Napoleon In The House

Napoleon's Coronation, which we saw last month at the Louvre

Sonnet and I begin the New Year with War And Peace, ten hours of it, broadcast on Radio 4 all day, New Year's day. It is a wonderful production, abridged of course, and brings alive the book I read several years ago.

W&P, Vanity Fair and Les Miserables (which I read following our visit to the Paris sewers) each cover the same period of history focusing on Napoleon's failure in Moscow or Waterloo. Tolstoy, Thackery and Hugo create epicness by making the wars a major character in their tails while writing their stories 50 or 60 years after the demise of the French army.  It is a window into a different era that changed the future of Europe.

And Napoleon, for his part, rose from the French Revolution of 1789. He dominated European affairs for two decades, leading France in the  Napoleonic Wars and seizing control of most of continental Europe before Waterloo 1815. One of the greatest commanders in history, his campaigns are studied at military schools worldwide and he remains simultaneously one of the most celebrated and controversial political figures in European history.

In civil affairs Napoloeon put in place many liberal reforms across Europe summarized by British historian Andrew Roberts:

"The ideas that underpin our modern world—meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on—were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire."

"Imagination rules the world."-Napoleon Bonaparte