On two successive pages of a recent weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal appeared book reviews of new biographies of two famous generals, Napoleon Bonaparte and George C. Marshall.  The juxtaposition in those pages gives the historian pause for thought.  Each general stands as a symbolic figure, one embodying the worst, the other the best in his respective century.

Napoleon (1769-1821) is admired by his newest biographer, but the dictator who sought to conquer Europe, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Ural Mountains, deserved his exile to a remote island in the South Atlantic.  Marshall (1880-1959), whose new biography apparently tries to cut him down to size, deserved the many honors recognizing his service during war and his peacetime restoration of a Europe ravaged by the war begun by National Socialist Germany.

Both Napoleon and Marshall rose from obscure origins to achieve almost legendary status.  Napoleon was born on his family’s estate on the island of Corsica, Marshall in a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania.  Both men were graduates of prestigious military academies and early on distinguished themselves as able administrators.  Napoleon forever nursed the outsider’s desire for entering the inner circle, eager to take any measure to achieve his ambition; Marshall had an old-fashioned Pennsylvanian’s characteristic laconic impatience with nonsense and injustice and was ready to speak his mind even if it cost him a promotion.

Like a cunning yet deranged villain in a James Bond story, Napoleon concocted and carried out a megalomaniacal scheme for world domination.  He could do so by first posing as a champion of democracy, riding in to rescue the poor people oppressed by kings, princes, and bishops.  This promise of a new world order came in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity.  It also came at the points of thousands of bayonets.

A little over a century later, Adolf Hitler began another enslavement of Europe, resistance to which involved the United States.  As Chief of Staff of the Army, General Marshall worked closely with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, their first meeting, however, taking an awkward turn when the glib patrician President rambled on about military strategy and then asked “George” whether he agreed.

Marshall, called by his first name only by his wife, bristled inwardly at this false familiarity and said bluntly that he did not agree and explained why.  Everyone present assumed that Marshall’s career was over.  Instead, although Marshall never laughed at his jokes, Roosevelt grew to depend on Marshall’s austere insights.  When the planned Allied invasion of Normandy needed a commander and Marshall seemed the obvious choice, Roosevelt told him, “I could not sleep at night knowing you were not in Washington.”

Under Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, Marshall served first as Secretary of State and then as Secretary of Defense.  In 1947, as Secretary of State, he received an honorary doctorate from Harvard and used the occasion to announce a bold initiative called the European Recovery Program, soon commonly known as the Marshall Plan.  Designed to rebuild the countries of Western Europe devastated by the Second World War, the Marshall Plan was denounced by Communists as a bourgeois plot to prevent the expansion of Soviet hegemony.  Meanwhile, demented alcoholics like Senator Joseph McCarthy denounced Marshall as a Communist agent.

Illustrative of the characters of Napoleon and Marshall is how each man dealt with the Bishop of Rome.  In 1798 Napoleon’s troops occupied the Papal States, declared a new Roman Republic, and deposed Pope Pius VI as head of state, forcing the old man into exile.  Napoleon planned to confine him to Sardinia, but Pius VI’s fragile health delayed that transfer.  The Pope remained a prisoner in a citadel in southern France.

In August, 1799, he died there, aged eighty-one, and in March, 1800, the papal conclave, meeting in Venice, elected Gregorio Cardinal Chiaramonte, a Benedictine monk who had taught theology in Rome.  As Pius VII, he entered Rome, despite French occupation, and in 1801 he negotiated a concordat with Napoleon, who wanted to change his title from First Consul to Emperor.

In 1804 Pius VII traveled to Paris for the imperial coronation:  Since the year 800, Popes had crowned Holy Roman Emperors, so the journey had some precedent.  Once in Paris, Pius VII was given a special seat from which to watch Napoleon crown himself emperor.  Tensions between Pope and Emperor increased, and in 1809 Napoleon arrested Pius VII, eventually moving him from Rome to France and keeping him in custody until 1814.

In contrast, Marshall, though an Episcopalian and a Freemason, sought an audience with Pope Pius XII.  They met at Castel Gandolfo on 19 October, 1948, where Marshall briefed the Pope on what Marshall always called the European Recovery Program, and the Pope expressed his warm appreciation of the Marshall Plan.  In the background, Pius XII’s aides, often cautious to a fault, worried that the Pope’s hour with the American Secretary of State would become part of Communist propaganda against the Church.  Nevertheless, both Marshall and Pius XII knew that a man is measured as much by the enemies he makes as by the friends he keeps.

Marshall’s reticence, capability, and sense of duty had long won him near reverence from both American political parties, although he belonged to neither, and in 1946 he received the Congressional Gold Medal.  His name had become synonymous with virtue and integrity.  In 1948 Time magazine named Marshall its Man of the Year; in 1953, he became the first soldier to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Nearly five decades later, it became known that in 1948 Marshall had opposed Truman on the timing of the United States’ diplomatic recognition of the new State of Israel.  To Marshall, Truman’s calculations derived from cynical courthouse politicking.  Marshall summed up his opposition by telling Truman that if he pursued his timetable, Marshall could not vote for him in that year’s presidential election.  Truman respected candor, even when it contradicted him, and kept Marshall in his Cabinet.

As for Napoleon, his decision to become a latter-day Caesar disillusioned his adoring egalitarian partisans, causing Beethoven to remove the dedication to Napoleon from his Third Symphony, the Eroica.  Moreover, it is telling that in 1904 a lapsed Catholic, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published a short story in which a plaster bust of Napoleon was used to hide the Black Pearl of the Borgias.

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B., is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.