Admirers in the United States saw Bolívar as a new Washington and named no fewer than five American towns after him, as well as hundreds of babies. A few decades later, it was the turn of South American independence leader Simón Bolívar, who fired imaginations across the Atlantic world, and drew thousands of Europeans to fight in his armies (many, admittedly, were soldiers left unemployed by the end of the Napoleonic Wars). He was, the Scots Magazine solemnly pronounced, “a man of sense and great integrity”. Washington made such a positive international impression that even in Britain, the country against which he was leading a violent rebellion, press coverage of him skewed towards the highly favourable. George Washington was one of the most prominent, especially during the dark moments of late 1776 when the American revolutionary cause seemed lost (“the times that try men’s souls” as Thomas Paine put it). “Foolish as we are,” wrote the Quartermaster General Lord Holland, “we cannot be so foolish as to go to war because Mr Boswell has been in Corsica.”īetween Paoli and Zelensky, many other figures have received similar treatment in Western media.
The Scot led a funding effort that raised more than £14,000 – a huge sum at the time – to purchase arms for the Corsicans and he also mounted a publicity campaign to urge British intervention in the struggle. Boswell claimed he had no more believed such a person could exist in the world than “seas of milk” or “ships of amber”.
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He went on to publish a wildly popular and breathlessly adulatory portrait of the man, full of quirky details (Paoli’s amazing memory, his inability to sit still). In 1765, an as-yet unknown young Scot named James Boswell travelled to Corsica to meet Paoli, and nearly melted in his presence. Pitt the Elder mused that he was “one of those men who are no longer to be found but in the Lives of Plutarch”. The English poet Anna Barbauld called him a “godlike Man”. Dashing and brave, handsome and popular, fighting against superior French forces, Paoli sent foreign observers into raptures. In the mid-18th century, a soldier named Pasquale Paoli led Corsica in a struggle for independence, first against the Republic of Genoa and then against France, which defeated him and annexed the island in 1768 (and still rules it today). Consider a man now largely forgotten outside his homeland. Many have played much the same role, going back quite far in time. The story is about Volodymyr Zelensky – but not only him. So appealing is he, and so insistent his calls for military intervention, that some of these same commentators even seem ready to risk global war to support him. Western commentators compare him to legendary figures of the past. The leader of a country on the periphery of Europe, one fighting against impossible odds to preserve its independence against ruthless foreign aggressors, achieves international fame.
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