>>213530354
People at the time literally and truly believed that he was the actual Antichrist because no one could explain coming from nothing and winning that much. Even rational Enlightenment guys saw him as a classical demigod like Caesar or Alexander that stepped out of history to wreak havok on the world.
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals:
>"Judæa proved yet once more victorious over the classical ideal in the French Revolution, and in a sense which was even more crucial and even more profound: the last political aristocracy that existed in Europe, that of the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, broke into pieces beneath the instincts of a resentful populace—never had the world heard a greater jubilation, a more uproarious enthusiasm: indeed, there took place in the midst of it the most monstrous and unexpected phenomenon; the ancient ideal itself swept before the eyes and conscience of humanity with all its life and with unheard-of splendour, and in opposition to resentment's lying war-cry of the prerogative of the most, in opposition to the will to lowliness, abasement, and equalisation, the will to a retrogression and twilight of humanity, there rang out once again, stronger, simpler, more penetrating than ever, the terrible and enchanting counter-warcry of the prerogative of the few! Like a final signpost to other ways, there appeared Napoleon, the most unique and violent anachronism that ever existed, and in him the incarnate problem of the aristocratic ideal in itself—consider well what a problem it is:—Napoleon, that synthesis of Monster and Superman."
In the middle of the most democratic mass anti-aristocratic slave revolt in history Napoleon, a hardcore Jacobin in his youth, proved the natural inequality of human beings. They will never be a good kino made about this man, just like a good one about Caesar or Alexander or Hitler.
