Napoleon’s Road to Glory: Triumphs, Defeats and Immortality

A general public, 'légende dorée', treatment of Napoleon, this book suffers greatly in comparison to Englund's recent book Napoleon: a political life (Simon and Schuster, 2003). Markham is largely uncritical and mostly simplistic – some unfortunate errors (typographical?) have crept in – after Waterloo, Markham makes Blucher say (meaninglessly) 'Quelle d'affaire'. As ever when dealing with Napoleon, attempts at brevity lead to lack of clarity and sometimes even the suppression of important information. In Markham's treatment of the Concordat, for example, no mention is made of the key 'organic articles', without which it is impossible either to understand why the Concordat was in the end a thorn in Pius VII's side or the main reason as to why the Pope finally made the huge concession to leave the Vatican to come and consecrate Napoleon Emperor in Paris. Similar unfortunate conciseness appears on p. 183 where Markham tells us that the Pope was 'forcibly removed to Savona, where he stayed until 1811.' In fact, the Pope was kept under house arrest in Savona, and then brought to Fontainebleau where Napoleon forced him to negociate an agreement on episcopal investiture, which the pontiff immediately recanted. On the other hand, Markham's 'Primary Source' bibliography is useful for its collection of early translations of key works originally written in French. Apart from letters apparently in Mr Markham's private collection, no archival work is mentioned. As for the 'Secondary Sources', the author does not appear to be aware of key works in English such as the essential, masterful biography of Napoleon by John Holland Rose (1915) and Peter Geyl's Napoleon for and against (1949), nor of more recent works by authors such as Broers, Ellis, Emsley, Woolf or Schroeder.