“Napoleon’s Wars: An International History, 1803-1815”, by Charles Esdaile

 

672 pages, Viking, ISBN-13: 978-0670020300

I bought Napoleon’s Wars: An International History, 1803-1815 by Charles Esdaile when it was first published in 2008 with great expectations, as the Little Corsican was one of my first Historical Loves (shut up) and Charles Esdaile has forgotten more about Napoleon than I will ever know; however, every page I turned was an effort as a book that promised to discuss the era “beyond merely the biography of Napoleon” and to discuss the relationship of the other major rulers of the contextual period…does nothing of the sort. For the most part I didn’t mind Esdaile's reliance on diplomatic history, or even his perpetual anti-Napoleonic stance – not everyone can be a Bonaparte slappy, after all – but Esdaile writes as though he were dictating a lecture, with each sentence chock full of qualifiers (so, so, so many “howevers” and “factors” and “verys”) that I still can’t believe that Viking sent the manuscript to the printers. Hardly a sentence goes by without the author inflicting on his readers language that would be better palced in the 7^th Grade.

The book also seems to spend an inordinate amount of ink on spreading the same old British propaganda smears of Napoleon and other European leaders to justify Albion’s every move (it even goes so far as to defend the British refusal to uphold the terms of the Treaty of Amiens on the grounds that France “forced” her to war, while giving nonsensical and obviously flawed reasons for her to do so logically). This could have been a good book – or as Esdaile would put it, “truly, a very good book” – however, the labored language and sentence constructions get in the way of what the man is trying to say. There are other, better books about Napoleon – for instance, Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts (reviewed on April 13, 2015), or even Napoleon: A Life by Adam Zamoyski (reviewed on March 7, 2019) – so go ahead and skip this dreck.