The toxic myth of the Great Man

Why we’re still in love with the toxic myth of the ‘Great Man’
Story by Antony Beevor

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Epic hero or ‘history’s slave’?: Joaquin Phoenix in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon - Album / Alamy Stock Photo
Epic hero or ‘history’s slave’?: Joaquin Phoenix in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon - Album / Alamy Stock Photo
© Provided by The Telegraph
This month, Ridley Scott will release his epic biopic of Napoleon. As a study of power and ambition, Napoleon – the archetypal Great Man of history – has fascinated many directors, not least Abel Gance whose silent film of 1927 is often cited as the finest cinematic work ever made. But with the academic tide turned so strongly against the Great Man school of history, you might struggle to find historians today willing to humour such a heroic narrative.

Because of his meteoric rise to command most of Europe, Napoleon became an exemplar of the Great Man theory – a concept much in vogue during the 19th century, which saw history as largely shaped by powerful individuals. In 1841, the British essayist Thomas Carlyle even claimed that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men”.
After Napoleon’s death in 1821, many hailed him as a hero. He was often portrayed as a moderniser at a time of the reactionary Holy Alliance between Russia, Prussia and Austria. In France, he was widely seen as a secular saint.

Others were unconvinced, considering him instead to be a megalomaniac who inflicted misery across Europe. Tolstoy flew into a rage when, on a visit to Les Invalides – Napoleon’s final resting place – he saw that the triumphs engraved on the sarcophagus claimed Borodino as a French victory, even though the battle had left his Grande Arm;e mortally wounded. This experience surely led Tolstoy to what he described in 1869’s War and Peace as the “law of causal coincidence” – the mass of factors which brought Napoleon to the decision to invade Russia. Even a king, Tolstoy argued, is “history’s slave”.

In the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud went further in turning Carlyle’s idea on its head, by identifying the widespread human need to seek out a strong man as saviour. For Freud, the Great Man was an expression of a mass longing for a father figure.

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Vanessa Kirby and Joaquin Phoenix in Ridley Scott's Napoleon - Aidan Monaghan
Vanessa Kirby and Joaquin Phoenix in Ridley Scott's Napoleon - Aidan Monaghan
© Provided by The Telegraph
Across the ages, the debate has often followed circular lines: do great leaders make events, or do events provide an opportunity for a leader to emerge? Confusion, uncertainty and even apathy in the midst of chaos can offer a huge advantage to the single-minded leader, whether Napoleon in the aftermath of the French Revolution or Lenin following the February Revolution in 1917. Each seized power during what Alexander Herzen called “the pregnant widow”. That is the period after an ancien r;gime has been overthrown when its successor has not yet been born. 

Many of history’s catastrophes can be traced to individuals. Ambrose Bierce, that wonderful Yankee satirist, once observed that: “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” He might equally have said that war is God’s way of teaching us the disaster of human history. Great Men have all too often led their nations into catastrophic conflicts.

Today, we may dislike the Great Man theory of history because it belittles a whole range of other factors. It also carries the insulting implication that women cannot be great leaders – despite them being much less susceptible to the narcissistic narratives so favoured by male dictators. But that does not mean that it is without truth.


The key question is straightforward. Can one person change history, thus affecting the lives of millions? How many examples are needed to prove the point? Xerxes the Great, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Charlemagne and Genghis Khan all achieved historical developments through conquest. Huge changes were also brought about by floods, earthquakes and pestilence. Yet the rise and fall of empires often rested on the ambitions of a single individual.

But surely the best test of the Great Man theory lies in counter-factuals. What would Europe have looked like without Napoleon? We simply cannot tell. The consequences, even the unintentional, are infinite. Look at the way that Napoleon’s humiliation of Prussia accelerated its subsequent rise and led, in turn, to German unification.

Another obvious example is Hitler. The reworking of frontiers at Versailles after the First World War was bound to lead to some sort of conflict in central Europe. But one man was responsible for the vast extent of the Second World War and its character of mass annihilation. When you have a leader with messianic tendencies, who commands the most effective army on the continent and who is absolutely longing for a war, then how can you avoid it?

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Bust of the Carthaginian General Hannibal - Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Bust of the Carthaginian General Hannibal - Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
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Of course, individuals alone have not created history. Threats to food or energy supplies have played their part in leading to revolution and war. So have differences over religion and its 20th-century successor, political ideology. In the past half-century we have seen the traditional top-down version of history divide into a wide range of sub-disciplines: economic, cultural, scientific;… the list is endless.

In addition, the Great Man theory is probably more applicable to previous centuries than to recent times. This is partly because in a globalised world, national sovereignty has been reduced, both economically and politically. The turning point came shortly before the end of the 20th century. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union accompanied an economic free-for-all in international banking and the end of exchange controls.

At the same time, the invention of the internet led to a rapid advance in communications technology that intensified price competition across the world. This meant that both the purchase of labour at the cheapest price and the recruitment of business leaders at vast salaries became a global phenomenon. It might take historians a long time to work out to what degree all these changes within such a short period of time were coincidental or interdependent.

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Former French President General Charles de Gaul - AFP/Getty Images
Former French President General Charles de Gaul - AFP/Getty Images
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The frequency with which commentators ask why there are no great statesmen today feels both significant and ironic: where are the Churchills, the de Gaulles? The answer lies with the influence of the media. Anxious politicians are constantly looking over their shoulder, lurching from one news management crisis to another.

The Great Man theory has also influenced political leadership in a dangerous way. Politicians and the mass media still cannot resist the temptation to dramatise the importance of a particular crisis by drawing comparisons to the Second World War and its leading figures. It was a war like no other, and yet has come to define our idea of war itself. History can never be a predictive mechanism. We must watch out when political leaders indulge in misleading historical parallels, with foreign dictators almost always cast in the role of Hitler.

In 1956 during the Suez Crisis Anthony Eden did precisely that. He compared Nasser with Hitler and any attempt to negotiate as appeasement. After 9/11, George W Bush compared the attack on the Twin Towers with the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor. Tony Blair and neo-cons in Washington also portrayed Saddam Hussein as another Hitler. Even Ridley Scott couldn’t resist comparing Napoleon with Hitler and Stalin when speaking of his film. The temptation for leaders to sound Churchillian can be overwhelming in moments of international upheaval. But historical parallels lead to dangerous strategic confusions.

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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin riding a horse in Southern Siberia - Alexsey Druginyn/AFP via Getty Images
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin riding a horse in Southern Siberia - Alexsey Druginyn/AFP via Getty Images
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Invoking Pearl Harbor in the case of al-Qaeda’s terrorist spectacular in New York produced a mentality of state-on-state warfare, rather than recognising the attack as a security disaster.

But even in this globalised world, the Great Man cannot be written off entirely. Just look at contemporary autocracies: Vladimir Putin’s obsession with rebuilding the Russian empire, or President Xi Jinping’s with Taiwan and the restoration of Chinese pride. 

These days, the power of the so-called Great Man is no longer limited to military conquest. It also extends to those leaders who can, through the force of personality, toxify politics by encouraging and exploiting hatred: the Trumps, the Orbans, the Milo;evi;s. (As Diarmaid MacCulloch observed, such reprehensible individuals might tempt one to rechristen the Great Man theory as “the ‘Right B-----d’ theory of history.”) All populist authoritarians have fomented hate, which is now so easy to do through social media where intellectual honesty is the first casualty of moral outrage. When weaponised, it becomes an extension of war by other means. Sadly for humanity, any witness to the past few decades of history must recognise that the Great Man is still alive and well.

Antony Beevor’s latest book is Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921; Napoleon is in cinemas from Nov 22


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