"How should one envisage this subject? With a great pomp of words,
or with simplicity?" -Charlotte Bronte, "The Death of Napoleon" The
most celebrated general in history, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
has for centuries attracted eminent male writers. Since Thomas
Carlyle first christened him "our last Great Man," regiments of
biographers have marched across the same territory, weighing
campaigns and conflicts, military tactics and power politics. Yet
in all this time, no definitive portrait of Napoleon has endured,
and a mere handful of women have written his biography-a fact that
surely would have pleased him. With Napoleon, Ruth Scurr, one of
our most eloquent and original historians, emphatically rejects the
shibboleth of the "Great Man" theory of history, instead following
the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon's life through gardens, parks,
and forests. As Scurr reveals, gardening was the first and last
love of Napoleon, offering him a retreat from the manifold
frustrations of war and politics. Gardens were, at the same time, a
mirror image to the battlefields on which he fought, discrete
settings in which terrain and weather were as important as they
were in combat, but for creative rather than destructive purposes.
Drawing on a wealth of contemporary and historical scholarship, and
taking us from his early days at the military school in
Brienne-le-Chateau through his canny seizure of power and eventual
exile, Napoleon frames the general's story through the green spaces
he cultivated. Amid Corsican olive groves, ornate menageries in
Paris, and lone garden plots on the island of Saint Helena, Scurr
introduces a diverse cast of scientists, architects, family
members, and gardeners, all of whom stood in the shadows of
Napoleon's meteoric rise and fall. Building a cumulative panorama,
she offers indelible portraits of Augustin Bon Joseph de
Robespierre, the younger brother of Maximilien Robespierre, who
used his position to advance Napoleon's career; Marianne Peusol,
the fourteen-year-old girl manipulated into a Christmas-Eve
assassination attempt on Napoleon that resulted in her death; and
Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases, the atlas maker to whom Napoleon
dictated his memoirs. As Scurr contends, Napoleon's dealings with
these people offer unusual and unguarded opportunities to see how
he grafted a new empire onto the remnants of the ancien regime and
the French Revolution. Epic in scale and novelistic in its detail,
Napoleon, with stunning illustrations, is a work of revelatory
range and depth, revealing the contours of the general's
personality and power as no conventional biography can.
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