2 plays against the backdrop of the first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835). Tocqueville is alert to the tension produced between a cherished passion for equality and the maintenance of frequently undervalued “liberty” (91). His criticism of slavery is awkwardly qualified whereas his condemnation of the “destruction” of numerous Native American tribes is unreserved (see 80). Duquette juxtaposes with these views a typically American “tyrannical style” as the “fusion of affect, personality, and politics” (75), combining “privilege, grievance, and frustration” (34) under the assumption that absolute personal liberty should trump majority consensus. This “tyrannical style” is particularly evident in the slave-holding South’s resentment of notional Northern interference and manipulation.

7Duquette’s third chapter shifts the lens to the effects of economic domination under industrial capitalism (34), as well as the correlation of inescapable wage-earning with enslavement. She foregrounds a collection of previously neglected articles in Horace Greely’s New-York Daily Tribune written by Margaret Fuller (1844–1850) and Karl Marx (1852–1862). Fuller sets out to re-evaluate “liberalism’s tyrannies” (34) as “America grows rich and strong”, which “seems to suffice her” (124) – avarice again. She also condemns the consequences of Napoleonic egotism (137). Marx traces the “sordid rise” of France’s Louis-Napoleon (137), while uncovering what Greely’s editorial staff term the “swindling” of “imperial socialism” through the disastrously misguided activity of the Crédit Mobilier (138). Far from empowering independent investors and supporting essential infrastructure, this irresponsible banking venture ended in nationalising spiralling debt.

8Chapter 4 begins the second section of the book by moving to the nexus of “tyranny, democracy, and individual genius” (34). Here Duquette surveys works centring on Napoleon by five landmark American authors. In Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), the titular figure is ingeniously linked to Napoleon via an investigation of crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon (1895) and Charles Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s story as “L’homme des foules” (163). William Ellery Channing feels impelled to warn readers against Napoleon’s preoccupation with his own “superhuman” greatness (164). By contrast, John S.C. Abbot’s fanciful, hagiographic, unprincipled and historically inaccurate biography of Napoleon is serialized in Harper’s Weekly to public acclaim. Conversely again, William Emerson considers Napoleon a tyrant with a dangerous capacity for “usurping” other minds and threatening the healthy “development of the individual” (176). For African American author William Wells Brown, Napoleon is conclusively “dwarfed” by Toussaint Louverture, since Louverture defended liberty and emancipated his people while Napoleon fought for his own advantage, turning into a despot (190).

9Chapter 5 refracts notions of domestic and/or female tyranny, together with rampant individualism, through the clauses of the Napoleonic Code as applied in Louisiana. The Code’s sharp distinctions between person, thing and action, supplemented by its endorsement of patriarchy, are set against Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). This novel is characterised by the “melting” of discriminations between such categories, proliferating forms of “not-thinking” and inviting readers to reflect on the possible force of “an individual’s will, the ability to make one’s own choices, … liv[ing] free of the demands or expectations of others” (216). Duquette probes the troubling prospect that visions of untrammelled liberty may shade into “tyranny” (220).

10In the final section of her book, Duquette appraises American authors in Europe within the framework of liberty and tyranny. Chapter 6 presents Victor Séjour, a homme de couleur libre from New Orleans who becomes highly successful as the writer of morally polarized melodramas for the Parisian stage (223). For Séjour, Napoleon was a benevolent emperor who promised “justice and meritocratic equality” (225); this reaction indicates that previously enslaved people might prefer the seeming protection of monarchy to a fickle democracy (223). To crystallize his conception of tyranny, Séjour fundamentally recasts Shakespeare’s Richard III, using the king’s physical deformity to project glaring moral deficiency while evoking the damning convergence of unrestrained desire and its actualization as noxious modes of being or becoming (243). Yet the noble antagonist Richemond embodies the putatively magnanimous Napoleonic ideal.

11In her closing chapter, Duquette examines Henry James’s novel The Princess Casamassima (1886) to demonstrate that tyranny can permeate radical or revolutionary projects as much as conservative political formations (34–35). The main character Hyacinth Robinson, a talented London bookbinder from the struggling working class, becomes embroiled in an anarchist assassination plot, although he later reassesses his intense self-dedication. In unsettling conflict with his political impetus, he finds himself also attracted to a fine European cultural legacy that is securely rooted in the privileged freedom to create art yet insidiously entwined with an underlying disregard of popular suffering. Since the text is haunted by French revolutionary aspirations and their stirring of subsequent movements of European unrest, Duquette interprets this novel through the ideas of liberté, égalité and fraternité. She suggests that the male characters have little significant freedom of action, being constrained by class and personal circumstances. Further, the lines of friendship are blurred by private attachments at odds with alienating political affiliations; in fact, revolutionary strategies transform the care of friendship into burgeoning tyranny.

12In her Coda, Duquette proposes direct analogies between Napoleon’s career and megalomania or delusions of grandeur (291). This conclusion endorses her judgement of the emperor and his extraordinary power in shaping nineteenth-century personhoods, events – and a host of imaginative afterlives.

13American Tyrannies will serve as a valuable resource for humanities scholars of the extended nineteenth century, particularly specialists in historical, literary and political studies. The book offers a wealth of information about the domestic situation in the United States as mapped onto reciprocal global exchanges. Recent theoretical perspectives range from thinkers as diverse as Karl Popper and Charles Taylor to Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou. The commentary is certainly intellectually rewarding, if occasionally whimsical in its critical scope or approach. Elizabeth Duquette’s concern about tyranny as latent within, or the sinister doppelgänger of, democracy is prescient; her admonition could scarcely be timelier for attentive readers in this third decade of the twenty-first century.