The Word and the Throne: Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet to Napoleon III

*A retelling based on **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi, the authoritative history of the Faith's first century, which recounts Bahá'u'lláh's proclamation to the kings of the earth and the Tablets addressed to Napoleon III. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that history.*

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In the eighteen-sixties, no monarch in Europe stood higher in the eyes of the world than Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. He was the nephew of the first Napoleon, and he had restored the imperial throne to his family by a stroke of audacity. His armies had fought in the Crimea and in Italy; his capital, Paris, was being rebuilt into the most splendid city of the age; his court set the fashion of nations.

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When the powers of Europe gathered, his voice was among the loudest. He was, by the reckoning the world uses, one of the great men of his century — a sovereign at the height of his fame and his strength.

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And it was to this man, twice, that an exiled and imprisoned Persian nobleman addressed Himself: Bahá'u'lláh, who at that time possessed neither a throne, nor an army, nor a country, nor even His liberty.

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Shoghi Effendi, in *God Passes By*, sets the two episodes side by side, and their contrast is one of the most striking in the whole history of the Faith. Bahá'u'lláh had been driven from His native Persia, exiled to Baghdád, summoned to Constantinople, and banished again to Adrianople, a remote town in the European corner of the Ottoman Empire.

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From there, and afterward from the prison-city of 'Akká, He carried out a proclamation without parallel in the annals of religion: He announced, to the assembled sovereigns and rulers of the earth, that the Day of God had come and that the Promised One of all ages had appeared.

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To several He wrote individually — to the Sháh of Persia, to the Czar of Russia, to Queen Victoria, to the Pope in Rome — and to Napoleon, the foremost of them, He wrote not once but twice.

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The first Tablet was sent to the Emperor by way of one of the French officials in the East and reached his hands. In it, Shoghi Effendi recounts, Bahá'u'lláh put to the Emperor a direct test of his sincerity. Napoleon had let it be known that his heart bled for the oppressed and that he was the champion of the wronged peoples of the world.

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Bahá'u'lláh, Himself a wronged and oppressed exile at the hands of two governments, took the Emperor at his word and called upon him to look into the cause of One who had been driven without justice from land to land. It was an invitation to a man of power to be, in deed, what he claimed to be in word.

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What did the Emperor do with it? The history preserves the tradition of his response, and it is a small thing that revealed a great deal. Napoleon, it is said, having read or heard the message, flung it aside and dismissed it with a contemptuous remark — that if its Author were truly God speaking, then he, Napoleon, must be two Gods. It was the laughter of worldly power at a claim it could not weigh on its own scales.

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To the Emperor, the idea that an obscure Eastern prisoner might address him as an equal, much less from a station above his own, was simply absurd, and not worth a second thought. He turned back to his palaces and his armies and his alliances, and thought no more of it.

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But the matter did not end there. Bahá'u'lláh wrote to him a second time, and this second Tablet — revealed, Shoghi Effendi notes, after the Emperor had so scornfully rejected the first — is among the most arresting documents of the entire Bahá'í Revelation. In it Bahá'u'lláh laid bare the Emperor's self-conceit and the emptiness of his profession of concern for the oppressed. And then He uttered a warning of unmistakable plainness.

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Shoghi Effendi summarizes its burden: Bahá'u'lláh foretold that, for what the Emperor had done, his kingdom would be thrown into confusion, that his empire would pass from his hands, and that his power and his dominion would be lost — that commotion would seize his people, and that he would be punished for his pride.

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Consider the audacity of that warning, measured against the facts of the hour. The man who uttered it was a prisoner under the watch of Ottoman officials, with no means whatever to bring about its fulfilment. He commanded not a single soldier. He held not a foot of territory. The man to whom it was addressed ruled one of the strongest states on earth, with a great army, a powerful navy, and the prestige of the Napoleonic name.

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By every visible measure, the threat of the prisoner against the emperor was an absurdity — the kind of thing that a courtier would have read aloud for the amusement of the palace. Yet Bahá'u'lláh did not speak as a man hoping to be heard. He spoke, Shoghi Effendi makes clear, with the calm and settled certainty of One announcing a thing already determined. He was not threatening Napoleon; He was informing him.

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History then did with the Emperor exactly what the Tablet had said it would. Within a few short years, Napoleon III led France into a disastrous war against Prussia. In the summer of 1870 the great imperial army was outmanoeuvred and broken; that autumn, at the catastrophe of Sedan, the Emperor himself was taken prisoner on the field of battle, his army surrendered, and his throne collapsed. The Second Empire fell.

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Napoleon, the foremost monarch of Europe, the man who had tossed aside the Tablet of an exiled Persian prisoner with a sneer, ended his days in exile in England — a fallen sovereign without a crown, without an army, without a country, dying not long after in a foreign land. The kingdom had indeed been thrown into confusion; the empire had indeed passed from his hands; the proud dominion had indeed been lost. Every word had come true, and quickly.

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Shoghi Effendi's history draws the comparison out without sentiment, and the comparison is the heart of the matter. Here were two men. One sat upon the mightiest throne in Europe, surrounded by every emblem of power the world could furnish — and within a decade he had nothing.

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The other lay a prisoner behind the walls of 'Akká, stripped of homeland, wealth, and liberty — and the Cause He proclaimed from that prison went on to spread across the very continent the Emperor had ruled, and far beyond it, to lands and peoples the Emperor never knew. The throne that had looked eternal proved to be the most perishable thing imaginable. The Word that had issued from a prison endured.

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This is why the episode belongs so fittingly to a Feast of Sulṭán — Sovereignty. It draws, in a single stark contrast, the whole truth the Feast exists to teach: that there are two kinds of dominion in the world, and that they are not to be confused. There is the sovereignty of crowns and armies and treasuries, which dazzles the eye and which can vanish in an afternoon on a battlefield.

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And there is the sovereignty of the Word of God, which owns nothing the world can seize and therefore loses nothing when the world's grandeur crumbles — a sovereignty that needs no throne beneath it and no army behind it, because it stands above every throne on earth. Napoleon trusted in the first. He had it taken from him. Bahá'u'lláh possessed the second, and no power on earth could touch it.

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The detachment in the story is total. A man who had been robbed of homeland and freedom by the governments of His age asked nothing of Napoleon for Himself — not his protection, not his pity, not his intervention to ease an unjust exile. He called the Emperor, rather, to justice and to truth, and warned him of the consequence of his pride. There is in it not a trace of the supplicant. It is the voice of One who stood, even in chains, immeasurably above the throne He was addressing, and who knew it.

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The crown that had seemed so secure was gone; the empire had passed from his hands; and the Word of the Prisoner who had warned him remained — read today, in reverence, in languages the Emperor never spoke, on continents his ambassadors never named. That is the lesson the Tablet to Napoleon presses upon every reader: that the things the world calls power are borrowed and brief, and that the only sovereignty worth fearing, and worth serving, is the one no battle can take away.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **God Passes By** by Shoghi Effendi.*

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