Napoleon

Napoleon: A Life- Adam Zamoyski
Basic Books/ Hachette
Release Date: October 16, 2018

Rating:
📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: "What a novel my life has been!" Napoleon once said of himself. Born into a poor family, the callow young man was, by twenty-six, an army general. Seduced by an older woman, his marriage transformed him into a galvanizing military commander. The Pope crowned him as Emperor of the French when he was only thirty-five. Within a few years, he became the effective master of Europe, his power unparalleled in modern history. His downfall was no less dramatic.

____________________________________________________________

Napoleon Bonaparte is one of those larger than life figures who becomes a myth, a hero, and a villain, and in the process the true human being often disappears.  In Napoleon: A Life Adam Zamoyski works to discover the man behind the legend.  Zamoyski works to place Napoleon in the context of his time period, both politically and philosophically. He works to explain the occasionally unexplainable mindset of the French Revolution and French Republic so that readers can understand how ready France was to accept someone like Napoleon as their leader.  

Zamoskyi warns readers in his introduction that he examines the military aspects of Napoleon's life only as he feels they effected his political and personal situation.  This leads to an uneven study of the military aspect of Napoleon, heavily emphasized in the beginning and much less so by the 1812 campaigns in Russia.  Waterloo receives barely a page and a half.  But since these are well researched and frequently written about in other books, I think the unevenness worked in the book's favor.  More is certainly known about those times than about Napoleon's family, his work on restoring France, or his behavior to enemies and colleagues.  

Here we discover Napoleon's formative years on Corsica and his work to define his life on his own terms.  Corsican traditions emphasized family above all and Napoleon followed this throughout his life- while his brothers and sisters only considered family when it benefitted them directly.  Napoleon was a man who grew up despising the idea of love, only to fall head over heels in love with Josephine- who I also learned far more about in this book than I had ever known before!  He was not a man who was comfortable delegating authority, which became a serious problem when he was on campaign and trying to run an empire. Even when he wanted peace, he felt his only true claim to the throne of France was as a general. 

A well-written and well researched book, Zampyshki's Napoleon delves behind the myths to get as close to the man as possible.  Neither a saint nor a demon, Napoleon is instead presented as a man with both genius and faults, who retained until the end of his life an incredible charisma that caused men to devote their lives to his star, even when it seemed hopeless.  Which is perhaps a large part of why he is still so fascinating today.

An excellent biography for those interested in learning more about French history and the Napoleonic Wars, as well as the self-made man behind the legend.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review