Thursday 15 January 2015

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant - Number 616 14 January 2015 - GREATEST FRENCHMAN


HOW WOULD NAPOLEON HAVE HANDLED THE CHARLIE HEBDO CARTOONS? WHAT WOULD AN ETHICAL STATE DO?

‘The Spirit of the Age on horseback!’ exclaimed philosopher Hegel when he saw Napoleon victorious after the battle of Jena. And Madame de Stael called the Corsican adventurer ‘Robespierre on horseback’, the triumphant embodiment of revolutionary France. Either way Napoleon cast a giant shadow over Europe. I wonder: what would the great Emperor make of the current tensions after the Paris terrorist attacks?

After invading Egypt in 1798, Napoleon contemplated embracing Islam. Along with his whole Army. Having read the Qur’an and expressing sympathy for the Book and for Muhammad, Napoleon addressed Egyptians in flattering terms: ‘We Frenchmen have overthrown your bitterest enemy, the Pope, as well as the Knights of Malta. Men who had sworn perpetual war against you and your religion. You can see we are your friends.’ Of course, Napoleon had an agenda. He wanted to strike at the British Empire. Conquering Egypt was the prelude to his undermining British rule in India. It would have suited him to have Islamic nations on his side. What smarter move than becoming a Muslim?

Napoleon made inquiries: ‘What do my Army and I have to do to convert?’ The al-Azhar authorities were succinct: ‘Forsake wine-drinking and be circumcised’. A bit excessive. The ‘cut’ apart, can you remotely imagine Frenchmen giving up the heavenly nectar? (My Algerian friend M. regretted that scholars had not simply asked for taking the shehada – a big chance missed.)

Napoleon secured a certificate of goodwill from al-Azhar, a second best, but the momentous conversion was off. After Nelson destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir the Egyptian dream faded away, like a desert mirage. Napoleon returned to France, made a concordat with Pope Pius VII and restored Catholicism as the religion of Frenchmen. Well, he did quarrel with Pius later. Did he ever threaten the Holy Father with this line, I wonder: ‘Either you bend to my will or I’ll become a Muslim!’

Vincent Cronin in his delightful biography stresses Napoleon’s intellectual and moral merits. He promoted the famous codification of laws, the Code Napoleon, something higher than any military victory and which has outlasted his creator. He also describes Napoleon’s plans once he had invaded England. He would have destroyed the land-owning oligarchy and abolished the House of Lords; introduced universal suffrage and supported the people’s party. The old Jacobin again. (Sounds like the Labour Party…haha!) As to his own domains, Cronin claims that the Emperor took immense pains ‘to help the downtrodden’. He improved the plight of the sick, orphans and the mentally ill. According to revolutionary principles, minorities were enfranchised everywhere and relieved of their burdens. A ruler for all seasons?  For democratic times, anyway.

Let us come down to brass tacks. The Charlie-Hebdo cartoons that have shaken France. Would Napoleon have allowed them to be printed? A rhetorical, anachronistic question because in his Empire freedom of the press was restricted, anyway. Napoleon was tolerant but no libertarian. Public order he valued highly, as any Chef d’Etat naturally would. The idea of a publication exciting religious discord and hatred among his subjects the Emperor would have regarded as mad and subversive. I have no doubt he would have banned it. Which confronts you with a dramatic dilemma. To put it crudely, what is better – or worse - a democratic regime in which journalists can print anything, never mind how incendiary, and be damned (in this case, be killed), or an authoritarian one in which the press has limited freedom and the public good is paternalistically protected from above? Discuss.

In an interview he had with Ali Ridha Jaffar on Ahulbayt TV last week, the priest argued that only in a true ethical and organic state you could properly tackle deep matters like the freedom of the press and the rights of religious minorities. ‘What would your ethical state be like then?’ the good Ali Ridha questioned me. I reply here: ‘It would be a state in which human beings can rightly pursue two overarching ends or goals. First, the happiness of their life here on earth, and second, the happiness or beatitude of their eternal life in Heaven. Religion is concerned chiefly about the later but anything earthly that hinders or interferes with that fundamental pursuit should be a matter for the ethical state to deal with. So, my project entails that those in charge of the common good, the government and the state apparatus, must make sure that the laws and rules ordering the life of the community should always facilitate the pursuit of Eternity. The spiritual is higher than
the material. God is greater than Caesar. In other words, it is not just the economy, stupid!

In his treatise De Monarchia Dante saw Pope and Emperor – the two chief emblems of medieval Christendom - as distinct but also as related, because the power and authority of both emanated from God. France and all other European nations today are as remote from that moral and spiritual ideal as the sky is from the earth. People are adrift in an ocean of individualistic and relativistic materialism – there is no ethical ballast left. Hence the mess the West is in.

Will the Creator send France and Europe another and better Napoleon to give the rotten edifice a good shove and usher in something like Dante’s Monarchia?

Utopian? Yes but I cannot despair. I trust he will.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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