Napoleon

Rating:
Summary: Heart-of-Oak Chauvinism
Review: Paul Johnson has always been a writer of prodigious knowledge and little insight. Still, if you can gnaw through the 800-plus pages of a typical Johnson book, you may find yourself forced to think clearly and carefully in order to refute his surly ultra-conservatism. The current biography of Napoleon, a mere 186 pages, is part of the "Penguin Lives" series, intended for mass readership. No one who has read Johnson before would expect a temperate approach to anyone associated with revolution, but I bought the volume hoping for an intelligent assessment. Instead, the book is little more than a tirade. Johnson seems to think that calling Napoleon a "relentless opportunist" suffices to explain his career, his policies, and his legacies. If Napoleon, as Johnson sneers, is The Man on Horseback, then France and all of Europe are the horse, a mere beast of burden for one man's ambition. Indeed, the highest praise Johnson can pay his subject is to call him "the grandest possible refutation of those determinists who hold that events are governed by forces, classes, economics, and geography rather than by the powerful wills of men and women." So much for Tolstoy! So much for the work of every thoughtful historian of the past 30 years! The text is replete with stereotypes of the French as frivolous, unsteady, unreliable, and amoral. On the other hand, the indomitable British constitution and the sturdy tars of Nelson's navy (forces? classes?) were more than enough to shake the upsart Corsican "like a rat." Johnson's heart-of-oak British chauvinism had already led him, in a previous book, to suggest that India might have done better if colonial administration had persisted another century or two.
A far better book, of about the same scope, is "Napoleone" by Vittorio Criscuolo, available in Italian and Spanish but sadly not in English.

Rating:
Summary: Members of the Napoleon cult will loathe this book
Review: Paul Johnson has written a readable and interesting biography of Napoleon. It is obvious from the first page, that Johnson holds the French emperor in contempt. But, what is fascinating is that the writer does such a great job of establishing the case against Bonaparte. Any of the "great"(and short-lived) achievements of Napoleon pale in comparison to the destruction he brought to Europe. Indeed, during his pathetic exile, Europe returned to the political systems of the past. Johnson's book will encourage readers to further explore Bonaparte's life. Indeed, I am currently reading Will and Ariel Durant's The Age of Napoleon and beginning to agree with the shrewd insights contained in Johnson's book.

Rating:
Summary: Hollow Johnson
Review: Paul Johnson has written many bad books, but this one tops them all. He says he wants to refute the notion that "great forces" rule the history. What he really hates about Napoleon is the fact that he was French. Johnson has spent the last thirty years worshiping the British Empire and in this book he attacks Napoleon for conquering other peoples. Pure hypocrisy and utter waste of time from a bitter old man.

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Summary: His history, his place in history
Review: Paul Johnson is the author of so many sweeping, multi-generational histories that it must have come as a pleasant change for him to write a brief life of one individual human being. But while Johnson's focus has shifted, he nevertheless retains his eye for the big picture. And although the portrait he paints apparently outrages centralizers, collectivists, "reformers," nationalists, and other acolytes of state power, there's no question Johnson has got the image just right.

Many reviewers have been horrified by Johnson's argument that Bonaparte, in style and substance, was precursor to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, as well as countless smaller demons. And yet, as Johnson shows, the lineage is incontrovertible. Bonaparte's opportunism and determination to carve for himself a place in history (an ambition that so often costs the blood of innocents) ... the cult of personality built around the Leader, co-opting intellectuals, artists, and the church ... the *levée-en-masse,* and "people's armies" marching to spread revolution and "modernism" ... the mania to abolish local customs, traditions, and identities, and impose one centralized "national" authority ... secular rites modeled on religious ones (Johnson tells how Bonaparte's sister Pauline had servants ritually wash her feet before appreciative crowds of VIPs, a clear [if unconscious?] echo of Christ bathing the feet of His disciples) ... in all of these things and more, Bonaparte blazed the bloody trail followed later by so many others. Bonaparte's era was a monarchical one, and so he called himself Emperor. But he could just as easily have been Führer, Duce, Great Leader, Comrade Chairman, El Caudillo, or simply "the President."

These Penguin Lives books are meant to be brief surveys of their subjects, and so serious students of Napoleonic history will no doubt find this book lacking in a lot of detail (for example, Johnson himself said he chose to skim over most of the tactical details of Bonaparte's battles). But what it lacks in specific detail, it more than makes up for in context and interpretation. If you don't object to that in your history-reading, I think you'll find this title takes a fairly short time to read, but gives you quite a lot to think about.

Rating:
Summary: An Opionated, Yet Exciting, Read
Review: Paul Johnson will anger many, deservedly, as he presents this short book on the life of Napoleon for the Penguin Lives Series. It is a brief and easy read presenting clearly and emphatically the conservative view of Napoleon (directly blaming him for Hitler and Stalin did seem stretching things, even amongst the other vilifying). The story is all there and it should interest readers and entice them to learn more and discover for themselves all sides of this complex character in history. With a subject like Napoleon there is no limit to the viewpoints and books out there and this particular book should lead the eager reader to search them out but no where will this specific view of Napoleon be found so succintly and engagingly written.

Rating:
Summary: Biased
Review: Paul Johson's book is too biased to be considered serious scholarship. See reviews below for specific examples.

Rating:
Summary: Napoleon biography
Review: Pretty good short synopsis of Napoleon's life. Given the number of adulatory biographies on Napoleon, this is a good read if for nothing else to get the opposing Anglo-Saxon view. There was however some biographical errors in the book. Specifically, Johnson confuses Lucien Bonaparte with another brother, Louis Bonaparte. It makes one wonder if there are not other biographical mistakes in the book. All in all, a good read.

Rating:
Summary: Napolean afficionados, beware!
Review: The author's principle assertion is that Bonaparte's life and career served as the model for modern totalitarians such as Hitler and Stalin. The tone of this short book will be troubling to afficionados of Bonaparte, particularly because Paul Johnson is a "one-armed historian": you will never catch him saying, "On the other hand...". Every act, word, and associate of Bonaparte is treated with scorn and contempt by Johnson, who clearly despises his subject (and perhaps also those who still worship the Emperor?).

Now that you have been warned about the author's prejudices, I must say that this is a fun little book that deftly traces the life and career of Bonaparte, from Corsica, to the "whiff of grapeshot," to Egypt, Moscow, and St. Helena. Anyone who enjoys reading history but only vaguely recalls the facts of Bonaparte's life will benefit from reading this slim volume. Johnson writes with marvelous clarity and his arguments are forceful and enthusiastic, if not always convincing.

The terrible thing about this book (about the Penguin Lives series altogether) is the ridiculous overpricing. This is why the book gets only 3 stars from me: [price] for what is essentially a very long magazine article is not worth the money. I don't know why Penguin doesn't issue these little geegaws as paperbacks; I think more people would read them if the price was reduced.

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Summary: his place in history according to Johnson
Review: The glory of France and the erstwhile Whig hero comes up short in this biography by a historian of decidedly Tory bent. It seems a rarity these days to find a biography of Napoleon that does not glorify the Corsican revolutionary. Johnson (The Renaissance, 2000, etc.) surely does not. Instead, he writes, the defeat of Napoleon and the subsequent Congress of Vienna are to be counted among the great accomplishments of modern history, ushering in an era of peace that would not end for nearly a century with the outbreak of WWI-when, he asserts, the modern cult of Napoleon began. Had Napoleon committed his campaigns of conquest today, Johnson further asserts, he "would have been obliged to face a war crimes tribunal, with an inevitable verdict of guilty' and a sentence of death or life imprisonment." Reckoning that Napoleon's dream of empire cost four or five million lives and incalculable destruction of property, Johnson lays at his door blame for a number of sins, including the "deification of force and war, the all-powerful centralized state, the use of cultural propaganda to apotheosize the autocrat, the marshaling of entire peoples in the pursuit of personal and ideological power." In brief, Johnson charges, Napoleon was less a liberator of Europe than a dictator of the sort that would follow in the century afterward-a Hitler or Mussolini for his day. The author recognizes Napoleon's talents as a commander and bravery-throughout his career, he reckons, Napoleon had 19 horses shot out from under him in battle-but still has little use for the fellow, unlike more enthusiastic recent biographers such as Frank McLynn (see below) and Robert Asprey. Despite an evident distaste for his subject, Johnson's sharp-edged view of Napoleon is well supported, and well worth considering.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Phillipic
Review: The people who don't like this book call it biased and lacking depth. These are the very qualities that make it a brilliant polemic that is really directed at the thinking of our times rather than an assessment of the past. What Johnson is really attacking is the sloppy romanticism that excuses dictators of their crimes due to their image as men of action. This form of thug chic most malevolently manifests itself in liberal bourgeois societies where so called progressive types are beguiled by the Hitlers, Lenins, Stalins, Maos, Castros, Ortegas and Saddams of the world.

Yes, Johnson goes for the throat and holds back nothing. It needed doing.