Abstract
Reviewed by: Charles J. Esdaile, University of Liverpool, UK
‘Why’, the author of this review recently asked Adam Zamoyski, ‘is Napoleon Bonaparte like a squirrel?’ The answer? ‘Because, just like a squirrel, he was a tree-borne rat with great PR’. Herein lies the problem for anyone working on Napoleon (something in which we are scarcely in short supply, the past decade having seen the publication of no fewer than three full-length biographies of the emperor, two of them even running to several volumes). Thus, metaphorically-speaking, the French ruler did not just spend his time bounding across Europe from one tree to the next in dazzling fashion, but, from almost the first moments of his public life, dedicated vast quantities of time and energy to ensuring that he was seen as a hero, a saviour and even a liberator. Under his direction, then – indeed, often with his direct participation – a propaganda machine second-to-none churned out a diet of news that legitimized and glorified his every action whilst at the same time damning all those who stood in his way, most notably Britain. Far ahead of its time though all this was, however, bulletins, paintings and newspaper articles could not save Napoleon from disaster, and so in 1815 he found himself a captive on the distant island of Saint Helena. That said, it was arguably there that he secured his greatest victory, drawing on twenty years of mendacity and self-delusion to produce a version of his career so seductive that it has continued to be repeated down to the present day by those who genuinely admire Napoleon or simply wish to follow the advice he gave to his companions in exile to make their fortune by writing down everything he said. The result, needless to say, has been one of bitter polarization: to paraphrase Pieter Geyl, discussion of the subject cannot but be a question of ‘Napoleon for or against’. Particularly for writers aiming at the popular market, this produces considerable tension: on the whole those men and women on the proverbial Clapham omnibus willing to buy a biography of the emperor are likely to expect the Napoleon of glory, adventure and romance, and are therefore but little disposed to engage with a scholarly critique that has generally been increasingly negative. In the face of this problem, one way out is simply to buy into the Napoleonic legend and repeat its basic tenets, but Zamoyski is far too good a scholar to stoop to such methods and has therefore clearly tried to balance the generally hostile academic view with the popular expectation. As we shall see, the result is a book that is far from wholly successful, but let us first do the author the justice of writing of its strengths. At the very least, then, what we have is a good read, even a gripping one – this in large part being the result of Zamoyski’s sensible decision not to get too bogged down in descriptions of each and every one of Napoleon’s actions from Toulon to Waterloo, aided though he was in this tactic by the inclusion of a series of sketch maps that do an excellent job with respect to filling in the missing narrative. Also highly admirable is the fact that Zamoyski has drawn on many sources that have been but little used, many of the quotations that enliven the text being hitherto unknown to the author of this review. And, finally, as one might expect from an East-European specialist, such matters as Poland rightly get much attention and certainly far more than one usually finds in the literature.
All this being the case, Zamoyski therefore deserves much credit and it would be churlish in the extreme to damn his efforts out of hand: Napoleon: A Life is a serious addition to the long list of biographies which have preceded it and a handsome addition to any bookshelf. Yet in the end it is not, alas, a work with which one can be entirely comfortable. The issue here is not the smattering of factual errors that mar the text – the rebels who rose in revolt in response to the overthrow of the Brissotins were not called fédérés, for example, just as Spain was allied to France not by the Treaty of Basel of 1795, but by the Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1796 – but rather the contortions in which Zamoyski engages in an attempt to square the circle of criticism and adulation. Thus, for the first half of the book or more, we read of a Napoleon who is an opportunist not only bent above all on his own advancement but incapable of setting limits upon his actions, this being a picture that is very much in line with that advanced by, say, Phillip Dwyer in his masterly Napoleon: The Path to Power. So far, so good, but then the picture suddenly changes in that the French ruler suddenly becomes a figure who is trapped by his own success and forced willy-nilly to make war when what he really desired was peace. To make this case, Zamoyski has no option but to draw heavily on remarks made by Napoleon himself, with the net result being that the passages concerned are deeply unconvincing, and all the more so given the previous stress on the manner in which the French ruler could brook no opposition and was inclined to see every victory as but one more springboard for the next. Only with regard to the 1815 ‘flight of the eagle’ can the argument really be made to stick, but this merely leads to a moral question that does Napoleon fresh harm: even if one accepts that the new King of Elba was never going to get the pension assigned to him by the Treaty of Paris and, further, that plans were afoot to ship him to Saint Helena, it is not clear that the appalling loss of life experienced in the Waterloo campaign could ever be justified, Zamoyski compounding his failure to consider this point by repeating many of the usual absurdities that are heard on the subject (at no time in 1815, for example, did the emperor have 500,000 men at his disposal: had all the 89,000 veterans recalled to the colours, and, in addition, all the National Guard, turned out to fight, this figure could just about have been achieved, but the response of both groups was extremely tepid, leaving Napoleon therefore having to go to war with little more than the troops Louis XVIII had possessed at the time of the escape from Elba).
To conclude, then, those whose only wish is to shout ‘Vive l’empereur!’ will find much to welcome in Napoleon: A Life, but more critical readers will find themselves being put off by the author’s evident desire to satisfy very different criteria that are completely at odds with one another. The so-called ‘strategy of the central position’ may often have worked very well for the emperor, but it does not do so for Zamoyski: read the book by all means, then, but at the same time do so with a critical eye.