A Napoleon On The Moon, 1919

“Une desolation magnifique”. I don’t think anyone alive in this amazing year of 1919 could forget the words of Jean-Jacques Napoleon as he looked out upon the moon. I myself heard and saw it on the visualiseur, our great Franco-escossais achievement in the City-State of Londres. It made me think how lucky we were that the founder of the Imperial family hadn’t made the wrong decision in 1812, and at how history could have been so different.

France, of course, was then merely the greatest of the European Empires. The first Napoleon had stabilized and improved upon the Revolution, and yet stood surrounded by the forces of Russian, Austrian and English reaction. One wrong move could have derailed everything; one refusal to note the danger Prussia, that long forgotten tribe of misplaced Viking slavs, one lucky break for England, one slip-up in the face of the Turks or the Russians and all could have been lost.

The problems faced by Napoleon the Great were of course intense. We can be grateful that, somehow, in 1812, he overcame the contempt that is natural to the military mind—how much more so the genius—and found Generals whom he could trust.

The Corsican had built a France united as never before by language, by semaphore signals and by science, and had grasped the vital heartland of Europe, the rhine and the Saar valley. He had vast agricultural resources at his disposal, and the genius of those scientists who had survived the excesses of the revolution.

So, when the Emperor chose a cold peace, and ended that remarkable and fissile division that had prevailed since the peace of Westphalia in the Germanies by incorporating the European lands into the Empire, Europe breathed a sigh of relief. The Emperor seems somehow to have tapped into some current of history in those years; certainly, encouraging the Protestants of the North of Ireland to accept the Empire and to be a base for the invasion of the Scottish and Irish north was incredible.

When the forces of France smashed into Southern England, having gained the neutrality of President Clinton in America, the English had to capitulate. They’d been oppressing their own poor for ages of course, anyway; presumably, that is why the division of England into the Duchies or Yorkshire, Norfolk, London, and the Pays de Galles works so well.

With France so strong, and determined not to be lured into Russia, the Tsar could do little. With the acquisition of the Australias, Southern India, and Madagascar, he could do nothing but desperately develop Alaska and California. It remained for President Calhoun and the Nipon Emperor later in the century, of course, to disabuse the Tsar of his lands, and his intrigues with the remains of the American Empires that did not fall to the United States.

Of course, he couldn’t have run it all himself. To merely replicate the sun-kings must have been a fear; to surpass them an intention of the sort more suited to the lofty disdain of taller men, which we now call a ‘Wellington complex’. Yet Napoleon the first didn’t. What of course not even he could have predicted was the way he stumbled across the two inventions that saved the Empire; the galvanic communicator and La Usine Babbage.

The machine had been conceived in England. The greed of that late Empire was intense; it took the brilliance of looms given their ordinated programmes by card, and made money from their looted textiles with them; it took chemistry and worked out new ways of killing Indians with them. When Babbage, building on the work of La Belle Lovelace—ah, that woman, how those impotent Englishmen before our liberation would have ignored her!—proposed his machine, they laughed at him.

It took Napoleon to see its possibilities. He was an old man by then, but a man who had had a great deal of time to think, and to contemplate the future. What a mind it was, that went forward to the galvanic communicator—the ‘telegraph’ as Les Americains put it. They should be allowed the word, I have always thought; it makes their surrenders quicker, and communicates the news of their periodic liberations by the forces of France much more effectively.

When Napoleon the great died in 1840, we were lucky that his nephew was available to refound the Imperial family. France would never again be a republic, but from Ireland to the Elbe, and from Sweden to Egypt, it was clear that the heartland of liberty was free. It fell to Louis, of course, to end slavery, and to lead the final assault on Cuba, which the Americans had set up as the heart of their golden circle. But what was there to do? Build railroads? A man like Louis-Napoleon, of that blood would not have been so contained.

So, of course, France was launched upon the great experiment, not to make money but to discover some source which would deliver energy and progress. That we should find it in the black oil and strange, diminishing rocks of L’Afrique was, I suppose, a serendipity.

We were always more scientific, our thoughts always grander than the English; our resources were greater than the Prussians, and our energies backed by forces and power greater than any available to the Americans. So it was no surprise that, after the opening to the Ottomans launched upon once Louis-Napoleon had won over the westernizing elements in the Russian court with the peace of 1850, we borrowed and enhanced their rocket technology.

They’d been firing great cannon since 1453 of course; once, for the benefit of a sultan in the seventeenth century, a man even sat upon a cage above what could only be described as a grand explosive. I suppose that when Louis-Napoleon sat within the great Pyramid, as all the Emperors have done in a homage to Napoleon the Great, his mind must have turned to Levantine things.

Levantine things….what amazing events those two, odd Saxon words convey. The re-establishment of Palestine, of Jordan, Lebanon and Israel, the creation of an Arab confederation modeled on the Confederation of the Rhine. I suppose that one is forced to take sides these days on the viability of the Arab National home set up around Mecca after the attempted holocaust of those people, but I for one would simply say that I like Arabs. Muslims were a successor state to the Byzantine empire and the fact that Arabs are stateless in a world of Moors, Berbers, Turks, and Persians and the various Jewish states is neither here nor there. We cannot abjure them. I despise the pathological sickness of contrarabisme. Quite why a few Americans, dictated, to, I suppose, by the national religion of the Mormon-Islam lobby, want to bomb everyone for the Arabs I don’t know.

Still, those rockets and cannon, when linked to the calculations of our Babbagettes, proved invaluable. And, of course to our remarkable Marie. How gifted we French are with our women!.

Who could have predicted we would have risen to world domination and the permanent end to any challenge to our power with the addition of Curium explosives to the rockets, and the development of Curium power to our homes? When, briefly, the radiative galvanic effects of Curium on the commicateur were noted, of course, we were led to the ‘radiophone’. What people live in Greater France!

So now, we stand, here in the year 1919, in a world of some seven rulers, an humanity under the Family Napoleon united in liberty, satisfait. The Union Francaise, exemplified by the Senate and Tribunes in the City of Paris whose initials grace our standards, beneath the giant N, subsists in glory.

Another, if hitherto minor, Napoleon, is upon the moon, erecting the copy of the Declaration de les Droits de l’homme on the site where, I am confident, a New Paris will one day stand. My mind turns to the possibilities of the impossible future. It is all that I can do to reflect on just how limited the futures of the peoples of the world would have been had Napoleon the Great never trusted his Generals, and never held back on his instinctive desire to penetrate quickly into the lands of the Tsar. 1812; the year no one remembers. The year our Printemps did not end. The year we did not begin to dream of carving our canals on Mars….

NSTVP