Napoleon was Italian. Although he attended school in France after the age of thirteen, he had received a Latin-style education from childhood.
Even during the Egyptian expedition, though Gauls were renowned for their physical strength, everyone was exhausted after trekking through the desert for so long. Why should the donkeys be given to the scholars to ride? Many people could not understand it.
Caesar and Cicero, along with the eloquent Roman aristocrats, did not get along either. Civil officials thought military men were too barbaric, while military men thought civil officials were too pedantic. Their values differed.
Yet Napoleon Bonaparte brought scholars and soldiers together through the Egyptian expedition. Monge even married his daughter to a soldier who had been wounded and disabled in the Great Patriotic War.
In fact, the House of Bourbon and many aristocrats had treated scholars with courtesy, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the artists in Madame du Barry's salon, but the feeling was different.
Just as Napoleon treated Bourbon aristocrats with courtesy, they swore loyalty to him. Yet in private, they still secretly found the bodies of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI in the mass grave, and went to mourn at the tower where they had once been imprisoned.
Napoleon thought that marrying Marie Louise would gain him the Holy Roman Empire as an ally. In reality, it was only after his death that his family was formally accepted, becoming Europe's royalty and aristocracy.
Commoners might not understand what these aristocrats were thinking.
Camus and Sartre had both discussed how people survived in an absurd world. Modern Western history had continually organized human life into rational systems. Within this rational order of production, every individual was a replaceable screw on an assembly line, and individuality's irreplaceability and uniqueness were erased.
If the Middle Ages emphasized divine