JOHNSON, the British historian renowned for such monumental surveys as A History of the Jews and Modern Times, narrows his focus in his most recent work, a slender biography of Napoleon. This splendid addition to the Penguin Lives series offers a comprehensive view of Napoleon in all of his incarnations: as an ambitious Corsican youngster, opportunistic revolutionary, invincible general, overreaching emperor, rapacious lover, and, finally, impotent exile. Johnson’s pithy and devastating judgments, reminiscent of Tacitus—e.g., “Warfare, from being a means to an end, became an end in itself, and Bonaparte, having once unsheathed his sword, found it impossible to lay it down for long”— and clear and direct prose make for a story that is fascinating and instructive.
The book moves swiftly, leading us along Napoleon’s meteoric rise up the ranks of the French army and through his stunning victories in battle after battle. Johnson offers an impressive selection of harrowing details: At the battle of Austerlitz, the artillery fired red-hot shot into frozen ponds over which 2,000 Russians were attempting to flee; the ice melted and the Russians were drowned. Other details make us recoil even further at Napoleon’s disregard for human life: He told Metternich that, rather than accept dishonorable terms of peace, he would gladly sacrifice a million men. By book’s end, one is glad that Johnson never allows his readers to succumb, as so many have before, to the temptation of thinking that greatness can compensate for utter lack of goodness. As Johnson writes in the last line of his biography, “All forms of greatness, military and administrative, nation and empire building, are as nothing— indeed are perilous in the extreme— without a humble and a contrite heart.” —Sarah Maserati
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