It's no surprise that the hagiographer Villepin and his "handful of dreamers" in contemporary Paris would ignore the endemic terror inherent in Napoleon's methods, offer cant to hide amorality, and instead focus on raw power. Villepin's France is a sort of hollow Directorate come alive, talking of the need for U.N. approval, all the while it intervenes unilaterally in the Ivory Coast; protesting the horrors of Middle East war while it sells weapons to Saddam Hussein; expressing notions of universal brotherhood while it abets the criminality of the Iraqi Ba'athists who ran up a bill in the billions to everyone in France from perfumists and pornographers to oil men and missile salesmen; and praising the Atlantic "alliance" as it strongarms two-bit dictatorships into opposing American efforts to take out the same type of fascists that once took it out. For the current naïfs who lament the Bush Administration's purported ineptness at trans-Atlantic relations, they could do no better in fathoming the current French antics than reading Paul Johnson's Napoleon alongside Villepin's Les Cents-Jours ou l'esprit de sacrifice.

Johnson tries to explain the pass given Napoleon by artists and intellectuals—the fawning by Shelley, Keats, Hegel, Carlyle, Belloc, Chesterton, Hardy, and Shaw—as the precursor of the Left's modern-day worship of odious tyrants. Attraction to a brute was not compelled, as Johnson points out, by the alternative of a decadent and corrupt French monarchy. For all his loud embrace of "the popular will," Napoleon impoverished and got more Frenchmen killed than did half-a-dozen Bourbons, and he removed republicans only to install family hacks in their place. He certainly was as dictatorial as any monarch, and aped the worst excesses—both material and cultural—of the Old Regime.

So what accounts for those who professed beauty but worshipped evil? It was not merely the romantic naïveté of artists and men of letters; a wide array of them from Beethoven to Coleridge quickly sized up Napoleon's atrocities in Spain and Switzerland. Here Johnson is not so explicit in his diagnosis, but implies something more deliberate: some intellectuals, cut off as they are from the practical life, are impatient with the clumsiness of republican government. They yearn for the enlightened autocrat, the philosopher-king who can by fiat do le peuple "good." As Napoleon put it, "The people must not be judge of its own rights." We still see this leftist attraction for the military in aspects of modern-day Clintonism, which, when thwarted by Congress, looked to implement its social agenda among the military, where it could be imposed rather than ratified.

Also a warped system of values that puts a higher premium on artistic and literary sensitivity—brilliantly and cynically exploited by the mostly ignorant Napoleon—than on mundane and unheralded morality. A Shelley no more knew or cared about typhus in Cairo, frostbite at Moscow, or mass executions of Swiss farmers than does a Noam Chomsky about the thousands murdered in Cuba, or Dominque de Villepin about the one million victims of Saddam Hussein's three-decade reign of terror. For the armchair idealist it is the grand gesture alone that matters.