Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Great, Flawed Man "Adieu Josephine. A thousand daggers stab my heart, do not plunge them in deeper. Adieu, my happiness, my life, all that had any real existence for me on this earth." Napoleon wrote many love letters like that to his wife when he was off on campaign, busily annexing and reorganizing much of Italy after 300+ years of Austrian dominion. One of the interesting things about Andrew Roberts' Napoleon: A Life (2014) is Napoleon's ability (or need) to compartmentalize his life, so that one moment he'd be writing melodramatic letters to Josephine, the next leading his French army to another military victory over allied European powers or installing a new legal system based on equality before the law or discussing literature or philosophy or science with the leading savants of his era. In his biography Roberts covers Napoleon's achievements as a general, 53 victories in 60 battles via influential tactics, and as a statesman, promoting meritocracy, improving infrastructure, reforming education, and implementing the Napoleonic Code still present to some extent in the legal systems of 40 countries today. "Even if Napoleon hadn't been one of the great military geniuses of history, he would still be a giant of the modern era." Roberts details aspects of Napoleon's character like his boundless energy, hands-on micromanaging, wide-ranging interests, sense of humor, and forgiveness of enemies (and of feckless siblings). He reveals Napoleon's private life, his intense relationship with Josephine and calmer one with Marie Louise, and his affairs. He conveys Napoleon's charisma, which got so many men to follow him as if on a grand adventure to make history. Roberts wants to correct the image painted by other historians of Napoleon that he was a war-loving tyrant who sacrificed myriad people and upset the world to satisfy his ambitions, pointing out that other countries declared war on him more often than he on them and that many of his callous comments vis-à-vis the lives of soldiers were taken out of context or fabricated. Perhaps at times Roberts tries too hard to put us in Napoleon's camp by using words like "Luckily, …" or "Unfortunately, . . ." to introduce sentences referring to developments that helped or harmed Napoleon and his aims. Anyway, Roberts successfully demonstrates that "What brought Napoleon down was not some deep-seated personality disorder but a combination of unforeseeable circumstances coupled with a handful of significant miscalculations: something altogether more believable, human and fascinating." Roberts' book begins with Napoleon's Corsican family history and youth, moves through his meteoric rise during the chaotic era of the French Revolution to become General, First Consul, and then Emperor, and ends with his forced abdication in 1814, his return from Elba, and his defeat at Waterloo and death on St. Helena. The ending is appalling, not because of the fall from power and empire or the awful living conditions on St. Helena, but because Napoleon died a slow, degrading, and painful death from stomach cancer. After all, even men who transform and rule the world only do so temporarily and are made of clay like us all. Roberts says that writing the biography took him longer than Napoleon spent on Elba and St. Helena combined. He read the accounts of people who knew and liked or hated Napoleon, Napoleon's autobiography (with a large dose of salt), and his myriad letters, 1/3 of which had recently become available for the first time. Roberts also takes into account the European historical political contexts of the late 18th- and early 19th-centuries. He visited 53 of Napoleon's 60 battlefields to get a sense of the challenges the terrain presented, and to make his history more immediate often says things like, "It [a key bridge] was about 15 yards upstream from today's bridge." Roberts' biography features plenty of Napoleonic Age warfare. Interesting details on weaponry (e.g., lightweight and powerful artillery) and tactics (e.g., mobile corps and combined arms attacks) and the impact their development had on war (as Napoleon's enemies learned to use his innovations against him). Not to mention casualties, disease, morale, provisioning, propaganda, spying, communications, leadership, and more. The wealth of pre-battle information regarding the names of generals and numbers of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, etc. can get a little boring, but the accounts of battles are suspenseful and full of vivid details, like a Russian soldier saying after Borodino that he had had to keep his mouth open through the entire battle to normalize air pressure in his ear amid the continuous percussive artillery and musket fire (at least 3 cannonballs and 77 musket balls were fired per second). Roberts at times may try a bit too hard to make us understand such warfare: "The combined losses are the equivalent of a fully laden jumbo jet crashing into an area of six square miles, every five minutes for the whole ten hours of the battle, killing or wounding everyone on board." John Lee reads the audiobook with the John Lee Rhythm, which tends to make all his books sound like they're written by the same person. He does have a great voice, precise pronunciation, and lively energy and intelligence. The audiobook lacks the books illustrations maps, and footnotes. Anyone interested in history should like this book. It draws on recently available letters and presents an absorbing and balanced account of Napoleon's life and times, and has witty and fine writing: "Ironically, although it was to get an imperial heir that Napoleon divorced Josephine, it would turn out to be her grandson, rather than any offspring of Napoleon's, who would become the next emperor of France, and her direct descendents who today sit on the thrones of Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Luxemburg. His sit on none." View all my reviews
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