“The Malady Of The Caesars.”

“The Malady Of The Caesars.” This is a chapter heading in one of my father’s books, Napoleon: A Doctor’s Biography, by Boris Sokoloff, MD, PhD. It is well known that the abuse of power brings moral corruption and psychological damage. It is less well known that the abuse of power also creates physiological damage.

Nearly every week, we are subjected to stories about the consequences of the abuse of power—corporate greed, corruption in politics, boards that were bribed to look the other way, entire industries that ignored the best interests of their customers, and CEOs who hoodwinked investors, their community and customers for years.

The story of the breakdown of Napoleon’s nervous system and the change in his personality brought about by the accumulation of too much power is as timely now as it was almost 200 years ago. We summarize some key parts of “The Malady Of The Caesars”:

Power and the struggle for power were now the fixed idea of Napoleon’s existence. With the increase of power comes only a craving for still greater power. He wanted power, but for what reason? For its own sake. There did not, there could not exist a reason.

He deemed such questions senseless, almost ridiculous. “I was born for power.” Restrictions of any kind irritated him more and more. He considered them intolerable. Absolute power, the power of the Caesars, was the mandate of his nature. He was sure of that now. The title of Emperor, that symbol of absolute, worldwide power, was necessary to him as a declaration on the part of the people that they ceded the power to him, and to him alone; that they allowed him to use this power, without any control, without any restrictions.

On December 2, 1804, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, a solemn ceremony is taking place. The Corsican, Napoleon Bonaparte, is being crowned Emperor of France. “Vivat Imperator in aeternum,” intones the Pope, stretching out his hand for the crown. But Napoleon remains faithful to his own tradition. He is quicker than the Pope. With his own hands, he takes off his golden wreath and sets the Emperor’s crown on his head. “God has given it to me. Woe to him who dares to touch,” he was to say later.

“To be Bonaparte and to become an emperor!” writes Paul Louis Courrier. “He wants to lower himself. Poor man…”

Beethoven, who had dedicated his symphony Eroica to Bonaparte, crosses off the dedication when he hears of the coronation. He wrote instead, “Heroic symphony to the memory of a great man.”

He is the Emperor of France; but that is not enough. He craves greater domination. He realizes, however, that the road to power lies through victory. “My power depends on my glory and my glory on my victories,” he says. “Victory has put me where I am; only victory can keep me there.” That means war—war in the name of power and for the sake of the preservation of power. Consequently, a new war begins and brings new victories with it.

Sacrificed to this passion for power are millions of human lives. Yet this fact does not touch him at all. “I spit on your millions of human lives,” he once said, although he may have been posing. Yet there is cruel truth in these terrible words, for he cared little for those who died to satisfy his desire for power.

He is no longer the ideal leader that he was in the days of the Consulate. No longer is he the open-minded, democratic freethinker, the soldier of the Revolution. He is a dictator. He consults no one, and the opinions of others, when they disagree with his own, annoy him. Freedom of speech has been garroted. Out of seventy-five newspapers, only five remain. “Newspapers are suited to advertising only,” he declares. “Thought is the foremost enemy of a monarch!” In another instance he says, “The rule of trouble-makers is over. I want to be obeyed. You must honor my power because it comes from God…”

He is on the verge of madness and has the intelligence to realize it: “One cannot lie in the bed of kings without catching from them the madness of destruction. I too have gone mad.”

During those years of struggle for world power, his nervousness, his irritability gradually increased. There was no limit to it. He lost his temper on any pretext, over the least trivial event. Dr. Corvisart described one of many incidents.

Corvisart entered the Emperor’s private study and paused at the door, bewildered. Napoleon, his face almost scarlet with rage, was charging around the room in the manner of a wild bull, uttering vicious curses and moaning with impatience. At times, he stopped short and stamped the floor violently with his feet.

“Your Majesty,” cautiously essayed the physician. “Am I in any way at fault?”

Napoleon turned on him furiously. “Yes, yes!” he shouted. “You certainly are!”

Understanding nothing, Corvisart inquired discreetly, “But what can be the matter? Won’t Your Majesty tell me the cause of the trouble?”

“The matter? The matter?” Napoleon was almost suffocating with rage. “Why, a piece of toothpick is stuck between my teeth! It annoys me—I can’t get it out!”

Generally pleasant and generous with his subordinates, he could become brutal when angered. An awkward gesture or an untimely word sometimes occasioned a paroxysm of ire. At such moments, he was quite capable of striking in the face those who displeased him.

On one occasion, when mounting his horse, he slipped and fell heavily. In a blind rage, he set upon the unfortunate head groom, Jardin, with his whip. Jardin’s only crime was that he had not been there when the fall occurred.

He would tear impatiently at his clothes and destroy anything that annoyed or irritated him, his valets at times receiving very vivid and concrete proof of his displeasure.

In reality, Napoleon’s impatience was a refusal, an inability to accept contradiction of any kind. He could not bear frustration. He would even lose his temper at the sea, if its behavior interfered with his plans.

Napoleon’s excessive irritability manifested itself in other ways as well. He had a variety of nervous twitchings and involuntary movements. One of these, which occurred in meditative moments, consisted of a spasmodic shrug of his right shoulder. Those who did not know him well interpreted it as a sign of displeasure, but in reality it was an uncontrollable nervous gesture, of which he himself was quite unconscious. It is interesting to note that Czar Peter the Great was subject to this same involuntary twitching.

His armchair in the Ministers’ Council Chamber was constantly in need of repair for, during the sessions, Napoleon would continuously stab at the arm with his penknife, ripping deep holes in it.

A piece of sculpture, finding its way into his hands, hardly ever left them without being mutilated.

Thus, after his famous interview with Pope Pius VII at Fontainebleau, the chamber where the conversation took place presented a picture of utter desolation. Pieces of broken furniture, fragments of smashed vases, and torn scraps of paper littered the entire room.

There were many such nervous seizures in Napoleon’s life. Talleyrand witnessed another convulsive fit at Strasbourg. According to him, Napoleon, feeling ill, passed into the next room where he fell to the floor. “He moaned and slobbered, and rolled on the floor in convulsions which lasted for about fifteen minutes. Then his speech came back to him and his senses returned. He ordered us to keep silent about what we had seen.”

His nervousness and irritability increased in a paradoxical parallel with the rise and expansion of his power. His ever-growing passion for dominance and control, his ever-increasing lack of restraint in the exercise of power, seem to have been the underlying causes which gave rise to these nervous manifestations.

It is a coincidence that the “Men of Destiny,” who in the history of mankind symbolized supreme power, suffered from the same nervous symptoms as Napoleon. Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great had the same irritability of temper, the same peculiar paroxysms of fury; both suffered from convulsions and nervous spasmodic movements. Very different from Napoleon physically—athletic in stature, men of iron health—they nevertheless resembled him in their dynamic energy, in their lust for power. Heirs to the same physiological complex, touched by grandiose visions of Caesarism, all of them trod the same path, all perished from an excess of power.

It is evident that in spite of Napoleon’s superhuman vitality, there must have been some restraining influence, purely physiological in nature, which finally asserted itself against the magnitude of his ambitions. His exercise of power, immoderate and excessive as it was, imposed an overwhelming tax on the centers of dynamic energy embodied in his endocrine system.

Since politically there are no limits to the power of one man over others, since such domination may become boundless and uncontrolled almost to the point of absurdity, there must be other forces which create obstacles to a single man’s supreme domination. Such limitations lie within the man himself—are imposed upon him by Nature.

And those who dare to go beyond these physiological limits, who dare to abuse their gift of power, are sternly punished. Nature alters and curbs the sources of their power, the treasure store of their dynamic energy. Such was the case with Napoleon. Through his abuse of the gift of power, his physical balance was destroyed. And with this destruction came about another change—the change in his personality.