2013 Vol. 4 №1

This article summarises the perception of Napoleon’s image in France in the 19th—21th centuries and describes the dynamics of attitudes towards Napoleon in connection with the changing political situation. Historical studies and belles-lettres help demonstrate that today the image of Napoleon is more popular in other European countries than in France and that the life of the emperor gave rise to a myth about a hero and great conqueror who faces defeat at the peak of his power and loses its empire.

This article considers judgements about Napoleon in the culture of German pre-romanticism as signs of literary diagnostics indicative of the contradictory dialectics of artistic consciousness in distinguishing the “codes” of life and death in arts. The completely opposite assessment of Napoleon in the history of German romanticism identifies the problem of a human being as a “field of fate” — a site of the battle between the Light and Darkness. The author emphasises the transformation of the legend of Napoleon in the German romanticism from the idealisation of the “world spirit” (G. W. H. Hegel) to defining it as a “symbol of social unnaturlaity” (H. von Kleist).