Today, if you really want to tar somebody’s ideas, you compare that person to Hitler. But, who were the people that were used as references before Hitler?
Some guesses on my part:
Did any of these people (or others) have the near universal status as the most wicked man in history that Hitler holds today?
Napoleon would be a big choice. In the United States, he’s remember with some interest as a symbol of a Romanic era, sort of like the Gone With the Wind and The Civil War. But he was responsible for vast, destructive, continent-spanning war which left millions dead.
Louis XIV, in his day.
Imperialists of a few centuries ago were often compared to Julius Caesar.
Mr A.T. Hun was widely used as the classic example of murdering barbarian. Hun was used a derogatory term for Germans in WWI.
Nero has been for centuries a byword for wickedness. This is probably because, although he was far less wicked than Caligula, he was the first Roman emperor to actively persecute the Christians.
King Herod was the embodiment of evil for Christians. In the Morality plays he stalks around the stage boasting, swearing, and behaving generally like a mad tyrant. The Sultan of the Turkish Empire (or the Great Turk) was also depicted as a monster of evil and cruelty in the West.
Back in the mid to late 1700’s it was Bill O’Reilly, but back then he was going by Baron Munchausen.
Honest.
The works of Macaulay contain many references to Napoleon as the vile monster who enslaved half of Europe. Whereas today, if anyone here thinks of Napoleon it’s of a tubby little man with one arm stuffed up his jumper saying “Not tonight, Josephine”.
For some reason, during the first half of the 20th century Napoleon was the person who the stereotypical “crazy person” usually thought he was, in popular culture in America. Was that also the case in the UK?
‘delusions of grandeur’ characters are usually dressed as Napoleon
Yes indeed.
Who is today’s stereotypical crazy person - here in the USA and elsewhere, perhaps?
I think Tom Cruise has made some serious inroads to being permanently remembered that way.
-Joe
Napoleon was never stereotyped as a “crazy person”, but rather, people who *thought * they were Napoleon were a stereotype for crazy people. There’s a difference.
Napoleon didn’t have delusions of grandeur because in his specific case, they weren’t delusions.
Yet, for some reason, you never see a “crazy person” dressed as Hitler.
Maybe you do - you just don’t see it in cartoons, because it wouldn’t be very funny.
Vlad the Impaler and Erzabet Bathory come to mind.
Vlad was a name to frighten with in his (brief) day, but hardly anybody outside the Carpathians and Balkans remembered him when Stoker wrote Dracula. In fact, Stoker seems to have chosen him for that reason: