The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Vol. 1 (of 4)
1896
The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Vol. 1 (of 4)
1896
William Milligan Sloane's monumental four-volume biography begins where every great story begins: with a place, a people, and the accidents of birth that would reshape history. This first volume immerses readers in the turbulent world of Corsica in the late eighteenth century, a Mediterranean island torn between ancient loyalties and revolutionary fervor, between Pascal Paoli's dying dream of independence and the rising tide of French power. Here we meet the young Napoleone di Buonaparte not as the Emperor who would conquer Europe, but as an ambitious, brilliant, resentful Corsican outsider, saturated in classical heroes and wounded by the family's fall from grace. Sloane renders with Victorian thoroughness the family dynamics, the island politics, and the educational battles that forged a mind capable of dominating a continent. The Europe that shaped him crackles with revolution, war, and ideological upheaval; the young man's ambitions calcify against this backdrop. This is biography as Victorians wrote it: exhaustive, measured, and concerned with character as destiny. The result is not hagiography but a careful, often critical portrait of a man whose Corsican roots ran deeper than anyone would later remember.
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“The Corsican nobleman di Buonaparte was now entirely transformed into the French general Bonaparte. The process had been long and difficult: loyal Corsican; mercenary cosmopolitan, ready as an expert artillery officer for service in any land or under any banner; lastly, Frenchman, liberal, and revolutionary.””
— William Milligan Sloane
“The adroit man profits by everything, neglects nothing which can increase his chances; the less adroit, by sometimes disregarding a single chance, fails in everything.””
— William Milligan Sloane
“The newly rich lost their balance and their stolidity, becoming as giddy and frivolous and aggressive as the worst.””
— William Milligan Sloane
“By common consent the eminent man of the time was Napoleon Bonaparte, the revolution queller, the burgher sovereign, the imperial democrat, the supreme captain, the civil reformer, the victim of circumstances which his soaring ambition used but which his unrivaled prowess could not control. Gigantic in his proportions, and satanic in his fate, his was the most tragic figure on the stage of modern history. While the men of his own and the following generation were still alive, it was almost impossible that the truth should be known concerning his actions or his motives; and to fix his place in general history was even less feasible. What he wrote and said about himself was of course animated by a determination to appear in the best light; what others wrote and said has been biased by either devotion or hatred.””
— William Milligan Sloane
