Today's Wisdom - Napoleon, Merkel and Radioactivity

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By 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte had been reshaping Europe by force for the better part of two decades and had arrived at a position that no European ruler had occupied since Charlemagne. France directly controlled or held as client states nearly the entire continent, from Spain in the west to the borders of Russia in the east, and Napoleon's military reputation was so formidable that the announcement of his approach had on more than one occasion caused opposing armies to hesitate before a single shot was fired. The engine that made all of this possible was the Continental System, Napoleon's attempt to strangle Britain economically by closing every European port to British trade. Britain, protected by the English Channel and the Royal Navy, was the one adversary he could not reach militarily, and the blockade was his alternative strategy. The problem was that the Continental System hurt the countries enforcing it almost as much as it hurt Britain, and Russia, whose economy depended heavily on exporting grain and timber to British merchants, was bleeding steadily under its terms. Tsar Alexander I had signed the Treaty of Tilsit with Napoleon in 1807 and agreed to honour the blockade, but by 1810 Russia had quietly resumed trading with Britain under neutral flags, and both men knew it. Napoleon regarded this as a betrayal that could not go unanswered. A Russia that defied him openly was a crack in the entire edifice of his European order, a signal to every other reluctant ally that French power had limits. He began planning the largest military operation of his career.

On June 24, 1812, Napoleon led the Grande Armée across the Niemen River into Russian territory. It numbered somewhere between 450,000 and 600,000 men drawn from across the French empire and its allied states. French, Polish, Italian, Prussian, Austrian, and a dozen other nationalities marched under a single command, the largest army ever assembled in European history to that point. Napoleon had broken every major European power in the field and he expected to do the same again. The Russians did not cooperate with the script. Rather than standing and fighting near the border where French tactical brilliance and the shock of a concentrated assault could be brought to bear, the Russian armies under generals Barclay de Tolly and later Kutuzov retreated eastward, drawing the Grande Armée deeper into Russia. The French army marched through a landscape the retreating Russians had stripped of food, fodder, and shelter, burning their own villages and crops behind them to deny any means of living off the land. Disease and starvation began killing men before they had fought a single battle, and the supply lines stretching back to the Niemen grew longer and more fragile with each additional mile.

Napoleon finally got his battle at Borodino on September 7, a grinding frontal collision of extraordinary violence that left 70,000 men dead or wounded in a single day and settled nothing. The Russians retreated in good order and the French, though technically the victors, had no reserves left to pursue and destroy them. When Napoleon entered Moscow a week later, expecting the keys to the city and a delegation seeking terms, he found instead a city largely abandoned by its population. Russian agents had set fires throughout the city that destroyed three quarters of it and left the Grande Armée sheltering in the ruins of what was supposed to be its prize. Napoleon waited in the smouldering wreckage for five weeks, sending increasingly unanswered letters to Alexander and unwilling to accept that his enemy simply had no intention of surrendering. When he finally ordered the retreat on October 19 it was already too late in the year. The Russian winter arrived early and with exceptional ferocity, temperatures falling to minus thirty degrees. The Grande Armée, already weakened by disease and months of inadequate supply, disintegrated on the march. Russian cavalry and Cossack raiders harassed the flanks and rear constantly, men froze to death at night and were found in the morning still sitting upright at dead campfires, and horses collapsed and were eaten within hours of falling. At the crossing of the Berezina River in November, with Russian armies closing from two directions, thousands drowned or were cut down on the banks. Of the half million men who had crossed the Niemen in June, somewhere between 400,000 never returned. Napoleon raced back to Paris in December leaving the largest army in European history in the Russian snow and, with it, the myth of his invincibility that had held his entire empire together. Prussia switched sides within weeks, Austria followed, and the coalition that would eventually finish him at Waterloo was already assembling before the last frostbitten survivors had staggered back across the Niemen.

Angela Merkel grew up on the wrong side of history's most famous wall. The daughter of a Lutheran pastor who had controversially moved his family from Hamburg to East Germany shortly after her birth in 1954, she was raised in the communist state, studied physics at the University of Leipzig, and earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry in East Berlin. She learned, from childhood, the particular survival skill that defines life under authoritarian surveillance: how to operate within a system you did not choose, how to say enough without saying too much, and how to keep your own counsel in a world where candour was a liability. It was, as it turned out, an almost perfect preparation for the career that followed. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 Merkel was 35 years old and working as a researcher at the Academy of Sciences. She entered politics almost immediately, attaching herself to the newly formed Democratic Awakening party and then to Helmut Kohl's Christian Democratic Union, where the old chancellor famously referred to her as "das Mädchen," the girl, a condescension that would age rather poorly. By 2005 she was Chancellor of Germany, the first person from the former East to hold the office, and she would remain there for sixteen years.

What made Merkel so formidable was precisely what made her so difficult to write about in the language journalists prefer. She had no grand ideology, no sweeping historical vision, no Thatcherite certainty or Churchillian rhetoric. She was, by instinct and by training, a scientist, and she approached political problems the way a scientist approaches an experiment: gathering data, testing hypotheses, resisting the pull of ideology, and revising conclusions when the evidence demanded it. Her political method was described by admirers as pragmatism and by critics as an absence of conviction, and both were partially right. She had reversed course on nuclear energy after Fukushima, on the minimum wage after years of opposing it, and most dramatically on the question of refugees, when in September 2015 she opened Germany's borders to over a million asylum seekers at the height of the Syrian crisis, uttering the three words that defined and divided her legacy in equal measure: "Wir schaffen das," we can do this. It was, depending on your politics, either the most courageous decision of her chancellorship or the most reckless, and the reverberations of it are still reshaping European politics today.

The crises that defined Merkel's sixteen years in office read like a stress test designed for a different, lesser politician. The 2008 financial crash, the Greek debt crisis, the rise of Putin, Brexit, Trump, the refugee wave, and finally the Covid pandemic, each one arriving before the last had been resolved. She managed the Eurozone crisis with a cold-eyed insistence on fiscal discipline that infuriated southern European governments but also almost certainly saved the single currency from collapse. She handled Trump with a quiet disdain that she never quite bothered to disguise, and her relationship with Putin, forged partly through their shared fluency in each other's languages, allowed her to maintain a channel of communication with Moscow that no other Western leader possessed. She stepped down in December 2021 after sixteen years with approval ratings above 70 percent, the longest-serving leader in the democratic world at the time of her departure. The arguments about her legacy, about the energy dependency on Russia she presided over, the military underfunding she tolerated, the migration crisis she triggered, are genuinely serious ones. But they are arguments conducted in the shadow of a politician who, for a generation, was the indispensable centre of gravity in European politics, the person every other leader ultimately had to reckon with, and who achieved that position not through charisma or ideology but through the relentless, grinding application of intelligence, patience, and an almost inhuman capacity for work.

Radioactivity was discovered by accident on a cloudy day in February 1896 when French physicist Henri Becquerel put some uranium salts and photographic plates wrapped in black paper into a desk drawer and forgot about them. He had been trying to prove that phosphorescent materials emitted X-rays, Wilhelm Röntgen's recent discovery that had electrified the scientific world, by exposing uranium salts to sunlight and seeing if they would darken photographic plates through the paper. Several overcast days in late February forced him to postpone his experiments, so he stashed everything in a drawer and waited for sunshine. On March 1, either out of thoroughness or boredom, he developed the plates anyway, expecting to see nothing or maybe a faint image from residual phosphorescence. Instead, the image was sharp and clear, meaning the uranium was emitting radiation constantly without any external energy source. He reported this astonishing finding to the French Academy of Sciences the next day, March 2, 1896, and inadvertently launched the atomic age. Becquerel published seven papers on the phenomenon in 1896 alone, but he moved on to other projects within a few years, leaving it to Marie and Pierre Curie to realize what he'd actually discovered. Marie Curie, a Polish immigrant studying physics at the Sorbonne, chose radioactivity as the subject of her doctoral thesis and discovered that the intensity of radiation depended on the amount of uranium present, meaning something intrinsic to the uranium atom itself was producing the energy. She found that thorium also emitted radiation and coined the term "radioactivity" to describe the phenomenon, then she and her husband Pierre noticed that pitchblende, a uranium-containing ore, was far more radioactive than pure uranium, suggesting the presence of unknown elements.

Working in a freezing, poorly ventilated shed across from their laboratory, the Curies spent years processing tons of pitchblende to isolate tiny amounts of two new elements they named polonium, after Marie's homeland Poland, and radium, from the Latin word for "ray." In 1902, Marie finally isolated one decigram of radium chloride from several tons of ore, determining its atomic weight as 225, and her doctoral thesis in 1903 was called the greatest scientific contribution ever made in a doctoral dissertation. The Curies shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Becquerel, and Marie won a second Nobel in 1911 for isolating pure radium, becoming the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields. But they had no idea they were killing themselves. Pierre liked to carry a sample of radium in his waistcoat pocket to show friends, and Marie kept a vial of radium salt by her bed that glowed in the darkness like a nightlight. The notebooks they used to document their 1898 discoveries are still so radioactive today that they're stored in lead-lined boxes, and anyone who wants to consult them at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris must sign a waiver acknowledging the radiation risk. It takes 1,620 years for radium's radioactivity to reduce by half, meaning those notebooks will remain dangerous for millennia. The Curies suffered from constant fatigue, burns on their hands, and mysterious illnesses they attributed to overwork, not realizing they were experiencing radiation poisoning. Pierre died in 1906 after being run over by a horse-drawn cart, but Marie continued working with radium for nearly three more decades before dying in 1934 at age 66 from aplastic anemia, a form of leukemia caused by radiation damage to her bone marrow.

The public, unaware of the dangers, embraced radium as a miracle substance. In the 1920s, companies sold radium face creams promising eternal youth, radium water claiming to cure everything from arthritis to impotence, and radium-laced chocolates marketed as health tonics. Factories across the United States hired thousands of young women, some as young as 11, to paint watch dials and military instruments with glow-in-the-dark radium paint, paying them well and assuring them the work was perfectly safe. To create fine lines on tiny watch faces, supervisors instructed the women to lick their paintbrushes to a sharp point between strokes, and the women, called "ghost girls" because they left work glowing with radium dust, saw no reason to object. By the mid-1920s, the women started falling ill with bizarre symptoms: their teeth fell out, their jaws literally rotted away from necrosis, their bones fractured spontaneously, and they developed anemia and tumors. The discovery of radioactivity revolutionized physics, medicine, and our understanding of matter itself, but it also revealed that scientific progress often runs ahead of our understanding of consequences.

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