Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts (Penguin UK, 2015). The following is an email exchange between the Psmiths, edited slightly for clarity. Jane: So, at what point in this book did you realize we went to college with Napoleon Bonaparte? Andrew Roberts is
Tyler and I are friendly, we grew up for a time in the same city (his family moved out at age 10 I think) and I went to junior high with the older daughter of a neighbor of his there. My dad was a Napoleonophile, and many of his family in Nidwalden (Switzerland) are, I think going back some generations. I got interested in Napoleon a few years ago and started with the Andrew Roberts book, although Napoleon also plays a huge role in Thomas Nipperdey's standard history of Germany from 1800 to 1918, which I'd read decades previous, at the instigation of a historian cousin. Nipperdey says right up front that the trajectory of modern German history is unimaginable without Napoleon. After Andrew Roberts' book, I read Patrice Gueniffey's Bonaparte, and I much prefer it to Roberts and treasure it, but it ends in 1802. I hope Gueniffey produces a second volume some day. To me, Gueniffey "gets" the woven tapestry of French society (and the Corsica Napoleon left early for military school) where Napoleon fit and didn't, whereas Roberts to me lacks a feel of what to emphasize and not, especially where the roles of women in their mutual relations and context are concerned. For example, Roberts hardly mentions what stands out in Gueniffey's account, that Napoleon's mother was as much a constant mistress as a wife, with statuses and protections accruing. As to Tyler, had he gone to a French or a German school system, his sort of intellectual omnivorousness would have been exceptional but hardly freakish. It's the failures of Anglo school systems overall and their hostility to intellectuals that make European intellectuals (which Napoleon certainly was, but so are many others too) look to us like freaks, or get readily caricatured as "figures".
I think my some of these measures, Tyler Cowen is one of the most Napoleonic figures I know, combining the intense eye for talent with the knowledge and intimacy that everyone on CWT seems to be having the deepest convo of their life, with someone more familiar with their work than most of their friends/family.
Tyler and I are friendly, we grew up for a time in the same city (his family moved out at age 10 I think) and I went to junior high with the older daughter of a neighbor of his there. My dad was a Napoleonophile, and many of his family in Nidwalden (Switzerland) are, I think going back some generations. I got interested in Napoleon a few years ago and started with the Andrew Roberts book, although Napoleon also plays a huge role in Thomas Nipperdey's standard history of Germany from 1800 to 1918, which I'd read decades previous, at the instigation of a historian cousin. Nipperdey says right up front that the trajectory of modern German history is unimaginable without Napoleon. After Andrew Roberts' book, I read Patrice Gueniffey's Bonaparte, and I much prefer it to Roberts and treasure it, but it ends in 1802. I hope Gueniffey produces a second volume some day. To me, Gueniffey "gets" the woven tapestry of French society (and the Corsica Napoleon left early for military school) where Napoleon fit and didn't, whereas Roberts to me lacks a feel of what to emphasize and not, especially where the roles of women in their mutual relations and context are concerned. For example, Roberts hardly mentions what stands out in Gueniffey's account, that Napoleon's mother was as much a constant mistress as a wife, with statuses and protections accruing. As to Tyler, had he gone to a French or a German school system, his sort of intellectual omnivorousness would have been exceptional but hardly freakish. It's the failures of Anglo school systems overall and their hostility to intellectuals that make European intellectuals (which Napoleon certainly was, but so are many others too) look to us like freaks, or get readily caricatured as "figures".
I think my some of these measures, Tyler Cowen is one of the most Napoleonic figures I know, combining the intense eye for talent with the knowledge and intimacy that everyone on CWT seems to be having the deepest convo of their life, with someone more familiar with their work than most of their friends/family.