is what I’ve been telling myself about the theory that Napoleon was the devil who was released after The Thousand Years that ran from Charlemagne’s coronation by the Pope in 800 A.D. until 1,800 A.D., part way through the brief Age of Napoleon.
Is the theory about that period being the Thousand Years described in the Book of Revelation wrong? Not necessarily. But, it is wrong to automatically believe that Napoleon was, in fact, the reappearance of satan described in the Book of Revelation.
Examining Napoleon’s actual behavior shows that most, if not all, of his wars were defensive. As head of the French government, he did no more than his duty to defend his nation after it was attacked. He did not break any of the many, many treaties into which he entered with Prussia, Russia, Austria, Sweden,and the many smaller countries that he allowed to stay in existence. Those countries broke all the treaties they made, after their attacks on France were repulsed and their armies made to surrender.
Napoleon’s British biographers were uniformly negative about his many, and very real, accomplishments. Many of them were paid to crank out propaganda that successfully demonized him. Other historians, both American and French, had a more balanced picture. They seem, in the overview, to be correct.
Napoleon was, in fact, a truly great and a reasonably good man. It’s hard not to conclude that he was a universal genius. He was actually more capable than Alexander or Caesar. He left France with a balanced budget, despite taking over from the fiscal chaos of the Revolution. With nearly three times England’s population, his government spent half as much, and did so without burdening the people of France with any government loans. He insured prosperity by building roads, bridges, sewers and infrastructure that made France the most prosperous nation in Europe. He seemed to be hated because his incredible successes in every area made less intelligent monarchs and governments look positively venal and incompetent, if not actually (as in the case of Gustavus Adolphus) stupid.
If it Wasn’t Napoleon, What Evil did Appear around 1800 A.D.?
So, if an evil did appear about that time, what, or who, was it? One thing that keeps focus on that date was the change in the calendar. In 1800, the old Julian Calendar, in use since Roman times, was replaced by the Gregorian Calendar. So, time, itself, changed in 1800, something that hadn’t happened since the Julian Calendar replaced whatever preceded it. So, 1800 was an epochal change on earth, much as was Charlemagne’s coronation, a thousand years previously.
The greatest evil around 1800, at least from the French point of view, were the English Hanoverian kings, England’s bloated aristocracy, and a predatory government that reduced the people to serving all three by impoverishing them with taxes. They put William Pitt the Younger at the head of the pack of hounds for whom the destruction of France and the elimination of a truly intelligent and enlightened ruler was the main purpose in life. When John and Abigail Adams were in England negotiating for America, she commented in one of her letters about the “amazing number of English people hanged every week” by what now appears to be an awful tyranny covered over by an English Literature that was never more than, and is now, pro-government propaganda. If evil is manifested in hypocrisy, we can see it spreading from the corruption in England that ruled, festered, and spread over the world in the years following 1800.
Examples of English hypocrisy at the time abound:
While England looted India and ruthlessly ruled the seas with the most powerful navy in history, they condemned France for having strong armies on land.
While England blamed other nations for owning slaves, she kidnapped countless citizens and sailors whom she made slaves on English ships.
While England castigated France for overthrowing the Bourbons, England refused to restore their own Stuarts to the throne.
While England refused to deal honorably with, or even listen to, Napoleon’s many, many attempts to bring peace to Europe, its government called him an “evil warmonger”.
While England was conquering and holding an overseas Empire, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, much of Africa, parts of the East and West Indies, and whatever else they could pry from the rest of the world, they blamed France for annexing a few small kingdoms and principalities necessary for her defense.
The evil that emerged in 1800 is may have been the hypocrisy was first institutionalized on a global scale in England. That living, breathing, Babylonian evil then spread itself around the world on huge, powerful, and comparatively unsinkable, fleets; mighty ships of the line that corrupted the earth with destruction and poverty like a plague. That hypocrisy has spread itself into other nations. It continues to corrupt whatever it can for as long as The Creation Program has left for it to run.
