Each is the product of strong and informed authorial reasoning and emotion, and the effect of reading them is to renew our sense of awe at the inexhaustible fount of meaning that pours out of this particular life story, so uniquely coincident with, and formative of, world history. They represent real advances in biographies of this man. What they contribute is original thinking about Napoleon and the clearing away of many myths about him.

They do not give definitive answers to the intricacies of psychological and historical causality. The books under review (and their number could easily be doubled or trebled after the Waterloo bicentennial year) range from good to very good to excellent, although their approaches-all legitimate and established-are quite different. Still, as Patrice Gueniffey notes in the introduction to his book, this attention should not astonish us, rather “we should be astonished by this astonishment.” Then, suddenly, in the last decade, we have half a dozen or more. Since he died there have been thousands of books about him, but for reasons mainly pertaining to the déclassement of the genre of biography in the academy, years passed with no serious biographies of the first French emperor appearing. Lately, the monstre sacré can be seen and heard all over. Helena was suitably distant and isolated as a place of exile for “General Bonaparte,” such that “all intrigue would be impossible and, being so far from the European world, he would soon be forgotten.” Yes, nobody will notice him-well, except maybe Goethe, who thought this life “the stride of a demigod.”

A month after Waterloo, the British prime minister, Lord Liverpool, wrote to his foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, in Vienna, to suggest that St. ‘The Coronation of Napoleon’ detail of a painting by Jacques-Louis David, 1806–1807Īndrew Roberts recounts yet another tale about Napoleon. Musée du Louvre, Paris/Erich Lessing/Art Resource

Napoleon roberts