This interview of American scholar Harold T. Parker begins a series of historiographical interviews with outstanding senior historians in the field of French Revolution/Napoleonic Studies from all over the world. Future issues will feature Col. John Elting (U. S. Military Academy, West Point); Dr. David G. Chandler, (Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, England); Dr. Dorothy Carrington (Frederica Lady Rose), an author who lives in Ajaccio, Corsica; and Dr. Donald Horward (Florida State University); among others.

As a whole, the autobiographical series will highlight the variety and richness of teaching, research, and writing in the 1990s. Not all the subjects included will be "academic"; some will talk about their interest in wargames and historical re-enactments.

This series is directed by, and most of the interviews conducted by Dr. June K. Burton, who retired from the Department of History at the University of Akron (Ohio) in 1994. Dr. Burton has written or edited dozens of articles and books on Napoleonic subjects, including contributing 22 extensive entries to the Historical Dictionary of Napoleonic France (published in 1985 by Greenwood Press).

Besides offering a great deal of human interest and providing role models, this series aims to promote future scholarship into sources and areas suggested by the interviewees.

Harold T. Parker, now celebrating his diamond jubilee as one of America's most respected scholars of the French Revolutionary Era, reminisces about his distinguished career, assesses the past and present state of the field, and suggests future directions for cooperation.

Although he was born in Ohio in 1907, Harold Talbot Parker attended the University of Chicago from kindergarten (at the John Dewey Laboratory School) to Ph.D. After completing his doctorate during the Great Depression, he taught high school in West Chicago for two years -- "the only two miserable years of my life" -- saved $900 (60% of his salary) each year, and quit, taking refuge in 1936 at Widener Library (Harvard) and the Library of Congress to work on his second book, Three Napoleonic Battles, which would be published in 1944 and reprinted in 1983.

In those days, the University of Chicago placed students by date of graduation alphabetically, so when the first available college-level vacancy finally occurred five years later for a 1934 doctoral recipient whose name happened to begin with "P", he was matched with Duke University. Parker served on the Duke faculty from 1939 until 1977.

However, the Duke historian had an interruption: when he was thirty-five years old and still a bachelor, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. Coincidentally, he completed the manuscript of Three Napoleonic Battles on the same day in 1942 when his draft number appeared in the Durham Morning Herald. After first being trained as a radioman, Staff Sergeant Parker was selected for an Army Air Corps Intelligence group that wrote the on-site histories of the 67th Troop Carrier Squadron in the Pacific Theater from 1943-45.

After the war, Parker became recognized not only as one of Duke University's finest teachers, but also as one of the most outstanding in America. Moreover, he assumed leadership roles in the Faculty Undergraduate Council and several history organizations as well as engaged in cooperative research projects. His numerous Ph.D. students include Chester Bowles, Richard Barker (Montclair State College), the late Joseph DiCorcia, William Olejniczak (University of Charleston), Hans Lischka (Francis Marion University), John Kirkland (Bucknell), John and Carolyn White (University of Alabama in Huntsville), James Winders (Appalachian State University) and Virginia Williams.

Dr. Parker, superficially a quiet and reserved, small and thin person with light blue eyes, always speaks with utmost civility; yet, throughout his career his personal and professional opinions have often been controversial. He thinks of himself as a "midwestern democrat" and pacifist who hates rank wherever it appears -- officers, bishops, senior professors. During the Vietnam War, as the faculty commencement speaker at Duke and with the University's next President, Terry Sanford, in the audience, he urged the campus to work toward creating a real community where students would not naturally be at the bottom of a hierarchial system; also, he stated his opinion that the University need not wait for an end to the war before it added peace studies to the curriculum.

After his forced retirement at age seventy, Dr. Parker taught briefly at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of the South (Sewanee, Tennessee) and the University of Alabama in Huntsville. At the latter he met his future wife, Dr. Louise Salley, with whom he later co-edited five volumes of the Proceedings of the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1850. It is noteworthy that in the two decades since his retirement, Dr. Parker has continued to be professionally active and has doubled his list of publications.

The 1997 annual Consortium on Revolutionary Europe [a historical society devoted to all aspects of the period 1750-1850 in Europe, which began meeting annually in 1971, under the sponsorship by five Southern universities whose faculty serve as its Directors], meeting at Louisiana State University, 20-22 February, 1997, celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Dr. Parker's first monograph. On this occasion he presented a paper entitled: "Toward Understanding Napoleon."

Understandably, Dr. Parker has received many awards. Four were for teaching: 1966 -- one of ten best undergraduate teachers at Duke; 1971 -- one of three best undergraduate teachers at Duke; 1973 -- The Annual Distinguished Teacher Award of the National Association of Schools and Colleges of the United Methodist Church; 1977 -- "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," Newsweek, one of seven outstanding retiring professors chosen nationally. Three other awards were for having been active in the early years of three scholarly societies -- The Society for French Historical Studies, The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, and The European History Section of the Southern Historical Association to which he has belonged since 1940.

Recently, the Parkers moved from Durham, North Carolina, to Still Hopes Retirement Community, West Columbia, South Carolina in order to free themselves from housework, thereby conserving their energies for scholarly pursuits and other pleasures. Dr. Parker has always enjoyed golf, a game he played "religiously" beginning at age seven.

How would you compare the state of the historical profession in the U.S. today to when you began teaching?

PARKER: I am unable to answer, since today the historical profession is so huge and amorphous that I cannot grasp it. In 1928, when I entered, it was a limited research enterprise: a few select, small departments of really outstanding scholars, few graduate students, and limited subject matter and methodologies. Since then it has participated in an explosion of personnel, financial aid, methodologies applied, and breadth and amount of knowledge obtained.

In 1989 Georg Iggers and I made a brave attempt to come to terms with the explosion, but our cooperative effort needs to be updated, perhaps, in the year 2000. Meanwhile, I can only indicate what happened and what might beneficially happen in a single field -- the Napoleonic.

What motivated your original interest in Napoleonic history?

PARKER: I entered the Napoleonic field as the unanticipated outcome of a series of accidents. In our progressive University of Chicago laboratory elementary and high schools, we were offered the opportunity from the fourth grade to enroll in French or German classes. Since German was my father's favorite foreign language, I took German. (And when the United States entered World War I, I suffered ostracism for doing so; enrollment in a class of ten students taught by Frau Gronow, a German wife of the German professor at the University of Chicago, dropped to three with our entry).

But in high school and college my foreign language was French, and I allowed my German to slip. When I entered the graduate school of the University in October, 1928, I intended to sign up for Bernadotte Schmitt's celebrated and formidable seminar on the July, 1914, origins of World War I. But James Westfall Thompson, who was registering me, advised that I not so enroll until my German was stronger and placed me instead in Louis Gottschalk's lecture course on the French Revolution, where my French would function.

What was it like being in Gottschalk's class?

PARKER: I was enrolled with six other graduate students in Gottschalk's two-quarter lecture course on the French Revolution, 1789-1794. On the first day he walked into the room and after a few preliminaries assigned a term paper: "Find a subject and come to know more about it than anyone else in the world," and walked out. Recently, Henry Eldridge Bourne had published a very useful article on research opportunities in the French Revolution [American Historical Review 33 (Jan., 1928): 315-22.] and mentioned the accumulating volumes of cahiers [the cahiers de doleances were lists of grievances that the French people prepared, as was constitutional custom, in preparation for the opening of the Estates General, called to meet for the first time in May of 1789, to address the financial crisis] that were being published and that were in the University of Chicago library, unused. With a second undergraduate major in economics and statistics, I applied quantitative methods to the peasant cahiers. Gottschalk was impressed and recommended that by all means I should have a year at Cornell with his mentor, Carl Lotus Becker [1873-1945].

Did you prepare for graduate study at Cornell?

PARKER: Yes. To improve my German, I spent the summer of 1929 in Berlin. Before entering Cornell the following September, I tracked down and read every line that Becker had published. (Today, how many graduate students think to read, study, and absorb the works of their supervisor?) I came across his suggestion that someone write a book on the 18th Century cult of antiquity of the French and American revolutionaries. The cahiers having become the preserve of Beatrice Hyslop, I responded to this second chance and asked his permission to work on it. By sheer chance I arrived the year when the senior/graduate course was on Napoleon!

How did Becker treat Napoleon?

PARKER: In his lectures Becker was eminently fair to Napoleon. However, in a closing class session he raised the question: Was Napoleon a Great Man? We had already read in the biographies of H. A. L. Fisher [see sidebar on Carl Becker] and John Holland Rose their last paragraph of qualified praise. To shock us into thinking, Becker read aloud H. G. Wells' outright condemnation from The Outline of History [1921: "...Napoleon could do no more than strut upon the crest of this great mountain of opportunity like a cockerel on a dunghill. The figure he makes in history is one of almost incredible self-conceit, of vanity, greed, and cunning, of callous contempt and disregard of all who trusted him, and of a grandiose aping of Caesar, Alexander, and Charlemagne which would be purely comic if it were not caked over with human blood...."].

Becker then led us to see that before we could answer the question we would first have to decide: what is greatness. He then noted that the professional historian is equipped by his training to discover what actually happened, and he is honor-bound to present it as honestly as he can, but when he comes to questions of greatness, values, and ultimate meaning he is no better off than anyone else. Such questions are simply beyond his expert competence and had best be left to others. The historian should stick to what he is trained to do: the search, discovery, and presentation of historical reality in all its complexity. However, the question Becker raised, Was Napoleon a Great Man? still hovers.

So did your year with Becker at Cornell turn you into a Napoleonic historian?

PARKER: Becker's course gave me the basis for a deliberate choice of fields for further research. Gottschalk's lecture and research on the cult of antiquity pointed me toward the French Revolution; Becker's lectures and associated reading opened up the Napoleonic field. After I had finished polishing for publication the manuscript of The Cult of Antiquity in the summer of 1935, I deliberately chose to enter the Napoleonic field.

Why? Because it seemed to me that the opportunities for fundamental and useful scholarly research were greater in the Napoleonic field than those remaining in the French Revolution (Lynn Hunt assures me this is still true.) and because the personal sources, including Napoleon's Correspondance, were more interesting.

Hadn't there already been much written on Napoleon?

PARKER: As Pieter Geyl pointed out in Napoleon, For and Against [1949], the 19th Century historiography was an unproductive series of controversies between protagonists and antagonists of the Hero, with little gain in substantial knowledge. Toward the close of the century, a few scholars, trained in those precepts and practices of historical criticism that we identify with Leopold von Ranke, began to accumulate a core of substantial knowledge that is beyond the play of partisan wind and weather.

This process has continued until today, with the result that Ronald J. Caldwell's massive and masterly bibliography [1991] can reveal the vast amount of scholarly publication that has occurred in the Napoleonic field, and the two dictionaries edited by Owen Connelly [1985] and Jean Tulard [1987] can demonstrate the amazing quantity of accurate information that has accrued.

Yet, when at mid-point in this historiographic development I read the monographs in 1929 and in 1936 the 28 volumes of Napoleon's Correspondance, it seemed to me that there were still unexploited opportunities in tracing Napoleon's activities as an administrator (still open) and in writing a biography that interweaves Napoleon, a complex, continuing and yet developing personality, with the events, trends, institutions, and changing values of a complex age (still open). Except for Three Napoleonic Battles (1944), my probes have all been inventive responses to the basic opportunities noted in 1936.

What made you return to Napoleon later on in your career?

PARKER: The answer is: after the summer of 1936 I never left. The Cult of Antiquity was submitted to the University of Chicago Press in September, 1935. During the following year, in the midst of the Great Depression, I decided to quit my job at West Chicago Community High School and spend a year in Widener Library [Harvard], probing the opportunities in the Napoleonic field. I have been probing and thinking about Napoleon ever since.

You were drafted in 1942. Did service in World War II alter your career significantly?

PARKER: Yes, it interrupted my career and distorted its "normal" course of development. Let me explain.

The Great Depression delayed for five years my entrance into a university career. Then, just as I was being incorporated into a university community, World War II knocked me out for more than 3 1/2 years.

In my second year at Duke (1940-1941) I was given the junior-senior course on the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon, which I taught for two years and started to develop an original approach to the origins and causes of the French Revolution. When I returned in February, 1946, I discovered that "my" junior-senior course had been given to a new instructor, another Gottschalk Ph.D., and I had been assigned to the junior-senior course on 19th Century European history, 1815-1914. The immediate effect of this postwar situation was that preparation of a new set of lectures in both a new introductory course and a new junior-senior course delayed my return to Napoleonic research until 1949, seven years after I left it.

The long-range effect was that until my retirement from Duke in 1977, I never gave a course or a graduate seminar in my research field. Teaching and research did not reinforce each other.

Did you find being in the service more exciting than the "ivory tower"?

PARKER: The army, for me, was a liberalizing experience. Reared in a faculty family and elite private schools and in the summers in an ideal small farm, small business town midwestern democracy, I was introduced by the army to young America. Lying on my cot in the barracks I listened enthralled to their braggadacio boasting of their (alleged) sexual prowess. I also enjoyed their basic friendliness and camaraderie.

Then, through the army experience I came to appreciate the predicament of the blacks by becoming a black myself. Let me explain. The army is a hierarchical institution in which formal rank counts, and enlisted men are discriminated against in pay, respect, and living quarters. I came to hate every officer, even the "good" officers who were pleasant to "the men." In other words, I was a black. The difference was that when on leave, I took off my uniform and donned civilian clothes, I was white again. A black can never put off the color of his skin.

Did the war affect your research methodology or teaching after the war?

PARKER: I came to distrust any source not written by a participant eyewitness. The best of the war reporters for human interest was Ernie Pyle. He was a very fine person, but his articles were too sentimental by far. The newsmagazine Time, to enhance the impression of verisimilitude, added pictorial details to their New Guinea accounts. To the soldiers who were there they were laughably inaccurate. Yet, as an army man even in a non-combat arm I frequently discovered that my Three Napoleonic Battles checked out. Why? Because it was based on participant eyewitnesses.

At the same time I recognized that until I had a comparable experience I had not understood the full import of what I had said or quoted. There is no substitute for first-hand experience, even though what one brings to the experience -- personality, education, knowledge, religion -- affects what the experience is and how it is perceived.

Practically, as a scholar and teacher, I carried away from the army only one thing that was useful to me in civilian life: how to print with chalk or a marker on a map and hence on a blackboard. Army experience was an intellectual vacation and personally a waste of time. However, as a public service to my country and to humanity, it may have been the most useful three and a half years of my life.

Why did your first two books The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries and Three Napoleonic Battles become "classics?"

PARKER: Last night for the first time in decades I read The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit [1937]. My response was that of the elderly Jonathan Swift when he re-read his youthful Tale of the Tub: "My I was once brilliant. This book is really very good." [Parker's own editorial note: Swift allegedly exclaimed: "Great God! What genius I was when I wrote this book."] So the question arises: What entered into its composition?

First, the topic was excellent. It was Becker's, of course. In a review of Bernard Fay's L'Esprit revolutionnaire en France et aux Etats-Unis [The Revolutionary Spirit in France and the United States], he wrote: "Will not someone write a book showing how the revolutionary state of mind in the eighteenth century was also nourished on an ideal conception of classical republicanism and Roman virtue?..." The topic opened vistas of exploration that no scholar had hitherto followed out. And it was a good topic for me. From age ten I had read history and hence could resonate to participants in the French Revolution who had done so, too.

Secondly, the investigation was guided by sound method. The basic approach, too, was Becker's: to seek the origin of ideas by placing the people thinking them in the public and private conditions of their lives, and then examining the situation, the thinker, and the ideas with psychological finesse. But I added a refinement. Repelled by the slovenly generalizing of Fay (an incident in Paris in 1781, another in Philadelphia in 1785, "voilˆ l'esprit revolutionnaire," [there's the revolutionary spirit] I deliberately sought and invented a foolproof method of writing intellectual history.

I took one hundred participants in the French Revolution and traced their lives and their attitudes toward classical antiquity from birth to the guillotine or exile. I found enough data about thirty-eight of them to generalize about their juvenile cult and then month by month their ideas during the Revolution. I did not know that this method was technically known as prosopography and had been used for years by literary historians. I had the thrill of believing I was "rolling my own". Since most of the participants were born in the 1750s, the method also implied a generation approach.

Third, I took my time. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I wrote eight term papers a year and I never had time to complete one to my satisfaction. During the Great Depression no jobs were available for history Ph.D.s Why not write a dissertation that would be a first book? So in the seminars of Becker, Preserved Smith, and Louis Gottschalk I explored the topic in essays on Plutarch, the 18th Century philosophy of history (history teaching by example), the curriculum of the French colleges, the orators and orations of the National Convention, and Condorcet.

Once my three years of graduate residence were completed I spent a year and a half at Chicago, at the Bibliotheque Nationale, and at Cornell, typing or handwriting allusions to antiquity verbatim (the investigator never knows what is important until he dovetails all his evidence). At the end it took me ten weeks simply to read all my notes and arrange them in strict chronological order before spending another sixteen months writing. In other words, the book has erudition, and books with that quality endure.

In researching the Bureau of Commerce I came across Leon Biollay's Etudes economiques sur le XVIII e siecle -- l'administration du commerce [Economic studies on the 18th Century -- the administration of commerce], published in 1885, and I recognized a kindred spirit. He had done his homework intelligently and honorably, and his word, every single one, can be relied upon.

Finally, The Cult of Antiquity was well-written. Here, too, the influence of Becker was decisive. At the scientific University of Chicago we were taught that the substance of the thought was all important, and that style was a frivolous adornment. Becker taught that the excellence of thought and its form of expression were intimately related. A scholar could not think well and scrupulously without writing well, or write well without thinking well, and style would follow. Listening to his lectures and to his monologues in seminar was like listening to a great book read aloud. He confessed that as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin he had aspired to be a novelist, and he had read aloud the great novelists and essayists.

So, taking the hint, every evening I read five pages of Sir Henry Craik's five-volume anthology of the masters of English prose from Thomas Malory to Robert Louis Stevenson, catching the cadences of their thought and expression, until I had my own voice. Not least, I copyedited my dissertation for publication. It had been accepted en bloc without change by the doctoral committee, but Gottschalk suggested that I might review it after it had cooled. So, a year later, for three hours every morning I sat with five pages of the typed manuscript and read them backward, scrutinizing for improvement of each sentence, one by one. Except for a few changes in punctuation, the University of Chicago Press copyeditors accepted the revised manuscript as it stood.

In the end, no one asks how long a book took, but how good it is.

How long did it take you to write your second monograph, Three Napoleonic Battles?

PARKER: The "Battle of Friedland" was not written for publication. Once I had decided to enter the Napoleonic field, I first spent the summer of 1936 reading straight through the twenty-eight volumes of his printed Correspondance, missing (I now see) most everything along the way but gaining an indelible sense of Napoleon as warrior and administrator. I also noted the specific topic of writing from the letters to his brothers an article on his philosophy of governing conquered peoples.

In preparing to write a biography of Napoleon I deliberately adopted the procedure that had worked well for The Cult of Antiquity, of undertaking exploratory probes into aspects of the field. I thought that as a student of Napoleon I should come to terms with his action as a warrior. Widener Library [Harvard] was rich in sources in French and German history and, specifically, on the battle of Friedland. So, at first for myself alone, I wrote my first probe, simply to discover -- what was there and how to do it.

Then, the accidental discovery at The University of Chicago library of extracts from the case book of Baron Larrey, the great military surgeon, led me to the second probe, the battle of Aspern-Essling.

Finally, to bring them together, I wrote the "Battle of Waterloo", always as a private experiment and never with the thought of becoming a military historian.

If the resultant book, Three Napoleonic Battles, has any value, it can be explained in terms of the soundness of its method -- the matching and dovetailing of eyewitness accounts from both sides, by the freshness of the vision of writing military history in terms of all the people involved, the commanders, the subordinate officers, the private soldiers, and the lay citizens, and by my emotional reaction of horror and divine pity.

Since its publication, I have continued my probes in the Napoleonic field into methods of governing, administrative history, psychohistory, and psychosocial history. By now, perhaps, I am ready to write a biography. Its title might be "Toward Understanding Napoleon". It would make sense of my many voyages of discovery.

Do you have a research assistant?

PARKER: I do not use a research assistant. The problem is that the investigator has to gain a sense of historical context and nuance, and only reading all the evidence will do that. However, I have closely collaborated with fellow-scholars with whom I shared the same intellectual equipment and historiographical knowledge: Richard Herr of the University of California at Berkeley [Ideas in History, 1965]; Marvin Brown of North Carolina State University [Major Themes in Modern European History, 1974]; Mike Martin of Glade Springs, Virginia ["Patterns of Consciousness: Romanticism and Neo-Romanticism," 1977]; Georg Iggers of the State University of New York at Buffalo [International Handbook of Historical Studies, 1979]; and, Louise Salley Parker of the University of Alabama at Huntsville [Great Historians of the Modern Age, 1991].

To these should be added my comrades in an Intelligence unit in the U.S. Army Air Force: Steve Benson, Bill Birdzell, Collas G. Harris, Robert Patrich and Eugene Miller; together we wrote The History of the 67th Troop Carrier Squadron [1944: see bibliography at end of article]. More recently, Betty Hodges, Louise Newton, Judith Pearson, Sibyl Powe, George Pyne, and David Ross, my fellow-communicants in St. Philip's Episcopal Church [Durham, North Carolina] joined me in writing The History of St. Philip's, 1878-1994 [1997].

In every instance of collaboration we shared identical or complementary knowledge and abilities and produced essays or books that were richer than an individual product would have been.

Are you planning future research?

PARKER: I have several projects underway: two essays on the origins and evolution of Napoleon's methods of governing, 1796-1807; a book encompassing my psychosocial articles on Napoleon, entitled "Toward Understanding Napoleon" (perhaps, followed by a short biography also with that title); these besides a third volume on the history of the Bureau of Commerce and Manufacture as well as editing a book entitled Sermons from St. Philip's.

Who do you feel are today's leading Napoleonic scholars/writers in the U.S. and abroad?

PARKER: Tentatively, I suggest the following in alphabetical order within each country: France: Louis Bergeron, Jean Bertaud (now that he is preparing a book on the French army under Napoleon), Jean Defranceschi, and Jean Tulard; Great Britain: Dorothy Carrington, David Chandler and Geoffrey Ellis; Canada: J. M. P. McErlean; United States: Eric Arnold (Denver, Colorado), Scott Bowden, June Burton, Ronald Caldwell, Owen Connelly, John R. Elting, Robert Forster, John Gallaher, Robert Holtman, Donald Horward, Proctor Jones, Leonard Macaluso, George Nafziger, Harold Parker, Steven Ross, Gunther Rothenberg, Paul Schroeder, John Severn, and Isser Woloch; Israel: Avner Falk.

There are also German, Italian, Russian and Spanish scholars.

Do you have any advice for young scholars just entering the profession?

PARKER: Yes. First, seek or stumble across the great teacher. Great teachers dissolve ceilings and open vistas. They raise open-ended questions that haunt you the rest of your life. In my experience they were George Herbert Mead (Philosophy), Carl Becker (History), William T. Laprade (History), and Irving Alexander (Psychology). Beside them there will be excellent practitioners who instruct in the principles of historical criticism. For me these were James Westfall Thompson (medieval history) and Bernadotte Schmitt (modern diplomatic).

Second, very early find a topic for research that can be expanded into a master's thesis, a doctoral dissertation, and a first book. It should be a topic that makes a serious, significant contribution to historical scholarship. Avoid curiosity topics such as: Did Marshal Ney evade execution and become a schoolmaster in western North Carolina? Was Napoleon murdered? Such curiosity topics are a waste of a serious scholar's time.

Third, having mastered the techniques of historical criticism, become acquainted with the instrumental advantages and limitations of fifteen or so auxiliary approaches and techniques, so that their usefulness to your investigation can be estimated; then test them in application to see what they will yield.

Fourth, invent methods on your own.

Fifth, learn to write well, please.

Despite the fact that so much has already been written on Napoleonic subjects, what opportunities for research and popularization exist today?

PARKER: I have three suggestions.

First, it has been the practice in the Napoleonic field for a knowledgeable scholar to survey the field of accomplishment and note what remains to be done: George Dutcher in the Journal of Modern History [1932]; Louis Villat in his "Etat des questions" in his La Revolution et l'Empire [1789-1815 volume of the original Clio series: 1936; third edition,1947]; Jacques Godechot in his footnotes to Les Institutions de la France sous la Revolution et l'Empire [first edition 1951; second edition 1968]; Robert Holtman and Harold T. Parker in a symposium of the American Historical Association [published in the Journal of Modern History, June, 1957]; and Parker again in an address to the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association [published as "Napoleon Reconsidered" in French Historical Studies, Spring, 1987].

It would be useful (a) if the two Napoleonic societies [Napoleonic Society of America and the Canadian-based International Napoleonic Society] and the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1850, would recruit a knowledgeable scholar or a panel of scholars to study how many of the opportunities thus identified have been answered, and (b) if the two societies and the Consortium would sponsor sessions on the opportunities still existing and opening up in the military, economic, social, political, and cultural history of the period.

Second, it will be discovered, I think, that to integrate (interweave) Napoleon with French and European society we shall need more longitudinal studies that move a family or an institution from the Old Regime through the Revolution into the Napoleonic era and Bourbon Restoration. Robert Forster's history of the house of Saulx-Tavanes, 1700-1830 [1971] is a fine example of what can and should be done in social history; Parker's two books and two articles on the Bureau of Commerce/Manufactures from 1781-1815 point to what might be accomplished in administrative history; Paul Schroeder's massive The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848 [1994] reveals what rich insights a longitudinal approach to diplomacy will yield.

Three, from time to time there has appeared a one-volume biography that deftly presents for non-professionals what scholars have achieved thus far. In 1929 these were H. A. L. Fisher (1913), August Fournier (1915), and John Holland Rose (new edition, 1916). Later, they were succeeded by the magisterial statement by Georges Lefebvre for the Peuples et civilisations series (1936, 1953) and Felix Markham's Napoleon and the Awakening of Europe (1965). Still later we have Albert Manfred, Napoleon Bonaparte (1973), translated from the Russian into French (1980) ; and Jean Tulard, Napoleon: ou, Le mythe du sauveur (1977) [Napoleon: or the myth of the savior].

But even as Tulard's book and the two dictionaries were being prepared, remorseless research was bringing into question some of their conclusions. For example, the books and articles by Dorothy Carrington, Jean Defranceschi, J. M. P. McErlean, and Leonard Maculoso on aspects of Napoleon's youth have rendered suspect nearly everything we thought we knew about his career until the siege of Toulon [1793]. The effect of Connelly's Blundering to Glory [1987] and of Paul Schroeder's The Transformation of European Politics is the same: to raise serious doubts about the conventional scholarly story of Napoleon's military campaigns and diplomacy.

Likewise, the unpublished, 1,000-typed-page psychobiography by Dr. Avner Falk of Jerusalem summarizes and raises doubts about our psychological interpretations of Napoleon, especially of his self-destructive behavior after 1807. Nor should the excellent monographs that are being turned out in all sectors of the Napoleonic story be overlooked. We need another one-volume biography that is abreast of current scholarly achievement.

Before we conclude, you described how Carl Becker tried to be fair to Napoleon in his teaching at Cornell in the 1930s, but you haven't told us what is your personal opinion of Napoleon's greatness and how has this evolved in your mind?

PARKER: As the member of an academic family and as a graduate student at Chicago and Cornell, I was reared to be objective and like Becker to avoid judging, even though I came to see that the ultimate "objective" narrative is the story of successive subjectivities. Nevertheless, it is difficult for the investigator to remain emotionally neutral with regard to Napoleon. He still projects his charisma across the centuries. And how one reacts to him depends as much on one's own emotional needs at that moment as on the nature of Napoleon's personality, whatever that is. So my reaction to Napoleon changed as I changed.

The essay I wrote as a high-school senior on "The Napoleonic Period" was a balanced, analytical appraisal of Napoleon's relation to the French Revolution, with no emotional reaction. My year of study with Becker, contrary to Becker's intent, turned me into a gung-ho Napoleonic fan. Three Napoleonic Battles was imbued with admiration, tinged with a sense of impending and accomplished tragedy. But during the succeeding years spent tracing Napoleon's policies and actions with regard to the management of conquered peoples I became fatigued and even bored by his never-ending self-seeking egoistic personal aggrandizement that corrupted and debased nearly everything he did and touched.

In a summer seminar for teachers I had three Catholic nuns. At the conclusion of a week's series of lectures on Napoleon and his measures, one nun asked me: "But Dr. Parker, what is your opinion of Napoleon?" As I placed the self-seeker Napoleon in juxtaposition to the nuns with their dedication to Jesus Christ and to their vocation I replied: "Despicable."

After the radiance of gung-ho-ism and the darkness of disapproval I have emerged into the settled tranquility of moving through study toward understanding Napoleon as he aggressively encountered the experiences of living.

One thing I have learned: that while he had continuously certain central qualities, he was never static, and hence a generalization about his personality traits and policies of a given year of his life will not be true of any preceding or posterior year. A second thing: one of the charms of Napoleon (I am now succumbing to his charisma) was his gift for observant, realistic self-analysis. Indeed, St. Helena was for him an adventure in self-analysis and self-understanding. His ultimate self-appraisal is illuminating: "J'ai trop d'ambition, et un esprit enflamme" [I have too much ambition, and a spirit afire"].

Bibliographical Notes