Napoleon and Romanticism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Napoleon and love story - Essay ExampleOf the three, it was Byron (1788-1824) who made the biggest impact during his lifetime. His poems acted as a major(ip) source of inspiration for generations of Romantics. Unfortunately, his verses have not lasted well. His most famous poems are very long and fail to a more leisurely age when people had the time to read such things. But take up Juan still sparkles with a wit that is most un-English and the shorter lyrical verses can still give much pleasure.The master of Napoleon brought no improvement in the condition of the masses. After 1815 there was a deep fall, which paralytic trade and brought a wide unemployment and poverty. The ranks of the unemployed were swelled by a flood of discharged soldiers and sailors. The victors of Waterloo and battle of Trafalgar were forced to beg for crusts of bread in the streets of London, Manchester and Portsmouth.In an analogy to Stalin, Napoleon, the gravedigger of the French Revolution, was seen b y umpteen as the continuator of the revolutionary traditions of 1789-93. Wherever his armies set foot, they set about smashing the old order in Europe, and therefore, in a distorted form, they stood for revolution. On the other hand, the armies of England everywhere defended the forces of reaction. Nelson, the national hero, hanged the patriots of Naples and delivered them over to torture and murder at the hands of the reactionaries. Inside England, the reactionaries went on the rampage, smashing printing presses and beating up suspected radicals.One big businessman say that occasionally the pose seemed more important to him than the idea itself. But this was entirely characteristic of the Romantics in general. It was also characteristic of many Romantics to admire, even worship - Napoleon, the Corsican upstart who had hijacked the French Revolution in its period of decline. The attraction felt for the person of Bonaparte among the Romantics bears a certain resemblance to the atti tude of many foreign intellectuals to Stalin. Sincerely sympathizing with the cause of the Russian Revolution and the USSR, they lacked the Marxist understanding to be able to essay the real nature of Stalins regime or see any difference between it and the regime of workers commonwealth established by Lenin and Trotsky in 1917.Therefore, napoleon is considered just the gravedigger of the French revolution and not the nemesis. RomanticismRomanticism was name given to the sassy tendency. According to Walter pater, it is the addition of curiosity to the desires of beauty , the eagerness for new impression and new pleasure, to be sought where the hard work of nature or the artist had been most cunning. More than this it was in revolt against authority, tradition and convention, whether political, social,