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The Mind of Napoleon: a Selection from His Written and Spoken Words, edited and translated by J. Christopher Herold. 322 pp. New York: Columbia University Press. $5.00

The great generals of the World’s history form three distinct groups that have little in common except military genius. Alexander and Jenghiz Khan, for instance, were the incarnation of daimonic forces that somehow made small nations expand with explosive violence; Hannibal and MacArthur were brilliant strategists in the service of governments whose policies they could not control; Caesar and Napoleon made foreign conquest the means of domestic revolution and the basis of personal despotism. Of these two self-made monarchs, Napoleon is, perhaps, the more remarkable and instructive figure, for he possessed neither the cold intellectual superiority nor the warm personal charm of the man who mastered and ended the Roman Republic.

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The Mind of Napoleon: a Selection from His Written and Spoken Words, edited and translated by J. Christopher Herold. 322 pp. New York: Columbia University Press. $5.00

The great generals of the World’s history form three distinct groups that have little in common except military genius. Alexander and Jenghiz Khan, for instance, were the incarnation of daimonic forces that somehow made small nations expand with explosive violence; Hannibal and MacArthur were brilliant strategists in the service of governments whose policies they could not control; Caesar and Napoleon made foreign conquest the means of domestic revolution and the basis of personal despotism. Of these two self-made monarchs, Napoleon is, perhaps, the more remarkable and instructive figure, for he possessed neither the cold intellectual superiority nor the warm personal charm of the man who mastered and ended the Roman Republic.