Untitled Book Review

THERE are, it is said, over 10,000 biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte in existence. Yet, so persistently does this man of destiny capture our imagination that each succeeding generation must reinterpret him anew.

To condense in a comparatively short volume the story of the Emperor Napoleon and to leave the reader under the impression that nothing of importance has been neglected would in itself be a remarkable achievement. In his Napoleon (Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown, $3.75),Jacques Bainville, in addition, has succeeded in giving a rare quality of artistic simplicity and unity to a study which rests on careful documentation and thorough meditation.

Execrated and worshiped in turn by the multitude, exalted for his military genius and his reorganization of France after the Revolution, severely criticized by the individualists for having crushed the citizen and strengthened the State, Napoleon presents in his life such an extraordinary combination of dramatic contrasts that even among his contemporaries he appeared an epic and legendary character. Such is, over a century after his death, the halo which surrounds the figure of the Corsican adventurer. Paris is still so full of his memory and the monuments he erected to perpetuate his victories that his biographer admits it is difficult not to be ‘ dazzled ’ by the swiftness of his rise, as well as by its height.

But no historian has a right to be dazzled very long, and, without neglecting the purely picturesque and narrative part of his account, M. Bainville has undertaken to find in circumstances and in Napoleon himself the explanation of this prodigious destiny.

Circumstances occurred, opportunities arose, some of them were neglected, most of them were eagerly pounced upon by the eagle-eyed genius during the first part of his career. But in the midst of his glory the Emperor was haunted by a sense of futility — he felt that he was supporting on his shoulders the great structure he had erected. In order to protect it against outside enemies he must continue fighting even if he wished for peace; he had no guaranty and little hope that after his disappearance his work would stand, no certainty that the frail son Marie-Louise had given him would ever succeed him on the throne he had hewn with his sword. He had rebuilt the empire of Charlemagne, but he did not represent a deep-rooted tradition; unlike the sovereigns he had defeated, he had not inherited the allegiance, the loyalty, and the devotion of generations of men. He was the product of eighteenth-century intellectualism, the son of the Revolution, and he himself dimly felt that he could found no dynasty. This bitter sense of unfulfillment, this search for permanency, this fever in building and organizing so that something of himself might survive, give a poignant unity to the figure of Napoleon delineated by M. Bainville.

Looking at the Empire after an interval of a century, and trying to estimate it as a modern Frenchman and a modern European, the author cannot help feeling that Napoleon’s apprehensions were fully justified. He left France with the Frontiers of Louis XVI; his Civil Code, now obsolete, is disintegrating. It is impossible to forget Napoleon, and the ears of men still catch his footsteps echoing ever more faintly in the reaches of time; but to the last why that comes to his mind the biographer can only answer negatively; ‘It would be better if Napoleon had never existed.’

Such a conclusion, however, Hilaire Belloc refuses to accept in his Napoleon (Lippincott, $1.00). To him Napoleon is above all the extraordinary genius who attempted the unity of Europe and caught up again the undying Augustan tradition, the inheritance of the Cæsars, ’the legacy of Rome to our race.’ He succeeded in making generally accepted certain postulates of civil law and certain principles of the French Revolution, but he failed in reëstablishing and fixing completely their ‘noble culture.’ If Europe at the present time stands disorganized and disrupted, it is because the Napoleonic ideal of unity has been abandoned; her only hope is to resurrect it.

For this contention, which Mr. Belloc develops with great sincerity and eloquence, there is much to be said, particularly as the author admits that this reuniting of Europe must result from a ’living conscious unity. Thus, to determine why Napoleon failed to accomplish his task becomes a problem of to-day.

He failed, according to Mr. Belloc, because, of the three great aspects of society, he was able to understand and utilize only two. A genius in civil and military matters, whom his biographer justifies even in having underestimated the importance of sea power, Napoleon failed to grasp the moral value of the ecclesiastical element in the life of modern Europe. No complete unity could be achieved by a man who had ostensibly shown disrespect to the head of the Church and, in so doing, prevented a complete pacification of the Vendée and even aroused against him the religious and national spirit of Spain.

After this long and stimulating introduction, which will not be accepted without reservations by every reader, Mr. Belloc proceeds to illustrate his thesis with a series of highly colored and picturesque episodes presenting Napoleon s life front the cradle to the tomb, Unlike the French biographer, M. Bainville, he does not hesitate to accept legends, for to him legend is almost as true and sometimes much more significant than history. He is at his best, however, when dealing with military scenes, in his analysis of tactics which will delight all those who, by the fireside, like to fight again the battles of old by which kingdoms were won and lost.

GILBERT CHINARD