As a young Senator, Palpatine was known as a bombastic and skilled orator, who regularly outwitted his foes with clever rhetorical arguments.
Ahh yes. Palpatine. The Enactor of Change, the Saviour of the Republic. He who repaid our adoration by moulding servitude into domination. Emperor! What a title! What a burden.
I suppose, amidst all those honours and privileges and the fame of being the Creator—or is it the Destroyer?—some forget how it came to be that he even rose to the position of First Citizen. No… what was it? First Chair. Who cares? It was First among the many, greatest of the great. Many forget how Palpatine the First rose to become the master of the universe.
Even more forget—or perhaps never even knew—that to wield such power cost… what would one even call it? Your soul? Your dignity? Let’s just say that the ‘master’ was ultimately made a slave.
You don’t get to tell admirals what to do when they can reduce your palace to rubble without setting foot on the planet. Or order around a general who is surrounded by a legion of his own loyal troops. Nor do you dictate terms to the Sith, as it turns out. Not if you value the breath in your lungs. These are the essential truths of politics, no matter the smoothness of one’s tongue. One might manipulate, one might flatter and deceive… but behind every title, every authority, lies the strength of brute force.
Palpatine was almost certainly the most gifted politician of his generation. Our generation. I still count myself among that generation, and I look upon his achievements with extraordinary envy. But there is such a thing as overreach, and Palpatine defied reason to think that he might actually control the Senate, the army, the navy and—insanity!—the Sith. All with the stroke of a pen.
No, it takes more than that to rule an empire. And that’s why he was—just as his successor has become—nothing more than a mere puppet of those who wield the only power that matters: military power.
—Pharus Harkati, Senator
Perhaps no figure looms larger in the history of the transition between the Old Republic and the Galactic Empire than Senator Caius Palpatine. It was he who engineered the vast conspiracy of interests which came to form the entity later known as the New Order Corporation (NOC), the neat and clean solution to the dirty problem of politics which many saw as having destabilised the entire republican system.
The very nature of the First Chair—the controlling arbiter of the fledgeling corporation which grew to replace the bureaucracy of the old democratic mechanisms of state—created a widespread secrecy which now makes understanding the specifics of Palpatine’s youth almost impossible. Even his career prior to his swearing in as a Senator has become a matter of debate. The history of this pivotal figure is likely to be shrouded in mystery indefinitely.
Even the early years of his ascent to the head of NOC—what most of the citizenry, even then, referred to as his imperial reign—are incredibly sparse for detail. It is largely surmised that the Imperial Security Bureau have worked hard to suppress the means by which he attained power. Whether this is to prevent a future usurpation of that power, or to hide the involvement of their own predecessors remains unknown. And it is likely that, while the New Order itself exists, such information will remain a tightly held secret.
On the other hand, what has been recorded in exquisite detail is his career as a member of the Galactic Senate, where he rose to prominence as an ambitious and effective advocate for the reformation of the galactic justice system. Whatever hesitation historians might now display toward Palpatine’s later grasp of the reins of power, such concern is clearly not apparent in regard to his early days as a Senator. Countless legal articles and arguments, public and private debates, even controversial declarations and Senate speeches, remain prominently within the public domain with easy access on the HoloNet.
Palpatine’s youth was marked by a fiery disposition and a passion for reform, particularly in the judicial arena. With little tolerance for the sluggish legislative methodology, Palpatine instead focused his efforts on a radical idea for the reformation of the judicial system itself. Some would undoubtedly suggest that his opposition toward the Jedi Order during the Clone Wars was a matter of cynical pragmatism, but ample evidence exists to suggest that his opposition to their dominance of the judicial arm of government extends into his very first political forays. He cannot be called a hypocrite in the realm of judicial oversight until he himself began to warp its purpose once he began engineering his new corporation.
For Palpatine, the Jedi were problematic not least because of the extralegal nature of their own status, but primarily because of the extent of their personal power. While the history of the Galactic Republic certainly explained why the Jedi had been granted such vaunted status, their several schisms and propensity toward factionalism indicated to him that they were in fact no different to any other flawed system. The Jedi, insofar as Palpatine was concerned, were a recipe for chaos and disorder. In other words, a threat to the very security they were meant to provide. While he spoke against them in the Senate, Palpatine was known to associate with many Jedi, and he clearly did not hold them in disdain individually. Only as a collective. In his view, the problem was not specific Jedi, but the Order itself and its place at the apex of galactic justice.
Palpatine favoured a system of bureaucratic governance, whereby political governors might be assigned to legislate and control the affairs of a given planet, or even regions of a planet like capital cities or industrial operations. And, critically, to whom the Jedi would report. The traditions of the Old Republic had long inferred that it was the right of a given Jedi to act essentially as such a governor themselves, dominating not only legal decisions and the application of justice but also a great deal of administrative direction as well. Palpatine felt that the oversight of such a system, given the insular nature of the Jedi Council, was frighteningly poor.
In his later years, Palpatine transitioned quite naturally toward all the pomp and ceremony accorded to his increased status within the Galactic Senate, eventually seeing him attain supremacy over his rivals and allies alike. As the so-called “emperor”, he achieved a status unrivalled in the history of the Old Republic.
The irony of Palpatine’s later dominance of a system with similarly shallow oversight should not go unnoticed, nor his eventual control of a bureaucratic system based on the very same sense of governance outlined in some of his earliest submissions in the Senate. Under the New Order, governors wield an enormous amount of authority, enforced not by the traditions of the Force of Others, but under the heel of the military. The NOC simply exchanged the figurehead of a Jedi for that of a governor.
Under the Old Republic, this authority was further symbolised by the lightsabre, the iconic weapon which represents the supernatural power of the Jedi. Under the New Order, authority was built upon military power. It was the strength of the Imperial Navy in particular, with governors frequently in league with an admiral or general who could enforce their will, which kept local systems in line.
As for Palpatine himself, it is understood that he did enjoy a brief period of time exercising almost absolute authority over the remnants of the Old Republic. Yet, his control remained bureaucratic, and it was not long before his enemies—most notably and infamously, the former Grand Admiral Galen Veich—began to apply enormous pressure upon the weakened Senate in order to extend the influence of the military. One by one, Palpatine’s puppet strings were severed, until he himself became a figure of derision among those admirals and generals who he once saw fit to command as he might a personal bodyguard.
Forced further from the political sphere, the position of First Chair was largely stripped of its legislative power, until Palpatine was finally declared an actual Emperor—perversely, a hollow title devoid of any practical power—in a grand formal ceremony on Coruscant. There is a supreme irony in the symbolism of his coronation: that upon the day of Caius Palpatine taking his seat upon the “throne” of the Galactic Empire he simultaneously reached the nadir of his political career. The imperial diadem literally represented his status as a servant to those he had once sought to dominate.
Ruling only as a figurehead, he had been outwitted and outmanoeuvred, relegated to a mere emblem of imperial hegemony. He was soon pressed from public view almost entirely, removed to the grand palaces at the Imperial Centre, appearing only to declare various festivities and proclaim changes to the law which had been long previously negotiated by the military apparatus which had come to dominate galactic politics. Without direct support from amongst the most powerful military figures, Palpatine had lost his grip on power entirely.
It is not known how Palpatine died, but most presume it was of natural causes. While a colourful variety of conspiracy theories remain, there seems little reason for any of his enemies to have him killed. He had, after all, been so effectively neutered by those enemies as to be entirely ineffective as a threat. In the end, even Palpatine himself seemed resigned to his fate, living out the end of his life in opulence but as a shadow of the dynamic man he had once been.