Never, probably, has there been a greater disproportion between the splendor of the career and the insipidness of the result. “I owe everything to my glory,” Napoleon said, and the glory was real. But the time is long gone when glory could be its own justification, could be (as Caesar and Alexander supposed it to be) an end in itself. When confronted even with so glorious a trajectory as Bonaparte’s, we parsimonious moderns judge by results. What good, we ask, did it do?
In his new biography, Andrew Roberts, one of the most accomplished historians at work today, does his best to show that the glory of the would-be conqueror of the world was preeminently useful. That he fails to prove his case does not in the least detract from the quality of a book that is — let it be said at once — magnificent. Roberts writes about Napoleon for the same reason that the most devoted of the Napoleonic marshals served him, from the pure pleasure of being in touch with greatness. The book is a labor of love, as great biographies very nearly always are. (What would Boswell’s have been if he had despised Dr. Johnson?) So convincingly does Roberts bring Napoleon to life that by the end of the volume even a dyed-in-the-wool Anglophile will find the emperor’s procrastination on the morning of Waterloo maddening. If only he would get on with it, and smash Wellesley before the arrival of Blücher’s corps.
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