One of my favorite recent books is Napoleon: A Life, by Andrew Roberts. Last spring, during a trip to Paris, I visited Napoleon’s Tomb at Les Invalides. The tomb sits beside the War Museum, whose Modern Department houses an extraordinary collection chronicling French military history from the time of the French Revolution to the Bourbon restoration. This look back in time, along with the reverence shown to the Emperor in his elaborate tomb under the Dome des Invalides, made me realize how little I knew about him and begged the question, “who was this man?”.
“It is but a step between the sublime and the ridiculous” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
Enter Andrew Roberts book, Napoleon: A Life. Roberts is a uniquely talented writer and historian who has masterfully stitched together Napoleon’s life through historical records, his own research (Roberts actually visited many of the historical Napoleonic sites), and the many letters written by Napoleon himself. Napoleon was quite prolific, dictating many thousands of letters from campaigns across Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. From these writings, Robert’s intersperses Napoleon’s own voice to narrate parts of the book. Robert’s himself has a unique way of characterizing some of the battle scenes. When describing the Battle of Borodino, one of Napoleon’s bloodiest, he says, “The combined losses are the equivalent of a fully laden jumbo jet crashing into an area of 6 square miles every five minutes for the whole ten hours of the battle, killing or wounding everyone on board.”
“The combined losses are the equivalent of a fully laden jumbo jet crashing into an area of 6 square miles every five minutes for the whole ten hours of the battle, killing or wounding everyone on board.”
While Napoleon is most famous for his conquests (and defeat at Waterloo), what comes across in Robert’s book is more of an intimate portrait of the man himself. Napoleon, to a man, was often humble and self-deprecating. He had an incredible memory and could recall soldiers’ personal details many years after even a chance encounter. These traits would endear him to the French Army, so much so that they welcomed him with open arms upon his return from his first exile on the island of Elba.
He was an incredibly prolific man. Beyond his letters and writings, he rewrote and liberalized much of European law via the Code Napoleon. He was a voracious reader, with a traveling library that followed him wherever he went. He was a very forgiving man, giving many who betrayed him, like his brother-in-law, Murat, and Talleyrand, his Foreign Minister, a second chance to serve him. He was extremely witty, with quite a wry sense of humor. On his first wife Josephine’s tendency to lie about her age (she was significantly older than Napoleon), Napoleon quipped ‘According to her calculations, Eugène (her son) must have been born aged twelve!’. Examples of his wit are found throughout the book.
While I enjoyed the review of all the Napoleonic campaigns and the detailed studies of many of his battles, my favorite part of this book was Robert’s effort to bring Napoleon himself to life– often through his own words. It would be easy to simply tell Napoleon’s story through his military deeds. By weaving the Emperor’s own voice into the narrative, we get an intimate portrait of the man himself. I finished the book feeling as if, in some small way, I actually knew him.
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