In 1791, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, France’s most valuable Caribbean colony, rose in rebellion. During the war that followed, which ended with the independence of the Republic of Haiti in 1804, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture emerged from obscurity and led an army of self-emancipated rebels against a shifting assemblage of British, French and Spanish forces. Toussaint overawed his rivals, wrote one biographer, “as a tall stately tree puts down the weeds and brushwood in its growth”.
He was among the heroes of an age of global rupture. In 1776, the US declared its independence from Britain. In 1789, the French Revolution shattered the European political settlement. In 1804, Haitian independence repudiated colonial slavery and shook the foundations of the Atlantic plantation economy. In 1808, Napoleon’s conquest of Bourbon Spain set in motion national independence movements across the Spanish empire in the Americas.
Fuelled by the curiosity, expanding global communications, increasing literacy and public-spiritedness of the Enlightenment, the story goes, these revolutions were a point of origin for modern liberal democracy. Subjects with concrete or customary obligations to a monarchy became citizens with abstract civil rights, and a share in government.
And yet, as historian David A Bell emphasises in Men on Horseback, if we take this “age of revolutions” seriously as the opening act of the rise of modern democracy, we must also account for the charismatic strongmen who were its prime movers. Leaders such as Toussaint were praised for their martial virtue in terms that evoked ancient Rome. The forefathers of liberal democracy often governed as dictators, invoking public will to justify and burnish personal rule.
Beginning with Pasquale Paoli, a mid-18th-century rebel against Genoese and later French control of his native Corsica, Bell traces the lineage of these enlightened generalissimos. Paoli was a sensation across Europe, the subject of books, songs and prints that ranged from patriotic to pornographic. During the American Revolution, some balladeers simply swapped out Paoli’s name for George Washington’s to satisfy the public demand for souvenirs celebrating the tall and handsome general.
In 1799, when Washington died, the young first consul of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, declared a period of national mourning. Soon, Toussaint became Napoleon’s foil in the Antilles, praised by France’s enemies for superhuman stamina in battle and in administration. Finally, Simón Bolívar – who relied on Haitian military support early in his campaigns in South America – self-consciously borrowed from the vernacular of populist authoritarianism invented in the past 50 years as he fought the Spanish empire.
Bell, a distinguished historian of France, is alive to the tension between revolutionary ideologies of freedom, democracy, equality and fraternity and the violence and repression that can be unleashed in their name. The intellectual and cultural forces of the Enlightenment, he argues, found a potent expression in cults of personality and mass military mobilisation.
As literacy increased in Europe and Europe’s colonies, print culture grew alongside it. Although some use “the Enlightenment” as shorthand for science, secularism and peace, the real Enlightenment was unruly. The era’s most popular new art form, the novel, made readers eager for a glimpse of the inner lives of the powerful. James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson, achieved early fame with a fawning biography of Paoli, widely distributed and translated across Europe and Europe’s colonies in the Americas. Mass media made “men on horseback”, Bell argues, among the first modern celebrities.
Celebrities are “just like us” and profoundly unlike us. Charisma earned through military success was augmented by the sometimes obsessive adulation of the public. In life, Washington was reluctant to embrace his fame, which added to his posthumous legend. In 1800, Mason Locke Weems published Life of Washington, a fanciful biography that remained in print for many decades. To Weems, Washington was both an ordinary man with homely habits and “the Demigod … the sun-beam in council, or the storm in war”. Other leaders, such as Napoleon and Bolívar, self-consciously moulded their public image into something they hoped would inspire not only loyalty, but worship.
Paoli’s fame fizzled after the Corsican rebellion; George Washington retired to his plantation; Toussaint and Napoleon both died prisoners. Martial charisma could be a slow-acting poison. The intimate, sometimes erotic, identification between the leader and the people needed enemies to sustain it. “A government like ours,” Napoleon reflected, “needs brilliant actions, and therefore war.” In 1822, after nearly a decade of victories in new-founded republics, Bolívar climbed Mount Chimborazo, outside Quito. There, he claimed to meet the personification of Time. When Time accused him of vanity, he replied: “I have risen above the heads of all. I dominate the earth.” His soldiers had become “the people that labours and the people that can act”. Napoleon needed the army to secure the nation; Bolívar boasted that the nation was the army.
National independence cost something, and many states founded in the age of revolutions are still in arrears. For Washington, a slaveholder, the independence of white Americans was made possible by the mass enslavement of African Americans. In free Haiti, the young democracy was undermined by the legacies of Toussaint’s near-absolute command of the army and the state and by constant threats from the slaveholding empires that surrounded the country. Bolívar cast the mould for a populist militarism that scarred Latin American democracies for generations. Far from fostering a sense of common humanity, the Enlightenment legacies of empires, print culture, technological change and streamlined bureaucracy could open paths from revolutionary idealism to autocratic decadence.
Men on Horseback is witty and elegant, a series of deft interlocking biographies. Although Bell is too disciplined a historian to compress the 18th into the 21st century, the book seems shaped by sorrow at the cruelty and stupidity of the Trump presidency, as it comes to an end during the global pandemic. Moreover, in response to invocations of “Enlightenment” as a one-dimensional synonym for secularism and technocracy, Bell shows that the age of revolutions has a living legacy in rightwing demagoguery as much as in ecumenical liberalism.
The book also resonates in the awful present, when politicians are celebrities and self-fashioning on social media is constant, dispiriting, uncompensated labour. Public figures are whip-sawed from idolatry to cancellation. The coronavirus pandemic has made public health into brinksmanship, with global and regional league tables of tests and cases, hijackings of medical equipment and the vilification of “contaminated” outsiders. In the background, the world keeps getting hotter and we add a billion discarded medical masks to the Pacific garbage patch.
We are in a crisis that seems capable of dissolving the bonds that hold global and national politics together. That might augur for a better, fairer world, with a new political settlement. But that is also what idealists thought at the turn of the 19th century. And yet, Bell warns, the Enlightenment appeared to many a “vision of war as potentially regenerative and sublime”. In that crisis, Men on Horseback shows, the contradictions and tensions of a fast-changing world emboldened autocrats, and moved the public not only to obey them, but to love them.