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Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Astrologie Individuelle (Pratique)


http://www.andrebarbault.com/napoleon_astrological_archetype.htm 
Translated into English by Françoise Moderne

NAPOLEON
AN ASTROLOGICAL ARCHETYPE

 When tackling what we could refer to as the « Napoleon Galaxy », we cannot but be amazed that this historical persona of such world impact and with such a unique reputation has been so seldom analyzed by astrologers.
Let’s consider the fabulous destiny of this second son from a minor and impoverished nobility, who became an army officer at 16, a general at 25, Chief of State of France at 30, emperor at 35, who dazzled the world through his military genius, and who conquered Europe with his glorious Great Army. No less imposing was he as a statesman, who structured a modern society, like Charlemagne had done before.
Among various side events we may also want to note his coronation by the pope himself in Paris and his second marriage with a descendant of Charles the Fifth … Even his fall from grace strikes one’s imagination and increases the glory of his life story. Here are the ready-made scenes that will feed lithographs and posterity: the triumphant flight of the ‘eagle’ who fled the island of Elba « from belfry to belfry to the Towers of Notre Dame », the funerary apotheosis of Waterloo and the exile from Europe.
As a crowning glory, there came the exile of the fallen emperor, alone on a faraway rocky island and shackled to his warden, the martyr’s fate on a par with the crowning of the Memorial, while the young romantic crowd, yearning for larger than life heroes, quickly turned him into a living god! And since that time, always admired as much as he is deviled, respected as much as he is hated (some going so far as to like Bonaparte and refuse Napoleon), the passionate feelings keep piling up at the feet of his monument.
One need only consider how many works of art have been dedicated to Napoleon: countless movies, so many music pieces from Beethoven to Schoënberg, numerous paintings (in “Le Louvre museum, « Le Sacre » -- the painting of Napoleon’s crowning -- is the most popular piece after the « Joconde » and « more books have been published on Napoleon than there have been days since his death » (Jean Tulard).
If a modicum of intellectual curiosity should move an astrologer to examine a specific celestial figure, would there be a more tempting historical figure than this one? Had his chart been commonplace, it would have been enough to undermine astrology, but there again we have evidence standing out more clearly than ever: an exceptional celestial configuration for an exceptional character and an exceptional destiny. That expectation is not let down in the least, to the extent that – his cosmographic monument being so evidently superior – the chart of Napoleon alone becomes a model of the astrological matter, and can be promoted to the rank of archetype.
The more outstanding the man the stronger the indexed value which goes with it; the filtering of the relatedness between the meaning and what is meant making all the purer the astral-print of the individual. In this « Napoleon in the hand of gods », let’s not avoid the conventional napoleonian rhetoric, since this reversibility benefits from the metaphoric picture. Such as the new emperor Phoebus driving the Sun’s chariot in his journey from East to West, himself with the Sun in its own sign, culminating, Napoleon is under our very eyes.
If he ever hopes to succeed in this initiatory journey as a live testimony to the reality of the art of Uranus, the interpreter cannot however avoid the criticism of a partisan reading, particularly with such a character. One should not however crystallize the picture of a « homo napoleonicus” which comes through from the centre of his astrological chart. One should accept the emphatic dissertations of those who make a hero of him compared with others’ disenchanted expressions, everyone perceiving the man through his (her) own senses.
But, as Georges Blond ackowledges: « Solar spots don’t prevent the sun from shining ».

The Birth of Bonaparte
and the astrological approach


First, let’s get a good start through a starting point that cannot be refuted: what do we know of his birth, and do we know the exact birthtime?
We need to spend some time over this critical question, because the answer took a long time to surface and put to the test many an astrologer, which may explain why no thorough interpretation of his chart has ever been tempted. Truth is that legend itself has taken over his birth. All the way to fantasies with various origins: Greece, Scotland, Brittany, and, of course, that of a royal root (heir to the Bourbon family) …The most persistent fantasy was to make him the illegitimate son of the Count of Marbeuf, the king’s representative in Corsica, born on the 5th of January 1768 on the governor’s domain, in Brittany near Ploërmel.
In issues number 27 and 28 of « Sous le Ciel »( Under the sky), the astrologer Gilbert de Chambertrand fell into this trap when he thought he had recognized the character in this mislaid sky. An admirer of the display of the Sun «  setting under the Arc de Triomphe » every year on the day of the emperor’s death, Don Neroman was misled by his collaborator when he repeated this version into « Grandeur et Pitié de l’Astrologie » (Greatness and Pity of Astrology) (Fernand Sorlot, 1949). The interpretative method was still in its trial and error stage, and in this case it was hardly attempted.

Buonaparte opened his eyes to the light in Ajaccio on August 15, 1769. His birth has been recorded in the « Book of expenses » of his father, Charles Bonaparte. His baptism act, written in Italian and kept in the records of the cathedral of the town, mentions it without specifying the time.
Today, this truth is so well accepted that the voluminous « Napoleon Dictionary », under the leadership of Jean Tulard, who does not leave a leaf unturned, does not even care to debate his birth
Anyway the problem of the time of his birth remains, which has stumped many French astrologers of the first generation, at the end of the last century. In his « Traité d’Astrologie Pratique » -(“Treatise of Practical Astrology”) (Chacornac 1912) Juvelno misleads his colleagues when he asserts Napoleon was born “at a quarter to ten as mentioned in the Memories of Bourrienne … ». However, he acknowledged that Bourrienne “was not unfailingly reliable”. This same version came to England through the « 1001 Notable Nativities » of Alan Leo, and through the « Text Book of Astrology » of Alfred J.Pearce, with « Modern Astrology”, Coming Events » and « The Horoscope ».

Referring to a biography, without mentioning which, Paul Choisnard gives a 9h 50 a.m. birth time in « Langage Astral »(Astral Language) (Chacornac, 1902), though he structured a chart for 10 a.m. in the issue n°4 (July 1913) of « Influence Astrale » (Astral Influence), without any interpretation. For lack of keeping updated about the works of their colleagues, some authors still carry on this inexcusable error, which turns out in their favor (J.Dorsan « Retour au Zodiaque des Etoiles »(“Return to the sideral zodiac”), Dervy 1980, Maurice Nouvel « Mercure et Vénus démasqués » (“Mercury and Venus unveiled”) Pardès 1991)…
  
Napoleon Bonaparte’s Act of Baptism. Archives of Ajaccio (Photos Tomasio)

If, in his “Encyclopédie Astrologique Française” (French Astrological Encyclopedia) (Niclaus 1936), Janduz is still fooled by this presentation, though Eudes Picard has already raised the «  Napoleon issue» in his « Astrologie Judiciaire » (“Judiciary Astrology”) (Leymarie 1932) where he initiates the debate: « Let’s hope that this birth time – 9H45 a.m.- is not listed in the « Errors » of Bourrienne. We must acknowledge however that the chart built around that birth time does not reflect the extraordinary glamour that rose from the prodigious stature of Napoleon ».
There follows a version which he ascribes to Alvidas in Vol.11, Key of Life : « The time chosen by Alvidas (11h31) seems more appropriate to the destiny of the Emperor. It is close to midday, the time of kings and, in all likelihood, it is not close enough ». So a third chart is drawn for 11H57 … In spite again of the lack of justification, the courageous astrological logic will prevail with a birth time of 11H30 presented by H.Beer in his « Introduction à l’Astrologie » (“Introduction to Astrology”) (Payot 1939).
A clarification is given by Guy Fradin in an article « Napoleon’s birth » published in « Astrologie Moderne » (“Modern Astrology”) n°13 (First term 1955), an issue from the International Center of Astrology, Paris. Having discounted the incorrect trails, he goes back to the baptismal act and recommends « around eleven in the morning » through a convergence of testimonies, among which a document from the counselor T.Nasica, a judge in Ajaccio from 1821 to 1829 : « Memoirs on infancy and youth of Napoleon till the age of 23 ; preceded by an historical document on his father » Paris 1852.

In fact, it would be more accurate to say « in the eleventh hour ». This would bring us closer to the “unofficial” source of the « Memorial of Sainte Hélène » of Las Cases, with the advantage of memories from picturesque tales of Napoleon’s delivery. Here is what is written about it from Sunday 27 to Thursday 31 August 1815:
« Napoleon was born on the 15th of August 1769, the day of the Assumption, around noon. His mother, a strong woman, both physically and morally, who participated in the war while pregnant with him, wanted to go to mass because of the solemnity of the day. She had to come back quickly and didn’t even have time to reach her bedroom and laid her newborn on one of those old antique carpets with great characters, those heroes from legend or may be from l’Iliad: there was Napoléon »

His mother, Letizia, explained away the romantic decoration « It is a tall tale to have him born on the head of Caesar; he did not need it. We had no carpets in our Corsica houses »
But the rest of the story stays the same: « When arriving at home – it was around noon – she had no time to go up to her bed (…) and gave birth almost immediately … » says again André Castelot in his « Bonaparte » (Academic Library Perrin 1967).
And we still have other precisions on this birth : 
« With the help of her sister in law Gertruda Paravicini – her husband’s sister – she went back home hastily to her house on Malerba street. As soon as she arrived, she had no time to go up to her bedroom : she made her way to the sitting room, laid down on a green couch and almost immediately gave birth with the help of her sister in law who acted as a midwife. It was around noon … » (André Castelot « Madame Mère » in his « Histoire Insolite” (“Lady Mother” in his “Unusual History”  (Academic Library Perrin 1982).

Finally, we can consider that he was born around 11h30 am, with a rough estimate of 15 minutes more or less, which is not too imprecise. This was the horary version that I suggested in « Le Lion » (“Leo) from the Zodiac Collection of Editions du Seuil (1958) and in my book « Traité Pratique d’Astrologie » (“Practical Treatise of Astrology”) (Le Seuil, 1961)
Outside of France they went through the same laborious discovery. In Belgium, Charles de Herbais de Thun bears testimony to the fact when he selects in his archives the time of 9h30, then gives 9h50 in his « Synthèse de l’Interprétation Astrologique » (“Synthesis of the Astrological Interpretation” (Demain 1937), while he reminds us of Juvelno, Picard, Choisnard (version of 10h00 in “Influence Astrale” n°4 (Astral Influence)). Jany Bessière even discovered in her files a version of 11h50 (without any justification) given by Eugène Caslant in Chacornac’s Almanach 1933).
In Italy, after having adopted the time of Choisnard recommended by Grazia Bordoni (Date di Nascita Interressanti …) various versions were proposed in Linguaggio Astrale : 11h00 with Natale Maione (n°97) and Davide Ferrero with Franco Orlandi (n°105) ; and 11h30 with D.Valente, C. Cannistra, M. Malagoli (n°78) and Rocco Pinneri (n° 103).
In Germany, confusion started early. As early as July 1910 in Zodiakus, Albert Kniepf complained about this horary uncertainty which made him doubt the veracity of the date of February 5, 1768 given by Bonaparte as the date of his wedding contract . The same confusion also worried Reinhold Ebertin, who came back to it several times (Meridian 1982/1), while he proposed in Koshlisher Beobatcher (annex of Kosmobiology) an almost similar chart with the Ascendant at 18° Scorpio, without justifying his choice.
“Well, says Henri Latou, the uncertainty of the birthtime of Napoleon discouraged our colleagues from Germany. In the third volume of “Horoskope Lexikon” (1992) Hans Hinrich Taeger, without justifying his sources, proposed eventually a chart for 11h30 also without justifying his choice in comparison with the other proposed times.
Finally, in the USA, Stephen Erlewine uses 9h45 in “The Circle book of Charts” (1972) while 11h30 is preferred by Lois M.Rodden in “The American Book of Charts” (1980).

A conclusion is necessary: the confused question of the birth of Bonaparte kept astrologers overcautious because there never has been any consistent text of interpretation which could retain their interest. At the very most, we can refer to some mumblings and eventually some small analysis such as the ones for the public at large in the “Petit Dictionnaire des gens du Lion” (“Small dictionary of Leo people”) of “Zodiaque” Collection, Le Seuil Edition”. There still lacked a real interpretation of the chart of Napoleon, one as large as his character. It is this “première” which is attempted here with the hope that the transcendental dimension of an archetypal figure will be reached.

A masterly star figure


According to the fundamental criteria of astrology and in regard to the exceptional character that faces us, the celestial figure of Napoleon is the sort of chart which should quite fulfil our expectations. The somewhat apologetic delight it gives us comes from many directions, and mainly from the convergence of a double prominence: the convergence of an exceptional “background”, an unexpected carrier environment, and a quasi omnipotent “signature”, the ultimate essence of space-time.


A prodigious generation

At the root of the celestial stars of Napoleon, the initial overture that forms the basses of his inner orchestration, a triple trine of the three slowest stars crops up in an already prestigious manner, like a crowning: the equilateral triangle between Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, this unique phenomenon of the millenary which serves as an apotheosis.


As a decisive crossroads of history: it is at the precise moment of the preceding triple conjunction Uranus-Neptune-Pluto in 575 b.c. that humankind as we know it came about, with the advent of great prophets (Zarathoustra, Deutero-Isaïe, Pythagorus, Buddha and Confucius), or in other words the advent of oriental religions and of a budding faith which is still alive in the greater population of today; and also the advent of Greek rationalism, the seed of our modern civilization, the real dawn of human knowledge as we know it, buoyed by the philosophers of Ionian cities (Thalès de Milet…), .

In the process of the cyclic development generated by the conjunction, its first phase (0°) is to the trine (120°) what the beginning of life is to a full life, in such a way that the triangular convergence of the three trines of this astral trio represents a highest development of society, which, because of its degree itself, necessarily promises a great historical turning point. It is in a way like the apex of the golden age.
The outcome of this inspiration is the rising of the philosophers “of light”. Through them, come to the fore the great liberating aspirations that have led to empty the world of the presence of God in order to better position the human being, who can take a more active role in the management of his own destiny. This humanism could do so thanks to the emergence of technical scientific progresses which help man control matter (the three stars are in a triplicity of earth: Taurus – Virgo- Capricorn). It is under this umbrella that the industrial revolution starts, with its instrumental creations that revolutionize everyday life and lead to a new age. The Philadelphia Congress in 1774 gave it a concrete expression as a foreword to the American Independence, with a human rights declaration modelled on the principles espoused and communicated by French philosophers: humanity was entering the modern era with its concurring leadership of materialism and Goddess-Rationality. Not without, one must admit, being escorted by the best and the worst.
It is therefore to be expected that the generation which comes at the crossing over of these two worlds of civilization would crop up and give birth to giants, not only Napoleon but also Hegel, Beethoven, de Cuvier and Chateaubriand … And not to forget the emperor and his opponents: Metternich and Wellington, and its shining army of generals and marshals: Bertrand, Bessières, Caulaincourt, Davout, Desaix, Duroc, Drouot, Hoche, Junot, Lannes, Marmont, Molitor, Murat, Ney, Rapp, Soult….

It is around this prestigious cohort that men of the time will be led to live the amazing epic of the Napoleonic empire. A generation sown with seeds of romantic heroes, as in the example of this soldier of the Great Army: “Our target was glory. It was a vast target as was the great epoch our youth was living in“… This generation was also making the transition between the Ancient Regime and modern times.


The socle of Neptune

From this first central triangle of the three slowest planets, let’s now consider the five-sided polygon formed with the addition of two more planets, Jupiter and Venus  making a splendid trine parallel to the axis Uranus-Pluto which forms the base of the pentagon and both equidistant to Neptune becoming the top. The big top of a pentagon made of a quadrilateral surmounted by an isosceles triangle.

As a result, the fundamental particles of the triangular nucleus become heated, dilated, magnified by the breath of air of this planetary duo (Venus Jupiter) which is itself in its phase of full expansiveness. Here is the dynamism of the chart that takes form and movement, the heavy trends ascending promisingly into spectacular configurations, in the splendour of their exegesis.

In the many sextiles successively formed by Uranus-Venus-Neptune-Jupiter- Pluto, a special pattern is formed by the isosceles triangle Venus-Neptune-Jupiter which overhangs a big rectangle Uranus-Venus-Jupiter-Pluto.



At the core of this sumptuous structure, the central position is occupied by Neptune in Virgo who, with its implications in the whole chart, is the great collector of the components of this configuration. In this configuration one can sense a human miasma full of a great common dream, a collective escape of souls driven by a high tide of passion, whirling along a grandiose historical adventure.


The Dome of Mars

Now, Mars arises as the keystone to this temple
Before looking at Mars alone, let’s overall appreciate the actualisation of the triangle of the transsaturnians which are united together by the isosceles triangle Venus-Mars-Jupiter. There is nothing better than the hot participation of this “carnal” trio to animate its quaver and bring it to a peak of existence. There could not have been any richer frame to bring to life the exceptional generation of the super trine Uranus-Neptune-Pluto.
The summit of the building is still Mars. Supported by Neptune in a harmonic field, it occupies a central position at the same distance by sextiles, to the trine Venus-Jupiter – the most beneficial aspect that ever existed as far as a sense of ease, auspiciousness, or even the natural advantage of a combination of circumstances – and, by trines, to the trine Uranus-Pluto. This heart is nothing else but the convergence of twelve major harmonics, among which five belong to Mars! This mechanism can then be evaluated as a record: the configuration of Mars in the chart of Napoleon is practically the only one of its kind and reaches a top.

Should it surprise us then that Bonaparte instinctively reacted to this extreme sign by entering the Military School of Paris in 1784, thereby obeying Mars and its configurations, and that his military genius made him the equal of Alexander, Hannibal, or Caesar, the greatest captain of all times? For, in spite of the shocking reality of the horrors of war, we can’t help viewing the story of the Great Army, spreading in all directions over Europe, as the most stunning, the most prodigious of all “chansons de geste”.
  
  
The splendor of this platform should not blind us to a pragmatic conclusion and the need to compare the Mars of Napoleon with the Mars of great military figures of history. The idea is so self-evident that it dominates: the meaning of the configuration of Mars in a soldier’s life is a precursor of his military journey, in accordance with the general background of his personal chart. The best way to determine this is to refer to typical historical examples by comparing extreme facts, brilliant victories, with disastrous defeats, the laurels of glory with military collapse.

The work begun with Didier Geslain gave me the opportunity to confirm this theory through empirical evidence. This was verified over the birth data points of a hundred marshals of France and the Empire, of all great generals of the time, including principal military opponents of the Emperor. The result is stunning: none of them has a position of Mars comparable with that of Napoleon. The best off among the greatest have only three major harmonics, exceptionally four, as for instance in the chart of the great marshal of Luxembourg. By comparison, the contrast is striking between these harmonic configurations and the disharmonic ones of Mars in the chart of the admiral François-Paul de Brueys who died in the defeat of his fleet at Aboukir; or of the admiral Pierre-Charles de Villeneuve, made prisoner in the defeat of his fleet at Trafalgar; and, more, (four major bad aspects to MC-Sun-Jupiter-Uranus) of the marshal François Achille Bazaine who surrendered without fighting in open country at Metz in 1870, condemned to military demotion and to death, the worst French military punishment.


A signature in apotheosis

We not only have a background which emphasizes a monumental Mars: with the steed comes the rider. The astrological signature which, for its part, brings out the intersection of time and space, the ‘here and now’ of the natal chart, is also colossal.

At the place and time of his birth, there is indeed an extreme convergence between planets which is rarely if ever seen. At the exact same moment, Jupiter rises in Scorpio, the Sun culminates in Leo, and Uranus sets in Taurus– a collusion between the three most powerful stars and the three strongest signs – linked to one another by aspect to the Medium Coeli where Mercury in Leo is also. A configuration which entails four angular conjunctions and five squares in a straight-angle triangle with the base being the opposition Jupiter-Uranus. We must even add to this tight concentration Moon in Capricorn. Difficult to top!

How can we not see in this extreme concentration a man with a hyper ego, bursting with willpower, devoured by the demon of ambition, entranced by the idea of power, all energies focused towards authority, supremacy, prestige, greatness, hugeness, and the epic?

What a thrust to make the most of the resources of the Mars platform! An immense personage with vast capabilities and driven by a profound confidence. How could such a man not have an immense faith in what he called his “lucky star”, because he felt he was “destiny’s son” called to a mission as others are to a supreme ministry? If Mars is the arbiter of his destiny, there is no doubt that it is in respect to and according to his hypertrophied astrological signature Sun-Jupiter-Uranus, that he drinks avidly off the dizzying cup of Fortune: politics, the great purpose of modern tragedy. It is that which will lift his destiny to breathtaking summits.

  
There is good reason to question why, in spite of this colossal Mars, the Napoleonic epic ended so tragically. The answer may be found in the rest of the chart, which leads us to the conclusion that it is the statesman (with many dissonances) and not the military man who was responsible for his fall.

The pre-eminence of the war general can be seen from beginning to end in his life journey. If Napoleon eventually lost the war at Leipzig, it was not due to a field mistake; it was simply that he could no longer fight a united European front, the biggest France had ever had to face. The specialists are unanimous in their opinion that the 1814 campaign of France is a masterpiece of military art.
In spite of waning resources – a single soldier for every four of the armed continent – he still managed to beat in separate campaigns the Austrian field marshal Schwarzenberg, the Prussian general Blücher, the Cossacks of Platov, the soldiers of Wurtemberg (nine victories in forty five days). The Allies even doubted for a moment that they could win and the emperor, renewed in his arrogance, thought he was closer to Vienna than the emperor of Austria was to Paris… But the game was far too unequal, besides the fact that the Saxon support did not materialize, and, above all, that his comrades-in-arms were abandoning him.

Neither was there a mistake made at Waterloo where the defeat (by a thread) was due to the absence of participation of the army corps of Grouchy. Sooner or later, there had to be a mistake made to bring an end to this intrusive statesman unwanted by the sovereigns of the reigning dynasties, themselves determined to bring France back into line. Moreover, it was by training at his ‘school’ that his military opponents managed to beat him: making sure above all, on the recommendations of Bernadotte, one more Swedish enemy, to systematically evade direct confrontation and to only fight his lieutenants. The prestige of the Great Army Chief remained intact, as well for the people who mostly remembered the panache of his brilliant victories as for the military experts who kept thinking he was the greatest captain in history. The Napoleonic epic still impresses posterity.



The Heir of French Revolution


First of all, what does the main figure - the conjunction Mars Neptune - tell us?
An initial meaning arises from a historical perspective as we meet the same conjunction in the charts of the three leaders of the French Revolution:  Danton, Robespierre and Saint Just; its meaning is consolidated through its repetition, the same index appearing also in Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin’s charts of the Bolshevik Revolution.
This common core expanded to the marshals of the empire:  Augereau and Massena who already won in 1796 and 1797;  Pérignon, a noble man devoted to the Republic, and especially Kellerman, the man of Valmy, the symbol of the triumph of republican armies.

The fabric of history is woven from the cycle Mars Neptune which gave emphasis to the reign of the revolutionary Commune, from the conjunction of August 10, 1792 when king Louis XVI was dethroned, to the one that accompanies Thermidor 9th (July 27, 1794) when Robespierre was overthrown.  This same Mars - Neptune conjunction came back for the third time on the 18 of Brumaire, year VIII (November 9, 1799) the date of the coup that put an end to the Directoire and brought to power Bonaparte, the First Consul.

“I am the French Revolution”

Through this self renewing cyclic current, Bonaparte feels he is the continuous link through the new manifestation of his generation, like a melting pot of civilization where men of the Old Regime mingle with the children of modern times.
With this conjunction in the mutable sign of Virgo, Napoleon first drinks from the popular revolt, all the way to its "sans culottes" tones, which help create the soldier of year II, re-made in the revolutionary cauldron and carrying beyond the borders the torch of the new age, while reigning in the national haemorrhaging of a regicide France, lost in chaos and tragedy.  It is the end of the quagmire: through him, order reigns again.
The duality of the mutable sign Virgo is passed from Bonaparte on Napoleon.  The emperor is the man through whom the Revolution’s work keeps being done, so much so that, for the European nations, "his passage was felt like the night of August 4" (George Lefebvre) as he introduced the Civil code into all the annexed countries and the vassal kingdoms of his vast empire.

This Revolution had destroyed the old world. The emperor establishes a new world, the present time starting from it. But he rebuilds according to the principles and the rights of the Revolution which are going to make there way everywhere in particular through this Civil Code, giving a lasting and universal radiance to France. These great and beautiful truths have become immortal.

"They will be the faith, the religion, the guiding principles of all people, and this unforgettable era will be related, in spite of all, to my own person, because after all was said and done, I made the torch shine, I established these principles and today persecution has finally succeeded in making a Messiah out of me" (Memorial)

This is the final contradiction. The pompous drums of the empire, while covering the lamentations from the horrors of war, cannot make us forget that the heir to the French Revolution is a tyrannical ruler, dictatorial, animated with the " unquenchable need to be the center of attention" (Mollien), making all yield before him.

- « There is but one secret to run the world, it is to be strong, because in strength there is no mistake, no illusion; it is the truth laid bare

This is a dangerous trap when strength is blinded by an excessive self-confidence fanned by an infinite ambition.

            - "True glory consists in putting oneself above one’s status"

The fascinating glory of Napoleon, betrayed by his own blinding power, can finally be reduced to a synthesis of the pros and cons

The Great Captain


Here are the initial signals of the conjunction Mars - Neptune:  while finding his way in the Brienne school, the young Bonaparte first saw himself as a future royal commander with forty guns, a project thwarted at once by the “madre”, anxious at the idea to see her dear Nabulio at sea.  A transient foreshadowing of the future, quickly outmatched by history, when the background with Mars merges with his signature.

Let’s first consider the entrance of this raw commander-in-chief of the Italian Army, 26 years old, small, thin, pale, dry, with a sallow complexion, the Vendemiaire general welcomed by its well established seniors.  Augereau, Masséna, Sérurier, generals of fortune risen from the ranks and having proved over and again that they were reliable, these strapping fellows, aloof, coarse, full of contempt, eyeing him harshly.  But this runt can stare down anyone, almost to the point of scaring these tough guys
And right away, in sharp tones, he exposes his plans, gives orders with an imperious tone and dismisses them.  As he has spoken to the petty chiefs as a Master, it is in the same vein that he gains control over his undisciplined troop of hungry and ragged beggars, close to anarchy.  You should hear him mobilizing his soldiers for the conquest of Italy, his famous speech waving like a flag.  He is already full of the charisma that will make him the most extraordinary leader since the time of Alexander. 

The neptunian magic of his military genius, is that, instinctively, he knows how a  private lives, thinks and likes, how to talk to him and what to tell him. He very quickly establishes excellent communions with his men, almost to the level of a mystical experience, the legendary figure of the "small corporal" with his grey frock coat, his two horn hat and his hand in his waistcoat, standing out in the shadow of the soldiers.  Nothing better portrays the depth of this intimate knowledge than the quote that follows one of his well-known field inspections of the troops:

            - "I draw my plans of battle from the dreams of my sleeping soldiers"

Fascinated by the genius of their leader -  maker of their dreams as in the image of the energetic "Bonaparte crossing the Alps" (1800) of Jacques Louis David -  these men are won over by the collective trance so much so that they worship and serve him as if there were no greater happiness.
He can ask them for feats of courage, of resistance, of heroism and of sacrifice: coming out of the Boulogne-sur-Mer campgrounds in 1803, transported by an indescribable passion, they are ready to follow him to the end of the world.  He is one with them and it is an invincible army which follows in this giant’s footsteps on his imperial flight, the "grognard" (= soldier of the old guard of Napoleon I) and "his" emperor, the "small close shaven man” even becoming a lucky charm.  For Napoleon is not afraid of exposing himself to enemy fire; he risks his life on the battlefield: ten horses will be killed under him.  In short, he is one of them.

            - "My soldiers were well at ease, very free with me; I have often seen some addressing me as one of theirs. I was seen as terrifying by the officers and perhaps by the Generals, but never by the soldiers. They had the instinct of truth and of sympathy, they knew me as their guardian and, if need be, their avenger "(to Las Cases).

- “….One has never seen such devotion from soldiers as from mine.  In all my misfortunes, no soldier, even while expiring, ever complained about me; no man has been served more faithfully by his troops than I was.  The last drop of blood flowed from their vein with the cry of "Long live the Emperor" (to O’Meara).

Hyperbole, as always, for this man who forgot he was hated during the worst moments of these battles where he asked his soldiers for the impossible. It still remains quintessentially true to the end of his adventure. 
If he "electrifies" thus his soldiers, almost as if they were in a trance, it is because he is hyper energetic, driven himself by a fantastic history.  As soon as he appears on the battlefield, victory rushes up to meet him and for a full ten years he remains invincible.  Thus, in a dazzling manner that feeds imaginations, we see the eagle fly from victory to victory, from one European capital to another, from Lisbon to Moscow, from the drums of Arcole to the knell of Waterloo.

Let’s notice in passing the neptunian note of an illusionist strategist, an expert in mystifying the opponent, an artist of the trick of smoke screens, as when he makes a racket with his drums to impress the enemy or when he distracts them by fanning the fires in his camps, thus manipulating the enemy into moving their apparel and better fall into his trap. 

Another angle comes from the resources of the opposition Jupiter Uranus which makes a triangle to the conjunction Mars Neptune.  It gives this tumultuous genius unprecedented daring, beyond the comprehension of his enemies.  Thus the feat of Bonaparte who has his army of Italy crossing the Great Saint Bernard pass, a horrendous expedition, a titanic adventure! 

As a military genius of powder, he "moves like a flash and strikes like lightning", already proclaims "The Mail of the army of Italy" on October 23, 1797.  Its main strategic quality is to upset the established order while initiating the technique (uranian) of the lightning-fast war, so appropriate to his striking glance. In the military annals of all times, there are no more brilliant accounts than his campaigns which lead to the immediate surrender of the opponent, and nothing equals the dazzling war pomp of Austerlitz. Starting around seven in the morning on June 14, 1800, with an enemy greater in numbers, the battle of Marengo ended brilliantly around 8 pm.  At Austerlitz, with a single French man for two Austro Russians, the engagement of December 2, 1805 started around seven am and ended around 5 pm with a complete victory and a legendary charge of the Guard.  Notwithstanding two victories in a single day, at Iéna and Auerstädt on October 14, 1806, when Prussia collapsed, nor the two-hour victory against the Russians at Friedland on June 14, 1807 …..

"Soldiers, we must finish this campaign with a roar that annihilates our enemy’s pride!"

 The whole style (Sun - Jupiter - Uranus) of the character is here. It is so in the full conviction of the emperor of the best days. 

- "Before tomorrow evening, this army is mine!"(One day before Austerlitz)

"I have them in hand!  In one month from now we will be in Vienna!  " (He will be there three weeks later). 

And in the bad days, the same state of mind turns to arrogance, an excess of confidence contributing to his downfall. 

His hyperactive rhythm is that of a troop that moves through forced marches.  The grognard wages war with his legs and walks fifty kilometres a day, always ahead, always faster, in the same manner his cavalry burns the pathways and he himself is always breathless, tireless, everywhere.

 A volunteer of 1803 will estimate he covered thirty six thousand kilometres on foot in ten years.  The geographical extent of the campaigns of Napoleon is unparalleled:  it covers Europe, from Portugal to Russia.  This continental intermixing by the grognards - older than their leader - concerned a particular generation under the passages of Uranus in Pisces (1752-1759) and Aries (1760-1767).

The uranian emphasis of Pisces split two populations because of the double character of the sign.  On one side, the extreme contraction of the self, fully experienced during the tragic time of the French Revolution: detention, captivity, prison (the Tower of the Temple, the Conciergerie, Sainte Pelagie, Luxembourg) on top of the emigration, and on the other side, the extreme expansion of the self through cosmopolitanism, conveyed after the American adventure of La Fayette and the Lameth, through this dizzying military flight that will mix for a few years over ten different populations.  In the end, all languages are spoken in the Grand Army.

 This is due also in large and possibly greater part to Uranus in Aries – a signature common to half the marshals of the empire, a particular element of a generation that, from its deepest innards, releases and spurts out an explosive force that will naturally find its preferred expression in perilous adventures, the feats, the climaxes, a risky extremism. In a way, this is a generation of tough guys and loose canons, if not black sheep.

The great captain also had his breakdowns:  he had not sought after improving the weaponry inherited from the Ancient Régime, he had not used the surveillance balloons of the hot air balloon pilots….  But the fate of his reign would be settled elsewhere.

"There are only two powers in the world, the sabre and the mind.  In the long run the sabre is always beaten by the mind”

Alas!  The sovereign did not have always the mind on his side.


The Statesman


By way of introduction let’s start with a comparison.  Among the two hundred European monarchs of whom we have the birth data, the one who is the most like Napoleon astrologically speaking, who shares with him two common major positions, is Louis XIV, whom incidentally he admired enthusiastically.

- "Starting with Charlemagne, who is the king of France that we can compare him to in all regards?”

Both have Jupiter in Scorpio conjunct Ascendant and Sun in X conjunct the MC, Jupiter making an aspect to it. And, if on Bourbon’s chart the diurnal luminary is in Virgo, at least he has the Moon and Venus in Leo. Are they not the two French notorieties of the absolute power? And also, didn’t the Sun king already carry the royal staff in his crib?

In the emperor‘s chart, the Jupiter Sun duo that we find also in the chart of Louis XIV, expands itself to a triumvirate completed by Uranus, these three components constituting the buttress of his internal structure. Each one of the three reinforces the other two to unite in a midpoint where the whole being imposes its passion:  the dizzying elixir of strength, the ecstasy of power, the intoxication of glory.  The true passion of Napoleon is not war and, for a time at least, the civil leader in him is greater than the captain.

Since the key word “passion” has been uttered, let’s recall that, in his "Treaty of Characterology" (PUF, 1945), René Le Senne draws Napoleon as a passionate individual (Emotive-Active-Secondary).  "I am the State” is the motto of this type of man, "man of the highest activity", because always driving "to the full the mobilization of his personal forces" and replacing "all passions by a SINGLE passion that is the driving force of his life; a major passion that can lead to excesses, to tyrannical hypertrophy of the willpower… A focused whole of which aspects we can find in his three inner characters

At the root of Jupiter rising in Scorpio, a vigorous animal vitality emanates:  an exuberant temperament with imperious desires and demanding aspirations, and that fully affirms its vitality.  There is a kind of a strong physical presence, with an attractive personal magnetism, whose egocentric demands, natural authority, and power of conviction exert a more or less enthralling dominance over others.  It is that which is already felt in the young Bonaparte and which has been compared to the power of the eagle.  This is also expressed in his morphology, at times expressed by portraitists (Guerin, Museum of Versailles; Horace Vernet, Tate Gallery London):  an angular face, with, crossing the look of lightning-filled set eyes, a nasal bridge underlined by hollow cheeks and high cheekbones, in short, a mask of a bird of prey.  Straight to the point!

- "There is no ifs, ands or buts, one has to succeed.
- I have myself but one need, to succeed

As for the culmination of the Sun in Leo, it indicates mainly the upward vertical tension of an ego which longs for greatness.  The ego which wants to be radiant is primarily looking for authority, supremacy, nobility, prestige, brilliance, opulence, at the risk of being theatrical. The eagle wants to soar and glide in all its majesty, wrapped in glory.


 


-  “What I seek above all, is greatness:  what is great is always beautiful (to Denon)”
- A new-born government must dazzle”.

The air we breathe here is heroic, reminiscent of Greco-Roman Antiquity.  One also muses back to the prestigious pump and circumstance of the Empire, to the dazzling luxury of the Court, which exceeds the splendours of Versailles.  Not only is he a great master in his talent for leadership, Napoleon is also a marvellous actor, but even more is he the greatest director of the story of a prestigious time.

- "I was born in a poor family and I now hold the greatest throne in the world.  I have laid the law on all of Europe. I have awarded crowns.  I have given millions….
- "I am so identified with our wonders, our monuments, our constitutions, all our national acts that one could not take me out of them without insulting France"
As for Uranus of Taurus setting, one can hear in it a transcending call that gives voice to the tyranny of a passion that passes through the individual to then go above it.

"The great man is in nobody’s way.
- I won’t be born of anybody” (while refusing the title of king)

In a focused awareness, his ‘concentration-driven’ mind draws fully inward on his inner life: the quasi paranoid or obsessive way of the inventor who forgets all, wife, children, social relationships, to focus single-mindedly on his invention and who thinks of it constantly and exclusively, like Kepler did with the orbits of planets. This explains all the more his confidence, his persuasiveness, his striking impression.  It also explains the hyper activity of a luminescent man, driven to frenzy, given to the vertigo of excess, living life at an exhausting pace that condemns him to a premature collapse like the brief blaze of a shooting star.

Naturally, all of this makes him a tireless hyperactive man who fills his days with eighteen-straight hours of activities, exhausting his collaborators.

"Work is my life, I was born and built for work.  I have known how far my legs could carry me, how far my eyes could see, I was never able to tell how long I could work …. I work a lot, while dining, while at the theatre:  at night I wake up in order to work (….). It is willpower, character, diligence and daring that have made me what I am"

Let’s not forget, of course, that this athletic drive is aided by an immense mind, large enough to be a political demiurge.  With this crowning, the unifying agent of our three giant planets comes into play:  Mercury of Leo at the top of the chart.  We will come back on the intellectual faculties of the man.

Meanwhile, the mobility of the person is related to this major influence of Mercury, for this character changed considerably during the course of his life, albeit short.  One is even surprised at the metamorphosis which takes place within him during the trajectory of his life, his alteration corresponding to the migration of the centre of gravity from one pole to the other of his triad.  Admittedly, his evolution could have followed the diurnal rhythm of rising, culminating and setting by putting Jupiter before the Sun, but here the chronocratoric archetypic order prevails, that assimilates the Sun to a young man in his formative years, an Apollo in the vertical behaviour of an idealistic aesthete, and Jupiter to a mature man, a beneficial and thriving maturity, in the horizontal expansion of a realist.

“The king is a Sun" thus spoke the cardinal de Bérulle about Louis XIV, and François Bluche counted seventeen medals linking him to Apollon, among which the well-known medal of the astrologers, that Morin de Villefranche had minted at his birth on which he reproduced his chart: a medal always available at the Mint (“Monnaie de Paris”).  But the Sun king had precursors: the diurnal star was one of the symbols of Charles VII, and Charles VIII was explicitly compared to Phoebus in a manuscript that once belonged to Louis XII. And even before then, there had already been a budding solar theology of Roman emperors.

When considering the astrological symbolism of the Sun, the star presents itself as an over- denotation of the fundamental values of God, the father and the king: an analogical chain that also encompasses the State, knighthood, heroes, honours, gold, any perfection in the shape of its ideogram, a circle surrounding its central point like a royal crown.  In the collective unconscious, a bond exists between these entities: God the Father, Christ the king, and the king father of his people. All three have a common denominator: authority.  Egypt had its Sun Pharaoh and in the Incan empire, the sovereign is called: "Son of Sun".  In addition, the Sun astrologically confers its charisma to the ruler, the psychic equivalent of its blazon or its armorial bearings.

How, with his Sun culminating in Leo, could our ruler not have a right to his hierophany? 

He is a Leo - a pure solar attribute - which is the symbol of the Consulate.  Bonaparte having espoused the idea of "a lion spread over the chart of France, his paw ready to reach beyond the Rhine …” and he compares himself to the lion

-    "Soldiers, on June 5, we were attacked in our camp by the Russian army. The opponent was mistaken on the causes of our inactivity.  He realized too late that our sleep was that of the lion…
-  I suppose that you are not one of those who think that the lion is dead “(to Murat in 1814)
-“You fought like lions... (when he said good-bye to its Guard at Fontainebleau).

One can even evoke the legs ending "with claws of lion" of the armchairs and pieces of furniture of Empire style.

 - “I am sometimes a fox, sometimes a lion.  The key for governing is to know when it is necessary to be one or the other “(at the Council of State, March 1806).

The first "comes in cunningly " while the second shows himself in the open, and as for the first, the image of a stinger wrapped in silk naturally recalls the Scorpio, with its kin in the eagle atop the pole of the flags, its wings slightly spread, its head to the right, its left claw holding the quiver of Jupiter without its lightning.

It is as the archetypical solar man, with a roman mask, that the silhouette of the young Bonaparte stands out.  Several of his busts (Corbet, Iselin, Houdon, Canova) have a proud appearance with a stare straight as a sword, pure as gold, and a bronze profile.  And the portrait of Edouard Detaille (Museum of the army), the one of Philippoteaux (Museum of Versailles) or of Gerard (Museum of Chantilly) look like Apollo .  Notwithstanding the feverish portraits with the stare of a feline and the profile of an eagle (Boilly, Gros, David).  Whatever the case, what the soldier himself dreams of is Apollo, the romantic hero haloed by legend, in the image of Bonaparte at the bridge of Arcole from Gros, his chest first, the wind in his hair, crossing the obstacle with a sabre in one hand and a flag in the other, or that of Bonaparte crossing the Alps from David, alert on his impetuous horse, the horse rearing, his head dominant, pointing his arm towards the summit in an irresistible call.

Bonaparte identifies so closely to the Olympus, superbly astride his chariot of triumph, that the identification approaches perfection: it is a firework!
In his memories of youth, Marmont squarely compares him to the star:  "He was the rising Sun...".  Later, the Poles of Cracow see him in the same manner:  "Oh God!...  we see you as the sun that shines atop the sky... "And it is not a surprise that his supreme victory became mixed up with the sun of Austerlitz.



« Horoscope » of Napoleon. Estampes Museum



Isabey: The first Consul at Malmaison . Malmaison Museum


- “Great men are meteors destined to burn the ground”.

There is no Fire type that blazes more brilliantly and with purer a flame. 
In April 1807, he writes to Talleyrand from the castle of Finckenstein in Prussia where he is staying:

-“It is a very beautiful castle where there are many chimneys, which is extremely pleasing for me who gets up during the night. I like to see a burning fire”.

Same thing in the figurative.  At Montholon, retrospectively admiring Murat charging and his other marshals fighting, he declares: 

- “- They were quite beautiful under fire!”

And, over all, what was the great noise of the Napoleon epic if not an enormous firestorm?

But the sacred fire of the epic legion of the marshals of the Empire will die out.

In Napoleon, the solar man gradually yields to the Jupiter man, and if the emperor is still raising the imperial eagle in the air, his power is waning
How far are we from the slim and slender Bonaparte of Marengo when his son, the king of Rome, is born!  A Hero mastering destiny before it can master him, the man has thickened out, the luminous god has already become a potbellied mass.  This is Napoleon of the thick silhouette, heavy on its steed, as seen by Meissonier in 1813 (Museum of the Legion of Honor – Musée de la Légion d’Honneur), and even more by Paul Delaroche in 1814 (Museum of the army), an obese, overpowered man, broken down on his chair at the time of his abdication.

In the final scene, the star is setting, without a morphological equivalent.  It is the Uranus man that appears in a transfiguration beyond the dethroned Jupiter man, turning his back to him.  As the eagle falls, Prometheus chained to his rock discovers a new strength, all the way to a transcendent power.  The eraser of time having gone over the bad memories from the tempest of the empire, the people, subjected anew to the absolute power of backward-looking kings, filter his image to retain only the noble figure of the emperor “son of the Revolution".  They do the same with the French Revolution, itself cleansed of the mad saturnalia of the guillotine, reduced to its liberating ideal.  The great Army has conveyed the modern mind of civilization in its tricolour march across the continent; at least as long as it does not clash with others’ patriotism.  During the “Cent Jours” (Hundred Days), the emperor adopts the three colours, designates himself as a constitutional monarch and keeps his word.  In the end, once again a figure of progress and the guardian of promises for the future, the prisoner enters folk legend as a soldier of freedom, and the Gospel of Sainte-Hélène announces the upcoming of the liberation of nations, that will shake thrones across the world.

As a wonder of the astrological representation, the opposition makes two contrary individualities cohabiting in one being. It is not unpleasant to see how Michelet portrays the antinomy of this Janus Jupiter-Uranus:  "With a remarkable oversight, he was held at Sainte-Hélène, so that, from a platform so highly placed, the jailbird could make a Caucasus."  Laboratory of legends, factory of falseness...



Napoleon in 1812
Drawing painted from life at the Emperor’s chapel
Mars 8, 1812

A unit beyond discontinuity in an ultimate metamorphosis, Napoleon knew that he would be the prophet of new times:

- “As a new Prometheus, I am chained to a rock where a vulture is gnawing me.  Yes, I had robbed the fire of heaven to give it to France, the fire came back to its source and here I am!

As a Phoenix coming back from his uranian fire, the exile, removed from his un-disowned jupiterian throne, erases the Caesar and captures the democratic spirit of the people’s Napoleon for his benefit.

Let us come back to this Mercury of Leo, culminating at the nonagesimus  point:

 - My great talent is to see clear.  It is the perpendicular, shorter than the oblique (to Gourgaud at Sainte-Hélène).

A Mercury conjunct Saturn, separating from culmination.  As early as the school of Brienne, the young Bonaparte likes mathematics and at the Military academy of Paris, he is noted for his scientific aptitude.  He even said to Laplace that he was distressed - one cannot be everywhere – because circumstances had directed him towards another career, keeping him away from science.

But this intelligence which reigns in him, is most of all realistic, vast and powerful, with a broad synthetic vision as well as great execution talents.  Very early, his mind is full of memorized readings, covering all subjects, so that he becomes dazzling through his knowledge, with ideas that are clear, well thought out, deep, abiding to his need to bring order everywhere..


The mercurian signature of a changing man can be observed in the
writer.We are in front of a restless handwriting, with a rough line
seeming vague and careless, because of a violent hurry in an exu-
berant activity. The Fire signature has been mostly retained, the si-
gnature of a Napoleon crushing his name with a large stroke of the
pen and with the thick imperial line.


We are not surprised to see - he is but twenty-eight years old - this new general of 1796 in Italy, who, not satisfied with having won, negotiates with the enemy over the head of the Parisian authorities, before settling as prince of Milan in the Serbelloni palate, receiving ambassadors and creating the machinery of a new State as an established statesman.  Let’s also represent him, three years later, aided by Cambacères, by Daunou... (he knows then how to choose his collaborators and to listen to them), dictating the text of the Constitution of the 22d of  Frimaire, year VIII (December 13, 1799), the writing of bills and amendments of public administration. With the institution, in article 52, of the Council of State, the supreme legal authority which constitutes today the administrative system of about thirty countries.  His activity extends to everything, often simultaneously, his ideas are numerous, lightning-quick, as for example when travelling in his carriage, simply, he decides to have plane trees grown along the roads so that horses are not dazzled by the sun…

This man of action entirely focused on the effectiveness of his efforts, also has a great intellectual life.  He is a bookworm.  This passion for books started very early with the works of his father. As a second lieutenant in a garrison in Valence, he devours the private library of a bookseller, taking notes of his readings.  Once he is general, he builds his first library in Paris. When he leaves for Italy, he makes sure books are taken along, and even more for his expedition to Egypt.  Upon his return, the library of his Malmaison house lists six thousand books.  He plays a role in the library of the Council of State, and it is on his orders that the libraries of the Tuileries, Saint-Cloud, Trianon, Fontainebleau, Compiegne, Rambouillet are created.  His preferred readings are of course history, but also geography, law, religion, without neglecting theatre, poetry and even novel which he consumes in surprising numbers.  When he is campaigning, he has hundreds of books packed, that he reads in his carriage.  Even at Schönbrunn, unable to find readings to his liking, he prescribes the creation of a three –thousand-book library (as if he was to be frequently around), a project which was not realized.
When he leaves for the island of Elba, he does not fail to bring along books that he borrows from the library of Fontainebleau, and after Waterloo, his personal librarian is given the responsibility of assembling a library of at least ten thousand volumes, a project that is thwarted by the hostility of the stupid Blücher.

Mercury is still there emphasized by Saturn, and, what is more, we will never have seen a head of State so close to the great minds of his time.  So as to be in the company of scientists, Napoleon has himself admitted at the Institute, in the “Mechanical arts of Physical and Mathematical Sciences” section, and attends the sessions as often as he can
Already, during his campaign of Egypt, he had brought along a cohort of scientists and artists, which enabled Champollion to decipher the hieroglyphs.  He attended the meeting of the Institute on November 7, 1801 to listen to the lecture of the Milanese Volta about electricity and awarded him a gold medal for his battery, resolving to create an award aimed atfocusing the attention of scientists on this field of physics, which is, in my opinion, the path to all great discoveries. He addresses without constraints all the scientists of Europe and crowns researchers from Berlin, London,  Paris.  Berthollet, Corvisart, Vat, Daubenton, Fourcroy, Jussieu, Lacépède, Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, Montgolfier, Volney... are rewarded and covered with honors for their lectures some of which are familiar to him.  .

-          I was the one who created industry in France. 

Having understood the formidable potentialities of the burgeoning industrialization, he contributed to its development, creating the school of Arts et Métiers (a higher education institute for industrial art and design) after l’Ecole Polytechnique (the Polytechnic School) and the Ecole Normale Supérieure (a High level School for training of teachers) which were coming from the French Revolution, and he extended awards to inventors of machines and founders of private establishments visited by him.  He pioneered the age of contemporary science

            On another level of the activity of his mind, we must mention his personal work, which is a kind of monument in itself:  the Civil Code which has his surname.  A collective work, certainly, with its 2 281 articles, but, for having taken part in 57 of the 102 meetings of its drafting, Bonaparte was its chief author, not excluding being its instigator, with Mercury of Leo as an organizer and an administrator.

Then again we have the Mercury of communication –

- “From the top of these pyramids...”

Through his bulletins and his speeches, masterpieces of the art of public speaking (Mercury-Leo), and using to good advantage both the written word and the image, Napoleon created his own legend while alive, a legend which will be completed with engravings, figures and apocryphal words.  He knew how to speak to the imagination of people, and the Memorial of Sainte Hélène will complete the worship of Napoleon.

Finally, by its presence in IX in opposition to the Moon, on the backdrop of four planets in the III-IX axis of travels, this same Mercury shows another face of the character: the itinerant.  The man was constantly on the roads, through provinces and countries, becoming one of the greatest travellers of his time. His berlin became a true travelling office, with drawers and compartments, where he processed files of all kinds and from where he remotely regulated the businesses of the State.

In the final analysis, what is the most difficult to deny, not to say the most obvious, is the exceptional calibre of the character, and there is no doubt that this excess was what was the least forgiven by his opponents.  All the more so as his greatness had a negative counterpart and was to end with one of the greatest disasters of our national history, the very scope of which ultimately served his legend.

 -“ Fortune dazzled me (to Decrès).


The inner Demon


To fall from such a high rank to the bottom of the abyss means there must have been something terribly dangerous in Napoleon. 
Were those four planets in angular houses concentrated on both plans, the horizon and the meridian, as well as the Moon in Capricorn (that we will study further), as well as so many indices aligned in the same direction until the scope was truly colossal, not likely to end in excess, until ambition became fatal?

Better or worse, the horizontal axis is held by the most expansionist configuration that can be: the Jupiter-Uranus opposition; which is at the same time an ultimate angular distance stretching the astral relation to the maximum, and a joining of the two most expansive planets. The fact that this configuration is explosive will be understood when we point out it is also on the meridian line of Nicolas Sadi Carnot, the father of modern thermodynamics (with his fire machine, the concept of energy takes hold in applied science) and of Albert Einstein, driven in spite of himself to the creation of the first atomic bomb.
Napoleon lives his own horizontal configuration as an inner rocket that propels him to the limits of his own self.  The man is driven by an irresistible expansive push of his being, and we may believe that this need for always more resulted in not knowing the way anymore, because he always went further, finally too far, the tyranny of his internal imperialism turning against him.

Charlemagne is his only reference, because what lives in him is the European dream:

  « Charlemagne, my august predecessor.  –

- My son must be the man of the new ideas and of the cause I have imposed everywhere...to unite Europe in indissoluble federative bonds.  My destiny is not accomplished;   I want to complete what is just an outline;  I need a European code, a European supreme court, a single currency, standard weights and measures, the same laws;  it is necessary that I make of all the people of Europe the same people and of Paris the capital of the World.

During the year 1810 when he spoke, did not Sweden ask for one of his lieutenants, Bernadotte to be their king?  In fact, it is, neither more nor less, a question of a dream of an emperor of Occident!  Before our continent be split into nationalities which were going to turn their back on this unitary aspiration, a thing which, even today, is only realizable in part and so laboriously...  One can see the hugeness of this utopian dream!  In short, he was thinking too big for his time, much too big and about a future yet to come.

What he was aware of in any case, was the hugeness of his greatness; he was "the son of the sun", fully inhabited by his irrepressible expansive power.  Let us judge of the totality and perfection of his identification to power, his "mistress":

-          “I myself do not have any ambition or, if I have, it is so natural to me, and so innate, it is so well attached to my existence that it is as the blood which runs in my veins, as the air that I breathe...” (to Roederer, 1804).  –

He does not complain about it, he even prides on it:

          - “Finally would this be my ambition?  Ah! Undoubtedly, they will say so, and more,  but of a largest and highest kind that ever existed.”

He was all the more conscious that the power he possessed was a strength, which had been to some extent only delegated to him, something like a loan, nothing more: 

“A higher power drives me towards a goal that I am unaware of; as long as that goal is not reached, I will be invulnerable; as soon as I am no longer necessary, a fly will be enough to topple me.

One can see the foreshadowing:

- “From triumph to downfall, there is but one step.  I have seen that, in the greatest circumstances, a mere nothing decides the greatest events”. 

Wellington and Blücher would not have met if the battle of Waterloo had taken place twenty-four hours earlier...
This man who rules the world knows that his mission will not be forever.  In the meantime, nothing can sway his motion, truly vertiginous, as if he were the champion of a cause that drives him to expand more and more the limits of his influence, to master history until the exhaustion of the empire which he is the incarnation of.  Thus, in a disastrous inflation of his character, he comes to exceed the limits of his strength and success, where too much is never too much. 

- “Great powers die from indigestion”...

With an angular Sun-Jupiter square (we can accept the wide orb) under the tension of Uranus, we could not better account for the immoderation, for the exorbitant nature of this "too far".  The empire became monstrously colossal, going from Spain to Niemen, diluting excessively an extreme French presence, too vast and too overwhelming not to generate hostile reactions from other States.  He was the strongest and he was criticized for being so having misused his power.  But before we get there, is the responsibility for the situation causing this overflow the one of the emperor alone?  Because the black legend of the bloodthirsty conqueror from Corsica is at the very least too easy, astrologically speaking.

In the same way as great soldiers have mainly Mars prominent at the angles of their chart, the same position is to be found in sovereigns and statesmen when they fight each other.

And it is such an alignment of Mars which is observed at the time of the long war of the French Revolution and of the Empire, the involved characters carrying this signature as if they were at parade during a military ceremony.

The French king Louis XVI, however weak he may have been, opened the dance on April 20, 1792 by declaring war to Austria, in the secret hope of breaking the upcoming revolution:  Mars was near the Ascendant. Facing him, François II, the nephew of Marie-Antoinette and father of Marie-Louise, repeated thrice the declaration of war and had to become inflexibly reactionary to the future Holy Alliance:  Mars was also near the Ascendant.

It is Prussia’s turn with Frederic-Guillaume III:  Mars at MC, and his wife, the warmongering queen Louise:  Mars on Ascendant; they both were attackers and military thunderbolt fell down on them.  Then there is Russia with, initially, Paul the 1st, who changed sides dramatically:  Mars at the MC; then Alexander the 1st, the continental leader of the European coalition before becoming the inspirer of the policy of the Holy Alliance:  Mars on Ascendant. Then, there is England, always at the heart of conflict, with George III, at the start of his cyclic disease where he used to see the King of Prussia in the trees of his park:  Mars in Aries at MC.  The Mars set up is thus thorough for the monarchs, notwithstanding their control over their Prime Ministers whose birth times (except for Metternich with a culminating Mars) are ignored. Here we have a concentration of warlike tendencies which is difficult to deny, which gives them a sense of responsibility, this stately group radiating a strong odour of gunpowder.

The problem arises even before Europe becomes tired of the domination of Napoleon.  Napoleon is the first to know that only peace can stabilize his reign and this is enough for him to really wish it.  A winner at war, which he tries to make decently, he wants to show magnanimity to the opponent that he treats tactfully in order to establish a lasting peace.
On March 25, 1802 (Sun conjunct Venus) the peace of Amiens is signed between England and France.  After one half-century of colonialist wars, could these two close countries, equally ambitious and imperialist, not find a diplomatic solution to their competition?  They discuss the fate of Malta...  At the Communes, Fox is infuriated to see the unwillingness of his country’s authorities: 
"Why give an evasive answer to the enemy who offers us peace? Is not this shameful for a government that should be aware of its force and honour?” But, as an incarnation of English patriotism, Pitt stands up to diplomatic spirit.  In vain does Napoleon send to George III a long letter, on January 2, 1805, begging his majesty not to turn down the happiness of giving peace to the world:

-“ Your Majesty has won, during the last ten years, more territories and wealth than  Europe has:  your  nation is at the apex in prosperity:  what can you hope for with war?” 

The thread of negotiation broke:  who knows who was the hardest to pull?...  Anyway, England took the initiative of the rupture.  The hostility to France was obvious, and will continue, fed as it is through “Pitt’s gold" (Napoleon).
Peace? The emperor, who is not yet cumbersome, does not cease clamouring for it.  He fights to get it and when it is broken, he pulls out all the stops, ever believing it will be the last time.  Thus, through the futile pursuit of a peace that escapes to him, one campaign follows the other, until the Great Army is mired far into the snow-covered plains of Russia

Pitt dies the day after Austerlitz, and Fox who succeeds him, with whom an agreement would have been possible, disappears in turn.  The Castlereagh-Canning team that replaces him carries the fight to the bitter end, in a bureaucratic way, "suffering downturns with phlegm, endlessly using the same procedures, those of a large commercial firm all the more determined to destroy its rival so that it has invested more money in the fight and from which it would be illusory to expect any gesture of sensitivity, as illusory as it would be to expect it from a trade union or a trust".  (...).« In the end, the impassivity of the London cabinet is somewhat fascinating.  The king is insane, the regent without authority.  The government is made up of men without any prestige, it is only a board of directors.  It is a calculating machine, and, because it is insensitive, it is all the more obstinate.  Nothing can help."  (Jacques Bainville).

Austria is the one which attacks at the third coalition in 1805, defeated in fourteen days at Ulm.  The day before Austerlitz, Napoleon writes toTalleyrand:

            - “Tomorrow, there will probably be a quite serious battle with the Russians;  I have tried to avoid it as I might, because it is blood unnecessarily spread”.

Then it is Prussia that leaps into war (fourth coalition) in 1806.  When Napoleon leaves Paris for the countryside, he says to his ministers

- « I am innocent of this war; I have not incited anybody to do it, it was not in my motives; let me be defeated if it is my own doing. 

Then he says to the King of Prussia: 

- The success of my armies is not to be doubted; your troops will be beaten at the cost of the blood of my children; if it could be spared through some arrangement compatible with the honour of my crown, there is nothing that I would not do to save such a precious blood.

At the battle of Eylau on February 8, 1807, looking over the plain littered with thousands of corpses, he says with disgust:

-                            -“This spectacle should inspire princes with love for peace and horror for war.” 

The day after this slaughter, the Austrian mediation that he jointly addresses to Russia is rejected by the tsar, immediately put back at Friedland.

In 1809, the Austrians attack again (fifth coalition) and Napoleon is drawn into war again, after he has done everything to avoid it;  and once again after Wagram, the peace of Vienna is useless.  They declare war again in 1813. 

To Josephine who challenges him, saying "Won’t you cease to wage war?  ", he responds:  .

-          Do you believe I like it? Listen, I know to do other things than war, but I must obey necessity and I am not the one who decides events, I obey them”.

He later expresses this disillusioned thought: 

- “They all have an appointment on my grave” 

It is not for lack of generous efforts.  The day after Friedland, he warmly embraces Alexander the 1st at Tilsit.  The tsar, who feared the worst, exults:
  "God saved us.  Instead of sacrifices, we leave the fight with velvet ", he writes his sister Catherine. 
A friendship begins, but Canning contemptuously rejects the peace offer addressed jointly by France and Russia.

The integration of the Corsican, an emperor off the ranks, in the family of kings through his marriage with Marie-Louise, changes nothing and the friendship with the tsar, a brooding ambivalent man who goes from "enchantment" to an obscure revenge, comes to a sudden end, unable to last against the Continental System.
As paradoxical as it may seem, it is with the hope of forcing a friendship with Alexander the 1st that the emperor undertakes the campaign of Russia in 1812, worded thus:

-          “If fortune were to keep supporting my weapons, Your Majesty will find me, as in Tilsitt and Erfurt, full of friendship and regard.”

He could not be better caught in his own trap...
His inner enemy got the upper hand: an imperial despotism at the service of his dynastic interests, not listening to advices, a deafness to the warnings, errors born of an excess of confidence, the excessiveness of an unchecked imperialism...

-          “I would have wanted to make of each of these nations a single and unique body of nations... (at Sainte-Hélène).

Undoubtedly, intoxicated by his glory and now megalomaniac, Napoleon has aimed too high.  His temperament of European emperor could but shatter against this continent which, far from perceiving a common future, was just starting to coalesce in a mosaic of nationalities, with expectations which would later throw down, in turn, the dull and quaint despotism of the mediocre rulers of the "Holy Alliance".
In the end, this emperor dazzling with greatness and having reached vertiginous summits sinks into a fall, as epic and thunderous as his glory had been enormous.  Would have his natal chart warned us?
One can first feel a concern from the discomfort of a situation tense to the extreme.  Indeed, on the basis of the Jupiter-Uranus opposition at the horizon, their dissonances by squares to the MC and the Sun stand up perpendicularly.  The image which emerges is really that of an emperor exploded, quartered, supporting at arms lengths his disproportionate creation, like Atlas carrying the world, exhausting himself till his last breath.

- “The star was fading; I felt the reins escaping from me and I could not do anything...”

But if fortune gives him up completely, it is because, beyond it, the exit of culmination of Saturn occurs, at about twenty degrees from the meridian line; a Saturn moreover particularly dissonant. This position is perhaps eminent for a scientist but critical for a ruler.
At 15° of orb from the MC, this Saturn appears four times more often than its ordinary usual passage in the charts of 47 dethroned sovereigns, out of 197 crowned heads.  Let’s point out only some evocative cases.  In France, Charles X, Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III. In Austria, Charles 1st;  In Bulgaria, Simeon II;  In Italy Umberto II, and in Belgium, Leopold III.
This Saturn in the thirteenth hour of its diurnal course, finally reached Mars by its semi-square, which reinforced the sesqui-square of the Moon, and was undoubtedly the water drop..., we should say rather, to respect the symbolic of the elements, that it was the blip in the works of the destiny of the empire.
We know the tragedy of the final collapse: a sovereign stripped of the powers of the history, a man in bad health, abandoned by an exhausted country and most of all by those around him, his marshals first: a man alone, resigned to sign his abdication.
"Let a mortal work on his loss, gods come to help him."  (Eschyle.)
            - I believe that nature had calculated I was meant for great reversals”.

The Soft Belly


If with Napoleon the apotheosis inspires the sublime, so much so that it creates deification, so much light deepens accordingly the shadows, the rise of the peak creating the deepest pit at its feet.
We cannot be surprised that, in his basket of configurations, he collects one which is considered as extremely negative in astrological tradition: an opposition from the Moon in "exile" in Capricorn in sector III, to Saturn in "exile" in Cancer, in sector IX; and, what is more, the Moon is separating from a conjunction to Pluto.  This super-solar man has a very weak Moon, it is as if he were filled with a lunar landscape of desolation.

Let’s look first at this Moon of Capricorn afflicted by a double Saturn, Saturn being both the ruler of Capricorn and making an opposition to the Moon.  In this sign, the nocturnal luminary tends to lose its animal, instinctual, instinctive, emotional life, to be reduced in its subjectivity, to lose its personality, the vital element moving away from the person, sublimating in ambition.  It is the position of Charlemagne (according to the accepted data), of Charles Quint, Monroe, Bismarck, Lenin, Hitler; and Charlotte Corday, Manon Roland and Therese Tallien, of women close to our study

Napoleon is an ascetic in his own way.  He stays away from sleep, table, women (the Moon).  He sleeps four hours a night and that is enough for him.  His meals are gobbled up in fifteen minutes; he does not eat much, rather some simple, peasant, soldier foods, and he drinks a little of his “Chambertin” wine with water.
How many guests invited to its imperial table have just swallowed half of the soup when the Master was getting up from table?  He delegates the gastronomic mission of the great diplomatic receptions to Cambacérès and Talleyrand. 
As for love, a matter we’ll come back to, his embraces are expeditious; he is satisfied with little and accepts easily to be deprived of it, his passing physical embraces mattering so little to him.  His style in clothing does not matter either, he contents himself with the sober and austere style of his grey frock coat and his cocked hat.  Furthermore, simplicity commands his life.  Absorbed by his work, his distractions are rare and short and he hardly has any fun at parties.
His main relaxation is reading: he reads much and fast.  He is not free in his way of life and in his private tastes, while being personally indifferent to luxury and ostentation which must serve only the glamour of the throne and the prestige of the crown.  Contrast is total between the parsimony of his personal expenditure and his generosity as a fine gentleman, distributing fortunes to his marshals, his ministers, his family, spreading a cornucopia of royal gifts...
This asceticism comes from his childhood and is accompanied by, if not based upon, a frozen sensitivity.  He said to Molé, speaking of it:

- “ Since my very first childhood, I have made every effort to stop this chord that no longer emits any sound”.

This fundamental insensitivity is indeed a great asset for the politician serving the cold reason of state.  He says when divorcing:

“Politics has no heart, it only has a head”.

In the hardest, most tragic circumstances of war, when everyone around him is drowning, he is the only one to remain calm, which enables him to rectify extreme situations. It is a drastic way of abstracting himself.  There is also this cynicism which makes him say in front of the victims laid on a battle field:

“Bah!  One night in Paris will repair all of it”.

This kind of monstrous thought was not without reason, since, in spite of the victims of war, the population of France went from 27 million inhabitants in 1801 to 29 in 1814.  It is true also that his sensitivity cannot be reduced to this only component of his personality.  With Venus in Cancer, he is not inhuman.  He individually loves his soldiers who are his nearest and dearest.  After each battle, he goes all over the battlefield to make sure that every wounded is picked up; and if he sees some, he speaks to them and brings them assistance.  There will not be for him greater pain than to lose in the heat of action, under his very eyes, those marshals who were the dearest to him, like Lannes in 1809.

Let’s now look at the opposition Moon-Saturn which reveals the infantile side of the character, through which weakness, inferiority, vulnerability come into play, in other words his "soft belly "
In his “Psychopathologie de l’échec” (“Psychopathology of failure”), referring to the best historians, the psychoanalyst Rene Laforgue looks back to the beginnings "It is likely that Napoleon was a premature child exposed to many traumatisms” (...).His mother could not feed the child.  We do not know the small dramas that went along with this observation, given the fact that the premature child already difficult to feed needs also a lot of care.  His family gives up, in order to save money, the baptism because everyone believes the new-born baby is doomed.  They just do an emergency baptism.  I think this shows us well the circumstances and the environment in which the child was born. A wet nurse is found, but she does not overcome easily the digestive troubles that have emerged in the child.  Under what conditions does he grow?  Nobody knows exactly.  He grows but stays "sickly, slender, quick tempered".  The nurse protects him from his stern mother and grandmother.  Did these women show a lack of understanding towards him? All his life, Napoleon will be filled with gratitude towards his good nurse.  Is it because of her that he learned to be happy in a simple environment?  Is it against his authoritative and rigid mother that a silent grudge develops which later results in his complaints and hostility against women?  ".

If his mother did not feed him, we should understand that she was married at fourteen, overwhelmed by ceaseless pregnancies (thirteen in nineteen years), pregnant of him during the worst time of a Corsican revolt in which she took part, sleeping in the maquis, so far as to be exhausted and sick:  , Furthermore, she was, later on, quick to smack. Napoleon keeps a bitter memory of her corporal punishments...

The nutritive disorders, of the weaning kind, are the source of a deep frustration and as a result of an enormous greed, which - here takes place the Saturn conjunction with Mercury - moves onto the spiritual ground, resulting in the bulimia of reading, the craving for knowledge.  We can connect this to the extremist attitude of the dangerous opposition between Jupiter and Uranus:  the man never had enough...

But this dissonance appears more particularly in his private life, in the emotional field of family and love life.

Let’s see first the man in his family.

Born after Joseph, his elder by a year and a half, he, from his youngest age, lays down the law among the siblings. "One did not discuss with him", Lucien, the third son, grumbled later.  When Charles Bonaparte, their father, dies, on February 20, 1785 (Pluto at 11° of Aquarius transiting the FC and an opposition between Moon and Saturn superimposing itself on the natal one, in reverse direction), the “madre”, Letizia, a penniless widow, has, at 35, eight children on her hands.  Immediately, the fifteen year old officer, set up as the head of the family, becomes responsible for the material well-being of the whole clan. He has to help first his impoverished family, by depriving himself of many things (conjunction Saturn-Pluto at 14° Aquarius in March 1786).
Will he be rewarded?  "It would have been much better for Bonaparte not to have a family" scoffs Stendhal.  Napoleon himself throws a "sad and deep glance" on the poverty of his family

- « All my preoccupations concerning my family spoiled my youth and made me serious before my time”.

From there, moreover, he became a morose young man with a tendency to depression.
The marquis de Bonneval witnessed a scene where the emperor lost his temper in front of his brothers and sisters

-          “I don’t believe there exists in the world a man more unhappy than me in my family.  Besides, let us recapitulate:  Lucien is ungrateful, Joseph a Sardanapale, Louis a legless cripple, Jerome a rascal.  As for you, ladies, you know who you are! “ -

He will come back several times on the matter, in particular with Las Cases on September 24, 1816:

-“Undoubtedly, I have not been assisted by my family and they did harm on me and on the great cause.  My willpower was often praised; I have been a coward, particularly in my family; and they knew it well: after the first anger, their perseverance, their obstinacy always won; I was tired of resisting and they used to do of me whatever they wanted.  I have made great mistakes there... »

This dominating sovereign who made everyone quaver was but a spineless rag with his family (the Moon in III).  Admittedly, the man with the very important trio, Sun, Jupiter Uranus, is not defenceless, but here, his behaviour is debased, the despot being more tyrannical than ever, using them without their consent, handling them like pawns on the chess-board of his ambitions, marrying, crowning, relieving as his please.  With what a casualness does he crown Murat, his brother-in-law!:

- “I want the king of Naples to reign in Madrid.  I want to give you the kingdom of Naples or the one of Portugal.  Reply at once with your preference, because it is necessary that this be made in one day”.

A royal gift, undoubtedly, but almost thrown at him.  With such a behavior, he can only grow weaker.  Complaints, reproaches, claims rain on him, which he usually ends up satisfying.  Although he continuously lavishes gifts and honours on them, this turbulent family showers him with bitterness.

That’s the limit.  The incurable incompetence of the pretentious Joseph.  The Dutch abdication of Louis, divorced from Hortense de Beauharnais, and who will end up writing three heavy volumes against his brother.  The escape of Lucien to America, with a brief passage in England.  After a thousand turn-about, the pitiful last-minute desertion of Jerome.  The aversion of Elisa for obedience, on her throne at Florence.  And most of all, the final betrayal of Caroline, who with an unrestrained ambition (she had, like her elder brother, a Jupiter-Uranus opposition at the horizon), joins the opposite side to try and save her crown of Naples.  Only his mother and Pauline will visit him in the Island of Elba...

Napoleon does not hold a grudge; when he writes his will, he generously forgives them

  - “I thank my good and very excellent mother, the cardinal, my brothers, Joseph, Lucien, Jerome, Pauline, Caroline, Hortense, Catherine, Eugene, of the interest they have shown me.”

We can now look at the lunar climate of the relation between Napoleon and women.  A relation very much marked with Saturn.
We saw it start with the almost-abandonment of his mother.  From this negative beginning, Rene Laforgue draws a failure-complex taking the particular form of the inability to become attached to a woman and of a flight from love.  Good-bye, conqueror...
He should be heard bitterly talking about love:

-           “I believe it harmful to society, to the individual happiness of men, finally, I believe that love hurts... and that it would be a benefit from a protective divinity to free us of it and deliver the world of it.

Moreover, the fact is not only that love is "a goof between two people";  it is also that women make him feel insecure and disconcert him, pushing his super-Sun to put it to rights.  The civil code provides for it by stating that the will of the father is the base of the family unit:

            « A woman must know that when she leaves the guardianship of her own family, she enters the one of her husband.
The husband owes protection to his wife, the woman obedience to her husband (article 213).

"Courtesy with women was not one of his best qualities”. Bourrienne used to say of Bonaparte; “He seldom had something pleasant to tell them; very often he used to tell them bad praise.”

-           "It is not your fault if you are ugly, but it is your fault if you are an intriguer... (to Mrs. de Staël).

As for his own life, in spite of some brief affairs, sexuality is not his strong point. He was not really submitted to sensual delight:

-          Strong minds repel it the same way as navigators avoid reefs

His craving often died out before he even took time to satisfy it.

But love?  It is on this essential point that the failure-complex evoked by Laforgue bears.  Fear of love or incapacity to love that he circumvents by an illusion of love, leading to "a love of that which is inaccessible, love that tries ever in vain and that, in order to exist, needs a barrier, a failure, a betrayal.  Did Bonaparte feel up to the task only when his partner was flying from love "?  The psychoanalyst will even say that he did turn away women who loved him (Desirée Clary and Marie Walewska) and became attached to those who did not.

The story of his first coupling with Josephine de Beauharnais is obviously that of a headlong flight. 
The signature Moon Saturn is already present on the act of marriage on March 9, 1796, when, as cheating twice, not only did Josephine think it a good idea to say she was younger but also that he was older, which did not prevent the clan of the Corsican family to call her "the old woman".  Moreover she was a widow, and a mother of two children.
Over thirty (already an old age for a woman at that time), this charmer who lived by her wits is determined to leave a dissolute life, having just ended an affair with Barras.  When the Vendemiaire General enters her life, he is just a passing fancy for her, her small heart not feeling anything, but the opportunity pushes her to "settle down ".  She does not like him and it will be a one way love.

- “I wake up full of you.  Your portrait and the memory of our delirious evening yesterday did not give my senses any rest (...) mio dolce amor, here are a million kisses, but don’t give me any, because they burn my blood.”

This short letter of Bonaparte to Josephine, the day after their first night together, testifies of the total influence of the attractive Creole who led this man, whom she truly bewitched right from the start, to discover love! This shows the influence of the intensity of her animal life with its extreme conjunction Sun-Mars in Cancer, positioned on the Venus of the Corsica man.  Let us add to this superposition the capacity of love of a Venus-Jupiter conjunction (supposed to be in sector X approaching the culmination) where Venus sits enthroned in its sign:  a true astral diadem!

As soon as he leaves for the campaign of Italy - a few days only after their marriage - and while he plagues her with ardent notes - already - she cheats on him...  It will soon become a public affair, and Bonaparte quickly learns of his misfortune.  There is a big clash when he returns from Italy, followed by the reaction of a child-man overcome by the surprising gift for teary play-acting of Josephine turning the great man who scared kingdoms into a little boy.  She will never stop cheating on him (her way of living her Moon-Venus opposition) in the open, this outrageously ridiculed husband becoming moreover an object of ridicule for his enemies.

             - At any time, any question, her first movement was negative, her first word, no.

This refusal is well explained by her Sun conjunct Mars and opposed Pluto.  This reminds us of Laforgue’s judgement:  "Everything in the feelings of this woman was false and intended to mislead, and it is perhaps for that reason that she was an ideal partner for Napoleon, a partner able to play the comedy of love, without having to feel it.  When love is only a façade, it is useless to run away for it, because there is no danger ".
  

Three Îlets, Martinique, June 23, 1763.  The time of birth is unknown.  The version presented here - approximately 9 am - is considered as most probable astrologically, but it remains however speculative.


- “A thousand kisses, as extreme as you are cold.”

Napoleon will enjoy until the end the luxury of such an illusion; telling Gourgaud, in Sainte-Hélène:

-          Josephine used to almost always lie, but with a high spirit:  I can say that she is the woman I loved the most.

By the way who did she love if not exclusively herself? 

With her planets in Cancer and her Moon in Sagittarius in opposition to the Venus-Jupiter conjunction, a woman from her tiptoes to her hair and in full bloom, Josephine is Narcissus. Her life is a continual and extraordinary private conversation with her many mirrors, with her rags and laces, feathers and precious stones;  a never ending exercise of ornament and elegance, always occupied by her dresses for which she spends fortunes.  An amazing art to be liked and to like herself, in a lunar charm of a silver plated tonality, a silky grace, an erudite languor, a melodious way...
On one point, however, Bonaparte was not mistaken: with Jupiter the Moon and Venus important in his chart, he felt she was equal to the task of his destiny. This imperial couple argued strongly for her ascendant in Leo, just on the conjunction MC Sun of the emperor.

Consulate, Empire, coronation:  never a single moment is this little Creole awkward, or intimidated; never a faux-pas, nor giddiness. The Tuileries, Fontainebleau, Malmaison..., she is at home everywhere as if she was born there, in a peaceful and natural amazement, in echo, one could say, to the magical palace of her interior world.  Moreover, she has an elegance of the Ancient Regime style in her art of receiving, of making her guests feel at ease, of welcoming them as if she immediately belongs to them, remembering a face, knowing how to name an appearance, being a good conversationalist;  in short, giving a climate of delicious company.  This represents the quality of a Moon probably in house IV.
It is also the signature of the ultimate achievement of this woman-child from Cancer:  Malmaison, with its flowers, its plants, its trees, its animals, reminiscent of the opulent tropical nature of her heart.

All the same: with Uranus in VII, the emperor who had included in the Civil Code the right to divorce, will partake of this right to himself on December 14, 1809.  Their common story will have lasted a hemicycle of Saturn.  Indeed, from the marriage (March 9, 1796) to this separation, Saturn went from 7° of Gemini (on the Venus-Jupiter conjunction) to 8° of Sagittarius (with Neptune), that is to say on the Moon, in accordance with the allowed time version.  Furthermore, repudiated by her divorce, Josephine becomes a dethroned empress:  Saturn at MC. 
Napoleon went for a new love play with Marie-Louise; an act he played until his death as he refused to see reality, he never accepted the fact that she had abandoned and disavowed him.
With her, the uranian style of the VIIth house is not less obvious.  It begins with the cynicism of his matrimonial project for paternity: 

- “It is a belly which I marry “(to Corvisart).  .

We find the same manifestation of Uranus in VII in his sensational attack of this second union.  He had already run through his marriage with Josephine in the twinkling of an eye. He is even more expeditious with Marie-Louise. First, it is almost in the form of an ultimatum that he makes his request (granted the following day!)  to the Austrian sovereign, her father, who makes "the present of a beautiful heifer to the Minotaur" (prince de Ligne). 
There follows a true kidnapping with military speed:  gone to meet her, disrespectful of the protocol when she is only engaged, he makes this innocent young girl of the Habsbourgh family his bed-mate in Compiègne on the evening of March 27, 1810 while the wedding will be celebrated on April 2! 

With Marie-Louise, what a terrible handicap to be overcome!
Since very young, she has been brought up at the Court of Vienna in the hate for the "Corsican ogre" who has made the royal family quake, of this “Krampus”, as the devil is called in his country;  yes, he is the Antichrist. With her brother she plays war with small wooden soldiers in wars where the Austrians win and after the fights the figurine of Bonaparte is hacked at with pins and thrown into the fire.  Nothing less but a witchcraft game!

When later on, the girl is told that following his divorce, Napoleon is seeking a new wife, with the anguish that his choice could be her, she declares "I sympathise with the unhappy princess whom he will choose".  And she adds: "I assure you that to regularly see this person would be a torment worse than all martyrdoms!"  It is therefore to this man whom she hates above all forever that her father marries her and she feels she is handed to him - with the feeling of a shameful stain - "in holocaust"...  handed over to politics like a heifer (the Moon of Cancer in X).



Vienna, December 12, 1791 11.30 pm official time


Of course, she is not any  more young enough as to burn her dolls when she says that she is “roasting the Corsican ", as she did the day after Austerlitz, but nothing could better lead to this situation and her case becomes symbolic. Marie-Louise is the essence of ambivalence, excessive, and of a dark power in this woman-child, a good lunar girl without personality and submissive to her fate.  Thus the terrible core of her chart is deciphered:  the angular square Sun-Mars focused in a double-semi-square on Venus in Scorpion.

This Venus is on the Ascendant of the emperor. 
A few nights are enough for the monster to be metamorphosed in an irresistible lover:  "I find that he gains much when one knows him closely; he is fascinating and very attentive and impossible to resist ".  Sensuality won over.  To a childhood friend who was announcing her marriage, she answers:  "May you soon enjoy a similar happiness to mine!  "But it is more the idea of love that she likes than the man who gives it to her.  And then - Lune/Vénus superposition in Cancer - their son arrives.
She is so little attached that she gives him up quickly and her first hate of him rushes back.  Indeed, once the emperor vanquished, and in spite of her love declarations, hardly is she away from him that she falls into the arms of the count de Neipperg, his spy. To cap it all: she deceives him precisely with the jailer charged by her father to prevent her from joining the ex-emperor at Elba Island!

After the “Cent Jours (Hundred Days), back to her first feelings, she says she is “angry at his person", does not hide her hate and approves every last measure taken against him.  And when she learns the defeat of Waterloo, "beside herself with joy”, she "blesses the sky"!  Not only does she leave him in his trying times, but – worst of all - she finally forgets him as if he had never existed!
If one adds to this double marital trial that of a father painfully separated from his son, lost forever to him, we will admit that the emotional fate of this man with a Moon so badly aspected (reinforced by an opposition of Pluto to Venus)  ends with a heart disaster.

In addition to all that, like a negative signal, the element of the Moon was fatal for him:  water, i.e. sea.  Mars is the dome of the large equilateral triangle in the triplicity of earth signs.  Napoleon is the Master on the ground.  At the camp of Boulogne, he glanced at the English coast across the English Channel and dreamed of making his grenadiers of the Guard camp in front of Westminster.  Alas, his two great defeats before his downfall were at sea: Aboukir and Trafalgar.  The disaster is final: adieu the invasion. He will always regret it:

- « I spent all my time seeking for the marine man”.

Shouldn't we still see the part of this lunar dissonance in the negative interference of the feelings on the statesman himself?  For example, in a kind of disastrous liking for all that is contrary for him, he wants to become reconciled with what is hostile for him.  The quest for the friendship of the Tsar Alexander 1st looks like a wild goose chase, and gives the impression that he was a victim of a Russian mirage.

- “Mr Fouché, you should be hung”...

And what a remarkable weakness was it to relieve his anger simply by insulting Talleyrand or Fouché who just outrageously betrayed him...  Undoubtedly he was also a sentimental man disappointed by politics.
But we should also consider Saturn in "exile", house  IX, which faces this Moon.  Of course, it makes us at once doubly think of the worst pitfall:  the coldness of the winter during the campaign of Russia where the Large Army disappeared, and the distant rock of Sainte-Hélène, the abyss of the deposed emperor, six years of captivity and a slow agony amid the harassment of a jailer, the boredom, the regrets, the sadness...
Let us not be satisfied with this and let us consider the other pole of weakness which comes, this time, from his mind.

- “My reason holds me in the incredulity of many things (to Bourrienne)”.

Napoleon, as we know, belonged to the pivotal generation between the old world and the modern world.  He witnessed the beginning of the industrial revolution with its technical progress that was going to upset society:  steam machine, hot air balloon, Chappe telegraph, battery..., he nevertheless had to travel on foot and with draft animals, as did Alexander the Great, neither more nor less.  The immediate future belonged to the transport revolution.  His bad luck - Saturn badly aspected on the axis IX-III of travels – was his missed meeting with Fulton who had come to bring him, with steam navigation, the instrument of a maritime victory on England. 
This failure, in spite of the insistence of the American engineer until 1803 and a belated corrective action by the emperor, was due to the short-sightedness of the commission charged with the review of the project.  Perhaps it was also due to the scepticism of the man who decided everything at the last minute, and he may have been partly responsible for the failure. Thus we could easily put forward a failure complex.  But it is always easy to justify history through hindsight...
  
NAPOLEON TIME


Going back in the sandglass of time, we still have to consider the path of destiny of the person.  Let us consider the broad lines of his life journey.
But we first must look beyond his entity to identify the forces of determinism of civilization, these driving forces of history that act in the shadows of power, the statesman being but an instrument in their service, carried along by them until the day he is no longer necessary to the historical order.

There is no surprise there:  a gigantic cosmic current escorts the napoleonian adventure, the accompanying astronomical phenomenon being close to a record.  As with all the great crossroads of humanity, such as with Alexander the Great, this historical time coincides with an exceptional concentration of planets that shows, one after the other, six great conjunctions in the eight years between 1802 to 1809

                                   Conjonctions                                                 Oppositions
 Jupiter-Saturn :          1802  (1)                                                        1812
 Jupiter-Uranus :         1803                                                               1810
 Jupiter-Neptune :       1804                                                               1811
Jupiter-Pluto :             1808                                                               1814
Saturn-Uranus :          1805 -  1806
Saturn-Neptune :        1809

(1)   Typical of Virgo where this first conjunction occurs, are both the creation of a new social man: the government official (substituted for officers, owners and commissioners of the Ancient Regime) and the creation of the Civil Service under the Consulate.
Simplicity, uniformity and effectiveness of a rational, geometrical, systematic order.
And this administrative model of a public service, created by Bonaparte and exported by Napoleon, was expanded to Europe and other countries.

Through these successive cyclic renewals, the world is in full mutation, the universe is being generated.  The essence of this astral phenomenon as a historical kinetics is that the four major cycles of Jupiter with the transjupiterian planets (Saturn-Uranus-Neptune-Pluto) were in their ascending phases since 1802: a power of expansive growth;  to fall in their downward phases from 1810 to 1814:  a power of regressive decrease.  
An evolution to which contributes the slow cycle Saturn-Uranus which enters its phase of first crisis of semi-square (45°) in 1812.

Historians agree to place the apex of the Empire in 1810-1811 - a top of the cyclic index, a maximum interplanetary distance - when Napoleon marries on April 2, 1810 Marie-Louise of Austria and when their son is born, the king of Rome, March 20, 1811.  A little later with the campaign of Russia on June 24, 1812, it is the decline, then the downfall. 

On this canvass, the personal configuration of the emperor is going to be profiled, according to the transit of his configurations.

There is nothing clearer than his historical course.  Indeed, his trajectory crosses both a Saturn hemicycle, from one end to the other of the meridian line, and a whole Jupiter cycle on his natal Sun
With the coup of the 19 Brumaire (November 10, 1799) which brings to power the First Consul, Saturn is at 10° Leo, a few degrees near his MC, and we find it just on the opposite side, 11° Aquarius, on his FC, when he signs his second abdication on June 22, 1815


First Consul
 Waterloo

.
Moreover, on July 29, 1802, when the Senate proclaims Bonaparte First Consul for life (his conquest of power is complete), Jupiter, 8° Virgo, has just transited his Sun (the star is 3° away of the Sun when, on the preceding May 10, the plebiscite leading to the event is agreed to).  And the Sun has returned to 3° of Virgo when he is definitively beaten in Leipzig, "battles of the nations" on October 19, 1813, his power gone.

At the time of the first transit, natal Jupiter itself is transited by Neptune (18° Scorpio), already at 14° on Brumaire 19:  it is the cornucopia of his power. 
So different is the second transit that occurs twelve years later, the jupiterian fruit being this time rotted.  Indeed, the star is conjunct a Sun doubly dissonant through a semi-square from Saturn-Uranus (13° Capricorn-26° Scorpio) that the diurnal luminary receives under the form of respectively a sesqui-square and a square, the passage of Jupiter amplifying the crisis.

Thus the napoleonian story is perfectly framed in a hemicycle of Saturn from the conjunction to the opposition, at MC, and in a full cycle of Jupiter from a conjunction to the Sun to the following one.

We can even widen this cyclic perspective by linking the beginning of the Napoleonic reign to the conjunction Jupiter-Saturn of 1802 at 3° Virgo, which is separating from the conjunction to the Sun.  A configuration moreover perfectly symbolic of the Napoleon Code, prepared at that time and propagated in 1804 (after a hundred meetings):  a Civil Code which moulds the social order in fixing the uses, rules and laws of modern society, not only in France but in various countries of the world.

It is at the end of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1803 that Bonaparte becomes emperor, May 18, 1804:  Jupiter at 27° Balance is separating from Saturn at l2° of the sign.  Thus, the imperialist native opposition of these two stars can start.  At the time of the famous crowning of Notre Dame, on December 2, Jupiter has just crossed its own position (21° of Scorpio).  We are approaching the time of the celestial conjunction Saturn-Uranus, so favourable to his cause.

Let us look back for a short while. It is at the time of the transit of Uranus on his Sun that his career takes shape, with the commotion of the capture of Toulon taken away from the British which gives him notoriety and establishes his brigadier general title (December 18/22, 1793):  at 28° Leo, Uranus seems to have awaited for the coming of a trine to Jupiter (16° Sagittarius) to the conjunction in Leo.  After this first meeting with fortune, its star starts to shine in all its glory when Uranus transits his conjunction Mars-Neptune: he becomes commander-in-chief of the army of Italy (March 2, 1796), his  victory at Arcole over the Austrians on November 17, 1796 (Uranus 12° Virgo) makes of him the hero who imposes himself upon everybody.

A journey mishap: the attack on his person, Saint-Nicaise street, on December 24, 1800:  Saturn at 23° Leo, on the Sun;  the man lives in danger, threatened by a royalist conspiracy.  The conspiracy comes back in autumn 1803 and it is this climate which will lead to the mistake of the tragic execution of the duke of Enghien on March 21, 1804.

The main turning point of his reign falls on the hemicycle of Uranus:  the star moves both to the opposition of itself in the VIIth and in conjunction to Jupiter from the Ist. It is the supreme shift of life with, first, the divorce from Josephine on December 15, 1809 (Uranus, 12° Scorpio), and then, the marriage with Marie-Louise on April 2, 1810 (Uranus, 18° Scorpio).

In this matrimonial spring, it is, even more greatly, a Jupiter-Uranus opposition that creates itself anew on the native opposition, in the inversion of the positions.  Napoleon believes he has definitely established his dynasty; his reign is at its top and he crowns it, to some extent, with the birth of the imperial son, the king of Rome, March 20, 1811 (Uranus 18° Scorpio, Neptune 11° Sagittarius, trine MC, Saturn 26° Sagittarius, trine Sun, Venus 12° Aquarius, FC, and Moon on itself).

While we are at it, let us note a cycle of love of Jupiter.  It is on October 15, 1795 that Bonaparte meets Josephine.  Jupiter , 28° Capricorn, is transiting his Moon (he will set  up house while Jupiter is moving through the FC).  Twelve years later, on January 1, 1807, he meets Marie Walewska and Jupiter is at 17° Capricorn, about to move again over his nocturnal luminary (its "Polish wife" has Venus at 20/21° Capricorn).

Let us come back to the great turning point of his reign.  Following the series of the five great conjunctions of 1802 to 1809, behind the first Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1810, three others come in turn from 1811 to 1814.  And this great shift of the historical configuration is accompanied by a reversal of the configuration of Mars of the emperor.
Let us recall that Uranus (12° Virgo) had transited his extraordinary conjunction Mars-Neptune with the imposing victory of Arcole confirming the hero; a transit that is qualified and intensified by the accompanying sextil of Neptune at 8° Scorpio.  In 1807-1808, it is this time Pluto which shifts to the opposition of this same conjunction: tough half-victory at Eylau, unhappy intervention in Portugal and in Spain; Already, the signs of vulnerability of the Great Army start appearing.

We must specify that after the conjunctions of Uranus, occurred the conjunction Saturn-Neptune.  Time is no longer an ecstasy of speed, noise, smoke, drum rolls and lightning strikes, and the Great Army, which had to this point been able to wrap itself in a mission of liberation ( Italian, Polish. awakening.) becomes almost stealthily a repressive power. In a stormy rush of nationalistic fervour, many countries awaken from their torpor and start to put a resistance to the military occupation (even if, there too, Napoleon tries his best) of an abusive conqueror.  Thence are heard the drumbeats of a guerrilla army; as it is with the holy war waged by a devout Spain where crucifix mixes with knife and gun.  It is impossible to fight an army of snipers, of partisans who, in an underground enterprise, badgers you and brings you to wear and tear and bogs you down.  The war became national in Europe, whereas it lost this characteristic in France.

When the campaign of Russia starts, on June 24, 1812, Neptune at 11° Sagittarius is squaring the conjunction Mars-Neptune already weakened by the opposition of Pluto.  And, this time, fate becomes mixed up.



The Empire
« The Empire had been proclaimed by the Senate in its session of 28 Floréal an XII, i.e May 18, 1804, 3 pm; on the wish of the court and repeated by the legislative body. The “Moniteur Officiel” does not indicate any time for this statement: it is calculated from the usual time taken in parliamentary meetings” (“La science astrale de l’astrologie” – The astral science of Astrology - n°2, 2d year, February 1905, Chacornac Library)
If the Empire longs for peace, - Venus ruler of the ascendant, at MC – it is nevertheless war which hounds it: Mars in Aries in the VIIth opposes Jupiter conjunct Uranus.


- “I always beat the Russians and that does not mean anything”

His entrance into Moscow, September 14, is a false victory.  Jupiter at 1° Leo is semi-square the conjunction Mars Neptune, and what a tragic reception the huge fire of the Holy City of Russia ordered by the tsar!

- “I wage war on  Your Majesty without animosity...

Alexander the 1st will not answer this last appeal of September 20 and it is after having waited in vain that the emperor will order the retreat on October 19.  Soon, it will be a complete disaster, the disaster of a retreat, an army of phantoms staggering and decimated.


 
The « Battle of Nations » of Leipzig

October 19 , 1813

The death-blow will be dealt in the "Battle of Nations" of Leipzig on October 19, 1813, with two against one:  Pluto is at 18° Pisces and Neptune at 13° Sagittarius, destroying the conjunction Mars-Neptune.  Also:  Saturn at 13° Capricorn is on Pluto, Mars at 16° Aquarius at FC and Sun at 25° Balance is semi-squaring the conjunction of Mars.  The death throes of the reign are starting.

The astral configurations of this ultimate defeat must be compared with those of the proclamation of the Empire, as per planetary cycles.  Essentially, the Empire is born at the conjunction of Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus, a concentration resembling a loaded spring, ready for a great extension.  With its downfall, the first dissonant triangle of these three planets occurs, Jupiter, by sesqui square and square,  has just been triangulated by the semi-square Saturn-Uranus.  Everything is said in this collecting.

As for the total course of the historical episode of Bonaparte-Napoleon, it is contained in a whole cycle Jupiter-Uranus, from one involute square to the following involute square.



Bonaparte Ist Consul
Saint Cloud: After a proclamation of Bonaparte made the day before, the 19 Brumaire 11 pm – November 11, 1799, 2 am, the three Consuls, Bonaparte, Sieyès and Ducos take an oath of loyalty to the Republic, one and indivisible


The 19 Brumaire occurs under the auspices of this aspect, the two stars being angular as when its author was born.  The Consulate takes place during the fourth phase of this cycle which started in 1789, which was the beginning of the French Revolution.  The Empire which takes over from it is born with the conjunction of 1804 and triumphs along the ascending phase of the cycle, until the apex-decline of the opposition of 1810.

This Napoleonic power - which is its principal astral signature - started to decline with this opposition, and finally breaks down with the involute square of these two stars. 

It is this dissonance which is specifically confirmed by the first abdication of April 6, 1814, a kind of 19 Brumaire, upside down.  Contained into it, indeed, is a semi-square Sun-Mars, the Sun being at an equal distance, by a double sesqui-square, from each of the two planets Jupiter and Uranus, Mars on the other hand being square to Jupiter and opposed to Uranus.

The whole chart is a meaningful solar ultra-dissonance indicative of a broken authority or a destroyed power, as is the case with the disappearance from the stage of the world of this colossal historical character.  On 19 Brumaire, on the other hand, Jupiter received a trine from Mars and as for it, Uranus received a sextil from the Sun and Mercury.




First Abdication

Fontainebleau, April 6, 1814 at sunrise


 
Second Abdication

Fontainebleau June 22, 1815 0h30 pm


As for the personal configuration of the emperor, in addition to the return of Jupiter on natal Sun, already evoked, Saturn crosses the opposition Moon-Saturn, which is its main dissonance, the man being at the turning point of a cycle and a half of this Saturn moving away from culmination.
It is true that it had not yet arrived on the FC, as if measurement were not enough and whereas this transit looked quite like an end.  In Fontainebleau, the curtain had fallen but badly, the man was to bounce back, as if he was meant to go to the end of his fate.  There were the additional “Cent Jours” (Hundred Days):  the escape of the island of Elba on February 26, 1815, the return to the Tuileries on March 20, then the disaster of Waterloo (though it came very close to happening that he won, in spite of the superiority of the enemy, but it would not have changed the course of the history) on June 18.




And finally, we have the episode of the second abdication of June 22, 1815, where the man finds himself alone and naked.  It is the time of the last of the four oppositions of Jupiter.  Whereas,  with the first opposition, there was a semi-square Sun-Mars, it is a square Sun-Mars which activates this opposition Jupiter-Pluto, through a common square of the Sun to both and through the alignment of Mars to the Plutonian pole.  A configuration which can also be seen as a destructive conjunction Mars-Pluto hitting a Sun-Jupiter square, the first on the MC and the second on the Ascendant, recreating the dominant natal Napoleonic signature, the final breach of the imperial power.

With this unit, dissonant through Mars, there is a joint apparition of an opposition Venus-Saturn (the latter having been stationary at 12° Aquarius for the past two months) right on the meridian of the deposed emperor, the sesqui square Sun-Saturn having worked during the battle of Waterloo.  Mercury also moves on natal Saturn, and the Moon approaches its initial position. 

Sainte-Hélène...
Napoleon breathed his last there, in Longwood, on Saturday May 5, 1821 at 5h 51 pm, just while the Sun was disappearing into the sea.  The cause put forward for his death is a cancer that has developed on an old stomach ulcer (dissonance Moon - Cancer), but the possibility of poisoning, although not really taken seriously, is not entirely eliminated.
Sun around 15° Taurus, in dissonance with a square Uranus-Neptune to Pluto, Venus also involved,  this whole configuration strikes his own Jupiter-MC-Uranus triangle, at the time of a return of the same natal houses.

"Alive, Napoleon marked the world, dead, he owns it" (Chateaubriant.)

The man has disappeared but the gilded light of the fantastic historical element starts.  This transfiguration of the myth is waiting before appearing for the actual cycles of Jupiter to clear away the Bourbon’s scenario of "the usurper", a bloodthirsty despot sacrificing France to his personal ambition.

This page takes place around the conjunctions Jupiter-Neptune and Jupiter-Uranus of 1830-1831, while Neptune transits his natal Moon.  The voice of Sainte-Hélène is rising, the shadow of the emperor hovers, the legend undertaking a final conquest that takes over the whole continent. "... all French, English, Italian, Russian, German poets, Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, Béranger and Lamartine, Byron and Manzoni, Lermontov and Pouchkine, Stàgemann, Zeddlitz and Henri Heine pay a royal homage to the ghost of Sainte-Hélène, this time unbeatable because he is nothing but spirit.  Napoleon, nailed by the kings on his Atlantic gibbet, appears like the new Prometheus, the son of the Revolution, the avenger of the people, the soldier of freedom "(Aubry Octave.)
One could quote so many other glorifying writers:  Nerval, Stendhal, Vigny... all sensitive to the image of a European demiurge in charge of the future.  In their trace, a plethora of Epinal images, plates decorated with napoleonic subjects, small statues...

- "I want my ashes to be thrown on the edges of the Seine, among the French I loved so much"

"Sleep, we will seek you out..." prophesied Hugo, and the Irish deputy O' Connell followed by the British Minister for the Foreign Affairs Lord Palmerston contributed to the event.

Already, the arrival of Louis-Philippe in 1830 inaugurates his rehabilitation: a restitution of his statue at the top of the Vendôme column, the completion of the Arc de Triomphe on the square Etoile.  It is a kind of resurrection that the remaining soldiers have lived, holding a vigil next to his coffin on the night of December 14 to 15, 1840 and attending the procession from the Champs-Elysées to the Invalides.  The prince of Joinville, third son of Louis-Philippe, had to bring back the remains of Napoleon from Sainte-Hélène.  A perfect astral filiation since he is born in Neuilly on August 14, 1818 at 1 40 pm, his Sun in sector IX being superimposed on the one of the emperor, within 1°;  and on that day, a conjunction Sun-Saturn at 24° Sagittarius was trining their common solar position.  A few days later, a Jupiter Saturn conjunction in the first degrees of Capricorn came up again, trine with the one which  had occurred in 1802 in the first degrees of Virgo.  The Napoleon myth was becoming part of history for ever.
  

One was to realize it, this time with regrets, with the coup of his nephew on December 2, 1851, when Napoleon III established the Second Empire.  Here, the historical leap was the one of the Saturn-Uranus cycle, of an authoritarian nature: the passage of the conjunction of 1805 to the next one of 1852.  Of a Napoleon the Great to a "Napoleon the Small", but what a story the life of the first one!

                                                                                              Translated by Françoise Moderne
                                                                                              -Pignan - France - June 21, 2005


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