Name: Napoleon
ISBN: 9780300137545

Philip G. Dwyer

An in-depth biography of a young Napoleon Bonaparte describes the evolution of Napoleon as a leader, debunks many myths that are often repeated about him, and sheds new light on his inner life to reveal a ruthless, manipulative, driven man.

The Path to Power

Napoleon

Gavin

How did a "haggard and ghastly" foreigner from a poor-noble family end up ruling two-thirds of Europe, getting one in every 200 people in the world killed (his namesake wars were the same size, though not the same shape, as the Holocaust), becoming one of the most successful generals in history? 
 
Dwyer's answer is via various sorts of creativity: nepotism, plagiarism, disloyalty, false advertising, ignoring orders (and then going AWOL to avoid reprisal), and but also actual military acumen.

This is true but the broader answer is: with the help of all the revolutionaries whose violence he used. The Corsican freedom fighters, the mob, the fucked-up Jacobins, and the Thermidorians each broke France, creating a ladder of corpses for people like Boney. (This feat is repeated by psychos in most revolutions.) He made general at 26 through an unearned political appointment, and was given absolute command of 63,000 men soon after. 

Dwyer is out to get Napoleon: he sees propaganda everywhere (even in Boney's private diary, aged 18). The whole book is obsessed with the Construction of Napoleon - for instance, did you know that when he won a battle, he told people about it expecting praise? This sentence, or its proposition, is repeated more than a hundred times:

  
 This encounter [with a prostitute] is taken by most historians at face value, but it is entirely possible that the account is fictional, nothing more than a fanciful exercise of the pen.


 Of course it's possible, but so what? What is its probability? (I continue to read nonfiction which isn't data-driven - more fool me, I suppose.) It's weird to feel annoyed by the hypercritical spirit; I'm usually on the other side of this fence. 

Dwyer is at least jargon-free. And Napoleon certainly lies all the time - to his rivals, his friends, and to posterity. An odd case: both genius and fraud - a genius of dishonesty. (Like Edison?)

Much of this long book is just a prose list of events, many of them insignificant (not to say prurient). There is basically no military detail - most of the major battles get half a page. Fine as reference work maybe.

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Misc: 

* I knew that standing armies of the day were rammed full of pillagers, rapists, and thieves, but I was surprised to find that their generals were little better - Napoleon extracted about 80 million francs (maybe half a billion dollars?) from the Italians he conquered, under the name "requisitions". 
(This is many times the tax rate of the previous Austrian occupiers.)

* The many portraits of N are comically dissimilar - simply because done by artists who had never seen him or any image of him. 

* His romantic insecurity is also surprising: he writes to Josephine much more than she replies, and is constantly crestfallen to find her gone without saying where.

* "Jacobin" is a terrible choice of name for a social justice magazine. It's more like "Khmer Rouge Weekly" or "the Daily Witchfinder" than anything laudable: ~40,000 executed or left to rot and a hundred thousand in the Vendée, mostly religious peasants, as well as atrocities like mass slow drownings). The Jacobins deserve some share of Napoleon's millions of dead too - for all that N was only pretending to be a Jacobin. 

Of course, the revolution nominally ended feudalism, redistributed land, and claimed to establish human rights. But we know in hindsight that this could have been done without killing 1% of the country and 0.6% of everyone alive - for instance, it was in Britain, and it was by earlier and later French republicans. So you got some nicer rhetoric in exchange for millions of gallons of blood. 

It suits me to call the Jacobins a perversion of the Enlightenment. This has lately been characterised as a trick - if it's wrong for Jacobin to cherry-pick the bits they like about the Jacobins (anger, radicalisation, protest marches, beautiful lip-service to egalitarianism) then it's wrong for me to say they're not really part of 'the Enlightenment'. But it is a sick joke of history that Montesquieu's rage at torture, Condorcet's rational politics, and Bentham's impressive moral generosity must share a name with these torturing and bigoted totalitarians.

But why is Jacobin called Jacobin? 

  
In the United States, most people do not associate the term with a particular political group. It sounds vaguely radical... I had heard the word as a child: my parents... had copies of CLR James' Black Jacobins at home. In reality, it was not more thoughtful or premeditated than that! For the artistic director Remeike Forbes who was born in Jamaica, the term refers to the same book... "Bolshevik" would not be bad as a title in fact! Why not, one day...



: just idiocy, not malice.

Napoleon The Path to Power

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