The little corporal.

AuthorSmith, Jordan Michael
PositionNapoleon: A Concise Biography, Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny - Book review

David A. Bell, Napoleon: A Concise Biography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 152 pp., $18.95.

Michael Broers, Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny (New York: Pegasus, 2015), 608 pp., $35.00.

The most famous statement from Richard Nixon's opening to China in the early 1970s emerged from an interaction between Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger. The historically minded Secretary of State asked Zhou for his views on the French Revolution. "It's too early to tell," replied Zhou. The answer was taken as evidence of Chinese leaders' supposed ability to take a long-term perspective on political events and is regularly generalized to serve as a warning against swift interpretations of historical occurrences.

In fact, the diplomat who served as the interpreter for the meeting, Charles Freeman, has revealed that Zhou thought Kissinger was talking about the 1968 French uprisings, which occurred just a few years before their discussion, not the events in 1789. "I cannot explain the confusion about Zhou's comment except in terms of the extent to which it conveniently bolstered a stereotype (as usual with all stereotypes, partly perceptive) about Chinese statesmen as far-sighted individuals who think in longer terms than their Western counterparts," Freeman said.

But Zhou's remarks could only be mistaken because he was thought to be speaking about the French Revolution generally. If, instead, it had been reported that he was asked his thoughts on Napoleon Bonaparte and responded with such an ambiguous perspective, few would believe it. Nobody lacks a firm opinion on the man who his soldiers affectionately nicknamed "the little corporal." The subtitle of one of the most respected books on Napoleon, written by the Dutch scholar Pieter Geyl and translated into English in 1949, is For And Against--Geyl surveyed a century and a half of opinion on Bonaparte and showed that historians usually lined up like lawyers, either prosecuting or defending the French general-turned-leader. Neutrality and ambivalence were unpopular paths. "Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they mostly fell, all too simplistically, into two camps: supporters and opponents," writes the Princeton historian David A. Bell in his new book, Napoleon: A Concise Biography. "Despite uncovering great masses of source material, most of the historical works generally spent too much time refighting old battles to provide much genuine illumination." Those works are astonishingly numerous: it has been said that no other human being has had more books written about him or her, except for Jesus Christ--more than 220,000 books and articles as of 1980 alone. Historian Charles Esdaile has claimed that Napoleon is second only to Christ in appearances in cinema, as well, a testament to his popularity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Fortunately, the Manichaeanism that characterized so much post-1815 writing about Napoleon is absent both from Bell's short book and from Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny, the first installment in a two-part biography by the English historian Michael Broers. Both works are highly nuanced, showcasing the monstrosities that Napoleon inflicted on Europe but also highlighting the lasting positive impacts the French leader left on the continent he almost single-handedly ruled for a brief but spectacular period.

Both also persuasively rebut claims that he was a proto-totalitarian, the precursor to Mussolini and Hitler. "No dictator of the twentieth century," wrote historian Paul Johnson, "was without distinctive echoes of the Napoleonic prototype." If that was so, it was primarily because Napoleon's rule was, along with the French Revolution that he simultaneously ended and consummated, the marker of the modern age. "Circumstance rendered Napoleon rather more than the traditional Caesar," as R.S. Alexander put it. L'Empereur was no Fuhrer. That much can be said for him. And, of course, so can much else, for and against.

The French Revolution is routinely fingered as the birth of the Modern Age as far as politics as concerned. As much as time can possibly be sliced into befores and afters, the French Revolution qualifies more than any other event as the knife that did the slicing. The number of developments attributed to it is staggering. Nationalism, arguably the most powerful political force in the world, has been dated...

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