Posted by Serban Brebenal
Difficult to actually picture the exact moment when Napoleon said this, considering that his entire life was a melding of abilities and opportunities. Nobody denies Napoleon’s genius, nobody doubts his organizational, administrative or military skills, but don’t we really meet remarkable people in our life who have never made it past the front desk? Destiny does indeed help only the strong ones, but it is often the case that the strong ones forge their own destiny.
True enough, if your name is Napoleon, you can’t really forge your destiny without the help of your wife-to-be, Josephine, and her lover, Barras, one of the strongest characters of the Directorate. Unfortunately, even in Napoleon’s times, value does not always bring you on top of the pyramid and you would still need something present and necessary even in the 21st century globalization: CONNECTIONS. The right connections, obviously, connections that will be able to lead a necessary PR campaign and market your abilities. And connections that will create the right opportunities, in which your abilities can be nurtured, promoted and encouraged.
Speculate the opportunities created by the connections and good PR and remember that the train usually only passes once through the station.
Posted by Serban Brebenal
I don’t know exactly why, but this is something that is passed down throughout history: it is true today, it was true 200 years ago and it was probably true even in Charlemagne’s times, even if at that time the French people was still a mixture between Visigoths and Franks and was just beginning to constitute its national identity.
Look at things today: there is almost nothing that can satisfy the French and make them abandon their certain sense of frustration. They lost the World Cup because the Italian defender spoke rude words about the God, Zidane, and provoked him. The economy is not going places, but this is because of the globalization, because of other competitive countries taking away jobs and industries and because nobody understands that, in the UE, they are the structural pillar on which everything is based, not because efficiency is no longer a word of order there. Nobody understands French movies or the French “Tour de France” until an American came about and explained it to everybody for about six times in a row.
The French believe that nobody understands the French. And they complain about it.
Posted by Serban Brebenal
As someone who has carefully created his image for posterity, Napoleon surely knew what he was talking about here. We can even go further than this and argue that history is not necessarily agreed upon, but created by the winners: after Napoleon’s defeat, they were keen to forget, ignore his role in history and to turn time back to before 1789. Why? Because they had defeated him and it was their right to “agree” upon history as they wrote it.
We live in a world of parallel histories, of parallel truths and approaches. The people who win, the nations who are successful, the alleged “good guys” turn to writing the history as THEY see it. It is not a set of lies that is agreed upon, because this is not a subject of discussion. History is created somewhere between an office and a laboratory.