Napoleon the Little

Victor Hugo wrote this book in exile, and you can feel every ounce of his fury. Published in 1852, it is a devastating portrait of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of the great emperor who rode to power on democratic promises only to stage a coup d'état and crown himself emperor. Hugo was there in the National Assembly on December 20, 1848, watching the man take his oath of office as President of the Republic, and he saw exactly what that oath was worth. The book traces every step of the betrayal, every broken principle, every convenient lie. But this is not dry history. It is a man watching the republic die and naming the murderer. More than a century and a half later, Hugo's account still burns because the story never really ends: a leader elected to preserve democracy, who destroys it instead.