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Napoleon, by Vincent Cronin
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A biography of Napoleon, which attempts to explain the history of this great man in personal terms.
- Sales Rank: #501746 in Books
- Brand: HarperCollins
- Published on: 1995-01
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.75" h x 5.25" w x 1.50" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 480 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
and excellent book on the man
By Tom Braun
Fascinating reading, and excellent book on the man.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
A balanced biography of a man who epitomized an age
By Amit Kumar Banerji
After years of reading one-sided anti-Napoleonic tracts masquerading as respectable biographies it was a pleasure to finally come across a balanced view of a man, who for better or worse, epitomized the age of the French Revolution (1789-1815). It was very gratifying to hear the author Vincent Cronin state that he was attempting to find the real man behind the legend, that he was not content intellectually with either the myths created by uncritical admirers who saw no fault in Napoleon or those, on the opposite end of the spectrum, who considered him to be nothing less than the devil's incarnate.
Napoleon was an intensely complex figure with numerous and inherent contradictions, but he was far, quite far one would add, from anything approaching the vile characterizations made by detractors during his lifetime and ever since 1815. The fact that the great Georges Lefebvre admired Napoleon, to a certain degree, shows that Napoleon possessed qualities and ideas that set him beyond characterization as a mere military man. Indeed, Vincent Cronin illustrates how even as a newly-minted second lieutenant in the French Army the young Napoleon had been concerned more with social issues and the possibilities of reform than with pursuing military matters. He embraced the Revolution as it unfolded in 1789, as the surest way of leading to an enlightened society and government. It goes without saying, if it was not for the Revolution, professional careers would have remained closed to all but the extremely well-off and the aristocracy. In the realm of professional soldiering, officers of the caliber of Hoche, Joubert, Jourdan, Lannes, Carnot (the "Organizer of Victory") and Napoleon (it should be kept in mind that his background in the Corsican nobility would have had its limitations in Royalist France as well) himself, who were mostly members of the middle or lower-middle classes would have advanced no further than the rank of captain or major in a royalist army no matter what their capabilities. Napoleon's moment in the Revolution came when he played a pivotal role in the defeat of the combined counter-revolutionary and royalist forces at Toulon in December 1793. It should also not be forgotten that he was the protégé of Augustin Robespierre, the younger brother of the great Jacobin, and who had described Napoleon as an officer of "transcendent merit." Napoleon was lucky to escape the bloodlust of the Thermidorians and their White Terror. As one of the few valuable and available military specialists not to have emigrated, he was given the responsibility for the defense of the National Convention against royalist forces in the journée of 13 Vendémiaire. While Napoleon accepted the Directory Government of France, he could not have been pleased by their increasingly undemocratic tendencies, manned as it was by mainly compromised revolutionaries tainted by Thermidor. Historians of course now have concrete evidence that Paul Barras and other Thermidorians were maneuvering to restore Louis XVIII after receiving pay-offs and pardons, and in the case of Barras the price was the tidy sum of twelve million francs. The events of 18 Brumaire of the Year VIII prevented that particular scheme.
It was thus that the Revolution was effectively ended and its gains secured for the middle-classes and for the landed peasantry. While Napoleon's centrist government tried to balance itself against both the left and the right, it was essentially a thankless job. On the one hand, the left had been grievously wounded, it would not recover until well into the 1820s as a cohesive force of any sort. The remnants, especially of the Jacobin tradition, remained unmoved by the new direction. The right on the other hand, recovered within France, and grew in strength outside Revolutionary France in the hostile reactionary courts of Europe and in Imperialist Britain. As Vincent Cronin put it succinctly, they made no distinctions between the National Convention, Sans-culottism, or the centrist rule of Napoleon. They would not rest until a Bourbon had been restored to the throne of France and the "natural order of things" imposed once again. It is also for this reason that Jacobins & others republicans did not wholly reject the coup of 1799. They were of course bitterly disappointed when Napoleon took on more powers himself (an interesting "what-might-have-been" situation to consider is what Louis Lazare Hoche, the committed Republican general whose popularity was on par with Napoleon's fame, would have made of the events of 18 Brumaire) and eased out from positions of influence and power most staunch and uncompromising Republicans who saw the establishment of the First Empire as a betrayal of the Revolution. Sadly, in the long run, this was not one of Napoleon's constructive acts because removing committed defenders of the Revolution could only weaken its defense from the Counter-Revolution. There is no denying that Napoleon did in fact institute many conservative laws, particularly in the social arena for example, which can be considered nothing less than 'anti-feminist' in modern parlance. These conservative laws stood side-by-side with the more enlightened progressive ideas of the Code Napoleon. Another conservative aspect of Napoleon's rule, indeed a glaring 'anti-revolutionary' action, was the brutal suppression of the Haitian struggle for liberation (this biography does not delve into this issue). This act is an example of the contradictions that Napoleon represented and it is one of those issues that certainly did not enhance his reputation.
Whatever else that can be said about Napoleon, he embodied, whether even if he liked it or not, the ideas of the French Revolution, and even for the sake of argument if he had wanted to reject those he could only do so at his own peril. Yet he also knew surely, that the energy and zeal of the French nation and its armies were driven by the ideals of the Revolution, and it was the revolutionized French army that was the mainstay of both the Consulate and the First Empire. Of course the whole idea for ending the Revolution was to rebuild France, something that the reactionary powers of Europe led by Britain would simply not allow. The discussion of the road to war in 1803 is quite insightful, the responsibility of the breach of the Treaty of Amiens lay with the British, not with Napoleon or the Consulate. As it was, given the covetous, brutal and blatant British empire-building in places such as South Asia (in fact, the defeat of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay discussed in the book meant that Napoleon was unable to assist Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the princely state of Mysore, who had waged a lonely but inspired struggle against the naked, criminal aggression of racist British imperialism for twenty years in southern India), not to mention the British imperialist war crimes, depredations & brutalities against the people of Ireland during the same period, the British were hardly in a position to make moral judgments about French Consular foreign policy, whatever its virtues or demerits. This is significant when one considers that the Wars of the Coalition continued unabated from 1803 until 1815. The author is also quite blunt in discussing the failings of Napoleon; the controversial execution of the Duke of Enghien as perhaps the most damaging political action. In personal terms, the author argues that Napoleon simply failed to understand the motivations of the various individuals he chose to bestow with his trust, from Talleyrand to Murat. For example, the insidious snake-in-the grass Talleyrand, as someone once famously termed him, goaded Napoleon into committing serious political errors, the Enghien Affair for one, that later proved costly. There were other failings, too much centralized power which was to be the critical weakness in his personalized rule, the lack of a General Staff or its equivalent to share the burdens of fighting against the coalitions. One perceptive observation of the author was that Napoleon was also to a great extent governed by circumstances; for example, while emigration gave Revolutionary France a new generation of innovative military leaders, the same could not be said about its impact on the French navy. While there had been a few notable successes, especially during the Year II under the supervision of Jean Bon Saint-André when a crucial grain fleet from the Americas reached the ports of the First Republic after an indecisive but bitter clash with the marauding British naval fleets, after Thermidor however Revolutionary France's naval record dipped again (in fact, arguably the greatest naval failure of the Directoire government of Revolutionary France was its inability to properly support the Rising of 1798 by Irish patriots, led by amongst others, by the brilliant, charismatic & completely selfless United Irishmen leader Theobald Wolfe Tone, who were fighting to oust the criminal & illegal occupation of their country by Britain). Despite intensified funding for all aspects of naval operations during the Consulate, Napoleon was unable to rebuild the navy before the shattering defeat of the Combined Fleet came to pass at Trafalgar. This battle indeed played, as Cronin observes, its part in forcing Napoleon to deal with the Russians to prevent the break-up of the Continental System.
The catastrophe of the Russian Campaign is gruesome at times in its detail, and the inability of the French to play the political angle before the invasion insured that the message of the Revolution would fall on deaf ears as far as the oppressed subjects of the Tsarist regime were concerned.
As the author rightly noted, as long as the revolutionary armies of Napoleon, particularly the veterans of the Italian & Egyptian Campaigns were in the field the coalition had been helpless (or in a state of stalemate) but once those armies and veterans disappeared in the vast snowy landscapes of Russia, France was once again on the defensive and as vulnerable as she had been in 1792.
Despite all odds, Napoleon made a final return after Elba, the famous "100 Days" or to be precise, the "136 Days." The gravity of the situation can be illustrated by the fact that all Jacobins and other republicans, who had rejected Napoleon until then, rallied around the returned emperor because a restoration would see the oblivion of everything for which the Revolution had been fought. In that, in the long run (barring the era of the Restoration, 1815-1823) they could have put aside their worries, the French Revolution had changed the world and nothing could reverse that however the reactionaries & conservatives might try. The ideals of the Revolution, of the rights of the citizen, democratic rule, secularism, egalitarianism amongst others were there to stay. And Napoleon was himself inextricably linked to all that, and represented them even if he did not necessarily abide by all of them. It is this Napoleon which Vincent Cronin has etched out superbly. This biography certainly leaves one exhausted at its end, truly, an epic about the "passionate drama" of a man who defined an age of possibility, exemplified by his own rise from a humble second-lieutenant to Emperor of the French First Empire, through the French Revolution. Ultimately, one's view of Napoleon depends on one's view of the French Revolution, and this excellent work by Vincent Cronin gives a balanced (an excellent and extremely useful bibliographical essay also details which memoirs, especially of those who "turned" against Napoleon after 1815 to ingratiate themselves with the Restoration, should be avoided in seeking an even-handed account of the events of 1789-1815) & sympathetic insight into Napoleon the man.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Great Introduction to a Fascinating Person and Period!
By Dave K
If someone asks me for a good place to start if they want to learn about Napoleon, I always recommend the Cronin biography. It offers an extremely flattering portrait of the emperor-perhaps too flattering. However, one does manage to see Napoleon as a brilliant man, and not just a demi-god. Cronin says in the introduction that he wanted to portray Napoleon as something other than as "a monster" . In this he succeeds.
There are times, however, in which Cronin defers too much to Napoleon. For example, in the episode at Jaffa, where Bonaparte orders the prisoners executed, Cronin writes that it "was the only thing he could do". That is not really true. Certainly a case can be made for ordering the executions, but it was not necessarily the "only" choice Bonaparte had. Also, he often takes Napoleon's own later statements (dictated in exile on St. Helena) at face value.
The book is odd in that, after a certain point, it ceases to be a chronological biography. I wonder if Cronin shortened his book for publication, or simply lost interest. Through the Brumaire coup and the establishment of the consulate, the book is in chronological order. After that, it sort of jumps around, so you are not informed of everything that was happening in Napoleon's life. It stops the narrative to describe a typical day in Napoleon's life. One chapter describes "The Empire Style". After these diversions, when it gets back on track, one finds that it has skipped some major campaigns, and the next thing you know, Napoleon is leading the army into Russia.
I still highly recommend the book as a starting point. After I read it, the next book I tackled was "The Campaigns of Napoleon" by David Chandler. I suppose you can say Cronin wisely left the details of Napoleon's military campaigns to others while concentrating on a look at Napoleon the man. The version of Cronin's bio that I first read was called Napoleon Bonaparte: An Intimate Biography" (some editions are merely called "Napoleon"). Cronin gives us more intimate personal details than many biographers, so his book should be regarded more as a personality profile than an exact account of Napoleon's entire career.
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