Signs Of Impending Downfall
Polycrates, Rigoletto, Napoleon
There's a story in Herodotus I think about sometimes. It goes like this:
The ruler of Samos, Polycrates, was enjoying an extraordinary run of success and good fortune: he'd built military power, cultural influence, prosperity, fame. But then he received an ominous letter from his friend, Amasis, the King of Egypt. Amasis didn't know of any threats in particular, but he knew that no one could be that lucky forever — the balance had tilted in Polycrates' favor for so long it would be only a matter of time before it tipped the other way. "I have never heard of anyone who was so fortunate all the time," he wrote, "who did not end badly — as a matter of fact, in utter ruin." He gave Polycrates some advice: take something you truly love, something it would hurt to lose, and give it up forever. Polycrates, heeding the warning, decided to take his favorite ring and throw it into the ocean.
A few days later, a fisherman came to him with an especially large and handsome catch, presenting it to him as a gift. When the fish was cut open, the ring was inside. Polycrates wrote back to his friend explaining what had happened, taking it as evidence that he was indeed beloved by the gods. Amasis, however, had the opposite reaction. Polycrates is doomed, he decided, and immediately cut off not only their alliance but their friendship. And, of course, Polycrates' downfall came shortly thereafter, when he was murdered by an enemy "in a way too horrible to describe."
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One of my favorite operas is Verdi's Rigoletto. Not only is it full of scenes that are dynamite both musically and theatrically, it's one of the few operas where the plot makes emotional sense all the way through, almost never relying on strained contrivances. There's one exception to this, however: early on in the opera, Rigoletto insults someone who is suffering, and in retaliation the man places a curse on him. When, at the opera's conclusion, Rigoletto is suffering in the same way this other man suffered, he knows exactly the cause: Ah! La maledizione! — the curse! This melodramatic line reliably draws some snickers from the audience; after all, thinking you've been cursed is kind of silly. Even Wiccans don't do curses now; we don't believe in them anymore.
Except, well, we do still believe in curses. They turn up in movie scripts all the time, in the form of pride comes before a fall or karma's a bitch or one day someone will hurt you the way you hurt me. We just call them something else. Narratively, it's extremely hard to let go of the idea of comeuppance, or a satisfying ending. We also find ourselves believing a kind of life-story version of the gambler's fallacy: that a string of luck, good or bad, must always turn.
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This is all to say that last month I finished the biography of Napoleon Bonaparte that has accompanied me (in audiobook form) on dog walks for a while. My fascination with Napoleon dates from an encounter at an impressionable age with Abel Gance's 1927 epic film about his rise to power, which may be a topic for another newsletter.
Before coming to the biography, I knew the basics (which, of course, are heavily distorted in the movie): Napoleon was a man from a middle-class family in Corsica, intelligent and ambitious but not well-connected. The French Revolution and the Terror, during which a substantial portion of France's elite class was either guillotined or exiled, left a gaping power vacuum into which he was able to step. With a number of innovative military techniques, he delivered a series of stunning battle victories to beleaguered France, and became popular and powerful enough to take over its government in a coup. He promoted himself as the heir of Enlightenment values, a force for modernity and justice, and in many ways, it appeared he was making good on that promise: abolishing old feudal privileges and installing a modern legal code, establishing a meritocracy* in government and the military, enshrining religious freedom and tolerance into law, funding science and the arts, and establishing a system of secular public schools. Not only was he very popular with the French public, he was the darling of many (but not all) of Europe's intellectuals — it's frighteningly easy to come under the thrall of a strongman, of course, if he's using force to do things you approve of. The leaders of the other European powers, terrified that what happened in France could happen to them, formed a military coalition to try to eject Napoleon and restore the old aristocracy, but he was able not just to thwart their aims but expand his own power considerably in the process — in wars that were extremely bloody.
Napoleon decided he wanted to be a real king and not just the leader of a republic. He crowned himself Emporer and created a new monarchy into which he could install his friends and relatives, disappointing the intellectuals who had previously seen him as the embodiment of all their hopes. He started making bad decisions driven by vanity, overconfidence, and personal grudges. Then the turn of luck came: his disastrous invasion of Russia, plus a bungled retreat, that saw most of his army freeze and starve to death. He was finally ousted and exiled to a remote island to live out his days, but he escaped and staged a comeback, returning to power in France. But the comeback was short-lived; he was finally defeated at the battle of Waterloo and exiled to an even more remote island, where he ultimately died.
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One thing that makes Napoleon interesting is how cleanly his life seems to follow a tragic arc, in the classical sense — a stunning rise to power fueled by idealism and force of character, followed by a reversal that in retrospect appears both self-inflicted and inevitable. His mistakes conform so closely to narratives of downfall (not only Shakespearean tragedies but stories about, say, startup founders with spectacular failures, or music stars who lose everything, or Citizen Kane) that I have to wonder: are these mistakes, or do we see them as such because they make for satisfying storytelling, like curses?
Here are the signs, as I encountered them, of impending doom — if you’re a character in a story, and perhaps also if you’re a real person:
Your most trusted friends are gone. In Napoleon's case, they simply kept dying in battle. But for other downfalls, they might be ejected for shoot-the-messenger reasons, or discarded to facilitate a more glamorous life.
You’re paranoid. On one hand, people really are trying to get rid of you. On the other hand, paranoia makes it impossible to hang onto your allies, and paradoxically makes it easier for bad-faith opportunists to manipulate you.
You abandon someone who loves you. At the peak of his power Napoleon divorced his longtime wife, Josephine, in favor of a young Austrian princess whom he hoped would give him an aristocratic heir and legitimize his (aspirational) dynasty. In his memoirs, he identified this decision as the beginning of his fall. Which leads me to...
You've just had a big party that ended badly. At a ball to celebrate the wedding to his new young princess, the curtains caught fire and soon the whole building was blazing, killing four.
Your old tactics stop working. I remember reading in a plot-formula book that one way to foreshadow your climax is to show the heroine failing at something early in the story — coincidentally, the very thing she'll need to do successfully at the climactic moment, making the attempt extra-suspenseful. This is in reverse: the lines you used to inspire someone in an earlier scene now strike people as hollow. The bold risks that paid off before now only weaken you.
On the other hand, you've abandoned your ideals. One of Napoleon's top generals had DEATH TO KINGS tattooed on his chest during the Revolution. This became awkward later, when the general was made King of Sweden.
Out of a refusal to lose face, you reject chances to save yourself. Napoleon rejected relatively generous peace offers that he admitted would have been beneficial to France, out of the belief that any terms that were personally humiliating for him would be bad for French morale.
You fall off your horse. Just as Napoleon was about to cross the river that would inaugurate his invasion of Russia, his horse reared and threw him to the ground. Someone present, possibly l'empereur himself, noted: this is a bad omen.
I had conceived and mentally sketched out this piece earlier in the year, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made it seem all wrong — this is the wrong time to be casting aspiring emperors in the role of narrative protagonist. But as I see people in the news, and on social media, searching for these downfall-omens in Vladimir Putin — has his inner circle been lying to him? Has his paranoia isolated him? Is he making ego-based miscalculations? — I thought differently about its resonance. We are looking for the signs, signs we recognize, that Putin is under a curse and is on a steady course to Waterloo. It’s so tempting to think we’ve identified the story arc. I wish I could be sure.