# Napoleon  ## Metadata - Author: [[David A. Bell]] - Full Title: Napoleon - Category: #books ## Highlights - He is, after all, the man who, born in obscurity, acquired the greatest military reputation of any European military commander in centuries while still in his twenties. At thirty he ruled France, and at forty he dominated Europe as no individual had since Charlemagne—perhaps, indeed, since the Caesars. ([Location 97](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=97)) - Tags: [[blue]] - But then Napoleon orders his own men to lower their weapons. An aide protests, but he insists. He steps forward, out in front of his own troops, to within twenty feet of the royalist regiment. “Soldiers of the Fifth!” he cries out to them. “I am your emperor! Acknowledge me!” He walks a few more steps, and in a dramatic gesture, opens his coat, exposing his chest as a target. “If there is any soldier among you who wants to kill his emperor,” he continues, his voice firm, “here I am!” For a moment, there is silence. Then, somewhere in the royalist lines, a voice can be heard ordering men to open fire. But no one does. The line stands, fearful, indecisive. And then, a different cry is heard. “Vive l’Empereur!” “Long Live the Emperor!” A single voice at first, but immediately repeated by others. “Vive l’Empereur!” In a moment, the entire royalist battalion is shouting the words, and as they do, they throw down their weapons, surround Napoleon joyously, and rush to embrace the men who have come with him from Elba. Hardened soldiers burst into tears as they clasp each other, screaming deliriously, “Vive l’Empereur!” As the clamor subsides, Napoleon smiles contentedly at his small army, which has just doubled in size. He prepares to move onward, further north. ([Location 109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=109)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This stage-management is, in its own way, as important as the drama itself for understanding Napoleon’s life. From his first campaigns in the mid-1790s, he knew the political importance of actively crafting his image in all available media: print, painting, sculpture, oratory, even architecture. It is no coincidence that so many images of the man have achieved iconic status. ([Location 132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=132)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Manage your image well. Make sure people know and respect you for what YOU want - deliberately. He was a product of the first great modern age of celebrity, and he understood, viscerally, how to manage celebrity in the service of power. In the voluminous source material that has survived about him, a very high proportion bears the marks of his own conscious manipulation and design. ([Location 137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=137)) - Tags: [[blue]] - He understood how radically Europe had changed in the decades during which he had come of age, and he knew better than anyone else how to seize the new opportunities that had arisen. While he did, repeatedly, take enormous and dramatic risks, in his battles, in his grand strategy, and in politics, he also did everything possible to maximize the odds in his favor. ([Location 142](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=142)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In 1766, the king of France, Louis XV, had appeared before the magistrates of his highest court of law and declared: “Sovereign power resides in my person alone … to me alone belongs legislative power without subordination and undivided … the rights and interests of the nation … repose solely in my hands.” ([Location 154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=154)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In every European state, steep social hierarchies were engrained in law, separating nobles from commoners and clerics from laity and subdividing every order of the state into a myriad of smaller orders, corporate bodies, and guilds, each with its own distinct privileges. “In every part of the state,” French magistrates told the king in 1776, “there exist bodies which can be regarded as links in a great chain, the first link of which is in the hands of Your Majesty.” ([Location 162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=162)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the churches taught submission: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” (Matthew 22); “For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power … shall receive to themselves damnation” (Romans 13). ([Location 170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=170)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The best-selling novels of the period, along with much of the dramatic literature and visual art, had highly sentimental, even melodramatic plots and messages. They encouraged readers and viewers to feel sympathy for characters deliberately portrayed as ordinary, as opposed to princes and heroes. They were also intensely moralizing, inculcating a deep hostility toward selfishness, corruption, and frivolity while praising selflessness and patriotic virtue. ([Location 193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=193)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Media and messaging shapes culture and thought - For two years, the Assembly tried to find a way to preserve a constitutional monarchy while beginning to implement a vastly ambitious reform program. But the more enthusiastic supporters of reform quickly fell out with conservatives, and with the king himself, over issues that included the extent of the suffrage and whether the Catholic Church should be subordinated to the state. ([Location 211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=211)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Immanuel Kant, better known for his Project for Perpetual Peace, wrote that “the sublime needs violence. … War itself has something sublime in it, … while a long peace generally brings … low selfishness, cowardice, and effeminacy.” ([Location 252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=252)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Napoleon was a product of total war, would become its master, and would end up its victim. ([Location 286](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=286)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “I am the French Revolution, and I will support it,” Napoleon declared in 1804.13 His statements of this sort were almost always carefully calculated, and he often, quite blithely, contradicted himself entirely. (On another occasion he remarked: “I found the crown of France in the gutter and placed it on my head.”) ([Location 288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=288)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nonetheless, the Revolution made him possible, by making possible the new forms of political authority and the new forms of war. ([Location 293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=293)) - Tags: [[blue]] - There was also another effect, less remarked on. Like countless lonely children, before and after, Napoleon found comfort and companionship in books. We do not know what he read at this earliest stage, but by adolescence the habit of intensive reading had already become deeply engrained. “I lived like a bear … always alone in my small room with my books … my only friends!” he wrote of his years as a teenage junior officer, when he was devouring novels, plays, and the most popular works of the French Enlightenment.4 ([Location 334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=334)) - Tags: [[blue]] - his entry represented his best piece of written work, and contained lines that, coming from one of the most ambitious men in history, appear more than a little ironic: “Ambition, like all disordered passions, is a violent and unthinking delirium. … Like a fire fed by a pitiless wind, it only burns out after having consumed everything in its path.” ([Location 358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=358)) - Tags: [[blue]] - his younger brother Lucien soon grasped the intensity of Napoleon’s drive, writing the following to Joseph in 1792: “I have always detected in Napoleon an ambition that is not altogether selfish, but which overcomes his love for the common good. … He seems inclined to be a tyrant, and I think that he would be one if he were king.” ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=371)) - Tags: [[blue]] - By the summer of 1792, as he later put it, he “no longer had that small ambition to become an author.” ([Location 387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=387)) - Tags: [[blue]] - He had a stroke of luck when the commander of the artillery was wounded and Christophe Salicetti, a Corsican member of the National Convention and patron of the Buonapartes, named him to the vacant position. Napoleon showed political ruthlessness immediately, denouncing superior officers to the dictatorial Committee of Public Safety in order to get his own battle plans approved. He also demonstrated his tremendous energy and military acumen by effectively reorganizing the artillery, identifying a crucial weak point in Toulon’s defenses and leading the attack against it personally. He demonstrated genuine physical courage as well, receiving a bayonet wound to the thigh and having a horse shot out from under him. Toulon fell to the Republic, and another powerful deputy wrote to Paris praising Napoleon as an officer of “transcendent merit.”16 Still just twenty-four years old, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. ([Location 414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=414)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: He got a rare opportunity by chance and knew to seize it with everything he had. When you get rare opportunities, put all of your energy into conquering them - Most likely this particular incident never took place, but Napoleon’s skill in organizing the defense and deploying troops and artillery in the narrow streets of central Paris did win him high praise from Barras. Within two weeks he had been given command of the Army of the Interior, one of the largest in France, with a high salary and lucrative appointments for his brothers Joseph and Lucien as well. ([Location 443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=443)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: His connections lead to a once in a lifetime opportunity and again he seizes it with everything in him. So far his greatest attribute in the story, a great feel for when to bring out his best and which opportunities to pursue - More than twenty years after defeating the Austrian army at Lodi, Napoleon Bonaparte confided to the tiny retinue accompanying him in exile that only after that battle “did I believe myself to be a superior man, and did the ambition come to me of executing the great things which so far had been occupying my thoughts only as a fantastic dream.” The words are easily dismissed as nostalgic bombast, but surely very few human beings have ever experienced what Napoleon did between mid-1796 and late 1799. At the start of this period, just twenty-six years old, he was already an important French general, but still just one of several. Three and a half years later, he was, without exaggeration, the new Caesar. ([Location 477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=477)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Opportunity after opportunity presented themselves and were seized by him. A true sense of stage presence - But history is not just a matter of impersonal forces, and nothing ensured that an individual would come along to exploit the changes as fully and spectacularly as Napoleon. Many are the historical opportunities that have been lost for lack of talent or vision, and many are the individuals who came into history at the wrong time and place to make the mark they could have. “Full many a gem of purest ray serene / The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear,” wrote the English poet Thomas Grey.1 But in Napoleon’s case, for better or for worse (for millions, it would be for worse), the man met his hour. He showed that he not only had genius, but a genius perfectly suited to the circumstances of 1796. ([Location 487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=487)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The genius was of two sorts, military and political. The former was grounded in genuinely extraordinary mental abilities that he had now had the chance to display to the fullest. He had a nearly photographic memory and the ability to visualize the positions of thousands of men in scores of separate units, along with salient details about munitions and supplies. ([Location 493](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=493)) - Tags: [[blue]] - His political genius was just as important. Napoleon understood, far better than his rivals, and far better than his predecessors on the merry-go-round of French revolutionary politics, that in a newly democratic age, political success depended on forging a bond with ordinary people. ([Location 507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=507)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Napoleon had an instinctive flair for presenting himself as both savior and intimate acquaintance, and in every medium available to him: oratory, the visual arts, and above all, print. ([Location 513](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=513)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Even in the midst of these intense operations, Napoleon paid as much attention to politics as to military matters, engaging in what could be considered a two-pronged political offensive. Its first prong targeted his core constituency: his own soldiers. He made frequent addresses to them, praising their bravery, calling them his brothers, and even insisting, on one occasion, “I can’t express the feelings I have for you any better than by saying that I bear along in my heart the love that you show me every day.”8 He doled out medals by the barrelful, while distributing a hundred specially engraved sabers for especially valiant acts of heroism. He appealed to the soldiers’ sense of pride and destiny: “The fatherland has the right to expect great things of you. … All of you wish to be able to say with pride, upon returning to your villages, ‘I was part of the conquering Army of Italy!’ ”9 And he did not hesitate to give his men a share of the spoils. Much later, in exile, he remembered telling them: “I will lead you into the most fertile plains on earth. Rich provinces, wealthy towns, all will be yours for the taking. There you will find honor, and glory, and riches.” ([Location 546](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=546)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Make those under you feel appreciated and feel part of something bigger than themselves. You can compel them to achieve amazing things - The second prong, meanwhile, was aimed squarely at the French public. Napoleon ensured that everyone back home knew of his exploits and appreciated his brilliance. During the campaign, artists made no fewer than thirty-seven portraits of him, many of which he commissioned directly. ([Location 562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=562)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Advertise your success. Make sure people are aware of your contributions and what you’ve done to change things - Today, it is hard to take prose like this seriously. But the French public, which had previously deified writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and had even, briefly, heaped similar accolades on the shoulders of King Louis XVI (before he tried to flee the country and join a counterrevolutionary army), had a ready appetite for over-the-top hero worship. ([Location 575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=575)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Know your audience. Language this effusive in its praise wouldn’t work today, but it was perfect for Napoleon’s context - whatever Napoleon’s true political beliefs were at this point, already by the end of 1797, at age twenty-eight, he had become one of the most powerful men on the continent: in Italy a prince deciding the fate of states; in France a savior of the Republic. ([Location 620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=620)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Before the battle, Napoleon made one of his most well-known speeches to his assembled men: “Soldiers, do your duty. Consider that from the top of these monuments forty centuries are looking down upon you.”20 By the end of the battle the pyramids, and Egypt itself, were in his hands. ([Location 676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=676)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Napoleon himself was utterly entranced with Egypt. Here he was, still not yet thirty years old, standing in triumph where Alexander and Caesar had stood before him, surrounded by an exotic and seemingly submissive people. The experience fed the romantic streak in his character that his early reading had kindled and that had previously expressed itself mostly in his fixation on Josephine. Now he took the first in a series of mistresses and indulged fantasies of carving out a new empire in the East. ([Location 692](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=692)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “In Egypt,” he later mused, “I found myself freed from the obstacles of an irksome civilization. I was full of dreams. I saw myself founding a religion, marching into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hand a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my need.” ([Location 702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=702)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Napoleon was something new, and the keenest observers understood it. What did the new constitution mean, a woman was reportedly asked, at a public reading of the document? Her reply: “It means Bonaparte.”28 ([Location 771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=771)) - Tags: [[blue]] - He considered himself a man of the Revolution, but what he admired in the Revolution was its hostility to undeserved social privilege, to intolerance and superstition, and to sloth and inefficiency disguised as tradition. He valued the Revolution’s commitment to the rule of reason and to forms of civic equality that would allow men of talent to raise themselves in society. And like all but the most radical revolutionaries, he believed firmly in the importance of property and social stability. ([Location 795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=795)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The French Republic in 1802 included not just all of present-day France but Belgium as well, plus a large chunk of present-day Germany (the left bank of the Rhine River) and smaller pieces of Italy and the Netherlands. The Netherlands itself and northern Italy again took on the role of French satellite states. ([Location 836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=836)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Napoleon, with his instinct and genius for propaganda, exploited these achievements for everything they were worth. His hallelujah choir of poets, songwriters, painters, and sculptors took the credit for Marengo away from those who deserved it most—Desaix, the cavalry commander François Étienne de Kellermann, and Lady Luck—and heaped it on Napoleon’s shoulders. They particularly hailed his daring crossing of the Saint Bernard pass, comparing it to Hannibal’s similar feat two millennia previously. ([Location 839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=839)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Make sure your achievements are noted and recognized. Exaggerate if you need to - It was against this authoritarian but not murderous backdrop that Napoleon’s collaborators set about erecting his new regime. Their goal, in keeping with his political vision, was to create a state that was in thrall to a single central power but oversaw society efficiently, fairly, and peacefully. It would respect the principle of equality before the law. But it would also promote social stability, by defending the rights of property-holders and of fathers and husbands. ([Location 911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=911)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Napoleon himself clearly believed that his rule depended on continual military success. “A First Consul is not like kings … who see their states as an inheritance,” he remarked in May 1803. “He needs brilliant deeds, and therefore war.” ([Location 1005](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1005)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As he would later confide to Benjamin Constant, “I wanted to rule the world—who wouldn’t have, in my place?”17 ([Location 1078](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1078)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Perhaps because Napoleon mythologized himself so insistently, it is easy to imagine him as a series of figures from Greek mythology. For the early Napoleon there is Hercules, accomplishing apparently impossible feats and sweeping out the Augean stables of French government with his consul’s broom. For the late Napoleon, one thinks of Prometheus: the titan chained to his South Atlantic rock, pecked at by English vultures. And for the emperor in his heyday, the figure that comes irresistibly to mind is Icarus, soaring higher, higher, and higher still, until suddenly his wings fall apart and he plummets from the sky. Except that in Napoleon’s case it is not the heat of the sun that prompts his fall but the howling chill of the Russian winter. ([Location 1086](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1086)) - Tags: [[blue]] - And in 1805–6, Napoleon’s forces stomped the continent of Europe more decisively than any army had done since the days of Julius Caesar. ([Location 1137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1137)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In fact, after 1805 Napoleon came to believe that he could make all of Europe into a Consular France writ large, with the sort of unity unseen since the days of Rome. Fouché in his memoirs remembered the emperor saying: “We need a European law code, a European supreme court, a single currency, the same weights and measures, the same laws; I must make all the peoples of Europe into a single people, and Paris, the capital of the world.” ([Location 1175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1175)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who later claimed to have seen Napoleon ride beneath his window in Jena, was moved to write of the events as nothing less than a turning point in the history of humanity: “The connecting bonds of the world are dissolved and have collapsed like images in a dream.”8 He called Napoleon “the world-soul … who, sitting here astride a horse, reaches out across the world and dominates it.”9 ([Location 1226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1226)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had an interview with the emperor in 1808, and it convinced him of Napoleon’s “state of continued illumination … indeed we see at his side divine protection and a constant fortune.”10 The future social theorist Henri de Saint-Simon insisted that a monument to Napoleon would have to recognize him not simply as the equal of Alexander, Caesar, and Charlemagne but also of Plato, Aristotle and Descartes. The future poet Lord Byron kept a bust of Napoleon in his room at Harrow. Beethoven planned to dedicate his Third Symphony to Napoleon, although he changed his mind after the proclamation of the empire. Napoleon himself was all too happy to believe this slathering of praise. ([Location 1232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1232)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When Napoleon Bonaparte crossed the Niemen River into Russian territory in June 1812, he brought along some potentially disturbing reading: Voltaire’s History of Charles XII. It told the story of a king of Sweden, the most admired military leader of his time, who had invaded Russia a century before. But Charles’s army, weakened by disease and sheer exhaustion after an eighteen-month trek through hostile territory, came to grief in the decisive battle of Poltava, which proved so disastrous that it sealed Sweden’s decline as a military power. Presumably, Napoleon took Voltaire with him in the hope of avoiding Charles’s mistakes. At one point, early in the campaign, he told an aide, “We shall not repeat the folly of Charles XII!”1 But in the end he proved a very bad reader. ([Location 1400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1400)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Learn from history, find analogous examples use them to try to extract causal relationships in your situation - “I do not fear that long road which is bordered by deserts,” an aide remembered him saying. “After all, that long road is the road to India. Alexander, to reach the Ganges, started from just as distant a point as Moscow.” ([Location 1411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1411)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Napoleon faced other obstacles. The very size of his army made it harder for him to control and maneuver than the forces he had commanded early in his career. ([Location 1428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1428)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: A small, lean team can outmaneuver a large, cumbersome one - Despite a readiness to negotiate, the monarchs of Britain, Russia, and Prussia still had trouble recognizing Napoleon, the son of the French Revolution, as a truly legitimate adversary. Indeed, they continued to wage an unprecedented propaganda campaign against him, demonizing him personally with an intensity they had never deployed against established dynastic adversaries. A popular German engraving portrayed him as the son of the Devil, while the German poet Ernst Moritz Arndt actually wrote that in Napoleon, “Satan has come, and taken on flesh and blood.”10 As early as November 1806 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church condemned Napoleon as a “precursor of the Antichrist.”11 In September 1812, as Moscow was burning, Tsar Alexander declared: “Napoleon or me, I or him, we cannot both rule at the same time.” ([Location 1518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1518)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Before the French Revolution, he wrote, “war was waged in the way that a pair of duelists carried out their pedantic struggle.” But, he continued, “there is no more talk of this sort of war, and one would have to be blind, not to be able to perceive the difference with … the wars that our age and our conditions require. … The war of the present time is a war of all against all. It is not the King who wars on a king, not an army which wars on an army, but a people which wars on another.” ([Location 1528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1528)) - Tags: [[blue]] - And on April 5, even as the allies seemed on the point of agreeing to allow the Bonaparte dynasty to continue, Marshal Auguste Marmont’s army corps defected to the allies. Napoleon now had no choice but to abdicate unconditionally. A few days later, seized by despair, he tried to kill himself by swallowing a sachet of poison he had carried with him since the Russian campaign. But the drugs had lost their potency and succeeded only in making him violently ill. ([Location 1611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1611)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: He hit absolute rock bottom and then later bounced back to the peak of glory. Never giving up attitude - Yet at the same time, Bonapartism as a political model continued to have resonance worldwide. In December 1804, one onlooker at Napoleon’s coronation had been an impressionable twenty-one year-old Venezuelan named Simon Bolívar. “The universal acclaim and the interest which his person inspired,” Bolívar later remembered, “made me think of the slavery of my country, and the glory that would benefit the one who liberated it.”1 Throughout his own long career as liberator and authoritarian ruler in South America, Bolívar took explicit inspiration from Napoleon, as did many future caudillos. ([Location 1733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1733)) - Tags: [[blue]] - for another century the image of the glorious general as savior figure continued to have an important place in French politics. Charles de Gaulle was Napoleon’s heir in more ways than one. ([Location 1803](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1803)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For all his crimes and errors, his life also incarnated a sense of sheer human possibility that quite rightly fascinated onlookers at the time and has continued to do so ever since. We look at his life and recoil from parts of it in horror. But at the same time, inescapably, there is something that takes the breath away. As Shakespeare’s Cassius said of Caesar, “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus.”9 What a novel his life was. ([Location 1879](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0146Y9T0W&location=1879)) - Tags: [[blue]]