His strategy always included dashing off thousands of letters and plans, in a personal regime calling for little sleep, much haste and a penchant for being read to while taking baths so as not to waste even a minute.

“Bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine” was Napoleon’s cool if brutal reminder of an ever-present item on his exhausting schedule.

Such views went hand in hand with the grand visions of politics outlined in the ancient histories and biographies Napoleon revered as a young man. If this sounds Machiavellian, that’s because it is - Machiavelli’s arguments about politics informed Napoleon’s self-consciousness, whether in appraising fortune as a woman or a river to be tamed and harnessed, or assuming that in politics it is better to be feared than loved. It requires a mastery of fortune, and a willingness to be ruthless when necessary. Napoleon didn’t mean fatalism by this, rather that political action is unavoidable if you want personal and national glory. Such broad contours get at what Napoleon meant by saying to his literary hero Goethe at a meeting in Erfurt, “Politics is fate.” 2, 1804, he could say, “I am the Revolution.” It was, according to the historian Andrew Roberts’s epically scaled new biography, “Napoleon: A Life,” both the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, an outsider from Corsica who rose to the apex of French political life, and simultaneously a “defining moment of the Enlightenment,” fixing the “best” of the French Revolution through his legal, educational and administrative reforms.

By the time he was crowned emperor on Dec. In a month.” His timing was off, but perhaps he took the misjudgment to heart because he spent the rest of his life trying to bring glory and order to France by building a new sort of empire. On July 22, 1789, a week after the storming of the Bastille in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to his older brother, Joseph, that there was nothing much to worry about.

Andrew roberts napoleon review