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Just Like Us
A Review by David A. Bell

In his Foundation trilogy, Isaac Asimov imagined a future civilization in which the social sciences attain such sophistication that it becomes possible accurately to predict the future. A group called the "psycho-historians" apply the techniques to the Galactic Empire in which they live, and find, to their horror, that it will soon collapse. So they create a secret organization to carry out strategic interventions in the course of events — not to halt the collapse (it is too late for that), but to accelerate the rebirth of order and civilization out of a new Dark Ages. For a time, the organization carries out its plan with complete success. But then disaster strikes, in the form of a human mutant called the Mule, who uses sinister telepathic powers to carve out a new empire of his own. The psycho-historians initially react with consternation to this creature, whom they have failed so completely to foresee or to explain. It takes several hundred closely plotted pages for them to regroup, and to set the course of history back on its predetermined path.

I often think that modern historians react to Napoleon Bonaparte in much the way that Asimov's psycho-historians do to the Mule: as a freak of nature, endowed with sinister and superhuman powers, who fits into few accepted categories or theories. As a result, amazingly, they often ignore him altogether. To be sure, popular interest in the man remains great — in the past decade, biographies have appeared from major publishers at the rate of more than one per year, from Alan Schom's exhaustive and exhausting narrative to Paul Johnson's caustic and careless pencil sketch. Yet The American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the profession, has not devoted a single article to Napoleon in thirty years. Even in France he attracts relatively scant scholarly interest. Perhaps one can expect little else from a discipline that for many years has preferred the longue durée to the play of events, and largescale impersonal forces to exceptional individuals, and history "from the bottom up" to history from the Napoleonic heights, and "microhistory" to epic narrative, and society and culture to diplomacy and war. Nor can Napoleon be said to have benefited from the profession's burgeoning interest in gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. He is the ultimate Dead White Rich Straight Male.

All these preconceptions make it difficult for historians to regard the sixteen years of Napoleon's rule, with their massive, bloody reshaping of the European order, as anything other than a giant historical deviation. Napoleon is arguably central to many stories of modernity: the advent of what Clausewitz, writing in his shadow, called "absolute war"; the rise of modern dictatorships and cults of personality; the development of militarism and nationalism (two words that first came into common currency in his period). But despite some heroic efforts on both sides of the Atlantic, most scholars have preferred to anchor their accounts of modern history in the democratic revolutions of 1776 and 1789, while leaving Napoleon's triumphs, disasters, and crimes largely in the hands of the popularizers.

Steven Englund is something of a popularizer himself, but in the older and more estimable fashion of the man of letters. In Napoleon, he eschews close analysis and makes the sort of minor errors common to writers who have not pickled their brains in historical journals since early adulthood. Still, he has serious and suggestive points to make, and he makes them in a luminous prose that few professional historians can match. His book is by far the best of the recent batch of Napoleoniana, and the best biography currently available.

The subtitle, "A Political Life," is somewhat misleading. Englund presents the book as a study of how Napoleon crafted himself as a figure above petty party politics, strove to incarnate the French nation, and constructed a well-oiled, domineering state that has survived to the present day (which is to say, at least fifty years too long). In one of the brilliant quotations that Englund sprinkles generously throughout, he cites Balzac on this Napoleonic state: "The nosiest, most meticulous, most scribbling, red-tape mongering, list-making, controlling, verifying, cautious, and finally just the most cleaning-lady of administrations — past, present or future." (Its heritage, by the way, lives on not only in France, but everywhere that French models and the Napoleonic Code have penetrated, which is to say much of Europe, Latin America, and Africa.)

Yet this political story is a familiar one, and a book truly centered on it would be of limited interest. Fortunately Englund, who confesses disarmingly that he initially came to Napoleon through a boyhood love of lead soldiers, cannot resist actually focusing on Napoleon's personality, and on war, about which he has more original things to say. Indeed, his signal achievement is to cover these subjects in a way that highlights not only Napoleon's genius — that is, his freakish Mule-like qualities — but also his place in a larger European historical context. Without reducing Napoleon to a mere expression of impersonal historical forces, Englund suggests how a figure such as Bonaparte became possible.

Englund starts with the interesting observation that, among the great figures in history, Napoleon is one of the most accessible to us. This is so, I would suggest, for at least two reasons. For a start, unlike the cases of earlier conquerors such as Alexander, Caesar, or Charlemagne, we know almost everything about Napoleon's life. We know what he read as a child. We know what he dreamed of as an adolescent (he kept notes). We know what he did in bed with Josephine. We know what he ate on Saint Helena (and it does not look likely that arsenic was on the menu, Englund insists, despite the claims of some conspiracy theorists). We know his actions as a general and a ruler in minuscule detail. Indeed, far more is known about Napoleon than is possible for any single biographer to read — and that is without even mentioning the literally tens of thousands of scholarly articles and books on the subject.

Of course, we possess similar floods of information about later conquerors as well, Hitler and Stalin in particular. But with those men any sense of sympathy or identification is instantly short-circuited by our knowledge of their pathologies and their atrocities. Not so with Napoleon. No one would ever label him psychologically normal, and a modern tribunal would probably have little trouble convicting him of crimes against humanity — but it is almost impossible not to feel a connection with him. This is the man who, a moment after crowning himself emperor in Notre Dame in 1804, turned to his elder brother and whispered: "if only Daddy could see us now" ("si Babbù ci vidi"). It is the man whose love for the unfaithful Josephine overwhelmed him even as he was overwhelming northern Italy, spilling into letter after letter of soppy, painfully embarrassing, utterly human passion. It is the man who remained genuinely captivated by great literature all his life, and tried his hand at writing history, philosophy, political treatises, and even a sentimental novel. It is hard to read about Napoleon without wondering, if only for a moment, what it might have been like to lead his life. Small wonder that the surrounding history, when set next to the vibrant colors and sharp details of his portrait, starts to look fuzzy and wan.

The ability of ordinary people to identify with Napoleon was also the key to his success. Napoleon did try hard, on occasion, to craft an aloof and majestic image in keeping with his imperial title. Ingres's emblematic portrait from 1806 depicts him as a splendid but strangely lifeless icon: the face peeks out, stiff and pale, from between lace collar and laurel wreath, while a hand shoots up at an unnatural angle from under ermine robes to grasp a suggestively elongated scepter. But this sort of display, and the kitschy imperial court with its Ruritanian titles (Prince of Benevento, Duke of Ragusa), never had its intended effect. Napoleon was no Louis XIV, capable of awing subjects into respectful silence by a show of pure, self-confident, princely grandeur. If the French loved him — and they did, for a long time — it was because they saw him as one of their own, even after he became emperor. To them, he was still the "little corporal" who joked with his troops and shared their dangers; still the provincial upstart with the uncouth accent who deliciously forced the flower of the old aristocracy to bow and scrape before him; still the clever little boy who could never quite believe that he had grown up to conquer Europe.

For this reason, Napoleon remained, to the end, very much the egalitarian embodiment of the French Revolution. But as Englund grasps very well, he embodied something else, too. To the Europeans of his age, he seemed something like a character out of a novel, and indeed he understood himself in precisely this manner. "What a novel my life has been," he allegedly remarked on Saint Helena in 1816. The various aspects of his story and character — the picaresque twists of fortune, the lachrymose sentimentality, the constant self-questioning, the intense awareness of his own originality — might have been the product of some wild literary collaboration between Richardson, Rousseau, and Goethe. Small wonder that he so bewitched the greatest novelists of the nineteenth century, from Stendhal through Hugo to Tolstoy.

Napoleon, in sum, embodied a truly modern sensibility, and it was his genius to be able to translate that sensibility into political terms. As Englund reminds us, he was himself a powerful writer, a master of self-presentation. From his early moments campaigning in Italy, he founded newspapers to report back on his achievements to the French public. He penned his own military dispatches with such verve and suspense that, as Englund comments, "contemporaries . . . enjoyed them for the serial novel that they were." Even — especially — in exile, he dictated his reminiscences with such force and pathos that the Memorial of Saint Helena became one of the best-sellers of the century. He knew, in short, how to address himself to millions of followers in a modern language so as to create a bond that was both strikingly powerful and intimately personal. "What a pity," Valéry, who recognized the emperor's literary abilities, once remarked, "to see a mind as great as Napoleon's devoted to trivial things such as empires, historical events, the thundering of cannons and of men." Englund quotes Valéry, and then, at the end of his book, answers him: "Napoleon chose to 'write' his novel on the world, not on paper."

Napoleon's modern sensibility even had its echoes on the battlefield. Before the French Revolution, aristocratic generals commanding relatively small armies of expensively trained professional soldiers had tended toward cautious campaigning. France's most celebrated soldier of the eighteenth century, the Maréchal de Saxe, once observed that he did not really believe in battles, and thought skillful commanders could win wars simply by outmaneuvering their opponents. He and his fellow nobles fought for limited political aims against adversaries whom they considered honorable equals. The French Revolution swept away this sort of warfare, unleashing huge conscript armies, toppling regimes left and right, and making it incumbent on commanders not merely to outmaneuver but to annihilate their enemies.

Napoleon, despite his training under the Old Regime, grasped the essence of this new sort of war more quickly and more completely than anyone else. As Englund suggests, it resonated on the deepest level with his character and his cultural outlook. Discussing Napoleon's aristocratic opponents, Englund comments that "war was their métier, not their self-expression and their meaning ... not their titanic personal struggle, the imposition of their very selves." For Napoleon, possessed of a keen, novelistic sense of the self, war was exactly such an act of expression. He was never so alive as when he was throwing everything into battle with a gambler's verve, praying that large, dispersed bodies of men would come together in just the right place at just the right time. At the battle of Marengo, in 1800, he famously succeeded, but it was, as the Duke of Wellington would later say about Waterloo, "a close run thing." At one point in the fray Napoleon sent the despairing message to General Desaix, "For God's sake, come up if you still can" — and Desaix did, dying heroically in the process. The resulting victory secured northern Italy for France, and Napoleon's place at the head of the French state. At Waterloo, an older Napoleon commanded more falteringly, and the dice rolled out a different number. But the legacy of his wars, and the notion that the modern personality can be fully tested and expressed only on the battlefield, hung heavily over the next century, and played its part in bringing about the horrors of the World War I trenches. For Napoleon and his followers, war was a "total" experience in a way that it had not been for his aristocratic predecessors.

It is somewhat surprising that Napoleon's modern sensibility has attracted so little attention from the recent crop of biographers. But then, while modern, it is not quite our own sensibility. Like most French Romantic fiction, it is too mawkish and grandiloquent, too lacking in irony, for contemporary tastes. Little surprise that Napoleon's recent chroniclers have mostly been military buffs such as Robert Asprey, interested in the man of action, or ideologues such as Paul Johnson, who want to see in Napoleon a forerunner of modern totalitarian horrors.

Englund has a romantic streak of his own, which allows him to grasp what the others have missed. To see this streak, one need only read the book's opening scene, a description of Napoleon's tomb at the Invalides:

Visiting Les Invalides is like visiting the Lincoln Memorial: amid all the funereal marble and the airless geometric space, something is alive.... The imperial sarcophagus is a costly slab of reddish porphyry — a hard and expensive crystalline rock — that is sculpted like a wave, a shape cut from a continuum: dense and heavy, frozen in stone yet eternally cresting. The stone is unexpectedly, almost shockingly, flesh-colored. . . . It is livid and living, the color of a flayed chest in an autopsy, exposing a raw, still-beating heart.... Most present in this place is the awe-evoking sense of human possibility, which is a different thing from hope. The wave of this tomb becomes a sleigh that will carry us off into an unknown future, even if only a hundred days' worth.

Throughout the book, as he follows the familiar path from Corsican boyhood to Parisian triumph to lachrymose South Atlantic exile, Englund gives us many more such set pieces (although none quite so brilliant) depicting the various decisive moments of Napoleon's career. Critics may object that these passages come close to reproducing Napoleonic propaganda, but Englund has an answer for them.

Consider David's portrait of Bonaparte crossing the Alps on a sleek, light gray charger in 1800. "Wrong," some say, "propaganda! He crossed the St. Bernard Pass on a mule, and he was wrapped in furs, without a flowing red cape." Not all people naïvely believe David depicted literal reality; rather they understood that there are literal and metaphorical truths.

The prose of the introduction, lushly appealing as it is, does stray dangerously close to the cliff's edge of sheer melodrama. An entire book's worth of it would be unreadable. But generally Englund employs a more conversational tone, and he makes good use of a dry wit. On the Austrian re-occupation of northern Italy in the late 1790s: "It was enough to make the Italians miss the French (at least until they returned)." On Napoleon's seizure of absolute power: "At a public reading of the new constitution, a woman was reported asking her neighbor what it all meant. She replied: 'It means Bonaparte.'" Or, quoting Napoleon himself on the same subject: "Moving into the Tuileries [Palace] isn't everything. You have to stay there." Moreover, the tart and sardonic tone does not simply serve to entertain. It also provides a frame against which to highlight the full, sentimental flood of Napoleon's own writings, which Englund quotes at luxuriant length. In one of the best passages of the book, he sets the scene for the coup d'état of the eighteenth Brumaire:

At the end of his life, Bonaparte got off a line — the valediction of his will, hence his last public utterance — which reads thus: "The love of glory is like the bridge that Satan built across Chaos to pass from Hell to Paradise: glory links the past with the future across a bottomless abyss." But in autumn 1799, Bonaparte had not yet reached either Paradise or Hell, he was only contemplating the Republic of France from the quarter deck of the frigate La Muirón, as it hove into view in the port of Fréjus.

Overall, Englund's prose, and, yes, his romanticism, allow him to take Napoleon's "metaphorical truths" seriously, and therefore to appreciate a quality that was central to the Napoleonic experience, but which has virtually disappeared from contemporary political life, namely, grandeur.

But alas, metaphorical truths sometimes conflict with literal ones, and grandeur has a tendency to inspire adulation instead of analysis. When it comes to Napoleon, some admittedly go much more deeply and disastrously in this direction than Englund, notably French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin, whose recent study of the Hundred Days whipped past straight hero-worship into the furthest reaches of hagiography. Englund, too, cannot always resist undue admiration, and has a tendency to minimize the uglier side of Napoleon's rule: the internal repression; the criminal sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of soldiers to little purpose; the savage quelling of revolts across Europe.

True, Napoleon locked up relatively few political opponents, and he remained genuinely popular for much of his rule. He was not a totalitarian so much as the last of the great Enlightened despots, with newly efficient systems of censorship and internal espionage. But to say, as Englund does, that Napoleon "only" faced resistance to his rule "under special conditions in Calabria, Spain, and the Tyrol" is rather like saying that Lyndon Johnson "only" faced resistance to his foreign policy in Vietnam. Spain in particular, as Napoleon himself acknowledged, was his empire's bleeding ulcer. The war there from 1808 to 1814 not only popularized the term "guerrilla," it gave the world the modern phenomenon. Spanish partisans ambushed French soldiers, destroyed French outposts, waylaid French convoys, and then melted back into the general population. The French army tried desperately to contain them, but its expeditions had no more effect than "plowing furrows in water," as one frustrated French officer put it. In desperation, he and his colleagues turned to increasingly cruel means of repression: forcing Spanish peasants into towns, taking and executing hostages, even wiping out whole villages in reprisal for attacks. The war pinned down hundreds of thousands of French soldiers who might have saved Napoleon from disaster elsewhere (say, Russia), confirmed for much of world opinion his reputation as the "Corsican Ogre," and, most importantly, irreparably punctured his image as unbeatable. The episode deserves more attention than the scant four pages that Englund devotes to it.

In general, Englund is weakest on this period, the last years of the empire, when exhaustion and disease took their toll on Napoleon, and the metaphorical truths of grandeur vanished under the chill waves of a remorseless reality. The epic calamity of the Russian campaign of 1812, which cost nearly a million lives to little purpose, gets no more space than Spain. The awakening of German resistance to Napoleon, and the fateful exposure of Germany to the idea of absolute war, flits by with similar speed. Part of the problem — beyond the understandable exhaustion any biographer incurs in following Napoleon through his labors — is that Englund's own expertise is largely confined to France and Italy. Once Napoleon's principal theater of operations moved beyond their borders, he becomes notably less sure of himself. As a result, the book rushes from the triumphant harmonies of Austerlitz to the plangent violin solo of Saint Helena, while largely missing the thundering chorus of Russia (the 1812 Overture, so to speak). The omissions may not bother patriotic French readers, but most others will find themselves wishing for an additional hundred pages of Nemesis.

Still, this is an enthralling work. Not only does it present Napoleon in the vivid detail he deserves, it also begins to suggest how to fit him back into the broad sweep of European history — in other words, how to avoid treating him as a Mulish freak. It helps us to see that Napoleon succeeded because, embodying a modern novelistic sensibility, he managed to create a personal, intimate bond between mass politics and ordinary citizens. He put a human face on mass politics in a way that the French Revolutionaries, with their cold and high abstractions, had failed to do. As Madame de Staël justly remarked, "The only new proper noun to come out of the Revolution is Bonaparte." He did not rise above politics so much as incarnate politics, the state, and the nation in a personality with which ordinary French people could identify. Unfortunately, for all his state-building talent, he built his regime on police repression rather than democratic institutions, and he legitimized it through the promise of conquest rather than free elections and the guarantee of human rights. When his conquests finally faltered, his regime blew away like dust, and his country resumed the wild and violent dance of political instability that had begun in 1789 and would last until well into the late nineteenth century (with echoes in the twentieth). This makes Napoleon's story criminal. But, as Englund shows, the story is also tragic — all the more so because it comes across to modern readers as so intensely human.

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