He watched with a dispassionate eye the chaotic storming of the Tuileries, when the masses launched an uprising against the assembly, pushing the revolutionary government even further to the left. He first witnessed great historical events in Paris in 1792, when he was still a young captain of artillery. He never really lost the sense, however, that he was a foreigner. As a young man, Napoleon went to France for his military education. It begins with his birth in 1769 in the obscure town of Ajaccio in Corsica, a year after Louis XV had bought the island from the Genoese authorities. Roberts is also not a man to stay in his study – he has walked 53 of Napoleon’s battlefields, experiences that have made descriptions of battle as lively, fresh and vivid as any you can find in the canon.īy any standards, the story of Napoleon is remarkably rich stuff for a biographer. Roberts does the same thing as Cronin but is generally less prone to hero-worship and has the advantage of being able to marshal the resources of the Fondation Napoléon in Paris, which since 2004 has been editing and archiving 33,000 of Napoleon’s extant letters, a third of which have never been published. There is a precedent in Vincent Cronin’s 1971 biography, Napoleon: An Intimate Biography, in which Cronin says that he goes in search of the “living, breathing human being”. Roberts is not the first Anglo-Saxon to admire Napoleon in prose. But we are not long into the book when his position becomes clear – he comes not to bury Bonaparte but to praise him, chiefly for his achievements as a soldier, but also for the fundamental changes he made in France to make it the modern state that it is today. Was he, as his detractors claim, a megalomaniac dictator – the precursor of such 20th-century monsters as Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini? Or was he a statesman, lawgiver and great warrior who, on the Roman model that Napoleon so admired, like Caesar and Augustus, brought order where there was none?Īndrew Roberts begins his entertaining and deeply forensic examination of Napoleon by teasing us, somewhat coyly, about where he is going to go with these arguments.
The recent return to the fray of Nicolas Sarkozy, whose diminutive stature matches that of the pocket-size emperor, is only the latest manifestation of this phenomenon.įor most of his biographers, however, French or otherwise, Napoleon Bonaparte remains a puzzle. This is an almost superstitious belief that every now and then a populist and charismatic figure will come to save France from chaos.
Most significantly, Napoleon still haunts French political life in the form of the cult of bonapartisme.
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