Napoleon (Penguin Lives)

About this book

The very name Napoleon Bonaparte still enthralls. Ever since this towering and terrible genius conquered Europe he has been endlessly debated compared and made an icon. In Napoleon the great dictators energy and acumen are matched by those of his biographer Paul Johnson whose histories have been lauded as "fresh readable provocative . . . wise" (Los Angeles Times). Here Johnson profiles "the grandest possible refutation of those who hold that events are governed by forces classes economics and geography rather than the powerful wills of men and women." With masterly eloquence Napoleon charts Bonapartes career from the barren island of Corsica and his early training in Paris-he was a bold soldier with an uncanny gift for math maps and strategy-through high-profile victories in Italy military dictatorship and campaigns across Europe to his end on the forsaken isle of St. Helena. In Napoleons insatiable hunger for power Johnson sees a realist unfettered by patriotism or ideology a brilliant opportunist and propagandist who fulfilled his ambition in the aftermath of the French Revolution. He interprets Napoleons life in the trajectory of his times revealing how his complex and violent legacy seeded totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century and sounds an alert to us in the twenty-first.