Napoleon biography book

If you were to explain the significance of Napoleon Bonaparte (–) to someone who knew nothing about him, what would you say?

I’d set aside his military achievements—conquering half of Europe in the 16 years of his rule between and —as all of those had completely disappeared by the time of the Congress of Vienna in Instead, I’d concentrate on those aspects of his rule that can still be seen in France and in much of Western Europe today.

I argue that although he didn’t have much to do with the French Revolution itself, as he was too young, he nonetheless kept the best bits of the Revolution—equality before the law, religious tolerance, meritocracy—for France and the countries that France conquered. The Code Napoleon was still in effect in the Rhineland until , for example, and it underlies modern European legal systems to this day.

He got rid of the worst bits, like the mass guillotining, the Reign of Terror, the various mad ideas they had like the ten-day week, abolishing Christianity, and so on. He was the person who brought France into the 19th century with huge reforms of administration and finance. He was a moderniser.

You mentioned his relationship with the Revolution. I think there’s something paradoxical about it. He’d declare things like “I am the Revolution”, and the Napoleonic Code did enshrine revolutionary principles like civic equality into law. But didn’t he also curtail the rights of women and reinstate slavery in the Caribbean sugar colonies? Some would argue that the main constitution itself was structurally undemocratic, with an unelected senate, even if it was put to the people in a plebiscite.

The Code Napoleon was not good for women, but then they were hardly over-endowed with rights before the Revolution. He went on to abolish slavery, of course, not once but twice. He did reinstitute it in , but abolished it again in So, he had an in-out/in-out policy with slavery. When I say a ‘moderniser’, I mean a m

This one took me a while; standing at over pages of meticulously researched biography, it’s not the sort of thing you can just pick for a little light reading. Requiring full alertness to be properly enjoyed, I had to keep putting it down when work became mentally draining. As such, it took me months to work through, but my goodness, it was worth it!

I’ve been obsessed with the Napoleonic wars since I watched my first episode of Sharpe aged around thirteen. In the seventeen (sob!) years since then, I’ve accumulated pretty much an entire bookcase worth of books on the lives of Napoleon Bonaparte and Arthur Wellesley.

This magnificent book will from now on be, as far as I am concerned, the definitive biography of Napoleon! Managing to condense one of the most remarkable lives in human history into a single volume in the first place is no mean feat, but what Andrew Roberts has accomplished is superlative.

Managing an excellent balance between meticulous academic rigour and enjoyable readability, the book never felt like a chore to read. It follows the meteoric trajectory of Napoleon’s extraordinary life from his birth in Ajaccio in Corsica in until his death in exile on the remote island of St Helena in

So often dismissed by some as a power-hungry warmonger, Roberts paints a dynamic picture of complex, multi-faceted man. He discusses many of his faults – the tendency to exaggerate or diminish battle information in his bulletins, his occasional examples of ruthlessness, his later overconfidence and his persistence in promoting and advancing the lives of his ungrateful and talentless siblings – but also focusses his multitude of strengths, something which many non-French biographers conveniently overlook, and concludes by asking whether Napoleon might not be deserving of the sobriquet Napoleon the Great.

He draws heavily on a recently released compendium of Napoleon’s personal correspondence (sometimes he wrote literally dozens of letters a day), all

By Frank McLynn

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