Bonaparte×Orwell

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on THE TRIAL, Napoleon Bonaparte and George Orwell. They take up On a colleague who failed in a way they secretly knew they were a hair away from themselves.
2. 00:12
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   Bernadotte. Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte. You want to know about failure, there is your specimen.
3. 00:18
   George Orwellshare moment

   One of your generals, wasn't he? Became King of Sweden eventually. Odd sort of failure.
4. 00:24
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   He failed me. At Wagram, at Leipzig. The man had all the gifts—courage, intelligence, command presence. And at the crucial moment, always, he hesitated. He could not commit fully to anything except his own advancement.
5. 00:44
   George Orwellshare moment

   Which is presumably why he ended up a king while you ended up on Saint Helena.
6. 00:49
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   You think you are clever? He betrayed France. He fought against us with the Swedes. That is not success, that is survival without honour.
7. 01:01
   George Orwellshare moment

   I wasn't praising him. I was observing that your complaint about his self-interest rings a bit hollow. You spent fifteen years drenching Europe in blood for your own glory.
8. 01:13
   Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

   For France. For the Revolution. For order against the chaos of petty kings and corrupt republics.
9. 01:20
   George Orwellshare moment

   Also for Napoleon. Let's not pretend otherwise. But go on—what bothered you about Bernadotte specifically? There must have been dozens of incompetent marshals.
10. 01:32
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    He was not incompetent. That is precisely the point. He understood warfare as well as Davout or Lannes. Better than Murat, certainly. But he could never silence the voice in his head asking what would happen if he failed, what Paris would say, whether he might be blamed.
11. 01:55
    George Orwellshare moment

    The voice that paralyzed him at the decisive moment.
12. 01:59
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Yes. He wanted certainty before committing his troops. In war there is no certainty. You see the opening, you strike. He would see it, recognize it, and then... wait. Calculate. Let it close.
13. 02:18
    George Orwellshare moment

    You're describing this very precisely. Almost intimately.
14. 02:22
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I commanded him for years. Of course I know how his mind worked.
15. 02:27
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's not quite what I meant. You're describing the inside of his hesitation, not just the external result. Which suggests you've felt something similar.
16. 02:38
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Absurd. I never hesitated at the critical moment.
17. 02:42
    George Orwellshare moment

    Russia. You hesitated in Russia. Whether to winter in Moscow or retreat while you still had an army.
18. 02:49
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    That was not hesitation, that was... the situation was complex. The Tsar would not negotiate. I could not appear weak by retreating without a treaty.
19. 03:02
    George Orwellshare moment

    So you waited. Calculated. Let the moment close. And lost half a million men.
20. 03:09
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You sit here, comfortable, decades after the fact, and judge. You were never responsible for an empire.
21. 03:16
    George Orwellshare moment

    No. I was responsible for much less. Which is why I can recognize the pattern. I knew a man in Spain—bit of a hack writer for one of the left papers. Decent enough fellow, understood Fascism as well as anyone. Saw exactly what was coming.
22. 03:34
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And?
23. 03:35
    George Orwellshare moment

    And when it mattered, when he could have said something clear and useful, he produced mush. Equivocations. Both-sides-ism. He was so terrified of being wrong, of being mocked by the clever people, that he said nothing true at all.
24. 03:53
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Another Bernadotte.
25. 03:54
    George Orwellshare moment

    Another human being. He wasn't evil or stupid. He was frightened of the same thing I was frightened of—being exposed as a fraud. Of having people realize we weren't quite as certain as we pretended.
26. 04:10
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You? Orwell, you never struck me as uncertain about anything. Your prose is like a hammer.
27. 04:17
    George Orwellshare moment

    The prose is a hammer because I'm terrified it might be a feather. Every writer knows this. We punch through the page because we're afraid the whole thing might dissolve into vagueness if we let up for a moment.
28. 04:31
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Then you understand. The general who hesitates is not a coward. He sees the abyss clearly. Perhaps more clearly than the general who charges.
29. 04:44
    George Orwellshare moment

    Yes. Which is why watching him fail is so bloody uncomfortable. You see yourself with slightly worse luck or slightly less willpower.
30. 04:54
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Bernadotte had his victory at Leipzig—for Sweden, against France. He finally committed fully. But to the wrong side, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.
31. 05:09
    George Orwellshare moment

    Was it the wrong side? You'd invaded Sweden's ally. From his position, you were the aggressor.
32. 05:15
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    From his position, he was a Frenchman who betrayed his country for a crown. Do not philosophize about perspectives. Some things are betrayal regardless of angle.
33. 05:28
    George Orwellshare moment

    Fair enough. Though I notice you're angrier about the betrayal than the hesitation now.
34. 05:33
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    The hesitation I could forgive. It wasted opportunities, it cost lives, but it was human. The betrayal was a choice. He chose certainty—his crown, his safety—over loyalty.
35. 05:51
    George Orwellshare moment

    And that's what you couldn't forgive. That he found a way to escape the thing you were both afraid of.
36. 05:57
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I was not afraid.
37. 05:59
    George Orwellshare moment

    Of course you were. You just marched straight into it instead of around it. Which is admirable, in its way, and also completely mad.
38. 06:08
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    War is mad. Empire is mad. You do not build anything by being cautious and reasonable.
39. 06:14
    George Orwellshare moment

    No, but you might avoid destroying it, which you managed quite thoroughly by 1815.
40. 06:20
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You are trying to provoke me.
41. 06:22
    George Orwellshare moment

    I'm trying to get you to admit that watching Bernadotte hesitate bothered you because you recognized the impulse. The little voice asking if this was the right moment, if you'd miscalculated, if the whole thing might come crashing down.
42. 06:38
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Every commander hears that voice. The question is whether you let it speak or whether you silence it and act.
43. 06:47
    George Orwellshare moment

    And if you silence it too completely, you end up invading Russia in June and staying until November. If you let it speak too loudly, you end up like Bernadotte—or my writer friend in Spain—dithering until someone else makes the choice for you.
44. 07:05
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    So there is no answer. Only action or paralysis, both leading to disaster.
45. 07:12
    George Orwellshare moment

    More or less. Though I'd say there's a third option—acting while admitting you might be wrong. Which is harder than it sounds.
46. 07:21
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    That is weakness. A commander cannot show doubt.
47. 07:25
    George Orwellshare moment

    A commander, maybe not. A writer, definitely not—at least not in public. But a human being had better acknowledge it to himself, or he'll end up either frozen or reckless.
48. 07:38
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Bernadotte was neither frozen nor reckless. He was calculating. Always calculating the advantage.
49. 07:48
    George Orwellshare moment

    Which brings us back to the real problem. It wasn't his hesitation that bothered you. It was that he hesitated for selfish reasons while you told yourself your own doubts were for France, for the Revolution, for something larger.
50. 08:03
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    They were.
51. 08:04
    George Orwellshare moment

    Perhaps. But the hesitation feels the same either way, doesn't it? That's what makes watching someone else's version so unsettling. The mechanism is identical even when the justification differs.
52. 08:19
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    You are saying I saw myself in Bernadotte.
53. 08:21
    George Orwellshare moment

    I'm saying you saw the version of yourself that you refused to become. Which is its own kind of mirror. Uncomfortable but clarifying.
54. 08:32
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    He died wealthy and comfortable in Stockholm. I died on a rock in the Atlantic. Tell me which of us refused what.
55. 08:41
    George Orwellshare moment

    You refused safety. He refused greatness. Both of you knew the cost. That's why you hated watching him make the choice you didn't.
56. 08:50
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    And your writer friend in Spain?
57. 08:52
    George Orwellshare moment

    Dead in the war, I think. I'm not certain. We lost track of each other. But I remember reading his equivocations and feeling physically ill because I'd written the same sort of mush two years earlier, before I understood what I was doing.
58. 09:09
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    So we are both discussing ourselves.
59. 09:12
    George Orwellshare moment

    Always were. That's the trick of these conversations. We think we're talking about someone else.
60. 09:18
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    No. Bernadotte was real. His failures were real. I am not projecting.
61. 09:25
    George Orwellshare moment

    Of course not. But the reason his failures bothered you so much—that's the projection. If he'd simply been incompetent, you'd have replaced him. But he was competent and hesitant, which meant his failure implicated something in you.
62. 09:40
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    I committed. I always committed.
63. 09:43
    George Orwellshare moment

    Yes. Which is why you're dead and he's remembered as a king. I'm not saying he made the better choice. I'm saying he made the choice you feared, and succeeded anyway, which is the final insult.
64. 09:56
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    There was no success in betrayal.
65. 09:59
    George Orwellshare moment

    There was survival. Sometimes that's enough.
66. 10:02
    Napoleon Bonaparteshare moment

    Not for me.
67. 10:04
    George Orwellshare moment

    No. Which is why you're interesting and he's a footnote. But it's also why watching him fail—or hesitate—felt like looking into a mirror you'd rather not see.