Napoleon: A Concise Biography
Have you seen the new Ridley Scott Napoleon movie and are wondering how much of it is true, but don’t want to spend the next month reading a thousand-page biography? David Bell’s “Napoleon: A Concise Biography” is the perfect book for you.
Writing at a brisk pace and covering everything from the famous general’s early years as a passionately anti-French Corsican patriot to his final years in exile in the South Pacific, Bell covers all the major events of Napoleon’s life. As far as I can tell, He takes a traditional view of Napoleon’s life and impact. While admitting he was a military genius, Bell also credits military reforms undertaken in the Revolutionary era and the backward practices of her enemies for France’s military dominance in this era.
A Struggle for Legitimacy
The problem for Napoleon was that his legitimacy as emperor was based not on being born into a god-ordained holy dynasty, but on his ability to win battles and bring glory to France. This made it impossible for him to make the sorts of concessions to his enemies that a more secure ruler may have been able to secure.
Unable to defeat the British at sea, he had to constantly dominate the other European land powers. As the years went on, this pressure forced the other nations to reform their military structures. Over the years their available manpower grew ever larger and it became less possible to rush in forces to surround and destroy entire armies in a single battle. Gone were the days of Marengo, Austerlitz, and Jena. Wars became costly slogs of attrition, and the individual genius of one supreme general counted for less and less, leading to his ultimate defeat. This is of course a simplification, but If this subject is of particular interest to you, Bell’s earlier book “Total War” covers this entire period in great detail.
Napoleon’s Accomplishments
While his career ended up in total military defeat and France at the mercy of her enemies, Ball credits Napoleon’s domestic accomplishments as First Consul with more long-lasting significance, in France itself as well as its overseas territories and Latin America more broadly, though Ball is skeptical of how beneficial it was to society to so strongly centralize the civil service and privilege Patriarchal stability over women’s rights in inheritance and divorce laws. I have to admit that when I hear the phrase “Napoleonic Code” my first thought is always Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, ranting about his rights under it in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
Napoleon’s Personal Life
A short book like this can’t go too far in-depth on any one subject, including the nature of Napoleon as a man. He does make sure to highlight his many contradictions, however. Though an undoubted authoritarian who strictly curtailed freedom of the press, Bell is hesitant to compare him to the Totalitarian dictators of the twentieth century.
He was surprisingly lenient to his political enemies, which helped make his kidnapping and execution of Duke D’Enghien such a shock across Europe. He claimed to represent the Revolution but reintroduced slavery to France’s Caribbean territories and began handing out kingdoms to his family members like candy. He had a truly deep connection to ordinary soldiers in his army, sharing their rations and burdens when on the campaign, but also had no regrets about the huge piles of corpses his wars left behind. That’s as far as this book goes into trying to understand the psychology of Napoleon. Relatively little attention is paid to his relationship with Josephine, other than repeated references to her being much less interested in him than he was in her. His second wife, the Austrian princess Marie Louise, and his son by her receive even less attention.
The “Invisible Emperor”
If you want a more intimate look into Napoleon the man, Mark Braude’s book “The Invisible Emperor” which focuses on his brief exile on the island of Elba, is an excellent choice. As much as the monarchs of Europe detested Napoleon and couldn’t live with him in power, they could never repeat what they saw as the greatest crime of the French Revolution and execute a fellow head of state who, despite the unprecedented act of placing the crown on his own head, had after all been declared Emperor in a ceremony overseen by the pope himself. Instead, they papered over his imprisonment by giving him the tiny island of Elba to rule over, penned in by the British fleet.
In Conclusion
In these reduced circumstances, Napoleon’s interactions with the small number of native islanders, his respectful British overseers, and his few visitors, provide a better look at Napoleon the man. His eventual daring escape and a brief return to power serve as an exciting climax to the book. Of course, this famous 100 days ended again in defeat at Waterloo.
There would be no pretense to his second exile, and he spent the rest of his life as an acknowledged prisoner on the remote island of St Helena, enduring constant petty humiliations from his British jailers, and narrating his memoirs. An ignoble end to a monumental life, but perhaps exactly what he deserved.
