BiblioVault - Books about Napoleon I, Emperor of the French

Robert Morrissey

University of Chicago Press

From the outset of Napoleon’s career, the charismatic Corsican was compared to mythic heroes of antiquity like Achilles, and even today he remains the apotheosis of French glory, a value deeply embedded in the country’s history. From this angle, the Napoleonic era can be viewed as the final chapter in the battle of the Ancients and Moderns. In this book, Robert Morrissey presents a literary and cultural history of glory and its development in France and explores the “economy of glory” Napoleon sought to implement in an attempt to heal the divide between the Old Regime and the Revolution.

Examining how Napoleon saw glory as a means of escaping the impasse of Revolutionary ideas of radical egalitarianism, Morrissey illustrates the challenge the leader faced in reconciling the antagonistic values of virtue and self-interest, heroism and equality. He reveals that the economy of glory was both egalitarian, creating the possibility of an aristocracy based on merit rather than wealth, and traditional, being deeply embedded in the history of aristocratic chivalry and the monarchy—making it the heart of Napoleon’s politics of fusion. Going beyond Napoleon, Morrissey considers how figures of French romanticism such as Chateaubriand, Balzac, and Hugo constantly reevaluated this legacy of glory and its consequences for modernity. Available for the first time in English, The Economy of Glory is a sophisticated and beautifully written addition to French history.

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Bonaparte

1769–1802

Patrice Gueniffey

Harvard University Press, 2015

Patrice Gueniffey is the leading French historian of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic age. This book, hailed as a masterwork on its publication in France, takes up the epic narrative at the heart of this turbulent period: the life of Napoleon himself, the man who—in Madame de Staël’s words—made the rest of “the human race anonymous.” Gueniffey follows Bonaparte from his obscure boyhood in Corsica, to his meteoric rise during the Italian and Egyptian campaigns of the Revolutionary wars, to his proclamation as Consul for Life in 1802. Bonaparte is the story of how Napoleon became Napoleon. A future volume will trace his career as emperor.

Most books approach Napoleon from an angle—the Machiavellian politician, the military genius, the life without the times, the times without the life. Gueniffey paints a full, nuanced portrait. We meet both the romantic cadet and the young general burning with ambition—one minute helplessly intoxicated with Josephine, the next minute dominating men twice his age, and always at war with his own family. Gueniffey recreates the violent upheavals and global rivalries that set the stage for Napoleon’s battles and for his crucial role as state builder. His successes ushered in a new age whose legacy is felt around the world today.

Averse as we are now to martial glory, Napoleon might seem to be a hero from a bygone time. But as Gueniffey says, his life still speaks to us, the ultimate incarnation of the distinctively modern dream to will our own destiny.

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Controversial Concordats

The Vatican's Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler

Frank J. Coppa

Catholic University of America Press, 1999

Controversial Concordats offers an engaging survey of the relationship of the Roman Catholic Church with three dictatorial figures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler.

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The Emperor's Last Campaign

A Napoleonic Empire in America

Emilio Ocampo

University of Alabama Press, 2009

Winner of the 2009 Literary Award, sponsored by the International Napoleonic Society/La Societe Napoleonienne Internationale of Montreal, Quebec's Literary Committee

Napoleon’s last campaign didn’t end at Waterloo. After that fateful day on June 1815, hundreds if not thousands of veterans of Napoleon’s army emigrated to America. Many went farther south and joined the rebels fighting for independence in the Spanish colonies, from Mexico to Buenos Aires. The Bonapartists roiled the Western World as they sought fortune, fame, and glory in the expanding United States and in the tumultuous Spanish Americas suffering from repression and civil disorder, and even in the states of Europe. They were joined by adventurers from other nations who shared their admiration for the fallen emperor.

This is the first full-length examination of the Bonapartists who emigrated from France after Napoleon’s defeat and exile, who formed a loose confederation with adventurers and romantics, and who contemplated a new empire in the Western Hemisphere. The scheme had the support and encouragement of the fallen emperor himself and his brother Joseph, former King of Spain, who lived in exile in the United States.

Emilio Ocampo has examined archives on three continents and sources in several languages to ferret out the evidence—a monumental task considering that conspirators tried to leave no evidence of their plans, and that a failed plot, like failure in general, leaves few claimants. Ocampo reinterprets Latin American independence as an international event that drew in all the major powers. By illuminating the complex connections between the shattered France of the Bourbon restoration; an England threatened by radical politician inspired by the French Revolution; Napoleon in exile at St. Helena; the United States, where home-grown adventurers and French émigrés alike saw opportunity; and the collapsing Spanish colonial empire, where revolutionaries were allying themselves with the veterans of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, Ocampo brings together two bodies of scholarship: Napoleonic history and Latin American independence. He does so by tracing the steps of four of the most fascinating characters of the era: two Britons disaffected with their own government—Lord Thomas Cochrane and Sir Robert Wilson—and two former generals of Napolean’s army named Charles Lallemand and Michel Brayer.

The Emperor’s Last Campaign is a fascinating story, well told, and peopled with all sorts of improbable characters and schemes that perhaps just missed coming to full fruition but that in the process contributed to one of the most important events of the nineteenth century: the breakdown of the Spanish empire in America and the rise of the United States as a world power.

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Napoleon and de Gaulle

Heroes and History

Patrice Gueniffey

Harvard University Press, 2020

An Australian Book Review Best Book of the Year

One of France’s most famous historians compares two exemplars of political and military leadership to make the unfashionable case that individuals, for better and worse, matter in history.

Historians have taught us that the past is not just a tale of heroes and wars. The anonymous millions matter and are active agents of change. But in democratizing history, we have lost track of the outsized role that individual will and charisma can play in shaping the world, especially in moments of extreme tumult. Patrice Gueniffey provides a compelling reminder in this powerful dual biography of two transformative leaders, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle.

Both became national figures at times of crisis and war. They were hailed as saviors and were eager to embrace the label. They were also animated by quests for personal and national greatness, by the desire to raise France above itself and lead it on a mission to enlighten the world. Both united an embattled nation, returned it to dignity, and left a permanent political legacy—in Napoleon’s case, a form of administration and a body of civil law; in de Gaulle’s case, new political institutions. Gueniffey compares Napoleon’s and de Gaulle’s journeys to power; their methods; their ideas and writings, notably about war; and their postmortem reputations. He also contrasts their weaknesses: Napoleon’s limitless ambitions and appetite for war and de Gaulle’s capacity for cruelty, manifested most clearly in Algeria.

They were men of genuine talent and achievement, with flaws almost as pronounced as their strengths. As many nations, not least France, struggle to find their soul in a rapidly changing world, Gueniffey shows us what a difference an extraordinary leader can make.

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Napoleonic Friendship

Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France

Brian Joseph Martin

University of New Hampshire Press, 2011

Winner of the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies

One of the first books on “Gays in the Military” published following the historic repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in 2011, Napoleonic Friendship examines the history of male intimacy in the French military, from Napoleon to the First World War. Echoing the historical record of gay soldiers in the United States, Napoleonic Friendship is the first book-length study on the origin of queer soldiers in modern France. Based on extensive archival research in France, the book traces the development of affectionate friendships in the French Army from 1789 to 1916. Following the French Revolution, radical military reforms created conditions for new physical and emotional intimacy between soldiers, establishing a model of fraternal affection during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that would persist amid the ravages of the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. Through readings of Napoleonic military memoirs (and other non-fiction archival material) and French military fiction (from Hugo and Balzac to Zola and Proust), Martin examines a broad range of emotional and erotic relationships, from combat buddies to soldier lovers. He argues that the French Revolution’s emphasis on military fraternity evolved into an unprecedented sense of camaraderie in the armies of Napoleon. For many soldiers, the hardships of combat led to intimate friendships. For some, the homosociality of military life inspired mutual affection, lifelong commitment, and homoerotic desire.

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Napoleon’s Garden Island

Lost and Old Gardens of St Helena, South Atlantic Ocean

Donal P. McCracken

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2022

Napoleon’s Garden Island reveals the amazing botanical history of one remote Atlantic island.

Though the South Atlantic island of St. Helena is best known as the site of Napoleon’s exile following his final defeat in 1815, this remote locale also has a rich gardening heritage and a population of highly diverse flora, both exotic and endemic. This is due to St. Helena’s history as a stopover for the vast East India Company fleets on their way to Europe, whose cargo holds carried not only spices but also plants from China, Malaysia, and India. As a result, St. Helena became a botanical hub and the island’s private plantation houses cultivated a number of extraordinarily varied gardens.

Illustrated throughout with drawings, maps, and archival materials, Napoleon’s Garden Island looks to St. Helena’s past and future alike. McCracken explores the island’s native and introduced flora, ultimately appealing for the establishment of a new permanent garden to showcase this singular botanical blend. Turning away from the military matters that characterize most other books about St. Helena’s history, Napoleon’s Garden Island highights how a dazzling assortment of plants have thrived thousands of miles from their nearest neighbors.

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The Saint-Napoleon

Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century France

Sudhir Hazareesingh

Harvard University Press, 2004

In 1852, President Louis Napoleon of France declared that August 15--Napoleon Bonaparte's birthday--would be celebrated as France's national day. Leading up to the creation of the Second Empire, this was the first in a series of attempts to "Bonapartize" his regime and strengthen its popular legitimacy. Across France, public institutions sought to draw local citizens together to celebrate civic ideals of unity, order, and patriotism. But the new sense of French togetherness was fraught with tensions.

Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Sudhir Hazareesingh vividly reconstructs the symbolic richness and political complexity of the Saint-Napoleon festivities in a work that opens up broader questions about the nature of the French state, unity and lines of fracture in society, changing boundaries between public and private spheres, and the role of myth and memory in constructing nationhood. The state's Bonapartist identity was at times vigorously contested by local social, political, and religious groups. In various regions, people used the national day to celebrate their own communities and to honor their hometown veterans; but elsewhere, the revival of republican sentiment clashed sharply with imperial attitudes.

Sophisticated and gracefully written, this book offers rich insights into modern French history and culture.

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The Slaves Who Defeated Napoléon

Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801–1804

Philippe R. Girard

University of Alabama Press, 2011

A deeply researched and definitive account of the climactic battle at the end of the Haitian Revolution

Among the many rebellions against European colonial empires, the Haitian Revolution against France is among the most dramatic and complex. Having begun in 1791 as France was in the throes of its own young revolution, the conflict reached its dramatic climax when Napoleon dispatched a heavily armed expeditionary force led by his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc to re-establish slavery and the sugar economy that had so enriched France. Philippe Girard’s Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon is a deeply researched and engrossing account of this invasion and its spectacular defeat.

For this ambitious account, Philippe Girard has studied not only primary records in Haiti itself but also rare documents from nineteen public and private archives and research libraries in French, U.S., British, and Spanish collections. His more inclusive approach provides a fuller, more accurate and detailed narrative. He reveals not only key military movements, but also less-known aspects like the activities of U.S. merchants, in-fighting within Napoleon’s government, and communication between both sides and other European powers.

Girard fills the work with unforgettable stories of those who led or were caught up in the war, people like poorly armed Black soldiers who ambushed Bonaparte’s columns, French child drummers, Jewish bankers in Kingston, weapon smugglers from Quaker Philadelphia, Polish artillerists, and mixed-raced people struggling to preserve their freedom against both Black and white opponents.

Transcending pat ideological and racial categories, the book brings into focus an Atlantic society at the crossroads of African and European influences, where Haitian rebels fought France while embracing its ideals.

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A Social History of Modern Art, Volume 2

Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800-1815

Albert Boime

University of Chicago Press, 1990

In this second volume, Albert Boime continues his work on the social history of Western art in the Modern epoch. This volume offers a major critique and revisionist interpretation of Western European culture, history, and society from Napoleon's seizure of power to 1815. Boime argues that Napoleon manipulated the production of images, as well as information generally, in order to maintain his political hegemony. He examines the works of French painters such as Jacques-Louis David and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, to illustrate how the art of the time helped to further the emperor's propagandistic goals. He also explores the work of contemporaneous English genre painters, Spain's Francisco de Goya, the German Romantics Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, and the emergence of a national Italian art.

Heavily illustrated, this volume is an invaluable social history of modern art during the Napoleonic era.

Stimulating and informative, this volume will become a valuable resource for faculty and undergraduates.—R. W. Liscombe, Choice

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Women Against Napoleon

Historical and Fictional Responses to his Rise and Legacy

Edited by Waltraud Maierhofer, Gertrud Roesch, and Caroline Bland

Campus Verlag, 2007

Although Prussia’s beloved Queen Luise and the Swiss-born aristocrat and writer Germaine de Staël were Napoleon Bonaparte’s best-known female opponents, women’s discontent with Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars was more widespread—and vocal—than once assumed. Women against Napoleon expands our awareness of the range of women’s responses to the despot by presenting an international spectrum of female opposition, including contemporary letters, diaries, and published writings, as well as historical fiction of the twentieth century. By setting these materials together, this volume forges new links between literary, historical, and gender scholarship.

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