Somewhere in the recesses of my brain there is a memory of reading that only Jesus Christ and Richard Wagner can compete with Napoleon for the amount written about them. Both Wagner and Napoleon shared a relentless myth-making about their own lives with a good portion of an eye on the judgement of history, to the extent that there’s a question as to whether either was able to act without considering posterity first. As a result, both are repugnantly egotistical. But, whereas Wagner’s reputation is saved from his own personality by the transcendent quality of the art he left behind, Napoleon has a much more questionable set of accomplishments to defend.
McLynn is a rather leaden writer, and it is hard to stay with him through 700 odd pages without lapsing into boredom. His style is extremely repetitive, especially when writing about people in Napoleon’s circle for whom he has an obvious enmity. Chief among these are Talleyrand, Murat and the Emperor’s sister, Pauline. McLynn has a habit of using the same pejorative adjective every time he mentions one of these personalities (for Talleyrand, for example, it is invariable ‘venal’, for Pauline, ‘nymphomaniac’).
McLynn also has a problem with women generally. Hardly any woman in his narrative emerges well, and some are condemned out of hand for the simple exercise of their sexuality. Pauline is criticised almost every time she appears for her ‘insatiable’ sex drive, and so on. McLynn is never able to tell us what is immoral about having sex on a regular basis, or even why it should be wrong for a woman to have several sexual partners. Worse still is that males in the story, none more than Napoleon himself, are not judged on equivalent terms, so the act of sleeping with many women is merely a fact of their lives rather than a moral basis upon which to condemn them. This prejudice against certain individuals and patterns of behaviour clouds the entire narrative.
McLynn is better at showing how Napoleon, far from being the liberal lawgiver he is sometimes portrayed as, was a profoundly conservative leader whose main aim was to establish a new elite and nobility – what we would today call an oligarchy – to replace the one so recently swept away by the French Revolution. Napoleon was happy to deploy his considerable power to exclude enemies as well as to promote, ennoble and enrich his friends. In many ways, Napoleon was a ruler without ideology and reminds me powerfully of Vladimir Putin. The reason for exercising power was power itself.
Here again McLynn reveals the poverty of his moral vision as he derides the ludicrous procession of Napoleon’s family and friends to assume kingships and other ennoblements. Ludicrous they were, not because they were of insufficient class, as McLynn thinks, but because the very idea of these pompous and unaccountable posts is laughable in the first place. As a genuinely great contemporary of Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, was to remark, the very idea of kings is evil. Monarchies don’t become satisfactory when the incumbent is of sufficient “breeding”; they are simply unsatisfactory all of the time. If the French Revolution was fought for anything at all, it was this, and Napoleon betrayed it in the most comprehensive way possible. He truly was the enemy of progress.
Napoleon’s military record is considerably more patchy than is commonly recognised, with his few genuinely great victories (Austerlitz and Marengo foremost among them) dwarfed by the scale of losses sustained in Russia and the otherwise largely indecisive battles fought after 1805. Given that Napoleon fought so many battles, McLynn has no choice but to deal with them in detail, but his descriptions merge into one another and, without the aid of maps for most of them, the narrative is hard to follow.
McLynn is also willing to forgive Napoleon for his many egregiously egotistical actions and, despite laying the evidence of them out in comprehensive detail, sums up his account of the dictator’s life in terms that Napoleon himself could hardly have objected to. As with so many commentators on his life, Napoleon is allowed to escape the accretion of detail of his corruption, violence, misogyny and, above all, his ultimate failure, to become a figure of legend of far greater status that the sum of his parts would permit.
Napoleon was a morally bankrupt leader, a dictator, a reactionary, an enemy of liberty and of truth. He deserves the everlasting condemnation of history. McLynn entirely refuses to hand out an appropriate judgement and that is the greatest of his many failings here.
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