David A. Bell, Napoleon: A Concise Biography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 152 pp., $18.95.

Michael Broers, Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny (New York: Pegasus, 2015), 608 pp., $35.00.

The most famous statement from Richard Nixon’s opening to China in the early 1970s emerged from an interaction between Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger. The historically minded Secretary of State asked Zhou for his views on the French Revolution. “It’s too early to tell,” replied Zhou. The answer was taken as evidence of Chinese leaders’ supposed ability to take a long-term perspective on political events and is regularly generalized to serve as a warning against swift interpretations of historical occurrences.

In fact, the diplomat who served as the interpreter for the meeting, Charles Freeman, has revealed that Zhou thought Kissinger was talking about the 1968 French uprisings, which occurred just a few years before their discussion, not the events in 1789. “I cannot explain the confusion about Zhou’s comment except in terms of the extent to which it conveniently bolstered a stereotype (as usual with all stereotypes, partly perceptive) about Chinese statesmen as far-sighted individuals who think in longer terms than their Western counterparts,” Freeman said.

But Zhou’s remarks could only be mistaken because he was thought to be speaking about the French Revolution generally. If, instead, it had been reported that he was asked his thoughts on Napoleon Bonaparte and responded with such an ambiguous perspective, few would believe it. Nobody lacks a firm opinion on the man who his soldiers affectionately nicknamed “the little corporal.” The subtitle of one of the most respected books on Napoleon, written by the Dutch scholar Pieter Geyl and translated into English in 1949, is For And Against—Geyl surveyed a century and a half of opinion on Bonaparte and showed that historians usually lined up like lawyers, either prosecuting or defending the French general-turned-leader. Neutrality and ambivalence were unpopular paths. “Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they mostly fell, all too simplistically, into two camps: supporters and opponents,” writes the Princeton historian David A. Bell in his new book, Napoleon: A Concise Biography. “Despite uncovering great masses of source material, most of the historical works generally spent too much time refighting old battles to provide much genuine illumination.” Those works are astonishingly numerous: it has been said that no other human being has had more books written about him or her, except for Jesus Christ—more than 220,000 books and articles as of 1980 alone. Historian Charles Esdaile has claimed that Napoleon is second only to Christ in appearances in cinema, as well, a testament to his popularity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Fortunately, the Manichaeanism that characterized so much post-1815 writing about Napoleon is absent both from Bell’s short book and from Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny, the first installment in a two-part biography by the English historian Michael Broers. Both works are highly nuanced, showcasing the monstrosities that Napoleon inflicted on Europe but also highlighting the lasting positive impacts the French leader left on the continent he almost single-handedly ruled for a brief but spectacular period.

Both also persuasively rebut claims that he was a proto-totalitarian, the precursor to Mussolini and Hitler. “No dictator of the twentieth century,” wrote historian Paul Johnson, “was without distinctive echoes of the Napoleonic prototype.” If that was so, it was primarily because Napoleon’s rule was, along with the French Revolution that he simultaneously ended and consummated, the marker of the modern age. “Circumstance rendered Napoleon rather more than the traditional Caesar,” as R.S. Alexander put it. L’Empereur was no Führer. That much can be said for him. And, of course, so can much else, for and against.

The French Revolution is routinely fingered as the birth of the Modern Age as far as politics as concerned. As much as time can possibly be sliced into befores and afters, the French Revolution qualifies more than any other event as the knife that did the slicing. The number of developments attributed to it is staggering. Nationalism, arguably the most powerful political force in the world, has been dated to France in the 1780s, by Hans Kohn and others. Contemporary forms of warfare are likewise identified as originating there. “Modern militarism first arose,” Bell wrote in a previous book, The First Total War, “in Revolutionary France and helped bring about the first military coup d’état of modern times.” The late Eric Hobsbawm went as far as anyone in arguing that the ”ideology of the modern world first penetrated the ancient civilizations which had hitherto resisted European ideas through French influence. This was the work of the French Revolution.... The French Revolution is a landmark in all countries.... In terms of political geography, the French Revolution ended the European Middle Ages.”

Napoleon’s singular role in these momentous developments has been curiously downplayed. His historical importance has of course been recognized, but his significance as a politician has been de-emphasized in favor of his military achievements. To some extent, this imbalance is understandable. Napoleon’s battlefield victories are indisputable in a way his accomplishments in the civilian realm are not. Rivoli, Ulm and above all Austerlitz were clear-cut victories (Bell notes that in 2005, France’s then president Jacques Chirac declined to attend the two-hundredth anniversary ceremony marking the Battle of Austerlitz, revealing much about the current fondness for Napoleon in contemporary society). The French gained territory and their opponents lost it.

Even when it comes to guns instead of butter, though, some present-day critics are unwilling to give Napoleon his due. “After all, the military record is unquestioned—17 years of wars, perhaps six million Europeans dead, France bankrupt, her overseas colonies lost,” the historian Victor Davis Hanson has written. This is to confuse Napoleon as a foreign-policy strategist with Napoleon as a general. The predecessor to Bismarck he was not. But the heir to Alexander the Great he was. Napoleon’s contemporaries had no such compunctions about acknowledging his military abilities. His most important opponent, the Duke of Wellington, identified him as a “genius,” famously saying, “his presence on the field made the difference of forty thousand men.” It was precisely those military leadership qualities—the ones that helped form the greatest European empire since the Romans—that awed early nineteenth-century Europe. As Johann Peter Eckermann told Goethe, “we see at his side divine protection and a constant fortune.” Hegel said that Napoleon was the “world-soul...astride a single horse, yet reaching across the world and ruling it.”

But the awe was due to the man on horseback, not the executive passing legislation. Napoleon’s unmatched skill in navigating the treacherous waters of post-revolutionary French politics was underappreciated at the time, primarily because politics was an underappreciated art. After all, with the exception of England, Europeans leaders did not have to be diplomatically adroit to maintain power. They simply had to be of royal descent. And yet, just as the French Revolution birthed modern politics, so was Napoleon, in effect, the first modern politician. No previous leader had been so skilled in marshaling public support for domestic and foreign ventures. This was no small source of frustration to his opponents. The royalist Chateaubriand, who was banned from Paris for comparing Napoleon to Nero, wrote:

"One asks oneself, by what sleight of hand Bonaparte, who was so much the aristocrat, who hated the people so cordially, has been able to obtain the popularity which he enjoys. For there is no gainsaying the fact that this subjugator has remained popular with a nation which once made it a point of honor to raise altars to independence and equality."

Chateaubriand had been appointed as a diplomat before resigning in disgust at Napoleon’s epoch-defining 1804 execution of the Duke of Enghien. (This killing led to Beethoven removing Napoleon from the dedication of his Third Symphony and to the legendary quip—made by police chief Joseph Fouché but often wrongly attributed to the diplomat Talleyrand—that “It was worse than a crime: it was a blunder.”) He explained Napoleon’s popularity as resulting foremost from an essential French tendency to worship equality to the point of favoring despots who shame the elite. “A proletarian king, he humiliated kings and noblemen in his anterooms,” wrote Chateaubriand. “He levelled the ranks, not down but up.”

Read more than one hundred and fifty years later—these words appeared posthumously in 1849-1850 in the aptly titled Memoirs from Beyond the Grave—Chateaubriand’s writings are simultaneously incisive and erroneous. They correctly identify that a major source of Napoleon’s appeal was his astonishing rise from his birth in a modest household in obscure Corsica, an ascent that seemed to embody the Revolution’s promise of egalitarianism. Broers shrewdly notes that among Napoleon’s first endeavors upon taking power was to open public parks. “The public parks of Napoleonic Paris were physical plebiscites, and an opening of a culture previously the preserve of the privileged, to the nation,” he writes. The number of such populist programs was significant. There was the State Council, which continues to advise the executive and provide oversight of government activity; the enshrinement of government and military promotions based on merit, not birthright; a national bank and stabilized currency; and most of all the Napoleonic Code.

The code, which Napoleon rightly considered his most lasting achievement, enshrined the revolutionary principle of equality before the law, freedom of worship and limited arbitrary police powers (although this latter postulate was far more observed in the breach). This was not something done cavalierly. Napoleon himself presided over fifty-seven of the more than one hundred sessions of the Commission of Legislation tasked with forming the code. Bell observes that

"The French today do not much admire Napoleon Bonaparte, but to the extent they do, it is for his domestic achievements during the period 1799-1804, known as the Consulate. It was a period of authoritarian rule but also of energetic state-building, during which Napoleon established institutions and principles by which the French still govern themselves today."

Chateaubriand was therefore not incorrect in identifying Napoleon’s appeal in his gestures toward classlessness. Where Chateaubriand went wrong was in overstating the emperor’s commitment to equality. Broers and Bell, both longtime scholars of Revolutionary France, underscore just how liberally Napoleon borrowed from the left and the right in consecrating his rule. Triangulation and stability, not adherence to the desires of either the Jacobins or the Bourbons, was Napoleon’s aim and achievement. This was demonstrated in the initial legislation the Napoleonic government moved to pass. It was designed “to reassure the political world that they would not follow victory with revenge,” writes Broers. The regime revoked unpopular laws, released political prisoners and submitted the new constitution to the public for approval by plebiscite (albeit an unnecessarily rigged one).

In some instances, Napoleon’s authoritarian practices increased alongside his confidence. Broers recalls an episode early in Napoleon’s rule when his brother Lucien—who had been instrumental in elevating Napoleon to power and served as Minister of the Interior—published a pamphlet called A Parallel among Caesar, Cromwell, Monck and Bonaparte. The title actually was misleading in that the tract stressed that Bonaparte would not make himself a king, and was in that respect unlike Caesar or Cromwell. Nonetheless, the booklet emphasized Napoleon’s indispensability to France and asked what might happen if the leader “were to be missing.” “The issue of the succession was suddenly made central to public debate, and the introduction of Caesar into the debate, however it was handled, ignited fears that Napoleon, like Caesar, might make himself Consul for Life or, like Cromwell, resort to nepotism if allowed to choose a successor,” writes Broers. Napoleon immediately and ruthlessly stripped Lucien of his powerful ministry and dispatched him to Spain as ambassador, permanently exiling him from power. “My only natural heirs are the French people, they are my child” was Napoleon’s savvy public response to the crisis. He knew the insecurity of his position and the degree to which his legitimacy derived from ties to the more popular notions inherent in the Revolution, above all the end of aristocratic rule.

Of course, eventually crowning himself Emperor of the French—he chose the title to avoid associations with monarchical power and to recall the majesty of Ancient Rome—was exactly what he did, in 1804. It was a different form of kingship than what had come before, however: “Napoleon had created the first explicit example of what came to be called ‘the administrative monarchy,’ an authoritarian state held in check by a well-defined legal code,” writes Broers. “Nothing was further removed from the concept of Divine Right, and it drove a theoretical wedge between the old and the new monarchies.” But it was largely a distinction in concept, not execution. Napoleon had reestablished a court with all the excess and pomp, and he created titles and official costumes that outdid anything the Bourbons contemplated. He moved both his private and official quarters into splendidly redecorated residencies, and even adopted the way of walking of monarchs, from side to side. At the same time, the Napoleonic Code and civic equality remained untouched. “Napoleon clearly wished to present himself as a man of the center,” writes Bell, “reconciling the Old Regime and the Revolution in his own person.”

Bell and Broers differentiate Napoleon from Hitler, Mussolini and co., in his concessions to popular sovereignty and liberalism. Napoleon had dictatorial impulses, certainly, but they existed along other ones that prioritized domestic calm. According to Bell,

"It is important to stress that while the regime created between 1799 and 1804 was authoritarian, illiberal, and undemocratic, it was not, despite the execution of d’Enghien, exceptionally arbitrary or bloodthirsty. Fouché’s networks of spies and informers and his severe censorship system might seem to recall the worst dictatorships of the twentieth century. But unlike those regimes, Napoleon’s France had no gulag and no concentration camps. Throughout Napoleon’s fifteen years in power, there were few political executions, and the rate of political imprisonment remained tiny by modern standards. Napoleon in fact reversed some of the harsher measures taken by the Directory during the military crisis of 1798-99 and allowed émigrés who had fled France during the Revolution to return. Many of the leading French authors of the day...ferociously attacked Napoleon in print at one time or another without losing their lives or their liberty."

By minimizing large-scale repression, Napoleon minimized the political backlash to his rule. That sort of political astuteness first showed itself not in Paris but in foreign battlefields, however. After his first success, at the Siege of Toulon, he sent a letter to the Ministry of War declaring that the English had been unreservedly routed. In fact, they had sunk twelve French warships and stolen another twelve, and burned all the timber stocks needed for repairs and constructions. An expression eventually gained prominence in France: “to lie like an army bulletin.” Broers cites the Toulon letter as the first example of this tendency.

Toulon was soon followed by an astounding success where Napoleon inspired his troops by promising them glory, wealth and honor. To underfed, unpaid soldiers, this was tremendous inspiration, and it encouraged them to follow Napoleon’s brutally long marches. He led infantry columns personally across the bridge at Lodi with his colleagues, and then brilliantly commissioned a painting of him crossing the bridge essentially alone. He consolidated his victories by sending huge sums of money and art looted from his conquered territories back to the Directory in Paris.

More than just wealth, he played up the glory of the French nation to his superiors at home. Just as Franklin Roosevelt made use of radio and John Kennedy of television, so Napoleon took advantage of the explosion of newspapers and a literate public that had emerged in Paris. He had military summaries reprinted in French newspapers boasting of the valor of French troops and their smashing victories over their enemies. He had more than thirty-five portraits of him in Italy made and sent back to Paris. He founded two French-language newspapers to report on his victories. By the time he returned, he was already the most beloved individual in France—thousands showed up to a public festival honoring him. Poets wrote odes to him, playwrights composed plays about his success, biographers conjured up his past and journalists founded a newspaper called Journal of Bonaparte and Virtuous Men. This popularity made the ruling politicians nervous, and they encouraged Napoleon to once again go abroad. With royalist papers fretting about powerful generals taking over, he wisely insisted on wearing civilian clothing and becoming a member of the National Institute, which was devoted to science and literature. He cunningly realized that avoiding the still volatile French political scene could only help him.

The subsequent decision to invade Egypt in 1798 was, in retrospect, a horrible one for the French. (It also had incalculable centuries-long effects: Edward Said wrote in Orientalism that “with Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt processes were set in motion between East and West that still dominate our contemporary cultural and political perspectives.” He was not being complimentary.) But it initially appeared a remarkable success, with the French taking Cairo swiftly in the “Battle of the Pyramids” and soon occupying the entire country, entrancing France with tales of a conquered ancient civilization. Edgar Quinet, a Frenchman who wrote about Napoleon in 1865, noted that another French general, Massena, won victories in Switzerland equaling anything Napoleon achieved in Egypt. Massena was no publicist, however, and his triumphs failed in France to gain anything approaching the attention Napoleon’s received.

The Egyptians soon proved hostile to their invaders, a move into modern-day Israel was disastrous, and soon enough the British were chasing him. Fortunately for Napoleon, by this time, after two more coups had taken place in France and foreign territories were lost, the new leader of the Directory was longing for a general to bring stability to the country. Napoleon was only too happy to oblige. Egypt would fall to the Turks and British just two years after he left. Church bells rang out and crowds mobbed him—Bell terms it the first age of celebrity—but Napoleon knew the disaster he had actually left behind. His own propaganda saved him, as Philip Dwyer has put it. Napoleon transfixed the French public with the genuine intellectual and scientific accomplishments of the adventure. “He did bring back a new vogue in fashion, furniture and frippery, and there was a giraffe as well, but it died on the way to Paris,” Broers writes mordantly. By the time the true scope of the disaster reached the French people, he had already taken power through a coup.

Napoleon’s political genius lay in oscillating between presenting himself as heir to the revolution and the man who ended its upheaval. “The Revolution is over. I am the Revolution,” he said, a statement that embodied his rule and self-perception. But after escaping Elba in 1815, any chance he had of regaining the French crown had to come from more democratic methods than he had hitherto appealed to. In addition to passing a host of liberal measures from reinstating Le Tricolore to expanding press freedom, Napoleon portrayed himself in his later writings after being defeated as more left-wing than he was for all but the last hundred days. Everything he did, he had done for France; everything his opponents did, they had done to France. The Memorial of Saint Helena “presents Napoleon not just as the aloof mighty Emperor, but as somebody who, for all his incomparable cleverness, greatness, and luck is nevertheless accessible, one of ourselves,” wrote historian Christopher Hibbert. To some extent, the gambit worked: the book was released in 1822 and became among the century’s literary sensations, inspiring Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo to write tributes to the man they had previously castigated. Thinks one of Stendhal’s characters, overhearing two workingmen recall the days of L’Empereur: “The only king remembered by the people.” No politician could ask for more.

Jordan Michael Smith is a contributing writer at Salon and the Christian Science Monitor.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse.