2023-12-01 05:14:51
Before the premiere of ‘Napoleon’, Ridley Scott He noticed that his film, casually or deliberately, was loaded with humor. Good old Scott, following a long and vengeful English tradition of ridiculing the Corsican, brings out the pathos, discomfort and extravagance that the story contains even in its most solemn moments. Slips, blunders and follies such as that Prussian general, By Blücher, who, suddenly believing himself pregnant with an elephant, was unable to conquer Paris and put an early end to the Napoleonic Empire. Because yes, nonsense is also part of history and also affected the greatest man of his century.
Known even in China
To measure the reach of Napoleon Bonaparte, who even gives his name to a syndrome characterized by those who compensate for their feeling of inferiority by accumulating power, it is enough to remember that in China a biography of him was written only a decade after his death to satisfy the great interest he aroused. over there. No title or nickname suited the most unexpected result of the French Revolution in life. His soldiers called him ‘the little corporal’; his enemies, the ‘tyrant Bonaparte’, ‘the ogre of Ajaccio’, ‘the universal usurper’ and even the antichrist; while his admirers praised him as ‘the soul of the world on horseback’ or the ‘man of the century’. The parade, of course, did not leave anyone indifferent.
Born in Corsica just a year after France bought the island from the Republic of Genoa, Napoleon Bonaparte was around 1796 a mere brigadier general stationed in Italy with a military future but not well known in his country. Less than a decade later, he was Emperor of the French and King of Italy. In pursuit of the growth of his house, Napoleon was responsible for a conflict that caused millions of deaths, spread part of the revolutionary ideas throughout the continent and left to the Old Regime hanging by a thread, although the body still walked alone by inertia for several more decades. The infallible Prussian military machine was blown up in its wake, the ancient Habsburg dignity had to bow after the battle of Austerlitz and the unstable Catholic Monarchy also knelt.
The Emperor’s Close Enemies
His objective was far from spreading revolutionary ideas across the continent or ending the monarchy as a system of government, but simply to create his own dynasty and put his brothers on the various neighboring thrones. Apart from France, there was a Bonaparte at the head of Holland, Naples, Tuscany, Westphalia and, of course, Spain. The lady-in-waiting of the Empress Josephine, Madame de Rémusat, narrated in her memoirs the private wars of the Bonaparte clanthat is, the fights between the brothers, Josefina’s fears that her husband would divorce – as ultimately happened – and the antics of the patriarch, angry and obsessed with extreme cleanliness.
Napoléon ate compulsively, until he suffered colic, a diet consisting of beans, lentils…
Every day without exception, the Emperor took a hot bath with his head wrapped in a scarf at more than 40 degrees, and, if he could, he stayed in the water for up to two or three hours while he transacted business with his ministers. Even on the battlefields he strictly complied with this custom before being inundated with cologne. Furthermore, Napoléon ate compulsively, to the point of suffering colic, a diet consisting of beans, lentils, potatoes and Italian-style pasta. He hardly drank wine and only once tried the pipe. What he was was a great fan of snuff.
The vision in the Pyramid that changed him
Victorious in Italy, the Little Great Corsican He landed in the Nile country during the summer of 1798 with more than thirty thousand French soldiers, aiming to advance towards Syria. In addition to its scientific and military objectives, the trip served as a spiritual quest for Napoleon in a land that had disturbed the imagination of great figures in history. He not only rested one night in Nazareth, but he supposedly slept inside the Pyramid of Cheops. The Corsican general spent seven hours surrounded only by bats, rats and scorpions. Just at dawn, he emerged from the labyrinthine structure, pale and frightened. To the worried questions of his trusted men about what had happened inside him, Napoleon responded with an enigmatic: «Even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.».
Bonaparte ante la esfinge, painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, c. 1868. abc
It is impossible to know what exactly Napoleon saw or felt in those seven hours, or even if the episode ever took place, although it seems likely that in any case the Corsican believed he was suffering some kind of mystical experience induced by loneliness, darkness , extreme temperatures and echo-distorted noises. What is clear is that – as different works of fiction have reported, see the novel ‘El Ocho’ (1988) by Katherine Neville or more recently Javier Sierra in ‘Napoleón’s Egyptian Secret’ (2002) – the night of Napoleon inside the Great Pyramid seemed to change his character forever. Despite returning militarily defeated to France, the privateer took off politically in the following months. In November of that year he organized the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire that began the Consulate with Napoleon Bonaparte as a leader.
Waterloo: a defeat that he saw drugged in bed
The Corsican did things in a big way and for two, even his defeats. After the Russian setback and under great internal and external pressure, he abdicated in April 1814 and went into exile to the island of Elba, a small island 20 km from the Italian coast, maintaining his title of emperor for life. The French minister Talleyrand designed this graceful exit for Bonaparte, all a golden cage with 400 of his servants and relatives at his side, contradicting those who demanded his execution. However, Bonaparte, 45, was watched by hundreds of spies and the thousand eyes of the island’s governor, while he watched as his friends and family stabbed him in the back. His second wife, María Luisa, did not even want to accompany him into exile.
While their enemies divided the spoils of war in Vienna, Napoleon returned by surprise from his forced exile to spread panic on the continent for a hundred days. An alliance of the powers gathered in Vienna definitively defeated the old Corsican in the battle of Waterloo, near Brussels, who, due to an attack of hemorrhoids, was unable to get on his horse and direct the battle on the front line as he always did. He watched his latest defeat from his tent while he took baths to alleviate the pain and remained drowsy from the effects of laudanum. His fall was not gentler, but it was less heroic than Scott’s film shows it.
He observed his latest defeat from his tent while he took baths to alleviate the pain and remained half asleep from the effect of laudanum.
Napoleon went to battle without having studied in detail the actions of Wellington, his executioner, whom he disdainfully called “the sepoy general” for his previous career in India and who promised rewards for whoever killed him. The British, for his part, was very critical of the genius’s lack of creativity in Waterloo, a battle where, in his words, he did not develop “any strategy; “He has limited himself to advancing in the old way.” In any case, if Napoleon was able to save his life that day it was because Wellington convinced the explosive Prussian general Blücher not to shoot the former Emperor of the French on the spot.
Was he turning into a woman?
With the idea that he could never escape again, a more isolated destination than Elba was conceived for his second exile, specifically an island lost by the hand of God in the South Atlantic, located more than 1,800 kilometers away from the western coast. from Angola. The one who was Emperor of France lived his last days in lto the African island of Saint Helena, which the British have traditionally used as a prison for their enemies and exiles. Captive of the English and surrounded by a small group of followers, Bonaparte began to suffer pain in his right side identical to that his father had suffered shortly before his death, possibly due to stomach cancer.
Beyond the hypothesis of poisoning or stomach cancer, el doctor Robert Greenblat –a specialist in endocrinology– defended in the eighties a curious theory that would explain the strange physical deterioration that the ‘Gran Corso’ was suffering in the last stage of his life. His body became rounder and his genital parts began to atrophy. As defended by this North American researcher in the scientific journal ‘British journal of sexual medicine’, from the age of forty Napoleon showed the symptoms of a glandular disease known as Zollinger-Ellison syndrome: a kind of transsexualization. Zollinger-Ellison syndrome is caused by tumors that are usually located in the head of the pancreas and the upper part of the small intestine.
Napoleon on Saint Helena, by François-Joseph Sandmann. ABC
Usually, people affected by these tumors end up in multiple endocrine neoplasia type I (MEN I), which cause serious hormonal disorders. As proof of this, Dr. Greenblat points out that, during the examination after his death, he found himself in the body of the Great Corsican a thick layer of fat, her skin was white, her back was narrow, her hands and feet were small, to the point that several forensic experts were amazed by the beauty of her arms and her round, hairless breasts, “which many women “they would have envied.”
Four centimeters of virile member
On May 5, 1821 at 5:49 p.m. Napoleone di Buonaparte died at the age of 51. According to people who were present at his deathbed, his last words were: “France, the army, Josephine”. On the day of the autopsy, surgeon Francesco Autommarchi mutilated the organ by order of Abbot Anges Paul Vignali, who had maintained a strong enmity with Napoleon throughout his life. Apparently, the cleric had a grudge against ‘the Little Corporal’ –the nickname the soldiers used when talking about their beloved general– for publicly accusing him of being impotent.
Another version, however, states that it was the priest who gave the last unction to Bonaparte who tore off the member to later sell it. A four-centimeter piece The valuable virile member remained in the Vignali family for several generations until 1924, when it passed into the hands of the American bookseller of A. S. W. Rosenbach, who in turn took it to the Museum of French Art in New York. In 1999, urologist John Lattimer won the penis at an auction organized by the museum and added it to his collection. Currently, Napoleon’s member belongs to the urologist’s son, Evan Lattimer, who recently showed it for a report on English television’s ‘Channel 4’.
The piece is extremely small, just under four centimeters in length, and when erected “it would have reached a maximum of 6.6 centimeters”, according to John Lattimer’s notes, already deceased. A size considered in the microphalosomia category, which is consistent with hormonal problems. But, given that there are so many contradictory theories, it could also be a fraud promoted by Abbot Vignali to tarnish the image of Napoleon as a great conqueror of women, and that this was not the real penis.
#crazy #secrets #Napoleon #Bonaparte