George Lucas: “All democracies turn into dictatorships – but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea…”

This is the quote I’m referring to.

Caesar actually did take power through a coup (which is why this quote is so ironic), and the general population of Germany never supported Hitler during his rise to power, he was appointed by the previous Chancellor. The highest he ever got in the popular vote was 33%.

I don’t know much about Napoleon’s rise to power to be honest, but I doubt he fits Lucas’s idea of history either. Because he’d be, like, the one exception. This sort of misanthropic view of authoritarianism is ahistorical and just inaccurate.

Well, Napoléon too literally came into power with a coup lol. So not a very clever quote from M. Lucas.
He should have made his analogy with the fall of the Roman Republic but take Augustus (a literal emperor) as an exemple of a guy who comes into power without a coup, not Caesar. It makes more sense and there are a lot more parallels to be drawn between him and Palpatine.