Volume 2, Number 10 · June 25, 1964
Napoleon Against Himself
By Peter Gay
Napoleon
by Felix Markham
New American Library, 292 pp., $5.95
For a century and a half now, Napoleon Bonaparte has been a projective test and a convenient symbol. Politicians rode to power by using his name and borrowing his charisma, patriots nostalgically invoked his image, royalists fed their resentments against the modern world by despising him. In this century, the dictators with their popular support, their grandiloquent lies, their manipulated plebiscites and quick appeal to violence, have driven many to find in Napoleon an object lesson; during the Second World War, the British kept up their morale against Hitler by recalling Napoleon's failure to invade their island. Historians have been as tempted to project their own prejudices on Napoleon as everyone else, although, confronted with mountains of documents and the rigorous demands of their discipline, they have tried to make Napoleon an object of cool scientific inquiry instead of political passion. They have not fully succeeded: twenty years ago, Pieter Geyl concluded his Napoleon, For and Against, a masterly survey of what French historians have made of Napoleon, with a half-patient, half-exasperated shrug of the shoulders. 'The argument,' he wrote, 'goes on.'
Review, 1246 words
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