Better of Two Evils?

 In“Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte,” Shelley selects the traditional sonnet form to express his complex sentiments concerning the reign of Napoleon and the political state of France after his deposition. The poet opens with the exclamation, “I hated thee, fallen tyrant!” and although he labels the ruler despotic, his choice of the past tense hints at the volta to come later in line 11. Admonishing Napoleon for his dedication to military conquest, which he calls “frail and bloody pomp,” he looks back with nostalgia on the revolutionary principle of Liberty—a reaction consistent with his idealistic political stance. This appreciation for ideologies lauded in the Revolution eventually stirs Shelley to renounce his hatred for Napoleon after he witnesses the resurrection of France’s previous political powerhouses—the Church and the Monarchy. As much as Shelley despised the “Force and Fraud” of the emperor’s reign, he prefers Napoleon to the pre-revolutionary politics dictated by the Catholic Church, an institution espousing “bloody Faith, the foulest birth of Time.” In this comparison of two evils, Shelley eventually chooses the atheistic principles of Napoleon’s reign because he considers any regime based on Christianity to be the “eternal foe” of Virtue.