Nietzsche: “Our Belief in the Virilising of Europe”

[The Joyful Wisdom, 362. Adapted from Thomas Common’s 1910 translation with reference to R. Kevin Hill’s 2018 Penguin Classics translation—which itself seems to make extensive reference to Common’s.]

We owe it to Napoleon (and not at all to the French Revolution, which had in view the “brotherhood” of the nations, and the florid interchange of hearts and flowers among people generally) that a few warlike centuries, which have not had their like in past history, may now follow one another—in short, that we have entered upon the classical age of war, war at once scientific and popular, war on the grandest scale (as regards means, talents and discipline), to which all coming millenniums will look back with envy and awe as a work of perfection:—for the national movement out of which this martial glory springs is only the counter-shock against Napoleon, and would not exist without him. To him, consequently, one will one day be able to attribute the fact that man in Europe has again got the upper hand of the merchant and the Philistine; perhaps even of “woman” also, who has been pampered by Christianity and the extravagant spirit of the eighteenth century, and still more by “modern ideas.” Napoleon, who saw in modern ideas, and accordingly in civilisation, something like a personal enemy, has by this hostility proved himself one of the greatest continuators of the Renaissance: he has brought to the surface a whole layer of the ancient character, the decisive layer perhaps—a layer of granite. And who knows but that this layer of ancient character will in the end get the upper hand of the national movement, and will have to make itself in a positive sense the heir and continuator of Napoleon,—who, as one knows, wanted one Europe, and this the mistress of the world.