Napoleon a biography frank mclynn reviews

Home / Historical Figures / Napoleon a biography frank mclynn reviews

Born there in 1769, Napoleon Bonaparte would convulse the Continent, precipitating thousands of books about him since. Then came the Winter (of napoleon’s discontent). The painting is Napoleon Crossing the Alps, by Napoleon's favorite painter, Jacques-Louis David.

While I was reading Andrew Roberts’ excellent 2014 biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon: A Life, I was also reading Frank McLynn’s 1997 book Napoleon: A Biography on my Kindle.

Charlemagne and Constantine could fall back on Christianity; Napoleon couldn’t. In French occupied land, “The brutal French soldiers, many of them rapists and murderers who had chosen the army instead of a prison sentence, took their pick of the local women.” One French soldier later wrote, “They cannot forgive us for having twenty years caressed their wives and daughters before their very faces.” Invading Spain for the French was hard because you are invading from the north, but Spain’s mountains and rivers run east-west.

Shooting practice was uncommon because ammunition was hard to get and guns sometimes blew up (burst barrel) in the face of the shooter. “He was both rootless and classless.” He gets coronated in 1804 and chooses a bee motif as symbol for his empire. He sends paintings by Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael to Paris.

Napoleon’s Spanish policy was one of his greatest errors.

His four greatest skills were: the tech he used, his men’s morale, “the effects of the French Revolution” and his genius at tactics and strategy. Indifferent to people except as he needed their loyalty, this Napoleon's embodies ambitions not tempered by any idealism, and McLynn dismisses "credulous" previous biographers for seeing anything in him beyond a familiar French grasping for "grandeur" and "glory," apparent on a lesser level from Louis XIV to de Gaulle.

The Directory was corrupt and so were the Generals, including Napoleon. Starvation loomed. The best estimate is that only 1/5 of the Italian stolen art made its way to the Directory. Lack of horses to move stuff. He couldn’t work out a winnable plan to invade England like Rome did, so he set his eyes on Egypt (another Roman favorite) which he thought would be easier and cheaper to plunder.

In Russia, French food wagons broke down on the Russian rutted tracks.

Waterloo was fought with 140,000 men crammed in three square miles. Napoleon knew how men liked the rewards of money, honorific titles, and flattery. When he arrived in Moscow it was intentionally a ghost town. "The true representative of the nation," Napoleon declared desperately in 1814, as his empire was collapsing around him, "is myself.