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From New York Times bestselling author Paul Johnson, “a very readable and entertaining biography” (The Washington Post) about one of the most important figures in modern European history: Napoleon Bonaparte
In an ideal pairing of author and subject, the magisterial historian Paul Johnson offers a vivid look at the life of the strategist, general, and dictator who conquered much of Europe. Following Napoleon from the barren island of Corsica to his early training in Paris, from his meteoric victories and military dictatorship to his exile and death, Johnson examines the origins of his ferocious ambition. In Napoleon's quest for power, Johnson sees a realist unfettered by patriotism or ideology. And he recognizes Bonaparte’s violent legacy in the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Napoleon is a magnificent work that bears witness to one individual's ability to work his will on history.
- Sales Rank: #425356 in eBooks
- Published on: 2006-05-02
- Released on: 2006-05-02
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
The career of a different kind of celebrity hound is examined in historian Paul Johnson's Napoleon. Johnson (A History of the American People) contends that Bonaparte sowed the seeds of the devastating warfare and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Stressing that the Corsican general was motivated by opportunism alone, Johnson traces his rise to power and expansionist bids, arguing that the most important legacies of his rule were the eclipse of France as the leading European power and the introduction of such enduring institutions as the secret police and government propaganda operations. ( on sale May 13)
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this newest addition to the "Penguin Life" series, Johnson (The Birth of the Modern) produces an "unromantic," "skeptical," and "searching" study of a person who exercised power "only for a decade and a half" but whose "impact on the future lasted until nearly the end of the twentieth century." Characterizing Bonaparte primarily as an opportunist "trained by his own ambitions and experiences to take the fullest advantage of the power the Revolution had created," Johnson suggests that, by 1813, the emperor "did not understand that all had changed ... and events were about to deposit him ... on history's smoldering rubbish dump." Why another biography of Napoleon now? Johnson's answer is that the great evils of "Bonapartism" "the deification of force and war, the all-powerful centralized state, the use of cultural propaganda..., the marshaling of entire peoples in the pursuit of personal and ideological power came to hateful maturity only in the twentieth century." Thus, Napoleon's is a grandly cautionary life. Readers might wish to counterbalance Johnson's deliberately sparse outline of Bonaparte's amazing career by examining James M. Thompson's Napoleon Bonaparte: His Rise and Fall. But Johnson's antiromantic treatment brings into sharp focus the ills he identifies with "Bonapartism," and that focus certainly justifies this new look at the much-studied old general. Recommended for larger public libraries. Robert C. Jones, Warrensburg, MO
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Reviewed with Frank McLynn's Napoleon.
Two new books, each one different in scope and audience, profile the French emperor who gave his name to an era.
A prolific and popular historian, Johnson provides an excellent overview. In what amounts to an extended essay, this volume in the Penguin Lives series presents a concise appraisal of Napoleon's career and a precise understanding of his enigmatic character. The author views Napoleon, not as an "idea man" whose ideology was the ladder by which he propelled himself to heights of power, but as an opportunist who took advantage of a series of events and situations he could manipulate into achieving supreme control. From the island of Corsica, which only recently had come under French rule, Napoleon saw France's raw, revolutionary condition as the perfect playing field for an "ambitious, politically conscious, and energetic soldier" such as himself. But, in the long run, he failed as a politician, which eventually caused his failure as a general as well.
If Johnson's book is an outstanding introduction, McLynn's study is for readers wanting a more in-depth analysis. At more than 700 pages, this journey through Napoleon's life, with its emphasis on detail, whether about military maneuvers or Napoleon's quasineuroses, certainly demands an investment in terms of time and undivided attention. Written with great stylistic flourish, McLynn's full embrace of his subject's life, which benefits from exhaustive research resulting in a comprehensive picture of the Napoleonic era, is a rich reading experience.
These two biographies are not mutually exclusive. They can comfortably sit side by side on the shelf, each one filling a different need. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
but best to read a more formal full biography of Napoleon ...
By RB Colorado
Alright, one of Johnson's shorties. His assessment, whick is worthwhile, but best to read a more formal full biography of Napoleon before reading this.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Great book!
By Dan
The author, Paul Johnson, really develops the character of Napoleon. He doesn't shy away from criticism, critique or honest assessment.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Some good points, but cannot recommend
By Chris
My feelings toward this book are somewhat mixed. I'll start with the bad news. The book has two main flaws in my view.
The first is a lack of chronological order in the discussion of Bonaparte's life. At a mere 190 pages, the work is ostensibly meant to be an introductory text, but the quasi-chronological thematic approach Johnson uses necessarily presupposes that the reader already knows the basic timeline of Napoleon's life. Johnson tends to hop back and forth willy-nilly to and from various events throughout the duration of Napoleon's life in any given chapter. This was not a huge problem for me personally, in that I've read enough books and watched enough documentaries about the wars themselves that I had a decent sense of the timeline to begin with. But I suspect I'm not the target audience, and that the text is intended for people with no knowledge of the Emperor's life. For them this may be problematic.
The second flaw is a decidedly, and I think unfair, anti-Napoleon bias that pervades the entire text, admittedly more in some places than in others. This anti-Bonaparte slant frequently takes the form of a comparison to modern evil dictators such Hitler or Stalin. For example, in one long but particularly egregious example, Johnson writes on the Revolutionary program "to roll up the old map of Europe and transform it on principles formed by its ideology":
"This program could not have been successfully carried out without Bonaparte - that is certain. But equally certain is that Bonaparte would not have possessed the ruthless disregard of human life, of natural and man-made law, of custom and good faith needed to carry it through without the positive example and teaching of the Revolution. The Revolution was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism, and Bonaparte was its ideal pupil. Moreover, the Revolution left behind itself a huge engine: administrative and legal machinery to repress the individual such as the monarchs of the ancien régime never dreamed of; a centralized power to organize national resources that no previous state had ever possessed; an absolute concentration of authority, first in a parliament, then in a committee, finally in a single tyrant, that had never been known before; and a universal teaching that such concentration expressed the general will of a united people, as laid down in due constitutional form, approved by referendum. In effect, then, the Revolution created the modern totalitarian state, in all of its essentials . . . more than a century before it came to its full and horrible fruition in the twentieth century. . . . In this awesome transformation, Bonaparte was the Demogorgon, the infernal executive, superbly molded by nature and trained by his own ambitions and experiences to take the fullest advantage of the power the Revolution had created and bequeathed to him." (29-30)
But Johnson's equation of Bonaparte with modern dictators does not hold. For example, the statement that the Revolution "was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism" is not quite accurate. The Revolution's evil resided precisely in its idealism, which was pushed to an extreme beyond all reason. And the evil of the Revolution manifested itself in the mass purging of French society through the attempted imprisonment and execution of an entire social class. However, Bonaparte's stabilization of French society is what definitively put an end to any possibility of further purging and internal violence. Additionally, Napoleon never committed any form of genocide or purge himself (which Johnson himself admits on page 114).
Herein lies the problem of Johnson's qualification of Napoleon as the world's first modern totalitarian dictator. Such dictators in the modern world (using Hitler and Stalin as prime examples) have certain common characteristics. A) they are driven blindly by an exaggerated ideology; B) they purge their societies of all individuals and groups who do not conform to, or who are not acceptable to, their ideologies; C) these purges take the form of mass murder in which substantial segments of society are imprisoned, often tortured, then executed. These points may well have held true for the Revolution, but they do not correspond with the facts of Napoleon's life that Johnson himself lays out.
Did Napoleon curtail individual liberties and rule with an iron hand? Definitely. Did he see himself, and his own ambitions as being above the law? Absolutely. Did he engage in wars of conquest? Certainly. But this simply casts him in the same mold as the monarchs of the French ancien régime. The only difference between say, a Louis XIV, for example, and Napoleon Bonaparte is in terms of how much more effective the latter was at doing the same things as the former. I would argue that Napoleon represents not the prototype of the modern dictator, but rather the summit of ancien-régime-style monarchy. The flawed Hitler-prototype premise seems to be the basis of Johnson's book. He constantly makes reference to Napoleon and his actions with terms such as "looting", "pillaging", "tyrant", "brigand" (scattered throughout the work) and my personal favorite "Bonaparte's legacy of evil" (101).
The book does have some positive points. Johnson presents some interesting insights into how and why various events, situations and problems arose from a pragmatic standpoint. And when he does, he is at his best. Just to take one example, I found Johnson's reflections on Bonaparte's marshals to be quite interesting, in that it helped to explain how, as its military operations got larger and consequently more scattered, the Empire began to face more, and more frequent, failure due to the fact that Napoleon was forced to rely more and more on his subordinates:
"What few [of the marshals] possessed - and therein lay their weakness - was independence of mind. They were, almost without exception, subordinates. Under the command of a decisive military genius like Bonaparte, they could perform prodigies. They rushed to obey his orders, to please him, to earn his praise and rewards. Sometimes, given an independent command, they acted well, especially if his orders were explicit and the task reasonably simple. But on their own, they tended to be nervous, looking over their shoulders, unresourceful in facing new problems he had not taught them how to solve. This exasperated the emperor, especially in Spain, where they all failed." (113)
I found passages such as this one intriguing and enlightening, leading me to think of things from perspectives I had not previously considered. But unfortunately these glimmers of untainted analytical insight are too few in the book for my taste, and the biased allusions to the "legacy of evil" and other such notions too frequent. When I add to this the lack of chronological progression so essential to a text for non-experts, I find I cannot recommend this book.
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