Customer Reviews

The Most Monstrous of Wars: The Napoleonic Guerrilla War in Southern Italy, 1806-1811

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Finley combines an essay format with accessible, reader-friendly language and clear, well organized points in which the most important are further embellished with choice quotes, neatly capturing both the main thrust of his material and something of the flavor of the era and its protagonists.
Reference notes blissfully follow each essay chapter.
Also in Finley's favor is his ability to immediately characterize vastly different personalities, from the rigid Reynier, the corrupt and vain Massena, to the absurd royal couple, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina Bourbon.
Finley accomplishes this feat by gleaning bits from his excellent sources, many of which are far superior, in scope and detail, to Finley's own book.

Herein lies the reason for this reviewer's criticism: Finley's breezy and adept writing style could have accommodated the additional text needed to develop a fuller reading of all the pertinent political and military factors that made Calabria the "ulcer" of not only foreign military domination but even for King Murat's long-held desire for Italian unification.
This last observation is itself a critical indicator that Finley's resources, such as R.M.Johnston's extraordinary history of the Napoleonic Empire in Southern Italy, and the eight volume (not ten volume as cited in bibliography) compilation of Murat's letters, deserved a more astute discussion concerning Napoleon's most mischaracterize associate.
The reader, upon seeing the hopeful sign that Murat's "Lettres" have been included, may be forgiven their subsequent disappointment that yet again a scholar succumbs to the disease of academic gullibility, an all too crowded, and international, sickroom as it is.
Any understanding of this Calabrian misery and Italian vulnerability, in which their rights to autonomy would be abused by the likes of a Metternich for decades to come, is dependent upon a legitimate analysis of the dauntingly complex personal and public relationship between Emperor Napoleon and King Murat.
To this end, Finley's reader is advised to put aside this brief collection of essays for the Johnston book, the Murat "Lettres;" also see Cmmdr.Weil's publication of additional correspondence and material on Murat.

If it is any consolation to Finley, this reviewer considers the efforts of exceedingly gullible French historians to be patently embarrassing; they were the first to fall prey to the idiocies contained in the now sacred tomes of certain "memoiristes."
Beth E.K.William