“And what would Monsieur Goethe say to that?”

Famously, Napoleon and Goethe met at Erfurt for an hour’s interchange in October 1808. They discussed many topics, each of which Napoleon would often end with the above “Qu’en dit Monsieur Goet.?”

Here I want to focus on one of Napoleon’s remarks to Goethe:

You, for instance, ought to write a tragedy about the death of Caesar one really worthy of the subject, a greater one than Voltaire’s [La Mort de César, presumably]. That could be the finest task you ever undertook. You would have to show the world how Caesar would have been its benefactor, how everything would have turned out quite differently if he had been given time to carry out his magnificent plans. You must come to Paris; I absolutely insist on it. We have a larger view of things there!

Ah, the certainty of those “would’s” and “magnificent plans”! And that phrase, “we have a larger view there,” said to the man who had written the first part of Faust by then.

Ah, “the glittering garb of societal relevance belongs to the rented costume of rhetoric,” Hans Blumenberg, the philosopher, said of an essay by historian, Reinhart Koselleck.

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Source.

https://www.scribd.com/document/511461854/Goethe-s-Encounter-With-Napoleon-2-Accounts-1808

http://the-tls.com/history/twentieth-century-onwards-history/die-ontologische-distanz-briefwechsel-hans-blumberg-reinhart-koselleck-der-riss-in-der-zeit-stefan-ludwig-hoffmann-book-review-angus-nicholls