About ten years ago, I read Paul Johnson’s life of Napoleon, which portrays the Corsican as a proto-Leninist. (For a friendlier view, try the Andrew Roberts bio.) Shortly after, I found myself at Les Invalides, looking at Napoleon’s tomb. I wrote to Johnson, “I inspected it, just to make sure the old monster was still dead.”
Napoleon is in the news lately. With the French president, President Trump visited the tomb. And there was this morsel from New York magazine:
On his office wall hung an oil painting of Bannon dressed as Napoleon in his study at the Tuileries, done in the style of Jacques-Louis David’s famous neoclassical painting — a gift from Nigel Farage.
(The morsel comes from this profile.)