Thomas Jefferson vs. Napoleon Bonaparte

In this lecture about Thomas Jefferson, part 3 of 4, Roger Weir discusses the life and legacy of Thomas Jefferson. The original lecture was entitled "Jefferson vs. Napoleon".
 
Episode transcript - https://sharedpresencefoundation.org/transcripts/377
 
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Image credit: detail from Pastoral Landscape (1861) by Asher Brown Durand.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
For some of you who have not been following this
for some time, I have to apologize for speaking out
a little forcibly. But you have to understand that I've
been at this for a quarter of a century now,
and most of the people I started with at the
University of Wisconsin are dead or gone, and so I

(00:30):
feel very strongly about some of these issues, and I
do my best to give you a yogic eye view,
but I preserve the right personally to keep the issues
significant to me. We have many tasks in this country,
and in the next decade some of the most difficult

(00:52):
ones are going to mature, and one of them is
to make sure that the United States mains a free lamp.
So these lectures, while they are describing the American portion

(01:14):
of the history of Western Man, the spiritual history of
Western Man that we've been working on for the last
five years. Here we began with Homer, and we took
the progressive march of Western civilization right up to the
twentieth century, up to Young and Wittgenstein, and we saw

(01:36):
that the European branch of Western civilization ends with the
Second World War, its own lunge, its own energy, its
own echo kept alive into the nineteen fifties, but for

(01:57):
all intents and purposes, the Second World War ended the
structure of the European branch of Western civilization, and new
transformations have been in progress in our lifetime, and they
are huge, and this country is playing the major role

(02:17):
in that transformation. Not in terms of planning, because the
transformation is within, but in terms of conscious energizing. And
so tonight we come to the clash of two titans,
the two individuals who represented in their time the clear

(02:38):
battle lines of civilization. Napoleon and Jefferson are in fact
still the catchwords of the two sides of this fight.
And a fight it is, but a fight in the
sense of a strategic, all encompassing history manifestation. So we

(03:04):
should make clear at the outset what the two principles are.
Napoleon stands for empire. He stands for the kind of
man who, in his verb and his intelligence, his manner,
his psychology, his tradition, yes, and even his accult powers,

(03:26):
stands for empire. Empire with the understanding that it is
a machine social, a social machine. And the empire that
Napoleon brought to fruition had been brewing for a long
time in the European mind. It was only through his

(03:52):
perseverance and his courage, And Napoleon said, these are the
two virtues of a soldier. He must have courage and
he must have perseverance. That when he crowned himself emperor
on the eighteenth of Brumaire November ninth, seventeen ninety nine,

(04:14):
he initiated the consolidation of a web of intrigue that
had elusively escaped being captured by any European individual, even
though attempts had been made. And we did a whole
lecture series on the sixteenth in seventeenth century, and saw

(04:36):
that the web of intrigue first mooted itself to the Italians,
the Italian bankers, then mooted itself to the Spanish Cortes
and the Conquista d'orance, and then mooted itself to the
Elizabethans in England, and then finally passed into the realm

(04:57):
of philosophical manipulation. And Napoleon was the first European human
being to sense empire in exactly the same way that
Julius Caesar sensed Empire. The web was centered on Paris,

(05:19):
and Paris was centered on the web of intrigue that
Napoleon set up, and he himself as an individual, was
positioned at the center. The will of the Emperor was
the will of the French Empire. It had two polarized

(05:42):
aspects that had to be kept constantly in balance and
aggressively in the forefront. The first aspect was one of
logical structure. The logical structure of administration of this empire
was based on empowerment. That authority is passed on, but

(06:04):
it has passed on specifically from someone higher up, and
you receive specifically that authority given you, and you may
pass on only that authority allowed you to pass on.
All authority ultimately rests in the hands of the emperor,
so that the logical structure has but one resolution for

(06:26):
its reason for being, that is the person and the
will of the Emperor. And going along with that logical
structure of administration is a counterpart, sort of the yen
to this yang, and that is to create a scarcity
of custom, the scarcity of beliefs that might slow down

(06:52):
the administration, slow down or compromise the logical structure. Napoleon
and inherited a historical situation where the French Revolution had
wiped clean the slate of custom. He received a social
tablia rossa, a blank tablet, and he took advantage of it.

(07:17):
In his exile in Saint Helena, writing his memoirs, the
Emperor called Lafayette naive because he had been in position
before him to seize power and had not done it.
Napoleon said, Lafayette was a simpleton. Here he was the
great general, with all the charisma and the popular acclaim,

(07:39):
the military know how, at the right place in history,
with the right instrument to seize power, and he had
refused to do it. To Napoleon, this was stupid, and
Lafayette became for him the symbol of the man who
will not seize the time. But we will see that

(08:03):
Lafayette had been trained well in the Jeffersonian tradition. And
whereas Napoleon led to empire, Jefferson led to the republic.
Just as Napoleon manifested the idea of empire, Jefferson manifested
the idea of republic. And there are two elements in

(08:28):
that which are balanced. One of them related to the
second point in the French question in Napoleon's Empire, and
that is the question of custom and belief. But for Jefferson,
instead of there being no custom, no belief, there were

(08:49):
new customs. Again and again his letters we find Jefferson saying,
there is something new under the sun, that this, this
country coming into being, is new under the sun. There
has never been a country where there are four million
people who are going to be free. Not just an

(09:11):
aristocracy it's going to be free, but the people themselves.
This is new. And with these new customs and beliefs,
their integration is founded upon nature, the natural rights of man.
They're not the rights that anyone gave. They're not the

(09:33):
rights of custom or history. They are the rights of
the natural structure of reality, which belong to human beings
because they exist in an integrated natural way. And going
with that was a natural structure of the political expression.

(09:54):
That a republic was a natural organism, and that what
it expressed, the way in which it expressed the structure
of natural relation was through representation leading towards unity. So
a republic was an organic, living entity. It was, in

(10:19):
fact the people themselves the body politic. Whereas for Napoleon,
the empire was a social machine that must work precisely
and proper for Napoleon for his idea of empire. The
Great Code Seville, the Code Napoleon was the integrating, central

(10:48):
programming pattern. The Code Napoleon reduced all law to twenty
two hundred and eighty one articles in one big, thick volume,
and that was it. All law is codified and centralized.
And so the system of empire is run on this

(11:09):
logical structure of administration, and the impulse of decision making
is a legal understanding of the machine, necessity of the
working of the parts, and if someone gets in the way,
they have to be taken out. Napoleon in fact, completed

(11:36):
in himself the betrayal of the democratic principles of the
French Revolution. We haven't had time to go into it
in detail, but the French Revolution was intimately tied up
to the American Revolution. It was Franklin's presence in Paris

(11:57):
for year after year after year that laid the intellectual
foundations the social expectations for the revolution. It was Jefferson's
five years in Paris that ended late in seventeen eighty
nine that schooled the first idealistic flush of the French revolutionaries.

(12:20):
It was the lack of a population who could understand
the personal meaning of freedom that soured the French Revolution
and led to the downfall of the Girondin Party. The
inculcation of the Jacobeans and their abject failure at the
most basic decencies of humanity that led to the counter

(12:43):
revolutionary Napoleon coming in and taking control. The provincialism of
many French people today out in the provinces is still
a record of the psychological damage done by Napoleon. The
haughtiness of the Parisian who will pour you Napoleonic brandy

(13:07):
with great pride and say ah the Emperor, and they
mean it. Jefferson sized up Napoleon as being the archetypal
enemy of the liberty of man, but instead of fighting
him as a military general would fight him on a
field of battle, Jefferson chose the wide open scope of

(13:36):
history and nature combined together as the arena of human endeavor,
and through a period of several years, brought Napoleon to
his first major defeat strategically at a time when Napoleon

(13:56):
was just beginning to be invincible in terms of military strategy.
The Code Napoleon is the focus for a moment to
understand Napoleon. It emphasized the rights of property rather than
the rights of man, and the rights of property defined

(14:24):
the legal participation of those people who happened to own
that property at that time or be in control of
that property at that time. Those who were without property
were without rights. Largely, but not only that. It set
up the structure of human life in such a way

(14:49):
that the male patriarch of the family was a representation,
a projection. We can't say emanation. It was a that Napoleon,
as the First Council, projected his authority through the Code Napoleon,
to the male head of each household, and he was

(15:09):
in his family the first Council. Everyone had to obey Papa, father, husband.
Women had no rights. Well, it wasn't just in this
time period. When I went to Canada to design an
educational program in nineteen seventy in Montreal, women could not

(15:31):
have a bank account in their own name because of
Code Napoleon nineteen seventy. We're dealing with archetypal energies. We're
not dealing with personal decisions. There are no good guys
and bad guys here. There are massive glacial movements that
are carving out of time and space, out of history

(15:52):
and geography, out of lives, great sculpted valleys, and leaving
cirque lakes of mystery all over the place. We inhabit
this nightmare landscape today and have still not come to
deal with it. The woman had no rights, no rights
to because of no rights of property. The phrase equality

(16:17):
before the law was a legalism, and this legalism engendered
liberty beyond the law. Equality before the law meant that
as long as the code Napoleon was applicable, you were defined,

(16:38):
you had a reality, you had a viability. Outside of
that code, nothing exists, so that liberty became a adjective,
a subsidiary to equality before the law, and the tyranny

(16:59):
of a legal structure first asserted itself almost completely over
Western Man for the first time since the Augustine Principate
some eighteen hundred years before it and evoked as archetypal

(17:22):
situations will do similar psychic reactions to visionaries and profits.
One of the clearest indications of that are the prophetic
writings of William Blake Use every bit an Old Testament prophet,
saying doom has come to the people. Shelley Gerte Beethoven, Hegel,

(17:49):
the list goes on and on. Their prophetic visions were
a response to what had happened, what was occurring before them.
None of those great individuals could do anything about it.
The only individual who was viable against Napoleon at the
beginning was Jefferson. He is the only figure in the

(18:12):
world who was not only mobile against this spread of
the idea of empire as a machine socia, but he
was a valiant warrior who won the battle that had
to be won. But he had an even more difficult

(18:32):
problem before him. Not enough to face the greatest military
general in history is at the beginning of his career.
We have to understand something here about Napoleon. The best indication,
I think is the Battle of Marengo June of eighteen hundred.

(18:57):
Morengo's in northern Italy. It's a plane one of the
few large plains in northern Italy where cavalry can be
deployed the French and the Austrians. The Austrians had, through
superiority of cavalry and guns and men and position, had

(19:21):
finally strung out the French lines into one long line
of about twenty thousand men and were just step by step,
pushing them into oblivion. Napoleon had set off so many
raiding parties right and left to try to discover where
the army was. That the French forces were weakened, and

(19:44):
it seemed that the battle was over, that it was
a massive victory for the Austrians. The commander Melios even
went back to his camp to have a smoke and
a brandy. And over the hills came Napoleon and his
great military companion Desai, who died in that Battle of Marengo.

(20:06):
When they came over the hill, just like in a
John Wayne movie with the cavalry, and it was an
unbelievable magical moment in military history, they simply refused to quit.
They rode into the Austrian lines again and again and again,
and something stirred in the response in the French soldiers

(20:30):
called the will to win. And when that came out,
Napoleon realized that he had the one spark of divine
energy that he needed to create a world in his image.
He had found the way to do it. In late
that afternoon, the Austrian lines fled in panic before the

(20:50):
French forces, who were more than human, some superhuman power
had grabbed control of human destiny, and the name Napoleon
began to be like a lightning bolt, a thunderbowlt. Goya
painted that great visionary painting of that colossus on the

(21:11):
field of battle, naked did brutal arms as clubs, striding
through mankind. It was the vision of the the god
man of vengeance who had come. It was like a sacred,
lethal cobra of hidden history that hypnotized all of Europe

(21:33):
and just began striking right and left, and from then
on for a decade, Napoleon was unbeatable. He was militarily
one of the greatest strategic thinkers since Hannibal. But right
at that moment where he was rising to power, Jefferson
beat him, and beat him in a strategic way. And

(21:56):
the complication for Jefferson was not just this incredible scintulating
image of Napoleon, but the problem with the United States,
because the United States was not yet formed. It was
like some young twelve year old adolescent of great promise
who wasn't yet a man, wasn't yet able to really

(22:18):
carry its loath. And he knew that if he fought
in a traditional way that it would change the mix
there was an alchemical mix that was going on in
the hopes and aspirations, the psyches and the minds of

(22:38):
the American population, and Jefferson was trying to nurture it
and keep it alive, not to drain its energy in
a war. He had to beat Napoleon without going to war.
He had to beat Napoleon on paper in a strategical way.
He had to present the case inch an overwhelming way

(23:02):
that the battle would never materially happen. And this was
a problem. But that other part, how to do it
without ruining the nascent American mind. That was what bothered Jefferson.
All these Titanic energies, and he well knew what they
could do. They'd almost come back again like a haunting ghost.

(23:25):
In the seventeen nineties, the Federalist Party had a gad
and again almost on the verge of addressing Washington as
King almost had brought this whole structure back. And with
the j Treaty seventeen ninety five with England, it looked
like the United States and England were going to all
slide back together. Jefferson was in the driver's seat behind

(23:51):
the scenes. Remember he was Washington Secretary of State. He
was Adam's vice president. He was there, he had been
there since the Declaration of Independence, almost a quarter of
a century before. Conscious about the whole situation. Jefferson's response

(24:15):
very much schooled on Franklin's early indications. One thing the
American people have got to keep doing is thinking west,
thinking westward. They've got to be trends appellation in their consciousness.
To the French mind. Tell Iran used to love to

(24:39):
grill Livingstone Jefferson's French Council, with the specter that you know,
once enough of Americans get on the other side of
the appellations, they'll be a totally different country, and they'll
find you there'll be a civil war. Why do you
want to go there anywhere? This was the empire mind speaking.

(25:02):
Anytime there was a possibility of a faction large enough
to really count, it eventually would mature and would come
into conflict. Yeah, the French predicted the civil war, but
they predicted an East West civil war. But in the
seventeen nineties. In seventeen ninety two, Kentucky was admitted to

(25:29):
the Union. It was the first state outside the original
thirteen colonies, and it pushed a finger of the United
States to the Mississippi River. Do you recall it in
the Revolutionary War that it was through the laison with
Jefferson that George Rogers Clark went to that very region,
to the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers,

(25:52):
Kaskaskia and those settlements Vincennes, and had taken them away
from the French. And just less than a generation later,
the United States as an entity was already inhabiting those regions.
And a few years later Tennessee came into the Union,
broadening broadening this base. And in eighteen o three, just

(26:15):
at the time when Jefferson and Napoleon were angling over
the French presence in North America, Jefferson saw to it
that Ohio was brought into the Union eighteen o three,
right at the critical juncture. It was a reminder in
large that the United States will stretch westward later on

(26:40):
a generation or two later on, this manifest destiny became
a right of the American archetypal expectation that the country
was not a frozen entity but was open ended. The
great hero that we'll see in the next section, that

(27:05):
James Fenimore Cooper would divine through his writings, who begins
as a dear slayer, matures his hawkeye, and then moves
west and dies out on the western prairies as an
old man, a leather stocking saga, the archetype of the
American who's free to open up another section of nature

(27:29):
to continue the experiment. And it will be this drive,
this energy, this visionary capacity, that Jefferson will strive to
preserve in its nascent childhood for the American people. It
was his notion that we have to beat the idea

(27:51):
of empire, not just by opposing it and being a
reaction to it, which would only magnetize ourselves and produce
an empire reactiveness in ourselves, but to oppose it by
a different vision, which, by the veracity of its own vitality,

(28:15):
provides the victory. And it was this that he attended to,
So that we come to a quotation of Napoleon. This
is what he thought about government. He said, there must
not be any opposition. What is government nothing if it

(28:39):
does not have public opinion on its side. How can
it hope to counterbalance the influence of a tribune if
it is always under attack. Therefore, public opinion must be
handled and in days before there was media exploitation and
all of those psychological sociological profile techniques. There was the

(29:01):
charismatic leader, with all the entrapments of empowerment, the crowns,
the scepters, the kind of a convoluted regality. Citizen. Bonaparte
was not a king, but he was an emperor. But

(29:24):
he was the people's emperor. And so we get the
first of the double talk, the first of the Orwellian
news speak. The language of the French Revolution is telescoped
and put into an old, familiar pattern. But the throne

(29:45):
was to be in the saddle of conquest. It was
only then that the dynamic could be continued. Jefferson realized
the situation quite clearly, and in a letter to Livingstone,
had this to say about the nature of the situation.

(30:07):
The cessation of Louisiana and the Floridas by Spain to
France works most sorely on the United States. There is
on the globe one spot, the possessor of which is
our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through

(30:28):
which the produce of three eighths of our territory must
pass to market. And of course that's going to grow.
That's the growing end of the three eights, and from
its fertility it will air along yield more than half
our whole produce, and contain more than half our inhabitants.

(30:51):
The American population of the Transappalachian regions in eighteen or
two was nine hundred thousand people in the Revolutionary War,
of the whole thirteen colonies was four million, So you
begin to see that in just one generation there was
perceptible already this massive shift. You know, Jefferson didn't get

(31:18):
many votes north of Delaware. The old New Englanders suspected him,
but he drew better than ninety five percent of the
votes of the new Men. He said in his correspondent,
he said, I feel a very curious relationship to these pioneers,
to these mountain people, these wilderness people. They're my people,

(31:43):
and there's some bond between us. And of course the
large manifestation of that bond would be when Andrew Jackson,
born in a log cabin, would come into the White House,
and in a way the coda to the whole Jeffersonian
notion that every man, given a chance could run this

(32:07):
show that that's the kind of country we have to have,
because then we'll be safe from the empire builders. If
you have one hundred men, they can kill sixty, and
you still have forty that could run it. What are
you going to do with the people like that. You
can't conquer them. There's no sense in even trying. So

(32:32):
he's writing here to Livingstone, New Orleans is the center,
it's the key, It's the place where all the marketing
comes together. In seventeen ninety, I think there were a
dozen riverboats that went down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
In eighteen hundred there were five hundred. The genius of

(32:54):
man turned free. Let's find a new way to do it,
and let's make some money. Let's open up some land
was producing a revolution and economic revolution. And by that
kind of a rate, one could see that in another
ten years there might be five thousand. So he's saying,

(33:16):
France placing herself in that door assumes to us the
attitude of defiance. Spain might have retained it quietly for years.
Her pacific disposition, her feeble state, would induce her to
increase our facilities there, so that her possession of the
place would be hardly felt by us. Jefferson was a

(33:39):
great believer that the natural courus of man is going
to open towards liberty. That they were the harbingers, They
were the forerunners of a natural occurrence, that the rational
understanding of the full significance and meaning of human livery

(34:01):
was an inevitable heritage that would belong to all men
in the future. It would be a matter of course.
No one would have to argue about it. It would
just be assumed. But they saw themselves as the forerunners
the profits in the wilderness, literally saying we've got to
keep this open ended, because closing the door now will

(34:25):
sour the whole situation, will turn everything back, so that
office politics will rule the day, and people will become
interested in backbudding and spinning their wheels instead of in
exercising this new natural visionary capacity to open up the
natural possibilities of man set free. Notice that liberty is

(34:50):
a woman. Liberty is a woman. It's the feminine, it's
the natural feminine. In William's vision, she has no property.
The feminine has no kingdom in this world other than

(35:11):
the masculine context within which she must live and have
her being. But liberty is a woman in the front
lines who holds the torch shop so that others may
see the way to go. And this is exactly the vision.
This is why the Statue of Liberty, incidentally is a feminine,
and why it was given to us by France later

(35:33):
on when the French remembered they finally came to at
one point in their history. And this is why it
was placed in the immigration harbor in New York, because
that was the way people coming from the old world
would come into the New and realize, we don't have
a Code Napoleon here. We have a statue of liberty

(35:54):
and we mean it. We may have to from time
to time fight for it, but that's all right. We're
used to them. He says that Spain could have held
on to this territory and we would not have felt
it at all, because Spain was on the decline. Spain

(36:15):
did not have that empire lightning, energizing bold, but France
did so. He wrote, it can never be so in
the hands of France. The impetuosity of her temper, the
energy and restlessness of her character, placed in a point

(36:36):
of eternal friction with us. Notice the choice of words
eternal friction. He saw it very clearly. He saw it
on the large scale of civilized projection, where archetypal energies
manifest the matters. It's going to be a point of
eternal friction with us, and with our character, open minded

(37:02):
natural man is a threat to empire. Every time Napoleon
liked nothing better than to rant and rave and throw
pots down and swear at the idea logues. Who still
talked with the old Enlightenment idea of the rights of men,
the ideal logues. He would say, the idea logues, they're

(37:25):
like vermin on my clothes. But he couldn't get Jefferson off,
couldn't get rid of him. He kept being there. And
Jefferson says, of our character, which, though quiet and loving
peace and the pursuit of wealth, is still high minded,

(37:48):
despising wealth. It need be in competition with insult and injury,
enterprising and energetic as any nation on earth. These circumsts, chances,
will render it impossible for France and the United States
to continue long friends. When they meet in so irritable
a position, they as well as we, must be blind

(38:12):
if they do not see this. And he say, Napoleon
certainly understands the strategic struggle that's going on here. You
know when he amassed his twenty thousand troops to regain
Santa Domingo back from Toucsaint Lovatre, many of the old

(38:36):
Federalist Council. Jefferson said, well, he wasn't coming for us,
after all. He just wanted his Brandy Islands as sugar
islands his rum source. When Jefferson nodded, saying uh huh. Sure,
a man like that thinks only in terms of extending

(38:56):
the empire to the whole world. That's the only limitation,
he wrote, They as well as we, must be blind
if they do not see this, and we must be
very improvident if we do not begin to make arrangements
on that hypothesis. The day that France takes possession of

(39:16):
New Orleans fixes the sentence, which is to restrain her
forever within her low water mark. It seals the union
of two countries who, in conjunction can maintain exclusive possession
of the ocean. The Jefferson's already thinking of the ocean,

(39:37):
Britain and France vying for each other on the ocean
Spain quickly falling out of position. Within two generations of Jefferson,
American ships were all over the world freely because preparations
were made at this time. The accounts that we have

(40:01):
most beautifully presented in Melville moby Dick is that epic
that the American spirit will quest in its epic self
revelation throughout the oceans of the world if need be
to find a resolution. It assumes that the whole world

(40:24):
is a province for the American spirit to find itself
to fulfill its destiny, that all the oceans of the
world are open. The hidden premise in moby Dick is
that the oceans are open. It was not so in
eighteen o one, eighteen o two, It was not so

(40:46):
at all. It had to be made so. And Jefferson
is the Godfather in a way, planning all the time,
all the time. What happens if the French take New
Orleans is that the Americans will be driven back into
British hands. We'll be forced to make an alliance with them.

(41:09):
They will co opt us, and the whole American experiment
will collapse. Well, I can see by the taper clatter
and your faces we need a break, so I'll calm down.
One of the books that we have around here at
PRS is the Metaphysical Foundations of American History published in Holland,

(41:35):
so it's not generally available, and you might like to
inspect it around your sometime. The preface has an interesting
quotation from Alfred North Whitehead three lines. A civilization which
cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility
after a very limited period of progress. A civilization which

(41:58):
cannot burst through it's abstractions current abstractions is doomed to
sterility after a very limited period of progress. As Tony
b put its distinctly in his formula, that we are
always given a challenge, and we must make a response

(42:21):
to that challenge, and that what kills us is the
failure of nerves, so that we do not make a response.
This is death. This is the thing you watch out for.
It's not so much the response, but it's the fearfulness

(42:45):
that the response might be wrong. And so one gets
caught into an extended limbo. And this comes from not
living life, but from being overly cautious that uh, one
should do it right according to the interpretive hermeneutical capacities

(43:08):
of one's projected intelligence. And these are the current abstractions
one has to live through. Those grow through those Napoleon's
idea of empire shattered. When it shattered, it took most

(43:28):
of Europe down with it, so that there was a vacuum,
a gap. The Congress of Vienna in eighteen fifteen brought
everybody together to bake a new pie and cut it
in various pieces again. And the Congress of Vienna led
exactly in a hundred years to the First World War.

(43:53):
There are seeds which must grow into the planets that
those seeds are. When Jefferson first took office, he said
to a Frenchman, a friend of his, DuPont Dannymore, the

(44:14):
speck that I saw on the horizon when I was
Secretary of State is becoming a tornado. And that was
the apparition of the energies of revolution that had been
stirred and awakened and given momentum, that were coming back

(44:37):
around to destroy its own creation, the phenomenon of the
counter revolution. And he recognized in Napoleon that the quality,
the charismatic quality of the man, was the psychological key

(44:57):
to that empire, to that structure. It was pride of
Napoleon more than the will. It is the pride that's
the kicker in the works. Napoleon's art of war was
his ability to project his pride onto his general staff.

(45:22):
They rode beautiful horses with red Roman capes and helmets
with the clicked headdress. They looked like Roman's again. They
looked like pictures out of history, and when they were
on the field at Austerlitz, it seemed just like old

(45:43):
times again. Who are we going to kill this time?
It was this projection of pride that Jefferson wanted to
draw the venom from. In the new world. He knew
because he had been in Paris, knew many people there.

(46:08):
He knew the French language. Well, you know, Livingstone, or envoy.
Jefferson's envoy at that time was deaf. He couldn't hear
and he could not speak French. He could read it,
and so he had limited capacity. But Jefferson trusted him.

(46:29):
He was an honest man. Any what he had to
have was an honest man to be there. He was
also naive. He needed someone naively, naturally open and honest,
so that he could tell by Livingstone's responses what was happening.
And when it got to a very difficult juncture, when

(46:51):
it got to the part in the battle where you
have to commit your cavalry. Jefferson still proceeded Livingstone with
two other individuals, one a frenchman, an old man DuPont
de m ne'emour, who was a friend of Benjamin Franklins.

(47:13):
And when nuh Denimour went to Paris and stirred around
ex officio and the French society, you know, Josephine was
trying to uh bring all the old uh aristocratic powerful
people back in and and turn them into bonaparties so
they would have all these soires. Even uh, even Lafayette

(47:38):
was going to these soires to try and and feel
the air. Napoleon very very uncomfortable about Lafayette, very uncomfortable
when he was in the outskirts of Vienna in seventeen
ninety seven. One of the first things that was given

(47:58):
to him, almost by mandate, by the French people, free Lafayette.
He had been in prison for five years, and Napoleon
sent the message to the Austrian king, free Lafayette, but
do not let him return to France. He sent Lafayette
and his wife, who was ill, and his two daughters

(48:21):
north to Hamburg, and Napoleon was still uncountable. He's still
too clothes. Send him to Denmark, get him, get him away,
and as soon as Napoleon crowned himself emperor the next week,
Lafayette showed up in person in Paris, and Napoleon was

(48:41):
full of panic. He wouldn't see him. Send his ministers
tell him to get out, and Lafayette, with courtesy, said
I am just going to bring my family and we're
going to retire to my estate at Lagrange. But he

(49:03):
showed by his courage of being one of the few
people who would walk in personally through all the bureaucratic
complications and say here I am, here, I am, I
have no fearfulness. The simpleton was courageous, and Napoleon couldn't
stand this because it was an affront to his pride.

(49:25):
Because pride is based on insolarity. It cannot relate. Pride
dissolves in relationality, it dissolves. Lafayette went to all the spires,
he kept turning Napoleon down. Napoleon wanted to make him
that his minister to America. You can talk to the man,

(49:48):
you know the man. Lafayette said, I have nothing to
do with this man. I'll come to his wife's parties
but I'm not gonna have anything to do with them.
Lafayette and DuPont de Nemour agreed that eventually the French
would sell not only New Orleans but the whole Louisiana Empire,

(50:15):
and they sent this terse message to Jefferson that after
all the complications, he will sell. And Jefferson took that
and held that up as a guiding star because he's
dealing with all kinds of complications. He didn't work from plans.
He worked like a Shao ln long fist kung food

(50:38):
fighter works whatever energy they threw at you, that's what
you work with, whatever it is, no plan, And this
is what exactly panicked Napoleon, because that was his technique,
was to go into battle with the whole matrix of
possibilities of move and whatever the opposing generals would do,

(51:01):
he would use that as his basic plan. That's how
he beat the Austrians at Marengo. They rode in with
the cavalry with absolutely no plan, with Napoleon and Desiah
the head, and they just reacted and responded to the
battle at the moment, and the Austrians trying to second
guess them. The commanders were going crazy because the patterns

(51:24):
were erratic, and by the time they figured out that
there was no pattern, they were done. But Jefferson was
quite an adversary because he had no discernible plan. Napoleon
could not find out what is the man after he
must also be a simpleton. Began the European myth that
Americans have no philosophy. They don't have they don't have

(51:48):
any kind of political savvy at all. Look at them
for all the time, just enjoying life. What's wrong with them? Hm?
So just living? They must be crazy. They don't consult
the systems before they go and act. They just go
and act. They must be simple. It's the Jeffersonian open mindedness.

(52:09):
And Napoleon was panicked by it. He couldn't stand that.
So Jefferson, realizing not through Livingstone but from his old
Franklin French buddy Neymore, that the situation was just about right,
Jefferson reached back and found somebody that would really cause

(52:33):
consternation for Napoleon. He found James Monroe, who was about
as plain as you can get, and he sent Monroe
to go and buy the whole Louisiana territory. It was
a strategic coup, because Monroe is not the sort of

(52:58):
individual that you would invite to a He was boring,
he was sort of single minded. Many European historians say, well,
Monroe really didn't do anything. I mean, look at all.
These things were almost all done by the time he
got there. They don't understand Jefferson's mind. They don't understand
the alchemist who dissolves everything and then introduces something to

(53:24):
precipitate a new form out of it, and Monroe was
the esoteric precipitate. Added to this solution, Jefferson had naturally
drawn everything into a soluble state. Napoleon didn't know what
was going on, and Jefferson would leak out certain information
from time to time. He leaked out the raws Amendments,

(53:46):
which authorized him to equip an arm eighty thousand armed
Americans in case of trouble along the Gulf. The whole population,
the whole French population of northern men, women and children,
was of two forty two thousand people in one of
the little facts that Jefferson leaked out. But when he

(54:10):
sent Monroe, Monroe was not a negotiator. He was not
there to negotiate with Nipole. He was there as an
image of the plane, Frank American man ready to do business.
Are you gonna sell or you're not gonna sell? Remember now, Monroe,

(54:33):
what he matured is the one who devised the Monroe doctrine.
The czars and that's yours. We're not gonna bother you
and you're not gonna bother us. That was the Monroe doctrin. Essentially,
he was that kind of an individual. His house, Oak Hill,
was a couple miles away from Montaseul. We could signal

(54:58):
each other with a pin of or flight. No rain today,
no no rain today. So I honest, men talk to
each other. There's no there's no uh complication. And so
Jefferson sending Monroe at a strategic time. His timing was masterful.
Napoleon was skittish about everything. For one thing, he was

(55:23):
very superstitious. Empire builders are always superstitious. He was trying
to amass ships and men for an invasion of North America.
Let's put it that way, because that's what he was
thinking of. In Holland, and they had the worst winter

(55:43):
in over a century, and the ice was freezing along
the Dutch coast for two months. They couldn't get ships out.
Napoleon are very skittish. What is happening? Nature herself is cooperating?
What does it mean? What does it mean? The man
is a simpleton, but he's very dangerous. Napoleon's art of war,

(56:11):
his strategic concepts, were all based in a collection of
of the principles and ingredients that could be applied. They
were like the various ways in which a saber can
be used. And Jefferson wouldn't play. He wasn't the target
that he should have been. He didn't respond. And when

(56:35):
the structure was finally set into uh motion and Monroe
appeared on the scene, Jefferson realized that the time had
come for the United States to be opened up completely.
In the Louisiana purchase in eighteen o three, more and

(57:00):
doubled the size of the country. It was finally settled
upon the price that Monroe said that he would pay
fifteen million dollars about eighty million francs, but those funds
were not to be paid until eighteen nineteen one, third

(57:20):
in eighteen nineteen one, third in eighteen twenty one, third
in eighteen twenty one. Until then, the United States would
only pay interest twice a year six percent. They paid
about five hundred thousand dollars every six months as interest.
The US gross national product at that time was about

(57:40):
ten million dollars, so about one twentieth of the gross
national product, about five percent. And Jefferson figured that the
growth of this country were this kind of population, the
way they're going, that by eighteen twenty they're going to
well able to afford the payments of the principal And
he was right. If you look at the United States

(58:03):
in seventeen ninety nine before Jefferson got in, and you
look at the United States after his sixth presidency, Madison
of Monroe were sort of Jeffersonian. I guess you know that.
You look at the United States in eighteen twenty five,
the differential in that generation is phenomenal. The United States
stood up economically. There was no question anymore about people

(58:29):
playing foot see with the United States in the commercial
or military way. And of course by the time of
the Civil War, the European powers were sending military observers.
Because the Civil War was the first modern war. The armaments,
the techniques and everything completely outstripped the European books on warfare.

(58:56):
It was the first indication to other powers that the
United States was producing a very strange kind of humanity.
They were opening up the traditional functions in ways that
had not been foreseen. And this, of course, unfortunately led
to a great deal of pride, exemplified by the smile

(59:20):
and handshake of Tr. Teddy Roosevelt. And it was this
sense of incredible capacity that caused the humility, the overfawning
humility of Woodrow Wilson, because he realized that if you
unleash the United States in a warlike economy, there's no

(59:43):
telling how far it will go, because it doesn't have
any of the governors that stop it. And this is
why Wilson struggled for neutrality in the First World War,
and we'll see that again and again. He kept saying,
other nations may fight, but this nation is different. We
don't know what its population will do if they become

(01:00:06):
military like, warlike. And the same echo we'll find when
it comes to FDR, this reluctance to turn the American
energies in vision and power into a military direction because

(01:00:26):
it does not have the limitations of European empire builders
in nationalities, we in our own time are seeing in
nineteen eighty five the first beginnings of the end of
the Cold War, because through sheer technological excellence over such

(01:00:49):
a wide range, the United States is beginning to pull
out ahead of the Soviet Union, and by nineteen ninety
two the United States will simply out dis since the
Soviets as if they were just a second rate power.
And this is a problem. It's a problem in pride

(01:01:09):
because after such a prolonged struggle, what kind of hubris
will come from that triumph. Jefferson was the first to
realize that this is a real problem with the American character,
that you have to wash yourself because you might really

(01:01:32):
not only hurt the other fellow, but yourself in sociological
ways and indelible ways. And he saw the responsibility for
creating a free people and open minded people for whom
military thought and strategy was of a secondary nature, that

(01:01:56):
it was not your primary response. And so in coming
into possession of the Louisiana territory, which w as Inns incidentally,
was illegal. The president was not empowered to do this.
There was no machinery for this, There was no political
machinery for this. Jefferson just did it. In American Stone said, well,

(01:02:21):
we gotta figure out some way to work this in.
We have it. We have a million square miles and
something as large as all of Europe that's been depopulated
by two hundred years of warfare. And we saw that
the the British from the sixteen sixties had provided guns
to the Iroquois, and the Iroquois League had decimated the

(01:02:44):
Indian tribe so that by the time of the Wi
Louisiana purchase, there were just a few tribes left. It
was almost barren open land. And Jefferson, as he had
done a generation before with George Rogers Clark, picked a
few individuals to send them to probe, and he picked

(01:03:07):
George Rogers, Clark's younger brother to go with Meriwether Lewis,
and Lewis and Clark went all the way to explore
the Louisiana territory. And notice that they went all the
way to the Pacific Ocean, because that's what Jefferson said
on the map. It says, we go as far as

(01:03:28):
the sources of the Missouri River, but in here where
I'm looking, we're going to go to the Pacific. So
that's where you go all the way. And there was
eighteen o three and he's already thinking that way. Listed
somebody who was born at a time when the appellations

(01:03:50):
were a long way from the Atlantic Ocean. Well, next
week we'll see a little bit more of Jefferson, and
don't worry about not covering everything. Next year we'll take
a good long look on the Tuesday Night series and uh,
we'll just look at Franklin and Jefferson real clothes. Right now,
all we can do is highlight some of the developments,

(01:04:13):
some of the next sies of intuition that manifested. And
what we're looking towards now more and more is the
way in which the Jeffersonian man was being formed. And
of course the Jeffersonian man would not be primarily political.
He would be primarily natural. And we'll see that Henry

(01:04:37):
David Thurrell is the perfect Jeffersonian natural man, whose first
instincts are not to fight with this fellow man for hedgemony,
but to stand in a s snowstorm and be a
part of it. Because no one had done that before. Well,
they had done it maybe in the Tongue dynasty in China,

(01:04:59):
with the the old Dallas poets like Lepo that nobody
in Europe had ever done that, and that was a
giant step from the moment that Rousseau had in his
row boat outside of Geneva, out on the lake, that
little brief mystical flash of unity with nature, that was

(01:05:22):
just a a nanosecond of an intuition. But Threaux, coming
a hundred years after Rousseau, after the Franklin Jeffersonian Revolution,
would spend years and years and years perfectly at home
in nature. And we'll see that, and I think that, uh,

(01:05:43):
there might be some insights in that. Thanks for coming