May 17th, 1838. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord, ‘The Prince of Diplomats’, Foreign Minister to Napoleon, dies.

Talleyrand is featured in Section 5 of History Lessons: Bringing People with You

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord, known to history (thankfully) as ‘Talleyrand’, is the towering figure of late-eighteenth century diplomacy. A man who forged alliances with nation states in the attempt to prevent wars or to influence their outcome, and who negotiated armistice conditions with emperors in their aftermath. A man who rose at eleven in the morning and conducted summit-level negotiations in his chambers during the elaborate ritual of his morning dressing – negotiations that continued over luncheons and suppers, in salons and ballrooms and over card tables at the close of the day. A man of little apparent faith who became a bishop; an aristocrat who helped to compose the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the philosophical cornerstone of the French Revolution, and who proposed the effective nationalisation of the French Church (and was excommunicated by Pope Pius VI for his efforts; resigning his bishopric and taking the opportunity to get married). A member of the ancien régime who had the good sense to leave France for America in order to avoid the guillotine and who returned to a position of great influence when the Jacobin terror was ended. Club-footed yet irresistible to women; principled, yet dedicated to acquiring sufficient funds from his diplomatic efforts to finance the elaborate infrastructure of grand houses, great chefs and large permanent staffs that sustained the whole business of being Talleyrand. There was, and will surely only ever be, one Talleyrand.

Talleyrand and Napoleon

Talleyrand had spotted the talented young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, and assisted his rise to power. Napoleon was the strong man who was needed to defend the revolutionary French Republic against the alarmed monarchies of Europe and to retain for its citizens the benefits of the radical restructuring of French society: the sweeping away of the old feudal aristocratic system and the entrenched powers of the church; the substantial redistribution of land, money and influence. Napoleon enshrined these gains in a new code of civil laws – the Napoleonic Code; one of the defining documents of the modern world, which helped to establish the principle of the rule the law. The two men became firm friends and allies, talking late into the night, inventing a new world order. But Talleyrand, though worldly and arguably corrupt, was also grounded and realistic. He believed passionately in the ever-shifting balance of power between nation states and of the need for diplomacy to maintain that balance. As Napoleon became increasingly megalomaniac – imposing harsh terms on defeated nations; seeking only to command and not to collaborate; embarking on expansionist invasions – so he began to lose the support of his most gifted advisor. Talleyrand resigned from his role as Foreign Minister, and began to sell his services to other European nations, taking money from Austria and Russia, amongst others. Even in this, Talleyrand may have had the best interests of France in mind (though he would fully expect to enrich himself in the process of protecting France’s interests).

Talleyrand maintained his contacts with the exiled Bourbon King Louis XVIII. When Napoleon was exiled to Elba, Talleyrand facilitated the restoration of the monarchy while resisting some of its constitutional aims in order to preserve the legacy of the revolution. At the Congress of Vienna, at which t he victorious Allies planned to push France back into a secondary role in Europe, Talleyrand inveigled his way to the negotiating table and began to unravel the Allied position. ‘What could this very word ‘Allies’ mean, when the alliance had existed only to defeat Napoleon, who was now in exile? Had the Allies not fought to reinstate Louis XVIII, and was Talleyrand not his representative?’  Talleyrand not only secured remarkably good terms for defeated France (reinstating her borders as of 1792), at which point Napoleon had re-established France’s ‘natural’ borders of the Rhine, Alps and Pyrenees) but also brokered a secret and effectively subversive deal between Great Britain, France and Austria, ensuring that each would come to the other’s aid in the event of an attack from Prussia or Russia. Talleyrand had successfully played the smaller nations off against the greater, exploiting the fears of Spain, Portugal and the German states about the Allies’ intentions at Vienna, and exposed the fears at the heart of the alliance about each other’s future intentions. Napoleon’s return from Elba undid some of Talleyrand’s good work for France, and the final Act of the Congress imposed harsher terms on France, pushing her back to the pre-revolutionary frontiers of 1789. After the Congress, Talleyrand retired to a life as elder statesman, and was Ambassador to Great Britain from 1830-1834 under King Louis-Philippe.

Talleyrand quotations:

On statesmanship

“The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.”

“Mistrust first impulses, they are nearly always good.”

“War is much too serious a thing to be left to military men.”

“Speech was given to a man to disguise his thoughts.”

“Treason is a matter of dates.”

On society

“She is such a good friend that she would throw all of her acquaintances into the water for the pleasure of fishing them out again”

“Show me another pleasure like dinner, which comes every day and last an hour.”

“To succeed in the world, it is much more necessary to possess the penetration to discern who is a fool than to discover who is a clever man.”

On leadership

“I am more afraid of an army of 100 sheep led by a lion than of 100 lions led by a sheep.”

On politics

“Without freedom of the press, there can be no representative government.”

Of Napoleon’s decision to kidnap from Germany and execute the Duke D’Enghien, a member of the House of Bourbon, on suspicion of involvement in an attempt to assassinate Napoleon – an act that freshly incensed every European monarchy, Talleyrand said,

“It was worse than crime, it was a mistake.”

Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandwashed, doesn’t seem to know what a brand is

I bought the book in a WH Smith on Marylebone station at full price and … uh … I didn’t much like it.

My review of Martin Lindstrom’s Brandwashed can be seen on Amazon UK. I got a bit carried away with the review, which is very naughty of me. But it seems to me that anyone who writes a book called Brandwashed ought, at the very least, to understand what a brand IS.  And Lindstrom clearly doesn’t.

Now read on . . .

Brandwashed, by Martin Lindstrom

Meretricious and sensationalist, but I could be wrong . . .

I don’t normally give books bad reviews. This is because I only have time to read books about subjects that interest me, and there is nearly always something worth praising in the efforts of an author who has gone to the trouble of writing a book about a shared interest. A book has to be pretty awful before one feels the need to say, `This is awful; don’t buy this book.’

I feel the need to say, `This is awful, don’t buy this book.’

The trouble is, this book is so awful that I couldn’t bring myself to finish reading it – so there may be many brilliant aperçus lying in wait for the seeker of wisdom after page 11 (which is where I lost the will to live, or at least the will to read further) but I wouldn’t bet £14.99 on it, if I were you (as I did, in WH Smiths in Marylebone Station, thinking that the book might offer me some interesting thoughts about marketing. It didn’t.)

To be honest, I struggled to get to page 11. I nearly gave up before I got to the end of the Introduction. Let me tell you why.

Brand detox for a whole 12 months

In the Introduction, Martin Lindstrom (`among the globe’s foremost marketers’) tries to persuade us that he went on a `brand detox’ for one year. For a whole twelve months, he tried not to buy any new brands. Did you really, Martin? Are you sure that you’re not just saying that to try to inject a little interest into the otherwise banal introduction to your book? Are you sure that you’re not trying to promote the carefully cultivated image of yourself as a wild and wacky (yet oh so percipient) thinker-outside-more-boxes-than-you-would-find-outside-the-back-of-a-shoe-store?

Let’s see.

Martin can no longer buy brands of breakfast cereal and stuff, so he starts to eat an apple for breakfast. OK. Let’s assume that he buys his apples loose from a greengrocer. But does he drink tea or coffee? If so, does he buy his tea loose from a tea chest in his local greengrocers, take it home in a paper bag and empty it into a tea caddy? Does he buy his coffee beans the same way? Does he get his milk from a churn at the end of a farmer’s lane? Does he bake his own bread? If so, does he get his yeast in a bowl from a baker?

Martin, sadly, can’t buy a round of drinks or gift for a friend because of his brand detox. He fears that ‘my friends secretly thought I was being tight-fisted, that my brand detox was just an excuse to be cheap.’ Nah – no real friend would think that, Martin. But why not give everyone apples as a birthday present? Or the lovely (but unpasteurised) milk from that churn at the end of your farmer’s lane? Or paper bags of tea from the greengrocer? On the matter of standing a round at the pub, why not give the money to somebody else in the group and ask them to buy a round of drinks without telling you what brand they chose? At least you might get to keep a few of your presumably scarce friends.

Martin falls off detox

This oh-so-amusing conceit of Lindstrom’s is simply stark nonsense.

What, exactly, did the Lindstrom family eat for this year? What did he wash himself with? What, if you’ll forgive me, did he wipe his bottom with? (And, in case you’re wondering, he wasn’t allowed to buy newspapers either.) And on board an aeroplane (Lindstrom is very keen to let us know that he is a jet-setting consultant who lives on planes and in hotel rooms) he cannot order a brand by name. This little subterfuge apparently gets round the whole ‘brand detox’ rigmarole: he has to ask for ‘a cola’ (even presumably, if he is flying with Virgin Airlines and he can be absolutely certain what brand of cola they will serve him).

Btu then, I found myself thinking: which airline is Lindstrom flying with? And what hotel is he staying at? Aren’t those brand choices? Lindstrom point is that it is virtually impossible to escape from ‘brands’ in the modern world. He is, in fact, right about this, but his silly ‘brand detox’ nonsense strongly suggests that he doesn’t actually understand what he thinks he is enlightening us about.

Despite these, uh, reservations, I was prepared to allow Lindstrom his detox nonsense as a dramatic conceit that was trying to make a serious point, until I got to the passage where he explained how he had fallen off his brand detox wagon. After yet another exhausting flight around the world delivering high-powered marketing seminars (or whatever), Lindstrom finds himself without a clean shirt for the next day’s presentation. He’s only got the sweaty old black T-shirt that he has travelled in. Now, call me old fashioned, but I wouldn’t pay an especially high consultancy fee to an allegedly world-class marketer who can’t plan ahead sufficiently to pack a clean shirt for the presentation that I have paid him handsomely for. But that is not the point. Having only the one sweaty black T-shirt that is currently clinging to his back, Lindstrom is forced to buy a new, white T-shirt from a local store (Lindstrom finds himself on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus). This T-shirt bears the slogan `I Love Cyprus.’ Lindstrom has, he wails, broken his brand detox, ‘and all for a dreadful T-shirt too’.

As far from a brand as it is possible to get

My point is this: a T-shirt bought in Cyprus bearing the slogan `I Love Cyprus’ (or even `My parents went to Cyprus and all they bought me was this lousy T-shirt’) is NOT A BRAND.

This is about as far from a brand as it is possible to get. What are the brand values of this T-shirt? If you fell in love with any of its qualities, how would you buy another one and still be certain that it had the same qualities?

An ‘I Love Cyprus’ T-shirt is about as undifferentiated as coffee beans or pork bellies.

The many millions of `I love Cyprus T-shirts’ in the world will be made to different standards and from different materials. The particular ‘I Love Cyprus T-shirt’ that Lindstrom happened to buy does not offer him any brand qualities that would enable him to repeat that experience, even if he wanted to.

“I want an `I Love Cyprus’ T-shirt,” he would be reduced to gibbering. “No – not that one, one like the one I bought in that store in Cyprus. It was a nice one. It had certain indefinable brand qualities that I am struggling to put into words, but I would happily pay you more if you could offer me an identical T-shirt experience.”

I’m aware that I am starting to foam at the mouth, but having just spent £14.99 on a book by ‘a marketing veteran who lists McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble and Microsoft among his former clients’ and having discovered that this veteran has no idea what a brand even IS . . . well, I was a little disappointed. (And whatever you’re paying him, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft etc . . . )

Hormones carry sound memories from mother to child. Really?

I did try to read the first chapter, really I did, but then I came to another carpet-chewing moment. Lindstrom is trying to persuade us that advertisers (wicked, sinister, manipulative etc etc) are trying to influence babies in the womb. Well, I can put up with that as a bit of sensationalism if Lindstrom has any kind of solid point to make. But then we are offered the opinions (I use the word lightly) of Minna Huotilainen, research fellow at the University of Helsinki. You must have heard of her. No, me neither.

She talks about the effect of music on unborn babies in their mothers’ womb. `When the mother frequently listens to music, the foetus will learn to recognize and prefer that same music compared to other music.’

I don’t mind that; that might well be true.

But sadly, the world-famous Ms Huotilainen goes on to say this: `The foetus will build the same musical taste with his/her mother automatically, since all of the hormones of the mother are shared by the fetus.’

So now hormones are meant to be carrying sound memories from mother to child?

Forgive me, but at this point it seemed pointless to read further. This book, I would hesitantly suggest, appears to be meretricious nonsense that will use any dubiously-sourced pseudo-science to advance its shallow, sensationalist and self-promoting cause. But I could be wrong.

Martin wears black like James Bond – uh – didn’t

One last thing. Lindstrom (embarrassingly) tells us that he always wears black (hence the horror of being forced to end his brand detox by buying a non-branded, white `I Love Cyprus’ T-Shirt) because (and this is the cringe-worthy bit)`James Bond always wore black’.

Now, this is not only one of the saddest statements I have ever read by a best-selling author, but it is also false.

Even a cursory search on the web will show that James Bond’s ‘trademark’ outfit was a dark blue (not black) suit. And even if all you know about James Bond has been learned from the world-famous films, you would be hard-pressed to miss the fact the Roger Moore incarnation of Bond spent a lot of his time on screen dressed in a ludicrous (but not black) Safari suit.

Do your research, Lindstrom! I think that you may be thinking of the man in the Milk Tray TV advertisements.

And, since you seem to be a bit confused about the issue, Cadbury’s ‘Milk Tray’ really IS a brand, but any old ‘I Love Cyprus’ T-shirt is not.

April 2nd, 1801. ‘I see no ships’: Horatio Nelson turns a blind eye at the Battle of Copenhagen

Horatio Nelson is featured in Section 4 of History Lessons: Leading from the Front.

Horatio Nelson, who would become Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson as he was successively promoted and honoured by the Royal Navy and a grateful British nation, was a consummate leader of men. A brilliant strategist, politically well-informed and adept, he was always likely to achieve a senior role in the navy. What set Nelson apart, however, was his determination to lead from the front. His intelligent and sympathetic management of his fellow officers led to the notion of the ‘band of brothers’, a team of highly-motivated officers who had been schooled in Nelson’s strategic thinking and tactical expertise, but who were given complete freedom of action in the heat of battle. But it was Nelson’s astonishing bravery and his determination to engage the enemy that earned him the adulation of his men.

Nelson in the longboat attack on Cadiz, 1797

In one desperate skirmish against the Spanish at Cadiz, which led to hand-to-hand fighting on small boats, Nelson’s life was saved by his coxswain, John Sykes, who used his bare arm to parry a sword blow aimed at Nelson’s head. ‘Thank God, sir, you are safe’, said the badly wounded Sykes.

Nelson was determined to succeed. Elements of vanity and a burning desire for recognition seem to have fuelled his ambition. He was prepared to ignore orders – or, at least, to choose to interpret orders in a way that would allow him to cover himself in glory without, hopefully, facing a court-martial. Ship-to-ship signalling by flags allowed for a degree of ambiguity in the interpretation of signalled orders and in the smoke of battle, flags were often impossible to see. The best-known example of Nelson’s apparently cavalier approach to orders is, of course, the Battle of Copenhagen, at which Nelson is supposed to have put his telescope to his blind eye and announced that he could not see the signal calling on him to end the action and retreat (Nelson had lost the sight of one eye during an shore attack on Cadiz, when a cannonball impact sprayed sand and pebbles into his face).

Britain was at war with Napoleonic France and the Royal Navy was attempting to prevent neutral ships from trading with the French Republic. Ships were intercepted and their cargoes seized. Denmark and Sweden had been persuaded by Russia to join a ‘League of Armed Neutrality’ which would defy this embargo. The League’s hostility to Britain threatened supplies of timber from Scandinavia, essential for the maintenance of the navy’s fleet of wooden ships. Britain launched a naval attack on Denmark.

The Danish fleet was drawn up in a formidable defensive position off the city of Copenhagen, situated on an island between the mainland of Denmark and Sweden that can only be approached by sea through a narrow and treacherous channel. Nelson’s fleet fought its way doggedly up the straights, each British ship anchoring within canon-shot of its Danish counterpart to begin a punishing exchange of broadsides.  Several British ships ran aground in the uncharted shallows.

After three and a half hours of firing, the British Admiral, Sir Hyde Parker, offered Nelson an honourable route out of this bloody action. Parker is normally cast as the villain of the piece for foolishly recalling Nelson on the brink of victory, but his motives were good: he feared that Nelson’s attack had stalled and that Nelson would be unable to retreat without an order to do so. He explicitly hoped that Nelson would ignore the order if able to do so.

Nelson turns a blind eye at the Battle of Copenhagen, 1801

In fact, a retreat would not only have wasted the initiative, but Nelson’s ships would have been forced to retreat across the line of fire from a still-active section of the Danish defences. Nelson turned to his flag-captain and said, ‘Foley, you know that I have lost an eye, and have a right to be blind sometimes’.  Then he did raise his telescope to his blind eye and said, “I really do not see the signal.”

Nelson went on to win the battle and to negotiate an armistice, followed by a peace agreement. The phrase ‘to turn a blind eye’ had entered the English language. Admiral Parker was deemed by the Admiralty to have shown a lack of vigour in the overall campaign and was recalled; Vice-Admiral Nelson took over his command.

Napoleon’s Whiff of Grapeshot

In the later phase of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte – then a mere Brigadier General (who had, in fact, recently been struck off by the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety and was therefore technically an ex-Brigadier General) famously said that he had used ‘a whiff of grapeshot’ when he repulsed a Royalist mob who, in 1795, took to the streets of Paris in an attempt to bring down the new republican government (The Directory) that had come to power after the execution of Robespierre and the end of the Reign of Terror.

Except that Napoleon didn’t actually say, ‘A whiff of grapeshot.’ The phrase does not, if you think about it, really even work in French.

Like a blast from an extremely large and powerful shotgun

The French word for grapeshot is ‘mitraille’, which means the pieces of metal that make up the actual grapeshot (slugs of metal packed into a bag or canister that, when fired from an eighteenth-century cannon, have the same effect as would be achieved by a very large and extremely powerful shotgun.) So the French might say, for example, that Napoloen ‘laisse la mitraille tirer pendant trois-quarts d’heure’  (let the grapeshot be fired for three quarters of an hour) but they are unlikely to talk about ‘whiff’s’ of grapeshot.

Napoleon fait tirer à Mitraille sur les sectionnaires, print of a painting by Yan' Dargent

The phrase ‘whiff of grapeshot’ has the very Anglo-Saxon merit of downplaying something that is, in fact, quite terrible. It was the Anglo-Saxons, after all, who chose ‘sword play’ as the most appropriate term to describe hand-to-and fighting with sharp weapons: Anglo-Saxons are strong on irony. But it is not obvious what Napoleon himself would have said in French that would translate as ‘whiff of grapeshot.’ One translation might be ‘Une bouffée de mitraille.’ ‘Bouffée’ can mean something like ‘whiff’ or ‘puff’:  a breath of fresh air, for example, is une bouffée d’air frais; une bouffée d’honte is a flush of shame. Not really the same thing, is it? And ‘whiff’ in English has strong connotations of smell, as well as puff: ‘ a whiff of gunpowder’ is a perfectly sensible phrase in English. Un parfum de mitraille, perhaps? Une odeur de mitraille?? I really don’t think do.

Rewriting history

In fact, the phrase ‘whiff of grapeshot’ was coined by the Scottish essayist and historian, Thomas Carlyle, in his book The French Revolution: A History. The work was published in 1837, sixteen years after Napoleon’s death in exile on St Helena. Carlyle’s book, to the distress of most historiographers, is written in a highly dramatic and poetic style which for the modern reader (certainly for this modern reader) is utterly unreadable.

It was, however, extremely popular at the time, not least because Europe was once again on the brink of revolution – a series of revolutions was to sweep through Europe in 1848 – and because Carlyle’s account of the impulses behind the French Revolution of 1789 seemed highly relevant. Dickens used the book as the historical source for A Tale of Two Cities.

There is also an excellent story associated with the writing of The French Revolution: A History. Carlyle sent the original, complete handwritten manuscript of Volume I of the book to his friend and mentor, the famous Utilitarian philosopher  and Member of Parliament, John Stuart Mills, seeking his opinion on  the work in progress. Sometime after receiving the manuscript, Mills rushed round to Carlyle’s house in Great Cheyne Row, on the bank of the river Thames in London’s Chelsea, in a state of high excitement, to say that the entire manuscript had been, most unfortunately, destroyed by the Mill’s housemaid, who had used it to start a fire.

You may have read Bill Bryson’s book, At Home: A short history of private life, which considers this episode in more detail.

‘A servant, Mill explained,’ writes Bryson, ‘had seen [the manuscript] lying by the fender and had used it to light a fire. Now you don’t have to consider the matter too carefully,’ continues Bryson, ‘to realize that this explanation has some problems. First, a handwritten document, however disposed’ [that is to say, lying by the fender or wherever],‘does not look inconsequential; any maid who worked in the Mill household would be used to seeing manuscripts and could not fail to have had impressed upon her their importance and value. In any case, it hardly takes an entire manuscript to light a fire. Burning the whole would require patiently feeding the pages in a few at a time – the action you would take if you wanted to get rid of the manuscript, but not if all you wanted was to start a blaze. In short, it is impossible to conceive circumstances in which a maid, however dim and deficient, could accidentally but plausibly destroy such a piece of work in its entirety. An alternative possibility was that Mill himself had burned the manuscript in a fit of jealousy or anger. Mill was an authority on the French Revolution and had told Carlyle that he had it in mind to write a book on the subject himself.’[1]

Well, one cannot possibly comment, but one does see Bryson’s point of view.

‘Its ragged Pythian Carmagnole-dance has transformed into a Pyrrhic . . .’  Well, we’ve all thought that

Carlyle, however, went on to rewrite the entire volume from memory – an impressive feat, which may also have helped him to develop his distinctive but idiosyncratic literary style. Let me give you an example of this, which is on the topic of the ‘Sans Culottes’: a popular term for the rank and file of the French revolution, who chose not to wear the silk knee-breeches typical of the period (which were seen as being representative of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy) but who wore, instead, the honest trousers (pantalons – named after the Commedia del Arte character, Pantalone) of the working classes. We British, of course, with our famous sense of humour, have often chosen to translate ‘sans-culottes’ as ‘without trousers’, thus causing much ribaldry and mirth at the expense of French revolutionaries.

Sans et avec cullotes

Anyway, here is what Carlyle has to say on the subject of ‘Sansculottism’, which he felt had been brought to an end by Napoleon’s ‘whiff of grapeshot’.

“So dies Sansculottism, the body of Sansculottism, or is changed. Its ragged Pythian Carmagnole-dance has transformed itself into a Pyrrhic, into a dance of Cabarus Balls. Sansculottism is dead; extinguished by new isms of that kind, which were its own natural progeny; and is buried, we may say, with such deafening jubilation and disharmony of funeral-knell on their part, that only after some half century or so does one begin to learn clearly why it ever was alive.”[2]

Uhhh – thank you, Mr Carlyle. Have you taken your medication today?  I started researching what Carlyle might have been be referring to with the phrase ‘a dance of Cabarus Balls’, but I began to lose the will to live. (If you have any idea, please do leave a comment on this blog.)

The Whiff of Grapeshot

A page or two later in the book, Carlyle moves on to refer to the famous ‘whiff of grapeshot’. You will see from the following extract that Carlyle is not ashamed to invent dialogue for Napoleon (as he did for other significant figures in the vast cast of characters portrayed in his book).

`It is false,` says Napoleon, `that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that.`

Funnily enough, that sounds rather like the real Napoleon: to have fired a round of blank shot, he might have argued, would have been to waste more human lives (i.e. the lives of the soldiers on his side of the barricades.) So far as I can tell, however, Napoleon never actually said that, either.

Carlyle continues.

`It is false,` says Napoleon, `that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that.`  Most false: the firing was with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch Church show splintered by it, to this hour. Singular: in old Broglie`s time, six years ago, this Whiff of Grapeshot was promised; but it could not be given then, could not have profited then. Now, however, the time is come for it, and the man; and behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and become a thing that was!’

So there we have it.

The reference to ‘old Broglie’ is presumably a reference to Victor François, the 2^nd Duke of Broglie, a marshal in the army of Louis XV and, subsequently, of Louis XVI. Carlyle’s reference to ‘six years’ before the Whiff of Grapeshot in 1795 place us in 1789, the year that saw the storming of the Bastille and the later storming of the Tuileries Palace, which forced King Louis and his Queen, Marie Antoinette, to flee from Paris and take refuge in Versailles (from which they were forcibly returned to Paris in October 1789), but I cannot find any reference that would put ‘old Broglie’ in a position where he might have fired a whiff of grapeshot of his own in a way that would have had an influence on the course of the revolution.

‘Why do they not sweep away for or five hundred of them with the cannon?’

It is well-known, however, that Napoleon, though a supporter of the Revolution, was horrified by the actions of the mob that stormed the Tuileries, massacring and mutilating the Swiss Guards who were defending the  palace. According to one account, written by a man who had attended military college with Napoleon and who witnessed the storming of the Tuileries, Napoleon was horrified by the Royal Guard’s lack of decisive action. ‘What madness! How could they allow that rabble to enter? Why do they not sweep away for or five hundred of them with the cannon? The rest would take themselves off very quickly.’[3]

The gruesome massacre at the Tuileries may well have been on Napoleon’s mind when he gave the order to use grapeshot against the insurrectionaries in 1795.  The dramatic and long-lasting effect of this brutal action, as Carlyle implies, was to bring an end to the power of the Paris mob – a force that had driven so many of the key episodes of the French Revolution. With Napoleon’s ruthless action, the Revolution was, in many ways, at an end – though Napoleon would continue to argue that he was preserving and protecting the goals of the Revolution, even as he had himself crowned Emperor in 1804.

Carlyle is entirely right in saying that the walls of Saint Roch church in the Rue Saint-Honoré are still pock-marked by the effects of Napoleon’s ‘whiff of grapeshot.’  ‘Wall’, however, was obviously far too prosaic a word for Carlyle to use when ‘rabbets and plinths’ was an available alternative. ‘Rabbet’ is a obscure term for a groove in a piece of wood that allows a joint to be made with a another piece of wood – what we might now call a ‘rebate’ (from the French rabattre) and the meaning of ‘plinth’ used by Carlyle in this context is presumably ‘continuous course of stones supporting a wall’.

‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grudge and a ray of sunshine’

I’m still not sure where the ‘rabbets’ come in, but Carlyle must have like the ring of the phrase, in the same way that he liked ‘whiff of grapeshot’, and , indeed, ‘a Dance of Cabarus Balls’. Carlyle was a dour and irascible Scottish Calvinist who also lost his faith: a slightly unnerving combination which might explain why few of Carlyle’s contemporaries found him to be congenial company: brilliant, certainly, but not necessarily the sort of chap one might hope to run into down at the coffee house. I am reminded of one P. G. Wodehouse’s quietly perfect comic sentences: ‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grudge and a ray of sunshine.’

Maybe John Stuart Mills was not jealous of Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution after, all – perhaps he was just trying to save the world from Carlyle’s prose-poetry.

[2] Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: a History, Book 3. VII Chapter 3.7.VI. http://carlyle.classicauthors.net/FrenchRevolution/FrenchRevolution157.html

[3] M. de Bourienne, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, London, 1836, Vol 1 p 5, quoted in David Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon, Scribner, New York, 1966, p 14.

Citizens United: corporations are not associations of citizens

In 2010, a ruling by the Supreme Court of America in the now notorious Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), allows corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money as ‘independent expenditures’ on political advertising, arguing that to prohibit  these organisations from doing this (as did the previous, relatively sensible and sane legislation) would amount to a limitation on these organisations’ rights to freedom of speech, as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights (the term given to the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States).

A nation conceived in liberty

Americans have sought to find laws and regulations that balance the need to prevent corruption, or the appearance of corruption, in the political process with the right to freedom of speech ever since their nation, ‘conceived in liberty’, was born. It’s a noble aim, the means to achieve which appeared to have been very cleverly enshrined in the 1789 Bill of Rights, which guaranteed the core liberties of any open democracy, including those spelled out in the First Amendment: the right to free assembly, the right to freedom of speech, the right to establish and practise a religion; the right to a free press. Despite the clear common sense of the Bill of Rights, the recent legalistic twists and turns in the continuing debate about its interpretation and implementation have, quite recently, led America into a very strange and potentially dangerous place.

At the heart of the debate is the understandable argument that, if John or Jane Doe feel strongly enough about a political issue to want to take out an advertisement saying that they disagree strongly with the policies of a particular politician and that they urge their fellow Americans to vote them out of office, then they should be allowed to do so. This kind of advertising is called ‘independent expenditure’, and it is seen as different from money that is given directly to political candidates or parties for them to use to promote their own cause. The latter kind of contribution and expenditure is (thankfully) still subject to regulation by the Federal Election Commission.

Advertising involving independent expenditures, it is argued, is merely another form of speech. Indeed, many argue that effective speech is likely to cost money: it’s all very well standing on a soap box and shouting, but your voice will not be heard by many people. Advertising, on this analogy, is just a bigger soap box and a more powerful megaphone.

So far, so good.

But the dramatic effect of the Supreme Court’s judgment in Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee is to rule that corporations have the same rights to free speech as ordinary citizens, and that it would be a breach of those corporations’ supposed constitutional rights if they were prevented (as they previously were prevented by law) from making direct contributions to ‘independent expenditures’, made by political action committees, in exactly the same way that citizens can make contributions to political action committees.

Corporations are no longer prevented from spending as much money as they like in order to influence the political process – though, you will be glad to hear, these expenditures must not be ‘coordinated or controlled’ by political candidates. (I won’t even bother to go into the detail of what is happening in reality: you can probably work out for yourself the various means by which candidates for political office could ‘not control’ and ‘not coordinate’ these vast expenditures.  All that one needs to note, in any case, is that these newly permitted ‘independent’ expenditures, impossible as it may seem, appear to be highly controlled and coordinated.)

Corporate money sloshing around the political system

The Supreme Court’s majority verdict could not have been narrower: 5 judges voted in favour of the new ruling; 4 against. But the results of the ruling have utterly transformed the political landscape of the United States of America – immeasurably for the worse. Huge amounts of corporate money are now sloshing around the American political system without any curb or oversight, funding strident advertising campaigns for individual political candidates – precisely what that the previous (sensible and sane) legislation had sought to avoid.

So how did the Supreme Court get America into this mess?  Well, there’s a long answer to that question, but for me, the fundamental error in the Supreme Court’s ruling is in this paragraph, taken from  the opinion of the court:

‘If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech. If the anti-distortion rationale were to be accepted, however, it would permit government to ban political speech simply because the speaker is an association that has taken on the corporate form.’[1]

In referring to ‘the anti-distortion rationale’ the opinion of court refers to a previous ruling (Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce), which held that corporate spending on the political process was highly likely to distort that process. That earlier court found ‘a compelling governmental interest in preventing “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregates of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporations’ political ideas”’.[2]

That quote about the potentially corrosive and distorting effect of huge amounts of corporate money entering the political process (from Austin v. Michigan) is very well put.

Not only is it very well put, it’s also true.

Amazingly, the opinion of the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case argues that it is not true, and that there will be no ‘corrosive and distorting effect’ from allowing corporate funds to enter the political process in this way.

The court reaches its surprising conclusion by getting itself into a muddle about the word ‘association’.

‘Simply . . . ‘

Referring to previous court rulings which had held, for example, that ‘Corporations and other associations, like individuals, ‘contribute to the discussion, debate and the dissemination of information that the First Amendment seeks to foster’,[3] the concurring judges in the Citizens United verdict seized upon this loose use of the word ‘association’ and based their entire case on it. We should not allow the government to ban political speech, they said, ‘simply because the speaker is an association that has taken on the corporate form.’

I like that use of the word ‘simply’. It reminds me of most instructions which, while proving impossible either to understand or to follow, start out boldly with the word ‘Simply . . . ‘

There is nothing simple about this decision. The very heart of the conclusion of the concurring judges in the case of Citizens United v. FEC – and their fundamental error – is the argument that corporations should be seen as ‘associations of citizens’. Having made their fundamental error, the concurring judges then dig themselves deeper into a pit of their own making.  The law as it previously stood, they argue, ‘permits the government to ban the freedom of speech of millions of associations of citizens’[4] (by ‘associations of citizens’, they now mean corporations’).

No it doesn’t. Or, rather, no it didn’t (farewell, previous sane and sensible legislation).

Corporations are not associations of citizens. To suggest that they are is to fail to have grasped what a corporation is.

Corporations are legal entities, not associations

Corporations must of course be free to speak on their own behalf (was anybody in America trying to gag the speech of corporations? If so, they should indeed be stopped). But if anybody was to attempt to deny the right to speech of a corporation, it would be the corporation’s right to speech that had been infringed, not that of its shareholders or employees (because corporations are not associations of citizens).

Corporations were created with the explicit and essential intention that they should not be ‘an association of persons’: a corporation is a legal entity in itself.

City of London, c. 1300

Some of the earliest examples of ‘corporations’ in relatively recent times include The City of London and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. If you wish to argue that the City of London is an association of citizens, then you must (and presumably do) accept that the City of London has the right to speak on behalf of all of the people of the City of London – and that, if the City of London is not allowed to speak in this way, then the freedom of speech of the inhabitants of the City of London has been diminished.

That, if I may say so, is a strange thing to believe.

There’s something else that’s very strange here. The corporation must of course be allowed to speak for itself. You really don’t need the First Amendment to ensure that, you just need not to have a law gagging the speech of corporations. What is not obvious is that the corporation’s ‘speech’ should take the form, not of speech about the corporation itself, but of speech about political candidates.

The City of London, for example is, in fact, very able to speak for itself and does so, promoting its own cause with vigour. It speaks for itself as a corporation, not on behalf of all of the people who live or work in the City of London. What the City of London is not allowed to do, under UK law, is to finance advertising campaigns aimed at electing politicians who are well-disposed to the City of London – who might, for example, propose tax legislation that was in the interests of the City of London. The City is welcome, in the UK, to use its resources to shout as loudly as it likes about the advantages of such a piece of legislation, but it is not allowed to use its resources to support the campaign of a particular politician who might subsequently promote its interests in parliament by attempting to promote such legislation. The freedom of speech of all of the citizens of the City of London is not thereby diminished. Concerns about the possibility of corruption and distortion in the political process are avoided.

The Association formerly known as Ford Motor Company

The freedom of speech of citizens is not, thankfully, at issue. What the US Supreme Court has managed to make an issue is the right of citizens to exercise their freedom of speech via ‘associations’: a word that (quite rightly) conjures images of citizens coming together voluntarily to make their feelings known about some issue they feel strongly about – the very stuff of democracy.  The question is this: has the average citizen, who might happen to be a shareholder of the Ford Motor Company, now entered into an ‘association’ called the Ford Motor Company? No they have not. Does that citizen, in having (not) joined that association, now demand that the executive officers of Ford  should have the right to spend huge amounts of the company’s money supporting the company’s political interests, which may or may not coincide with the citizen’s own political interests?  No, they do not.

In what sense can The Association known as The Ford Motor Company possibly speak for both the humblest of its employees and the richest of its shareholders?  To suggest that the shareholders or the employees of Ford are some kind of association and that the freedom of speech of that association is diminished (or ‘chilled’ to use the bizarre term that is favoured by the opinion of the court) by refusing to allow Ford to spend money on political advertising, is a kind of madness.

Do you, or have you ever, worked for a corporation?

There is a real sleight of hand involved in taking the line that corporations are ‘associations of citizens’: this makes it sound as if extending the right of freedom of speech to corporations is merely ensuring that all of those citizens’ voices get to be heard. But that is not how corporations work – as we all know very well.

Have you ever worked for a corporation? Did it feel as if you were an association of individuals? Do you feel, for example, that every decision made by that corporation was something that you were happy to endorse?

Let me guess . . . Er, not exactly? Quite.

Corporations are run by the executives, or officers, of that corporation in the best interest of the corporation. Corporations are not democracies.  A relatively small group of people are charged with making the corporation’s key decisions. We are beginning to have a debate about whether corporations should in fact be run on more democratic lines, but to suggest that any corporation expresses the joint views of all of its shareholders or employees is laughable and, more importantly, wilfully wrongheaded.

When the officers of a corporation decide to spend large amounts of money supporting a particular political cause (which they should be prevented, by law, from doing), this does not and cannot reflect the wishes of the ‘association of citizens’ that the corporation is said to represent under this false representation of what a corporation is.

There are a couple of other points that are worth exploring before we put ‘corporations are associations of citizens’ to rest.

i) Limited Liability

One of the most important forms of the corporation is the limited liability company. Precisely because such companies are not associations of individuals, the corporation, as a legal entity, is liable for its own debts and the investor – the shareholder – is liable only to the extent of his or her investment. In the earliest commercial ventures, investors came together as partners to fund enterprises. If the venture failed, the partners lost all of their expenditure and were personally liable for all of the venture’s debts. To attempt to argue that the shareholders of limited liability company are ‘an association of citizens’ raises, to my mind, some interesting legal questions about the principle of limited liability. If a corporation is ‘an association of citizens’ as opposed to . . . what’s the right word here? Oh, I know: ‘a corporation’ . . .  then perhaps that association of citizens should be liable for all of the association’s debts. It’s just a thought.

ii) Corporations are not citizens

Corporations, by definition, follow their own agenda. It would be legally (and arguably morally) wrong for the officers of a corporation to do or to support anything that was not in the interests of that corporation. The corporation is obliged to strive to fulfil its purpose (typically to maximise its profits in the interest its owners, the shareholders, but the same obligation would apply to a non-profit corporation that had been created to pursue a particular goal). Corporations, unlike citizens, cannot be expected to support laws that disfavour them, in the interest of the common good. If new legislation threatens a corporation’s profitability or the fulfilment of its other goals, the corporation is duty bound to use of its resources to oppose this.  Corporations, as you may have noticed, are not in the habit of saying ‘Oh well, this particular piece of legislation will cut my profits, or runs counter to everything that we have been lobbying for, but what the heck? That’s democracy for you!’ Corporations will in fact, and rightly so, fight tooth and nail on behalf of their shareholders to prevent such legislation. This is the free market in action. It is also a compelling argument against allowing corporations to use their corporate wealth to influence the political process.

Corporations shout louder than citizens

The collective expression of citizens’ free speech helps to ensures that a democracy reflects the general will of the people. The unfettered free speech of corporations – if this ‘speech’ is allowed to enter the political process – will ensure that democracy reflects the will of the corporations, because corporations can shout louder than citizens.

Politics in America, since the ruling of Citizens United v. Federal Electoral Commission in 2010, is already a sleazier place, in which citizens can be far less confident that the political process is free from influence by powerful vested interests.

[2] Opinion of the Court, ibid., pp 31-32, quoting from Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce

[3] Opinion of the Court, ibid., p 26, quoting Pacific Gas and Electric Company v. Public Utilities Commission of California, in turn quoting First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti

[4] Opinion of the Court, ibid., p 38

Napoleon first demonstrates his leadership skills: The Siege of Toulon

Young 'Buonaparte': Lieutenant-Colonel of the First Battalion of Corsica

Napoleon’s first opportunity to demonstrate his exceptional leadership skills came with the French Revolution – the  dramatic social upheaval that swept away all of France’s previous power structures and hierarchies, giving this apparently unremarkable young man the opportunity to step onto the world stage.

The young student from Corsica

Napoleon Bonaparte was christened Napoleone di Buonaparte, the son of a family of minor Corsican aristocrats who had moved to Corsica from the Italian mainland in the sixteenth century. The governor of Corsica, a family friend, helped to secure Napoleon a place at the Royal School of Brienne in north-central France: a kind of French prep school for the aristocracy. The education was provided by the state (which, at this time, meant by the monarchy) and the Buonaparte’s had needed to prove that they had the necessary four generations of nobility that would qualify them for admission. Though the school was not an officer-cadet school as such, many of the aristocratic French youngsters aspired, like Napoleon, to a military career. Young Napoleon began his studies at Brienne at the tender age of nine.

Napoleon went on to study at the military academy at Troyes, in Northern France, and subsequently won a place at the elite École Militaire Royale in Paris, completing the two-year course in only one year and graduating as second lieutenant of artillery in January 1786, at the age of sixteen. He had been a rather solitary student – mocked for his Corsican accent and gaunt appearance. He studied hard, showing great ability in mathematics and geography and reading widely, especially in military history.  He was intrigued by the battle tactics and strategy of Alexander the Great, who had conquered most of the known world in the third century BCE. Alexander was to be a lasting influence on Napoleon’s military and strategic thinking.

‘I take but one meal a day, at three; that is good for my health.’

The Buonaparte family’s fortunes took a turn for the worse when Napoleon’s father died in 1785. His brothers Lucien and Joseph abandoned their own studies and returned to Corsica to support the family: Napoleon continued his studies under conditions of real hardship. It is possible that the military academy had allowed Napoleon to take his examination early so that he would at least earn a meagre salary as a newly-commissioned officer. He passed his examinations at a less than impressive forty-second place, and took up his post with an artillery regiment. Even then, Napoleon’s army pay was barely enough to survive on.[1]

In a poignant letter to his mother, which attempts to put a brave face on his condition, Napoleon wrote: ‘I have no other resource but work. I dress but once in eight days; I sleep but little since my illness [Napoleon’s health had nearly broken down late in 1788]; it is incredible; I retire at ten (to save candles) and rise at four in the morning. I take but one meal a day, at three; that is good for my health.’[2]

For the rest of his life, perhaps as a result of the training provided by these hard times, Napoleon was able to maintain a punishing workload – both as a soldier and as an administrator – with little sleep and on a frugal diet.

When the revolution broke out, Napoleon returned to Corsica to support the Corsican nationalist movement. He became the leader of a group of volunteers, and appealed to the new revolutionary National Assembly in Paris for aid. He was ecstatic when the Assembly declared that Corsica was part of the new France. The newly-graduated officer in the army of  Louis XVI had become an ardent supporter of the Revolution.

Grasping the significant moment

It was not until 1793 that Napoleon was first able to demonstrate his ability to grasp the significant moment, to devise the successful strategy, to lead from the front and by example. In this year – the year in which Louis XVI  had been guillotined, at the beginning of what was to become ‘The Terror’ – Napoleon, now a twenty-four-year-old artillery captain, was given the opportunity to take control of artillery for the siege of Toulon. At this time, there were still significant pockets of royalist insurrection against the revolution throughout the provinces, especially in the western Vendée region and in the South East. When royalist Marseille was retaken in August by the Jacobins, with appalling reprisals, the counter-revolutionaries holding Toulon called on the British Royal Navy to help them, along with their Spanish and other allies. Britain had been at war with France since the formation of the ‘First Coalition’ of European allies against revolutionary France, formed earlier that year after the execution of Louis XVI.

The English fleet anchored in the harbour at Toulon was commanded by Rear Admiral Hood. Captain Horatio Nelson was with Hood’s fleet, in command of the 64-gun ‘third-rater’ Agamemnon.

HMS Agamemnon - Nelson's first flagship - leading a squadron in the Mediterranean in1796

First- and second-raters and, indeed, third-raters

‘Ships of the line’, that is to say, ships of the line of battle, were rated by size. A ‘first rate’ ship of the line had more than one hundred guns, typically on three decks; a third-rate, like Nelson’s Agamemnon, had between sixty-four and eighty guns, usually on two gun-decks. The terminology, as you will have noticed, has taken on an unfairly derogatory popular meaning: to be considered ’second rate’ is now unfortunate, whereas there was nothing ’second-rate’ about a second rate – a fearsome fighting ship with some ninety or more guns on three decks, which was merely a slightly smaller (and slightly cheaper) version of a  first rate. The third rate Agamemnon had 64 guns on two decks; such ships could be argued to offer the best compromise between speed, handling, fire power and cost.

From King’s officer to revolutionary

Napoleon’s career – like that of many other young officers –  had taken him from being a member of the King’s army to becoming a member of the French revolutionary army. He was fortunate that his Corsican ancestry, though undoubtedly ‘aristocratic’, was too obscurely provincial to alarm the political sensibilities of the new revolutionary government in Paris. A similar ancestry on mainland France might have cost Napoleon his head, once the extreme wing of the revolution began executing large numbers of its fellow citizens with that recently-invented, modern and humane killing machine, the Guillotine. In fact, Napoleon at the time enthusiastically embraced this extreme,  left-wing ‘Jacobin’ faction of the revolution.

Political appointments and the siege of Toulon

The French revolutionary army – like the Russian and Chinese Red Armies two centuries later – was monitored by powerful political ‘advisors’. Napoleon’s political activism gave him the ear of these advisers, especially that of a fellow Corsican called Saliceti; a Deputy to the National Convention (a later political derivation of the first revolutionary National Assembly) and an enthusiastic supporter of the Terror. Saliceti’s colleague was Augustin Robespierre, younger brother of the infamous Maximilien François Marie Isadore de Robespierre – the austere and terrifying member of the Committee of Public Safety and, many would argue, the intellectual father of the Terror. In that year of 1793, Napoleon, the young artillery captain in the French revolutionary army, was in the south of France escorting a cargo of gunpowder from Avignon to the revolutionary army of Italy. En route from Marseille to Nice, he dropped by at the siege of Toulon to pay his repsects to his fellow Coriscan Saliceti, the powerful poltical advisor. It was a shrewd move. The occupation of Toulouse – France’s most important Mediterranean naval base – by royalist forces, supported by Britain and the allies, was a threat to the whole revolution. The original commander of artillery at the siege had been  wounded, and Saliceti and Robespierre insisted that he should be immediately be replaced by the young Bonaparte, despite the reluctance of the military general in charge of the siege.

Toulon harbour

Napoleon carried out a reconnaissance and quickly sized up the strategic situation. He recommended training the artillery on the British encampment on a promontory overlooking Toulon’s harbour, rather than on the city itself. He could see that seizing control of the British position would allow him to fire on the harbour itself, rather than the town, and to drive out the British fleet, leaving the defenders without a supply-line from the sea.  The general in charge, however,  made a half-hearted attempt on the promontory which succeeded only in alerting the British to their danger: they reinforced the promontory so heavily that it was dubbed ‘Little Gibraltar’.

Seizing the initiative: ‘The Men Without Fear’

Napoleon had been denied what was to become one of his later trade-mark routes to success: acting with great speed to surprise the enemy, exploiting a weakness that they had not recognised. Denied this, his next move represented another classic Napoleonic strategy: apply overwhelming force.  He requisitioned artillery from all around the region, and established a series of batteries that were given stirring patriotic names – ‘The Convention’, ‘Camp of the Republicans’, ‘The Jacobins’, ‘The Men Without Fear’. This in itself was a clever piece of leadership, demonstrating Napoleon’s instinctive grasp of motivation. The battery of ‘The Men without Fear’ was indeed sited in a very exposed and dangerous position, but it never lacked for volunteers, keen to prove their bravery. Legend has it that Napoleon himself worked on this battery, wielding a ramrod alongside his gunners. He probably did.

The original general in charge of the siege was dismissed by the politicos; he was succeeded by a former doctor – a classic example of the danger of letting political cadres take control of an army. He in turn resigned in recognition of his own incompetence and was succeeded at last by an experienced soldier, Dugommier, who recognised the merit of Napoleon’s strategy and gave it his full support.

Napoleon leads charge against British positions at the siege of Toulon. Painting by Onfray de Breville Job

After repulsing one British attack on the French gun emplacements, Napoleon and Dugommier together led a counter-attack, during which Napoleon captured General O’Hara, the British commanding officer.  Napoleon was promoted to Colonel. Later he led the final, successful, attack on the British position and was wounded in the thigh by a bayonet.  It was, astoundingly, the only wound that he was ever to receive in battle, despite his legendary insouciance about exposing himself to enemy fire. As his career progressed, this insouciance (or bravery) seemed to come from a genuine fatalism: he believed that he would not be killed until he had fulfilled his destiny.

Napoleon meets Josephine

The British fleet were indeed driven out of the harbour by French artillery, Toulon fell and Napoleon was the hero of the day, emerging as General of Brigade. His success brought him further to the attention of the Committee of Public Safety. It also brought him to the attention of Paul Barras, then a member of the National Convention and Commissioner of the French Army. Barras was (incidentally) to introduce Napoleon to a mistress of his, whose minor aristocrat husband had been killed in the Terror, and of whom Barras was growing slightly (but not yet irrevocably) tired – the young but far from innocent Josephine Beauharnais, Napoleon’s future wife and, despite their infidelities and Napoleon’s later divorce of Josephine and remarriage, the love of his life.

Robespierre arrested and shot

Less than one year after the siege of Toulon, the revolutionary excesses of the Terror had burned themselves out. Barras was one of many in the Convention sickened by the excesses of the Jacobins and fearful of who might be its next victims: after a revolt of moderates in the Convention, Barras led the National Guard to arrest the Robespierre brothers, and others, on the night of July 27^th 1794. Augustin threw himself out of a window to his death; Maximilien was either shot in jaw by a member of the National Guard or wounded himself in an attempted suicide – he was guillotined the next day, without trial, with nineteen of his colleagues.  Napoleon subsequently spent two weeks in prison as a result of his friendship with Augustin Robespierre, but was released.  The following year, Barras had become a member of the French Directoire: one of the five members of the Directory, an executive body heading up two new parliamentary houses: the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients. Members of the two hundred an fifty-strong ‘Ancients’ were indeed ancient, having to be at least forty years old.

Napoleon set out to prove to the Directoire that he was the most important man in their lives.

[2] F.M. Kircheisen, Memoirs of Napoleon I, trans, F. Collins, London 1929, p 26, quoted in Chandler op.cit. p 12

March 4th 1193. Saladin, Islamic liberator of Jerusalem from the invading Crusaders, dies.

Artist's impression of Saladin: Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub

Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub – known in the West as ‘Saladin’ – was the Islamic leader who brought together the fragmented forces of twelfth-century Syria and Mesopotamia to drive the invading Christian Crusader forces out of Palestine. The First Crusade had been launched in 1095 by Pope Urban II to help the Eastern Christians of Byzantium against a Turkish invasion. Its objective later became the liberation of Jerusalem and the creation of a Christian state in Palestine: the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

1099: Crusaders capture Jerusalem and massacre the inhabitants

Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders in 1099; its inhabitants were subjected to an appalling massacre, only the exact scale of which is disputed. This bloody history makes the future restraint of Saladin all the more remarkable: when he recaptured Jerusalem in 1187, the inhabitants were ransomed rather than slaughtered, which also allowed Saladin to reward the various emirs and warlords who had supported him in cash rather than from the traditional plunder from the sack of a great city – Saladin was keen to preserve the city’s sacred sites and artefacts. Citizens of the defeated city who were too poor to find a ransom were saved by ingenious schemes: money donated by England’s Henry II to the Knights Hospitallers was used to free seven thousand poor people unable to raise a ransom; Saladin’s brother asked for one thousand slaves as his reward for services in battle and immediately set them free; Saladin responded by releasing many thousand old and infirm inhabitants. Great ladies who had lost their lords and their lands were compensated by Saladin and assisted on their homeward journey.

Force and generosity

Saladin had risen to power as the military commander and then the Sultan of Egypt, and had dramatically captured the important port of Aqaba from the Christians. When the ruler of Syria died, Saladin rode to Damascus (where his father had previously been governor) at the city’s invitation, and began to establish himself as the ruler who could unite the Islamic world against the Christian invaders. He proceeded to win over the other great city states and leaders of the area by a nice combination of the threat of force tempered by a show of great generosity to those who chose to join sides with him.

After the symbolic recapture of Jerusalem by Saladin, another Crusade (the Third) was launched, bringing Saladin into confrontation with England’s great Crusader king, Richard I: ‘The Lionheart’. The two never met, but seemed to develop a genuine admiration for each other. Saladin sent fruit chilled with snow to Richard when he was ill and offered the services of his personal physician; when Richard’s horse was killed in battle, Saladin sent a gift of two horses. Richard later proposed a dynastic marriage between Richard’s sister and Saladin’s brother to create a united Palestine with the two as joint rulers. The wedding never came about, and it is unlikely that Saladin would have countenanced a marriage to an infidel.

The limits of chivalry

Saladin came to be respected and even revered in the West as great example of a chivalric leader – a worthy opponent who showed respect for the rules of ‘civilized’ combat. It is worth remembering that the medieval notion of chivalry in combat only ever extended to the aristocracy, and also that even Saladin’s mercy was not bottomless. While he was romantically chivalrous towards Richard the Lionheart, the worthy opponent, he was unsurprisingly ruthless to those that he saw as treacherous, and, of course, to anyone who was not of the highest rank. One such ‘treacherous’ foe was

The Crusader fortress of Al-Karak, Jordan

Raynald of Chatillon, a Christian hot-head who raided rich caravans in the south from his fortress of al-Karak, in Jordan: a crusader fortress that constantly threatened both the caravan and pilgrim trails between the port of Aqaba on the Red Sea and Jerusalem and Damascus to the north.

In early 1187, the year in which Saladin would recapture Jerusalem, when his increasingly united forces were beginning to gain the upper hand over the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, Saladin summoned all provinces to the holy war. The Christians were comprehensively defeated at the Battle of Hattin, where they had gone into battle carrying what was believed to be the True Cross (the actual cross on which Jesus had been crucified) and had lost this mighty talisman to the Muslims. The defeated King Guy of Jerusalem was led before Saladin with the hated Raynald, whom Saladin had sworn to kill. Water was brought for the exhausted King Guy, who passed it on to Raynald. Saladin insisted that Guy tell Raynald that the water was given to Raynald without Saladin’s permission: if Saladin had offered food or water to Raynald, then Raynald would be able to claim the protection of Saladin as his ‘host’ – Saladin, as ever, was puntilious in these matters of honour. Having made it plain that Raynald was not his ‘guest’, Saladin was now free to kill him, and later that evening Raynald was indeed killed; Saladin may have struck the blow himself.

Saladin with the defeated Guy of Lusignan, King of Jerusalem

King Guy is spared; the Knights Templar are executed

The King and even the Grand Master of the Templars were spared and later released, but a hundred Templar and Hospitaller Knights were executed: these committed and fanatical shock troops of the Crusades were too dangerous to spare and, as ‘troops’ rather than ‘leaders’, they did not come within the scope of chivalry amongst the true elite – just as Raynald had forgone his right to mercy through his underhand raiding of caravans and pilgrims. The chivalrous Saladin was humane, but he was not above occasional ruthlessness. Or, to put a modern and less chivalrous spin on the matter: he was a nice guy, but he wasn’t stupid.

The great unifier

Saladin was, above all, a great unifier. He emerges as a genuinely humane and generous man, whose civilised instincts allowed him to rise above the politics of revenge: Saladin’s habit of treating a defeated enemy with kindness and even with generosity won him many friends, while his firm control from the centre prevented this from being exploited as weakness. It had practical benefits: cities were relatively happy to surrender to Saladin, in expectation of decent treatment, where they would have held out against an attacker likely to wreak destruction on a vanquished city. In his struggle to assert his leadership, he tried always to strike a deal, to negotiate a treaty or to use politics to gain the upper hand, rather than to batter his opponents into submission. He then used his hard-won position as leader of the region to take the offensive against the common enemy.

Saladin is featured in Section 7 of History Lessons: Taking the Offensive

Further reading: Geoffrey Hindley, Saladin: Hero of Islam. Available from my Amazon store

Terence Conran’s Habitat: changing lifestyles in 1960s Britain

The current Terence Conran exhibition at the London Design Museum reminds us of the startling impact that Habitat had on the tastes and lifestyles of Britons in the 1960s.  As The Guardian’s video contribution to the current wave of Conran reportage says, ‘He transformed the high street!’ It’s true. Shopping for furniture and interior design in the UK was never the same again. But Conran changed more than the high street: by introducing the idea that everyday items could, and should, be both well-designed and affordable, he changed British people’s lives.

Suddenly, by means of a few, relatively inexpensive purchases: modern, streamlined furniture that was nothing like Edwardian bookshelves or Granny’s chintz-covered best sofa; some inexpensive but stylish kitchen accessories; a Japanese paper lampshade – we were modern! It was also, of course, obligatory to paint all of one’s walls white. Wallpaper of any kind quickly became a social embarrassment (woodchip or lining paper was marginally acceptable once it had been painted white, and was largely unavoidable since the plaster of most older British houses was in no condition to be exposed, and needed to be covered up with something more robust than paint; it was during the 1960s that Polyfilla became a household name, as the cellulose filler was used to fill the countless cracks and gaps in the typical British interior wall, once stripped of its forgiving covering of decorative wallpaper.)

A design revolution

In this way, with a few bits of typically British improvisation and ‘making do’, the UK seized on what Habitat offered and broke free from the 1950s, a decade that combined the elation of war’s end with the continuing realities of rationing (which was in force in the UK until 1954) and of national poverty, and emerged into the elegant and uncluttered modernism of the 1960s. In fact, most of us didn’t actually emerge into the bright white modernism of the 1960s until the rather more stylistically-confused 1970s, a decade that was already nostalgic for the magical ‘swinging’ sixties, but during which the majority of the UK began to catch up with the design revolution that Conran has started in 1964. As is the case with many decades which seem to define an era, ‘the sixties’ lasted for more than a decade.

What is fascinating, with hindsight, is the way in which consumers’ perceptions of ‘design’ changed so fundamentally between the previous and the current centuries: a change for which Conran can accept a great deal of the credit. Or, as some design purists would have it, the blame.

In the twenty-first century, ‘design’ is a good word. We expect things to be designed; we pay a hefty price premium for ‘designer’ goods; we restlessly seek out the most modern design. Having ‘designed’ stuff marks us out as being cutting edge and cool.

It wasn’t always like this.

Consumption engineering: ‘We must use up the goods we now merely use’

An unease with the idea of ‘design’ probably began when American marketers began to realise that they needed consumers to keep on consuming: that buying one car, or one kitchen range, or one fridge in a lifetime was not enough to keep the economy running at full speed. Consumers would have to be persuaded that their major purchases needed to be upgraded on a regular basis: that it did not matter if something was still functioning perfectly well, for example; what mattered was whether it was the right colour, or in the most modern styling.

An American adman called Earnest Calkins, co-founder in 1902 of what has been called the first modern advertising agency, Calkins and Holden, (‘modern’, because of its single-minded focus on graphic design), Calkins was a remarkably prescient marketing thinker. In the 1930s, he came to believe (as did the economist John Maynard Keynes) that America needed to consume its way out of the Depression and that, as an obvious corollary, it was the essential business of manufacturing and marketing industries to create more and more products that got ‘used up’ in the way that what we now call fast moving consumer goods (groceries, soft drinks, toiletries) get used up; that things which used to be ‘once in a lifetime’ purchases must now be replaced on a regular basis, not because they were no longer functional, but because they were no longer ‘cool’ (to use a modern term).

‘Consumption engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use,’ wrote Calkin. ‘Consumption engineering does not stop until we can consume all that we can make.’[1] The terms that Calkins used to describe this process – ‘artificial obsolescence’; ‘consumption engineering’ – have become terms of abuse to which we all still pay unthinking lip service. ‘Artificial obsolescence’ is a terrible thing, we say to ourselves. Why design something that could last for fifty years (like a car) in such a way that it will only last ten years (or less)? What a terrible waste of limited resources!  Worse still, do people really design things with the sole purpose of tempting us to buy them? Surely design should be about functionality; about creating things that fulfil their function better?

Britain’s Council of Industrial Design

We still say (or think) this kind of thing, despite the demonstrable fact that we like to change our car every few years because the old one seems a bit dated, and that we rush out to buy the latest coffee-making machine, not because it makes better coffee , but  because it is absolutely the latest thing in coffee-making machine design, which impresses our friends and makes us happy. Welcome to the supposedly dubious world of consumption engineering.

Britain’s Design Council – a state-run body set up with the explicit aim of raising the status of good design in the national consciousness – got itself into a bit of a lather about this kind of ‘consumption engineering’ in the 1960s – perhaps not surprisingly so, since we all still seem to be a bit ambivalent about the concept.

The Design Council had been brought into being in wartime Britain, in 1944, as The Council of Industrial Design. It had a clearly proclaimed aim, as pronounced by its house magazine, Design, which was launched in 1949: ‘To help industry in its task of raising standards in design.’[2] There was an unashamedly commercial aspect to this arguably high-minded vision: it was fervently hoped that, if Britain produced better-designed goods, it would be able to export more of them. This does not seem to be a foolish hope; the post-war economy of Germany flourished on the basis of enviable level of exports driven by great design and top-class engineering.

Nevertheless, along with our lingering concerns that ‘consumption engineering’ was a bad thing, so we continued (in the UK, at least) to fret that ‘design’ was being used to sell us things that we didn’t really need.  Good design, in the early days of the Council, was seen as something like good art:  something that it might be hard to define but that was, nevertheless, an objective quality; something that could be agreed upon by well-educated and cultured folk. The Design Council’s job was to try to improve the tastes of the general public, so that they would acquire an understanding of ‘good design’; manufacturers who made use of ‘good design’ would then be rewarded by the custom of these new consumers, with their improved sensitivities and newly-elevated levels of good taste. An article in the Oxford Art Journal, published in 1987, Good Design in the Market Place: The Rise of Habitat Man, said this, ‘For the Council of Industrial Design, the appearance of an object, its designed form, had to reflect the fundamental structure  of the object and thus be the product of the creative aesthetic power of the designer [...] As for the consumer, he/she [...] was to be educated and later to have his/her real needs served not merely pandered too. His/her taste was to be improved rather than his/her appetite merely sated.’[3]

As the author of the article notes, the Design Council was set up at a time when Britons were used to having their lives overseen and regulated by the state – there was, after all, a war on. The Council’s aims were paternalistic and didactic: the general public was to have its taste improved, which would encourage the production of ‘well-designed’ goods. It was a well-meaning, if slightly Big Brother-ish, government strategy.

A British version of Bauhaus

The problem faced by this rather Victorian world view was that neither manufacturers, designers or the general public were behaving quite in the way that they were supposed to. They weren’t really following the rules of Good Design. Manufacturers and designers were worrying about what might sell, and consumers were buying whatever caught their fancy – some of which happened to have been really well designed, which is why we bought it. It was all so confusing.

You will notice the reference in the description of the  Design Counicil’s aims  to ‘(good) design reflecting the fundamental structure of the object’ –the quintessentially modernist view of good design which we associate mainly with Germany’s state-sponsored Bauhaus academy, founded in 1919 by the German architect Walter Gropius. The most memorable founding principles of the developing school of modernism were to become

Ornament is a Crime

Form follows Function

Truth to Materials

The Council like most design bodies of the time, seemed to believe that these principles were rules: that design that did not follow these rules could not be good design.

Conran, naughty (and immensely successful) marketer that he was, offered us a range of ‘Bauhaus style’ furnishing – suitably stern and functional, true to its materials (typically steel, black leather, pale woods and modern surfacings) and without any criminally decadent ornamentation. But he also – unashamedly! – offered us simple but seductive elements of a continental lifestyle that was overwhelmingly appealing to a nation tired of the drab utilitarianism of wartime Britain.

The article on Sir Terence Conran at the website of London’s Design Museum (of which Conran was a founder and is still a trustee) highlights the way in which Conran mixed and matched the styles that he felt would appeal to the British public.

‘It was a very particular version of modernism, based on simple forms, natural materials, and a fresh colour palette. It was a humanised, British version of Bauhaus. [...] Habitat sold not only Conran’s own furniture designs, but products sourced from Europe and inspired by “triggers” of traditional domestic utility and continental sensuality: “the markets, the roadside cafes, the simple, unpretentious but abundant displays, the delicious food washed down with carafes of rough red wine”. By offering small, casual purchases alongside large furniture items Conran aimed at “that irresistible feeling of plenty you find on market stalls” and set in motion a revolution in home styling whose effects are still felt. By naming “essential” items and tools for the kitchen and home Conran celebrated the aesthetics of utility and connected the home to the exciting post-war tenor of industry and progress.’[4]

But it was not just the general public’s tendency to like items that were rather less austere and rather more sensual than the extreme vision of modernism would allow that was driving us away from the Council’s original vision of what ‘good design’ might be. It was that manufacturers were not following the strict and objective principles of ‘good design’ (putting to one side the fact that nobody has, to the best of my knowledge, succeeded in setting out exactly what those principles would be). In fact, it was even worse than that. Manufacturers were designing things that they thought people would want to buy!

The Persuading Image

As an article published in Design magazine in 1960, ‘The Persuading Image’, made clear, the pressure was now on to persuade consumers to consume: the principle that Earnest Calkin had set out so clearly thirty years earlier.  The author, Richard Hamilton, echoing Arthur Drexler, curator and director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York wrote this: ‘there is no ideal in design, no pre-determined consumer, only a market in a constant state of flux’.[5]

On this basis, good design is dictated by the vagaries of the market. We like what is good, and it is good because we like it.

I think that today we are all fairly relaxed with this notion of deign: design, we now believe, is not absolute but relative. What seemed like good design last year seems dated this year. This flies in the face, of course of the notion that there were (or are) a set of principles that could define ‘good design’ but then – to stray into an area which we really don’t have time to explore in this blog – the idea that there was a definitive idea of what was ‘good (or great) art’ has relatively recently entered similarly difficult waters.

The Design Council, as I hinted at earlier, got into a particular lather about a product shown at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition of 1962. It was (you will be shocked to hear) a new Tricity electric cooker with a built-in radio to entertain the housewife as she cooked! What could be a more extreme example of unnecessary ornamentation and of ‘pandering’ to consumers’ wants? Design magazine made a series of laboured jokes on the subject to show how strongly it disapproved.  If you think that’s acceptable, they wrote, then what about these side-splitting examples of obviously pointless and unnecessary innovations? What about (writers collapse in fits of giggles) a ‘foculpoynte’: a TV screen built into an electric fire or a coal fireplace?  What about (snort!) a ’toast-a-phone’? A toaster that was also a telephone?? (No, stop it – you’re killing me!) What about (wait for it!) a ‘Rockmaster’: a baby’s cradle with a record player attached that plays music to the baby? (No really, it’s too much – wipes tears from eyes.)[6]

Good industrial design: good because we like it?

TVs and other entertainment systems are now seen as essential features of a kitchen, so the we can, indeed, be entertained while we cook. We tend to like to have ‘Foculpoyntes’ in our houses: many modern homes have a giant flatscreen TV on the wall above a fireplace. As for cots that play music to babies – well, that’s obvious nonsense, isn’t it? (I will admit that the toast-a-phone seems not to have caught on.)

We have, I would suggest, come not merely to accept that good industrial design is guided by what we want; I think we would now agree, almost without second thoughts, with the supposedly extreme version of the argument: that good industrial design is, by definition, what we want. It is good because we want to buy it.

[2] Design, January 1949, p.1

[3] John Hewitt, Good Design in the Market Place: The Rise of Habitat Man, Oxford Art Journal, Vol 10 no 2 The 60s (1987) pp 28-42. http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/2/28.full.pdf+html

[4] http://designmuseum.org/design/terence-conran

[5] John Hewitt, op cit., p 30

[6] John Hewitt, op.cit., p 31

February 12th, 1809: Abraham Lincoln is born

Abraham Lincoln, at a truly critical moment in American history, presented to a troubled and divided nation a clear and commanding vision: that the United States of America was ‘a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12^th 1809, in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky, in the new United States of America: a twelve-year-old nation state whose independence had been recognised by its former colonial master, Britain, in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, following the rebel territory’s military victory over British forces in America in 1781. The new nation state consisted of only thirteen states, all clustered on the Eastern seaboard of the sub-continent – and Abraham’s birthplace, Kentucky, wasn’t even one of them at the time. After the revolution, inhabitants of the territory known as ‘Kentucky County’ in the State of Virginia, east of the Appalachian Mountains, petitioned to become an independent state. America was beginning to expand westward from the coastal ‘Thirteen Colonies’, established by predominantly English settlers in the seventeenth century.

From backwoodsman to barrister

Kentucky’s independence was granted in 1792, making Kentucky the fifteenth state to join the new union (Vermont had become the fourteenth state – the first addition to the original Thirteen Colonies – in 1791.) Shawnee and Cherokee Indians attacked the settlers of Kentucky from the outset to protect their traditional hunting grounds; Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather was killed. His father scraped a living as a boy labourer, growing up to become a farmer and carpenter – respected in the local community of settlers, but still dirt poor. Lincoln was born in one-room log cabin. When the family moved to Indiana (adopted as the nineteenth state of the union in 1816) when Abraham was seven years old, their first home was a rudimentary three-sided shelter, protected by a permanently-lit fire on the open side. They lived off wild game until they were able to establish their farm. Lincoln’s mother died when he was nine. He attended school only haphazardly (and poorly-clothed) but educated himself from borrowed books, studying at the end of each day’s labours on the farm. He went on to teach himself law, and passed his bar examinations at the age of 27. In 1847 he was elected to the House of Representatives as a Whig. In 1856, he joined the new Republican Party, founded two years earlier on an anti-slavery platform. Abraham Lincoln was to become the first Republican president of the United States in 1860. The issue of slavery immediately threatened to split the United States in two: the American Civil War was about to begin.

The moral issue is the core issue

Abraham Lincoln started his presidency of the United States of America with an understandably conservative position: he was simply desperate to hold the United States together. The new nation’s radical experiment in republican government was in danger of fragmenting into a collection of loosely associated states; of ceasing to be a nation. Lincoln set out at first only to prevent the secession of the Southern States, and preferred not to address the issue of slavery in states where it was long-established. Deeply as he loathed the institution of slavery itself, he at first sought only to prevent the spread of slave ownership into new territories as America expanded to the west. As the American Civil War progressed, he realised that the moral issue was in fact the core issue; that the pragmatic solution of merely holding the states together was no solution. The vision that he offered was suddenly crystal clear in his own mind, as it would soon be to the nation as a whole: ‘a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’

Leadership visions for ordinary mortals: what are we trying to achieve?

A great vision for any organisation is both simple and bold, but it need not be as ‘grand’ as this. The question is simply, what is any leader leading their team or organisation for? There will be targets to be achieved (and directions to be set), but these are the essential running, the unavoidable management of any business. A vision is something else: an overriding sense of purpose, a raison d‘etre, a genuine corporate identity. ‘Boldness’ is, after all, a matter of degree – but a vision, by definition, is something that everybody in the organisation can grasp; a simple answer that can instantly be given to the question, ‘What are we trying to achieve?’

Abraham Lincoln is featured in Section 2 of History Lessons: ‘Boldness of Vision’.

February 11th, 1990. Nelson Mandela walks to freedom

One of the most difficult tasks that a leader may face is to change the engrained ‘mood’ of an organisation; its very culture. South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, who, after his release and his later election as president of a country that had voted for the first time on the basis of ‘one man one vote’, was expected by his white opponents to introduce a new regime that would be implacably hostile to whites. In fact, Mandela set out to create a racially mixed government of national unity, and set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an attempt to heal old wounds. His personal commitment to a process of forgiveness – visiting his old persecutor, ex-president Botha; having dinner with his ex-gaoler, the commander of the maximum security Robben Island prison – set a tone that the nation quickly followed. White citizens felt included in the new South Africa. A new mood had been created.

High treason

On February 11th, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked free from the low-security Victor Verster prison near Paarl in the Western Cape district of South Africa. He had been sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1964 after being found guilty on a charge of high treason, after he had been linked to acts of sabotage against the apartheid regime. Mandela had served 18 of his total of 27 years of imprisonment enduring a ‘hard labour’ regime on Robben Island. When convicted of treason, Mandela was already serving a five year sentence for leaving the country illegally (black people were not allowed to have passports) and for instigating a strike in protest against the creation of the newly declared Republic of South Africa, which had broken away from the British Commonwealth after a referendum from which blacks, some seventy percent of the population, had been excluded.

During his treason trial, Mandela freely admitted to his membership of the African National Council (ANC) and to having founded the military wing of the ANC, which had begun a campaign of sabotage after the notorious Sharpeville Massacre in which at least sixty-nine black protesters were shot dead by South African police.

An ideal for which I am prepared to die

During his treason trial, Mandela said this.

‘Our complaint is not that we are poor by comparison with people in other countries, but that we are poor by comparison with white people in our own country, and that we are prevented by legislation from altering this imbalance’.

‘Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. [. . .] It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will result in racial domination. [. . .] The ANC has spent half a century fighting against racialism. When it triumphs it will not change that policy . . .

‘During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.[1]’

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/23/nelsonmandela2

Nelson Mandela features in section 1 of History Lessons: ‘Changing the Mood’.