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THE TRIAL

Bonaparte×Jr.

Two architects of their ages confront the sentences that haunt them.

00:00of11:10
legend · A
Napoleon Bonaparte
1769–1821
Takes the question personally
corpus18.6k pages · dictations, letters, memoirs
Vera speaking
Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on THE TRIAL OF ——: Napoleon Bonaparte and Martin Luther King Jr., on On the sentence in their own work they regret most.
legend · B
Martin Luther King Jr.
1929–1968
Every sentence arrives on time
corpus11.3k pages · sermons, speeches, letters

full transcript

  1. Vera
    Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on THE TRIAL OF ——: Napoleon Bonaparte and Martin Luther King Jr., on On the sentence in their own work they regret most.
  2. Napoleon Bonaparte
    I have no regrets. That is the first thing. A man who regrets is a man who hesitates, and hesitation is death on the battlefield, death in government, death in history.
  3. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Then why are we here, Emperor? The question isn't whether you admit regret. The question is what sentence in your own work you would unwrite if you could.
  4. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Very well. If we must play this game. There is a dispatch I sent in 1799, from Egypt, after Jaffa. I wrote that the sick who could not be evacuated should be given opium. Mercy, I called it.
  5. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Mercy. You ordered men poisoned.
  6. Napoleon Bonaparte
    I ordered men released from certain torture by the Turks. You think the enemy would have nursed them? They had plague, Reverend. They were dying already. But the sentence, yes. I regret the sentence because it was misunderstood, twisted by my enemies into something it was not.
  7. Martin Luther King Jr.
    You regret the interpretation, not the act.
  8. Napoleon Bonaparte
    I regret the words that allowed the interpretation. A commander must be precise. And you? What sentence do you regret, Doctor King? Some overheated phrase from a pulpit in Montgomery?
  9. Martin Luther King Jr.
    No. Nothing from a pulpit. It's from the Letter from Birmingham Jail. April 1963. I wrote that the Negro's great stumbling block was not the Klansman but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice.
  10. Napoleon Bonaparte
    That is regrettable? It sounds like sound strategy. Identify the true obstacle.
  11. Martin Luther King Jr.
    It was true. That's not why I regret it. I regret it because it cut off conversation with the very people I needed to reach. It hardened hearts that might have softened. It gave comfort to those who wanted to dismiss me as too radical, too impatient, too uncompromising.
  12. Napoleon Bonaparte
    So you regret being honest.
  13. Martin Luther King Jr.
    I regret being imprecise in my honesty. I meant white moderates in positions of power, in the churches, in the institutions. But the sentence reads as condemnation of millions. A teacher in Ohio, a shopkeeper in Oregon who'd never thought much about segregation but might have been moved to thought. I closed a door.
  14. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Doors must be closed sometimes. An army cannot march in all directions. You choose your enemy, you strike, you move forward. This is leadership.
  15. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Leadership is also knowing that words are not soldiers, Emperor. Words multiply in directions you cannot control. A soldier follows orders. A sentence takes on a life of its own.
  16. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Then you agree with me. The sentence is regrettable because it was misused, not because it was wrong.
  17. Martin Luther King Jr.
    No. I'm saying I wrote it in anger, in a jail cell, after months of patience had yielded nothing but further patience. And anger has its place. The prophets were angry. Jesus was angry in the temple. But that sentence, that particular formulation, it carried a bitterness that obscured the love beneath it.
  18. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Love. You cannot build a nation on love, Reverend.
  19. Martin Luther King Jr.
    You cannot sustain one without it. You built an empire. Where is it now?
  20. Napoleon Bonaparte
    It lasted longer than your movement's gains, which are being rolled back as we speak. Do not lecture me on permanence.
  21. Martin Luther King Jr.
    The moral arc is long. You wouldn't know. You bent it toward yourself.
  22. Napoleon Bonaparte
    I bent it toward France. Toward meritocracy, toward law, toward the overthrow of feudal privilege. The Code Napoléon still governs half of Europe. What sentence in that do you find regrettable?
  23. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Article 213. The husband owes protection to his wife, the wife obedience to her husband.
  24. Napoleon Bonaparte
    That is not my regret, that is yours. You are changing the subject.
  25. Martin Luther King Jr.
    I'm asking if you've considered it.
  26. Napoleon Bonaparte
    It was 1804. It reflected the realities of the time. Women were not soldiers, were not magistrates, were not equipped for public life. This is simply observation.
  27. Martin Luther King Jr.
    So was segregation, to those who enforced it. Simply observation. Simply the way things are. You're telling me you have no second thoughts about encoding that into law?
  28. Napoleon Bonaparte
    The Code was a revolution in itself. It abolished the law of primogeniture, it established equality before the law for men, it secularized marriage, it created a rational system from feudal chaos. You focus on one article and ignore the edifice.
  29. Martin Luther King Jr.
    The edifice was built with that article as a foundation stone. And it taught generations that inequality could be rational, legal, even revolutionary. That's the danger of a sentence, Emperor. It carries authority beyond your intention.
  30. Napoleon Bonaparte
    My intention was empire. I achieved empire. Your intention was equality. You achieved legislation that is now being challenged in courts, in schools, in voting booths. Which of us understood authority?
  31. Martin Luther King Jr.
    You understood power. I sought justice. They are not the same thing. And yes, justice is fragile. It requires each generation to choose it again. Your Code required only obedience.
  32. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Obedience to law is civilization. Without it, you have only the mob.
  33. Martin Luther King Jr.
    With only it, you have only the boot. The law must be just, or obedience becomes collaboration.
  34. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Fine words. But return to the question. You regret your sentence about white moderates because it was tactically unwise. I regret my dispatch about Jaffa because it was misunderstood. We are both saying the same thing. The sentence failed its purpose.
  35. Martin Luther King Jr.
    No. I'm saying the sentence succeeded too well. It said exactly what I felt, and feeling is not always what should be said. You're saying your sentence was distorted. I'm saying mine was accurate, and that accuracy was the problem.
  36. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Then you regret your honesty. Which makes you either a liar then or a coward now.
  37. Martin Luther King Jr.
    I regret the timing and the totality of my honesty in that moment. There is a difference between speaking truth and speaking all of the truth all at once in the way most likely to be misheard. I was in a cell. I was exhausted. I was right, but I was not wise.
  38. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Wisdom is a luxury afforded to historians. Men of action must speak in the moment, must decide in the moment, must live with consequences. This is our burden.
  39. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Yes. And the burden includes examining those moments later and asking, what did I do? What did I say? Who did I harm? Who did I help? What would I change? You're telling me you've done none of that?
  40. Napoleon Bonaparte
    I have done all of that. And I return to the same conclusion. The sentence about Jaffa was necessary. The words were perhaps poorly chosen for posterity. But the decision was sound.
  41. Martin Luther King Jr.
    You regret the public relations, not the ethics.
  42. Napoleon Bonaparte
    I regret that lesser men could not see the necessity. Could not see that a general must sometimes choose between bad and worse, and that the choice itself is a kind of damnation. The sentence simply made that choice visible.
  43. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Then perhaps that's what we're both saying. The sentences we regret are the ones that made visible what we would rather had remained complex, ambiguous, open to interpretation. Yours made your calculation visible. Mine made my exhaustion visible.
  44. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Exhaustion is weakness. Calculation is strength. I do not accept the equivalence.
  45. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Exhaustion is human. Calculation can be monstrous. I don't accept your hierarchy.
  46. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Then we are at an impasse.
  47. Martin Luther King Jr.
    No. We're at the truth. You regret a sentence because it revealed you as willing to kill for expedience. I regret a sentence because it revealed me as willing to alienate for righteousness. We both wrote something true that we wish we could soften.
  48. Napoleon Bonaparte
    I do not wish to soften it. I wish to have written it in a way that could not be weaponized against me by the British press, by Bourbon royalists, by those who never stood in the desert with plague spreading through the ranks and Turkish forces approaching. Context is everything.
  49. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Yes. And I wish I had written my sentence in a way that preserved the context. That the white moderate I condemned was not my neighbor but my obstacle. Not the person but the position. Not the individual but the ideology. But I was angry, and anger abbreviates.
  50. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Anger is clarifying. It is the fog of peace that confuses.
  51. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Anger is necessary. But it is not sufficient. And a sentence born only of anger will outlive its usefulness and become a weapon in hands you never intended.
  52. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Every sentence I wrote became a weapon. That was the point. Words are tools of command, of persuasion, of conquest. You write to achieve an effect. If the effect is not what you intended, you have failed as a writer.
  53. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Or you have succeeded as a human. Imperfect, struggling, trying to speak truth in a crooked time. I don't regret the truth of what I wrote. I regret that I couldn't find a way to tell that truth that left the door open.
  54. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Some doors should remain closed.
  55. Martin Luther King Jr.
    And some sentences should remain unwritten. That's what we're here to admit.
  56. Napoleon Bonaparte
    I admit nothing. I acknowledge that in the fullness of time, with infinite space to explain, I might have phrased the matter differently. But I had neither time nor space, and so I wrote what I wrote. As did you.
  57. Martin Luther King Jr.
    Yes. And we're both here because those sentences mattered. Because they lived beyond us. Because they hurt in ways we didn't intend. That's the cost of being read, Emperor. Your words escape your control.
  58. Napoleon Bonaparte
    Then the regret is not the sentence but the audience. Pearls before swine, as your book says.
  59. Martin Luther King Jr.
    No. The regret is that we were human when we needed to be perfect. And we wrote sentences that proved it.