Held - Märtyrer - Usurpator

In the beginning there was Napoleon’s death. It marked a fissure for the contemporary discourses on the heroic of the 19th century. In the imagination of european societies, more than ever, the departed hero lived on as the homme du siècle as which he had tried to represent himself in his lifetime. By talking about him contemporaries were simultaneously arguing about the fundamental challenges of a postrevolutionary era in constant motion. This study analyses contemporary discourse about the hero Napoleon in France, Great Britain and Germany between 1821 and 1869. It shows how he, as an exceptional figure that oscillated between the heroic, the sacred and the demonic, functioned as a versatile symbolic figure on the spectrum between politics of legitimacy and politics of history.