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Summary
Summary
The definitive biography of the great soldier-statesman by the New York Times bestselling author of The Storm of War
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.
Author Notes
Andrew Roberts was born on January 13, 1963 in Hammersmith, England. He studied at Gonville and Caius College and earned his B.A. degree in Modern History in 1985. He began his post-graduate career in corporate finance as an investment banker and private company director with the London merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. He published his first historical book in 1991.
He went on to become a public commentator appearing in several periodicals such as The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. Roberts himself is best known for his 2009 non-fiction work The Storm of War A look at the Second World War covering historical factors such as Hitler's rise to power and the organisation of Nazi Germany, the book received the British Army Military Book of the Year Award for 2010. In 2018 his work, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, made the Bestseller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Military historian Roberts (The Storm of War) examines Napoleon Bonaparte's life and times in excruciating detail, leaving out little, if anything, of consequence that happened to the legendary general and ruler of France during his 52 years. Roberts moves from Napoleon's obscure Corsican origins to his meteoric rise to power, through his fraught personal relationships and his numerous military campaigns, to his sad and ignominious exile on St. Helena, where he died of stomach cancer. Basing his conclusions on a vast trove of Napoleon's published letters and other contemporary sources, along with personal visits to 53 of 60 battlefields that figured in Napoleon's career, Roberts argues that Napoleon was not only a brilliant military strategist but also a great statesman and a true intellectual. A micromanager, Napoleon effectively "compartmentaliz[ed] his life" to achieve success in both political and military realms-although less so with his wives and mistresses. "Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback," Roberts writes, describing his coronation as Emperor of France as "a defining moment" of the Enlightenment. He contends that Napoleon's downfall was due to a combination of unforeseeable circumstances and "a handful of significant miscalculations," including the invasion of Russia. This is a definitive account that dispels many of the myths that surrounded Napoleon from his lifetime to the present day. Maps. Agent: Georgina Capel, Capel & Land. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Next year will be the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, so a massive, single-volume biography of Napoléon is, perhaps, appropriate, especially given the recent release of more than 33 thousand of Napoléon's letters. Although there was hardly a shortage of primary source material on Napoléon and his era, Roberts, a prizewinning historian and fellow of the Napoleonic Institute, has effectively used these new sources to offer some interesting and probably controversial perspectives on the man, his career, and his lasting impact. In a cradle-to-grave format, Roberts devotes some pages to Napoléon's Corsican boyhood and his difficult years in a French military academy. But the strength of the narrative emphasizes his brilliance as a military commander and his lasting political reforms in France. Unfortunately, Roberts' admiration for Napoléon, which borders on idolatry, leads him to minimize or even ignore his subject's unsavory personal qualities and actions, including his ego-driven selfishness, his willingness to abandon friends when it suited his advancement, and even his leaving his soldiers to face their fate without him in Egypt and Russia. This is a well-researched, absorbing, but unbalanced biography of a historical giant.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ON JULY 22, 1789, a week after the storming of the Bastille in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to his older brother, Joseph, that there was nothing much to worry about. "Calm will return. In a month." His timing was off, but perhaps he took the misjudgment to heart because he spent the rest of his life trying to bring glory and order to France by building a new sort of empire. By the time he was crowned emperor on Dec. 2, 1804, he could say, "I am the Revolution." It was, according to the historian Andrew Roberts's epically scaled new biography, "Napoleon: A Life," both the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, an outsider from Corsica who rose to the apex of French political life, and simultaneously a "defining moment of the Enlightenment," fixing the "best" of the French Revolution through his legal, educational and administrative reforms. Such broad contours get at what Napoleon meant by saying to his literary hero Goethe at a meeting in Erfurt, "Politics is fate." Napoleon didn't mean fatalism by this, rather that political action is unavoidable if you want personal and national glory. It requires a mastery of fortune, and a willingness to be ruthless when necessary. If this sounds Machiavellian, that's because it is - Machiavelli's arguments about politics informed Napoleon's self-consciousness, whether in appraising fortune as a woman or a river to be tamed and harnessed, or assuming that in politics it is better to be feared than loved. Such views went hand in hand with the grand visions of politics outlined in the ancient histories and biographies Napoleon revered as a young man. "Bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine" was Napoleon's cool if brutal reminder of an ever-present item on his exhausting schedule. His strategy always included dashing off thousands of letters and plans, in a personal regime calling for little sleep, much haste and a penchant for being read to while taking baths so as not to waste even a minute. He compartmentalized ruthlessly, changing tack between lobbying for more shoes and brandy for the army at one minute, to directing the personal lives of his siblings or writing love letters to the notorious Josephine at another; here ensuring extravagant financial "contributions" from those whom he had vanquished, there discussing the booty to send back to Paris, particularly from the extraordinary expedition in Egypt where his "savants had missed nothing." The personal and the political ran alongside each other in his mind. Yet when his longtime collaborator but fair-weather political friend, the diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, suggested that Napoleon try to make those he conquered learn to love France, Napoleon replied that this was an irrelevance. "Aimer: I don't really know what this means when applied to politics," he said. Still, if grand strategy and national interest lay behind foreign affairs, there were nevertheless personal rules of conduct to uphold. Talleyrand was a party to Napoleon's strategy since supporting his coup d'état against the French Directory in 1799. That was O.K. And by short-selling securities he made millions for himself. But he was called out by Napoleon and dismissed as vice grand elector when found facing both ways politically at a crucial moment. Napoleon understood those temptations because he was also flexible enough to tilt toward the winning side, regularly supporting any form of local religion that could help him militarily. Nonetheless, Roberts's Napoleon is a soldier, statesman and "bona fide intellectual," who rode his luck for longer than most intellectuals in politics ever do. Testing himself against fate seems to have been his mantra. A relative outsider to the French elite, he forced his way up its ranks through ferocious hard work, making the best of his natural talents, particularly in mathematics and artillery. He was among the few selected for the prestigious École Militaire in Paris, and there he grasped every opportunity. He was a severe young man with little small talk. "His favorite entertainments were intellectual rather than social," though he eventually cultivated a happy marriage with Josephine, only later to annul it for strategic reasons. Having arrived early at the view that political life needed to be determined by an all-powerful state, he was delighted when first appointed to a part of it in the Historical and Topographical Bureau of the War Ministry, which was described as "the most sophisticated planning organization of its day." But before gaining state power for himself, Napoleon first had to suppress the many enemies of revolutionary France, particularly Austria and what one observer called the "geopolitical expression" known as Italy. Roberts brilliantly conveys the sheer energy and presence of Napoleon the organizational and military whirlwind who, through crisp and incessant questioning, sized up people and problems and got things done. His rapport with soldiers was unparalleled, and his ability to cultivate a stable image of authority while taking advantage of shifting situations made him not only an astonishing soldier but a terrific statesman as well. He was as comfortable in dramatic nine-hour diplomatic encounters with Prince Metternich of Austria at the Marcolini Palace, or on a raft with Czar Alexander in the middle of the Neman River discussing the reorganization of Europe, as he was slicing through enemy lines. His dynamism shines in Roberts's set-piece chapters on major battles like Austerlitz, Jena and Marengo, turning visionary military maneuvers into politically potent moments that could bolster the four pillars of his rule at home - low taxes, property rights, centralized authority and national glory. When his political antennas ultimately deserted him, it proved fatal. He attempted to impose, through the "continental system," a blockade on English goods to damage an enemy he could not beat at sea, which led him toward a form of imperial overreach that backfired. England built continual coalitions against France, and eventually Napoleon fell into a coalition trap as messy as the bogs and marshes that slowed him up on his ill-fated Russian campaign. Napoleon was outthought and outmaneuvered as Moscow burned. Meanwhile, typhus wiped out nearly a fifth of his men. He was a master tactician of relatively localized battlefields, but one of his generals put his finger on Napoleon's Russian problem. Here was "a man annihilated by the presence of space." In the retreat his enemies struck hard, but even then his engineers were able to pioneer an astonishing escape, erecting flexible bridges across the freezing Berezina River, hidden from the advancing Russian Army. Even this, however, couldn't thwart the inevitable, and Napoleon tasted defeat in Leipzig. Simultaneously, Wellington entered France. The devious Talleyrand supported the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, and Napoleon was forced into exile on Elba. Though he soon retook Paris in another coup, his ultimate defeat at Waterloo was, as Roberts implies, tragic because it was so odd, the result of some elementary mistakes. During his second exile, on Saint Helena, he died of stomach cancer in 1821, at the age of 51, finally falling victim to a fate not even he could master. He was as comfortable in diplomatic sessions as he was slicing through enemy lines. DUNCAN KELLY teaches political thought at the University of Cambridge.
Kirkus Review
More books have been written with Napoleon (1769-1821) in the title than there have been days since his death, writes prolific historian and Napoleonic Institute fellow Roberts (The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, 2011, etc.) in this 800-page doorstop. Entirely conventional and mostly admiring, it fills no great need, but few readers will complain. After his early years in the backwater of Corsica, Napoleon's influential father sent him to France at the age of 9 to learn French and be educated in an elite military academy. An obscure officer when the revolution broke out in 1789, he left his post to spend most of those years in a complex factional struggle in Corsica, which he ultimately lost. He fled to France in 1793, a penniless but fiercely ambitious artillery captain. Six years later, already a national hero after a brilliant campaign in Italy, he engineered a coup that made him dictator. For the next 15 years, except for a brief armistice, his armies rampaged through Europe, mostly crushing opposing forces until he overreached in Spain and Russia and went down to defeat and humiliating exile. "Although his conquests ended in defeat and ignominious imprisonment," writes the author, "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." Readers will find this book to be a long but mostly pleasant reading experience, although some will doubt that Napoleon "saved the best aspects of the Revolution, discarded the worst, and ensured that even when the Bourbons were restored they could not return to the Ancient Regime." Other opinionated observersPaul Johnson, Charles Esdaile, Alan Schomconsider Napoleon a self-absorbed opportunist plagued by his incompetent economics, pugnacious foreign policy, totalitarian government and massive propaganda, but Roberts offers a solid reconsideration. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A life as full and influential as that of Napoleon Bonaparte, the obscure Corsican artillery lieutenant who in a few short years rose to become Emperor of the French, warrants a book of meticulous detail and stylistic flourish. Roberts (The Storm of War) has succeeded in crafting just such a book. Making good use of the thousands of letters written by Napoleon that have recently become available, the author delights listeners with a hitherto unthinkably intimate examination of the mind and personality of the European colossus. The resulting portrait of Napoleon is rich. He was indefatigable and possessed a sparkling dry wit that surfaced in good and bad times. He could be chummy, even gracious, with friends and strangers alike but exacting and stormy when he expected perfection. Napoleon was a voracious reader and often traveled with a library on his many campaigns; his eclectic interests included modern novels, ancient history, and the latest scientific developments. He was not only a master military strategist but also capable of deft political maneuvers. He had a heart that sought romance and a mind for statistical calculation. This is as complete and enjoyable a biography of Napoleon as one could want. The voice work of John Lee is crisp, and the pace as brisk as the ceaselessly active soldier turned emperor. VERDICT Recommended for all history lovers. ["This voluminous work is likely to set the standard for subsequent accounts of Napoleon's life," read the starred review of the Viking hc, LJ 10/15/14.]-Denis Frias, -Mississauga Lib. Syst., Ont. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Introduction 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 spanning every continent except Antarctica. 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, and the Cour des Comptes still checks public spending accounts more than two centuries after he founded it. The Légion 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'État 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. The leadership skills he employed to inspire his men have been adopted by other leaders over the centuries, yet never equaled except perhaps by his great devotee Winston Churchill. Some of his techniques he learned from the ancients--especially his heroes Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar--and others he conceived himself in response to the circumstances of the day. The fact that his army was willing to follow him even after the retreat from Moscow, the battle of Leipzig and the fall of Paris testifies to his capacity to make ordinary people feel that they were capable of doing extraordinary, history-making deeds. A more unexpected aspect of Napoleon's personality that also came out strongly over the course of researching this book was his fine sense of humour. All too often historians have taken seriously remarks that were clearly intended as humorous. Napoleon was constantly joking to his family and entourage, even in the most dire situations. Scores of examples pit this book. Napoleon's love affair with Josephine has been presented all too often in plays, novels and movies as a Romeo and Juliet story: in fact, it was anything but. He had an overwhelming crush on her, but she didn't love him, at least in the beginning, and was unfaithful from the very start of their marriage. When he learned of her infidelities two years later while on campaign in the middle of the Egyptian desert, he was devastated. He took a mistress in Cairo in part to protect himself from accusations of cuckoldry, which were far more dangerous for a French general of the era than those of adultery. Yet he forgave Josephine when he returned to France, and they started off on a decade of harmonious marital and sexual contentment, despite his taking a series of mistresses. Josephine remained faithful and even fell in love with him. When he decided to divorce for dynastic and geostrategic reasons, Josephine was desolate but they remained friendly. Napoleon's second wife, Marie Louise, would also be unfaithful to him, with an Austrian general Napoleon had defeated on the battlefield but clearly couldn't match in bed. Napoleon was able to compartmentalize his life to quite a remarkable degree, much more so even than most statesmen and great leaders. 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. On the eve of battle, as aides-de-camp were arriving and departing with orders to his marshals and reports from his generals, he could dictate his thoughts on the establishment of a girls' school for the orphans of members of the Légion d'Honneur, and shortly after having captured Moscow he set down the regulations governing the Comédie-Française. No detail about his empire was too minute for his restless, questing energy. The prefect of a department would be instructed to stop taking his young mistress to the opera; an obscure country priest would be reprimanded for giving a bad sermon on his birthday; a corporal told he was drinking too much; a demi-brigade that it could stitch the words 'Les Incomparables' in gold onto its standard. He was one of the most unrelenting micromanagers in history, but this obsession with details did not prevent him from radically transforming the physical, legal, political and cultural landscape of Europe. More books have been written with Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821. Admittedly, many have titles like Napoleon's Haemorrhoids and Napoleon's Buttons , but there are several thousand comprehensive, cradle-to-grave biographies too. Every one of them published since 1857 relied upon the correspondence that Napoleon III published as a tribute to his uncle. We now know that this was shamefully bowdlerized and distorted for propaganda purposes: letters that Napoleon never wrote were included while embarrassing or compromising ones that he did write were passed over. In all the compendium included only two-thirds of his total output. In one of the great publishing endeavours of the twenty-first century, the Fondation Napoléon in Paris has since 2004 been publishing every one of the more than 33,000 letters that Napoleon signed. The culmination of this immense project demands nothing less than a complete re-evaluation of this extraordinary man. Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback. His letters show a charm, humour and capacity for candid self-appraisal. He could lose his temper--volcanically so on occasion--but usually with some cause. Above all he was no totalitarian dictator, as many have been eager to suggest: he may have established an unprecedentedly efficient surveillance system, but he had no interest in controlling every aspect of his subjects' lives. Nor did he want the lands he conquered to be ruled directly by Frenchmen. He believed that one can control foreign lands only by winning over the population and sought accordingly to present himself in terms that would make him sympathetic to the locals, feigning sympathy for their religion as a means to an end. (It is notable that his strategies varied considerably in Italy, Egypt and Germany.) In the one instance where this was not the case--Haiti--he later acknowledged that the brutality of his policies had compromised his effectiveness and mused with foresight that one could not keep people subject for long at a great distance. Above all he hoped to modernize Europe. 'They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person,' he said after the failure of the royalist assassination plot of 1804. 'I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.' His characteristic egotism aside, Napoleon was right. He personified the best parts of the French Revolution, the ones that have survived and infused European life ever since. Although the Terror had finished five years before he grabbed power, the Jacobins were a powerful force who could always return. Similarly, a royalist restoration which would have wiped away the benefits of the Revolution was also possible. Instead, the fifteen-year rule of Napoleon saved the best aspects of the Revolution, discarded the worst and ensured that even when the Bourbons were restored they could not return to the Ancien Régime. 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 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. At the same time he dispensed with the absurd revolutionary calendar of ten-day weeks, the theology of the Cult of the Supreme Being, the corruption and cronyism of the Directory and the hyper-inflation that had characterized the dying days of the Republic. 'We have done with the romance of the Revolution,' he told an early meeting of his Conseil d'Etat, 'we must now commence its history.' For his reforms to work they needed one commodity that Europe's monarchs were determined to deny him: time. 'Chemists have a species of powder out of which they can make marble,' he said, 'but it must have time to become solid.' Because many of the principles of the Revolution threatened the absolute monarchies of Russia (which was to practice serfdom until 1861), Austria and Prussia, and the nascent industrial kingdom of England, they formed seven coalitions over twenty-three years to crush revolutionary France. In the end they succeeded, but, thanks to Napoleon, the Bourbons were too late to destroy the revolutionary principles he had codified into law. Many of those who opposed him were forced to adopt aspects of his reforms in their own countries in order to defeat him. 'There are two ways of constructing an international order,' Henry Kissinger wrote in A World Restored , 'by will or by renunciation; by conquest or by legitimacy.' Only one of these was open to Napoleon. In Britain, which had already had its revolution 140 years earlier and thus enjoyed many of the legal benefits that the Revolution brought to France, Napoleon faced William Pitt the Younger, who saw in the destruction of French power--be it revolutionary or Napoleonic--an opportunity to translate Britain's maritime trading success into global great power status. Napoleon's threat to invade Britain in 1803 ensured that successive British governments would remain determined to overthrow him. Their decrying of French imperialism was pure hypocrisy as Britain was busy building a vast empire at the time. Napoleon boasted that he was 'of the race that founds empires'--but he had a different kind of empire in mind, more in keeping with those of Caesar, Alexander and Frederick the Great. Napoleon is often accused of being a quintessential warmonger, yet war was declared on him far more often than he declared it on others. France and Britain were at war for nearly half the period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and Waterloo, and Napoleon was only a second lieutenant when the Revolutionary Wars broke out. He launched the Peninsular War and the war against Russia in 1812 in the hope of extending the reach of his 'Continental System,' a misguided protectionist answer to Britain's control of the seas, and thereby force Britain to sue for peace. It was thus Colbertian protectionism that brought him down, far more than the bloodlust and egomania of which he is so often accused. His decision to invade Russia was not in and of itself his worst mistake. The French had defeated the Russians three times since 1799, so it was understandable that he should believe he could do so again. He had fought in blizzards at Eylau and in the Sierra de Guadarrama, and at the end of long lines of communications at Austerlitz and Friedland. It was the very size of his army in 1812 that forced the Russians to adopt their strategy of constant retreat, and their adroitness in avoiding battle until they had lured him to within 75 miles of Moscow accounted for much of their victory. He could not have known how to block the ravages of the typhus epidemic that killed around 100,000 men in his central striking force as its origins and cure would not be discovered for another century. Despite this, had Napoleon chosen either one of two other possible routes back from Malojaroslavetz, he would have saved enough of the Grande Armée to preserve his crown. He thought he could bring the enemy to a decisive battle and pushed his forces too fast and hard in pursuit of that goal. He failed to appreciate that the Russian army had fundamentally changed and that Alexander I would stop at nothing to annihilate him. Overall, however, Napoleon's capacity for battlefield decision-making was astounding. Having walked the ground of fifty-three of his sixty battlefields, I was astonished by his genius for topography, his acuity and sense of timing. A general must ultimately be judged by the outcome of the battles, and of Napoleon's sixty battles and sieges he lost only Acre, Aspern-Essling, Leipzig, La Rothière, Lâon, Arcis and Waterloo. When asked who was the greatest captain of the age, the Duke of Wellington replied: 'In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.' He convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment and a story whose sheer splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries. He was able to impart to ordinary people the sense that their lives--and, if necessary, their deaths in battle--mattered in the context of great events. They too could make history. It is untrue that he cared nothing for his men and was careless with their lives. He lost a friend in almost every major battle, and his letters to Josephine and Marie Louise make it clear that these deaths, and those of his soldiers, affected him. Yet he could not allow that to deflect him from his main purpose of pursuing victory, and he would not have been able to function as a general if it had, any more than Ulysses Grant or George Patton could have done. Napoleon certainly never lacked confidence in his own capacity as a military leader. On St Helena, when asked why he had not taken Frederick the Great's sword when he had visited Sans Souci, he replied, 'Because I had my own.' Excerpted from Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.