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Napoleon (Reputations)

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More than a quarter of million books have already been written about Napoleon, yet authors and historians continue to interpret his life-often in contradictory terms. Was Napoleon a devil or a god, a charlatan or a visionary, a superman or a madman? Contemporary events color the view of the past so that during the Restoration Napoleon was "the Revolution Crowned," in the middle of the nineteenth century he was his nephew, in the 1940s Napoleon was Hitler and in the 1950s he was Stalin. After the slaughter of WWI Napoleon's military reputation suffered.

Peter Geyl has called Napoleon "the debate without end." Napoleon's own complexities, contradictions and ambiguities have made that endless debate possible. As in a Rorschach test writers often see what they want in the protean and evolving examination of his reputation; sometimes it seems reflecting as much of themselves as of Napoleon in their view of him. "Seeing something positive in Napoleon's legacy," Alexander writes, "was not simply a matter of expediency; it was also a product of the way in which altering circumstance could place Napoleon in a different light."

Alexander turns his eye to perennial questions such as whether Napoleon was the heir or the betrayer of the Revolution, or the precursor to modern dictators. By the twentieth century Napoleon had lost his Jacobin side and had come to be associated with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. Real or perceived threats of European hegemony by Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin evoke in the popular mind the wars against Napoleon. Comparisons were often based on superficial similarities of circumstances or personal characteristics and often served a propaganda purpose. The "Black Legend" of Napoleon, created during his life and after his fall, is also discussed. Napoleon was rejected by elements of the Right-Catholic, Royalist, etc., as well as by the Left-anarchist, socialist, etc., and embraced by others across the political spectrum. By World War I, Napoleon had already taken on the chameleon colors of being all things to all people.

Alexander's Napoleon (Reputations) can be viewed as a series of essays on different themes surrounding Napoleon's enduring reputation. The main weakness of this approach is that the individual essays do not always work to form a coherent whole. The lack of conclusions or even a clearly expressed specific point of view tends to give equal weight to competing visions of Napoleon, adding the ambiguity. Some chapters are more successful than others, with that on Popular Bonapartism standing out. Other chapters become more of a catalog of differing opinions, which don't come together into a cohesive whole-such as that on Napoleon in twentieth-century historiography. This might be a function of space, as it is likely the publishers wanted to keep the book to a compact size. A chronology of the events and works discussed in the book and an extensive bibliography of books on Napoleon and his legacy are included. Napoleon (Reputations) includes a detailed index.