The Decline and Fall of Napoleon’s Empire: How the Emperor self-destructed

This book is an insidious one. Firmly 'legende noire' in its treatment, it makes much use of source material to back up its never wavering criticism. Unfortunately, some of it is hearsay – as Smith admits himself, but quotes anyway… (p. 53)

There are furthermore strange omissions. The Timeline is missing not only the whole of the First Italian campaign and all the civil innovations of the Consulate but also much of the beginning of 1805 (the crowning in Milan, for example), there is no treaty of Pressburg, …. Much of the material used in the argument dates from 1811 on, perhaps because Mr Smith's most recent book is one on the Russian campaign. Whilst this is not surprising, it means that many of his swingeing conclusions though sustainable for the later period bear no relation whatsoever to the Consulate or earlier. The book has no notes and the bibliography lists barely 30 titles (Caldwell has tens of thousands of reference numbers in his bibliography).
 
One section deserves particular attention. Entitled 'Totalitarian Dictator', it in fact deals with Napoleon's well-known censorship of the press. There is no discussion of the meaning of either of these words, nor indeed any attempt to justify the description. The two words are so coloured by 20th-century history that they should not be used lightly. It is true that the totalitarian dictators Stalin and Hitler liked to see themselves as spiritually descended from Napoleon. It is however anti-historical to try to trace the relationship the other way around. Thierry Lentz in his useful little book Idées reçues, Napoléon (Le Cavalier Bleu, 2001) has shown clearly how it is ridiculous and pernicious to see Napoleon as totalitarian in the 20th-century sense. Nor is he a dictator in the 20th-century sense. If Mr Smith had really read Tulard's 'Myth of the Saviour' he would have seen that Napoleon considered himself a 'dictateur de salut public', in the Cincinnatus sense of the term.
 
This book is so bad that one would be tempted to see it not as Napoleon's decline and fall, but rather the author's, given the latter's excellent reference books.
 
In the words of Monty Python, this is a book for 'laying down and avoiding'.

Peter Hicks, November, 2005

Digby Smith is the author of The Greenhill Napoleonic wars data book: Actions and losses in personnel, colours, standards ans artillery, 1792-1815 (Greenhill Books, 1998) and Napoleon's regiments: Battle histories of the regiments of the French Army 1792-1815 (Greenhill Books, 2000).