The Age of Napoleon by J. Christopher Herold
“One feels at a loss, trying to fit the brief era of Napoleon’s domination into the scheme of history. Somehow he does not seem to belong there. His positive achievements merely continued the centralizing trends set by Richelieu and Louis XIV. In nearly all other respects, his historical role was that of an unconscious tool of destruction, clearing the way for a modern age that little resembled the age he thought he was creating. The first of the modern dictators, he was less the creature of his times than were his successors and imitators, and he remains unique. Some have found it convenient, therefore, to discount the entire Napoleonic era as an adventure, brilliant but hopeless, made possible by the chaos of the times, paid for by millions of lives, unnecessary and senseless—a pageant of classical glory interrupting the prosaic evolution of modern industrial society. What the historical temperament discounts as a freakish intrusion, the poetic temperament extols as a creation of the will and a manifestation of energy, complete in itself, like a work of art, in which the terrible is transmuted into the sublime, and which has no other purpose than itself.”
—J. Christopher Herold, 1963
