Napoleon [Hardcover]

Frank McLynn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2002

Napoleon Bonaparte's character and achievements have always divided critics and commentators. In this compelling new biography, Frank McLynn draws on the most recent scholarship and throws a brilliant light on this most paradoxical of men-as military leader, lover, and emperor. Tracing Napoleon's extraordinary career, McLynn examines the Promethean legend from his Corsican roots, through the years of the French Revolution and his military triumphs, to his coronation in 1804 and ultimate defeat and imprisonment. McLynn brilliantly reveals the extent to which Napoleon was both existential hero and plaything of Fate; mathematician and mystic; intellectual giant and moral pygmy; great man and deeply flawed human being.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Napoleon Bonaparte was a bully, rude and insulting. Women did not like him. But even so, writes Frank McLynn, "he had an amazing ability to sway other men to his purposes," which earned him one of the greatest empires Europe had ever known. McLynn, a noted biographer of difficult personalities, gives us a many-sided Napoleon: the shrewd strategist, the intolerant prude, the scrappy fighter, the charismatic leader, the sadist. ("He liked to strike people of both sexes, to slap them, pull their hair, pinch their ears and tweak their noses.") He nonetheless managed to extend French rule to the gates of Moscow. Why, then, was he so resoundingly defeated? McLynn argues that, among other things, Napoleon was not ruthless enough in dealing with the "endless list of ingrates" that surrounded him.

McLynn's book has several virtues, and readers interested in Napoleon's brief but brilliant career will want to have a look. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

After visiting Corsica, Rousseau declared, "I have a presentiment that one day this small island will astonish Europe." Corsica did. Born there in 1769, Napoleon Bonaparte would convulse the Continent, precipitating thousands of books about him since. This latest, by British historian and Strathclyde University (U.K.) literature professor McLynn (Villa and Zapata; The Jacobites), is a crowded and persuasive one-volume life. McLynn's study but for his addictions to clich‚ and to repetition, and his labored leaning on both Freud and Jung is one the best of the new breed (since the 1978 discovery of Bonaparte's arsenic poisoning made earlier volumes obsolete). No hagiographer, McLynn is hard on Napoleon both as general and as statesman, and faults his failures to rein in his openly "venal" marshals, treacherous administrative elite and astonishingly rapacious siblings. Indifferent to people except as he needed their loyalty, this Napoleon's embodies ambitions not tempered by any idealism, and McLynn dismisses "credulous" previous biographers for seeing anything in him beyond a familiar French grasping for "grandeur" and "glory," apparent on a lesser level from Louis XIV to de Gaulle. To McLynn the difference is that Napoleon's dreams were truly Alexandrine that "His genius was of a kind that needed constant warfare to fuel it and... that all the hopes vested in him were illusory." While deftly exposing the material realities underlying the Napoleonic wars, McLynn also graphically describes the battles, suggesting that few (Austerlitz is an exception) demonstrate any authentic military brilliance. He is even more explicit about the general's tumultuous domestic and sexual life, in which Napoleon allegedly found little but masochistic satisfaction. "The true representative of the nation," Napoleon declared desperately in 1814, as his empire was collapsing around him, "is myself. France has more need of me than I have need of France." Such is still the case, McLynn claims, as France continues to cultivate his myth. Although McLynn's is a well-researched, convincing portrait, aficionados will find it not quite up to the standard of Alan Schom's 1997 Napoleon Bonaparte, which is both better written and more psychologically astute. 16 pages of b&w illustrations.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 739 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (April 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559706317
• ISBN-13: 978-1559706315
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.8 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #930,995 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A complex too many, January 1, 2008

By 

Tuhul - See all my reviews

This review is from: Napoleon: A Biography (Paperback)

I'm sure every biographer of Napoleon aspires to be the one to pin this man down once and for all, to figure him out and deliver him on a platter. Well, it does not happen with this book and even if the author claims that this was never the goal, the attempt is there. The result is a tome that might become increasingly tiresome to anyone who is already familiar with the subject and who does not already harbor a dedicated dislike for Napoleon, and too much for those trying to find a starting point. I would not recommend it to beginner students of Napoleon as it is heavily charged with the largelly negative personal biases and opinions of the author, lacks in specific maps - a necessity when covering a battle in great detail - and assumes the reader has a solid grasp of Europe in the 18th century, particularly France.

McLynn, though calling him a "genius" at times, is hyper-critical of Napoleon as a man, son, husband, step-father and leader - at every stage of his career. His relationships with women are always "misogynistic". With the rest of society, institutions and other powers, invariably "machiavellian" - a word repeated ad nauseam, applicable or not. He is equally censorious of his mother, his wives, his lovers, his brothers, his sisters, his entourage, his friends, his assistants, his bourgeois nobility and his marshals. Did I leave anyone out?

His marshals are singled out for scathing condemnation, marched in front of the firing squad of his pen one by one. Those like Masséna, Ney and Augereau who were "low born" are particular targets. Once riff-raff always riff-raff he seems to be saying.

What made reading this book almost unbearable for me, in the end, are Mr.McLynn's psychoanalytic pretensions. He seems to rely heavily on Jung's speculative rumminations about Napoleon, coming up with novel and often ridiculous (as in "laughable") diagnoses of his own. Thus, Napoleon suffered from every personality disorder and crippling neurosis known to modern mental health professionals, and a few others yet to be discovered; enough for a full psychiatric conference, in fact! In their milder forms, his mental quirks are presented as "complexes". The "Rome complex" for example...Napoleon was interested in ancient Rome but indifferent to the Rome of his own time and, no Gibbon he, never went there. McLynn seriously writes that an "obsession" (another word he loves) with a city one doesn't intend to visit is a "complex". I personally have several then.

His "Oriental complex" is the vague explanation for Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. Nothing about European powers keeping an eye on the crumbling Ottoman Empire and the generally held ambition to be the first to take Constantinople. Oddly, the planned invasion of England - which French strategists studied and prepared for long before Napoleon burst on the scene, and something he personally pursued on and off during his career - never rises to the status of an "England complex". But those familiar with complex-nomenclature in general will be happy to find "Oedipal complex" in there too. Of course.

And so on. Annoying also are the puritanical judgments on the mores, or lack thereof, of 1789-1815 French society, which betray a poor ability to understand the period and refrain from veneering it with present values. It has also been observed that some biographies of Napoleon are essays on tyranny as understood by a post-Stalin or post-Hitler world. It's time Napoleon was allowed to return to his own time.

41 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Overview or Starting Point, April 19, 2006

By 

Patrick B. Shirley "pshirley" (KY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Napoleon: A Biography (Paperback)

This is the book to grab if you want to know all the important things about Napoleon's life in one book without having to worry about becoming bogged down with too much information.

You will not be a Napoleonic expert after reading the book but you will have learned about all the significant events in Napoleon's life to be able to speak intelligently about them on a general level. This book should be enough for those who have a casual interest in Napoleon, but should also serve as a great starting point for those who want to learn more. For instance, the campaign in Russia is given good coverage in the book but left me yearning for more so one of my next purchases will be a book that deals specifically with the Russian campaign. Fortunately, there are great books out there for nearly every siginificant battle and event that Napoleon was in so this book is a great primer for those. Thanks to this book I've now picked out several other books to read on Napoleon, Nelson, Louis Davout and more.

One of the great things about the book is how easy it is to read. McLynn writes straightforwardly but interestingly. The pages fly by. McLynn does use a lot of words that you don't see every day so keep a dictionary handy. Words like "tatterdemalion" were certainly new to me, but its nice to learn some new vocabulary.

McLynn does engage in a fair amount of speculation about some of the events in Napoleon's life and of Napoleon's motives. Most of the theories advanced, such as McLynn's belief that Napoleon was probably poisoned instead of dying of the officially given reason of stomach cancer, are not outrageous because they have supporting facts. More troubling for some, though not me, may be the psychoanalysis that McLynn engages in. McLynn really tries to get at some of the psychological bases for some of Napoleon's actions and while that may be an impossible task the book does not suffer for it. You can agree or disagree but again, the explanations are not outlandish.

The book is a well-balanced treatment of Napoleon overall. It is not hagiographic as the author makes it clear that he does not view Napoloen as the greatest military leader ever. McLynn acknowledges that Napoleon was largely untouchable from 1796-1805, working military magic at times, but also sets out the repeated mistakes Napoleon made, such as failure to account for the weather in battle, that meant fewer victories after 1805. McLynn makes judgments on Napoleon but all of them seem fair, even if one disagrees with some of them. All in all the facts are laid out clearly so you can make up your own mind.

The book does a great job of trying to cover all the significant events and chapters in Napoleon's life. The book covers all the important military campaigns, including the reasons for going to war, but also provides excellent coverage of Napoleon's youth in Corsica, his marriages and affairs, his time on St. Helena, his economic policies and political and diplomatic strategies.

Most importantly I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It gave me an excellent one volume history of Napoleon while being interesting at the same time.

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and occasionally surprising, May 11, 2003

By 

Charles Poncet (Geneva Switzerland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Napoleon (Hardcover)

Mr. McLynn's book confirms my long held view that a fair account of a great man's life (well, shall we say a famous man, because opinions on Napoleon's supposed greatness may differ...) is better approached through a biographer who does not emanate from the same country. Although I read somewhere that Mr. McLynn is supposed to be "worshipping at the shrine", I found his biography thoroughly fair and balanced, very well written, constantly interesting and free of the rubbish very often found in French books on Napoleon. For sure, there are some Freudian explanations of Napoleon's attitudes, which appear somewhat speculative (why, for example, should the young Bonaparte have been "ambivalent" towards Louis XVI just because of his supposed attitude toward a protector who may or may not have gone to bed with Laetizia Buonaparte?). Other points are funny and entertaining, such as a comparison between the infamous Fouché and....J. Edgar HOOVER!!
Napoleon's military skills are frankly acknowledged, but so are his tendencies to sudden depression and the story of his campaigns is told with precision, yet the reader is never lost in the minutiae of some strategy. One may have wished for a few more maps but here is a very good biography, easily read, well written and entertaining, which can be highly recommended to anyone with a general interest in this strange Corsican, whose similarities with his sinister twentieth century successor (Adolf Hitler) are indeed striking.