Emperor of France, and the 46th anniversary of
Napoleon I's famous
Which, of course, he does, to great acclaim, though not from the ordinary mothers, sons and daughters of the one-and-a-half-million French soldiers who died through the nine years of
Napoleon I's massive, unprincipled attack on civilised Europe - just for the fun of it, as it now often seems in retrospect.
The death in Vienna in 1832, at the age of twenty-one, of
Napoleon I's only son, the Duke of Reichstadt, allowed Louis Napoleon to regard himself as the true Bonaparte heir and he made vain attempts to bring off coups in France in 1836 and in 1840.
Moreover, there was a monarchical alternative to
Napoleon I. In Vienna, Saint Petersburg and London there flourished what Count S.
Nowadays, many a visitor comes to Fontainebleau for its political and romantic association with
Napoleon I. Who could be allowed to forget that on April 20th, 1814, there took place,- at the foot of the horseshoe-shaped staircase, the ceremony of Napoleon's departure for the island of Elba?
Two centuries after his defeat,
Napoleon is nothing but personality.
8.30pm:
Napoleon is exiled to St Helena and Wellington is a hero.
Although
Napoleon is often described as the greatest French man to have ever lived, he wasn't actually French.
This, according to Kagan, is the view of those for whom
Napoleon is incapable of miscalculation--a group, incidentally, to which Napoleon belonged himself.
In the U.S.,
napoleon is the name of one of my favorite pastries, which was originally called a mille-feuille.
There is too much here already, and
Napoleon is not just for the French.
Horne's treatment of
Napoleon is the latest in the Modern Library Chronicles, a series of short popular accounts of subjects ranging from Islam to the joint-stock company; it is intended to be the historian's version of a beach book, a niche it fits splendidly.