Lincoln×Bonaparte

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Abraham Lincoln sits down with Napoleon Bonaparte for THE TRIAL. The subject — On the door they didn't open, and what they imagine was on the other side.
2. 00:12
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   You know, they say opportunity only knocks once. But I've always wondered if maybe opportunity knocked twice and we just didn't hear it the second time because we were too busy congratulating ourselves for answering the first.
3. 00:24
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   Philosophy. Always you begin with philosophy, Monsieur Lincoln. I prefer facts. What door do you speak of?
4. 00:34
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   The ones we didn't open, General. The paths we didn't take. I've been thinking lately about my years as a young man, reading law by candlelight in New Salem. There was a girl there, Ann Rutledge. She died of fever in '35, when I was twenty-six.
5. 00:46
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   Ah. A woman. Always it comes to this. But you married another, non? This is not a door unopened. This is a door you chose not to open.
6. 00:58
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   Well now, that's the question, isn't it? Did I choose, or did fever make the choice for me? Sometimes I wonder what sort of man I might have been if she'd lived. Whether I would have stayed in New Salem, practicing small-town law, raising a family in peace.
7. 01:14
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   You would have been nothing. Obscure. Do you not see? The tragedy made you hungry. Without it, you remain a provincial attorney telling jokes at the tavern.
8. 01:26
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   Maybe so. But I'll confess, General, there were nights in the White House, with the casualty reports coming in from Antietam, from Gettysburg, when I thought that provincial attorney might have been the wiser man. He might have slept better.
9. 01:38
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   Sleep! Bah. Sleep is for the dead. And we have plenty of time for that now, non? You saved your Union. This is what matters.
10. 01:50
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    At the cost of six hundred thousand lives. Sometimes I wonder if there was another way, a door I walked past without seeing. Some combination of words that might have prevented the whole awful business.
11. 02:02
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    There was no other way. The South would not yield. You know this. I know this. We are men who understand power, and power yields only to greater power.
12. 02:16
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Is that what you tell yourself about Russia, General?
13. 02:18
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Russia. Always they come back to Russia. Yes, very well. You wish to speak of doors not opened? Russia is my door.
14. 02:30
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I didn't mean to touch a nerve.
15. 02:31
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You meant exactly this. But I will answer. In 1812, I stood in Moscow. The city burned. The Tsar would not negotiate. My marshals, they begged me to winter there, to wait for spring.
16. 02:49
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    And you retreated instead.
17. 02:50
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I withdrew. There is a difference. But yes. I opened the door marked 'return' and behind it was snow and ice and a hundred thousand dead men. Sometimes I see the other door. The one marked 'winter in Moscow.' I wonder what was behind that one.
18. 03:11
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    More dead men, I'd wager. Just French ones instead of on the road.
19. 03:14
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps I negotiate with Alexander from a position of strength. Perhaps I hold Russia through the winter and in spring I dictate terms. Perhaps the entire history changes.
20. 03:32
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Or perhaps you starve in a burned city, and some other Frenchman makes himself Emperor. It's a fool's game, General, imagining what might have been.
21. 03:39
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And yet you play it. You play it with your dead girl and your small-town life.
22. 03:46
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Touché. I suppose we're both fools, then. Though I'll note that between the two of us, only one died on a rock in the middle of the ocean, courtesy of the British.
23. 03:54
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And only one was shot in a theater by a madman. We choose our deaths as poorly as we choose our doors, it seems.
24. 04:03
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Fair enough. But tell me this, did you ever think about the door marked 'Constitutional Monarchy'? Before you crowned yourself Emperor? There was a moment there, after you'd stabilized France, when you might have stepped back.
25. 04:17
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Step back? To what? To chaos? To the Directory? To more revolution? France needed order. France needed strength.
26. 04:25
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    France needed Napoleon Bonaparte, you mean.
27. 04:27
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Yes! Exactly yes! You understand nothing if you think this is vanity. I was the Revolution made flesh. I was the guarantee that France would not slide back into the Terror or into monarchy of the old kind. The crown was necessary.
28. 04:47
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    And yet it's the crown that turned all of Europe against you. Kings and emperors, they don't like upstarts. If you'd stayed First Consul, if you'd established a republic in fact rather than just in name, might not Britain have made peace?
29. 04:59
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Britain would never make peace. Not while France was strong. You think my title mattered to them? They feared French power, not French crowns.
30. 05:13
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Maybe. But it gave them an excuse to make it personal. Made you a tyrant instead of a revolutionary. Changed the story they could tell about the war.
31. 05:23
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Stories. Always Americans worry about stories. I worried about artillery and supply lines and whether my cavalry could ford the Danube. This is the difference between us.
32. 05:35
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    The difference between us, General, is that I understood something you never did. Power in a republic flows from the people's sense that you serve them. The moment they believe you serve yourself, you're finished.
33. 05:46
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I did serve them! I gave them law, order, prosperity. The Code Napoleon still governs half of Europe. What more could I give?
34. 05:55
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Your wars. You could have given them less of those.
35. 05:57
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    The wars came to me! You think I wished to fight Austria six times? Russia? Prussia? They would not leave France in peace.
36. 06:06
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Even Spain? Even the Peninsula?
37. 06:07
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Spain. Yes. Spain was my error. You wish me to admit this? Very well. Spain was the door I should not have opened. Behind it was only blood and guerrilla war and the beginning of the end.
38. 06:27
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Now we're getting somewhere. What did you think was behind that door when you opened it?
39. 06:31
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    A compliant ally. A brother on the throne. Control of the Peninsula to enforce the Continental System against Britain. It seemed simple.
40. 06:42
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    It always does, doesn't it? The door seems simple before you open it. Afterward, you find it led to a hall with a hundred more doors, and you're lost.
41. 06:50
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And you, Monsieur Lincoln? You have your Spain? Your door that you regret?
42. 06:57
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Reconstruction. I think about it every day, or whatever passes for days in this peculiar afterlife. I was just beginning to shape the policy when Booth pulled his trigger.
43. 07:06
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You did not open this door. You died before you could.
44. 07:09
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Exactly. And so I'll never know what was behind it. Whether my plans for reconciliation would have worked. Whether I could have brought the South back into the fold without the bitterness that followed. It's the door I'll wonder about forever.
45. 07:24
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You imagine it would have worked. Naturally. The door we do not open is always the one that leads to paradise.
46. 07:32
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    You're probably right. Maybe my plans were naïve. Maybe the hatred ran too deep. Maybe Johnson's way, or the Radical Republicans' way, were the only ways possible.
47. 07:43
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    But you do not believe this.
48. 07:45
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    No. I don't. I think with malice toward none and charity for all, we might have done better. But that's just the dead talking, imagining we were wiser than we were.
49. 07:55
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    We were wise enough. We were men of action. We opened the doors that were before us. We did what we thought necessary.
50. 08:05
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    And the men who came after, they opened the doors we left for them. For good or ill.
51. 08:10
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    This is the only certainty. The doors continue. Someone always opens them.
52. 08:18
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I suppose that's true. Though I confess, General, I sometimes think the real test of a leader isn't which doors he opens, but which ones he has the wisdom to walk past. The restraint to say 'not this one, not today.'
53. 08:30
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Restraint. The virtue of men who do nothing. I do not accept this.
54. 08:37
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    And that's why you ended on St. Helena and I ended with half a nation calling me Father Abraham. The difference between us isn't courage, General. We both had that. It's knowing when not to use it.
55. 08:48
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You think if I showed restraint, I would be remembered better? That I should have stopped after Austerlitz? After Jena?
56. 08:57
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I think if you'd stopped anywhere, you'd have kept France. And keeping France seems like it might have been the point.
57. 09:03
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Keeping France was never possible. Not in the Europe of kings and emperors who feared revolution. You do not understand the world I inherited.
58. 09:14
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Maybe not. But I understood the country I inherited. And I knew that if I tried to hold it by force alone, I'd lose it entirely. So I held it by force and by words, by armies and by argument. It's a balance you never quite managed.
59. 09:28
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Your country was one nation, one language, one history. Mine was a revolution trying to survive in a continent of enemies. We are not comparable.
60. 09:41
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Perhaps not. But we're both here now, talking about the doors we didn't open. Funny how that equalizes things.
61. 09:47
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    What do you imagine was behind your door, truly? Your reconciliation, your reconstruction without bitterness. What does this look like?
62. 10:00
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I imagine Negro children and white children going to the same schools within a generation. I imagine former Confederate soldiers voting Republican because they saw we meant what we said about charity for all. I imagine no Jim Crow, no lynch mobs, no Klan. Maybe that's foolish.
63. 10:16
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    It is foolish. Men do not change so quickly. The South would hate you no matter how gentle your hand.
64. 10:24
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Maybe. But I'd rather be foolish and merciful than wise and cruel. That's a door you never even looked for, is it?
65. 10:31
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I looked. I found nothing there. Mercy to your enemies is only possible when you are so strong they cannot threaten you. I was never that strong.
66. 10:43
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Or perhaps you were never strong enough to risk mercy. It takes a different kind of courage.
67. 10:47
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You had four years of war, six hundred thousand dead, and you speak to me of mercy. Where was your mercy at Shiloh? At Cold Harbor?
68. 10:57
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Fighting the war. But planning the peace. Both at once. That's the door you never found, General. The one marked 'what comes after.' You were always fighting the next battle, never building the next peace.
69. 11:08
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Because there was always another battle! Until Waterloo, and then there was nothing. Nothing but an island and slow death.
70. 11:18
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I'm sorry for that. Truly. No man deserves that end.
71. 11:21
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I do not want your pity, Monsieur Lincoln. I want you to understand that the doors we see depend on where we stand. You stood in a young republic with an ocean between you and Europe. I stood in France with enemies on every border. Your unopened doors and my unopened doors, they are not the same.
72. 11:45
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    That's fair. I'll grant you that. But here's what I keep coming back to, in all our talk of doors and choices. The question isn't whether we chose rightly. It's whether we chose for ourselves or for something larger than ourselves. And I think that's where you and I part ways, General. My unopened door haunts me because of what the nation lost. Yours haunts you because of what Napoleon lost.
73. 12:08
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    They are the same thing! I was France!
74. 12:10
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    No, sir. You were a man who led France. A great man, I'll grant. But just a man. And that's the door you never found. The one where Napoleon Bonaparte could be both great and unnecessary. Where France could continue without you.
75. 12:23
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You are wrong. But I think we will not agree on this. We are too different, you and I.
76. 12:30
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Different doors, different times, different nations. But the same regrets, in the end. The same wondering about what might have been. Maybe that's what makes us human, General. Not the doors we opened, but the ones we still dream about.