Napoleon No. 3

ANOTHER CAESAR--Alfred Neumann--Knopf ($3).

Louis Napoleon, nephew of the great Napoleon, spent some 35 years attempting to become Emperor of the French. He finally succeeded. But according to Historian Philip Guedalla he should have died on the day of his coronation. For the story which Guedalla told in his The Second Empire is one of anticlimax, of a nouveau riche court, a theme for irony and wisecracks, the Napoleonic legend reduced to farce. "The gaslit tragedy of the Second Empire," Guedalla contemptuously called the regime which was born in intrigue in the early 1850's, found its Empress in the granddaughter of a foreign keeper of a wine shop, and collapsed in a shambles when Bismarck and Moltke sent their crack Prussians into France in 1870.

Alfred Neumann, German historical novelist, has evidently pondered Guedalla's book. Preferring heroics to irony, and following the career of a man who is one of the "outs," to satirizing the bigwigs of the "ins," Neumann has wisely terminated his story of Louis Napoleon in the early '50's. Another Caesar is the prelude to the "gaslit tragedy." It is a big, colorful, shrewd novel that sticks pretty closely to the actual course of history. Conversations may be invented, but the characters are all out of the past. And Neumann's analysis of personality and motive is strictly in accordance with the probabilities. His Louis Napoleon is the real Louis Napoleon, a mixture of clownishness, perseverance, luck and good judgment.

The story of the illegal search for political mastery followed the same course in the mid-19th Century that it follows today. Like Adolf Hitler, Louis Napoleon staged his own opera boufle "beer hall putsch." Louis' fiasco consisted of a ridiculous attempt to rally the garrison town of Strasbourg behind him for an invasion of Louis Philippe's France. And, like Hitler, Louis spent a period in jail, at the French fortress of Ham, where he managed to be solaced by his serving maid. Again, like Hitler, Louis talked, before his term as President of the short-lived Second French republic (the equivalent of Hitler's term of office under Hindenburg), of taking over some of the elements of Socialism into the new State which he promised. Where Hitler got the Socialist planks for the "National Socialist" platform from the hated German Marxians, Louis got his ideas from Louis Blanc, French radical. And to carry out his ideas, Louis had to banish recalcitrant politically-minded poets like Victor Hugo, even as Hitler had to banish writers like Lion Feuchtwanger. Some people, indeed, have seen in Louis Napoleon the father of the modern "planned State," have even called him "the first Fascist."

Neumann, while alive to the contemporary parallels in the story of the third Napoleon, does not go out of his way to stress them. He is more concerned with the pernicious effects of an inherited legend upon a nice young man. Through Le Bas, the young Louis' Jacobin tutor, he dins it in that the boy had no chance to develop normally. All his life he was subjected to a forcing process, whether at home in Switzerland or at the Artillery School at Thun. Hortense, Louis' mother, was soaked in the Napoleonic idea. The daughter of Josephine, she had achieved a double relationship to Bonaparte when she was married off to his brother, the crippled King of Holland. After Waterloo she gave up her lovers and let her beauty run to fat in order to train the young Louis for the role of Pretender. It did not matter that Louis was an eight-month child, and probably no blood relation of Bonaparte at all.

The Author, a Jew, is an exile from Hitler's Germany, which may explain his interest in the art of achieving a dictatorship. When he refused to sign a declaration of obedience to the Third Reich, he lost his property, including his library. His troubles with Hitlerism are very probably behind the note of passionate conviction that crops out in Le Bas' speech to Louis at the close of Another Caesar. Says Le Bas:

"Louis, genuine Bonapartism was the destiny of the first half of the century. . . . Spurious Bonapartism, taking its rise at the middle of this nineteenth century, will be the destiny of the second half of that century; and the Third Republic, which in due time will be its unhappy heir, will suffer from it. . . . You have destroyed the promise of '48, Louis, not only in France, but the world over; and you have destroyed a great deal more than that. . . . You are liberal-minded, and will destroy liberalism; for, as a professedly liberal emperor, smiling and amiable, you will establish yourself as a tyrant, in order to keep yourself firmly seated in the saddle. . . . You, a man who hates bloodshed, will sow the seeds of bloodshed. . . . You are not a man to be envied . . . for your good fortune is not a sun or a fire, but only a miner's lamp."

Another Caesar is not Neumann's first historical novel. The Devil, published in the U. S. in 1928, had considerable success. A play, The Patriot, was made into one of Emil Jannings' best cinemas. Since the advent of Hitler, Neumann has lived in Florence. Another Caesar has been translated into eight languages besides English.

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