Includes Illustrations and Index

After years of reading one-sided anti-Napoleonic tracts masquerading as respectable biographies it was a pleasure to finally come across a balanced view of a man, who for better or worse, epitomized the age of the French Revolution (1789-1815). It was very gratifying to hear the author Vincent Cronin state that he was attempting to find the real man behind the legend, that he was not content intellectually with either the myths created by uncritical admirers who saw no fault in Napoleon or those, on the opposite end of the spectrum, who considered him to be nothing less than the devil's incarnate.
Napoleon was an intensely complex figure with numerous and inherent contradictions, but he was far, quite far one would add, from anything approaching the vile characterizations made by detractors during his lifetime and ever since 1815. The fact that the great Georges Lefebvre admired Napoleon, to a certain degree, shows that Napoleon possessed qualities and ideas that set him beyond characterization as a mere military man. Indeed, Vincent Cronin illustrates how even as a newly-minted second lieutenant in the French Army the young Napoleon had been concerned more with social issues and the possibilities of reform than with pursuing military matters. He embraced the Revolution as it unfolded in 1789, as the surest way of leading to an enlightened society and government. It goes without saying, if it was not for the Revolution, professional careers would have remained closed to all but the extremely well-off and the aristocracy. In the realm of professional soldiering, officers of the caliber of Hoche, Joubert, Jourdan, Lannes, Carnot (the "Organizer of Victory") and Napoleon (it should be kept in mind that his background in the Corsican nobility would have had its limitations in Royalist France as well) himself, who were mostly members of the middle or lower-middle classes would have advanced no further than the rank of captain or major in a royalist army no matter what their capabilities. Napoleon's moment in the Revolution came when he played a pivotal role in the defeat of the combined counter-revolutionary and royalist forces at Toulon in December 1793. It should also not be forgotten that he was the protégé of Augustin Robespierre, the younger brother of the great Jacobin, and who had described Napoleon as an officer of "transcendent merit." Napoleon was lucky to escape the bloodlust of the Thermidorians and their White Terror. As one of the few valuable and available military specialists not to have emigrated, he was given the responsibility for the defense of the National Convention against royalist forces in the journée of 13 Vendémiaire. While Napoleon accepted the Directory Government of France, he could not have been pleased by their increasingly undemocratic tendencies, manned as it was by mainly compromised revolutionaries tainted by Thermidor. Historians of course now have concrete evidence that Paul Barras and other Thermidorians were maneuvering to restore Louis XVIII after receiving pay-offs and pardons, and in the case of Barras the price was the tidy sum of twelve million francs. The events of 18 Brumaire of the Year VIII prevented that particular scheme.