Customer Reviews

Napoleon

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Simply put, Vincent Cronin's Napoleon is the best biography of Napoleon I have ever read. As a student of Napoleonic history, I have read many biographies of the great man, but none has struck home like this one. Cronin presents Napoleon as the man he was, not the myth, not the legend, not the "Anti-Christ." Napoleon's fascinating life from birth to death reads like a novel. It is hard to put down.
Unlike other authors, Cronin does not appear to take sides. He presents Napoleon's accomplishments as well as his faults. If you were to chose one biography of Napoleon, this should be the one!

Books about Napoleon seem to fall in two categories : the hate-him biographers, like Paul Johnson, who depict him as a demon who can do no good, or the admirers, like all French authors on Napoleon I have seen, who can say no bad about him.

Cronin's book is also very kind to Napoleon : for instance when he is crowned emperor of France, we are told that Napoleon did not really seek this title, but that it was his friends who thought it would be a splendid idea. I cannot imagine that someone as ambitious as Napoleon would just sit back and wait for his friends to have such a good idea. Furthermore we are told Napoleon's wars were defensive only. Whilst I have sympathy for Cronins argument that all Europe's old regime monarchs ganged up against France, I still think Napoleon was a person who tended to settle differences on the battlefield rather than at the negotiating table.

Still, as long as one bears this bias in mind, this is a highly enjoyable psychological portrait because it succeeds very well in showing how Napoleon changed during his life. For instance, the description of his relationship with his wife Josephine is an eye-opener because it shows Napoleon in such a different light from his battlefield image : he stayed with her for a long time despite knowing she betrayed him repeatedly.

There is relatively little in this book about specific battles, except to demonstrate how creative Napoleon was in military strategy and tactics (for instance you may read more in this book about Napoleon's favourite foods or his daytime routines). The battle at Waterloo merits only 3 pages (Napoleon was less than inspired that day).

This book is not for those interested in military history, but I recommend it for those who want to understand a man who managed to terrorise the established monarchs, czars and emperors of Europe for many years and who left a more lasting legacy than his victors : from his Code Civil, which is still the basis to civil law in a number of European countries, to the tree-lined French routes nationales ( so his troups could march in the shadow). In particular I would recommend it to those who have purchased Paul Johnson's book about Napoleon.

This book paints an incredibly accurate account of Napoleon's life from a close and intimate angle. Whilst it is obvious the author is no Napoleon-hater, he does not make up anecdotes to manipulate the reader (as many Napoleon-haters do in their biographies).

However, this book is no good for people who are interested in the military aspects of Napoleon. This book is more concentrated on the personal side of Napoleon. Although it mentions basic battle plans and overall strategy, that is not the purpose of the book. If you are truly interested in his army, I suggest you read "Napoleon and his Marshalls" and the Greenwood Military volume on The Napoleonic Wars.

Napoleon is reported to have said this, and it is true. In this magnificent biography of the Corsican, Cronin has written the life of Napoleon from the inside: who the man really was. It is not only circunscribed to battles and politics, but especially the intimate life and anecdotes of Napoleon. It changed my vision about this man. The information and research are exhaustive, yet the book reads like a novel. That is the true art of biography.

Napoleon has been one of the most controversial characters in History, and deservedly so. Cronin does not take sides, but he clearly rejects the portrait of Napoleon as an overambitious monster, always trying to get more and more territories for France. Undoubtedly, ambition was the driving force for this man, but we have to consider that he was constantly harassed by other powers who feared that his influence would destroy the old European regimes. Undoubtedly, his coronation as Emperor was a big disappointment to all those who believed he would be the leader of Republicanism. Beethoven, for instance, dedicated his Third Symphony to him, but after the coronation he erased the dedicatory, writing instead: "To the memory of a great man". However, we have to judge historical figures by the standards of their times, not ours.

All in all, this is probably the best biography of Napoleon. At least it is the best among the three or four I have read. It is a shame that it is out of print.

As a student in a Louisiana Catholic school, Napoleon came across my desk in school twice: first as the man who sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States (a dogmatic point to history teachers and students alike), and as the great general-cum-outlaw who stormed across the face of European history. In spite of its well-known French heritage, the Louisiana state government provided a textbook which went out of its way to state that the reason Napoleon sold the territory to the United States way to finance "his" wars in Europe. True as that fact may be, Napoleon still came across as a just another warrior. No mention was made, for example, of the Civil Law he played so important a role to create. A legal code which governs Louisiana to this day; a situation unique in the 50 United States. Mr. Cronin's fine biography goes out of its way to avoid the well-trodden territory most people know already about Napoleon. Details of his great battles are kept to a minimum, and no mention is made about the sale of Louisiana. Rather, Cronin devotes his biography to how a Corsican-born outsider (who grew up speaking Italian) made his way through the fluid, chaotic, and dangerous environment of post-revolutionary France. Through his excellent handling of ever-greater shares of the responsibility of defending the newborn Republic against a pan-European monarchism, eager to reestablish the old Bourbon dynasty and social order, Napoleon finds a political stage which brings form and establishment to the ideals of the French Revolution. Cronin argues how Napoleon, from his leadership of the post-Directorate Triumverate to being Emperor, established the new educational, eccelsial, military, and legal foundations which have given permanence to French Republican ideals both in France and elsewhere in Europe and the world that fell under that nation's political and military influence. Though Cronin is sympathetic to his subject, he does point out his failings and mistakes as both a soldier and a ruler. In the end, however, one finds a persuasive argument for a historical figure who accomplished great things, but was forced into situations (such as becoming Emperor) and ultimately brought down by the anti-Republican (later personified into an hysterical anti-Napoleon complex) which dominated European politics. A prejudice which refused Napoleon and France the peace both so desperately desired. This life is not an abstract historical exercise. Cronin's Napoleon is an enfleshed person. Using the benefit of hindsight into his childhood in Corsica, and seeing how he related with his intimate family and friends, one understands the how the personality of Napoleon developed, and why that personality helped give rise to the decisions he made. Cronin illustrates the curious balance between analytical prowess, and a passion for people and for country that gave a concrete form and permanence to a Revolution whose ideals are today practiced in even the most surprising of places. Where, dear reader, do you ask? Buy this book!

I got this book at a second hand stall in Thailand, because there was nothing better there (all romances etc.) and I was unable to put it down! It's fascinating, and the characters are so vibrant and real that you can almost smell them. There is a lot of talk in the introduction about how Napolean is treated as a villain in England, and how this book runs counter to that. I have never been exposed to that bias, so it didn't affect me. What was interesting, though, was how Napolean's early success set him up for his later, spectacular defeats. The book covers the events from Napolean's birth to his death, and even if you end up not entirely in sympathy with his actions during his life, you still can maintain sympathy for him as a person, and for France at that crazy time in its history. The best thing about this book, though, is its readability. You can swap it for some popular adventure/romance/light reading novel, and actually learn something without your brain hurting at all.

Having been raised under a British-biased educational system, I can confirm the many prejudices we are prey to on the subject of Napoleon. (Insidiously, these are actually not so much taught as absorbed during childhood through popular myth, fable, hearsay and caricature.). Nonetheless, emboldened by the reputation of the author, whose books on the Italian renaissance were the best I had ever read, I decided to give old "Nap" a second chance and a careful hearing.Was I impressed? Put it this way: the following week I drove 1,000 miles to Paris to pay my belated respects and express my admiration at his tomb in the Invalides.Excellent, absorbing reading.

After years of reading one-sided anti-Napoleonic tracts masquerading as respectable biographies it was a pleasure to finally come across a balanced view of a man, who for better or worse, epitomized the age of the French Revolution (1789-1815). It was very gratifying to hear the author Vincent Cronin state that he was attempting to find the real man behind the legend, that he was not content intellectually with either the myths created by uncritical admirers who saw no fault in Napoleon or those, on the opposite end of the spectrum, who considered him to be nothing less than the devil's incarnate.
Napoleon was an intensely complex figure with numerous and inherent contradictions, but he was far, quite far one would add, from anything approaching the vile characterizations made by detractors during his lifetime and ever since 1815. The fact that the great Georges Lefebvre admired Napoleon, to a certain degree, shows that Napoleon possessed qualities and ideas that set him beyond characterization as a mere military man. Indeed, Vincent Cronin illustrates how even as a newly-minted second lieutenant in the French Army the young Napoleon had been concerned more with social issues and the possibilities of reform than with pursuing military matters. He embraced the Revolution as it unfolded in 1789, as the surest way of leading to an enlightened society and government. It goes without saying, if it was not for the Revolution, professional careers would have remained closed to all but the extremely well-off and the aristocracy. In the realm of professional soldiering, officers of the caliber of Hoche, Joubert, Jourdan, Lannes, Carnot (the "Organizer of Victory") and Napoleon (it should be kept in mind that his background in the Corsican nobility would have had its limitations in Royalist France as well) himself, who were mostly members of the middle or lower-middle classes would have advanced no further than the rank of captain or major in a royalist army no matter what their capabilities. Napoleon's moment in the Revolution came when he played a pivotal role in the defeat of the combined counter-revolutionary and royalist forces at Toulon in December 1793. It should also not be forgotten that he was the protégé of Augustin Robespierre, the younger brother of the great Jacobin, and who had described Napoleon as an officer of "transcendent merit." Napoleon was lucky to escape the bloodlust of the Thermidorians and their White Terror. As one of the few valuable and available military specialists not to have emigrated, he was given the responsibility for the defense of the National Convention against royalist forces in the journée of 13 Vendémiaire. While Napoleon accepted the Directory Government of France, he could not have been pleased by their increasingly undemocratic tendencies, manned as it was by mainly compromised revolutionaries tainted by Thermidor. Historians of course now have concrete evidence that Paul Barras and other Thermidorians were maneuvering to restore Louis XVIII after receiving pay-offs and pardons, and in the case of Barras the price was the tidy sum of twelve million francs. The events of 18 Brumaire of the Year VIII prevented that particular scheme.
It was thus that the Revolution was effectively ended and its gains secured for the middle-classes and for the landed peasantry. While Napoleon's centrist government tried to balance itself against both the left and the right, it was essentially a thankless job. On the one hand, the left had been grievously wounded, it would not recover until well into the 1820s as a cohesive force of any sort. The remnants, especially of the Jacobin tradition, remained unmoved by the new direction. The right on the other hand, recovered within France, and grew in strength outside Revolutionary France in the hostile reactionary courts of Europe and in Imperialist Britain. As Vincent Cronin put it succinctly, they made no distinctions between the National Convention, Sans-culottism, or the centrist rule of Napoleon. They would not rest until a Bourbon had been restored to the throne of France and the "natural order of things" imposed once again. It is also for this reason that Jacobins & others republicans did not wholly reject the coup of 1799. They were of course bitterly disappointed when Napoleon took on more powers himself (an interesting "what-might-have-been" situation to consider is what Louis Lazare Hoche, the committed Republican general whose popularity was on par with Napoleon's fame, would have made of the events of 18 Brumaire) and eased out from positions of influence and power most staunch and uncompromising Republicans who saw the establishment of the First Empire as a betrayal of the Revolution. Sadly, in the long run, this was not one of Napoleon's constructive acts because removing committed defenders of the Revolution could only weaken its defense from the Counter-Revolution. There is no denying that Napoleon did in fact institute many conservative laws, particularly in the social arena for example, which can be considered nothing less than 'anti-feminist' in modern parlance. These conservative laws stood side-by-side with the more enlightened progressive ideas of the Code Napoleon. Another conservative aspect of Napoleon's rule, indeed a glaring 'anti-revolutionary' action, was the brutal suppression of the Haitian struggle for liberation (this biography does not delve into this issue). This act is an example of the contradictions that Napoleon represented and it is one of those issues that certainly did not enhance his reputation.
Whatever else that can be said about Napoleon, he embodied, whether even if he liked it or not, the ideas of the French Revolution, and even for the sake of argument if he had wanted to reject those he could only do so at his own peril. Yet he also knew surely, that the energy and zeal of the French nation and its armies were driven by the ideals of the Revolution, and it was the revolutionized French army that was the mainstay of both the Consulate and the First Empire. Of course the whole idea for ending the Revolution was to rebuild France, something that the reactionary powers of Europe led by Britain would simply not allow. The discussion of the road to war in 1803 is quite insightful, the responsibility of the breach of the Treaty of Amiens lay with the British, not with Napoleon or the Consulate. As it was, given the covetous, brutal and blatant British empire-building in places such as South Asia (in fact, the defeat of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay discussed in the book meant that Napoleon was unable to assist Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the princely state of Mysore, who had waged a lonely but inspired struggled against the naked aggression of racist British imperialism for twenty years in southern India), not to mention the British imperialist crimes, depredations & brutalities against Ireland during the same period, the British were hardly in a position to make moral judgments about French Consular foreign policy, whatever its virtues or demerits. This is significant when one considers that the Wars of the Coalition continued unabated from 1803 until 1815. The author is also quite blunt in discussing the failings of Napoleon; the controversial execution of the Duke of Enghien as perhaps the most damaging political action. In personal terms, the author argues that Napoleon simply failed to understand the motivations of the various individuals he chose to bestow with his trust, from Talleyrand to Murat. For example, the insidious snake-in-the grass Talleyrand, as someone once famously termed him, goaded Napoleon into committing serious political errors, the Enghien Affair for one, that later proved costly. There were other failings, too much centralized power which was to be the critical weakness in his personalized rule, the lack of a General Staff or its equivalent to share the burdens of fighting against the coalitions. One perceptive observation of the author was that Napoleon was also to a great extent governed by circumstances; for example, while emigration gave Revolutionary France a new generation of innovative military leaders, the same could not be said about its impact on the French navy. While there had been a few notable successes, especially during the Year II under the supervision of Jean Bon Saint-André when a crucial grain fleet from the Americas reached the ports of the First Republic after an indecisive but bitter clash with the marauding British naval fleets, after Thermidor however Revolutionary France's naval record dipped again (in fact, arguably the greatest naval failure of the Directoire government of Revolutionary France was its inability to properly support the Rising of 1798 by Irish patriots, led by amongst others, the brilliant, charismatic & completely selfless United Irishmen leader Theobald Wolfe Tone, who were fighting to oust the criminal & illegal occupation of their homeland by Britain). Despite intensified funding for all aspects of naval operations during the Consulate, Napoleon was unable to rebuild the navy before the shattering defeat of the Combined Fleet came to pass at Trafalgar. This battle indeed played, as Cronin observes, its part in forcing Napoleon to deal with the Russians to prevent the break-up of the Continental System.
The catastrophe of the Russian Campaign is gruesome at times in its detail, and the inability of the French to play the political angle before the invasion insured that the message of the Revolution would fall on deaf ears as far as the oppressed subjects of the Tsarist regime were concerned.
As long as the revolutionary armies of Napoleon, particularly the veterans of the Italian & Egyptian Campaigns were in the field the coalition had been helpless (or in a state of stalemate) but once those armies and veterans disappeared in the vast snowy landscapes of Russia, France was once again on the defensive and as vulnerable as she had been in 1792.
Despite all odds, Napoleon made a final return after Elba, the famous "100 Days" or to be precise, the "136 Days." The gravity of the situation can be illustrated by the fact that all Jacobins and other republicans, who had rejected Napoleon until then, rallied around the returned emperor because a restoration would see the oblivion of everything for which the Revolution had been fought. In that, in the long run (barring the era of the Restoration, 1815-1823) they could have put aside their worries, the French Revolution had changed the world and nothing could reverse that however the reactionaries & conservatives might try. The ideals of the Revolution, of the rights of the citizen, democratic rule, secularism, egalitarianism amongst others were there to stay. And Napoleon was himself inextricably linked to all that, and represented them even if he did not necessarily abide by all of them. It is this Napoleon which Vincent Cronin has etched out superbly. This biography certainly leaves one exhausted at its end, truly, an epic about the "passionate drama" of a man who defined an age of possibility, exemplified by his own rise from a humble second-lieutenant to Emperor of the French First Empire, through the French Revolution. Ultimately, one's view of Napoleon depends on one's view of the French Revolution, and this excellent work by Vincent Cronin gives a balanced (an excellent and extremely useful bibliographical essay also details which memoirs, especially of those who "turned" against Napoleon after 1815 to ingratiate themselves with the Restoration, should be avoided in seeking an even-handed account of the events of 1789-1815) & sympathetic insight into Napoleon the man.

If someone asks me for a good place to start if they want to learn about Napoleon, I always recommend the Cronin biography. It offers an extremely flattering portrait of the emperor-perhaps too flattering. However, one does manage to see Napoleon as a brilliant man, and not just a demi-god. Cronin says in the introduction that he wanted to portray Napoleon as something other than as "a monster" . In this he succeeds.

There are times, however, in which Cronin defers too much to Napoleon. For example, in the episode at Jaffa, where Bonaparte orders the prisoners executed, Cronin writes that it "was the only thing he could do". That is not really true. Certainly a case can be made for ordering the executions, but it was not necessarily the "only" choice Bonaparte had. Also, he often takes Napoleon's own later statements (dictated in exile on St. Helena) at face value.

The book is odd in that, after a certain point, it ceases to be a chronological biography. I wonder if Cronin shortened his book for publication, or simply lost interest. Through the Brumaire coup and the establishment of the consulate, the book is in chronological order. After that, it sort of jumps around, so you are not informed of everything that was happening in Napoleon's life. It stops the narrative to describe a typical day in Napoleon's life. One chapter describes "The Empire Style". After these diversions, when it gets back on track, one finds that it has skipped some major campaigns, and the next thing you know, Napoleon is leading the army into Russia.

I still highly recommend the book as a starting point. After I read it, the next book I tackled was "The Campaigns of Napoleon" by David Chandler. I suppose you can say Cronin wisely left the details of Napoleon's military campaigns to others while concentrating on a look at Napoleon the man. The version of Cronin's bio that I first read was called Napoleon Bonaparte: An Intimate Biography" (some editions are merely called "Napoleon"). Cronin gives us more intimate personal details than many biographers, so his book should be regarded more as a personality profile than an exact account of Napoleon's entire career.

Over the years Napoleon's name has been blackened by many apocryphal writers of biography. They have tried to paint Napoleon as the 'Corsican Orge' , their favourite term for the Frenchman. Just as Tudor historians tarnished Richard III so was Napoleon's image destroyed by pro-Bourbon writers , who were essentially pro-British. Vincent Cronin has most effectively countered those accusations against the French Emperor. He has revealed a man with a great depth of feeling and knowledge, a man who was tragically governed by circumstances all his life and thus had to take certain actions which have been construed by pro British writers as being imperialistic. Cronin doesn't mince his words about the Napoleon versus Britain issue. He methodically and analytically shows that it was the British who broke the Treaty of Amiens in 1803 by seizing French merchantmen. He explains quite correctly that the British were not doing it for any humane reasons but because they simply feared Napoleon's France as being a shining example to all those who wanted to leave the 'old order' behind. More so the British feared that a powerful France would be a source of help and inspiration to those who were trying to overthrow the British occupation of their homelands. Namely , Wolf Tone of Ireland in 1798 and Tipu Sultan of Mysore(in India) in 1799 tried to get French aid to defeat the imperialistic British who didn't want a strong France to interfere in their bid for world conquest. After Napoleon's defeat the British then tried to put the image of the world conqueror on Napoleon! All of this and more Cronin clarifies in his brilliantly written work. He even points out memoirs which were written principally to win favour with Bourbons between 1815 and 1830. All in all, this book is very objective and presents revolutionary France as she really was and not the way British tried to portray her. Vincent Cronin has painted a man who was more familiar with pens, letters and laws then with guns ,artillery and cavalry. His Civil Code has survived to this day .His laws have effected Civil Codes as far as South America. It is my opinion that this is 'the definitive' biography of Napoleon. A must for all Revolutionary France readers and historians.