Coda

Abstract

Abstract Napoleon Bonaparte defined greatness for the nineteenth century—and he also defined madness and monomania. The coda briefly charts this association, focusing on Henry James’s deathbed dictations, where he imagined, briefly, that he was the French emperor. Napoleon was, in short, not only the symbol of tyrannical ambition; he was also implicated in ambition’s pathology, the delusion of grandeur. Bringing together these two dimensions of ambition opens onto the book’s final point. Reorienting our political imagination so that we remember that tyranny has many forms, that it presented a constant concern across the nineteenth century, and that its return is easier than its defeat. The latter is necessary if we are to finally achieve the democracy we have celebrated for centuries.