David A. Bell, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). 352 pp., $30.00.

WHAT MAKES leadership charismatic? That question has loomed large since the eighteenth century with transformations wrought by revolution and mass politics. Political hero worship has ties with authoritarian temptations, but it also has a place in the electoral politics of constitutional democracies with their demand for persuasion. Charisma inspires more effectively than rational argument, let alone the currently diminished claims of technical expertise or standing within bureaucratic hierarchies. 

In Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, David A. Bell gallops through the eighteenth century to trace the modern emergence of charismatic leadership when romanticism met revolutionary politics. Heroic figures captured popular imagination not only through impressive exploits but a sense among their admirers that they expressed the spirit of the age. Indeed, George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Simon Bolivar, along with Pasquale Paoli and Toussaint Louverture, seemed to guide that spirit. Bell argues that bonds they had with their followers enhanced their ability to shape events and gained them a heroic status as founders of a new order, even if, in some cases, a transitory one. These men on horseback created a new image of leadership in the age of revolution that lasted beyond it. Bell, who is a historian at Princeton University, has written several important books, but this is by far his most ambitious. The result is a superb study.

CHARISMA ORIGINALLY meant a gift of divine favor that subordinated an individual or group to god’s will. Like genius, which referred first to an inspiring spirit or temperament rather than the person who possessed it, the word’s meaning changed. Max Weber secularized charisma during the 1920s as a power-conferring authority to describe a phenomenon he associated with the new demands of mass politics, though his usage captured a long-established dynamic. But conditions that made charismatic leadership a force predated the expanded suffrage, increased literacy, and growing popular media of the late nineteenth century. The parallel phenomenon of celebrity filled an eighteenth-century lacuna left by waning religious enthusiasm. Rather than producing a disenchantment of the world as Weber theorized, Enlightenment secularism redirected the focus of devotion to extraordinary figures who captured the public imagination. Print and visual culture, sometimes including cheap memorabilia, spread their fame. The process fostered a personal identification with heroes which became the hallmark of the charismatic leadership Bell describes as followers bound themselves to his cause.

Paoli made a compelling romantic hero, especially once the greatest biographer of the day popularized his exploits. Now largely forgotten, Paoli’s story inspired more famous imitators who became the models others later followed. Leading Corsica’s effort to secure independence from the Republic of Genoa, which had ruled the island for five centuries, Paoli combined the country’s presidency with command of its army. Genoa, controlling only a few coastal fortresses, transferred its claims to France in a secret 1764 treaty. The French began their campaign to conquer Corsica four years later after declaring its annexation and liquidating the opposition Paoli directed in 1769.

The struggle captured European attention. Besides the geopolitical implication French control over Corsica had for the Mediterranean, popular resistance evoked memories of classical antiquity in a virtuous struggle for republican independence against massive odds. Paoli seemed, in William Pitt the Elder’s description, “one of those men who are no longer to be found but in the Lives of Plutarch.” Bell highlights James Boswell’s role as his publicist which anticipated how the writer later turned a lexicographer, critic, and occasional writer of Anglican sermons into the heroic man of letters Samuel Johnson. Arriving in search of adventure, the credulous Boswell met Paoli who became a cultured and informative host after early suspicion. Their relationship played to the younger man’s infatuation with the picturesque. Close observation enabled him to capture the intimacy of the Corsican leader’s relationship with his followers. Paoli landed a promoter for more than his nation’s cause.

Boswell’s Account of Corsica quickly became a commercial success on its publication in 1768. Reigning monarchs like Frederick the Great and Peter the Great had drawn adulation for their exploits as rulers and generals, but presenting a republican insurgent this way marked an important change. The phrase “father of his country” generally followed from equating the king’s relationship with his realm to that of a father and his family, but here it evokes the role of the founder in an echo of antiquity. Boswell’s intimate portrait reinforced by other writers and the visual culture of prints also reflected its own time with an emphasis on the feeling that bound followers to their hero. Appealing to an age of sensibility, it reframed customary idioms of representation in a new way that sold Paoli as a man of sense with whom people could identify. That identification reinforced his standing as a statesman exiled in London. What Bell describes as a media revolution of the eighteenth century turned a celebrity into a charismatic leader by giving him a standing long reserved to kings and princes. 

Paoli’s renown provided Americans, who had named a town in Pennsylvania for him, a ready comparison for Washington and their own revolution. The high public reputation Washington enjoyed from his arrival to command the Continental Army outside Boston in June 1775 weathered setbacks and defeats in a war struggle whose outcome remained in question until the final campaign at Yorktown in 1781. He embodied the American Revolution. Although brave and decisive, particularly in crossing the Delaware at a pivotal moment in late 1776, Washington was hardly among the great commanders of the day. Rather, his greatest triumph was simply to maintain the Continental Army as a fighting force and raise its effectiveness until victory won in cooperation with the French compelled Britain to capitulate. Nevertheless, the combination of political skill, management of the war effort, and personal leadership made him the indispensable man for the glorious cause of independence.

WASHINGTON FIT the role particularly well as the epitome of an English gentleman translated into the rougher, competitive environment of Colonial Virginia. An exceptionally able horseman, Washington stood taller than most contemporaries and drew notice for his strength and athleticism. Politeness and self-possession defined a persona matched by a commanding physical presence. Frontier exploits had made his reputation, but he also learned from British officers during the Seven Years War and internalized aspects of their professional military ethos. He fashioned himself, in the title of Stephen Brumwell’s biography, into a “gentleman warrior” who impressed Americans, Europeans, and Indians alike. Benjamin Rush, later a critic of Washington who privately urged his removal from command, believed that his martial deportment was so impressive that “there is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet de chambre by his side.”

Standing for election to Virginia’s House of Burgesses, not to mention his rise through colonial society, taught Washington other lessons. Colonial elections, like parliamentary elections in Britain, involved appealing for support, often from social inferiors, both face-to-face and on the hustings. Gaining the confidence of voters counted for more than persuading them on any particular issue. Washington imbibed the give and take of politics while carrying earlier lessons from military service on the value of inspiring confidence into a different context. Charisma enabling him to command any room he entered differed from the charismatic leadership Bell explores, but it won Washington the loyalty of aides and subordinates whose efforts became a force multiplier during his command. It also gave admirers the material to fashion him as a national hero.

“The burgeoning cult of the commander in chief derived less from his own achievements,” Bell argues, “than from the longings of his fellow citizens.” Washington filled a space left by the toppling of George III as a republican icon fighting for independence. Paoli offered a recent template, along with Roman models and biblical figures like Moses and Joshua, that Americans used to make him a particular kind of hero by amplifying personal virtues. Only Benjamin Franklin, the celebrity savant who turned a performance as an American original at the Court of Versailles to diplomatic advantage, matched Washington’s fame. But as the paradigmatic man on horseback, the general personified charismatic leadership in the American Revolution.

Washington put his own stamp on the image. British observers who likened the American Revolution’s early stages in New England to an earlier struggle at home during the 1640s cast Washington in the unwelcome role of Oliver Cromwell, the “bold, bad man” who rose to lead parliament’s army, behead Charles I, and later seized power himself. Rather than Cromwell or Julius Caesar, Washington imitated Cincinnatus. Besides stepping down from commanding the army, Washington preempted a conspiracy at Newburgh by officers aiming to demand concessions from Congress. His actions helped preserve civilian authority at a difficult moment. George III told the painter Benjamin West that such restraint would make Washington “the greatest man in the world.” Serving only two terms as president later set a lasting precedent that showed him the servant of the fledgling state rather than its master. It became part of the brand.

Washington’s legend gained especial purchase in France among enthusiasts for the American cause, many of whom volunteered to serve under Washington in the fight for independence. He became a larger-than-life figure drawn from heroic antiquity. The neoclassical turn in art captured a sensibility that bolstered Washington’s heroic standing. He offered a republican role model just as monarchy fell into crisis when the French state failed to manage either finance or governance. Revolution in France then brought forth new leaders as its votaries beheaded the king, abolished the monarchy, and unleashed a prolonged European war.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, a Corsican who left home to pursue a military career in France which began before the French Revolution, admired Paoli before meeting and then breaking with the older man. He also paid respects to Washington and ordered public mourning on the American’s death. By then, Napoleon had seized power over the French Republic as the most successful and politically astute of its generals. Unlike Paoli and Washington, he deliberately crafted his own legend from well-known victories. The army Napoleon led in Italy had two newspapers—one for his soldiers and the other for civilians at home—to build a personal following. He recruited artists like Jean-Antoine Gros and Jacques-Louis David to paint him as the republic’s heroic victor. Theatrical gestures bolstered emotional ties with soldiers that reinforced the carefully framed narrative of a virtuous genius committed to the common good. Who else could save the French Republic from the politicians who had failed it?

Napoleon filled a gap that involved more than a power vacuum from cycles of revolutionary unrest. Beheading Louis XVI and rejecting monarchy shattered a political culture focused on the king and opened space for men striving to make the world entirely anew. A Committee of Public Safety ruled France, but alongside its collective leadership, a personality cult grew around Maximilien Robespierre. His fall and execution at the height of a reign of terror discredited the idea of personal power even as the French continued seeking a replacement for the king as a focus for their loyalty. Bell notes that no civilian leader under the Directory that ruled from 1795 to 1799 drew a significant personal following. Instead, the army, opened to talent by the flight of noble officers into exile and protracted war, brought forth men who animated the public.

Charisma fostered by military success and careful publicity aided the coup that brought Napoleon to power as First Consul, a title drawn from Ancient Rome. Peace with Austria and then Britain consolidated his authority by ending the strains of what had become an inconclusive war. His rule ended revolutionary upheaval and normalized relations with the Catholic Church. But rather than following the lead of George Monck, the English general who managed Charles II’s restoration, or Washington’s example, Napoleon gathered power to himself as a new Caesar. His brother Lucien made the parallel explicit in a pamphlet he instigated. Republic gave way to empire as Napoleon leaned in.

Napoleon envisioned ruling “with absolute, unmediated, and unquestioned authority over an adoring people thanks to the sheer force of his personality.” Propaganda underpinned the regime by elevating his personal abilities and undoubted military triumphs. Those triumphs spared France the cost of prolonged war laid instead on the vanquished and provided spoils to reward loyal followers. Napoleon’s modernization of government and rewriting the legal code highlighted his genius as an enlightened ruler. The bond he had with admirers, however, could not be transferred to the empire as an institution that depended upon him for its legitimacy. Bell astutely points out this failure as a key weakness of “regimes founded on a single person’s charisma.” A true founding required more than Napoleon could provide.

THE DRAMA of his story, however, pales beside the unlikely one of the ex-slave who became the Spartacus of the Caribbean for liberating Saint-Domingue from the French and ending slavery there. Toussaint Louverture not only inspired his followers in Haiti but also won admiration from readers in Europe and America captivated by his exploits. Subsequent neglect reflects both Haiti’s tragic history and the limited sources for understanding his appeal to the Haitians he led. Bell focuses on the charismatic authority Louverture gained over Europeans and North Americans while noting how it consolidated, for a time, his power at home. A legend constructed in print aided leadership on the ground.

Real accomplishments and a compelling story underpinned the legend. A freed slave known for his horsemanship and later called the “Centaur of the Savannah,” Louverture had a key role in the 1791 slave revolt and kept it alive by organizing resistance to colonial authorities. Spain, which ruled the other half of the island and had joined the coalition against Revolutionary France, gave him a military commission, but a French officer persuaded him to switch sides as the republic had abolished slavery. Their relationship brought him to prominence as Louverture led his men in the colony’s defense and protected whites from vengeance by mixed-race troops. He helped restore stability in the name of a French republic now committed to emancipation.

Louverture died a captive in France after Napoleon betrayed him, but earlier French officials promoted him as a friend to both whites and the revolution. Like Napoleon to whom he was sometimes compared, he worked to shape a public image that bolstered his standing. Personal warmth reinforced the impression of his military prowess and writings arguing for black equality. Ironically, racial prejudice made his merits stand out all the more in comparison with other Haitians. Believing his own publicity, however, made Louverture overreach in ways that forced him from power as a French expedition arrived to bring the island under control. “Encouraged from the start by Europeans to see himself as a providential savior figure,” Bell argues, pushed him on an authoritarian path that ended in exile. His story, like Napoleon’s, showed how charismatic authority rested upon enthusiasm for the leader.

SIMON BOLIVAR, who twice sought refuge in Haiti during his protracted struggle for Latin American independence, made charismatic leadership the foundation of post-colonial governance. Equality ruled out monarchy and its trappings, but he also believed South America’s character precluded British or American-style constitutionalism and demanded instead firm governance. Legitimate power, Bolivar told the Haitian president-for-life Alexandre Pétion who had sheltered him, could derive only from the free acclamation of fellow citizens. Bell rightly emphasizes the word “acclamation” as Bolivar insisted that national unity rested upon the popular devotion that gave a leader the authority to pursue the public good without law constraining him. The example he left putting these principles into practice had a lasting impact.

The eldest son of a prominent Venezuelan family who lost both parents as a child, Bolivar showed little early ambition, but that changed after extended travel in Europe. Napoleon, along with Washington and the Haitian regime, shaped his own evolving understanding of power even as he rejected aspects of the models they provided. Like many autodidacts conscious of their limited formal education, Bolivar read widely. Indeed, Bell describes these men on horseback as engaging ideas at a level that puts today’s public figures to shame. Bolivar was the most intellectual among them, albeit in an idiosyncratic way refracted by the prism of South America’s culture and emphasized by its distinctiveness with European, African, and indigenous influences. How did Enlightenment thought and romantic aspirations fit that world? Earlier reforms to enhance royal authority had created a further split by replacing office-holding creole elites, like Bolivar’s family, with men appointed from Spain. During a visit to Rome in 1805, Bolivar swore never to rest until he had broken the chains that bound his homeland to Spain.

The opportunity for revolt came when Napoleon’s seizure of Spain in 1808 shattered imperial governance. Local committees in various colonies refused to acknowledge the main junta in Cadiz and pledged direct loyalty to the imprisoned Ferdinand VII. Francisco de Miranda, known as “the Precursor” for his revolutionary efforts, declared a Venezuelan republic in 1811. With Bolivar among its leading figures, the republic fought a vicious civil war against Venezuelans loyal to the Spanish crown. Similar uprisings occurred elsewhere in Latin America. Miranda’s surrender and imprisonment in Spain opened Bolivar’s path to become Venezuela’s liberator in 1813, but the republic fell a year later.

A string of victories after he returned from exile in late 1816 won Bolivar control over most of northern South America. Diplomacy had brought chieftains leading irregular troops under his command while careful use of the press built his reputation as supreme leader. Bolivar reached the peak of his career liberating Peru. Fame abroad consolidated his standing at home. The love of the people empowered Bolivar to rule for their benefit and unite a fractious society. Popular art and public ritual celebrated the liberator, but the acclamation that held him in power faded and resistance grew by the late 1820s. Bolivar faced opposition as the Gran Colombia he had established fragmented. Driven again into exile, he died of tuberculosis in 1830 at a town on the Caribbean shore.

Bolivar bequeathed South America a legacy of charismatic military leaders backed by their troops competing for power. It put a populist spin in practice on a combination of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the general will and the prestige military victory conferred. Bolivar thought leadership exercised by great men like him empowered by popular devotion could take the place of the republican virtue he believed his countrymen lacked. But government founded on personal will rather than law or monarchical legitimacy made for instability. Reliance on a charismatic leader to unite a fractious people became the tragic flaw of Latin America that impeded the emergence of political order and governance under impartial law.

THE AGE of revolution provided the environment for the charismatic leadership Bell explores to develop. Romanticism gave the hero worship it involved fuel to burn even as it inspired movements that created heroes. Passionate commitment, or feelings in a slightly lower key, fashioned a personal bond even over great distances as admirers made leaders the repository for their hopes. Much the same happened later with “the people” or “the nation” as a collective protagonist in history’s supposed onward march. Charismatic leadership involved more than just men on horseback who evoked figures from classical antiquity in ways that highlighted the seeming inadequacies of the more recent past. It also operated within a widening sphere of public debate even before mass politics while anticipating the twentieth-century phenomenon of political religion that cast revolutionaries and dictators as secular prophets.

Weber’s contemporary and fellow sociologist Emile Durkheim missed something important by dismissing charisma as “society creating sacred things out of ordinary ones” by elevating men who capture “the principle aspirations that move it.” His take has a passive tone at odds with historical experience. One need not share Thomas Carlyle’s view of history as the biography of great men to recognize that individuals do shape events, often decisively and in unexpected ways, as Donald Trump has recently demonstrated. Charismatic leaders translate accomplishment into acclamation, typically using media both old and new to connect with followers. Persuasion and seizing the moment to act translates accomplishments into the acclaim that confers authority, at least so long as it can be maintained.

Charismatic leadership guided reform movements along with revolutions. Andrew Jackson, a true man on horseback, led and symbolized a populist wave that changed the United States in the late 1820s. Two other lawyers had a similar impact across the Atlantic. Henry Brougham deployed a blend of parliamentary oratory, courtroom success, and deft management of the press to build a coalition behind political reform that transformed Britain. The political realignment he crafted established the Liberal Party as a dominant force until the 1880s. Daniel O’Connell mobilized Irish Catholics during the same years into a force that compelled Britain to end religious qualifications excluding them from the political nation. He transformed an elite-dominated protest movement for Catholic Emancipation into a mass organization committed to working within constitutional politics and the representative system. They present a different kind of charismatic leadership from Bell’s subjects, but one equally important to understanding the modern world.

William Anthony Hay is a Professor of History at Mississippi State University and is currently writing a history of British strategy in the American Revolution.