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Napoleon

In 1997 I got a book on Napoleon. It takes a plague to get me to read it. I wasn't attracted to history until I moved to NYC in 1990 and began to read some recommended history books by my uncle. I think I joined the history book club and got this book as one of the early freebies. I soon resigned once I'd fulfilled my agreement.

It's written by Alan Schom. He set out to write a book that wasn't too positive like the French or too negative like the English. But if you read the reviews on Goodreads, it contains a political slant. It's not about hero worship. Indeed, this paragraph suggests comparison with a current American president.




(p.30)


Links:

Schom on Booknotes on C-SPAN. Schom calls himself a lazy man, he put off writing the book for 2 years, but he also didn't take much time off and only slept 4-5 hours a night for 2 years. He seems to have gotten to some glossed over truths about Napoleon, and like Balzac whom he did a biography of, he might have been persecuted--Schom moved from France. Balzac was killed for supporting Jews in the Dreyfus Affair. The publisher cut much of the footnotes and a thousand pages. It's an fascinating interview. Not least the information about Napoleon. I didn't get the sense that he was against Napoleon, even though he called him a psychopath.

The people on Goodreads who don't like the honest account of his life wanted a hatchet job for their hero, for the great man. It's taboo in France to talk about a lot of the negative sides. The French apparently think Napoleon gave them glory or some crazy thing. I guess he's one of the few great military minds of France, which is often joked about on the Simpsons, that arbiter of culture.

I also wondered if the chaos of the revolution led to his strong armed rise.

The legacy to America is that he sold Louisiana to fund his blood-lust for war.

There is a 4 part series on AP about Napoleon.

You can read the book on Internet Archives

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