29 April 2021Politics
Of Charles XII of Sweden, who was until 19 April this year the last head of state killed in battle, Voltaire said that he was half-Alexander the Great, half-Don Quixote. While in the trenches of Fredriksten, Norway, a bullet went through his head with the plopping sound of ‘a stone forcefully thrown into the mud’ (according to a witness). Death was instantaneous. Almost equally instantaneous were rumours that enemy fire might not be to blame, especially since the king’s death was followed by a coup d’état and a thorough reform of Sweden’s system of government. Kanem, a desert environment with temperatures averaging 40 degrees, is no Norway, but the demise there of Chad’s president Idriss Déby – reportedly from a bullet wound in the chest – bears a few resemblances to Charles’s Norwegian end. There are the rumours, the bullet wound, and the coup d’état – which is plainly what the rushed succession of Déby’s son Mahamat Idriss Déby is. But the deepest parallel is that, ultimately, Déby was a victim of his belief in the mythology of the warrior king, and in the indispensability of that mythology in what remains the fraying edge of France’s ghost empire in Africa. Déby would never have inspired Voltaire’s quip, but he quixotically saw himself as a Napoleonic Braveheart, a mix of French general and tribal captain. Last August, he anointed himself