“Napoleon and Josephine: An Improbable Marriage”, by Evangeline Bruce

555 pages, Charles Scribner’s Sons, ISBN-13: 978-0025178106

Napoleon and Josephine, the self-crowned emperor and empress of France, exerts a certain timeless fascination. Married two years after both had been imprisoned in the upheaval of 1794 – she as an aristocrat, he as a Robespierren – they rose to the well-known dizzying heights. Carried on frequently by letter, their marriage was accentuated by volatile swings of endearment and hate. In Napoleon and Josephine: An Improbable Marriage, Evangeline Bruce attempts to delve into Josephine and Napoleon’s lesser-known private relations. Alas, if you are seeking a disinterested chronicle of a most interesting couple you must look elsewhere, as Bruce’s book could have been written during the Bourbon Restoration, being, as it is, a compendium of all kinds of Royalist gossip and slander ever written against Napoleon and his Italian family, whereas Josephine and her French family are always treated fairly and sympathetically.

Bruce sees Napoleon as a natural born monster: cynical, unscrupulous, ambitious, calculating, tyrannical and a bloodthirsty warmonger – in short, the Corsican Ogre, that famous boogeyman invented by French and English Royalists to extinguish all trace of the Revolution which, according to them, was embodied by that single man. She denies him any patriotism, idealism, or real merit, attributing his military successes to his marshals and his political ones to his “incredible luck”. Josephine, on the other hand, is the destitute brave mother of two children who survived the Revolution’s Terror, caught the eye of the Ogre and, thanks to her sweetness, delicacy and femininity that only a lady of noble stock can provide, succeeded to make something of a human being of that Ogre, but ended up as martyr when he put her aside to marry another woman (and a foreign one at that).

There is hardly one paragraph in this whole lampoon without some unpleasant remark on any of Napoleon’s acts. Everything he does is distorted by a maligned bias. No word he ever utters is sincere. Even his most generous attitudes are not to be trusted. For Bruce, it seems, everything Napoleon’s enemies tell is true, like when Talleyrand – you know, whom Napoleon said was “shit in a silk stocking” – says that that the Emperor was “fascinated by himself”, or when Metternich declared that Napoleon said that he would “drag down the whole of society in his fall”. All the guilty ones of betrayal towards him are acquitted, like treacherous Bernadotte, depicted by Bruce as opposing his benefactor out of true republican feeling and as “elected” for the Swedish throne, although even the rocks in Sweden know that this French marshal owed that throne exclusively to Napoleon.

It is far from surprising the author’s deliberate omission of everything that could account for Napoleon’s well-deserved fame of administrative genius as well as a military one. Considering him nothing but an usurper, out of sheer intellectual dishonesty Bruce simply omits the fact that the immense majority of the French elected Napoleon their Consul, as well as their Emperor through a referendum, which made him, in the democratic sense, the only legitimate monarch of his time in all Europe. Bruce doesn't mention that First Consul Bonaparte found the country bankrupt by the Directory and that he put finances in order. She wouldn’t dream on mentioning his improvements in the education system, his protection of the labor classes, or that salaries in France were high as never before, limit. Bruce ignores Napoleon’s sane and balanced financial policy to say, rather deliriously, “War became France’s almost sole industry”. And, of course, she blames him for all the wars, although the whole world knows that the English government, which ultimately benefited from them, pushed for war relentlessly.

Bruce does describe in a lively manner a few aspects of Revolutionary France, as well as some picturesque episodes concerning French salons, people’s clothes and house decorations. But for that she seldom quotes her sources, and, given her general untrustworthiness and incredible prejudices against the main character and his family, there’s no way to know if any description comes from historical fact or her own fanciful imagination. Even when she does indicate her sources at the end of the book, she won't give the chapter, making it difficult for us to go check the quotations for ourselves. There is only one recommendable thing in this whole 555 page book, which are its 32 pages of black and white pictures, untouched by the author’s fantasy and prejudices. That’s not saying much.

“The Rise and Fall of the British Empire”, by Lawrence James

720 pages, St. Martin’s Press, ISBN-13: 978-0312140397

In The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, Lawrence James, biographer and military historian, takes the entire empire as his subject, from the days of North American colonization in the early 1600’s to the post-World War II era and its “winds of change,” Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s description of the movements of national self-determination and anticolonialism which resulted in the empire’s demise, except for such remaining outposts as the Falkland Islands. In his classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wrote that “[i]t has been calculated by the ablest politicians that no State, without becoming soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness” (how true; Britain maintained only a 17,000 man army and an 18,000 man navy in the peace prior to the American Revolution). Which is why the Empire was so spectacular, for with just sparse numbers of men (which expanded during wartime) Britain was able to initiate, maintain, expand and control almost the entire world trading centers from China to North America. Hardly a country in the world today was not impacted, for good or for ill, by this sudden expansion of these tiny islands off the northwest coast of Europe, bought about by its ability to design, build and crew the finest ships. Control the sea and you controlled the world, until the United States invented aircraft and the freedom of all individuals and the US took over Britain’s role.

Although, unlike Gibbon, James discusses the origins of Britain’s empire, like Gibbon he seems more interested in its fall; almost half the volume discusses the decline that James contends significantly began only in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I and its lasting economic, psychological, and intellectual consequences. Democratic and nationalist ideologies undermined the rationale for empire and declining resources made it too costly to maintain. But James’ work is not just history from the top: he also incorporates the “voice” of the ordinary citizen as well as that of the politicians, generals, and imperial pro-consuls. More attention is paid to the British perspective than the colonial, and by necessity the treatment of some topics is brief, but the work is well written and provides an excellent overview of an important era whose effects and influences are still in evidence. Indeed, the book constantly emphasizes what, to my mind, is a shamefully overlooked subject in many histories: to wit, the disparity between how Britons themselves viewed the empire – as an enlightened, divinely inspired enterprise – and how those in the hinterlands administering and attempting to cope with matters saw things – shoot the wogs first and ask questions later.

Overall, Lawrence James gives the reader an excellent survey/overview of the British Empire (he even covers the Falkland War with some detail) for amateur historians interested in the British Empire; I particularly enjoyed his use of artistic achievements to setup the historical context of the particular period he is discussing. A comprehensive, perceptive, and insightful history of the British Empire, spanning over 400 years, this critically acclaimed book combines detailed scholarship with readable popular history.

“The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain”, edited by Kenneth O. Morgan

646 pages, Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0198226840

There was a time when the importance of British history was self-evident: every British schoolroom map of the world glowed pink, the color inexplicably chosen to represent the King-Emperor’s dominions; on every continent and the high seas Britons brought order, good government, and, not least, high quality consumer goods to the world; in America, constitutional government was a British gift (George III notwithstanding). In a new century, however, these certainties have lost some of their power. The British Empire is no more, and many historians have become dubious about the benefits of British government and commerce. Britain’s current role in the world is that of a power of the second rank, whose future many believe lies within the European Union. And yet Britain’s current, reduced status should not blind us to the nation’s historical importance, which is immense. Kenneth O. Morgan and nine other distinguished historians provide a welcome reminder of this fact in The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain.

First published in 1984 (the edition I asked for a received for Christmas that year) and reissued several times since, The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain remains perhaps the best single-volume treatment of its subject available. Its ten chapters cover British history from before the Roman invasion to the rise of Margaret Thatcher, and each is written by one of the best scholars in the field. Most books written by committee suffer as successive re-writes squeeze individual prose styles into the most acceptable (that is, mostly bland) text. That is not the case here; individual styles remain, though they do not jar, and the whole is refreshingly readable (nor are the authors afraid to challenge old shibboleths, as when John Guy takes on the overblown reputation of Elizabeth I in his chapter). The book’s illustrations, including two dozen color plates, are well chosen and do much to enhance the text, as do its clearly-presented maps. This is a volume for scholars interested in the thinking of major historians as well as for the student or general reader who wants to read a fascinating, well-told story.

The history of a nation over the course of two millennia could easily become a jumble of random facts, overwhelming readers with characters as diverse as Boudicca (the female leader of a violent revolt against Roman occupation) to Bevin (the architect of the modern welfare state). But what holds the story together and makes it comprehensible are the broader themes connecting one generation to the next. An obvious one here is continuity: Britons’ preference for evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change. Even the upheavals of the 17^th Century, civil war, the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the overthrow of James II in 1688, seem by contrast to the titanic events of 1789 in France or 1917 in Russia hardly “revolutionary”. Some historians indeed have argued that there never was a revolution in Britain; John Morrill, in his chapter on the Stuarts, sympathizes with this view. The survival of the monarchy, not to mention the forms and procedures of the common law, add to the sense of Britain’s unique nature. The “pomp and circumstance” industry thrives in the United Kingdom today, but even in Roman times foreign visitors commented on the British obsession with ritual and tradition.

The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain is a superb book, and anyone interested in the impact that a single nation can have on the world will find this account a valuable one, describing the rise and fall of a hegemonic power. These chapters tell a compelling story very well and cannot but remind us of the enormous British contribution to Western Civilization. Some of the views it expounds appear dated at this remove (Morgan’s account of the popularity of the monarchy being one) and throughout the emphasis is emphatically English; the Celts remain firmly on the fringe. Nevertheless, readers looking for a concise, well-illustrated, one-volume history of Britain can do no better than this.