Napoleon’s Library Coming Out Soon
Bonaparte’s love of the written word, birthed in childhood and nurtured as an adolescent and young adult, never left him. He was a lover of literature for its own sake – often swooning over melodramatic love stories – but he also understood the value of books as instruments of power. Before his campaigns, he poured over dozens of texts relating to the relevant theatres’ geography, population, trade, and history. When contemplating grave decisions, such as his divorce to Empress Josephine, he consulted the historical record for useful precedents to justify and inform his actions. To bolster his troop’s morale during challenging times, he constantly referenced history in his proclamations, making his contemporaries feel as if they were actively shaping history. They were.
The library of an individual is the key to his mind. Behind the grandiose paintings of the victorious conqueror and the constructions of the propagandist, stands the reader. This book is an attempt to glimpse Napoleon’s character without the veneer of imperial glory.
What was he like, alone at night by his fireplace? What thoughts percolated in the mind of the ambitious 20-year-old, isolated in a little room while theorizing about man’s happiness? Who are the literary and historical figures which can claim to have had impacted his life? Who were his favourite authors?
Through this book the reader will embark on a literary promenade with the great general and statemen. In these pages are found the emperor’s favourite authors. And with them, the key to understanding his mind.
“This is a very ambitious book: nothing less than a chronological journey through the intellectual life of Napoleon Bonaparte. It attempts to delve into the restless mind of France’s most intellectual monarch, through an in-depth investigation of everything that we know that he read and wrote. It is a prospect that would daunt the most eminent of professors at Oxbridge or the Sorbonne, yet it has been undertaken by a man in his mid-twenties, as his first book. And it succeeds triumphantly.”
-Andrew Roberts is an English popular historian, journalist and member of the House of Lords. He is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society