Author: Alistair Horne
Pages: 429
Illustrations: 14 color reproductions and 18 black and white period paintings and prints.
Maps: 15, including 9 grand tactical indicating movements and major units identified by their commander's names, plus 6 strategic theater and regional maps with battle sites noted.
Footnotes: 177
Appendices: None, but a short chronology is provided at the beginning.
Bibliography: 138 sources noted Index: 1,828 entries and sub-entries
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers, Ltd. (England), reprinted in the U.S. by St. Martin's Press, New York
Publication Date: 1996
Binding: Cloth (hardbound)
ISBN: 0-312-15548-4
Price: $26.95
Summary: This entertaining book covers Napoleon's public and private life from his height at Austerlitz in 1805 to his fall and final exile at St. Helena in 1815. French Minister of Foreign Affairs Talleyrand's career is given almost equal coverage. According to Horne, Napoleon's failure to heed Talleyrand's advice led to Talleyrand's defection and Napoleon's eventual defeat, despite all the Emperor's battlefield triumphs.

Alistair Horne's books are usually considered obligatory reading for students of modern French history. Fortunately, unlike much obligatory work, Horne's works are generally exceptionally well-written and captivating. His Price of Glory covered the 1917 battle of Verdun, his Fall of Paris and The Terrible Year covered the siege of Paris in 1870-1871 and the Paris Commune in 1871, and To Lose a Battle covered the collapse of the Third Republic in 1940. Less well known, A Savage War of Peace, is one of the great books on a guerrilla war, in this case the French in Algeria 1954-1962. Given such mastery of French history, including an earlier work on Napoleon in 1805-1807 [Napoleon, Master of Europe 1805-1807 published in 1979 by William Morrow and Company, New York], his verdict on Napoleon was something I have looked forward to reading.

This is not a book on Austerlitz, although that battle takes up a key chapter. It's also not strictly military history, despite a lot of information presented about the Emperor's various campaigns. How Far from Austerlitz? is really a biography of Napoleon. It is an look at the decline and fall of Napoleon, as Horne believes Austerlitz was truly his peak, both militarily and diplomatically. (Prior to Austerlitz, Napoleon's career is only covered briefly, almost as an introductory chapter.)

Horne's view can be summed up from a comment in his introduction: "Dictators and nations can win striking victories, but still lose wars Ñ and the peace. There follows the exhaustion, failure or death of the dynamic leader, and everything collapses."

The real "hero" of this book is Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, Napoleon's Minister of Foreign Affairs, an idea that many Frenchmen, who regard him as an unscrupulous traitor, would find difficult to accept. Of course Talleyrand committed a betrayal of unparalleled scope when he defected to Napoleon's enemies after the Peace of Tilsit in 1807. At Erfurt, Talleyrand was nominally Napoleon's foreign minister, but in reality he was working for Tsar Alexander. Horne accepts this with Talleyrand's own self-serving excuse that treason was just a matter of dates. Horne argues that it was Napoleon's failure to listen to Talleyrand's diplomatic advice that was the long-term cause of the Emperor's downfall.

Horne contends that the treaties Napoleon imposed on Austria in 1805 and 1809, and on Prussia and Russia in 1807 were just too humiliating for those countries to accept indefinitely. With the help of British gold, these nations were bound to try again and again to unseat the French Emperor. Horne never discusses whether a more generous treatment could have genuinely reconciled the autocratic rulers of nations that were enemies of France even before the Revolution to a true peace with a man regarded as an upstart.

Horne's main thesis is that by ignoring the balance of power and failing to make any allies (Bavaria and the minor German states apparently don't count), Napoleon was doomed. Horne, clearly an admirer of the Poles, considers Napoleon's failure to really re-establish Poland a missed opportunity. Horne admires Marie Walewska, Napoleon's mistress and mother of his illegitimate son, Alexandre. Napoleon's callous treatment of her, even when she tried to see him when he was exiled at Elba, sums up all Horne's disapproval of Napoleon.

A few sources are well used. It was irritating that inadequate footnotes don't always allow you to find out where key quotations can be found. But this is a classic rendition of Napoleon as a "great bad man", doomed by his own insatiable ambitions. It owes a great debt to Duff Cooper's Life of Talleyrand.

It is an entertaining book, if you accept its Anglocentric view of the period. It was disappointing that such an expert on France writes so little on what the French, then and now, thought of Napoleon, and what effect Napoleon had on France. Instead we are given far more on British and even American public opinion.

The book's weaknesses is its paucity of sources. Horne seems a little lost without the ability to interview veterans of the time, as was possible in some of his other books. A few famous memoirs and a mass of British secondary sources fill his bibliography. Winston Churchill, Carola Oman, Bernard Montgomery, Arthur Bryant are good historians of Britain, but they don't provide that much insight on Napoleon. French sources include Caulaincourt and Bourienne, Marbot and Thiers, and so forth, but for a historian of France, surprisingly few Frenchmen. Horne has done wonders with what sources he has, but it's a very rickety edifice.

The numerous references to Hitler and World War Two are fine at first, but in the end even Horne has to admit the comparisons are superficial at best. The "pop" judgments often left me aghast. For example:

"And soon [Napoleon] would be slipping back to the transient infidelities which he needed to bolster the sexual inferiority complex that never ceased to fret him."

Was Austerlitz fought simply because Napoleon was over-compensating for his sexual inadequacy? The Emperor's numerous and documented sexual adventures indicate that he had more than enough opportunities for indulgence without having to resort to wars. Such psychological mumbo-jumbo tarnishes the book, particularly since it often appears in unsubstantiated throw-away comments. It is a shame to see Horne perpetuate some of the trendy reductionist arguments that have done nothing to enhance a true understanding of a figure as complex as Napoleon.

The reading of this book was also spoiled by the surprising number of minor errors, none great enough to wreck Horne's arguments, but sometimes irritating, sometimes entertaining:

"Though the Directory had done much to improve France's political structure..."

"(the Emperor) setting forth, on 1 October, on one of his rare campaigns without a woman." Is there something Napoleonic scholars are not telling us?

"...on 28 July Wellesley inflicted a serious defeat on Soult at Talavera." Victor actually, Soult was defeated at Oporto a little earlier.

In 1814 "...Wellington was across the Pyrenees at Narbonne with 125,000 men." Wrong end of the Pyrenees; Wellington crossed by Bayonne at the western end.

"On 6 September, Ney suffering from the loss of his genius, Jomini,...blundered foolishly into a trap laid for him by Bernadotte." This not only overrates the prowess of Jomini, but also Bernadotte, who was dragged unwillingly into the battle by his Prussian subordinates.

"...the Prussians, whose triumph at Leipzig would herald their emergence as the leading power in Germany." Actually Prussia was considered a second-rate power, a pawn of Austria or Russia, for the next 50 years, until it dramatically and unexpectedly assumed dominance under the guidance of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

"It was the black-clad infantry from Prussia." The Prussians wore dark blue of course, but this anachronism still persists.

At Waterloo: "(Blucher) after meeting Wellington at the farm of the well-named Belle-Alliance, on the morning of the historic 18th..." This is not only a meeting that never happened, but one that would have required both generals to infiltrate through the French army since this hamlet was just behind the center of the French line!

The multitude of historical inaccuracies engenders little confidence in the reference value of this book. The "lesson" Horne's book postulates is that a major power, no matter how strong, is always doomed if it attempts to stand alone against coalitions. While this is a supportable argument, it certainly isn't an original idea, nor does this book provide new insight or new material to make it a valuable biography of the man who has had more written about him than any other human being.

This is a great shame as Alistair Horne is usually an engrossing narrator of history. Talleyrand, not Napoleon, seems to be the real subject of this book. However, if you want to see a masterful popular historian at work, read Horne's earlier and more powerful books.

More Book Reviews:

How Far from Austerlitz?
Napoleon Bonaparte
Brassey's Napoleonic Wars

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