Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) is one of the most illustrated political and military figures of the last two millennia. He has remained in the memory of the world as a legend that the passage of the years has failed to blur. On the contrary, Napoleon Bonaparte widely continues to be considered the personification of human genius.

In this memoir, which was first published in this English translation in 1937, author and historian Evgeny Tarle vividly presents in detail Napoleon’s life and official activity.

“THE man, with whose life and personality this book deals, presents one of the most extraordinary phenomena in world history. It is not surprising that he has been, still is, and will continue to be, the subject of many biographies.

“As recently as 1914, a section of the militant German press sang fervent praises of Napoleon as the creator of the Continental Blockade and as the author of the idea of uniting the European continent against England; after the World War, the victorious Allies, inspired by his example, inserted the more ruthless clauses into the Versailles Treaty; and the Fascist dictatorship in Italy made the study of Napoleon’s personality a compulsory course of history instruction in the schools. And before and after the World War the figure of Napoleon loomed constantly before the minds of the ruling classes, frightened by approaching revolution and yearning for the strong man and deliverer.

“The grandiose Napoleonic epic has had almost as strong a hold on political philosophers and theoreticians as on historians, publicists and poets. Beginning with the Hegelians and ending with the revolutionary Marxist writers, there has been no single noticeable current of social and philosophic thought which, in one fashion or another, has not been influenced by Napoleon.”—E. V. Tarle, Introduction