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Napoleon: A Life
The definitive biography of the great soldier-statesman by the New York Times bestselling author of The Storm of War—winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoleon
Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, he was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all times.
Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon is the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon’s thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single bestselling book of the nineteenth century.
An award-winning historian, Roberts traveled to fifty-three of Napoleon’s sixty battle sites, discovered crucial new documents in archives, and even made the long trip by boat to St. Helena. He is as acute in his understanding of politics as he is of military history. Here at last is a biography worthy of its subject: magisterial, insightful, beautifully written, by one of our foremost historians.
Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, he was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all times.
Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon is the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon’s thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single bestselling book of the nineteenth century.
An award-winning historian, Roberts traveled to fifty-three of Napoleon’s sixty battle sites, discovered crucial new documents in archives, and even made the long trip by boat to St. Helena. He is as acute in his understanding of politics as he is of military history. Here at last is a biography worthy of its subject: magisterial, insightful, beautifully written, by one of our foremost historians.
976 pages, Paperback
First published October 2, 2014
About the author
Andrew Roberts
200 books1,332 followersDr Andrew Roberts, who was born in 1963, took a first class honours degree in Modern History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, from where he is an honorary senior scholar and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). He has written or edited twelve books, and appears regularly on radio and television around the world. Based in New York, he is an accomplished public speaker, and is represented by HarperCollins Speakers’ Bureau (See Speaking Engagements and Speaking Testimonials). He has recently lectured at Yale, Princeton and Stanford Universities and at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
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December 2, 2023
“Napoleon Bonaparte was the founder of modern France and one of the great conquerors of history. He came to power through a military coup only six years after entering the country as a penniless political refugee. As First Consul and later Emperor, he almost won hegemony in Europe, but for a series of coalitions specifically designed to bring him down. Although his conquests ended in defeat and ignominious imprisonment, over the course of his short but eventful life he fought sixty battles and lost only seven. For any general, of any age, this was an extraordinary record. Yet his greatest and most lasting victories were those of his institutions, which put an end to the chaos of the French Revolution and cemented its guiding principle of equality before the law. Today the Napoleonic Code forms the basis of law in Europe and aspects of it have been adopted by forty countries…Napoleon’s bridges, reservoirs, canals and sewers remain in use throughout France. The French foreign ministry sits above the stone quays he built along the Seine…The Legion d’Honneur, an honor he introduced to take the place of feudal privilege, is highly coveted; France’s top secondary schools, many of them founded by Napoleon, provide excellent education and his Conseil d’Etat still meets every Wednesday to vet laws. Even if Napoleon hadn’t been one of the great military geniuses of history, he would still be a giant of the modern era…”
- Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life
Few men or women have towered so completely over their age as the diminutive Napoleon Bonaparte. For untold millions he was a trusted leader, the man who brought order, stability, and glory to a France that had been riven by the anarchy of revolution. For other untold millions, he was a terrifying figure, an irrepressible warmonger, and quite possibly the antichrist (or the first of three antichrists, for those of you who – like me – were ever obsessed with Nostradamus).
There were times when Napoleon seemed to bend the arc of history to his will. He pulled off dazzling military victories that captured the imagination of generations of military leaders. He seeded the thrones of Europe with his family members. He appeared a man of unmatched ability and intellect.
And yet, Napoleon is interesting because he also made mistakes. Huge mistakes. Huge, obvious, never-start-a-land-war-in-Asia type mistakes. As far as he rose, he fell in an instant, and died in lonely exile on a South Atlantic volcano.
The type of man who could do these things – who could dazzle at Austerlitz, yet fail to recognize the manifest shortcomings of his siblings; who could believe deeply in the law, yet also slaughter thousands of captured Ottomans – is exceptionally complex indeed. To attempt to understand this man, this Napoleon, is a very tall task.
So tall a task, in fact, that Andrew Roberts barely tries.
***
Roberts’s Napoleon: A Life, is incredibly entertaining and overstuffed with events. At eight-hundred pages of text, it is a veritable literary behemoth, yet it is briskly paced and reads effortlessly. The prose is not fancy, but clear, and Roberts does a good job narrating the many set pieces of Napoleon’s life. It also gamely tries to touch on every aspect of Napoleon’s multi-faceted being. Ultimately, however, in attempting to encompass so much, there is very little space for breath, and almost none for reflection. This is an artful recounting of facts and chronology, with little by way of judgment.
***
Roberts is very much an old fashioned “great man” biographer, and Napoleon is very much an old fashioned biography. As he did in Churchill: Walking With Destiny, Roberts presents an epic, cradle-to-grave retelling of a polymath genius with autocratic tendencies, and he does so with unconcealed relish that borders on boyish zeal. It is not that he hides Napoleon’s warts, because he does not. Those warts are there, whether we’re talking about the atrocities he perpetrated in Egypt, his racist beliefs regarding Haitians, or his apparent awfulness at sex (the phrase “Three-Minute Monsieur” springs to mind). Nevertheless, Roberts never hesitates in brushing past these deficits, en route to more glorious destinations.
***
Napoleon is one of history’s greatest military figures. Thus, it is not surprising that Roberts devotes the largest amount of space to the martial aspects of his subject’s existence. There are a lot of battles here, many of them receiving an entire chapter in the telling. Roberts describes each conflict from on-high, with a focus on tactical maneuvering that comes at the expense of visceral, you-are-there-in-the-ranks details. It can get a bit tedious at times, though the maps are a helpful aid in visualizing the parry and thrust. One of the things I appreciated was Roberts’s attempt to capture the lay of the land, commenting on how Napoleon used topography to complement his skillful use of combined arms.
Roberts points out that he visited many Napoleonic locations, and throughout the book, he drops little footnotes that act as a sort of travel guide. He tells you how places look today, where to get the best view, and the specific artifacts you might find in a certain museum. This is great for the entirely aspirational Napoleonic tour I desperately need in my life.
***
It’s not really fair to criticize the topical imbalance in a single-volume biography of Napoleon. Whole tomes have been devoted to the smallest details of his life. (In the introduction, Roberts points out that there have been more books with “Napoleon” in the title than there have been days since his death). As such, even though I would have appreciated more time spent on Napoleon’s bawdy letters – much more time – and less time on the Battle of Jena, that’s not really appropriate.
What this really lacks – in my opinion – is some statement as to what Napoleon means today. What is his place in history, beyond his extremely high Q Score? Obviously, he was the dominant figure in his day, affecting the lives of millions of people, ending the lives of countless thousands. How, then, should we view him two-hundred years after his death?
This isn’t a rhetorical question. I don’t have a clue. I have barely dipped my toes into the Napoleonic Wars – and I’m still on the fence about whether I’m going to jump in – and it is hard, based solely on Napoleon, to gauge the extent of his legacy. It felt – reading these pages – that he burned meteorically and then went dark; that the France he constructed did not last long beyond his exile. This book might have profited from a concluding chapter where this issue was discussed with more depth than Roberts’s passing references to the legacy of Napoleonic laws and sewers.
***
While Napoleon left me unconvinced about the place of the Little Corporal in history’s firmament, there is no doubt he is worth studying, if only to gaze in awe at the way his reach exceeded his grasp.
I finished reading Napoleon while sitting on my porch. Winter had broken, the sun was shining, and I was drinking cheap wine while surveying my modest front-yard, which I had conquered with a thirty-year mortgage. It was hard not to reflect on Napoleon’s mighty achievements, how he parlayed ambition, drive, skill, and an exquisite sense of timing – to see the opportunity in the world’s convulsions – into a dizzying rise from anonymous artillery officer to emperor. It is quite humbling to compare one’s own life to Napoleon. Yet, I also smiled to see how we had ended up in the same place, the both of us on a porch on the continuum of time, drinking wine and reading books, the masters of not-much-at-all.
That’s what makes this such a spectacular tale. Napoleon’s rise was tremendous, but his fall even more precipitous. Napoleon’s genius was unsurpassed, except by his dimwitted miscalculations. He only lost a handful of battles, but one of them happened to be the Battle of Waterloo, the textbook definition of decisive.
Napoleon once remarked, upon his retreat from Moscow, “that from the sublime to the ridiculous is but one step.”
Importantly for later readers, it was a spectacular step.
- Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life
Few men or women have towered so completely over their age as the diminutive Napoleon Bonaparte. For untold millions he was a trusted leader, the man who brought order, stability, and glory to a France that had been riven by the anarchy of revolution. For other untold millions, he was a terrifying figure, an irrepressible warmonger, and quite possibly the antichrist (or the first of three antichrists, for those of you who – like me – were ever obsessed with Nostradamus).
There were times when Napoleon seemed to bend the arc of history to his will. He pulled off dazzling military victories that captured the imagination of generations of military leaders. He seeded the thrones of Europe with his family members. He appeared a man of unmatched ability and intellect.
And yet, Napoleon is interesting because he also made mistakes. Huge mistakes. Huge, obvious, never-start-a-land-war-in-Asia type mistakes. As far as he rose, he fell in an instant, and died in lonely exile on a South Atlantic volcano.
The type of man who could do these things – who could dazzle at Austerlitz, yet fail to recognize the manifest shortcomings of his siblings; who could believe deeply in the law, yet also slaughter thousands of captured Ottomans – is exceptionally complex indeed. To attempt to understand this man, this Napoleon, is a very tall task.
So tall a task, in fact, that Andrew Roberts barely tries.
***
Roberts’s Napoleon: A Life, is incredibly entertaining and overstuffed with events. At eight-hundred pages of text, it is a veritable literary behemoth, yet it is briskly paced and reads effortlessly. The prose is not fancy, but clear, and Roberts does a good job narrating the many set pieces of Napoleon’s life. It also gamely tries to touch on every aspect of Napoleon’s multi-faceted being. Ultimately, however, in attempting to encompass so much, there is very little space for breath, and almost none for reflection. This is an artful recounting of facts and chronology, with little by way of judgment.
***
Roberts is very much an old fashioned “great man” biographer, and Napoleon is very much an old fashioned biography. As he did in Churchill: Walking With Destiny, Roberts presents an epic, cradle-to-grave retelling of a polymath genius with autocratic tendencies, and he does so with unconcealed relish that borders on boyish zeal. It is not that he hides Napoleon’s warts, because he does not. Those warts are there, whether we’re talking about the atrocities he perpetrated in Egypt, his racist beliefs regarding Haitians, or his apparent awfulness at sex (the phrase “Three-Minute Monsieur” springs to mind). Nevertheless, Roberts never hesitates in brushing past these deficits, en route to more glorious destinations.
***
Napoleon is one of history’s greatest military figures. Thus, it is not surprising that Roberts devotes the largest amount of space to the martial aspects of his subject’s existence. There are a lot of battles here, many of them receiving an entire chapter in the telling. Roberts describes each conflict from on-high, with a focus on tactical maneuvering that comes at the expense of visceral, you-are-there-in-the-ranks details. It can get a bit tedious at times, though the maps are a helpful aid in visualizing the parry and thrust. One of the things I appreciated was Roberts’s attempt to capture the lay of the land, commenting on how Napoleon used topography to complement his skillful use of combined arms.
Roberts points out that he visited many Napoleonic locations, and throughout the book, he drops little footnotes that act as a sort of travel guide. He tells you how places look today, where to get the best view, and the specific artifacts you might find in a certain museum. This is great for the entirely aspirational Napoleonic tour I desperately need in my life.
***
It’s not really fair to criticize the topical imbalance in a single-volume biography of Napoleon. Whole tomes have been devoted to the smallest details of his life. (In the introduction, Roberts points out that there have been more books with “Napoleon” in the title than there have been days since his death). As such, even though I would have appreciated more time spent on Napoleon’s bawdy letters – much more time – and less time on the Battle of Jena, that’s not really appropriate.
What this really lacks – in my opinion – is some statement as to what Napoleon means today. What is his place in history, beyond his extremely high Q Score? Obviously, he was the dominant figure in his day, affecting the lives of millions of people, ending the lives of countless thousands. How, then, should we view him two-hundred years after his death?
This isn’t a rhetorical question. I don’t have a clue. I have barely dipped my toes into the Napoleonic Wars – and I’m still on the fence about whether I’m going to jump in – and it is hard, based solely on Napoleon, to gauge the extent of his legacy. It felt – reading these pages – that he burned meteorically and then went dark; that the France he constructed did not last long beyond his exile. This book might have profited from a concluding chapter where this issue was discussed with more depth than Roberts’s passing references to the legacy of Napoleonic laws and sewers.
***
While Napoleon left me unconvinced about the place of the Little Corporal in history’s firmament, there is no doubt he is worth studying, if only to gaze in awe at the way his reach exceeded his grasp.
I finished reading Napoleon while sitting on my porch. Winter had broken, the sun was shining, and I was drinking cheap wine while surveying my modest front-yard, which I had conquered with a thirty-year mortgage. It was hard not to reflect on Napoleon’s mighty achievements, how he parlayed ambition, drive, skill, and an exquisite sense of timing – to see the opportunity in the world’s convulsions – into a dizzying rise from anonymous artillery officer to emperor. It is quite humbling to compare one’s own life to Napoleon. Yet, I also smiled to see how we had ended up in the same place, the both of us on a porch on the continuum of time, drinking wine and reading books, the masters of not-much-at-all.
That’s what makes this such a spectacular tale. Napoleon’s rise was tremendous, but his fall even more precipitous. Napoleon’s genius was unsurpassed, except by his dimwitted miscalculations. He only lost a handful of battles, but one of them happened to be the Battle of Waterloo, the textbook definition of decisive.
Napoleon once remarked, upon his retreat from Moscow, “that from the sublime to the ridiculous is but one step.”
Importantly for later readers, it was a spectacular step.
August 18, 2019
"The ideas that underpin our modern world—meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on—were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire".
Napoleon Bonaparte may never have stalked so largely through the pages of early 19th century history if not for the French Revolution. He almost didn’t survive it. He was even arrested at one point by the counter-revolutionists as a collaborator with Robespierre, which even for a man of Napoleon’s self-assurance must have been a moment of uncertainty. The trials of this period were mere shams, so regardless of your level of guilt or innocence, it was hard to gauge what would be your fate. I was not surprised, of course, that he did reassure his captors and was liberated. In the military he benefited from the mass retirements of many overaged commanders that helped clear the way for his ascension. Timing is everything, as they say, and certainly, Napoleon picked a good time for a man to be alive who had aspirations to be the next Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great.
Napoleon proved himself more than adept on the battlefield, even as a second lieutenant, and rose quickly through the ranks. Being successful in the military was not enough for him. With the annihilation of most of the powerful men in France, who lost their heads to the guillotine, yet again another power vacuum created an audacious opportunity for the young Napoleon. Fresh off recent military victories, he used that success to propel himself to the forefront of an audacious coup d'etat that put him in the First Consul’s chair at the tender age of 30.
Obviously, he was a man who, by the force of his personality, convinced everyone around him of his capabilities. The consulship was supposed to be a single term, but when the time came for the position to switch to someone else, Napoleon remained. The administration was disguised as a republican government, but in reality, it was a dictatorship. The men around him, forming this new government, were older and more experienced than he was, but they ended up deferring to Napoleon’s wants and desires, and by doing so let the last line of defense against his attainment of complete power crumble without a fight. I don’t know if I was more amazed or baffled at this revelation.
Napoleon declared himself emperor for life in 1804.
He certainly did not win all of his battles, but he won many of them in spectacular fashion. His tactics and the outcomes of his battles still continue to be studied today. When people run simulations of his final defeat at Waterloo, they show the French winning. So why did he lose? The better question to ask is, Why did he win all those other battles? Yes, there were brilliant military decisions made, but what really made the difference was the speed with which he implemented those tactics. At Waterloo, his brilliantly developed battle plan was circumvented by sluggish responses to his commands. The command structure was not as well oiled as it had been before his abdication. It seems to me that Napoleon might have lost some of his edge as well. Long before the Prussians arrived to break his flank, he had ample opportunity to rout the Austrians and the British.
So, did Wellington defeat Napoleon, or did Napoleon defeat himself? I’d say both, which is usually the case of most battles. One side makes critical errors, and the other side capitalizes on those mistakes. The Duke of Wellington on hearing about the death of Napoleon said: ”Now I may say I am the most successful general alive.” Long before Waterloo, Wellington had proven himself one of the greatest generals of that age, or really any age. Was he being modest, or was he quite possibly one of the best qualified men who faced Napoleon to recognize his genius?
An odd little tidbit about Wellington that I found amusing was that he slept with two of Napoleon’s mistresses.
As close as one can come to sleeping with the man himself. *shiver*
In my opinion, the Russian campaign should have been the end of his rule as Emperor, and in many ways it was. The constant wars had weakened not only his army but France as well. In 1812, he decided to invade Russia with a massive army. He pushed the Russians back at the heavy cost of men and supplies and captured Moscow, only to watch the Russians burn their own city. There were lots of tactical decisions for burning Moscow to keep the French from using the city to supply their army, but when I thought about the long term cost to the Russian people, it left me shaking my head.
The one thing the Russians could count on was that the winter would prove to be their best defense. They could lose all the battles, and they generally historically did, but the cold would destroy their enemies.
By the time Napoleon extracted his men from Russia, he had left over 500,000 of them as frozen corpses behind him. France was weary of war, and this defeat truly showed his vulnerabilities. He was no longer seen as invincible. In his conquests for the edification ofFrance Bonaparte, he was a burden France was not able or willing to bear any longer.
Sensing correctly that the timing was right, a massive coalition of European powers attacked, and despite a series of losses inflicted upon them, due to sheer numbers, they steadily pushed Napoleon’s dwindling forces back to Paris. Now as defeat seemed eminent, French generals started defecting to the Coalition, but this might have been Napoleon at his best. He was outnumbered and outgunned and was still managing to find ways to win battles. Strictly from a historical perspective, I do wonder, if France hadn’t turned against against him, what would have happened if he had managed to keep finding ways to win?
Napoleon abdicated and accepted exile to Elba, but it was a short lived stay. Most men would have been content with their place in history. They would write a few books, enjoy the company of fawning women, drink too much wine, tell outrageous stories of their conquests to groups of adoring fans, become corpulent, and dream about how close they came to world domination.
But then few men were Napoleon.
Napoleon escaped, raised an army, and made one more attempt to win back all that he had lost. The fascinating thing was that he was even able to make a comeback at all. Given the mental state of the French at this stage, they would have to be insane to let this “madman” have another army.
So certainly, my view of Napoleon had changed. I have a deeper understanding of the man beyond just his characteristics that created the term Napoleon Complex. I liked some of the humane innovations that he introduced to French law, such as getting rid of torture. Introducing meritocity was seen as dangerously progressive by all of Europe, and obviously, one close to his own heart. Under the aristocracy, he would have never seen the success he saw under a fractured republic, but he seized the opportunity that was there. Part of his success in war was also due to how draconian he was at replacing generals who proved incompetent. He didn’t give a fig about who their ancestors were or how accomplished their family line. He was certainly more cultured than I expected. He was an ardent bibliophile and assembled many libraries over his lifetime. He amassed an art collection that gave the world the Louvre. He changed warfare which still has influence on its application today.
Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln are two of the most written about men in history. So how does one decide which biography to read? One of the reasons I was attracted to Andrew Roberts’s biography was the access he had to 33,000 recently published letters written by Napoleon. Needless to say, an archive like this will reveal the inner man often hidden beneath the public man. Roberts also visited 53 battlefields, 16 countries, and pillaged 80 archives to bring a comprehensive, refreshing view of one of the most controversial figures in history.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading a chapter every morning with my first cup of tea, until I became so gripped by the narrative that I set all other books aside to finish the last 200 pages in one epic reading bout. Especially if you are planning to read only one Napoleon biography,...in my opinion, this is the one.
Highly recommended!
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Napoleon Bonaparte may never have stalked so largely through the pages of early 19th century history if not for the French Revolution. He almost didn’t survive it. He was even arrested at one point by the counter-revolutionists as a collaborator with Robespierre, which even for a man of Napoleon’s self-assurance must have been a moment of uncertainty. The trials of this period were mere shams, so regardless of your level of guilt or innocence, it was hard to gauge what would be your fate. I was not surprised, of course, that he did reassure his captors and was liberated. In the military he benefited from the mass retirements of many overaged commanders that helped clear the way for his ascension. Timing is everything, as they say, and certainly, Napoleon picked a good time for a man to be alive who had aspirations to be the next Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great.
Napoleon proved himself more than adept on the battlefield, even as a second lieutenant, and rose quickly through the ranks. Being successful in the military was not enough for him. With the annihilation of most of the powerful men in France, who lost their heads to the guillotine, yet again another power vacuum created an audacious opportunity for the young Napoleon. Fresh off recent military victories, he used that success to propel himself to the forefront of an audacious coup d'etat that put him in the First Consul’s chair at the tender age of 30.
Obviously, he was a man who, by the force of his personality, convinced everyone around him of his capabilities. The consulship was supposed to be a single term, but when the time came for the position to switch to someone else, Napoleon remained. The administration was disguised as a republican government, but in reality, it was a dictatorship. The men around him, forming this new government, were older and more experienced than he was, but they ended up deferring to Napoleon’s wants and desires, and by doing so let the last line of defense against his attainment of complete power crumble without a fight. I don’t know if I was more amazed or baffled at this revelation.
Napoleon declared himself emperor for life in 1804.
He certainly did not win all of his battles, but he won many of them in spectacular fashion. His tactics and the outcomes of his battles still continue to be studied today. When people run simulations of his final defeat at Waterloo, they show the French winning. So why did he lose? The better question to ask is, Why did he win all those other battles? Yes, there were brilliant military decisions made, but what really made the difference was the speed with which he implemented those tactics. At Waterloo, his brilliantly developed battle plan was circumvented by sluggish responses to his commands. The command structure was not as well oiled as it had been before his abdication. It seems to me that Napoleon might have lost some of his edge as well. Long before the Prussians arrived to break his flank, he had ample opportunity to rout the Austrians and the British.
So, did Wellington defeat Napoleon, or did Napoleon defeat himself? I’d say both, which is usually the case of most battles. One side makes critical errors, and the other side capitalizes on those mistakes. The Duke of Wellington on hearing about the death of Napoleon said: ”Now I may say I am the most successful general alive.” Long before Waterloo, Wellington had proven himself one of the greatest generals of that age, or really any age. Was he being modest, or was he quite possibly one of the best qualified men who faced Napoleon to recognize his genius?
An odd little tidbit about Wellington that I found amusing was that he slept with two of Napoleon’s mistresses.
As close as one can come to sleeping with the man himself. *shiver*
In my opinion, the Russian campaign should have been the end of his rule as Emperor, and in many ways it was. The constant wars had weakened not only his army but France as well. In 1812, he decided to invade Russia with a massive army. He pushed the Russians back at the heavy cost of men and supplies and captured Moscow, only to watch the Russians burn their own city. There were lots of tactical decisions for burning Moscow to keep the French from using the city to supply their army, but when I thought about the long term cost to the Russian people, it left me shaking my head.
The one thing the Russians could count on was that the winter would prove to be their best defense. They could lose all the battles, and they generally historically did, but the cold would destroy their enemies.
By the time Napoleon extracted his men from Russia, he had left over 500,000 of them as frozen corpses behind him. France was weary of war, and this defeat truly showed his vulnerabilities. He was no longer seen as invincible. In his conquests for the edification of
Sensing correctly that the timing was right, a massive coalition of European powers attacked, and despite a series of losses inflicted upon them, due to sheer numbers, they steadily pushed Napoleon’s dwindling forces back to Paris. Now as defeat seemed eminent, French generals started defecting to the Coalition, but this might have been Napoleon at his best. He was outnumbered and outgunned and was still managing to find ways to win battles. Strictly from a historical perspective, I do wonder, if France hadn’t turned against against him, what would have happened if he had managed to keep finding ways to win?
Napoleon abdicated and accepted exile to Elba, but it was a short lived stay. Most men would have been content with their place in history. They would write a few books, enjoy the company of fawning women, drink too much wine, tell outrageous stories of their conquests to groups of adoring fans, become corpulent, and dream about how close they came to world domination.
But then few men were Napoleon.
Napoleon escaped, raised an army, and made one more attempt to win back all that he had lost. The fascinating thing was that he was even able to make a comeback at all. Given the mental state of the French at this stage, they would have to be insane to let this “madman” have another army.
So certainly, my view of Napoleon had changed. I have a deeper understanding of the man beyond just his characteristics that created the term Napoleon Complex. I liked some of the humane innovations that he introduced to French law, such as getting rid of torture. Introducing meritocity was seen as dangerously progressive by all of Europe, and obviously, one close to his own heart. Under the aristocracy, he would have never seen the success he saw under a fractured republic, but he seized the opportunity that was there. Part of his success in war was also due to how draconian he was at replacing generals who proved incompetent. He didn’t give a fig about who their ancestors were or how accomplished their family line. He was certainly more cultured than I expected. He was an ardent bibliophile and assembled many libraries over his lifetime. He amassed an art collection that gave the world the Louvre. He changed warfare which still has influence on its application today.
Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln are two of the most written about men in history. So how does one decide which biography to read? One of the reasons I was attracted to Andrew Roberts’s biography was the access he had to 33,000 recently published letters written by Napoleon. Needless to say, an archive like this will reveal the inner man often hidden beneath the public man. Roberts also visited 53 battlefields, 16 countries, and pillaged 80 archives to bring a comprehensive, refreshing view of one of the most controversial figures in history.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading a chapter every morning with my first cup of tea, until I became so gripped by the narrative that I set all other books aside to finish the last 200 pages in one epic reading bout. Especially if you are planning to read only one Napoleon biography,...in my opinion, this is the one.
Highly recommended!
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
February 4, 2023
This is a life so big that 800+ pages can hardly contain it. Full books have been written about single weeks in his life. Philip Dwyer started a more feasible "series" format in: Napoleon Vol I: The Path to Power 1769 - 1799: Path to Power 1769 - 1799 v. 1 several years ago. For this book, Andrew Roberts is to be saluted for his ability to condense the outsized story of Napoleon Bonaparte into one book as well as for his research.
Roberts brings out the best in his subject. He shows Napoleon's acts of empathy, his ability to converse with the distinguished thinkers of his day, his Code and its long lasting effects, his connection with his troops and brilliance on the battlefield. He abbreviates the bad, for instance writing that he left his troops in Egypt "without orders" rather than say he abandoned them.
I was struck on how well Napoleon fits Malcolm Gladwell's theory expressed in Outliers: The Story of Success: The Story of Success. In revolutionary France, standing with one side meant persecution when the other side came to power. Napoleon was from Corsica so earlier positions and loyalties were not known. His family was of dubious noble status which could be played either way: he could promote his nobility when it was a requirement of generalship and show that he wasn't noble in times such status was questioned. He may have been the only one with the education, ambition and determination to fit the new requirements for positions that could be obtained by (or created by) commoners in Europe in this sliver of time.
While the actual battles are the least of my historical interests the story can't be told without them. Roberts does a good job with context, logistics (although he along with everyone else leaves to the imagination what is done with 20,000 POWs) and strategy. There are clear maps of campaign routes and battle positions. The discussion culminates with Waterloo, where, after you understand the brilliance of Napoleon's previous career you understand, logistically what went wrong. This leaves you to guess about Napoleon's health (you learn of his weight gain on Elba and perhaps a hemorrhoid problem that interferes with his horsemanship) and mental state - he has only 3 remaining marshals, all the others have died or betrayed him.
I learned a lot from small things (Napoleon wrote novels in his youth and Josephine's teeth were black from sugar cane) to large (the unusual "friendship" of Napoleon and Alexander I and the "unforced errors" of Waterloo). While the section on the Louisiana Purchase in only 2-3 pages, I know more clearly his motives which show the far reach of his thinking (distant colonies will only rebel, better to let the Americans drain the British with them). The treatment of Spain and Portugal is the best I've read. The Moscow episode and retreat is so heart-wrenching, you forget that Napoleon was the aggressor. The cast is so large that in the Epilogue, there were so many whose names I'd forgotten, I stopped checking the index.
While the character of Napoleon remains cryptic, the excerpts from his letters and diaries are helpful. From the preface you learn that newly available primary sources were used. The layout of the "Notes" makes it difficult to find which ones the new ones are and/or to use the "Notes" in general.
There are many color plates including portraits of the principals and renditions of the battles, treaty signings, buildings, caricatures, possessions. The Index got me everywhere I needed to go.
I could spend a year finding sources and reading biographies of the colorful people of this era. Of the French, the most intriguing are Talleyrand and Marshalls Nye and Bernadotte; of the Corsicans any member of Napoleon's family; and of the opponents, the Duke of Wellington and Alexander I.
This is a notable assemblage of the life of Napoleon. I am uncertain if its positive spin is the result of weeding out a lot of previously covered material or the weeding out of previous bias. Writers of these "big" biographies have to make decisions on how to present facts to make them readable. In this bio, sometimes the facts won making many areas a cumbersome read; nevertheless, I stayed with it and I am glad I did.
Roberts brings out the best in his subject. He shows Napoleon's acts of empathy, his ability to converse with the distinguished thinkers of his day, his Code and its long lasting effects, his connection with his troops and brilliance on the battlefield. He abbreviates the bad, for instance writing that he left his troops in Egypt "without orders" rather than say he abandoned them.
I was struck on how well Napoleon fits Malcolm Gladwell's theory expressed in Outliers: The Story of Success: The Story of Success. In revolutionary France, standing with one side meant persecution when the other side came to power. Napoleon was from Corsica so earlier positions and loyalties were not known. His family was of dubious noble status which could be played either way: he could promote his nobility when it was a requirement of generalship and show that he wasn't noble in times such status was questioned. He may have been the only one with the education, ambition and determination to fit the new requirements for positions that could be obtained by (or created by) commoners in Europe in this sliver of time.
While the actual battles are the least of my historical interests the story can't be told without them. Roberts does a good job with context, logistics (although he along with everyone else leaves to the imagination what is done with 20,000 POWs) and strategy. There are clear maps of campaign routes and battle positions. The discussion culminates with Waterloo, where, after you understand the brilliance of Napoleon's previous career you understand, logistically what went wrong. This leaves you to guess about Napoleon's health (you learn of his weight gain on Elba and perhaps a hemorrhoid problem that interferes with his horsemanship) and mental state - he has only 3 remaining marshals, all the others have died or betrayed him.
I learned a lot from small things (Napoleon wrote novels in his youth and Josephine's teeth were black from sugar cane) to large (the unusual "friendship" of Napoleon and Alexander I and the "unforced errors" of Waterloo). While the section on the Louisiana Purchase in only 2-3 pages, I know more clearly his motives which show the far reach of his thinking (distant colonies will only rebel, better to let the Americans drain the British with them). The treatment of Spain and Portugal is the best I've read. The Moscow episode and retreat is so heart-wrenching, you forget that Napoleon was the aggressor. The cast is so large that in the Epilogue, there were so many whose names I'd forgotten, I stopped checking the index.
While the character of Napoleon remains cryptic, the excerpts from his letters and diaries are helpful. From the preface you learn that newly available primary sources were used. The layout of the "Notes" makes it difficult to find which ones the new ones are and/or to use the "Notes" in general.
There are many color plates including portraits of the principals and renditions of the battles, treaty signings, buildings, caricatures, possessions. The Index got me everywhere I needed to go.
I could spend a year finding sources and reading biographies of the colorful people of this era. Of the French, the most intriguing are Talleyrand and Marshalls Nye and Bernadotte; of the Corsicans any member of Napoleon's family; and of the opponents, the Duke of Wellington and Alexander I.
This is a notable assemblage of the life of Napoleon. I am uncertain if its positive spin is the result of weeding out a lot of previously covered material or the weeding out of previous bias. Writers of these "big" biographies have to make decisions on how to present facts to make them readable. In this bio, sometimes the facts won making many areas a cumbersome read; nevertheless, I stayed with it and I am glad I did.
January 12, 2024
"There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind."
-Napoléon Bonaparte
This excellent book is an unbiased account of Napoléon’s personal life and his military endeavors, achievements, blunders and failures.
It is well researched and meticulously detailed without exaggeration or needless over-explanations and by far the best biography of this ambitious, intelligent and unequaled personality who was one of the best leaders in history.
-Napoléon Bonaparte
This excellent book is an unbiased account of Napoléon’s personal life and his military endeavors, achievements, blunders and failures.
It is well researched and meticulously detailed without exaggeration or needless over-explanations and by far the best biography of this ambitious, intelligent and unequaled personality who was one of the best leaders in history.
June 30, 2015
Confession off the bat: This is a great biography. Well written, well researched. Hagiographic perhaps, but not in a way that makes your teeth chatter. Maps are a little shaky at the beginning, but become better throughout. All in all, head and shoulders above almost all modern biographies.
But this is Andrew Roberts here, writing about Napoleon, his hero! As such, let's hold him to a higher standard and see if he succeeds. Roberts openly admits that Napoleon is a hero of his. The book, as such, is five parts biography, one part advocacy. Roberts wants to save Napoleon from the likes of Alan Schom, whose 1998 biography painted the Little Corporal as the predecessor to the Nazis, Fascists, and Stalinists who did so much to paint the last century in blood. No! Roberts tells us. Napoleon was not Hitler! Napoleon was a combination of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton in one man! He is the quintessential self-made man! The slayer of the Old Regime! Certainly he deserves our respect!
It's a credit to Roberts's ability as biographer (as opposed to hagiographer) that I dislike Napoleon more after reading this book than before (though my sympathies are aroused for the Young Werther-wannabe that Bonaparte sometimes inhabited). First off, Roberts's emphasis on Napoleon being "self-made" are overrated. The dictators of Nazi Germany and the USSR had equal claims on being self-made (more than Messers Churchill and Roosevelt ever could claim!). Who cares about being self-made if one's accomplishments are treacherous?
So what were Napoleon's accomplishments? Those of the military variety scarcely need be mentioned; he was a genius on par with Caesar and Alexander. But military genius is not inherently good or bad; how can we deny that the men running the Wehrmacht were geniuses, if not only for our moral revulsion? Thus, I found it very interesting to read about NB's behavior in Egypt and Palestine: As Roberts tells us, Bonaparte was actually considering converting to Islam and joining the Ottomans in order to fulfill his dream of conquering India and fully imitating Alexander. This is astounding. Napoleon, the paragon of rationality, the guardian of the French, the expounder of the Enlightenment, was ready to join one of the most backwards empires in Europe in order to quench his desire for glory. Forget Caesar--Napoleon could have very easily reenacted the tragedy of Coriolanus.
Roberts's writing about the Levant also gets tedious in a modern fashion. With respect to the slaughter of Turks at Jaffa, there was "of course, a racial element to this; Napoleon would not have executed European prisoners-of-war." (190). Of course, the fact that the French opponent Jezzar was in the habit of sewing Christians into sacks (described on page 191 for goodness' sake!) probably has as much explanatory power as the "racial element." The fact that NB treated his "non-white, non-Christian enemies" (201) with greater cruelty is more owing to the barbarity of the Turks than anything else.
I bring up this scene because the book is, thankfully, free of most of the ugly bugaboos of modern academia. Roberts, here, dabs his toe into race-as-everything explanations, but elsewhere they are absent. Absent, too, are the sub-Freudian explanations which at times characterize other biographies.(Wouldn't Napoleon have been better if he hadn't suffered from a Napoleon Complex?) Roberts lets Napoleon be a man, and not a symptom of a nagging disease or aggregation of a million social variables. This is much appreciated.
The problem with Roberts is that he is still a modern, through and through--a man born of the world Napoleon created, if you will. Napoleon's most important contribution, after all, was the creation of the technocratic, liberal state. Roberts never passes up the chance to laud Napoleon's belief in the meritocracy and equal political rights. The politics of the Revolution are forcibly applied across Italy and Germany, and Roberts never questions the rightness of this once. After all, who can argue with the equality of man? Then again, what was the difference between the terror practiced by the French army and that practiced by the rolling Soviets in 1948? What is the difference between ISIS now? It would be nice if Roberts considered the perspective of, well, the rest of the whole of Europe at the time. France was a revolutionary, terrorist state with no little respect for national sovereignty and none for kings. Perhaps the Czar of Russia is not the best representative of the Old Regime, but certainly there were civilized Prussians and Austrians who might have stood in as a counterpoise to French terror? Certainly Edmund Burke!
This is the main problem with the book. Roberts is a great author of military battles and lifetimes, but he is lousy as an author of ideas. Roberts seems to consider himself above ideology, a man so certain in progress that he need not consider alternatives. At times his political analysis is so inept and unctuous you'd think you were reading The Economist. Roberts lauds the fact that Napoleon instituted meritocratic reforms throughout his rule; he also notes that these reforms were in part to resemble NB's modern military. Napoleon modernized and made efficient the French state--again, like the military. Does anyone else see a pattern here? One has to wonder if the "liberated" peasant or Jew would not have preferred his former servitude to freezing to death outside Moscow. But!--progress...progress...
Naturally, Roberts hates the Church above all things. NB's cruel and stupid invasion of Iberia is justified by Roberts as an act of--you guessed it--modernization. The backwards Spaniards were lagging on the long arc of history, still adhering to the Inquisition (fatalities of which couldn't hold a flame to Wagram, Borodino, etc.). In all the 800 pages, I don't think I can remember Roberts criticizing Napoleon's Spanish policy but for the fact that he should have been more severe and gone to the peninsula himself. This is astounding. From 1795 onward, Spain was an acquiescent, weak power, and posed no serious threat to French interests. Beyond raw lust for power and cruelty, there was no reason to subject Spain to the lawless treatment she received at the hands of the French. Why is there no voice condemning this tyrannical, despicable course or action? Roberts provides us with no countervailing voice, and becomes sycophantic in his praise (or, more accurately, lame criticism) of NB. But the Iberian policy was a failure at every level: Morally, militarily, and politically (let us remember that the illegal and unscrupulous Louisiana Purchase did about as much for European decline as any other one act).
The reason Roberts can't come to criticize Napoleon for his mass slaughter of men is that he doesn't seem to realize the possibility for another side, i.e. that the Old Regime had a right to defend itself (or at least to not be destroyed at the price paid). It's hard to read this and think that Roberts has not been struck by the worst of revolutionary impulses, i.e. that the ends justify the means. Hundreds of thousands killed--but isn't the Code Napoleon nice? States destroyed, cultures ruined--but the Jews! They're free! There are even some homosexuals working in Provence! How can you argue with Progress?
Beyond political naivitee, Roberts contradicts himself in his descriptions of his hero. However much he may like to twist it, the Peace of Amiens was broken by Napoleon. Yes, the later coalitions formed and waged war on him, but only after his tyrannical decrees made war all but inevitable. Napoleon was a bully, and this trait served neither him nor the citizens of Europe well. There is something of the swash-buckler in such behavior which is intriguing and captivating--but again, is such decadence worth the hundreds of thousands rotting across Europe?
And so, while Roberts has saved Napoleon from the pathetic over-analyzers and the postmodernists, he has not moved on to perform the greatest task of the historian: To make us understand Napoleon's time and context. Without an understanding of the appeal and fault of the Old Regime, we can never be sure what NB is really up against, or if the wars he waged to defeat its tenets were really worth it. Perhaps such consideration is not necessary. Napoleon was intriguing enough without such considerations, perhaps. But Roberts cannot succeed in his larger project--convincing us that Napoleon was of another league than Hitler, Stalin, etc.--without convincing us that his wars were worthwhile. And he simply hasn't done this. He's only succeeded in forgetting the dead.
These considerations aside, Roberts does a nice job of letting us inside the mind of this great genius. Most interesting are Napoleon's letters to Josephine, and his other ruminations on the romance. The image of NB waiting on Elba, rooms reserved for his son and empress, is incredibly moving, no matter who the tyrant. His letters are funny, his personality is affable, his heartache is sincere. Proust said that falling in love is the only poetic thing most men ever achieve. Greater than his faux-royal processions and bloody military feats, his success and failure in romance stuck with me the most throughout reading.
Nonetheless, I still can't help but think that Roberts has not achieved his goals. Yes, Napoleon was a "great man" in the Carlyle sense, but by creating the modern state he ruined the conditions whereby later men might become great. He modernized his country, but so did Jefferson and Hamilton, without the bloodshed. He led an army, but led it to endless war, unlike General Washington who led his to peace and prosperity. Even America's murderer-tyrant, Abe Lincoln, attempted no coup and wouldn't even disallow the 1864 election which may have ruined his war. These are acts of true character; acts of true moral courage. Napoleon, as one men, may have bettered this group, but his faults and crimes loom much larger. His hubris alone killed more than his weak principles. Roberts never captures Napoleon's strange contradictions, the mix of the squalid and the grand in the man. For now, it does us readers well to remember how many of the great patriots we dote upon might have just as well become our oppressors, lashing us alongside of the Turks.
But this is Andrew Roberts here, writing about Napoleon, his hero! As such, let's hold him to a higher standard and see if he succeeds. Roberts openly admits that Napoleon is a hero of his. The book, as such, is five parts biography, one part advocacy. Roberts wants to save Napoleon from the likes of Alan Schom, whose 1998 biography painted the Little Corporal as the predecessor to the Nazis, Fascists, and Stalinists who did so much to paint the last century in blood. No! Roberts tells us. Napoleon was not Hitler! Napoleon was a combination of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton in one man! He is the quintessential self-made man! The slayer of the Old Regime! Certainly he deserves our respect!
It's a credit to Roberts's ability as biographer (as opposed to hagiographer) that I dislike Napoleon more after reading this book than before (though my sympathies are aroused for the Young Werther-wannabe that Bonaparte sometimes inhabited). First off, Roberts's emphasis on Napoleon being "self-made" are overrated. The dictators of Nazi Germany and the USSR had equal claims on being self-made (more than Messers Churchill and Roosevelt ever could claim!). Who cares about being self-made if one's accomplishments are treacherous?
So what were Napoleon's accomplishments? Those of the military variety scarcely need be mentioned; he was a genius on par with Caesar and Alexander. But military genius is not inherently good or bad; how can we deny that the men running the Wehrmacht were geniuses, if not only for our moral revulsion? Thus, I found it very interesting to read about NB's behavior in Egypt and Palestine: As Roberts tells us, Bonaparte was actually considering converting to Islam and joining the Ottomans in order to fulfill his dream of conquering India and fully imitating Alexander. This is astounding. Napoleon, the paragon of rationality, the guardian of the French, the expounder of the Enlightenment, was ready to join one of the most backwards empires in Europe in order to quench his desire for glory. Forget Caesar--Napoleon could have very easily reenacted the tragedy of Coriolanus.
Roberts's writing about the Levant also gets tedious in a modern fashion. With respect to the slaughter of Turks at Jaffa, there was "of course, a racial element to this; Napoleon would not have executed European prisoners-of-war." (190). Of course, the fact that the French opponent Jezzar was in the habit of sewing Christians into sacks (described on page 191 for goodness' sake!) probably has as much explanatory power as the "racial element." The fact that NB treated his "non-white, non-Christian enemies" (201) with greater cruelty is more owing to the barbarity of the Turks than anything else.
I bring up this scene because the book is, thankfully, free of most of the ugly bugaboos of modern academia. Roberts, here, dabs his toe into race-as-everything explanations, but elsewhere they are absent. Absent, too, are the sub-Freudian explanations which at times characterize other biographies.(Wouldn't Napoleon have been better if he hadn't suffered from a Napoleon Complex?) Roberts lets Napoleon be a man, and not a symptom of a nagging disease or aggregation of a million social variables. This is much appreciated.
The problem with Roberts is that he is still a modern, through and through--a man born of the world Napoleon created, if you will. Napoleon's most important contribution, after all, was the creation of the technocratic, liberal state. Roberts never passes up the chance to laud Napoleon's belief in the meritocracy and equal political rights. The politics of the Revolution are forcibly applied across Italy and Germany, and Roberts never questions the rightness of this once. After all, who can argue with the equality of man? Then again, what was the difference between the terror practiced by the French army and that practiced by the rolling Soviets in 1948? What is the difference between ISIS now? It would be nice if Roberts considered the perspective of, well, the rest of the whole of Europe at the time. France was a revolutionary, terrorist state with no little respect for national sovereignty and none for kings. Perhaps the Czar of Russia is not the best representative of the Old Regime, but certainly there were civilized Prussians and Austrians who might have stood in as a counterpoise to French terror? Certainly Edmund Burke!
This is the main problem with the book. Roberts is a great author of military battles and lifetimes, but he is lousy as an author of ideas. Roberts seems to consider himself above ideology, a man so certain in progress that he need not consider alternatives. At times his political analysis is so inept and unctuous you'd think you were reading The Economist. Roberts lauds the fact that Napoleon instituted meritocratic reforms throughout his rule; he also notes that these reforms were in part to resemble NB's modern military. Napoleon modernized and made efficient the French state--again, like the military. Does anyone else see a pattern here? One has to wonder if the "liberated" peasant or Jew would not have preferred his former servitude to freezing to death outside Moscow. But!--progress...progress...
Naturally, Roberts hates the Church above all things. NB's cruel and stupid invasion of Iberia is justified by Roberts as an act of--you guessed it--modernization. The backwards Spaniards were lagging on the long arc of history, still adhering to the Inquisition (fatalities of which couldn't hold a flame to Wagram, Borodino, etc.). In all the 800 pages, I don't think I can remember Roberts criticizing Napoleon's Spanish policy but for the fact that he should have been more severe and gone to the peninsula himself. This is astounding. From 1795 onward, Spain was an acquiescent, weak power, and posed no serious threat to French interests. Beyond raw lust for power and cruelty, there was no reason to subject Spain to the lawless treatment she received at the hands of the French. Why is there no voice condemning this tyrannical, despicable course or action? Roberts provides us with no countervailing voice, and becomes sycophantic in his praise (or, more accurately, lame criticism) of NB. But the Iberian policy was a failure at every level: Morally, militarily, and politically (let us remember that the illegal and unscrupulous Louisiana Purchase did about as much for European decline as any other one act).
The reason Roberts can't come to criticize Napoleon for his mass slaughter of men is that he doesn't seem to realize the possibility for another side, i.e. that the Old Regime had a right to defend itself (or at least to not be destroyed at the price paid). It's hard to read this and think that Roberts has not been struck by the worst of revolutionary impulses, i.e. that the ends justify the means. Hundreds of thousands killed--but isn't the Code Napoleon nice? States destroyed, cultures ruined--but the Jews! They're free! There are even some homosexuals working in Provence! How can you argue with Progress?
Beyond political naivitee, Roberts contradicts himself in his descriptions of his hero. However much he may like to twist it, the Peace of Amiens was broken by Napoleon. Yes, the later coalitions formed and waged war on him, but only after his tyrannical decrees made war all but inevitable. Napoleon was a bully, and this trait served neither him nor the citizens of Europe well. There is something of the swash-buckler in such behavior which is intriguing and captivating--but again, is such decadence worth the hundreds of thousands rotting across Europe?
And so, while Roberts has saved Napoleon from the pathetic over-analyzers and the postmodernists, he has not moved on to perform the greatest task of the historian: To make us understand Napoleon's time and context. Without an understanding of the appeal and fault of the Old Regime, we can never be sure what NB is really up against, or if the wars he waged to defeat its tenets were really worth it. Perhaps such consideration is not necessary. Napoleon was intriguing enough without such considerations, perhaps. But Roberts cannot succeed in his larger project--convincing us that Napoleon was of another league than Hitler, Stalin, etc.--without convincing us that his wars were worthwhile. And he simply hasn't done this. He's only succeeded in forgetting the dead.
These considerations aside, Roberts does a nice job of letting us inside the mind of this great genius. Most interesting are Napoleon's letters to Josephine, and his other ruminations on the romance. The image of NB waiting on Elba, rooms reserved for his son and empress, is incredibly moving, no matter who the tyrant. His letters are funny, his personality is affable, his heartache is sincere. Proust said that falling in love is the only poetic thing most men ever achieve. Greater than his faux-royal processions and bloody military feats, his success and failure in romance stuck with me the most throughout reading.
Nonetheless, I still can't help but think that Roberts has not achieved his goals. Yes, Napoleon was a "great man" in the Carlyle sense, but by creating the modern state he ruined the conditions whereby later men might become great. He modernized his country, but so did Jefferson and Hamilton, without the bloodshed. He led an army, but led it to endless war, unlike General Washington who led his to peace and prosperity. Even America's murderer-tyrant, Abe Lincoln, attempted no coup and wouldn't even disallow the 1864 election which may have ruined his war. These are acts of true character; acts of true moral courage. Napoleon, as one men, may have bettered this group, but his faults and crimes loom much larger. His hubris alone killed more than his weak principles. Roberts never captures Napoleon's strange contradictions, the mix of the squalid and the grand in the man. For now, it does us readers well to remember how many of the great patriots we dote upon might have just as well become our oppressors, lashing us alongside of the Turks.
June 5, 2023
‘’The ambition he had conceived as a schoolboy at Brienne, and from which he had never wavered, had been achieved. He had transformed the art of leadership, built an empire, handed down laws for the ages, and joined the ancients’’
Napoleon’s life is famously difficult to encapsulate in a single book or in a series of volumes. One of the sixty famous battlefields he led, such as Borodino or Waterloo, can yield volumes worth of content. However, I think Andrew Roberts’s book does an almost perfect job of presenting Napoleon’s life that is useful for any history enthusiast or an academic historian. I will try to elaborate why I say ‘’almost perfect’’ later in the review. This book is by no means a light read. The writing style is very academic at times, and Andrew’s use of the English language is astounding. And at 900+ pages, it certainly is a big book. All in all, this is an absolutely remarkable biography on one of history's most iconic figures. Napoleon’s significance can be seen in such classics as Les Misérables, War and Peace and The Count of Monte Cristo.
The book is rich with references from letters written by Napoleon himself as well as from his family, his generals, his rivals, his friends and his close companions. The added anecdotes, factual corrections and personal notes of the author make it so easy to put everything into a historical context. Of course, like many historical figures, Napoleon was not perfect. As he himself put it,
‘’The hero of a tragedy, in order to interest us, should be neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent…. All weakness and all contradictions are unhappily in the heart of man, and present a colouring eminently tragic’’
Napoleon spoke Corsican as a native tongue and was taught Italian at school (Corsica was of course part of the Italian-speaking Genoa republic for over 500 years before the birth of Napoleon). He was nearly ten years old before he learned French and throughout his life, he spoke it with a thick accent. The Corsican independence movement had a massive effect in his early political and military career. For all his education at The Military College Brienne and The Military Academy of Paris, he credits his love of books for his superior knowledge of history, military strategy, the arts, philosophy and many more. He also possessed a phenomenal memory. While in his final exile in St. Helena when a visitor asked him how he could recall the details of units that fought in each engagement, he quipped
‘’Madam, this is a lover’s recollection of his former mistress’’.
Many people, including the author, accredit the love that Napoleon received from his soldiers to
‘’ [His understanding] of the psychology of the ordinary soldier and the power of regimental pride. Napoleon instinctively understood what soldiers wanted, and he gave it to them. And at least until the battle of Aspern-Essling in 1809 he gave them what they wanted most of all: victory.’’
This affection from his soldiers followed him from his Egypt campaign to his final campaign at Waterloo. Famously, when boarding The HMS Bellerophon for his final departure from France in July 1815, French officers and sailors cried in the most heartrending manner ‘’Vive l’Empereur’’ one last time.
However, for all his understanding of soldiers’ morale, his administrative abilities, his genius for understanding his enemy’s weaknesses and his sheer work ethic, he was met with good luck throughout his career (which he was supremely superstitious about). He had an undeniable charisma and aptitude in the presence of intellectuals of his time. Upon meeting Napoleon after Erfurt, Goethe said of him
‘’ He made observations at a very high intellectual level, as a man who has studied the tragical scene with the attention of a criminal judge. Meeting him was the most gratifying experience of my life’’
Where this book thrives is at the spectacular description of Napoleon’s greatest battles. The vivid and magnificent portrayal of the battles of Jena, Austerlitz, Friedland and Borodino was first class. I found it to be much better than documentaries I have seen on them. Especially the chapter on Austerlitz is a masterpiece in historical writing. The details were simply magnificent. It makes owning the expensive hardcopy of this book absolutely worth it. But the one disappointment I have with the book is in the chapter on Waterloo. It didn’t feel as detailed and enticing as the other famous battles that Napoleon commanded. I can’t say it’s because of the outcome of the battle. For me, it takes a tiny bit of quality away from the book.
Napoleon was one of the most consequential leaders the world has ever seen. He instituted the metric system, made French a standardized official language of the people and the government (Breton, German, Flemish, Basque and Celtic were spoken by different sections of the French society along with French before that), he set the strictly disciplined lycées (Secondary schools where Greek, Latin, Mathematics, physics and others were taught), built an extensive library system, reformed the military hierarchical structure, reformed and codified the French law system, laid the great architectural blueprint of Paris including the bridges on the Seine and the sewer system that serves the city to this day. He built institutions that will be, as he puts them, masses of granite in the soul of France.
Overall, the book is engaging, detailed and highly researched. It’s everything that you would want in a history book. Principally, if you are someone who enjoys military history, this is a must-read. Another motivation to pick up this book might be the fact that understanding the Napoleonic wars comes in handy when reading classic works of literature written or based upon of this era of French and European history. To sum up, this book is a 4.5 for me.
September 24, 2019
Description: Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, he was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all times.
Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon is the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon’s thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single bestselling book of the nineteenth century.
An award-winning historian, Roberts traveled to fifty-three of Napoleon’s sixty battle sites, discovered crucial new documents in archives, and even made the long trip by boat to St. Helena. He is as acute in his understanding of politics as he is of military history. Here at last is a biography worthy of its subject: magisterial, insightful, beautifully written, by one of our foremost historians.
Fantastic. The most comprehensive biography of Bonaparte that I have had the pleasure to encounter. Fully recommended.
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. A French army under the command of Napoleon was defeated by the armies of the Seventh Coalition, comprising an Anglo-allied army under the command of the Duke of Wellington combined with a Prussian army under the command of Gebhard von Blücher. (wiki sourced)
December 4, 2023
Andrew Roberts has a very favorable view of Napoleon. 3 of his arguments stand out in my recollection.
First, Napoleon was an amazing general. This is uncontroversial. All the key battles are described in detail with Roberts explaining what made Napoleon’s strategies so effective. As I was reading this book, I would watch short videos on YouTube from “Epic History” that describe the battles. Frankly, I got more out of those videos than the book. That’s not really Robert’s fault, just that it is so much easier to absorb this information while looking at maps and clever visuals than just reading text.
Second, Roberts claims that Napoleon was not a tyrant. Rather, he brought increased freedom to France and the people in the lands that he conquered. There was some interesting stuff here. Overall though, the book was light on politics. I don’t feel like I have a good understanding of his philosophical views, and how daily life for people in his domain changed under his rule.
Third, Roberts claims that it was more often that others declared war on France than vice versa. I’ll trust Roberts on the math, though it didn’t feel like that as I was reading. It seemed like he was constantly starting wars!
The Mistakes
As much of an admirer as Roberts was, Napoleon’s huge mistakes were the more memorable parts of the book for me. In particular, 3 mistakes stand out.
Getting bogged down in an unwinnable war in Spain and Portugal for 6 years was a huge unforced error.
Then there was the disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. Of the 400,000 soldiers he led into Russia in June 1812, only 40,000 made it back to France. That’s just an unfathomable loss, for a war that he didn’t have to undertake.
And then of course, there was Waterloo. Roberts was blunt and brutal in detailing various tactical blunders leading up to and during Waterloo.
The Movie
Since both the book and movie are fresh in my mind, I can’t help but sharing a couple thoughts. I won’t go into the various historical inaccuracies – there are plenty of good sources for that (one hint: he didn’t really blow up the Pyramids).
What I really want to complain about instead is how Joaquin Phoenix was a terrible choice. He has this laconic, aloof, hipster feel to him in this and every other role he does. Sometimes that works but I think it was not a good fit for Napoleon at all. The Napoleon Roberts describes is someone who has a ton of energy, constantly giving orders to people faster than they can write them down. Someone with insatiable curiosity who asks tons of questions. Someone who could be charming when he needs to be. Someone who knew details about what supplies his troops needed and had an incredible memory. Someone who could inspire his troops with rousing speeches. Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon seemed to have none of these qualities.
His relationship with Josephine was not portrayed very accurately either. First, showing him abandoning his post in Egypt after finding out that Josephine was unfaithful was not only inaccurate, but demonstrates a basic lack of understanding of the man. The infidelities did happen, and he was devastated by it, but he had the ability to compartmentalize and would never lose control of himself like that. Also, the movie shows him as being obsessed and in-love with Josephine throughout his life, even after divorcing her when she could not bear a child. From Roberts, I read him as being much more cold-hearted, not just choosing to divorce her but moving on quickly to a new wife, a new child, and new wars to fight. Even before the divorce, he distanced himself from Josephine and was typically more enamored with whoever his mistress was at the time. It is true that he retained a fondness for her and did express regret for the divorce while he was in exile. But the movie overplays this into a life-long obsession.
First, Napoleon was an amazing general. This is uncontroversial. All the key battles are described in detail with Roberts explaining what made Napoleon’s strategies so effective. As I was reading this book, I would watch short videos on YouTube from “Epic History” that describe the battles. Frankly, I got more out of those videos than the book. That’s not really Robert’s fault, just that it is so much easier to absorb this information while looking at maps and clever visuals than just reading text.
Second, Roberts claims that Napoleon was not a tyrant. Rather, he brought increased freedom to France and the people in the lands that he conquered. There was some interesting stuff here. Overall though, the book was light on politics. I don’t feel like I have a good understanding of his philosophical views, and how daily life for people in his domain changed under his rule.
Third, Roberts claims that it was more often that others declared war on France than vice versa. I’ll trust Roberts on the math, though it didn’t feel like that as I was reading. It seemed like he was constantly starting wars!
The Mistakes
As much of an admirer as Roberts was, Napoleon’s huge mistakes were the more memorable parts of the book for me. In particular, 3 mistakes stand out.
Getting bogged down in an unwinnable war in Spain and Portugal for 6 years was a huge unforced error.
Then there was the disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. Of the 400,000 soldiers he led into Russia in June 1812, only 40,000 made it back to France. That’s just an unfathomable loss, for a war that he didn’t have to undertake.
And then of course, there was Waterloo. Roberts was blunt and brutal in detailing various tactical blunders leading up to and during Waterloo.
The Movie
Since both the book and movie are fresh in my mind, I can’t help but sharing a couple thoughts. I won’t go into the various historical inaccuracies – there are plenty of good sources for that (one hint: he didn’t really blow up the Pyramids).
What I really want to complain about instead is how Joaquin Phoenix was a terrible choice. He has this laconic, aloof, hipster feel to him in this and every other role he does. Sometimes that works but I think it was not a good fit for Napoleon at all. The Napoleon Roberts describes is someone who has a ton of energy, constantly giving orders to people faster than they can write them down. Someone with insatiable curiosity who asks tons of questions. Someone who could be charming when he needs to be. Someone who knew details about what supplies his troops needed and had an incredible memory. Someone who could inspire his troops with rousing speeches. Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon seemed to have none of these qualities.
His relationship with Josephine was not portrayed very accurately either. First, showing him abandoning his post in Egypt after finding out that Josephine was unfaithful was not only inaccurate, but demonstrates a basic lack of understanding of the man. The infidelities did happen, and he was devastated by it, but he had the ability to compartmentalize and would never lose control of himself like that. Also, the movie shows him as being obsessed and in-love with Josephine throughout his life, even after divorcing her when she could not bear a child. From Roberts, I read him as being much more cold-hearted, not just choosing to divorce her but moving on quickly to a new wife, a new child, and new wars to fight. Even before the divorce, he distanced himself from Josephine and was typically more enamored with whoever his mistress was at the time. It is true that he retained a fondness for her and did express regret for the divorce while he was in exile. But the movie overplays this into a life-long obsession.
August 3, 2016
Napoleon: A Life, written by Andrew Roberts, is an absolutely astounding biography on one of modern history's greatest conquerors, Napoleon Bonaparte. Born in Corsica and resentful of French rule over the island, he eventually gave up his nationalist views and joined the French army as an artillery officer. Rising through the ranks during France's bloody Revolutionary period, Napoleon eventually become the centre of a coup d'etat attempt by a number of conspirators to overthrow the ineffective and chaotic French revolutionary system. Napoleon outfoxed his co-conspirators, and took full military control of France, eventually proclaiming himself an Emperor. What followed was a whirlwind of political reform, French expansion and military victory. Italian, German and Austrian states were all defeated by Napoleons armies, and the geopolitical situation of Europe was drastically changed. Multiple coalitions consisting of almost every European power were allayed and defeated 5 times, until the disastrous Russian campaign and Napoleon's Hundred Days out of political exile. He ended his life in captivity on British owned St. Helena, far away from the political gambit of Europe.
Napoleon was an energetic, meticulous and rebellious figure. He did away with most established conventions, dismissed most religious traditions (at times dabbling in Islam, and considering marrying a Russian Orthodox princess). He took personal control over much of the facets of his Empire, simultaneously fighting major campaign battles while engaging in reforms at home, offering advice to his subordinates and involving himself in minute disputes and issues. He married for love, and was with his wife, Empress Josephine, for 13 years before divorcing and marrying an Austrian princess in a political move to try and end Austria's stringent opposition of French power.
Napoleon was also Machiavellian to his core. Nothing was done if not for political gain. Every victory became a grandiose tale, and every defeat (what few there were) was played down or exaggerated. He arranged spectacles with his soldiers, awarded them for bravery on the battlefield (once quipping about how men would live or die for a bit of metal) and eating and sleeping in their camps on the battlefield. His long memory served him well, as he would remember details about individuals he had crossed briefly years before. He stacked the European states with his own family (much to his detriment) and espoused his liberal/revolutionary ideals only as long as it served. He quickly disposed of them after he became Emperor.
Roberts biography is similarly glowing. Was Napoleon perfect? Obviously not. If he was, he would not have ended his days on St. Helena. He often insulted others behind their backs, had a long memory for slights, took meticulous control of everything around him, and of course, lost it all due to his grandiose ambitions. Even so, his large number of military victories, his complete reform of the European system with liberal ideals (surpassing even Britain and the United States of the time in some respects) and the lasting impact of these changes cannot be renounced. Roberts does a fantastic job showcasing the life of an Enlightened Despot, or a cheeky Corsican Jacobite, depending on how you see it.
This book is well researched and brimming with detail, right down to some of Napoleon's odd quirks, such as his poor French, his feverish disregard for sleeping, his poor ways with the women in his life or his incessant need to involve himself in the love affairs of his family members. The book also gives detailed blow-by-blow accounts of the famous battles he fought, such as Austerlitz, with troop movements, battle maps and casualty figures. The political system Napoleon set up is examined in detail, and its successes and flaws noted.
I could write more, suffice to say that Napoleon: A Life stands out as a fantastically detailed account of the life of one of Europe's most influential historic figures. Napoleon left an impact on the European state system which was felt for years after his death. His Napoleonic code was in force until early in the 20th century in some parts of Germany. His political reorginizations of Italy, Germany and Poland helped stoke nationalistic movements in each of the countries that would have drastic impacts on Europe's political borders. His defeat marked the hegemonic achievements of the British Empire, which would last right up till 1945. His charismatic charm and leadership capabilities became legendary, and continue to influence people to this day. Napoleon's grand ambitions to be Europe's modern Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great were almost achieved, save for the fact that he eventually lost, and Napoleon will surely be remembered as one of histories greats. Roberts biography is a fantastic and detailed look into the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. It should not be missed.
Napoleon was an energetic, meticulous and rebellious figure. He did away with most established conventions, dismissed most religious traditions (at times dabbling in Islam, and considering marrying a Russian Orthodox princess). He took personal control over much of the facets of his Empire, simultaneously fighting major campaign battles while engaging in reforms at home, offering advice to his subordinates and involving himself in minute disputes and issues. He married for love, and was with his wife, Empress Josephine, for 13 years before divorcing and marrying an Austrian princess in a political move to try and end Austria's stringent opposition of French power.
Napoleon was also Machiavellian to his core. Nothing was done if not for political gain. Every victory became a grandiose tale, and every defeat (what few there were) was played down or exaggerated. He arranged spectacles with his soldiers, awarded them for bravery on the battlefield (once quipping about how men would live or die for a bit of metal) and eating and sleeping in their camps on the battlefield. His long memory served him well, as he would remember details about individuals he had crossed briefly years before. He stacked the European states with his own family (much to his detriment) and espoused his liberal/revolutionary ideals only as long as it served. He quickly disposed of them after he became Emperor.
Roberts biography is similarly glowing. Was Napoleon perfect? Obviously not. If he was, he would not have ended his days on St. Helena. He often insulted others behind their backs, had a long memory for slights, took meticulous control of everything around him, and of course, lost it all due to his grandiose ambitions. Even so, his large number of military victories, his complete reform of the European system with liberal ideals (surpassing even Britain and the United States of the time in some respects) and the lasting impact of these changes cannot be renounced. Roberts does a fantastic job showcasing the life of an Enlightened Despot, or a cheeky Corsican Jacobite, depending on how you see it.
This book is well researched and brimming with detail, right down to some of Napoleon's odd quirks, such as his poor French, his feverish disregard for sleeping, his poor ways with the women in his life or his incessant need to involve himself in the love affairs of his family members. The book also gives detailed blow-by-blow accounts of the famous battles he fought, such as Austerlitz, with troop movements, battle maps and casualty figures. The political system Napoleon set up is examined in detail, and its successes and flaws noted.
I could write more, suffice to say that Napoleon: A Life stands out as a fantastically detailed account of the life of one of Europe's most influential historic figures. Napoleon left an impact on the European state system which was felt for years after his death. His Napoleonic code was in force until early in the 20th century in some parts of Germany. His political reorginizations of Italy, Germany and Poland helped stoke nationalistic movements in each of the countries that would have drastic impacts on Europe's political borders. His defeat marked the hegemonic achievements of the British Empire, which would last right up till 1945. His charismatic charm and leadership capabilities became legendary, and continue to influence people to this day. Napoleon's grand ambitions to be Europe's modern Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great were almost achieved, save for the fact that he eventually lost, and Napoleon will surely be remembered as one of histories greats. Roberts biography is a fantastic and detailed look into the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. It should not be missed.
April 4, 2024
Fantastic biography with many hidden gems about his historic life. His wife, Josephine teeth were so bad that she never smiled. Napoleon never won a naval battle & the only time he went against the British was his loss at Waterloo. His ill-advised plan to invade Britain which never happened, his conquer of faraway Egypt but not his neighbor country of Spain. His attempted suicide and his remarkable coup from Elba are detailed in rich prose. His idol was Julius Caesar, he imprisoned the Pope, the brilliant selling of Louisiana Purchase to fund his wars and his conviction that having the draft lead to his downfall.
November 17, 2021
The Code Napoleon was based on the idea that laws must be based on common sense and equality rather than on custom, societal division and the rule of kings.
The Napoleonic Code was used by many nations who wanted to move towards modernization through legal reforms. It has been called one of the few documents to have influenced the whole world.
In 1797 Napoleon launched an expedition to seize Egypt with the aim to cut off British trade routes to India. Perhaps knowing of the countries rich heritage Napoleon brought along scientists, engineers and scholars popularly known as savants in his campaign. The resultant work would later lead to the publication of a 23 volume Description de l’Égypte (Description of Egypt) published between 1809 and 1829. But eclipsing this was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Captain Pierre François Bouchard during demolition of a wall in Rosetta. Written in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, Rosetta Stone eventually proved to be the cipher that cracked ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs leading to understanding of ancient Egyptian history and birth of the entire field of modern Egyptology.
This is what made Napoleon Bonaparte Great.
The Napoleonic Code was used by many nations who wanted to move towards modernization through legal reforms. It has been called one of the few documents to have influenced the whole world.
In 1797 Napoleon launched an expedition to seize Egypt with the aim to cut off British trade routes to India. Perhaps knowing of the countries rich heritage Napoleon brought along scientists, engineers and scholars popularly known as savants in his campaign. The resultant work would later lead to the publication of a 23 volume Description de l’Égypte (Description of Egypt) published between 1809 and 1829. But eclipsing this was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Captain Pierre François Bouchard during demolition of a wall in Rosetta. Written in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, Rosetta Stone eventually proved to be the cipher that cracked ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs leading to understanding of ancient Egyptian history and birth of the entire field of modern Egyptology.
This is what made Napoleon Bonaparte Great.
April 11, 2021
Excellent coverage of Napoleon. You think you know—but do you really?
An epic beast of a book about the man who only lost 7 of the 60 lifetime battles waged.
“I lived like a bear, in a little room, with books for my only friends
. . . These were the joys and debaucheries of my youth.”
An epic beast of a book about the man who only lost 7 of the 60 lifetime battles waged.
“I lived like a bear, in a little room, with books for my only friends
. . . These were the joys and debaucheries of my youth.”
September 10, 2023
Better to Burn Out than Fade Away.
Andrew Roberts for me is one the great historians of our age. I have found many of his books to be excellent. The apex being his history of Winston Churchill, but a Storm of War and George III are also first class. His book on Napoleon, titled ‘Napoleon the Great’ in the United Kingdom and ‘Napoleon: A Life’ in the US is another great piece of writing, but has split option amongst academics. The premise of the book is that if Napoleon managed to die on the throne of France then he would have been received the suffix ‘the Great’ based on the standards of others, such as Peter, Catherine or Frederick who received this most prestigious of accolades. This is of course an interesting argument, theories and perspectives like this bring a historian really to the top of the table in my opinion. Roberts’ other histories also deliver great arguments like this, Roberts himself shows he is up for the fight. Often I like and agree with him.
However, on this occasion the book has received much criticism from respected academics of the period, as it is too pro Napoleon, in an ongoing and bitter debate. Charles J Esdaile has recommended Philip Dwyer’s trilogy as a more balanced and realistic history of the man and has stated that Roberts has taken a shameless opportunity to exploit the title, as he was very much pro ‘John Bull’ before writing this. For me Napoleon was a warlord, who did not know when to stop. Others like Frederick the Great or Louis XIV (who in equal argument could have been called ‘the Great’) knew when to draw the line. When they were beaten or when to fight another day. Napoleon’s hubris got the better of him. A case in point is Moscow in 1812. It was not the snow that defeated the Grande Armée, but Naploeon’s decision making. Mainly his complete disregard for his own military maxims at Borodino, he did the same again at Waterloo, and then waiting too long in the Russian spiritual city for Tsar Alexander I to offer negotiations. By Waterloo the magic was utterly gone, Napoleon was old, tired and ill. The Duke of Wellington had found a way to beat him (his defensive reserve slope tactic) and Napoleon who had allowed Wellington to choose the battlefield seemed to just throw his forces forward with no masterful flanking manoeuvres.
What is undeniable is that Napoleon changed history. The world was turned upside down by his time in power, his genius in the early days has been unmatched. The political matter was competed reshaped, he dismantled the thousand year old Holy Roman Empire and the ancient Republic of Venice, changed Italy and the Netherlands. He brought stability to the French after years of political unrest by reversing some of the most extreme policies of the regime and making peace with the Catholic Church. He was a strategic genius and his military tactics have been studied ever since. He also created a number of lasting reforms such as centralising government administration, created a law code and national bank alongside other infrastructural systems, such as sewage works and education systems. He also awarded people on merit (revolutionary at the time), although some of his marshals were definitely over promoted so this didn’t always work. But he did also display nepotism, his family was the great chain around his neck and by installing his brothers as kings of Spain and Holland he was caused no end of issues.
The story of Napoleon is so fascinating, he is one of the most influential figures in history. His name defines an age. He was not short, average height for the time, the British propaganda of George Cruikshank et al worked a treat here. He was not French, he was Corsican and spoke French, his second language with an accent all his life. Josephine and Napoleon was not a great love story either, she never loved him. She was an opportunist for an up and coming man. Both nearly got executed after being imprisoned during the revolution. But the history is larger than life, it is amazing what he and those around him accomplished. Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena are three brilliant victories. The Battle of Leipzig was also another achievement for Napoleonic, only messed up by his own mistake and allowing a break in the fighting he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. But there were also other talented men of the age, military men such as Wellington or Viscount Horatio Nelson or political schemers such as Prince Klemens von Metternich or Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand who in their own ways were geniuses and scuppered Napoleon’s grand plan.
This is worth reading because Roberts is a good writer. But it is not the ultimate or complete book on Napoleon Bonaparte, for the reasons I have mentioned above. It should be handled with care and other biographies of the man are more balanced and provide the full view of how history should judge him. I disagree that he should be called 'the Great' as he contributed to his own decline and made too many mistakes in the later years. He simply didn’t know when to stop. As I have said above the arrogance got him in the end. Therefore I would recommend Michael Broers or Philip Dwyer first and then read this for the literary skill.
Andrew Roberts for me is one the great historians of our age. I have found many of his books to be excellent. The apex being his history of Winston Churchill, but a Storm of War and George III are also first class. His book on Napoleon, titled ‘Napoleon the Great’ in the United Kingdom and ‘Napoleon: A Life’ in the US is another great piece of writing, but has split option amongst academics. The premise of the book is that if Napoleon managed to die on the throne of France then he would have been received the suffix ‘the Great’ based on the standards of others, such as Peter, Catherine or Frederick who received this most prestigious of accolades. This is of course an interesting argument, theories and perspectives like this bring a historian really to the top of the table in my opinion. Roberts’ other histories also deliver great arguments like this, Roberts himself shows he is up for the fight. Often I like and agree with him.
However, on this occasion the book has received much criticism from respected academics of the period, as it is too pro Napoleon, in an ongoing and bitter debate. Charles J Esdaile has recommended Philip Dwyer’s trilogy as a more balanced and realistic history of the man and has stated that Roberts has taken a shameless opportunity to exploit the title, as he was very much pro ‘John Bull’ before writing this. For me Napoleon was a warlord, who did not know when to stop. Others like Frederick the Great or Louis XIV (who in equal argument could have been called ‘the Great’) knew when to draw the line. When they were beaten or when to fight another day. Napoleon’s hubris got the better of him. A case in point is Moscow in 1812. It was not the snow that defeated the Grande Armée, but Naploeon’s decision making. Mainly his complete disregard for his own military maxims at Borodino, he did the same again at Waterloo, and then waiting too long in the Russian spiritual city for Tsar Alexander I to offer negotiations. By Waterloo the magic was utterly gone, Napoleon was old, tired and ill. The Duke of Wellington had found a way to beat him (his defensive reserve slope tactic) and Napoleon who had allowed Wellington to choose the battlefield seemed to just throw his forces forward with no masterful flanking manoeuvres.
What is undeniable is that Napoleon changed history. The world was turned upside down by his time in power, his genius in the early days has been unmatched. The political matter was competed reshaped, he dismantled the thousand year old Holy Roman Empire and the ancient Republic of Venice, changed Italy and the Netherlands. He brought stability to the French after years of political unrest by reversing some of the most extreme policies of the regime and making peace with the Catholic Church. He was a strategic genius and his military tactics have been studied ever since. He also created a number of lasting reforms such as centralising government administration, created a law code and national bank alongside other infrastructural systems, such as sewage works and education systems. He also awarded people on merit (revolutionary at the time), although some of his marshals were definitely over promoted so this didn’t always work. But he did also display nepotism, his family was the great chain around his neck and by installing his brothers as kings of Spain and Holland he was caused no end of issues.
The story of Napoleon is so fascinating, he is one of the most influential figures in history. His name defines an age. He was not short, average height for the time, the British propaganda of George Cruikshank et al worked a treat here. He was not French, he was Corsican and spoke French, his second language with an accent all his life. Josephine and Napoleon was not a great love story either, she never loved him. She was an opportunist for an up and coming man. Both nearly got executed after being imprisoned during the revolution. But the history is larger than life, it is amazing what he and those around him accomplished. Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena are three brilliant victories. The Battle of Leipzig was also another achievement for Napoleonic, only messed up by his own mistake and allowing a break in the fighting he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. But there were also other talented men of the age, military men such as Wellington or Viscount Horatio Nelson or political schemers such as Prince Klemens von Metternich or Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand who in their own ways were geniuses and scuppered Napoleon’s grand plan.
This is worth reading because Roberts is a good writer. But it is not the ultimate or complete book on Napoleon Bonaparte, for the reasons I have mentioned above. It should be handled with care and other biographies of the man are more balanced and provide the full view of how history should judge him. I disagree that he should be called 'the Great' as he contributed to his own decline and made too many mistakes in the later years. He simply didn’t know when to stop. As I have said above the arrogance got him in the end. Therefore I would recommend Michael Broers or Philip Dwyer first and then read this for the literary skill.
March 12, 2020
After reading his excellent account of the Storm Of War, I had high expectations of Robert's newest release, his biography of Napoleon. I was not dissapointed.
I suspect you can fill half of the New York's library with books dealing with Napoleon and as I understood these can be divided in two sorts: you either hate him, or you love him.
Andrew Roberts is comfortably between these two camps. He does not praise him, but is here and there rather critical of Napoleon's decisions. He is unbiased and stays to the facts, but while reading the book my admiration for Napoleon has grown quite a bit. I mean, who can compare his self to this guy, who was emperor at 38? I'm 38, and all that I've managed is to become a consultant at an energy company.
As a novice reader in the Napoleon subject (I am ashamed to admit) Andrew stays to the facts, which is quite comfortable in that respect. He does deliver his tale with objective reasoning, introduces a lot of names that I've never heard of, but this is not a hinderance. Andrew Roberts seems to have had access to a lot of letters from Napoleon to various friends and relatives, which gives you the feeling that you to get to know Napoleon quite personally. Also, here and there you can't supress a quick smile if Andrew mentiones some nice anecdotes and some interactions between Napoleon and the common soldier.
So this book met in all aspects my expectations. I can imagine that for the more experienced Napoleon reader, this will not hold many suprises, but for a beginner in the Napoleon subject, this is an excellent introduction. Al in all, 5 stars!
I suspect you can fill half of the New York's library with books dealing with Napoleon and as I understood these can be divided in two sorts: you either hate him, or you love him.
Andrew Roberts is comfortably between these two camps. He does not praise him, but is here and there rather critical of Napoleon's decisions. He is unbiased and stays to the facts, but while reading the book my admiration for Napoleon has grown quite a bit. I mean, who can compare his self to this guy, who was emperor at 38? I'm 38, and all that I've managed is to become a consultant at an energy company.
As a novice reader in the Napoleon subject (I am ashamed to admit) Andrew stays to the facts, which is quite comfortable in that respect. He does deliver his tale with objective reasoning, introduces a lot of names that I've never heard of, but this is not a hinderance. Andrew Roberts seems to have had access to a lot of letters from Napoleon to various friends and relatives, which gives you the feeling that you to get to know Napoleon quite personally. Also, here and there you can't supress a quick smile if Andrew mentiones some nice anecdotes and some interactions between Napoleon and the common soldier.
So this book met in all aspects my expectations. I can imagine that for the more experienced Napoleon reader, this will not hold many suprises, but for a beginner in the Napoleon subject, this is an excellent introduction. Al in all, 5 stars!
November 21, 2015
Gushing bio--unusual for an Englishman. Roberts claims that newly available letters present a vastly more favorable portrait than previously available to scholars. "All too often historians have taken at face value the biographies written by people around Napoleon, whereas many of them were deeply compromised, to the point of being worthless unless co firmed by as second source." The problem is that although Roberts tries to be balanced, and points out the warts, his over-the-top admiration for his subject distorts the lens of otherwise excellent research.
One example--Roberts extols Napoleon's re-created nobility: "Unlike anywhere else in Europe, a French family's noble simply lapsed if the next generation hadn't done enough to deserve its passing on." A paragraph later, however, he describes the new hierarchy -- "a complete reordering of the system" -- from top to bottom without placing the new peers. Instead, he digresses into a discussion of the exact mix of liberty, equality and fraternity the new scheme supplied.
Similarly, Roberts's discussion on Napoleon and the Jews is muddled. On one page, he touts (reasonably enough) the Decree on Jews and Usury. A page later, Napoleon is upholding prosecutions of Jewish moneylenders, and the best Roberts can manage is that "Napoleon was personally prejudiced against Jews to much the same degree as the rest of his class and background."
While the book is readable, the writing is not page turning. Lots of facts; snippets of stirring writing (the best of which is when Roberts called something "yet another example of the luck that [Napoleon] was starting to mistake for Fate."). So far, most interesting thing I've learned is that Napoleon's autobiography "Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène" was the bestseller of the 19th Century, topping "Uncle Tom's Cabin".
In sum, Roberts is unparalleled as a researcher. But he doesn't provide the reader reasons why any particular piece of previously accepted Napoleonic legend should be rejected in favor of his new interpretation. And, although is writing is good enough, he's hardly a compelling read like a Ian Toll, Corrigan, Nicolson, Stephen Taylor or Donald Thomas; better than N.A.M. Rodger, however.
Born in quasi-obscurity on Corsica, Napoleon (a native Italian and Corsican speaker) was trucked off to learn French, then to a military academy. Napoleon not only was an excellent student but -- ill-dressed and awkward, with plenty of time on his hands-- he read of heroes and conquerors past: Caesar, Alexander the Great, etc. Napoleon's fascination (for the non-French) is in part because he may have been history's most successful autodidact. For that reason alone, more bios, and more reading, are justified.
"Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback."… The ideas that underpin our modern world--meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances and so on--were championed by Napoleon."
"An astonishing number of his letters throughout his career refer to providing footwear for his troops."
"One of the reasons why he maintained such a fluid campaign [in Italy] was that he had no resources for anything else."
"'The strength of the army', he stated, 'like power in mechanics, is the product of multiplying the mass by the velocity."
"Napoleon was capable of compartmentalizing his life, so that one set of concerns never spilled over into another -- probably a necessary attribute for any great statesman, but one he possessed to an extraordinary degree."
"'Severe to the officers,' was his his stated mantra, 'kindly to the men.'"
"'I have no doubt there will be lively criticism of the treaty I've just signed,' Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand the [day after signing the treaty of Campo Formio], but he argued that he only way to get a better deal was by going to war again and conquering 'two or three times more provinces than Austria. Was that possible? Yes. Probable? No' He sent Berthier and Monge to Paris with the treaty to expound its merits. They did such a good job, and so enthusiastic was the public enthusiasm [sic] for peace, that the Directory ratified it swiftly despite several of its members privately regretting the lack of republican solidarity shown to Venice. (It is said that when asked about the Venetian clauses, Napoleon explained 'I was playing vingt-et-un, and stopped at twenty.')"
Napoleon's general orders for army behavior in Egypt: "'Every soldier who shall enter into the houses of the inhabitants to steal horses or camels shall be punished,' he instructed. He was particularly careful to give no cause for jihad. 'Do not contradict them,' he ordered his men with regard to Muslims. 'Deal with them as we dealt with the Jews and the Italians. Respect their muftis and imams as you respected rabbis and bishops. . .The Roman legions protected all religions. . . The people here treat their wives differently from us, but in all countries the man who commits rape is a monster.'"
"Soldiers! You came to this country to save the inhabitants from barbarism, to bring civilization to the Orient and subtract this beautiful part of the world from the domination of England [sic--England was not running Egypt at the time]. From the top of those pyramids, forty centuries are contemplating you."
The closest Napoleon came to being killed was in Israel, while crossing the Red Sea, as the tide came in: "[T]hey got lost as night fell, and wandered through the low lying marshy sea-shore as the tide rose: 'Soon we were bogged down to the bellies of our mounts, who were struggling and having great difficulty in pulling themselves free. . . It was nine at night and the tide had already risen three feet. We were in a terrible situation, when it was announced that a ford had been found. General Bonaparte was among the first to cross; guides were situated at various points to direct the rest. . . We were happy not to have to have shared the fate of the Pharaoh's soldiers.'"
"Even if Acre had fallen, and the Druze Christians and Jews had all joined him, the logistics and demographics would not have permitted an invasion of either Turkey or India"
"Long accused afterwards of deserting his men, in fact he was marching to the sound of the guns, for it was absurd to have France's best general stuck in a strategic sideshow in the Orient when France itself was under threat of invasion."
"The greatest long-term achievements of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign were not military or strategic, but intellectual, cultural and artistic. The first volume of Vivant Denon's l'Égypte was published in 1809, it's title pag proclaiming that it was 'published by the order of His Majesty Emperor Napoleon the Great'. . .although not politically triumphalist, the multiple volumes of the Description de l'Égypte represent an apogee of French, indeed Napoleonic, civilization, and had a profound effect on the artistic, architectural, aesthetic and design sensibilities of Europe. . . Tragically, the Institut near Trahir Square in Cairo was burned down during the Arab Spring uprising on December 17, 2011, and almost all 192,000 books, journals, and other manuscripts -- including the only handwritten manuscript of Denon's Description de l'Égypt -- were destroyed.
"he forgave Josephine totally, and never made allusion to her infidelity again, either to her or anyone else."
"only two letters of his survive for the twenty-three days between his arrival in Paris on October 16 and the 18 Brumaire when the coup was launched, neither of which was compromising. For a man who wrote an average of fifteen letters a day, this time everything was to be done by word of mouth."
"They put the orders of the officers under which which they had served . . . . before those of their elected officials. When it came down to a choice between obeying those giants of their profession or the politicians baying for their arrest in the Orangerey, there was simply no contest."
"Talleyrand was characteristically profiting from the situation. When Napoleon years later asked him how he had made his fortune, he insouciantly replied 'Nothing simpler; I bought rentes [government securities] on the 17th and sold them on the 19th.'"
"In his first week as First Consul, Napoleon wrote two letters proposing peace to Emperor Francis of Austria and to Britain’s King George III. ‘I venture to declare that the fate of all civilized nations is concerned in the termination of a war which kindles a conflagration over the whole world,’ he told the latter. When the British foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, responded by saying that Napoleon should restore the Bourbons, Napoleon replied that if the same principle were applied to Britain it would result in the restoration of the Stuarts."
"'A newly born government must dazzle and astonish,' he told Bourrienne at this time. 'When it ceases to do that it fails.'"
"Within a week of Brumaire, as a result of the new sense of stability, efficiency and sheer competence, the franc-dollar and franc-pound exchange rate rates had doubled."
"The art of policing is punishing infrequently and severely."
"In November 1799, some 40 percent of France was under martial law, but within three years it was safe to travel around France again, and trade could be resumed. Not even His Italian victories brought Napoleon more popularity."
"Napoleon took a deep personal interest in the strategic dissemination of news. ‘Spread the following reports in an official manner,’ he once instructed Fouché. ‘They are, however, true. Spread them first in the salons, and then put them in the papers.’"
"All the leading French admirals -- Genteaume, Eustche Bruix, Laurent Trugent, Pierre de Villeneuve, as well as Decès -- opposed the English expedition."
III
"[T]he duke [d'Enghien] had offered to serve in the British army, was receiving large amounts of money from London, was paying British gold to other émigrés, and was hoping to follow the Austrians into France should they invade. He had also corresponded with William Wickham . . . that is, the British secret service. [A]lthough he was not specifically aware of the Cadoudal-Pichegru plot [to assassinate Napoleon], he was clearly holding himself in readiness. It hardly constituted strong enough grounds to have him executed, however, except as a ruthless message to Louis XVIII to call off my further plots."
Roberts's absurd justification for Napoleon's becoming Emperor: "France was de facto an empire by 1804, and it was only acknowledging that fact that Napoleon declared himself an emperor de jure, just as Queen Victoria would become for the British Empire in 1877." Roberts ignores what made Napoleon an illegitimate ruler, much less Emperor: the regicide, the phony plebiscites, and the fact that -- at the time -- France had little territory beyond today's hexagram: part of the Rhineland, and Northern Italy (the latter of which hardly counts since it was stolen from the chinless Hapsburgs).
The Emperor "took the somewhat convoluted and seemingly contradictory style 'Napoleon, through the grace of God and the Constitution of the Republic, Emperor of the French.'"
Preparing for the coronation, "Napoleon ordered his officials to treat the pontiff as though he had 200,000 troops at has back, just about his greatest complement."
Roberts says, contrary to most other sources, "Although [Napoleon] lifted the Charlemagne replica over his own head, as previously rehearsed with the Pope, he didn't actually place it on top because he was already was wearing the [crown of laurels, meant to invoke Rome]. He did, however, crown Josephine."
"He never did understand that a fleet which spent seven-eighths of its time in port simply could not gain the seamanship necessary to take on the Royal Navy at the height of its operational capacity."
"The fall of Berlin came so quickly that shopkeepers did t have time to take down the numerous satirical caricatures of Napoleon from their window."
After the battle of Friedland: "Soldiers! On 5 June we were attacked in our cantonments by the Russian army, which misconstrued the causes of our inactivity. It perceived, too late, that our repose was that of the lion, now it does penance for its mistake… From the shores of the Vistula, we have reached those of the Nieman with the rapidity of the eagle."
In establishing brother Jérôme as King of Westphalia, Napoleon wrote, "It is essential that your people enjoy a liberty, an equally, a well-being unknown in Germany…The population of Germany anxiously awaits the moment when those who are not of noble birth but who are talented, have an equal right to be considered for jobs; for the abolition of all serfdom as well as intermediaries between the people and their sovereign."
"As the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars progressed, the casualty rates in battles increased exponentially [sic]: at Fleurus they were 6% of the total number of men engaged, at Austerlitz, 15%, at Eylau 26%, at Borodino 31% and at Waterloo 45%."
At the famous meeting in the middle of the river at Tilsit--"The Tsar's first words were ' I will be your second against England'"…Napoleon immediately appreciated that a wide-ranging agreement would be possible -- indeed, as he put it later, 'Those words changed everything.'"
It was the late-night conversations about philosophy, politics and strategy that shaped Napoleon's relationship with the Tsar.
Years later, Napoleon said--"Perhaps I was happiest at Tilsit. I had just surmounted many vicissitudes, many anxieties, at Eylau for instance; and I found myself victorious, dictating laws, having emperors and kings pay me court."
"The simple fact that Napoleon had missed was also the most obvious one: its vast size made Russia impossible to invade much beyond Vilnius in a single campaign. His military administration was incapable of dealing with the enormous strain that he was putting on it. Each day, in his desperation for a decisive battle, he had fallen further into Barclay's trap."
"In retrospect, it would have been better for the French had [Moscow] been razed to the ground, as that would have forced and immediate retreat.…Napoleon eventually chose what turned out to be the worst possible option: to return to the a Kremlin, which had survived the fire, on September 18, to see whether Alexander would agree to end the war."
"[T]he real significance of the rain was that his artillery commander, General Drouot, suggested waiting for the ground to dry before starting the battle the next day, so that he could get his guns into place more easily and the cannonballs would bounce further when fired. It was advice that Drouot was to regret for the rest of his life."
"'If it had not been for you English, I should have been Emperor of the East; but wherever there is water to float a ship we are sure to find you in our way.'"
One example--Roberts extols Napoleon's re-created nobility: "Unlike anywhere else in Europe, a French family's noble simply lapsed if the next generation hadn't done enough to deserve its passing on." A paragraph later, however, he describes the new hierarchy -- "a complete reordering of the system" -- from top to bottom without placing the new peers. Instead, he digresses into a discussion of the exact mix of liberty, equality and fraternity the new scheme supplied.
Similarly, Roberts's discussion on Napoleon and the Jews is muddled. On one page, he touts (reasonably enough) the Decree on Jews and Usury. A page later, Napoleon is upholding prosecutions of Jewish moneylenders, and the best Roberts can manage is that "Napoleon was personally prejudiced against Jews to much the same degree as the rest of his class and background."
While the book is readable, the writing is not page turning. Lots of facts; snippets of stirring writing (the best of which is when Roberts called something "yet another example of the luck that [Napoleon] was starting to mistake for Fate."). So far, most interesting thing I've learned is that Napoleon's autobiography "Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène" was the bestseller of the 19th Century, topping "Uncle Tom's Cabin".
In sum, Roberts is unparalleled as a researcher. But he doesn't provide the reader reasons why any particular piece of previously accepted Napoleonic legend should be rejected in favor of his new interpretation. And, although is writing is good enough, he's hardly a compelling read like a Ian Toll, Corrigan, Nicolson, Stephen Taylor or Donald Thomas; better than N.A.M. Rodger, however.
Born in quasi-obscurity on Corsica, Napoleon (a native Italian and Corsican speaker) was trucked off to learn French, then to a military academy. Napoleon not only was an excellent student but -- ill-dressed and awkward, with plenty of time on his hands-- he read of heroes and conquerors past: Caesar, Alexander the Great, etc. Napoleon's fascination (for the non-French) is in part because he may have been history's most successful autodidact. For that reason alone, more bios, and more reading, are justified.
"Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback."… The ideas that underpin our modern world--meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances and so on--were championed by Napoleon."
"An astonishing number of his letters throughout his career refer to providing footwear for his troops."
"One of the reasons why he maintained such a fluid campaign [in Italy] was that he had no resources for anything else."
"'The strength of the army', he stated, 'like power in mechanics, is the product of multiplying the mass by the velocity."
"Napoleon was capable of compartmentalizing his life, so that one set of concerns never spilled over into another -- probably a necessary attribute for any great statesman, but one he possessed to an extraordinary degree."
"'Severe to the officers,' was his his stated mantra, 'kindly to the men.'"
"'I have no doubt there will be lively criticism of the treaty I've just signed,' Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand the [day after signing the treaty of Campo Formio], but he argued that he only way to get a better deal was by going to war again and conquering 'two or three times more provinces than Austria. Was that possible? Yes. Probable? No' He sent Berthier and Monge to Paris with the treaty to expound its merits. They did such a good job, and so enthusiastic was the public enthusiasm [sic] for peace, that the Directory ratified it swiftly despite several of its members privately regretting the lack of republican solidarity shown to Venice. (It is said that when asked about the Venetian clauses, Napoleon explained 'I was playing vingt-et-un, and stopped at twenty.')"
Napoleon's general orders for army behavior in Egypt: "'Every soldier who shall enter into the houses of the inhabitants to steal horses or camels shall be punished,' he instructed. He was particularly careful to give no cause for jihad. 'Do not contradict them,' he ordered his men with regard to Muslims. 'Deal with them as we dealt with the Jews and the Italians. Respect their muftis and imams as you respected rabbis and bishops. . .The Roman legions protected all religions. . . The people here treat their wives differently from us, but in all countries the man who commits rape is a monster.'"
"Soldiers! You came to this country to save the inhabitants from barbarism, to bring civilization to the Orient and subtract this beautiful part of the world from the domination of England [sic--England was not running Egypt at the time]. From the top of those pyramids, forty centuries are contemplating you."
The closest Napoleon came to being killed was in Israel, while crossing the Red Sea, as the tide came in: "[T]hey got lost as night fell, and wandered through the low lying marshy sea-shore as the tide rose: 'Soon we were bogged down to the bellies of our mounts, who were struggling and having great difficulty in pulling themselves free. . . It was nine at night and the tide had already risen three feet. We were in a terrible situation, when it was announced that a ford had been found. General Bonaparte was among the first to cross; guides were situated at various points to direct the rest. . . We were happy not to have to have shared the fate of the Pharaoh's soldiers.'"
"Even if Acre had fallen, and the Druze Christians and Jews had all joined him, the logistics and demographics would not have permitted an invasion of either Turkey or India"
"Long accused afterwards of deserting his men, in fact he was marching to the sound of the guns, for it was absurd to have France's best general stuck in a strategic sideshow in the Orient when France itself was under threat of invasion."
"The greatest long-term achievements of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign were not military or strategic, but intellectual, cultural and artistic. The first volume of Vivant Denon's l'Égypte was published in 1809, it's title pag proclaiming that it was 'published by the order of His Majesty Emperor Napoleon the Great'. . .although not politically triumphalist, the multiple volumes of the Description de l'Égypte represent an apogee of French, indeed Napoleonic, civilization, and had a profound effect on the artistic, architectural, aesthetic and design sensibilities of Europe. . . Tragically, the Institut near Trahir Square in Cairo was burned down during the Arab Spring uprising on December 17, 2011, and almost all 192,000 books, journals, and other manuscripts -- including the only handwritten manuscript of Denon's Description de l'Égypt -- were destroyed.
"he forgave Josephine totally, and never made allusion to her infidelity again, either to her or anyone else."
"only two letters of his survive for the twenty-three days between his arrival in Paris on October 16 and the 18 Brumaire when the coup was launched, neither of which was compromising. For a man who wrote an average of fifteen letters a day, this time everything was to be done by word of mouth."
"They put the orders of the officers under which which they had served . . . . before those of their elected officials. When it came down to a choice between obeying those giants of their profession or the politicians baying for their arrest in the Orangerey, there was simply no contest."
"Talleyrand was characteristically profiting from the situation. When Napoleon years later asked him how he had made his fortune, he insouciantly replied 'Nothing simpler; I bought rentes [government securities] on the 17th and sold them on the 19th.'"
"In his first week as First Consul, Napoleon wrote two letters proposing peace to Emperor Francis of Austria and to Britain’s King George III. ‘I venture to declare that the fate of all civilized nations is concerned in the termination of a war which kindles a conflagration over the whole world,’ he told the latter. When the British foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, responded by saying that Napoleon should restore the Bourbons, Napoleon replied that if the same principle were applied to Britain it would result in the restoration of the Stuarts."
"'A newly born government must dazzle and astonish,' he told Bourrienne at this time. 'When it ceases to do that it fails.'"
"Within a week of Brumaire, as a result of the new sense of stability, efficiency and sheer competence, the franc-dollar and franc-pound exchange rate rates had doubled."
"The art of policing is punishing infrequently and severely."
"In November 1799, some 40 percent of France was under martial law, but within three years it was safe to travel around France again, and trade could be resumed. Not even His Italian victories brought Napoleon more popularity."
"Napoleon took a deep personal interest in the strategic dissemination of news. ‘Spread the following reports in an official manner,’ he once instructed Fouché. ‘They are, however, true. Spread them first in the salons, and then put them in the papers.’"
"All the leading French admirals -- Genteaume, Eustche Bruix, Laurent Trugent, Pierre de Villeneuve, as well as Decès -- opposed the English expedition."
III
"[T]he duke [d'Enghien] had offered to serve in the British army, was receiving large amounts of money from London, was paying British gold to other émigrés, and was hoping to follow the Austrians into France should they invade. He had also corresponded with William Wickham . . . that is, the British secret service. [A]lthough he was not specifically aware of the Cadoudal-Pichegru plot [to assassinate Napoleon], he was clearly holding himself in readiness. It hardly constituted strong enough grounds to have him executed, however, except as a ruthless message to Louis XVIII to call off my further plots."
Roberts's absurd justification for Napoleon's becoming Emperor: "France was de facto an empire by 1804, and it was only acknowledging that fact that Napoleon declared himself an emperor de jure, just as Queen Victoria would become for the British Empire in 1877." Roberts ignores what made Napoleon an illegitimate ruler, much less Emperor: the regicide, the phony plebiscites, and the fact that -- at the time -- France had little territory beyond today's hexagram: part of the Rhineland, and Northern Italy (the latter of which hardly counts since it was stolen from the chinless Hapsburgs).
The Emperor "took the somewhat convoluted and seemingly contradictory style 'Napoleon, through the grace of God and the Constitution of the Republic, Emperor of the French.'"
Preparing for the coronation, "Napoleon ordered his officials to treat the pontiff as though he had 200,000 troops at has back, just about his greatest complement."
Roberts says, contrary to most other sources, "Although [Napoleon] lifted the Charlemagne replica over his own head, as previously rehearsed with the Pope, he didn't actually place it on top because he was already was wearing the [crown of laurels, meant to invoke Rome]. He did, however, crown Josephine."
"He never did understand that a fleet which spent seven-eighths of its time in port simply could not gain the seamanship necessary to take on the Royal Navy at the height of its operational capacity."
"The fall of Berlin came so quickly that shopkeepers did t have time to take down the numerous satirical caricatures of Napoleon from their window."
After the battle of Friedland: "Soldiers! On 5 June we were attacked in our cantonments by the Russian army, which misconstrued the causes of our inactivity. It perceived, too late, that our repose was that of the lion, now it does penance for its mistake… From the shores of the Vistula, we have reached those of the Nieman with the rapidity of the eagle."
In establishing brother Jérôme as King of Westphalia, Napoleon wrote, "It is essential that your people enjoy a liberty, an equally, a well-being unknown in Germany…The population of Germany anxiously awaits the moment when those who are not of noble birth but who are talented, have an equal right to be considered for jobs; for the abolition of all serfdom as well as intermediaries between the people and their sovereign."
"As the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars progressed, the casualty rates in battles increased exponentially [sic]: at Fleurus they were 6% of the total number of men engaged, at Austerlitz, 15%, at Eylau 26%, at Borodino 31% and at Waterloo 45%."
At the famous meeting in the middle of the river at Tilsit--"The Tsar's first words were ' I will be your second against England'"…Napoleon immediately appreciated that a wide-ranging agreement would be possible -- indeed, as he put it later, 'Those words changed everything.'"
It was the late-night conversations about philosophy, politics and strategy that shaped Napoleon's relationship with the Tsar.
Years later, Napoleon said--"Perhaps I was happiest at Tilsit. I had just surmounted many vicissitudes, many anxieties, at Eylau for instance; and I found myself victorious, dictating laws, having emperors and kings pay me court."
"The simple fact that Napoleon had missed was also the most obvious one: its vast size made Russia impossible to invade much beyond Vilnius in a single campaign. His military administration was incapable of dealing with the enormous strain that he was putting on it. Each day, in his desperation for a decisive battle, he had fallen further into Barclay's trap."
"In retrospect, it would have been better for the French had [Moscow] been razed to the ground, as that would have forced and immediate retreat.…Napoleon eventually chose what turned out to be the worst possible option: to return to the a Kremlin, which had survived the fire, on September 18, to see whether Alexander would agree to end the war."
"[T]he real significance of the rain was that his artillery commander, General Drouot, suggested waiting for the ground to dry before starting the battle the next day, so that he could get his guns into place more easily and the cannonballs would bounce further when fired. It was advice that Drouot was to regret for the rest of his life."
"'If it had not been for you English, I should have been Emperor of the East; but wherever there is water to float a ship we are sure to find you in our way.'"
December 16, 2014
A magnificent biography. The author notes that he has access to thousands of previously unavailable letters of Napoleon. These letters add a great richness to this volume, and provides a somewhat different picture of Napoleon than I had had before. One of the strengths, too, is that Andrew Roberts has a cool eye toward Napoleon. He speaks highly of his major accomplishments, such as a massive change in the legal system, and he criticizes him for his weaknesses--such as the Russian campaign, his lethargic performance at Leipzig (leaving his best field commander, Davout, on garrison duty with a large force when he was badly outnumbered), and his subpar performance at Waterloo. Hence, a nuanced biography.
The book takes a chronological perspective on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. We follow the trajectory of his life--from his youth on Corsica to his developing military career to his first experiences in battle to his rapid rise in the military hierarchy to his leading of armies to his accession to leadership of France to his reforms to his leadership in wars. Over time, his victories became more labored (think Wagram) and then he suffered reverses as he began to forget some of his own maxims of war and battle. The arc from the Russian campaign to Leipzig to Waterloo shows him performing with little brilliance (as he had, for instance, at Austerlitz). His best generalship in the late period, in fact, was his fighting retreat from Waterloo. The book discusses his short exile on Elba and his return to France as well as his longer (and more miserable) exile to St. Helena.
On a personal level, we see the tensions within his own family, his relationship with Josephine, his children, the varying relationships with his top commanders (Davout, Oudinot, Ney, Murat, Bernadotte, Kellerman, and so on). And so on. The book also details his reforms in administration, his interest in science and literature, his intellectual curiosity. We see a complex and intriguing human being--flawed but also a major force within France.
Some pluses: numerous maps, to provide perspective on campaigns and battles (although some are not as useful as others); nice slick pages of paintings of key actors of the era.
Overall, a major look at Napoleon and well worth reading.
The book takes a chronological perspective on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. We follow the trajectory of his life--from his youth on Corsica to his developing military career to his first experiences in battle to his rapid rise in the military hierarchy to his leading of armies to his accession to leadership of France to his reforms to his leadership in wars. Over time, his victories became more labored (think Wagram) and then he suffered reverses as he began to forget some of his own maxims of war and battle. The arc from the Russian campaign to Leipzig to Waterloo shows him performing with little brilliance (as he had, for instance, at Austerlitz). His best generalship in the late period, in fact, was his fighting retreat from Waterloo. The book discusses his short exile on Elba and his return to France as well as his longer (and more miserable) exile to St. Helena.
On a personal level, we see the tensions within his own family, his relationship with Josephine, his children, the varying relationships with his top commanders (Davout, Oudinot, Ney, Murat, Bernadotte, Kellerman, and so on). And so on. The book also details his reforms in administration, his interest in science and literature, his intellectual curiosity. We see a complex and intriguing human being--flawed but also a major force within France.
Some pluses: numerous maps, to provide perspective on campaigns and battles (although some are not as useful as others); nice slick pages of paintings of key actors of the era.
Overall, a major look at Napoleon and well worth reading.
December 29, 2022
Throughout the pages of history, one will find that there are stories of individuals who leave indelible marks on the world; these people had capabilities and skills that surpassed those of their time, and they are revered even today. To my mind, I think of generals like Alexander, Cesar, Frederick the Great, or I think of men like Washington, but this list wouldn’t be complete without Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon Bonaparte truly deserves to belong in the pantheon of great generals, but not even this, he deserves recognition for his political, and social prowess that was just as truly exceptional. He was a man who possessed a wealth of knowledge that was truly impressive, a man of action, a man with unbounded charisma , and a man who deserves to be looked at in a more positive light.
For so long, we have seen and heard this idea that Napoleon was a precursor to the 20th century totalitarian dictator, and he has been compared to Adolf Hitler, the bloodthirsty maniac of the 20th century. Napoleon was a man of the enlightenment, who pushed fourth enlightenement values, and created a lot of reforms that benefited Europe immensely. Napoleon was not a racist, genocidal maniac, and unlike Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte will be remembered in a positive way lightyears from now.
Yes, Napoleon was flawed as an individual, but aren’t we all? That shouldn’t stop us from examining and admiring his many talents, and viewing him not as a monsterous madman but as an innovator and a visionary. His few criticisms I have are that he put his siblings in charge of various European countries, and when he invaded Russia, he had the chance to get support from the populace by calling for abolishment of serfdom, on top of him not really using Marshal Davout effectively in the sixth and seventh coalitions. I will say his stubbornness did sometimes muddle his chances of success later on, but then again, looking at the bigger picture, it doesn’t detract from his skill and abilities.
This is the view that Andrew Robert’s presented in his book, and it is one that for the most part I can agree with.
Before this, I had never really read anything on Napoleon, and I was really apprehensive about picking this book up. I’ve always been interested in the Napoleonic wars and Napoleon himself, and I’ve always wanted to get an understanding of his life, his campaigns, and what exactly it was he left the world as a legacy?
Another one of the reasons I’ve been interested in the napoleonic wars is because so many generals from the American Civil War tried fashioning themselves after Napoleon, and at West Point they studied his campaigns a great deal, I wanted to see if I could find instances where I could find a comparison between Napoleon and someone like Robert E Lee or Stonewall Jackson PGT Beauregard, or George Thomas. I have to say, I found quite a few instances where I could see Napoleons strategy and tactics being used in the ACW.
I found out so much from this book, and I have to say that it was worth reading. It has started me down a rabbit hole of studying the Napoleonic Wars
For so long, we have seen and heard this idea that Napoleon was a precursor to the 20th century totalitarian dictator, and he has been compared to Adolf Hitler, the bloodthirsty maniac of the 20th century. Napoleon was a man of the enlightenment, who pushed fourth enlightenement values, and created a lot of reforms that benefited Europe immensely. Napoleon was not a racist, genocidal maniac, and unlike Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte will be remembered in a positive way lightyears from now.
Yes, Napoleon was flawed as an individual, but aren’t we all? That shouldn’t stop us from examining and admiring his many talents, and viewing him not as a monsterous madman but as an innovator and a visionary. His few criticisms I have are that he put his siblings in charge of various European countries, and when he invaded Russia, he had the chance to get support from the populace by calling for abolishment of serfdom, on top of him not really using Marshal Davout effectively in the sixth and seventh coalitions. I will say his stubbornness did sometimes muddle his chances of success later on, but then again, looking at the bigger picture, it doesn’t detract from his skill and abilities.
This is the view that Andrew Robert’s presented in his book, and it is one that for the most part I can agree with.
Before this, I had never really read anything on Napoleon, and I was really apprehensive about picking this book up. I’ve always been interested in the Napoleonic wars and Napoleon himself, and I’ve always wanted to get an understanding of his life, his campaigns, and what exactly it was he left the world as a legacy?
Another one of the reasons I’ve been interested in the napoleonic wars is because so many generals from the American Civil War tried fashioning themselves after Napoleon, and at West Point they studied his campaigns a great deal, I wanted to see if I could find instances where I could find a comparison between Napoleon and someone like Robert E Lee or Stonewall Jackson PGT Beauregard, or George Thomas. I have to say, I found quite a few instances where I could see Napoleons strategy and tactics being used in the ACW.
I found out so much from this book, and I have to say that it was worth reading. It has started me down a rabbit hole of studying the Napoleonic Wars
March 23, 2019
Okay, I know a biography of Napoleon is going to have a lot of detail about battles in it (after all he conquered Europe, so yeah), but I just couldn’t take it anymore and stopped reading somewhere around page 100. One more page and I would have fallen on my sword.
December 8, 2019
Abandoned at a third of the way through. The book's getting great reviews so it must be one of those cases where the author and reader simply don't 'gel' but I'm finding it as turgid as wading through treacle. After reading some truly great, well-written histories and biographies over the last few years, this one is simply failing to inspire my interest - despite the fact that Napoleon must surely be one of the most fascinating characters in history. Oh well!
Shelved as 'did-not-finish'
November 17, 2024DNF @ 13%
Maybe straight up raw dogging history isn't my thing...
Maybe straight up raw dogging history isn't my thing...
November 26, 2014
I have been fascinated with Napoleon for as long as I can remember. Needless to say I have read extensively about him. This new book about Napoleon was given to me by a friend who knows of my obsession.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France and by many people’s reckoning the most brilliant general of modern times. As a child Napoleon studied the careers of history’s titans with a view to following their footsteps. He was a general by age 24 an emperor at age 34. He promoted on merit not birth rank or political favor and changed the French military and government accordingly.
In research for this book Roberts walked almost everyone of the 60 battlefields. He also made use of the new scholarly edition of Napoleon’s 33,000 letters. The effect is a huge, deep, witty, humane, and admiring biography of 900 pages. The Napoleon painted here is a whirlwind of a man, not only a vigorous and supremely confident commander, but an astonishingly busy governor, and correspondent. Roberts points out that Napoleon was a master of multitasking, had a great sense of humor and was a great negotiator.
Robert’s new book tries to understand why this peculiarly brilliant Corsican managed for so long to dazzle the world. Roberts’s book is not just another brilliant narrative biography of Napoleon but also an essay on statesmanship and meditation on history itself. Throughout his life, Napoleon wrote and spoke of himself as though he was already an immortal: his world view was molded by the concepts of duty, glory, and genius: his law code, he thought would “live forever”. Napoleon would therefore be delighted to know that he is the subject of historical obsession nearly two centuries after his death.
Robert has been indefatigable in tracking down memorabilia and visiting sites of battles, palaces and places of exile. This is all richly depicted and woven into a narrative that is told with the aplomb of an accomplished historical storyteller. Roberts points out that the laws and structure of modern France, indeed, to a significant degree, of all Europe, derive from those created by Napoleon.
If you are interested in Napoleon I would recommend this book.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France and by many people’s reckoning the most brilliant general of modern times. As a child Napoleon studied the careers of history’s titans with a view to following their footsteps. He was a general by age 24 an emperor at age 34. He promoted on merit not birth rank or political favor and changed the French military and government accordingly.
In research for this book Roberts walked almost everyone of the 60 battlefields. He also made use of the new scholarly edition of Napoleon’s 33,000 letters. The effect is a huge, deep, witty, humane, and admiring biography of 900 pages. The Napoleon painted here is a whirlwind of a man, not only a vigorous and supremely confident commander, but an astonishingly busy governor, and correspondent. Roberts points out that Napoleon was a master of multitasking, had a great sense of humor and was a great negotiator.
Robert’s new book tries to understand why this peculiarly brilliant Corsican managed for so long to dazzle the world. Roberts’s book is not just another brilliant narrative biography of Napoleon but also an essay on statesmanship and meditation on history itself. Throughout his life, Napoleon wrote and spoke of himself as though he was already an immortal: his world view was molded by the concepts of duty, glory, and genius: his law code, he thought would “live forever”. Napoleon would therefore be delighted to know that he is the subject of historical obsession nearly two centuries after his death.
Robert has been indefatigable in tracking down memorabilia and visiting sites of battles, palaces and places of exile. This is all richly depicted and woven into a narrative that is told with the aplomb of an accomplished historical storyteller. Roberts points out that the laws and structure of modern France, indeed, to a significant degree, of all Europe, derive from those created by Napoleon.
If you are interested in Napoleon I would recommend this book.
February 18, 2024
Napoleon: A Life - Andrew Roberts
بعد إنهاء الكتاب شاهدت مناظرة جرت بين مؤلفي الكتابين والذين تعرفت عليهما مؤخرًا، وكتب أح��هم في خانة التعليقات:
"أندرو روبرتس مؤرخ رائع لكن لا أحد يمكن أن يجعلني أعجب بنابليون إلا آدم زاموسكي."
وكم يمثل هذا التعليق رأيي تمامًا. يكتب آندرو روبرتس- والذي يرى نابليون عظيمًا كل العظمة، يكتب كل شيء عن نابليون، يكتب الحقائق والمعارك والانتصارات والهزائم، لحظات الضعف ولحظات القوة، ويقدمها بلا مورابة ويكتب عن حياته الشخصية باستفاضة ويستعين باقتباسات لنابليون ومرافقيه ونرى رسائله لمساعديه وزوجته .. آندرو روبرتس حقًا مؤرخ رائع، لكنه يؤرخ للقصة فقط، ووجدتها مملة إلى حد ما وكانت تفتقد لشيء ما- لا أعرف ما هو لكنها كانت ناقصة.
في حين يكتب زاموسكي عن نابليون بشكل جذاب للغاية -سبحان من رزقه سحر الكتابة، يكتب كل شيء باختصار وسرعة هائلة ولا يعيد ولا يزيد في عظمته بل لا يراه عظيمًا على الإطلاق، ولكن يكتب عنه بشغف لا يضاهيه شيء، وأزعم أن نابليون كان سيحب كتابه عنه.
يكفيني الاستشهاد بـ الفصل الأول العظيم الذي بدأ به كتاب زاموسكي للتدليل على روعة كتابه، وهو بعنوان
|A Reluctant Messiah
حيث اختار البدء بحفل استقبال نابليون بعد عودته منتصرًا من الحملة الايطالية الأولى في ديسمبر 1797 م وكان أول جيش يقوده وهو في ال28. في مشهد مهيب عكس المقدمة التقليدية العادية جدًا والأقرب إلى المملة التي بدأ بها كتاب روبرتس.
هنا رابط المناظرة:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxQ4T...
بعد إنهاء الكتاب شاهدت مناظرة جرت بين مؤلفي الكتابين والذين تعرفت عليهما مؤخرًا، وكتب أح��هم في خانة التعليقات:
"أندرو روبرتس مؤرخ رائع لكن لا أحد يمكن أن يجعلني أعجب بنابليون إلا آدم زاموسكي."
وكم يمثل هذا التعليق رأيي تمامًا. يكتب آندرو روبرتس- والذي يرى نابليون عظيمًا كل العظمة، يكتب كل شيء عن نابليون، يكتب الحقائق والمعارك والانتصارات والهزائم، لحظات الضعف ولحظات القوة، ويقدمها بلا مورابة ويكتب عن حياته الشخصية باستفاضة ويستعين باقتباسات لنابليون ومرافقيه ونرى رسائله لمساعديه وزوجته .. آندرو روبرتس حقًا مؤرخ رائع، لكنه يؤرخ للقصة فقط، ووجدتها مملة إلى حد ما وكانت تفتقد لشيء ما- لا أعرف ما هو لكنها كانت ناقصة.
في حين يكتب زاموسكي عن نابليون بشكل جذاب للغاية -سبحان من رزقه سحر الكتابة، يكتب كل شيء باختصار وسرعة هائلة ولا يعيد ولا يزيد في عظمته بل لا يراه عظيمًا على الإطلاق، ولكن يكتب عنه بشغف لا يضاهيه شيء، وأزعم أن نابليون كان سيحب كتابه عنه.
يكفيني الاستشهاد بـ الفصل الأول العظيم الذي بدأ به كتاب زاموسكي للتدليل على روعة كتابه، وهو بعنوان
|A Reluctant Messiah
حيث اختار البدء بحفل استقبال نابليون بعد عودته منتصرًا من الحملة الايطالية الأولى في ديسمبر 1797 م وكان أول جيش يقوده وهو في ال28. في مشهد مهيب عكس المقدمة التقليدية العادية جدًا والأقرب إلى المملة التي بدأ بها كتاب روبرتس.
هنا رابط المناظرة:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxQ4T...
November 30, 2018
This book had me thinking of it even when I wasn't reading from it, more so than any other book I've read. The story is epic, larger than life.
Man is attracted to war. The threat of death seems distant when a declaration of war is made and the identification of the self with great national power, the bonding of fellow citizens that cared nothing for each other a day before, and the spectacle of masses of uniformed men marching in step puts reason at a distance as emotion overwhelms. And it all is concentrated on the person of the leader, be it a Caesar, a Washington or a Napoleon.
This has been true over all of history until technology made slaughter of civilians greater than that of soldiers and the immediacy of missile borne nuclear weapons made total destruction likely before people would even know a war is underway, let alone rush out to celebrate it.
Napoleon came along at the time when all of the factors that glorify war were present for those in the cities while the chance for heroism at the scenes of battle was high. He was the man for the time.
And what a fascinating man! Read this book to find out why Robert E. Lee said that it is good war is so terrible else we would love it too much.
Napoleon was to a great degree self educated. His idols from youth were Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. This would not distinguish him from many other boys, but his phenomenal talent on the battlefield made him one of a kind.
I cannot understand how in a time before airplanes and instant communication a general could have any idea what tens of thousands of troops were doing and where they were doing it let alone command them in a timely enough manner to counter, even to anticipate what the enemy was doing. It all relied on finding some high ground for an overlook, even if it were only a church tower, and to send and receive messengers on horseback. This could not be done effectively if the commander were away from the scene, nor could a commander have the respect of his troops were he not seen in action.
Napoleon was heedless of danger. He had horses killed under him and he regularly saw people at his side wounded or killed, on occasion being dismembered or disemboweled in the act of taking his orders. If any environment could bring on post traumatic stress disorder, this would be the one yet he functioned effectively for many years in it, and after, never suffering more than a grazing wound.
His ability as a commander is legendary. The British general, Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, remarked that in battle he would rather hear that tens of thousands of enemy reinforcements had arrived than that Napoleon had come to direct the fight. Andrew Roberts relates how Napoleon achieved this fame.
Consider his qualities.
He had a compartmentalized mind that could put everything else aside for the subject at hand. He had a phenomenal memory and a love of detail, particularly helpful on the topography of battlegrounds. He was never emotional in action, remaining cool and collected even when it seemed that everything was going wrong. He did not hesitate to use the lives of his troops as a tool when a costly maneuver was called for (as did Grant in the American Civil War). He continually asked himself "what if" questions. What if another army appears on my left? What is my plan Y and Z if my plan X is not successful? He was incessantly active, never taking a break. He had a sense of humor even under the worst conditions. He verbally encouraged his officers and men and accepted even their negative comments to him without the least resentment. He would not tolerate incompetence and he rewarded bravery and initiative. He had no vanity on the battlefield, dressed without ostentation with no care for a chest bedecked with ribbons or signs of rank. He routinely interacted with his men, asking them how they were doing, what they needed, and responded by seeing that they were taken care of. His speeches before battle were electrifying. No one could complain that he thought he always had the right idea, because time and again he had proven that he did.
In addition to all of this, he was trustworthy and pleasant to be with, knowledgeable on many topics that would engage intellectuals. He earned the devotion so many felt for him who saw him regularly if not daily. War was an adventure that made life vivid and demanding. He was not vindictive, even to the point of trusting some, like his foreign minister, Tallyrand, that he should not have trusted. Only his family members would have reason to complain of him ordering their lives.
In short, until the end of his time in power, he was a tyrant whose subjects believed he had earned the right to it. He got things done and put into practice ideas that the French and the rest of Europe had never been exposed to before.
For all of the foregoing, it might seem strange that he wanted to be crowned emperor and was anxious to have a son to provide heredity rule. But it was a time when only the United States had a democracy. There appeared to be no other way to keep order than monarchy and royalists who wished to see the return of the Bourbon kings were numerous in early 19th century France (and Europe). To his credit, it has to be said that during the time he was ruler, he gradually relaxed the total hold on power he had when first crowned.
You probably know what went wrong: the Russian campaign. I discovered that Napoleon had intended to overwinter at least once before attempting a march on Moscow, but unfortunately when Moscow did not seem distant, he went for it and succeeded in taking it, undefended, with ease. The famous burning of Moscow took place afterward. The Russians had cleverly removed all firefighting equipment so that when fires started in this city of wood there was no way to keep them from spreading. The French for all their armed might had to watch helplessly as the city turned to ash.
It was winter that brought disaster even though Typhus had decimated the army before it reached Moscow. Improper food given to the horses had them dying at the rate of 1,000 a month before Moscow was gained. This, even without a serious battle (the Russians wisely retreated) greatly reduced what began as a force of 450,000 at the Russian border. I had heard that Napoleon took his army in without winter clothing, but this isn't true. In fact they had that clothing but in the late summer when first the army crossed into Russia, the weather was very hot (upper 90's F) and the troops simply dumped their winter gear. Once snow and subzero temperatures arrived, retreat was the only option and it was too late to prevent tens of thousands dying in the process.
The most incredible account in the book is of the construction of two bridges to allow Napoleon's army to get back across the Berezina River, 300 feet wide and with air temperatures well below freezing. Engineers had to wade in shoulder deep to erect wooden trestles. Of 450 mostly Dutch engineers only 50 survived, but the rickety bridges got the army across even as a Russian army nearby failed to see it happening, a major blunder that if avoided would have ended Napoleon's career, and probably his life, right there.
It was only two years from the retreat from Moscow to the invasion of Paris by the Russian army. Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba between Corsica and mainland Italy, escaped easily, returned to Paris, and raised another army only to be defeated at Waterloo. He was not a man given to despair or the idea that a thing could not be done.
The Allies vowed not to be fooled again and his next place of exile was the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic thousands of miles from Europe. The man who had conquered Europe and enjoyed the attentions of over 20 mistresses while doing so, was alone with a handful of retainers with nothing to do but write his memoirs. Still he did not collapse, enjoying playing children's games with the kids of the locals, who appreciated him as one would a fun grandpa.
Hundreds of thousands died during his time in power, but what a guy!
Man is attracted to war. The threat of death seems distant when a declaration of war is made and the identification of the self with great national power, the bonding of fellow citizens that cared nothing for each other a day before, and the spectacle of masses of uniformed men marching in step puts reason at a distance as emotion overwhelms. And it all is concentrated on the person of the leader, be it a Caesar, a Washington or a Napoleon.
This has been true over all of history until technology made slaughter of civilians greater than that of soldiers and the immediacy of missile borne nuclear weapons made total destruction likely before people would even know a war is underway, let alone rush out to celebrate it.
Napoleon came along at the time when all of the factors that glorify war were present for those in the cities while the chance for heroism at the scenes of battle was high. He was the man for the time.
And what a fascinating man! Read this book to find out why Robert E. Lee said that it is good war is so terrible else we would love it too much.
Napoleon was to a great degree self educated. His idols from youth were Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. This would not distinguish him from many other boys, but his phenomenal talent on the battlefield made him one of a kind.
I cannot understand how in a time before airplanes and instant communication a general could have any idea what tens of thousands of troops were doing and where they were doing it let alone command them in a timely enough manner to counter, even to anticipate what the enemy was doing. It all relied on finding some high ground for an overlook, even if it were only a church tower, and to send and receive messengers on horseback. This could not be done effectively if the commander were away from the scene, nor could a commander have the respect of his troops were he not seen in action.
Napoleon was heedless of danger. He had horses killed under him and he regularly saw people at his side wounded or killed, on occasion being dismembered or disemboweled in the act of taking his orders. If any environment could bring on post traumatic stress disorder, this would be the one yet he functioned effectively for many years in it, and after, never suffering more than a grazing wound.
His ability as a commander is legendary. The British general, Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, remarked that in battle he would rather hear that tens of thousands of enemy reinforcements had arrived than that Napoleon had come to direct the fight. Andrew Roberts relates how Napoleon achieved this fame.
Consider his qualities.
He had a compartmentalized mind that could put everything else aside for the subject at hand. He had a phenomenal memory and a love of detail, particularly helpful on the topography of battlegrounds. He was never emotional in action, remaining cool and collected even when it seemed that everything was going wrong. He did not hesitate to use the lives of his troops as a tool when a costly maneuver was called for (as did Grant in the American Civil War). He continually asked himself "what if" questions. What if another army appears on my left? What is my plan Y and Z if my plan X is not successful? He was incessantly active, never taking a break. He had a sense of humor even under the worst conditions. He verbally encouraged his officers and men and accepted even their negative comments to him without the least resentment. He would not tolerate incompetence and he rewarded bravery and initiative. He had no vanity on the battlefield, dressed without ostentation with no care for a chest bedecked with ribbons or signs of rank. He routinely interacted with his men, asking them how they were doing, what they needed, and responded by seeing that they were taken care of. His speeches before battle were electrifying. No one could complain that he thought he always had the right idea, because time and again he had proven that he did.
In addition to all of this, he was trustworthy and pleasant to be with, knowledgeable on many topics that would engage intellectuals. He earned the devotion so many felt for him who saw him regularly if not daily. War was an adventure that made life vivid and demanding. He was not vindictive, even to the point of trusting some, like his foreign minister, Tallyrand, that he should not have trusted. Only his family members would have reason to complain of him ordering their lives.
In short, until the end of his time in power, he was a tyrant whose subjects believed he had earned the right to it. He got things done and put into practice ideas that the French and the rest of Europe had never been exposed to before.
For all of the foregoing, it might seem strange that he wanted to be crowned emperor and was anxious to have a son to provide heredity rule. But it was a time when only the United States had a democracy. There appeared to be no other way to keep order than monarchy and royalists who wished to see the return of the Bourbon kings were numerous in early 19th century France (and Europe). To his credit, it has to be said that during the time he was ruler, he gradually relaxed the total hold on power he had when first crowned.
You probably know what went wrong: the Russian campaign. I discovered that Napoleon had intended to overwinter at least once before attempting a march on Moscow, but unfortunately when Moscow did not seem distant, he went for it and succeeded in taking it, undefended, with ease. The famous burning of Moscow took place afterward. The Russians had cleverly removed all firefighting equipment so that when fires started in this city of wood there was no way to keep them from spreading. The French for all their armed might had to watch helplessly as the city turned to ash.
It was winter that brought disaster even though Typhus had decimated the army before it reached Moscow. Improper food given to the horses had them dying at the rate of 1,000 a month before Moscow was gained. This, even without a serious battle (the Russians wisely retreated) greatly reduced what began as a force of 450,000 at the Russian border. I had heard that Napoleon took his army in without winter clothing, but this isn't true. In fact they had that clothing but in the late summer when first the army crossed into Russia, the weather was very hot (upper 90's F) and the troops simply dumped their winter gear. Once snow and subzero temperatures arrived, retreat was the only option and it was too late to prevent tens of thousands dying in the process.
The most incredible account in the book is of the construction of two bridges to allow Napoleon's army to get back across the Berezina River, 300 feet wide and with air temperatures well below freezing. Engineers had to wade in shoulder deep to erect wooden trestles. Of 450 mostly Dutch engineers only 50 survived, but the rickety bridges got the army across even as a Russian army nearby failed to see it happening, a major blunder that if avoided would have ended Napoleon's career, and probably his life, right there.
It was only two years from the retreat from Moscow to the invasion of Paris by the Russian army. Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba between Corsica and mainland Italy, escaped easily, returned to Paris, and raised another army only to be defeated at Waterloo. He was not a man given to despair or the idea that a thing could not be done.
The Allies vowed not to be fooled again and his next place of exile was the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic thousands of miles from Europe. The man who had conquered Europe and enjoyed the attentions of over 20 mistresses while doing so, was alone with a handful of retainers with nothing to do but write his memoirs. Still he did not collapse, enjoying playing children's games with the kids of the locals, who appreciated him as one would a fun grandpa.
Hundreds of thousands died during his time in power, but what a guy!
May 1, 2018
If you're looking for an overview of Napoleon's life and google around, this is usually the biography you end up finding, readable, engaging, thrilling, more than 900 pages long. Roberts is a military historian, so the focus is definitely on military action, less on other interesting aspects of Napoleon's life like, for example, the specific art style of the Napoleonic era.
The majority of this book's maps are maps of battlefields and positions, the largest part of the text is descriptions of the various battles, which is perhaps unsurprising for a biography of a man who made his name in war. Especially in the last chapter Roberts makes a lot of Napoleon's military background, which I'm sure many won't agree with:
The focus on war is the trick that makes book so fast-paced, the battles are almost described like sports matches with tactic errors and routes and whatnot, you almost (almost!) forget that every time Napoleon stirred 100,000 Europeans had to die.
Roberts' viewpoint is, let's say, conciliatory - he likes to look at instances where history judged Napoleon harshly and tries to defend Napoleon, often by assuming the most positive view ('Yes, Napoleon wrote this error in his letter, but he was probably betting on it being intercepted, thereby confusing the English!', or, 'an overzealous underling probably did that', and so on), sometimes by painting other politicians in a worse light ('[Napoleon] cannot be accused of being the only, or even the principal, warmonger of the age').
There are a few cases where Roberts criticises Napoleon more than other historians: his treatment of women and the laws he introduced (sexist even for his time, women as birth machines for the army), or the way he treated Jews ('Napoleon therefore hardly deserves his present reputation in Jewry as a righteous Gentile').
Reading this I learned lots of fun things, Roberts has a knack for finding these small side-actors who deserve their own books:
What's ridiculous is how fast-paced Napoleon's life is, you can't help but compare your own life. He learned French at 9, joined the army as a secondary lieutenant at 16, brigadier general at 24, commander of a whole army at 27, Emperor of France at 35, lost everything and was exiled at 45, died (as Roberts is adamant, of stomach cancer like his father, not of any poisonous plot) at 51. That to me is the biggest strength here, how Roberts succeeds in depicting Napoleon's sheer energy and speed (often by citing from Napoleon's many micro-managing letters).
Another fun thing I learned is that if there are indeed infinite universes where everything possible has happened, then we live in one of the few universes where Napoleon didn't die on the battlefield. I think there are at least 20 sentences like this, perhaps somebody else should count?
or this one:
and so on!
Overall, very, very interesting reading, I can see why this is generally recommended as the general Napoleon biography.
P.S.: Did you know Napoleon was nearly exiled to Botany Bay (the one in Sydney) instead of St. Helena? I didn't!
P.P.S.:
The majority of this book's maps are maps of battlefields and positions, the largest part of the text is descriptions of the various battles, which is perhaps unsurprising for a biography of a man who made his name in war. Especially in the last chapter Roberts makes a lot of Napoleon's military background, which I'm sure many won't agree with:
Much has been written about his Corsicanness, his origins in the petit noblesse, his absorption of the ideas of the Enlightenment, and his inspiration by the ancient world, but the years he spent in military schooling at Brienne and the École Militaire affected him even more than any of these, and it was from the ethos of the Army that he took most of his beliefs and assumptions.
The focus on war is the trick that makes book so fast-paced, the battles are almost described like sports matches with tactic errors and routes and whatnot, you almost (almost!) forget that every time Napoleon stirred 100,000 Europeans had to die.
Roberts' viewpoint is, let's say, conciliatory - he likes to look at instances where history judged Napoleon harshly and tries to defend Napoleon, often by assuming the most positive view ('Yes, Napoleon wrote this error in his letter, but he was probably betting on it being intercepted, thereby confusing the English!', or, 'an overzealous underling probably did that', and so on), sometimes by painting other politicians in a worse light ('[Napoleon] cannot be accused of being the only, or even the principal, warmonger of the age').
There are a few cases where Roberts criticises Napoleon more than other historians: his treatment of women and the laws he introduced (sexist even for his time, women as birth machines for the army), or the way he treated Jews ('Napoleon therefore hardly deserves his present reputation in Jewry as a righteous Gentile').
Reading this I learned lots of fun things, Roberts has a knack for finding these small side-actors who deserve their own books:
[Pauline Fourès] later made a fortune in the Brazilian timber business, wore men’s clothing and smoked a pipe, before coming back to Paris with her pet parrots and monkeys and living to be ninety.
What's ridiculous is how fast-paced Napoleon's life is, you can't help but compare your own life. He learned French at 9, joined the army as a secondary lieutenant at 16, brigadier general at 24, commander of a whole army at 27, Emperor of France at 35, lost everything and was exiled at 45, died (as Roberts is adamant, of stomach cancer like his father, not of any poisonous plot) at 51. That to me is the biggest strength here, how Roberts succeeds in depicting Napoleon's sheer energy and speed (often by citing from Napoleon's many micro-managing letters).
Another fun thing I learned is that if there are indeed infinite universes where everything possible has happened, then we live in one of the few universes where Napoleon didn't die on the battlefield. I think there are at least 20 sentences like this, perhaps somebody else should count?
With the Emperor riding beside him, Desvaux was cut in half by a cannonball.
or this one:
[..] where a howitzer shell disembowelled a horse [Napoleon] was riding but left him unscathed.
and so on!
Overall, very, very interesting reading, I can see why this is generally recommended as the general Napoleon biography.
Napoleon’s life and career stand as a rebuke to determinist analyses of history which explain events in terms of vast impersonal forces and minimize the part played by individuals. We should find this uplifting, since, as George Home, that midshipman on board HMS Bellerophon, put it in his memoirs, ‘He showed us what one little human creature like ourselves could accomplish in a span so short.’
P.S.: Did you know Napoleon was nearly exiled to Botany Bay (the one in Sydney) instead of St. Helena? I didn't!
P.P.S.:
Only those openly denouncing Napoleon were liable to arrest, and even this mild crackdown was carried out in a classically French eighteenth-century manner. When the royalist Charles de Rivière ‘proclaimed his hopes a little too spitefully and prematurely’, he was sent to La Force prison, but was later released when a friend won his freedom in a game of billiards against Savary.
November 30, 2015
Roberts is an unabashed hero-worshipper when it comes to Napoleon. That can become a little irritating. But he has also done tremendous research and presents a very thorough, very readable and very up to date biography of Napoleon (up to date because new information, including 100s of perviously lost letters, have continued to turn up and all that information is included in this work). His hero worship does not affect my five star rating because he does not hide any of Napoleon's faults, mistakes or disasters. He just feels the need to jump in with explanations, mitigating factors and examples of similar atrocities/mistakes etc. from others to try and keep things in perspective. If you do not share his Napoleon-love, you can still benefit from reading this book. As someone who grew up hearing about Napoleon from Justice Sipra (an admirer at the Andrew Roberts level), with several editions of Emil Ludwig's classic biography always present in the house, I am not exactly an unbiased observer, but I think the book really IS worth a read. Factually accurate, extremely detailed and highly readable.
Go for it :)
Best "new thing I learned from this book"? Exactly how much money the British spent (very effectively) as subsideies to various European powers to keep Napoleon in check. I knew they spent money but it had never been clear to me how systematic, well thought out, effective and extensive that effort was.
btw, Roberts' England-love is also real. That too shows up occasionally in the book :)
Go for it :)
Best "new thing I learned from this book"? Exactly how much money the British spent (very effectively) as subsideies to various European powers to keep Napoleon in check. I knew they spent money but it had never been clear to me how systematic, well thought out, effective and extensive that effort was.
btw, Roberts' England-love is also real. That too shows up occasionally in the book :)
April 8, 2022
A very thorough and well laid out biography of Napoleon. How he rose from a sorta well to do family in the secluded area of Corsica to the ruler of the French Empire, Mr. Roberts does not spare any details regarding any part of his life. Mr. Roberts is a fan of Napoleon, and he lays out a well-researched argument to suggest that he wasn't all that bad as many of his [Roberts] contemporaries make him out to be. The only issue in this book is the Mr. Roberts tends to fanboy a lot during the book and that can ruin a biography for me. I am aware that biographers who try to put a positive spin on their subjects tend to be fans of who they are writing about, but there is a way to do it without looking like a gushing teenager or a member of their cult of personality. It is a minor issue, but the overall piece of work is still amazing.
July 12, 2023
Robert Andrews has created an historical masterpiece in this massive tome, a biography of Napoleon. Thank you and thank you again to Net Galley and Viking Adult Publishers for the ARC.
Andrews is well known among historians; his scholarship and experience firmly establish him as an expert in the field of European history, especially military history and biography. The recent availability of a vast treasure-trove of primary documents made this biography possible, together with a tremendous amount of work and travel. He visited libraries and battle sites where Napoleon had been before him, before all of us. (And he set off the alarm in Napoleon’s throne three times!)
How long did this take, I wonder? By the time it was published, Andrews must have felt an overwhelming sense both of loss and of satisfaction.
As for your humble reviewer, I came to read about Napoleon, whose military career, rule, and downfall I had studied only at the shallowest level during my undergraduate years a whole long time ago, through the back door. My field is the American Civil War, but I was intrigued by the number of Civil War heroes (and others) who had studied Napoleon’s methods in detail, and referred to them when creating their own battle plans. What was it about Napoleon?
Generally, my advice to those contemplating reading a lengthy biography is to get the basics down first, but I didn’t follow my own advice here. I had the opportunity to get the ARC at the end of November, and it was now or never. I decided to plunge in, poorly prepared though I might be. When I was finished, I found I had bookmarked or made notes in over 700 places in this 926 page work. So whereas I won’t use all of my references, I can truthfully say that there is no filler, no fat. If you haven’t the patience for almost a thousand pages of Napoleon, then don’t go there, but for heaven’s sake don’t pretend that more is included here than is necessary for a thorough, scholarly, yet interesting treatment.
Having said that much, I also have to confess that I struggled somewhat with the ARC. My knowledge of European geography is pretty basic. I know where most of the countries are, what their climates are like, and for the most part, where the borders are located. When we morph into the Napoleonic era, I really, really needed maps, and that’s the price one sometimes pays for an ARC: your “map” is [map insert] noted. There will be a map; I don’t get to see it. So I gamely brought myself to my desktop for the first four Coalition Wars, and was lucky enough to find an interactive map that gave me part of what I needed to know. In some places, Andrews explained what took place so well that I could see most of the battle inside my head. But as of the fifth coalition forward, I quit trying to find my own maps when I couldn’t follow the action, and just read what was in the book.
All told, Andrews corrected some misperceptions I had developed regarding Napoleon. My own view had been that there was a heroic French Revolution, followed by what are usually termed “excesses” by the Jacobins who began the Revolution. (Today these en masse trips to the guillotine would be called atrocities.) But could the whole thing be salvaged? It seemed such a terrible waste to have a popular revolution, throw out not only a monarchy but one unusually lacking in decency toward the peasants and urban poor of France, and then have it all come tumbling down. And it also seems like a waste to have an autocrat take over. This was my perspective before reading Andrews’s biography.
Though his approach is both scholarly and balanced, Andrews offers a positive portrait of Napoleon, whom he treats with a fond, almost affectionate narrative. He points out that Napoleon kept the Bourbons off the throne for over twenty years, and it’s true that they returned in 1815 after Napoleon’s first abdication. Things got really ugly then. And he also points out that Napoleon’s career was unusually complicated. The point is well taken.
For example, who invades neighboring nations, overthrows their leaders, presumes to rewrite their constitution without consulting anyone that lives there…yet bestows upon them more civil rights than they have ever had before? And who else would insist in his terms for peace not only remuneration so that he can pay his troops and the annual benefits of military widows, but also demand that great works of art, privately owned, be turned over to him…whereupon he places them in a gallery where all visitors can enjoy them?
Mind you, the man is no Robin Hood. Far from it! He makes it clear from the beginning that he has no use for the ‘hoi polloi’, and whenever he seizes privately held property, he also sees to it that the previous owner is compensated.
The word “hubris” is often applied to Napoleon, and if not him, then who? Andrews argues that he might have been successful…if only. And there’s the rub, right? Because initially, he and his troops travel fast and hard. In the beginning, he asks nothing of them that he would not do himself. His opponents, on the other hand, are spoiled and effete. They travel with vast amounts of personal baggage and servants. They can’t move until they personally have this, that, the other. And in the end, that is the guy that Napoleon becomes.
The text is made more lively throughout with quotations of Napoleon himself, a prolific writer and a brilliant, articulate speaker.
The chapters are organized according to place, generally speaking, and this is very useful when the reader needs to go back and fact-check.
Andrews argues that Napoleon’s autocracy-as-meritocracy might have been successful if he had applied the standard to all of the dynasties he created after toppling their rulers that he applied to France. Nepotism created endless problems, and though Napoleon somehow thought that he personally might make up for the failings of his relatives, there is only so much one man can do. The many, many worthless siblings and other relatives he installed as instant royalty drained his resources and made problems that didn’t have to happen. His first wife, Josephine, was such an obsessive spender that one hates to think of the number of children under age six who might have lived had the wealth been more widely distributed.
Napoleon’s most loyal base of support was within the military, but he fought so aggressively that too many soldiers died, and the backlash was bound to come sooner or later. Yet the military base he so depended upon wanted him back again after just ten months of Bourbon reign.
Could Napoleon have been successful if he had left the Iberian peninsula alone? If he had avoided attacking Russia? Napoleon himself, upon looking back while in exile during his last years, recognizes that trying to best Britain, with its unstoppable navy, was folly; yet he certainly kept them busy for a good long while.
At one point, he reflects that if he had known he would end up defeated, he could have made different choices. He would like to be allowed to emigrate to the United States; who knows, he could have founded a state there! And here, my jaw drops as I imagine that instead of selling the Louisiana Purchase (which doubled the size of the USA) to the USA via President Thomas Jefferson, he had decided to settle it. But being Napoleon, would it have even stopped there, I wonder? He hated Britain and had nothing against US rulers; maybe he would have been able to kick the British out of Canada instead of fruitlessly attempting to rout them from their homeland.
Suddenly I can see how Andrews has become spellbound by what might have been. He has spent a lot more time with this material than I have, and it’s starting to affect me, too!
I know that some of those who read my reviews are teachers. I don’t see this as high school material; a small portion of it could be selected for honors level seniors or community college students perhaps, but then you have huge books to buy in order to use just a portion. I don’t see even the most gifted teenager sticking it out from start to finish. Though the narrative is engaging, the definitive biography is epic .It requires patience and dedication on the part of its readers. Developmentally, most young folks in their late teens and early twenties just won’t be there yet.
But if you are in doubt, buy one copy and read it yourself, then pass it around a little bit and see how it goes. Likewise, if you are homeschooling a truly extraordinary teenager that you think would gobble this up, buy it, read it (because you can’t home school anyone using a text you have not personally read), and then if you still think it may work and your student is game, give it a try.
All told, the price you will pay for this remarkable single volume biography is nothing compared to its worth in your own library, even if only used as a reference source.
Andrews is well known among historians; his scholarship and experience firmly establish him as an expert in the field of European history, especially military history and biography. The recent availability of a vast treasure-trove of primary documents made this biography possible, together with a tremendous amount of work and travel. He visited libraries and battle sites where Napoleon had been before him, before all of us. (And he set off the alarm in Napoleon’s throne three times!)
How long did this take, I wonder? By the time it was published, Andrews must have felt an overwhelming sense both of loss and of satisfaction.
As for your humble reviewer, I came to read about Napoleon, whose military career, rule, and downfall I had studied only at the shallowest level during my undergraduate years a whole long time ago, through the back door. My field is the American Civil War, but I was intrigued by the number of Civil War heroes (and others) who had studied Napoleon’s methods in detail, and referred to them when creating their own battle plans. What was it about Napoleon?
Generally, my advice to those contemplating reading a lengthy biography is to get the basics down first, but I didn’t follow my own advice here. I had the opportunity to get the ARC at the end of November, and it was now or never. I decided to plunge in, poorly prepared though I might be. When I was finished, I found I had bookmarked or made notes in over 700 places in this 926 page work. So whereas I won’t use all of my references, I can truthfully say that there is no filler, no fat. If you haven’t the patience for almost a thousand pages of Napoleon, then don’t go there, but for heaven’s sake don’t pretend that more is included here than is necessary for a thorough, scholarly, yet interesting treatment.
Having said that much, I also have to confess that I struggled somewhat with the ARC. My knowledge of European geography is pretty basic. I know where most of the countries are, what their climates are like, and for the most part, where the borders are located. When we morph into the Napoleonic era, I really, really needed maps, and that’s the price one sometimes pays for an ARC: your “map” is [map insert] noted. There will be a map; I don’t get to see it. So I gamely brought myself to my desktop for the first four Coalition Wars, and was lucky enough to find an interactive map that gave me part of what I needed to know. In some places, Andrews explained what took place so well that I could see most of the battle inside my head. But as of the fifth coalition forward, I quit trying to find my own maps when I couldn’t follow the action, and just read what was in the book.
All told, Andrews corrected some misperceptions I had developed regarding Napoleon. My own view had been that there was a heroic French Revolution, followed by what are usually termed “excesses” by the Jacobins who began the Revolution. (Today these en masse trips to the guillotine would be called atrocities.) But could the whole thing be salvaged? It seemed such a terrible waste to have a popular revolution, throw out not only a monarchy but one unusually lacking in decency toward the peasants and urban poor of France, and then have it all come tumbling down. And it also seems like a waste to have an autocrat take over. This was my perspective before reading Andrews’s biography.
Though his approach is both scholarly and balanced, Andrews offers a positive portrait of Napoleon, whom he treats with a fond, almost affectionate narrative. He points out that Napoleon kept the Bourbons off the throne for over twenty years, and it’s true that they returned in 1815 after Napoleon’s first abdication. Things got really ugly then. And he also points out that Napoleon’s career was unusually complicated. The point is well taken.
For example, who invades neighboring nations, overthrows their leaders, presumes to rewrite their constitution without consulting anyone that lives there…yet bestows upon them more civil rights than they have ever had before? And who else would insist in his terms for peace not only remuneration so that he can pay his troops and the annual benefits of military widows, but also demand that great works of art, privately owned, be turned over to him…whereupon he places them in a gallery where all visitors can enjoy them?
Mind you, the man is no Robin Hood. Far from it! He makes it clear from the beginning that he has no use for the ‘hoi polloi’, and whenever he seizes privately held property, he also sees to it that the previous owner is compensated.
The word “hubris” is often applied to Napoleon, and if not him, then who? Andrews argues that he might have been successful…if only. And there’s the rub, right? Because initially, he and his troops travel fast and hard. In the beginning, he asks nothing of them that he would not do himself. His opponents, on the other hand, are spoiled and effete. They travel with vast amounts of personal baggage and servants. They can’t move until they personally have this, that, the other. And in the end, that is the guy that Napoleon becomes.
The text is made more lively throughout with quotations of Napoleon himself, a prolific writer and a brilliant, articulate speaker.
The chapters are organized according to place, generally speaking, and this is very useful when the reader needs to go back and fact-check.
Andrews argues that Napoleon’s autocracy-as-meritocracy might have been successful if he had applied the standard to all of the dynasties he created after toppling their rulers that he applied to France. Nepotism created endless problems, and though Napoleon somehow thought that he personally might make up for the failings of his relatives, there is only so much one man can do. The many, many worthless siblings and other relatives he installed as instant royalty drained his resources and made problems that didn’t have to happen. His first wife, Josephine, was such an obsessive spender that one hates to think of the number of children under age six who might have lived had the wealth been more widely distributed.
Napoleon’s most loyal base of support was within the military, but he fought so aggressively that too many soldiers died, and the backlash was bound to come sooner or later. Yet the military base he so depended upon wanted him back again after just ten months of Bourbon reign.
Could Napoleon have been successful if he had left the Iberian peninsula alone? If he had avoided attacking Russia? Napoleon himself, upon looking back while in exile during his last years, recognizes that trying to best Britain, with its unstoppable navy, was folly; yet he certainly kept them busy for a good long while.
At one point, he reflects that if he had known he would end up defeated, he could have made different choices. He would like to be allowed to emigrate to the United States; who knows, he could have founded a state there! And here, my jaw drops as I imagine that instead of selling the Louisiana Purchase (which doubled the size of the USA) to the USA via President Thomas Jefferson, he had decided to settle it. But being Napoleon, would it have even stopped there, I wonder? He hated Britain and had nothing against US rulers; maybe he would have been able to kick the British out of Canada instead of fruitlessly attempting to rout them from their homeland.
Suddenly I can see how Andrews has become spellbound by what might have been. He has spent a lot more time with this material than I have, and it’s starting to affect me, too!
I know that some of those who read my reviews are teachers. I don’t see this as high school material; a small portion of it could be selected for honors level seniors or community college students perhaps, but then you have huge books to buy in order to use just a portion. I don’t see even the most gifted teenager sticking it out from start to finish. Though the narrative is engaging, the definitive biography is epic .It requires patience and dedication on the part of its readers. Developmentally, most young folks in their late teens and early twenties just won’t be there yet.
But if you are in doubt, buy one copy and read it yourself, then pass it around a little bit and see how it goes. Likewise, if you are homeschooling a truly extraordinary teenager that you think would gobble this up, buy it, read it (because you can’t home school anyone using a text you have not personally read), and then if you still think it may work and your student is game, give it a try.
All told, the price you will pay for this remarkable single volume biography is nothing compared to its worth in your own library, even if only used as a reference source.
July 12, 2021
Sometimes life can be strange. When I was a newly minted Ph.D., I did some post-doc research at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. While there I was introduced to a visiting lecturer named Dr. Andrew Roberts from Cambridge. It is funny that several years later I stumbled upon this book and was surprised to see Dr. Robert's name. I am certainly glad that I picked this one up and proudly add it to my library. It is truly magnificent.
"Napoleon: A Life" is that rare piece of history that is not only vastly informative, but is also tremendously entertaining. Dr. Robert's writing style draws the reader in with witty sayings uttered by Napoleon, fascinating side notes, and detailed maps of the various conflicts. It is in the writing of the conflicts that Dr. Roberts shines. Some people (generally heretics) find military history to be boring. Dr. Robert's wonderful accounts of the battles should dispel that vile calumny.
But there is so much more to the complex character that is Napoleon. He is generally associated with his Wars and that is understandable, but far fewer know about the tremendous changes that occurred after his conquest of Europe. Many of the old traditional structures came undone due to his new Napoleonic Code. In many ways, his progressive ideas and successes were overshadowed by the myth of this ogre-like Anti-Christ coming to burn a city near you.
Beautifully written, fascinating to read, and always entertaining- this is the must-have version of Napoleon's history. Using new research, Dr. Roberts gives the reader an idea as to the truly complex mind of Napoleon. It is also interesting that Robert shows that Napoleon did make mistakes, sometimes ignoring his own maxims (such is the case during the Battle of Waterloo).
There are many wonderful illustrations and maps in this book. The scope of the story is vast and wonderfully complete. Not only will you learn about the man Napoleon, but you will see how his actions changed the face of Europe forever.
A brilliant book by a brilliant historian about a brilliant man. What could be better? Not much. If you are going to read one history book this year, let this be the one. Highly recommended.
"Napoleon: A Life" is that rare piece of history that is not only vastly informative, but is also tremendously entertaining. Dr. Robert's writing style draws the reader in with witty sayings uttered by Napoleon, fascinating side notes, and detailed maps of the various conflicts. It is in the writing of the conflicts that Dr. Roberts shines. Some people (generally heretics) find military history to be boring. Dr. Robert's wonderful accounts of the battles should dispel that vile calumny.
But there is so much more to the complex character that is Napoleon. He is generally associated with his Wars and that is understandable, but far fewer know about the tremendous changes that occurred after his conquest of Europe. Many of the old traditional structures came undone due to his new Napoleonic Code. In many ways, his progressive ideas and successes were overshadowed by the myth of this ogre-like Anti-Christ coming to burn a city near you.
Beautifully written, fascinating to read, and always entertaining- this is the must-have version of Napoleon's history. Using new research, Dr. Roberts gives the reader an idea as to the truly complex mind of Napoleon. It is also interesting that Robert shows that Napoleon did make mistakes, sometimes ignoring his own maxims (such is the case during the Battle of Waterloo).
There are many wonderful illustrations and maps in this book. The scope of the story is vast and wonderfully complete. Not only will you learn about the man Napoleon, but you will see how his actions changed the face of Europe forever.
A brilliant book by a brilliant historian about a brilliant man. What could be better? Not much. If you are going to read one history book this year, let this be the one. Highly recommended.
September 7, 2018
For some time now, I have been claiming that what we are likely to get, and probably need, whether we like it or not, is a Man of Destiny. The original man called that was, of course, Napoleon Bonaparte. Neither my claim nor Napoleon is popular nowadays. We have gotten used to hearing that individual men don’t matter—that history is instead, take your pick, a matter of struggle for economic advantage, or of the opinions and actions of the masses, or of blind and random fate, or of group politics of one type or another. This book, Andrew Roberts’s generally positive take on Napoleon, shows the falsehood of those claims, and proves that what matters is men. Not men in general, but a tiny subset of men who make, and have always made, the world what it is, and what it will be, good and bad.
This is obvious, of course. We are today made to pretend it’s not obvious because it offends two shrill and culturally dominant sets of ideologues: egalitarians, who think that somehow it is humiliating to mankind that the mass of people does not matter at all in history; and self-appointed leaders of groups from whom great men have never arisen, who likewise find it humiliating that reality excludes them from prominence. But it’s still obvious. I should note, too, that I keep saying “men” not as a verbal tic, but because women in this sense, of individuals who directly and sua sponte change the course of history by reaching out and bending the world to their will, don’t exist in any significant number. Certainly, the sum total of such women who have ever existed can be counted on the fingers of one hand, if there are any at all. Now that I mention it, in fact, I can’t think of any. Thus, of course, “feminists” are prominent among the latter set of offended ideologues. It’s not that women are not very important to history, but in the nature of things their influence tends to be indirect—the essential differences among men and women make it unlikely that any woman has ever wanted to be like Napoleon, or his forerunners such as Alexander and Julius Caesar, since megalomania is a nearly exclusively male trait.
And it’s Napoleon’s megalomania that comes through most in this biography, along with the extremely rare ability to lead and inspire men in good times and bad, and a variety of other traits, including off-the-charts charisma and charm, an inexhaustible capacity for work, an insatiable desire for knowledge (often gained by rapid-fire questioning of whomever he was with), a wry sense of humor and a limited sense of vanity, a practical approach to solving all problems, excessive loyalty to family, and the timing and sparkle of the showman. An additional characteristic I found particularly fascinating about Napoleon, to which Roberts recurs several times, is his ability to compartmentalize his life. “He could entirely close off one part of his mind to what was going on in the rest of it; he himself likened it to being able to open and close drawers in a cupboard.” Coupled with a prodigious memory (like Bill Clinton, he could remember people he had met briefly many years before) and a trap-like mind that excelled in mathematics and absorbed history, this allowed Napoleon to focus on what he chose to do, and not to be distracted. In effect, he was able to accomplish more than other men, because of the combination of talents with which he was blessed.
Finally, Napoleon had that most important personality characteristic for a winner—he was decisive, so he got things done. We often told that large organizations and bureaucracies defeat those who are putatively at the top of the hierarchy. This is false, or rather it doesn’t have to be that way, if the man at the top has actual power and the will to use it. Donald Trump can’t effectively defeat the Deep State, even if he were disciplined and focused, because he lacks the necessary power—the structures of the American system don’t permit him to accrue such power (though Trump would be happy to change those structures to his benefit, I’m sure). On the other hand, in the modern world, there are some leaders with that power—a good example is the Pope. Supposedly, Pope Benedict quit because he couldn’t exercise his power because of the bureaucracy, which opposed him. But Benedict, unlike Trump, was an absolute monarch, with limitless financial resources. If he had had the will, he could have burnt out the malignancy at the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, starting by simply firing the entire Curia—it only has three thousand people, and as John XXIII responded, when asked “how many people work in the Curia?”, “about half.” I guarantee that if I were Pope (admittedly an unlikely possibility), within a week I would have solved the institutional problems of the Catholic Church. (Napoleon would have done it in two days.) I would have a lot of new problems as a result, but those can be dealt with in order of priority (another thing as which Napoleon excelled). The career of Napoleon proves that things like that can be done—but they need the right person to do them.
Not that Napoleon didn’t have faults. Like Julius Caesar, he was fond of generously pardoning his enemies and those who betrayed him, and also like Caesar, this harmed him in the end. He had a lot of bad character traits, too. He was an inveterate liar, compulsively unable to admit the magnitude of defeat, or any defeat. He was sometimes brutal, though in some cases he was willing to admit it, and admit the error. He cheated at cards, because he could not face losing (although he paid the money back afterwards). But what Napoleon was not, most of all, was a prototype of the mass killers of the twentieth century. This, apparently, has been a very common comparison for decades, although it is transparently silly. If anything, Napoleon was more like a megalomaniac Eurocrat, desperate to create a new system and indifferent to the human cost to the little people. The dictators of the twentieth century killed for ideology, and killed a vastly greater number of people, both absolutely and in relative numbers. Their progenitors were the men of the Committee of Public Safety, of whom Napoleon was the heir in time, but not in thought. He had no ideology at all, other than wanting glory for himself and for France, between which two he didn’t distinguish much, and he didn’t kill anyone deliberately except soldiers and others directly opposed to him. Unlike Robespierre and Saint Just, he was no totalitarian, and he had no interest in dictating how people lived their daily lives or in ruling their thoughts, though he was happy to assist in making those lives a little better. Napoleon did not even want to dictate the details of how conquered countries and territories were to be governed. Rather, like all such conquering men before the twentieth century, he was driven by an internal spring wound around his ego, and not given to overmuch self-analysis as to how or why he got that way, or to who had to bear the costs of his choices.
I have to admit that my knowledge of Napoleon before reading this book was pretty basic. It appears that Roberts goes against the grain of quite a bit of scholarship about Napoleon, in that the English-speaking world has traditionally viewed him as aggressive monster, and Continental scholars have either agreed or, on the Left, (accurately) seen him as betraying the principles of 1789. Perhaps drawing my conclusions about Napoleon from reading one book is a mistake. Still, Roberts apparently had access to fresh resources, including all of Napoleon’s letters, many published recently for the first time, so at a minimum this book is unlikely to be completely wrong in its views and conclusions. Time travels fast, though, as Napoleon would be the first to say. Perhaps this biography, published in 2014, will be superseded—it is, for example, prominently noted on the inside cover that “it has been optioned by The Weinstein Company for a TV series.” Sic transit. For now, this book seems to set the modern gold standard. But this book isn’t for the weak of heart. It’s engagingly written, but still very long. Names of people and places are endless (though the excellent maps help with the latter). So it’s a commitment—but a worthwhile commitment. And it has other highlights—for example, Roberts appears to have personally visited nearly all, or perhaps all, of the scores of Napoleon’s battlefields. References to such visits are only occasional, but they add a lot—both flavor, in how a site looks today, and insight, in how a battle proceeded and why it went one way or the other. The author is, for this reason and because of his writing, outstanding at giving the feel of battles—a very difficult, and hard to pin down, ability in an author, but one which makes this book much more than a dry recitation of the facts of battles, even though battles take up many of its pages, just like they took up most of Napoleon’s life.
Napoleon was born in Corsica, as everyone knows. Corsica is beautiful, though not a place of wealth, then or now. It was 1769, so Napoleon was only twenty when the French Revolution began, a young military officer, in the artillery (an occupation that required mathematics knowledge—it was, of course, the Europeans who turned artillery into an actual science, even if artillery was invented by the Chinese). He generally sympathized with the Revolution, liking some of its ideals, such as meritocracy and that it promised more autonomy for Corsica, though ideology as such was totally unimportant to him. As seems to have been the case for officers in many pre-modern militaries, he sometimes showed up for duty, and sometimes didn’t, spending many months on Corsica dealing with family business matters. Napoleon was a reliable Jacobin in his concrete actions, though, and was instrumental in recapturing Toulon from the British for the (nascent) Republic in 1793, the first major battle in which he personally participated, and where he showed his customary personal bravery. So, at twenty-four, he was made a general.
He ended up in Paris, as the Terror concluded and power was solidified by the central government, a process Napoleon helped by scything down rebellious sans-culottes with grapeshot in the autumn of 1795. His success there enhanced his public profile, and benefited both himself and his family. The new Directory gave him command of the Army of Italy, fighting the Austrians and the Italians (the latter playing second fiddle, like always) and conquering the entire peninsula (although Italy was only one of the many fronts on which France was then fighting). Then he partially defeated the Ottomans in Egypt, discovering the Rosetta Stone and causing a fashion sensation for things Egyptian in Europe. (All the scientific documents he left behind, hundreds of thousands, were burned in 2011 during the so-called Arab Spring uprising, showing why the West should never return anything of value to the Third World countries from which they stole them—after all, for example, the Elgin Marbles wouldn’t exist if the British hadn’t taken them, since the Ottomans used the Parthenon as a powder magazine.)
After returning to Paris in 1799, Napoleon seized power from the Directory in the coup of 18 Brumaire (the annoying French revolutionary calendar was, thankfully, retired a few years later), becoming (shades of Augustus), “first consul,” backed up by (somewhat fraudulent) plebiscites confirming his new role under a new constitution. That was supposed to be for ten years, but by 1802 Napoleon had had himself declared consul for life, then in 1804 had himself declared emperor, accompanied by another plebiscite, whereupon he famously crowned himself, with the Pope standing by. Although the vote totals were altered, there is no doubt that the mass of French, high and low, were happy to have Napoleon in charge. Anarchy becomes tiresome after a few hours, much more so after a few decades. Occasional conspiring grumblers, whether Jacobin terrorists or Bourbon restorationists, had to be executed, but at this point Napoleon, an unalloyed success, was pretty much on top of the world.
Following some more fighting in Italy, in 1802 the wars of the Revolution had already formally come to an end through the Peace of Amiens, signed with Britain. It wasn’t much of a peace, though, since by 1805 the Third Coalition had been formed to combat Napoleon, combining Britain, Austria, and Russia, the Holy Roman Empire, and a few others, against France. This set of campaigns contained many of the most famous Napoleonic battles, such as Ulm and Austerlitz, as well as Jena, where Hegel saw him riding through town and maundered on about his “world soul,” a phrase that was used a little too much at times in the twentieth century. Following that (I should speed up, or this review will never end) came the disastrous Peninsular War, the even more disastrous invasion of Russia, the loss of the Battle of Leipzig, abdication and exile to Elba, the return and the Hundred Days, final defeat at Waterloo, and exile to St. Helena, where after nearly six years, Napoleon died at fifty-one (not apparently poisoned, something Roberts totally rejects—rather of stomach cancer, of which his father also died, at thirty-eight).
During all these incessant wars, Napoleon managed to do a lot of other things. Some of that was having affairs with a wide variety of women, but he also managed to oversee the creation of the Code Napoléon, replacing the hodgepodge of customary law and Roman law that applied in different places in the Empire. To Americans, or at least Americans until a few years ago, codified statutory law on the Roman model was inferior to the common law model of organic development that we inherited from Britain. On the other hand, the Code Napoléon didn’t purport to have a rule for everything, but rather laid out general principles within which judges could work, thus it had elements of the common law as well. To us today, groaning under tens of thousands of pages of unreadable and ever-changing federal statute law and hundreds of thousands of pages of (mostly unconstitutional) administrative law, the light touch of the Code Napoléon can only seem like the greatest beneficence, and to the extent it created more certainty and equality before the law among Frenchmen, it was certainly a great accomplishment. Along with the Code Napoléon, other codes (such as civil procedure) were promulgated, as well as standard coinage, weights and measures, and so forth—all worthwhile modernizing programs. He also engaged in a wide variety of Colbertist economic practices, heavily subsidizing and protecting by tariffs French industry in an attempt to catch up to Britain.
So that’s Napoleon’s life. It is fascinating, but it seems to me that the wrong conclusions and lessons are frequently drawn from that life. For example, Napoleon is often viewed as an avatar of the Enlightenment, in contradistinction to prior monarchic darkness, but that is obviously wrong. He certainly didn’t want the Bourbons back, because they would have executed him, and he didn’t want the social structure of pre-Revolutionary France back, either. Too many encrustations and decadences make a society sclerotic, something on full display in late monarchical France. (This is something modern conservatives often fail to recognize—political systems do reach the end of the line, and there is no Burkean solution to revive them at that point.) But you wouldn’t catch Napoleon believing in the Rights of Man. He wasn’t interested in expanding liberty in the abstract, much less atomized liberty untethered to virtue. John Locke and John Stuart Mill held no interest for him (his political reading tended to the Roman classics). Emancipation of the supposedly oppressed wasn’t on his list of things to do, except to achieve instrumental gain for himself. Utopia was not a goal; he would have sneered at anyone who suggested that to him. Instead, he wanted realistic glory for France, a modicum of virtue for the people, and for everyone, order and the rule of law. These are profoundly conservative, or more accurately in context, Reactionary, sentiments. That Napoleon was not an avatar of the Enlightenment is easy to prove by mere modern observation—if he really were such an avatar, the Left would love him. But they hate him, especially in France, where very little praise is lavished on Napoleon—he has two statutes in Paris, and one small street named after him.
Probably Napoleon is seen by some as an Enlightenment figure as a result of the binary choice that propagandists for the Enlightenment like to pose: modern, decayed, end-state liberalism, on the one hand, and the France of Louis XVI, on the other hand. They ask, in effect, why would you want to go back to the latter, and if you don’t, you are required to love instead what we have to offer, as nasty as that is. But you can be anti-Enlightenment and not want to go backwards at all. In fact, if you are anti-Enlightenment, like me, you know you can’t go backwards, and it’s stupid to try. As I have repeatedly said, the idea that Reaction is a return to some imagined Golden Age is wrong; rather, it is moving forward to meet the needs of the present informed by the wisdom of the past, rather than by ideology. And really, that’s what Napoleon did his whole life. Thus, the closest historical analogue to Napoleon was probably not, as is usually supposed, Alexander the Great, a pure conqueror, but Caesar Augustus (although Napoleon has parallels to Charlemagne as well). Both Napoleon and Augustus restored order after anarchy; centralized power; operated a propaganda machine; collected admirers across society; and modernized where modernization was necessary, using where possible the structures of the past, modified for the present to a greater or lesser degree. True, Napoleon was not as fortunate in his enemies as Augustus, and he had to engage in more radical change, given the situations he was handed. And, of course, Fate led him to a different end. But in a slightly different world, Napoleon might have founded a long-lasting but modernized structure of non-democratic government that could have helped avoid the twentieth century. We’ll never know, but that doesn’t mean we can’t apply lessons drawn from Napoleon to the decisions we are likely to face in the future, when history returns.
This is obvious, of course. We are today made to pretend it’s not obvious because it offends two shrill and culturally dominant sets of ideologues: egalitarians, who think that somehow it is humiliating to mankind that the mass of people does not matter at all in history; and self-appointed leaders of groups from whom great men have never arisen, who likewise find it humiliating that reality excludes them from prominence. But it’s still obvious. I should note, too, that I keep saying “men” not as a verbal tic, but because women in this sense, of individuals who directly and sua sponte change the course of history by reaching out and bending the world to their will, don’t exist in any significant number. Certainly, the sum total of such women who have ever existed can be counted on the fingers of one hand, if there are any at all. Now that I mention it, in fact, I can’t think of any. Thus, of course, “feminists” are prominent among the latter set of offended ideologues. It’s not that women are not very important to history, but in the nature of things their influence tends to be indirect—the essential differences among men and women make it unlikely that any woman has ever wanted to be like Napoleon, or his forerunners such as Alexander and Julius Caesar, since megalomania is a nearly exclusively male trait.
And it’s Napoleon’s megalomania that comes through most in this biography, along with the extremely rare ability to lead and inspire men in good times and bad, and a variety of other traits, including off-the-charts charisma and charm, an inexhaustible capacity for work, an insatiable desire for knowledge (often gained by rapid-fire questioning of whomever he was with), a wry sense of humor and a limited sense of vanity, a practical approach to solving all problems, excessive loyalty to family, and the timing and sparkle of the showman. An additional characteristic I found particularly fascinating about Napoleon, to which Roberts recurs several times, is his ability to compartmentalize his life. “He could entirely close off one part of his mind to what was going on in the rest of it; he himself likened it to being able to open and close drawers in a cupboard.” Coupled with a prodigious memory (like Bill Clinton, he could remember people he had met briefly many years before) and a trap-like mind that excelled in mathematics and absorbed history, this allowed Napoleon to focus on what he chose to do, and not to be distracted. In effect, he was able to accomplish more than other men, because of the combination of talents with which he was blessed.
Finally, Napoleon had that most important personality characteristic for a winner—he was decisive, so he got things done. We often told that large organizations and bureaucracies defeat those who are putatively at the top of the hierarchy. This is false, or rather it doesn’t have to be that way, if the man at the top has actual power and the will to use it. Donald Trump can’t effectively defeat the Deep State, even if he were disciplined and focused, because he lacks the necessary power—the structures of the American system don’t permit him to accrue such power (though Trump would be happy to change those structures to his benefit, I’m sure). On the other hand, in the modern world, there are some leaders with that power—a good example is the Pope. Supposedly, Pope Benedict quit because he couldn’t exercise his power because of the bureaucracy, which opposed him. But Benedict, unlike Trump, was an absolute monarch, with limitless financial resources. If he had had the will, he could have burnt out the malignancy at the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, starting by simply firing the entire Curia—it only has three thousand people, and as John XXIII responded, when asked “how many people work in the Curia?”, “about half.” I guarantee that if I were Pope (admittedly an unlikely possibility), within a week I would have solved the institutional problems of the Catholic Church. (Napoleon would have done it in two days.) I would have a lot of new problems as a result, but those can be dealt with in order of priority (another thing as which Napoleon excelled). The career of Napoleon proves that things like that can be done—but they need the right person to do them.
Not that Napoleon didn’t have faults. Like Julius Caesar, he was fond of generously pardoning his enemies and those who betrayed him, and also like Caesar, this harmed him in the end. He had a lot of bad character traits, too. He was an inveterate liar, compulsively unable to admit the magnitude of defeat, or any defeat. He was sometimes brutal, though in some cases he was willing to admit it, and admit the error. He cheated at cards, because he could not face losing (although he paid the money back afterwards). But what Napoleon was not, most of all, was a prototype of the mass killers of the twentieth century. This, apparently, has been a very common comparison for decades, although it is transparently silly. If anything, Napoleon was more like a megalomaniac Eurocrat, desperate to create a new system and indifferent to the human cost to the little people. The dictators of the twentieth century killed for ideology, and killed a vastly greater number of people, both absolutely and in relative numbers. Their progenitors were the men of the Committee of Public Safety, of whom Napoleon was the heir in time, but not in thought. He had no ideology at all, other than wanting glory for himself and for France, between which two he didn’t distinguish much, and he didn’t kill anyone deliberately except soldiers and others directly opposed to him. Unlike Robespierre and Saint Just, he was no totalitarian, and he had no interest in dictating how people lived their daily lives or in ruling their thoughts, though he was happy to assist in making those lives a little better. Napoleon did not even want to dictate the details of how conquered countries and territories were to be governed. Rather, like all such conquering men before the twentieth century, he was driven by an internal spring wound around his ego, and not given to overmuch self-analysis as to how or why he got that way, or to who had to bear the costs of his choices.
I have to admit that my knowledge of Napoleon before reading this book was pretty basic. It appears that Roberts goes against the grain of quite a bit of scholarship about Napoleon, in that the English-speaking world has traditionally viewed him as aggressive monster, and Continental scholars have either agreed or, on the Left, (accurately) seen him as betraying the principles of 1789. Perhaps drawing my conclusions about Napoleon from reading one book is a mistake. Still, Roberts apparently had access to fresh resources, including all of Napoleon’s letters, many published recently for the first time, so at a minimum this book is unlikely to be completely wrong in its views and conclusions. Time travels fast, though, as Napoleon would be the first to say. Perhaps this biography, published in 2014, will be superseded—it is, for example, prominently noted on the inside cover that “it has been optioned by The Weinstein Company for a TV series.” Sic transit. For now, this book seems to set the modern gold standard. But this book isn’t for the weak of heart. It’s engagingly written, but still very long. Names of people and places are endless (though the excellent maps help with the latter). So it’s a commitment—but a worthwhile commitment. And it has other highlights—for example, Roberts appears to have personally visited nearly all, or perhaps all, of the scores of Napoleon’s battlefields. References to such visits are only occasional, but they add a lot—both flavor, in how a site looks today, and insight, in how a battle proceeded and why it went one way or the other. The author is, for this reason and because of his writing, outstanding at giving the feel of battles—a very difficult, and hard to pin down, ability in an author, but one which makes this book much more than a dry recitation of the facts of battles, even though battles take up many of its pages, just like they took up most of Napoleon’s life.
Napoleon was born in Corsica, as everyone knows. Corsica is beautiful, though not a place of wealth, then or now. It was 1769, so Napoleon was only twenty when the French Revolution began, a young military officer, in the artillery (an occupation that required mathematics knowledge—it was, of course, the Europeans who turned artillery into an actual science, even if artillery was invented by the Chinese). He generally sympathized with the Revolution, liking some of its ideals, such as meritocracy and that it promised more autonomy for Corsica, though ideology as such was totally unimportant to him. As seems to have been the case for officers in many pre-modern militaries, he sometimes showed up for duty, and sometimes didn’t, spending many months on Corsica dealing with family business matters. Napoleon was a reliable Jacobin in his concrete actions, though, and was instrumental in recapturing Toulon from the British for the (nascent) Republic in 1793, the first major battle in which he personally participated, and where he showed his customary personal bravery. So, at twenty-four, he was made a general.
He ended up in Paris, as the Terror concluded and power was solidified by the central government, a process Napoleon helped by scything down rebellious sans-culottes with grapeshot in the autumn of 1795. His success there enhanced his public profile, and benefited both himself and his family. The new Directory gave him command of the Army of Italy, fighting the Austrians and the Italians (the latter playing second fiddle, like always) and conquering the entire peninsula (although Italy was only one of the many fronts on which France was then fighting). Then he partially defeated the Ottomans in Egypt, discovering the Rosetta Stone and causing a fashion sensation for things Egyptian in Europe. (All the scientific documents he left behind, hundreds of thousands, were burned in 2011 during the so-called Arab Spring uprising, showing why the West should never return anything of value to the Third World countries from which they stole them—after all, for example, the Elgin Marbles wouldn’t exist if the British hadn’t taken them, since the Ottomans used the Parthenon as a powder magazine.)
After returning to Paris in 1799, Napoleon seized power from the Directory in the coup of 18 Brumaire (the annoying French revolutionary calendar was, thankfully, retired a few years later), becoming (shades of Augustus), “first consul,” backed up by (somewhat fraudulent) plebiscites confirming his new role under a new constitution. That was supposed to be for ten years, but by 1802 Napoleon had had himself declared consul for life, then in 1804 had himself declared emperor, accompanied by another plebiscite, whereupon he famously crowned himself, with the Pope standing by. Although the vote totals were altered, there is no doubt that the mass of French, high and low, were happy to have Napoleon in charge. Anarchy becomes tiresome after a few hours, much more so after a few decades. Occasional conspiring grumblers, whether Jacobin terrorists or Bourbon restorationists, had to be executed, but at this point Napoleon, an unalloyed success, was pretty much on top of the world.
Following some more fighting in Italy, in 1802 the wars of the Revolution had already formally come to an end through the Peace of Amiens, signed with Britain. It wasn’t much of a peace, though, since by 1805 the Third Coalition had been formed to combat Napoleon, combining Britain, Austria, and Russia, the Holy Roman Empire, and a few others, against France. This set of campaigns contained many of the most famous Napoleonic battles, such as Ulm and Austerlitz, as well as Jena, where Hegel saw him riding through town and maundered on about his “world soul,” a phrase that was used a little too much at times in the twentieth century. Following that (I should speed up, or this review will never end) came the disastrous Peninsular War, the even more disastrous invasion of Russia, the loss of the Battle of Leipzig, abdication and exile to Elba, the return and the Hundred Days, final defeat at Waterloo, and exile to St. Helena, where after nearly six years, Napoleon died at fifty-one (not apparently poisoned, something Roberts totally rejects—rather of stomach cancer, of which his father also died, at thirty-eight).
During all these incessant wars, Napoleon managed to do a lot of other things. Some of that was having affairs with a wide variety of women, but he also managed to oversee the creation of the Code Napoléon, replacing the hodgepodge of customary law and Roman law that applied in different places in the Empire. To Americans, or at least Americans until a few years ago, codified statutory law on the Roman model was inferior to the common law model of organic development that we inherited from Britain. On the other hand, the Code Napoléon didn’t purport to have a rule for everything, but rather laid out general principles within which judges could work, thus it had elements of the common law as well. To us today, groaning under tens of thousands of pages of unreadable and ever-changing federal statute law and hundreds of thousands of pages of (mostly unconstitutional) administrative law, the light touch of the Code Napoléon can only seem like the greatest beneficence, and to the extent it created more certainty and equality before the law among Frenchmen, it was certainly a great accomplishment. Along with the Code Napoléon, other codes (such as civil procedure) were promulgated, as well as standard coinage, weights and measures, and so forth—all worthwhile modernizing programs. He also engaged in a wide variety of Colbertist economic practices, heavily subsidizing and protecting by tariffs French industry in an attempt to catch up to Britain.
So that’s Napoleon’s life. It is fascinating, but it seems to me that the wrong conclusions and lessons are frequently drawn from that life. For example, Napoleon is often viewed as an avatar of the Enlightenment, in contradistinction to prior monarchic darkness, but that is obviously wrong. He certainly didn’t want the Bourbons back, because they would have executed him, and he didn’t want the social structure of pre-Revolutionary France back, either. Too many encrustations and decadences make a society sclerotic, something on full display in late monarchical France. (This is something modern conservatives often fail to recognize—political systems do reach the end of the line, and there is no Burkean solution to revive them at that point.) But you wouldn’t catch Napoleon believing in the Rights of Man. He wasn’t interested in expanding liberty in the abstract, much less atomized liberty untethered to virtue. John Locke and John Stuart Mill held no interest for him (his political reading tended to the Roman classics). Emancipation of the supposedly oppressed wasn’t on his list of things to do, except to achieve instrumental gain for himself. Utopia was not a goal; he would have sneered at anyone who suggested that to him. Instead, he wanted realistic glory for France, a modicum of virtue for the people, and for everyone, order and the rule of law. These are profoundly conservative, or more accurately in context, Reactionary, sentiments. That Napoleon was not an avatar of the Enlightenment is easy to prove by mere modern observation—if he really were such an avatar, the Left would love him. But they hate him, especially in France, where very little praise is lavished on Napoleon—he has two statutes in Paris, and one small street named after him.
Probably Napoleon is seen by some as an Enlightenment figure as a result of the binary choice that propagandists for the Enlightenment like to pose: modern, decayed, end-state liberalism, on the one hand, and the France of Louis XVI, on the other hand. They ask, in effect, why would you want to go back to the latter, and if you don’t, you are required to love instead what we have to offer, as nasty as that is. But you can be anti-Enlightenment and not want to go backwards at all. In fact, if you are anti-Enlightenment, like me, you know you can’t go backwards, and it’s stupid to try. As I have repeatedly said, the idea that Reaction is a return to some imagined Golden Age is wrong; rather, it is moving forward to meet the needs of the present informed by the wisdom of the past, rather than by ideology. And really, that’s what Napoleon did his whole life. Thus, the closest historical analogue to Napoleon was probably not, as is usually supposed, Alexander the Great, a pure conqueror, but Caesar Augustus (although Napoleon has parallels to Charlemagne as well). Both Napoleon and Augustus restored order after anarchy; centralized power; operated a propaganda machine; collected admirers across society; and modernized where modernization was necessary, using where possible the structures of the past, modified for the present to a greater or lesser degree. True, Napoleon was not as fortunate in his enemies as Augustus, and he had to engage in more radical change, given the situations he was handed. And, of course, Fate led him to a different end. But in a slightly different world, Napoleon might have founded a long-lasting but modernized structure of non-democratic government that could have helped avoid the twentieth century. We’ll never know, but that doesn’t mean we can’t apply lessons drawn from Napoleon to the decisions we are likely to face in the future, when history returns.
June 23, 2020
Andrew Roberts is a British historian, biographer and journalist. Since numerous books have been written about Napoleon, one must wonder why we need yet one more. Perhaps Henry Kissinger said it best during an interview when he stated that “Andrew Roberts is a great historian who is always relevant to contemporary thinking and contemporary problems.” Thus, Roberts explains for a new generation exactly why Napoleon mattered.
Napoleon was not French at all. He was born Napoleone di Bounaparte in Corsica to a relatively modest Italian family. He was a lonely, introverted boy whose only real friends were his books and he developed into an immature, self-conscious man, always seeking approval. His favorite pastimes were intellectual rather than social. His family sent him to France to get an education; he was among the few selected for the prestigious École Militaire in Paris, where he took advantage of every opportunity. He rose to prominence during the French Revolution and led several successful military campaigns. Not being a part of the French elite, he worked his way up the ranks through hard work and natural talent, particularly in mathematics and artillery. But grasping national power for himself, Napoleon first had to defeat the enemies of revolutionary France, particularly Austria and Italy.
As Emperor of France from 1804 until 1814, Napoleon took a country in the midst of acute fiscal crisis and social unrest and made it the dominant power in Europe. He tried to restore glory and order to France, lost in the days after the storming of the Bastille, by making a series of legal, educational and administrative reforms. The central pillars of his reign were low taxes, property rights, centralized authority, and national glory. Before the Napoleonic Code, France did not have a single set of laws. The Code standardized and modernized a conflicting set of local customs and provincial laws that consisted mainly of exemptions, privileges, and special charters that had existed for centuries. Napoleon also brought enlightenment to people. In the new French Empire, talent mattered more than birth and glory depended on achievements rather than status. He abolished noble privilege while bringing religious tolerance. He was the hero of the growing middle class and he made Paris a great center for culture and learning.
Napoleon was a talented genius, yet he failed on occasion as he grew older. His ability as a master tactician on relatively localized battlefields failed him when he invaded Russia, where he was outthought and outmaneuvered in the open spaces he found there. While his engineers were able to help him and his army make an amazing escape, he was defeated again at Leipzig. Meanwhile, Wellington entered France, and Napoleon’s ultimate defeat at Waterloo came soon after—largely the result of some significant miscalculations.
Despite significant advancements, Napoleon empire was flawed, to be sure. He was driven by violence and the love of power. While the plight of many was improved, women’s rights were drastically curtailed under the new Napoleonic Code. Prior to the Code, women had enjoyed wide freedom, separate property rights, and an influential place in society. The Code also gave immense powers to the state.
Mr. Roberts is an excellent writer and a good storyteller. He brilliantly conveys the vigor and charisma of Napoleon, especially his military genius. He is at his best when describing the battles. While he never excuses Napoleon’s failings, he places the stress on the Napoleon’s achievements rather than his faults. In doing so, he often overlooks the negative consequences of the ruler’s actions. Still, this is a worthwhile epic biography.
Napoleon was not French at all. He was born Napoleone di Bounaparte in Corsica to a relatively modest Italian family. He was a lonely, introverted boy whose only real friends were his books and he developed into an immature, self-conscious man, always seeking approval. His favorite pastimes were intellectual rather than social. His family sent him to France to get an education; he was among the few selected for the prestigious École Militaire in Paris, where he took advantage of every opportunity. He rose to prominence during the French Revolution and led several successful military campaigns. Not being a part of the French elite, he worked his way up the ranks through hard work and natural talent, particularly in mathematics and artillery. But grasping national power for himself, Napoleon first had to defeat the enemies of revolutionary France, particularly Austria and Italy.
As Emperor of France from 1804 until 1814, Napoleon took a country in the midst of acute fiscal crisis and social unrest and made it the dominant power in Europe. He tried to restore glory and order to France, lost in the days after the storming of the Bastille, by making a series of legal, educational and administrative reforms. The central pillars of his reign were low taxes, property rights, centralized authority, and national glory. Before the Napoleonic Code, France did not have a single set of laws. The Code standardized and modernized a conflicting set of local customs and provincial laws that consisted mainly of exemptions, privileges, and special charters that had existed for centuries. Napoleon also brought enlightenment to people. In the new French Empire, talent mattered more than birth and glory depended on achievements rather than status. He abolished noble privilege while bringing religious tolerance. He was the hero of the growing middle class and he made Paris a great center for culture and learning.
Napoleon was a talented genius, yet he failed on occasion as he grew older. His ability as a master tactician on relatively localized battlefields failed him when he invaded Russia, where he was outthought and outmaneuvered in the open spaces he found there. While his engineers were able to help him and his army make an amazing escape, he was defeated again at Leipzig. Meanwhile, Wellington entered France, and Napoleon’s ultimate defeat at Waterloo came soon after—largely the result of some significant miscalculations.
Despite significant advancements, Napoleon empire was flawed, to be sure. He was driven by violence and the love of power. While the plight of many was improved, women’s rights were drastically curtailed under the new Napoleonic Code. Prior to the Code, women had enjoyed wide freedom, separate property rights, and an influential place in society. The Code also gave immense powers to the state.
Mr. Roberts is an excellent writer and a good storyteller. He brilliantly conveys the vigor and charisma of Napoleon, especially his military genius. He is at his best when describing the battles. While he never excuses Napoleon’s failings, he places the stress on the Napoleon’s achievements rather than his faults. In doing so, he often overlooks the negative consequences of the ruler’s actions. Still, this is a worthwhile epic biography.
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