“Napoleon: A Life”, by Adam Zamoyski

784 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-0465055937

Napoleon Bonaparte has had more books written about him than just about anyone else – 40 in this 21^st Century alone, 475,000 total since Bonaparte kicked it in 1821 – and after I read Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts four years ago (reviewed by me on April 13^th, 2015), I swore off all new biographies of the Corsican Ogre…well, never mind, ‘cause I went and bought Napoleon: A Life by Adam Zamoyski, new late last year. I mean, c’mon; every detail of the man’s life has been endlessly dissected by now by myriad historians, poets, librettists, psychoanalysts, spiritualists, military strategists, business moguls, culinary experts, horticulturalists, legal scholars and a phalanx of novelists. His meteoric rise and blistering fall have been well documented on film, to boot, so, really, now: what more can be said? A lot, according to Zamoyski, whose central contention is that Bonaparte, for all the outlandish things written about him positive and negative, was after all only human. Oh. Thanks. But here’s one glaring problem: Zamoyski warns his dear 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 is rather like writing a biography of Henry Ford and only mentioning the automobile as it applies to his marriage to Clara: it may sound like you’re narrowing your subject to a laser-like focus, but in so doing you ignore a great deal – hell, almost everything – that made your subject what he was.

Now, here’s where I tone it down a little and say this book isn’t all bad, ‘cause it isn’t. I admit, by focusing on Napoleon the Man, Zamoyski shows us that he was not the monster of British propaganda and instead provides context to the factors that made Napoleon a constant warrior and, especially, explores his restoration of order to post-revolutionary France, no mean feat, that. To be sure, it is tempting to portray Napoleon as a blood-soaked monster whose war-making machine stained the killing fields of Europe, North Africa and the Levant with the blood of some five million men (give-or-take); however, Zamoyski prefers to paint Napoleon as “the embodiment of his epoch”, which saw democracy emerge in a hard and bloody birth and the old regime attempt to snuff it out before it had the chance to draw a breath.

In the 1790s Napoleon entered a world at war, and one in which the very basis of human society was being questioned. It was a struggle for supremacy and survival in which every state on the Continent acted out of self-interest, breaking treaties and betraying allies shamelessly. Monarchs, statesmen, and commanders on all sides displayed similar levels of fearful aggression, greed, callousness, and brutality.

All nations were culpable, none was better than the rest and one must simply accept that political men driven by “the lust for power” will engage in enormity without a second thought (as one of my old Profs used to say, “There are no innocents”). Napoleon was not uniquely wicked, perhaps not wicked at all; in Zamoyski’s eyes, to parcel out Good and Evil is mere cant when discussing power politics.

Modern sophisticates like us want the great men of the past cut down to size, and I’m sure smart folks like you know the proverb that “no man is a hero to his valet”. For all his military and political genius, for all the pomp and splendor of his reign, Napoleon, as Zamoyski presents him, is afflicted with what George Eliot called “spots of commonness”: one sees him as a fool in love; as a newlywed cuckolded by his first wife, Joséphine; as a serial adulterer himself (and perhaps even a rapist); as a pituitary case with a gross paunch and shrunken genitalia; as a loser sunk in dejection after his 1812 Russian fiasco, sulking at dinner and snapping at his (second) wife; as a bored and restive exile on Elba habitually cheating at cards (for which only his mother had the temerity to call him out); and as a writhing mass of pathologies after Waterloo, floundering haplessly when he might have had a chance to gather his forces for a counterblow if he had kept his nerve: “But Napoleon was in a state of shock. ‘What a disaster!’ he had exclaimed to Davout. ‘Oh! My God!’ he cried out with ‘an epileptic laugh’ as he greeted Lavalette.”

Was a new biography of Napoleon really necessary? Probably not, and while Zamoyski’s adds no knew knowledge to what is already known – and while his focus on Napoleon Mere Mortal and not Napoleon Warlord adds as much as it subtracts – it’s always nice catching up with old friends.