Description
Book SynopsisWhat if the American experiment is twofold, encompassing both democracy and tyranny? That is the question at the core of this book, which traces some of ways that Americans across the nineteenth century understood the perversions tyranny introduced into both their polity and society. While some informed their thinking with reference to classical texts, which comprehensively consider tyranny''s dangers, most drew on a more contemporary source--Napoleon Bonaparte, the century''s most famous man and its most notorious tyrant. Because Napoleon defined tyranny around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world--its features and emergence, its relationship to democratic institutions, its effects on persons and peoples--he provides a way for nineteenth-century Americans to explore the parameters of tyranny and their complicity in its cruelties. Napoleon helps us see the decidedly plural forms of tyranny in the US, bringing their fictions into focus. At the same time, however, there are distinctly American modes of tyranny. From the tyrannical style of the American imagination to the usurping potential of American individualism, Elizabeth Duquette shows that tyranny is as American as democracy.
Trade ReviewElizabeth Duquette has written an ambitious, monumental book that proposes a fundamental reframing of the nineteenth century as the long age of Napoleon. Dislodging "democracy" as the nation's mythic political basis and putting "tyranny" in its place, Duquette amasses a substantial archive of America's obsession with Napoleon Bonaparte to develop a thoroughly convincing account of the multiple tyrannies that stand at the foundation of US political culture-from the actual oppression of slavery to those purported incursions on the liberty of aggrieved elites that form the "tyrannical style" of nineteenth-century political discourse. * Jennifer Greiman, Wake Forest University *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Dispatches Introduction: Seeing Tyranny 1: Tyranny in America, or David Walker 2: The Tyrannical Style of American Politics 3: Raking Imperial Muck 4: The Bedazzler 5: Napoleonic Codes 6: Séjour's Spectacles 7: Young Men From the Provinces Coda: Napoleon Complex, or Mad About Napoleon Bibliography Notes Index
