Napoleoniana
Ridley Scott’s new film Napoleon really should have been released this past Wednesday—the 18th Brumaire Year CCXXXII. A missed opportunity. Instead, it is coming out on Friday the 24th. I am seeing an advance press screening this Tuesday and will write up some preliminary thoughts here. My main review will be in The New York Review of Books. Meanwhile, I published a short piece in The Wall Street Journal this weekend.
I have written a fair amount about Napoleon Bonaparte over the years. The most substantial things are my Napoleon: A Concise Biography, as well as the chapters dedicated to the man in my books Men on Horseback and The First Total War. Among my academic articles are “Napoleon Bonaparte in Modern Political Culture,” and “Tocqueville, Napoleon, and History-Writing in a Democratic Age,” I was particularly happy with the last of these, which gave me a chance to dive deep into the writings of one of the greatest French thinkers of all time. A while back I also edited a collection of articles for Modern Language Notes on “The Specter of Napoleon.” In Eurozine I speculated about the legacies of Bonapartim for modern political culture.
And there are a lot of reviews, on books on Napoleon by…
· Isser Woloch and Robert Asprey (not online)
· Dominique de Villepin (not online)
· Steven Englund (not online)
· Sudhir Hazareesingh, Max Gallo, and Stuart Semmel
· Jean-Yves Guiomar and Michael Leggiere
· Patrice Gueniffey and Andrew Roberts
Not all of these reviews are favorable. Patrice Gueniffey is a first-rate historian, whose Bonaparte, 1769-1802 is a stupendous feat of research, and in many ways definitive on the first part of Napoleon’s life. But his work has been increasingly shaped by his far-right politics, especially in his recent book-length essay comparing Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle. The most evil thing Napoleon ever did was to restore slavery where he could in France’s overseas empire, putting hundreds of thousands of people back in bondage. On this subject, Gueniffey can barely contain his scorn. He calls those who fault Napoleon for this act “simple-minded” and “hypocrites,” and refers to “alleged descendants of slaves.” He does not try to deal with their arguments, but states instead, inaccurately and irrelevantly: “If Napoleon’s Grande Armée set out to conquer Europe, it was not to enslave it but to free it.” Another of the biographies I reviewed was full of embarrassing historical errors. As it was only the first volume of a projected two, I could not resist writing of the author: “He might learn from his subject's mistakes, and stop now, before getting to Russia.”
But there are some superb full-length biographies of Napoleon out there. The one I would probably recommend most highly is the set by Michael Broers, starting with his Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny.