There are 10,000 biographies of Napoleon, ten or more of which are available at any time in bookstores. 1,500 people have published their memories of him. As with Luther, Goethe and Beethoven every day was explored in Napoleon's life, every little complaint investigated, taken every Bettgeschichte under the microscope, every utterance, every joke and every mistake of the great small Corsican carefully documented.
Do we therefore again a Napoleon biography, nor to a brick with a thousand English pages where the reader with names of kings, emperors, tsars, dukes, countesses, generals, officers, locations and town is supplied in a fix in the whole of Europe?
Not really, would you say, if it were not the letters of Napoleon. The first Emperor of the French has namely posted 33,000 letters during his short life, to 30 a day, a few thousand every year of his reign. Napoleon's letters were indeed published in 1857, but first, there were only two-thirds of existing; Second, some of these letters were not of Napoleon, and, thirdly, was anything that was compromising, embarrassing or politically onerous from the 19th century view, not only published but swept neatly under the carpet.
Since the Paris Fondation Napoléon has started in 2004 to publish every scrap of paper that Napoleon has signed, is this treasure trove of historical documents firsthand anyone who can speak French, openly. Andrew Roberts has undergone the first task, this correspondence which exists now up to and including 1812 evaluate.
However, a new Napoleon image ensues from this. Roberts shows beautiful that Napoleon was as letter writers often funny, problems just, clear and seized up to the root, but he was equally manipulative, hurtful and sometimes cold and unfeeling. The widow of his fallen officers he knew best to say no more than: Her husband was a brave hero and a true patriot, but now he's dead, that's life, because we have to, you also ma chere.
His four brothers, he had installed as king of Spain, Holland, Westphalia and Naples, he is having a day up to five letters in which he to the attitude everything dictated to them by the policies of the military strategy, quite violently on my nerves gone, so no one wanted to have anything to do with him after his fall more. Joséphine de Beauharnais, his first wife, who already betrayed him weeks after the wedding, Napoleon wrote thousands of romantic letters in which he asks servile and embarrassing to love and affection.
Roberts shows with many quotes Napoleon's insane micromanagement, with whom he wanted to regulate the smallest details in the whole of France during all campaigns. A priest who had kept a bad sermon, the program of the Comedie Francaise, the production of soldier boots nothing Napoleon was too low, so as not to deal with it in detail.
The Corsican was a hard man of power, but he was not a sadistic mass murderers like Stalin, Hitler, Mao or Pol Pot. When, after the Battle of Austerlitz was seriously wounded an Austrian on an ice floe in a lake and Napoleon heard his cries for help, he had the man by two officers of his bodyguard save.
The biggest shortcoming of this biography is that Roberts does not know how Napoleon's battles, which are among the most dramatic, ever struck, stirring to portray. Fasting, flat and linear world-historical dramas are simply shut told so since. Despite all Faktenhuberei this biography does not know about the military technology of the time, the reader learns a lot about logistics and indeed Napoleon's revolutionary disposition of an army corps in, but nothing about guns, guns, equipment and tactics.
Even the geopolitical earthquake that hosted Napoleon, his scrambling of European royal families that looks like nothing else earned him the hatred of the Austrians, Russians and eventually also of Prussia, Roberts hardly interested.
All in all, this is certainly a competent, readable biography, which announced an unqualified success, it is not but become.
