Not-so-evil genius

It is almost inconceivable that there could be a more densely detailed book about Napoleon than this — 800 crowded pages to get him from his birth in 1769 to his acclamation as First Consul for life in 1802. When completed in three or more further volumes, this will be an extremely comprehensive study.

As only French biographers can do, every conceivable motive and alternative scenario is presented at every stage in the astonishing rise of the subject from the petty and parvenu and rather impecunious nobility of Corsica to a greater position of power than anyone had exercised in Europe since Charlemagne, if not the greater Roman emperors. The endless squabbles and shifting alliances within Napoleon’s family, and in the tangled, unforgiving, almost Sicilian politics of Corsica, get a fuller airing than all but the most insatiable Napoleonic devotee would aspire to read. Though the intense politics even in his bedroom is interesting: Josephine wanted nothing to do with Napoleon as monarch, as she saw she would be disembarked because of her inability to produce an heir. The author does as well as anyone can to describe where Napoleon’s astounding sense of destiny and fierce motivation to achieve it originated, and how, although he was not religious, he believed in a deity of destiny which was fickle, and impossible to propitiate.

No matter how much anyone may have read on the subject, this book will provide some new insights into how Napoleon became convinced of, and clung to, his belief in his exalted and exceptional destiny through many years of obscurity and indifference or even mockery at the hands of his young French peers. He could not possibly have had the opportunity to advance so quickly without the chaos of the revolution, which opened up immense horizons for those who showed daring and brilliance in defence of the young and endangered French republic.

Once the French state was in the hands of a gang of swiftly changing schemers and adventurers, and no one had any purchase on the fury of events, opportunities for one so brilliant, energetic and unconstrained by conventional limits of imagination as the young Napoleon were endless, and he saw it as soon as the Bourbon monarchy started to wobble.