NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE : The Battle of Waterloo--and the Great Commanders Who Fought It

Rating:
Summary: A Superb Dual Biography
Review: Evangeline Bruce must be congratulated for this excellent dual biography of Napoleon and Josephine. This is the most useful kind of biography, in that we not only learn the idiosyncratic details of individual lives, but the protagonists serve as windows through which we observe an age.

I have assigned this book to my students in a 300-level seminar on "The Age of Napoleon," and it has generated innumerable classroom discussions on valuable topics: the role of women in revolutionary and imperial France, the sources of political power, the nature of Thermidorian society, and many other things. Despite the length of the book, the students ate it up.

Bruce makes an occasional small error. She describes Joseph and Lucien Bonaparte as "uxorious," despite the fact that both men (indeed, all the Bonaparte men) had several lovers. She describes Andre Massena as "over six feet tall," although he was actually only about an inch taller than Napoleon. She describes General (later Marshal) Augereau as "illiterate," which was true of him before he became a general, but he had learned to read and write before the period she describes.

But despite these things, her grasp of the "big picture" is so good that this book will become one of my standard texts on this period for years to come.