Customer Reviews

Napoleon (Penguin Lives)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

My reasons for choosing this book: my world history background is weak, I wanted to fill in a crucial gap; I did not want to spend several months on a steamer trunk of a biography; I am a fan of the Penguin Lives series; I have read Paul Johnson before and know him to be a fine stylist in content areas that many writers lay waste with stultifying prose. I was not disappointed for the most part.

Understandably, it is impossible to catch every fact, every nuance of Napoleon Bonaparte's life and ongoing contribution to history in just under 200 pages (one Victorian era writer dedicated 10 volumes to the man). Johnson limns the environment of the Enlightenment and revolution that was sweeping the western world and connects the life in terms of its how, why and consequences. He strikes a remarkable balance between the birds-eye view of Bonaparte sweeping through Europe and close-up personal sketches, the former conveying the formidably shrewd man of action, the latter revealing an often comic figure. It is to Johnson's credit that he reconciles the two in one body.

Johnson is in no way forgiving of Bonaparte but he does invite wonder at how he rose up out of inauspicious beginnings, could seize a continent, only to make such glaring errors in strategy at Waterloo and ultimately die in exile on a distant island. The autopsy report is a final ironic twist.

Johnson is not without his biases, but I got very good information from him via bright, fluent prose.

Why the vituperative reviews for what is intended as a concise but accurate psychological treatment of a historical figure?

Napoleon has been much romantacized. As Johnson states, more books have been written about Napoleon than any other historical figure except Jesus Christ.

I had always thought of Napoleon as the brief restorer of France's glory after the devastation of the French Revolution. Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo ended what would have been France's return to glory. This books shows that Napoleon's brief reign in France consisted of very thin soup. Contrary to some of the negative reviews, Johnson doesn't think everything Napoleon did was bad. He quit persecuting the Catholic Church, restored some order to governing, and did not hold grudges. He treated the army rather well.

On the other hand, he bankrupted the country with endless military campaigns. As soon as the money ran out, he would decide to attack another country. There was no stabilty to the government because it depended financially upon the next military victory which inevitably quit coming. Napoleon also established a secret police. Bribery was rampant.

Johnson rightly debunks the past attempts to romantacize Napoleon's relationships with women especially his first wife, Josephine. There have been entire novels purportingly based upon Napoleon and Josephine's love life. Very little is known about their actual life together except the bare facts.

I found this book easy to read and informative.

This is not strictly speaking a biography. It is more an essay on the imact of Napolean. It is an attempt to place Napoleon in context of world events. Johnson's conclusions that he was the developer of the authoritarian state are absolutely correct. Napoleon was a fantastic military leader, and great self promoter and opportunitst who led France and Europe into disaster.

Johnson puts forward a compelling case that Napoleon's memory should be scorned. It is hard to see how the French regard him as a national hero after his actions.

This book is a good short life of Napoleon. The problem that I have with it is that Johnson is convinced that Napoleon's real contribution to western civilization is to be the creator of the dictatorical state. I think that this is reading far too much into things and that he is reaching here. Most of the elements that Napoleon used to preserve himself in power (such as the secret police) had existed in previous versions under other regimes. Roman emperors opened the mail of their citizens as did Louis XIV. They also used propaganda to varying degrees of effectiveness. This was an important part of kingship. One gets the impression that Johnson's problem is not so much with Napoleon as it is the French Revolution in general. He also appears to have set out to research a book on Napoleon and came away from the experience with a great deal of admiration for the Duke of Wellington (who was no bargin when he was prime minister later in the UK). He does also tend to downplay Napoleon's military skill, insisting on crediting subordinates instead. However, it is the mark of a good leader if he can attract good subordinates to realize his ambitions, something Johnson does not appreciate. Napoleon's legacy was not nearly as black as Johnson portrays it, it might have been more useful to try for a more balanced approach.

Johnson does a good job of channeling William Pitt, but a poor job of history in this tendentious, glib, shoddy, but, thankfully ,short volume. It is one thing to shy away from hagiography, quite another to omit facts or invent them to create a historical figure that did not exist.

From the very first pages, Johnson proudly displays his biases. He views the French Revolution as an unnecessary "accident", and announces, without any supporting argument save England's example, that the inequalities it addressed would have been solved peacefully in time by history. The scholarship is extremely sloppy, and Johnson continually contradicts himself and gets his facts wrong. Her are but a few examples:

He says Napoleon was not an ideologue, then proclaims him the progenitor of "a new brand of ideological dictator" like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

He says that Napoleon "never seems to have grasped the essence of the English constitution", yet during the young Napoleon's school years, the text on which he made the most notes was a history of the English constitution. He also tried to bring the English jury system into the Code Civil, but was blocked by the Directory.

He cites a M. de Remurat as saying that Napoleon "is really ignorant, having read very little, and always hastily." A glance at the reading Napoleon did while in school, the notes he took, and the memoirs he dictated at St. Helena, with their detailed knowledge of history and past political affairs, easily give the lie to this.

He writes that Napoleon "did not understand [the sea's] true strategic significance", ignoring Napoleon's continued respect--and envy--of the British Navy, a service he once tried to join. That strategic knowledge is also what prompted him to deny England's demand for the island of Lampedusa, which Bonaparte knew would give the British Navy control of the Mediterranean.

Johnson says Napoleon "took no notice of air power, though it was then much discussed", yet Napoleon noticed it enough to take balloonists on his Egyptian expedition.

Regarding leaving Corsica, Johnson imputes to Napoleon the following: "So he asked himself , where does the nearest source of real power lie? And the answer came immediately: France." Napoleon was a ten year-old boy when he left Corsica, being sent away to military school. He might have been thinking of glory, more likely he was missing his mother.

Regarding returning to Corsica, Napoleon, Johnson writes, "took no interest in the place once he had left it." Not only did Napoleon order numerous books on Corsica while in school, but he returned to the island in 1791 on leave, then petitioned the War Office to stand for election in the Corsican National Guard. He fought his first engagements as an officer in Corsica.

He states that Napoleon, "made no lifelong friends at the college or the academy"--except for Alexandre des Mazis, who wrote a memoir about Napoleon. Interestingly, Johnson doesn't cite des Mazis, but he does cite Bourrienne's memoirs--which have been totally discredited.

He says Napoleon retired after Toulon and "following his principle of going direct to where power lay, he went to Paris. " Napoleon did not retire; he'd been removed from the artillery and posted to the infantry, when, severely depressed, he moved into a cheap hotel on The Left Bank.


Johnson tries his best to link Napoleon with the twentieth century's dictators. Indeed, it's the centerpiece of his thematic argument. Of the Italian Campaign, which he calls a "looting expedition", he writes that Napoleon's "technique adumbrated the Stalinist methods used in Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War." The Old Guard was "rather like Hitler's military SS division"--except for the fact that Napoleon's army liberated Jews, instead of murdering them. He cites all the Englishmen who hated Bonaparte and the few who didn't, like Keats and Shelley, who "fell for the propaganda", like "Shaw for Stalin, Mailer for Castro, and Sartre for Mao"! Bonaparte's "monumental schemes were like those of Mussolini and Speer." Yet Johnson offers not a shred of evidence to support his point that Napoleon was the progenitor of the 20th century's great dictators.

(Johnson goes on at length about Napoleon's looting, never comparing it to other empires' spoils, say, for example, those inside the British Museum, which houses the Rosetta stone, discovered by Napoleon's Egyptian Expedition. )

Johnson makes other broad generalizations, again without any support in the text: "The 19th century was in general a time of peace" or "The Revolution created the modern totalitarian state". His prose borders on purple: "He blew himself into the stratosphere of power from the brazen mouth of his own guns." But for the most part, the book consists largely of unsupported calumnies against Napoleon: "He was not a patriot either" ; "The Italians themselves he despised"; "He was not moved by sentiment ; "His sensibilities were blunt. His compassion was shallow." He had "an inability to delegate", which must have been news to those living in an Empire of 40 million!

To Johnson, Napoleon's wives are portrayed as sexually dissatisfied, his marshals as writhing lackeys, his relations hapless rulers, and Napoleon himself a rapist.

Johnson's enmity stems from his contempt for Bonaparte's militarism. He says that Napoleon "unleashed on Europe the most destructive wars the continent had ever experienced", and, "Bonaparte , having once unsheathed his sword, found it impossible to lay it down for long."

But Johnson never once mentions the contribution to that outcome by England's War Party, which refused to make peace with France after 1800. Bonaparte "emerged from a political background where a man's word meant nothing, honor was dead, and murder was routine," and "William Pitt found ... that [Napoleon's ] word could never be trusted". But nowhere does Johnson mention that it was the British--and Pitt's War Party in particular-- who broke their word in the Treaty of Amiens when they refused to leave Malta after Napoleon had left Taranto. The best Johnson can muster here is "Both Britain and France, mutually suspicious, refused to carry out the terms of the treaty."

These oversights are not for lack of space: Johnson spends three pages on Napoleon's wedding arrangement to Marie-Louise, scarcely a paragraph on the Code Civil. Maybe that's what led him to conclude that cultural displays were "the most successful aspect of Bonaparte's dictatorship." As for the Code itself, "Bonaparte did not create it" and "its apparent novelty was not new."

There are a few bright spots: the last 50 pages give a decent rundown of the Spanish and Russian campaigns, but they can't save this Pocket Book of the Bad, Bad Bonaparte. There are no footnotes, no bibliography, but there is one saving grace--the book is less than 200 pages.

The author's principle assertion is that Bonaparte's life and career served as the model for modern totalitarians such as Hitler and Stalin. The tone of this short book will be troubling to afficionados of Bonaparte, particularly because Paul Johnson is a "one-armed historian": you will never catch him saying, "On the other hand...". Every act, word, and associate of Bonaparte is treated with scorn and contempt by Johnson, who clearly despises his subject (and perhaps also those who still worship the Emperor?).

Now that you have been warned about the author's prejudices, I must say that this is a fun little book that deftly traces the life and career of Bonaparte, from Corsica, to the "whiff of grapeshot," to Egypt, Moscow, and St. Helena. Anyone who enjoys reading history but only vaguely recalls the facts of Bonaparte's life will benefit from reading this slim volume. Johnson writes with marvelous clarity and his arguments are forceful and enthusiastic, if not always convincing.

The terrible thing about this book (about the Penguin Lives series altogether) is the ridiculous overpricing. This is why the book gets only 3 stars from me: [price] for what is essentially a very long magazine article is not worth the money. I don't know why Penguin doesn't issue these little geegaws as paperbacks; I think more people would read them if the price was reduced.

As Johnson himself observes, "Bonaparte has had more books written about him than any other individual, with the sole exception of Jesus Christ."

So why another one?

I think this book is unlikely to be read by hardcore Bonaparte students; it is short, with only a thin bibliographical essay and no footnotes. It never quotes from original sources.

Instead, this is an introduction to Napoleon for the general reader. It's brisk, well-written and easy to read. It draws a very human picture of a flawed man of tremendous consequence, and lays out what some of those consequences have been: the reshaping of European geography, the Code Napoleon and the rise of the totalitarian state.

Johnson simply sees Napoleon as the precursor of the wars and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. To Johnson Napoleon begat Lenin, Stalin, Hitler Mao, Kim Il Sung, Castro, Peron, Saddam Hussein, Ceausescu, and Gadhafi. In fact Johnson evokes Hitleresque and Stalinesque imagery repeatly throughout the book. But Johnson doesn't stop with his references to Nazis and other unsavory types in order to cut Napoleon down to size. In Johnson's view Napoleon was a "cultural racist," a rapist (literally), ignorant, with bourgeois tastes.

Johnson also criticizes Napoleon's military abilities. Napoleon "made little use of observation balloons; he indeed took no notice of airpower, though it was then much discussed. He ignored steam power, though traction engines and the railroad were just over the horizon...One might have said that military rail was made for Bonaparte's geo-strategy of swift transfer of armies. But he preferred merely to improve the old military road system." Of course we are all familiar with the aerial armies, submarine services, rail-based logistical support and steam-powered tank armies of Napoleon's enemies!

The book seems almost to have been written from memory. Mistakes abound--Lucien Bonaparte is repeatedly referred to as the King of Holland, Betsy Balcombe becomes Betsy Briars, the Napoleonic electorate was "smaller than the one that produced the...lower house under the ancien régime," Napoleon's artillery drowned ... Russians by firing "red-hot shot" into frozen ponds, Charles XII was king of Sweden during this period and Wellington's Peninsular army was made up of British troops and "Spanish auxiliaries."

Johnson's writing style also produces strange turns of phrase that imply things that are just not true--the Directory followed the Terror (does Johnson not know of the Thermidorians or is he ignoring them?); Napoleon instituted conscription, the metric system and the secret police (or that the Revolution had instituted the prefectorial corps); or Johnson's comparisons of casualties between the French armies fighting in 1805-1809 and Wellington's Peninsular campaigns (is Johnson aware of the disparity between the sizes of the respective armies?). According to Johnson, Wellington wore is hat "fore and aft" because he, unlike Napoleon, whose hat was worn from "side to side," liked to "raise his hat, out of courtesy and return salutes." Johnson contends it was "British efforts to circumvent Bonaparte's Continental System [that]...eventually drove the United States into war with the British Empire." According to Johnson the three most important men in Napoleon's administration were Talleyrand, Fouche and Vivant Denon!

Johnson proposes in his introduction to examine Napoleon's life "unromantically, skeptically, and searchingly." ... He certainly has removed all the "romance" from Napoleon's career, and he is skeptical. But as a biography "searching" for the real Napoleon, I think it fails. Johnson's characterization of the "bad" Napoleon is as much of a cardboard cutout of the "Man" as the worst hagiographies that Johnson derides. There is a place for an intelligent, modern [popping] of the balloon of Napoleonic myth and legend, but Johnson, like Schom, seems to have merely run wild in the nineteenth century "Napoleon as Ogre" school of historiography. Lacking any fresh insights, with no new ideas, retailing a mixture of hoary nineteenth century myths, the book is superficial at best. The book contains no index, no footnotes, no maps, no illustrations and only a rudimentary note on "Further Reading." Considering the final product, the ... price tag seems high for such a lightweight book.

Paul Johnson's strength is his ability to capture a major historical figure very efficiently. He did it with Churchill. He does it here with Bonaparte.

My prior knowledge of Napoleon was superficial. A number of reviewers would say it still is. Other reviewers would say that my view is now biased by having obtained most of my information from an Englishman

Johnson is NOT a fan. While he gives Bonaparte credit for his military achievements, he is quick to point out that a major reason for those successes was that he had little regard for his casualty rate. The author spends a good bit of time comparing him with Wellington....unfavorably. He goes on to call Napoleon a war criminal and to declare him the predecessor to and role model for Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

Having spent much of my life in Louisiana, my impression of Napoleon was generally favorable--that of a great and heroic general who brought glory to France. Further reflection and the reading of this biography have altered that opinion. I would now conclude that Napoleon was a great tactical general with a unique ability to inspire his soldiers despite considering them expendable. But he was an egomaniac who plundered and terrorized a continent for almost a quarter of a century. Even so, I would not put him on a par with Hitler or Stalin as does the author

As with other Johnson efforts, this book is enjoyable, enlightening and easy to read, even though the author is opinionated and clearly does not like his subject. The narrative rambles in places, and Johnson goes a bit overboard with French phrases and a few too many professorial words. The book could also use a few maps and a timeline or two.

Overall, though, this is a good primer on the life and exploits of Napoleon Bonaparte. I don't know where else one could get so much information in such a small package.

Written by the prolific British historian Paul Johnson, this small volume on Napoleon Bonaparte is part of the excellent new series of "Penguin Lives" which is a series of concise biographies of major historical figures written by distinguished writers. "Napoleon" is not a hagiographical account of the famous French general's life. Johnson is a historian who isn't afraid to make judgments and this account is one, which holds Bonaparte up to moral scrutiny and finds him responsible for the long series of wars that bear his name. The hardships that the continent of Europe had to endure and the loss of millions of lives are laid at the doorstep of "Le Emperor's" tremendous ego. Johnson clearly sees him as an opportunist who took advantage of the power vacuum left after the bloodletting of the French Revolution. Napoleon, like many 20th century dictators recognized that revolutions provided an opportunity for those who were ruthless enough to seize power. Johnson's Napoleon is a charismatic man but one who doesn't truly care for the men who won him glory and bore the brunt of his insatiable lust for power. The author succeeds well at describing the battles and campaigns that made up Napoleon's life and as usual, he is particularly adept at sketching the character of Napoleon's generals and ministers. The constant death and mayhem are enlivened by humorous anecdotes about Napoleon's love life, which was the subject of much ribaldry in the British Army, when they intercepted one of his love letters. Johnson does give credit to a man who, after all, rose from nothing to attain great power. As the Emperor of France, he did institute much needed reforms, some of which are still in place in the France of today, but more than anything, Paul Johnson sees Napoleon as a man who came out of the chaos of revolution to dominate an epoch and become a precussor to the bloody tyrants of the 20th Century - Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Hussien - who each built their cult of personality on the Napoleonic model. Jeffrey Morseburg