Book Review
L'Epopee Napoleonienne
Reviewed by Stephen Ede-Borrett
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by F.G.Hourtoulle, illustrations by J. Girbal. Histoire & Collections, 5 Avenue de la Republique, 75541 Paris In the late 1960's Dr F.G. Hourtoulle's series of uniform plates, "Soldats et Uniformes Du Premier Empire" with the artwork by Jack Girbal was both well known and highly respected. The quality of the production was superb to the point that at the 1996 Napoleonic Fair I had a disagreement with a bookseller who was genuinely convinced that the pair of Hourtoulle plates that he was selling ('Les Creates a la grande armee en 1812' if I remember rightly) were actually water-colours and not printed ! The text of Hourtoulle plates was a combination of a history of the unit or event covered and a description of the uniforms which, like the illustration itself, was drawn from as wide variety of contemporary sources as possible. In short the complete and overall package was excellent although I also recall them as being even more expensive than Rigo's Le Plumet series of plates (if you really want to know they were the outlandish price of 15s each plate - 75p) What the publishers have done here is to bring together a11'78 plates of the original series with their accompanying texts in full. Sadly there is, though, no acknowledgement of the original source of the book - nowhere does it tell you that these were originally a series of prints which would account for the eclectic choice of subject matter. Each of the original sets of plates (they were issued as a text plus one or more actual plates) is given a separate 'Chapter' to the total of 47 in all with subjects as wildly varying as "L'etat-major de Wellington a Waterloo" (2 plates), "Murat" (4 plates), "Les Krakus" (1 plate) and "Le 2e Hussards en Espagne" (2 plates). The plates also cover a number of the more obscure units of the French Army such as the Garde de Paris, the Neuchatel Battalion and, as mentioned, the Croats. Despite the series' title all but four of the plates are of the French Army and its allies, although Prussians, Austrians and British do feature - as objects of French musketry or sabres. The information that Dr Hourtoulle has amassed in the text is quite excellent - much of it had not, in the 1960's, been published before and although a great number of books have come out since then there will still be a mass of information here to whet the appetite of any Napoleonic devotee. The content of the book cannot be faulted but, and let's not mince words here the production is absolutely appalling ! To list all of the errors in production would take up a good part of this journal, and I do not mean annoying but basically irrelevant typos. The fact that the publishers have managed to actually give Jack Girbal as "J.Jirbal" on the front cover is not a good start. The "erratum sheet" that comes with the book lists nineteen fairly major errors such as the texts to plates being transposed (quite a common one that one), the fact that the text makes reference to a soldier - who does not appear on the reproduction of the plate, and (most horrendous of all) that the plate on page 19 is actually misplaced from page 25 where it appears again ! The nice illustration on the back of the sheet of erratum ? - its not decoration, it is the plate from page 19... The quality of the reproduction of the artwork is also very poor, not, I would add, from any basic standpoint but against the original artwork, it simply does not compare. Take a look at the Bavarians on page 205 and 207 and, as a bookseller said to me, they look as though they have come from a child's "painting by numbers" set completed by the child ! Admittedly these two plates are perhaps the worst but none of the others are even in the same ballpark as Monsieur Girbal's original work. So the 64000 dollar question - Would I recommend this book ? When I picked up my copy from the shelf I never had any second thoughts about buying it, even though I was well aware of many of the production faults (although certainly not all of them at that time). simply because I knew the quality of the text and the illustrations are passable. At £ 29.95 (which is what I paid for my copy) this is not a cheap book and I would have to say that you will need to look at the book's contents for yourself and decide. Myself ? Yes I do think that it's a worthwhile buy - it is just a great shame that the final production was botched so badly. More Reader's Reviews
Die Vorgeschichte, Gründung und fröhe Entwicklung The Glory Years 1805-1807 Napoleonic Weekend (video) Wellington's War L'Epopee Napoleonienne 1815: The Waterloo Campaign The Eagle Back to Table of Contents -- First Empire #40 Back to First Empire List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by First Empire. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com |