God was bored with Napoleon.
Victor Hugo
I finished up Age of Napoleon, the final volume in the The Story of Civilization series by Will and Ariel Durant, yesterday. (I am rereading the series backwards like witches say their prayers.) The conclusion, where they admitted what a remarkable man Napoleon had been and how exhausting they had found following his career (Of course she was 77 when the final volume was published and her husband was 90.), brought to my attention whether the times make the great man or the great man makes the times, a question as old as History. Usually it is both. Napoleon likely would have ended his military career as a half pay retired Major in the French artillery, but for the French Revolution. But for the turmoil over slavery in the 1850s Lincoln would be now a completely forgotten Prairie State politician. However the times are nothing without great men who can seize them and give them their form. After the fall of the French monarchy it was remarkable that Napoleon could create a French Empire with himself as Emperor Napoleon. The Civil War would likely have had a much different outcome, if it had been fought at all, but for Lincoln. Some men, Buddha and Mohammed come to mind, initiate great revolutions without the times seeming to be relevant. Christ is in that category, but God is always and ever an exception in human affairs. Historians, at least a lot of them, like to claim that events are inevitable based upon the underlying factors that led up to them. I call this History as Hindsight. The Protestant Reformation was inevitable, something that would have alarmed Father Martin Luther as he peacefully nailed up his Theses, inviting academic debate on them. It was inevitable that Bolsheviks would seize power in Russia, something that Lenin would privately have laughed at prior to World War I. It was inevitable that Oliver Cromwell would become dictator of England, something that the obscure Huntingdon Squire would likely have regarded as a vision sent from Satan prior to the English Civil War. God can bring good out of the worst that humanity can do, but absent His interventions in History, it is Man who calls the tune, hence why History is frequently such a macabre and confusing dance. The Good Samaritan in the parable chose to help the victim of bandits. Judas chose to betray Christ. No matter the times in which our lots are cast, we are always responsible for our own choices, just as Great Men and Great Women are, and it is our aggregate choices, over time, which make the Times.
