By Andrew Roberts

Impressions

Napoleon was one of the most influential figures in history. He was a general who rarely lost battles and did not needlessly start wars (most were declared on him). He had a constant desire to be doing work and was extremely well read and interested in a multitude of subjects. Many of his actions impacted the next century in Europe and led to military formations and administration that is still with us today.

Actionable Notes

  1. Read more. Napoleon read all the time and was extremely well-versed in his ancient history.
  2. Constantly be learning something new.
  3. Do not meddle in other people’s love lives.
  4. Do not become too arrogant/stick to guiding principles. He lost later wars because he could not follow his own military maxims.
  5. Do not blindly trust family or give people limitless opportunities to prove their worth.

Good Quotes

  • Since the campaign had begun a year earlier, Napoleon had crossed the Apennines and the Alps, defeated a Sardinian army and no fewer than six Austrian armies, and killed, wounded or captured 120,000 Austrian soldiers. All this he had done before his twenty-eighth birthday. Eighteen months earlier he had been an unknown, moody soldier writing essays on suicide; now he was famous across Europe, having defeated mighty Austria, wrung peace treaties from the Pope and the kings of Piedmont and Naples, abolished the medieval dukedom of Modena, and defeated in every conceivable set of military circumstances most of Austria’s most celebrated generals – Beaulieu, Wurmser, Provera, Quasdanovich, Alvinczi, Davidovich – and outwitted the Archduke Charles.
  • In an unscripted speech to the Conseil in 1806, which he made only because his education minister, Antoine Fourcroy, hadn’t brought his report to the meeting, Napoleon was almost poetic about how education was the most important of all the institutions, since everything depends upon it, the present and the future. It is essential that the morals and political ideas of the generation which is now growing up should no longer be dependent on the news of the day or the circumstances of the moment… Men already differ enough in their inclinations, their characters and everything that education does not give and cannot reform… Let us have a body of doctrine that doesn’t vary and a body of teachers that doesn’t die.
  • Alsatian Jews made up nearly half of France’s Jewish population of 55,000, and they were blamed for ‘excessive’ usury in that curious inversion whereby people who borrow money under free contracts in an open market blame those who lend it to them.
  • ‘Society in the salons is always in a state of hostility against the government. Everything is criticized and nothing praised.’
  • He was adamant that his role in international affairs was over. ‘History has a triumvirate of great men,’ Macnamara stated, ‘Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon.’ At this, Napoleon looked steadfastly at him without speaking, and Macnamara said ‘he thought he saw the Emperor’s eyes moisten.’