Two hundred years after his death, what more is there to say about Napoleon Bonaparte? He remains a perennially popular subject for works of history aimed at the general reader, whether conventional biographies or more specialised studies on aspects of his life, regime and cultural legacy. If, as the Napoleonic historian Philip Dwyer suggests, writing a biography is like holding up a mirror for a contemporary readership, who is the Napoleon that is reflected back at us in 2021?
The work of Napoleonic biographers has been made somewhat easier in the past two decades thanks to the publication, with the support of the Fondation Napoléon, of 15 volumes of Napoleon’s correspondence (the final volume appeared in 2018). This material underpins many of the biographies published in recent years. Chief among these are the multi-volume works by Philip Dwyer, whose final volume in his trilogy, Napoleon: Passion, Death and Resurrection 1815-1840 (Bloomsbury), was published in 2018, and Michael Broers, whose Napoleon: Spirit of the Age: 1805-1810 (Pegasus) appeared in the same year. This, the second in Broers’ three-part biography, covers only five years of Napoleon’s life. But, Broers argues, they mark the zenith of his career, particularly as a military leader. This period saw transformations in his private life, too, as he divorced Joséphine and married Marie-Louise, daughter of the Emperor of Austria, in a bid to secure his dynasty.
