NAPOLEON

I've started reading Paul Johnson's short biography of Napoleon Bonaparte.  It's well written and very readable, though simplistic in places. (On change in 1780s Europe: "Virtually everyone wanted it.  There was little opposition to it." Oh, really?) 

The first page of the introduction gave me something to take issue with: he calls the French Revolution an accident 

"because the example of Britain and the Scandinavian countries showed that all the desirable reforms that the French radicals brought about by force and blood could have been achieved by peaceful means.  As it was, the horrific course of the Revolution lead, as was almost inevitable, to absolutism..."

Well, Britain and Scandinavia didn't have to deal with the weighty legacy of Louis XIV, the original absolutist. ("I'm the state!") He should really say that the Revolution led back to absolutism, albeit with more bloodthirsty leaders and a more systematic bureaucracy.

I recall thirty years ago when right-wing bloviator Johnson wrote Intellectuals, a book attacking all the left-wing intellectuals he disliked. (A David Levine drawing in The New York Review of Books showed him as a boxer using a brain-shaped punching bag.) Private Eye magazine wrote a review with this passage:

Having proved that brains are bad, Johnson fails to consider the opposite question:  whether it's possible to have too much of a good thing.  Is there an optimum level of cretinization?  Has Prince Philip exceeded it?

Reading this book got me consulting Wikipedia all about Napoleon's family and background. (Did you know that his mother never learned to speak French?)  Before becoming Emperor he rarely used his first name--which comes from Naples like the name Roman comes from Rome and was a reminder of his Corsican-Italian heritage--preferring to call himself Lieutenant Bonaparte/Captain Bonaparte/General Bonaparte. Famous Corsicans include young Casabianca, the boy who stood on the burning deck, and supermodel Laetitia Casta. Viva Wikipedia!  I'll have to make another contribution to it someday.

It was fascinating reading about Pasquale Paoli, an insurgent who took over most of Corsica in 1755--limiting the Genoans to a few fortified ports--and founded the first republic with a written constitution in the Enlightenment style. (Some American revolutionaries admired him.) Napoleon's father Carlo Buonaparte became his close assistant. But Genoa despaired of retaking the island and sold it to France for a song, and the French soon overwhelmed Paoli's guerrilla resistance. (Napoleon's mother, pregnant with him, joined her husband in the hills for several months!)

Someone should make a movie about Paoli and Buonaparte! Paoli went into exile in a sympathetic Britain, where he joined the Literary Club that included Samuel Johnson, James Boswell (who'd written glowingly of Paoli in a famous book about visiting Corsica), Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick and Oliver Goldsmith.  In the 1851 Owen Bailey engraving at the top, Paoli's sixth from the left.

Meanwhile, Carlo Buonaparte became a "collaborationist," becoming friendly with the French intendant and using their relationship to get his famous second son a military school posting in France proper at the age of nine. Before dying at 39, he'd squandered his small fortune on gambling and bad investments--another form of gambling. (Whenever Napoleon played cards, he cheated!)

Paoli actually got a second chance when the French Revolution broke out, being acclaimed by the National Assembly and allowed to return to Corsica.  But the British had recruited him as an agent and ineptly pressured him into attacking Savoyard Sardinia.  He agreed, but arranged for the attack to fail, leading to a rift with young officer Napoleon.  Paoli chose the monarchist side and broke with Paris, depending for two years on the support of the British navy (just driven from Toulon by Napoleon) until they had to evacuate, and he returned to Britain for the rest of his life.  He became a friend of Maria Cosway, who'd been friendly with Thomas Jefferson in Paris back in the 1780s, leading to one of James Ivory's less successful movies...

History rocks!