flâneur

Founders Notes: Napoleon

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Napoleon David A. Bell His life was enormously important, endlessly fascinating, and connected to some of the most controversial and constantly reinterpreted events in world history. NOTE Reading about Napoleon will increase ambition. Why, then, this book? While the current crop of biographies has many virtues, concision is not among them. Not only do many readers not have the time and patience for such tomes, but it is all too easy to get lost in the welter of details. NOTE Concision is a virtue. Napoleon was born in 1769, the year after France purchased Corsica from the Italian city-state of Genoa. His father, Charles Buonaparte, came from a family of minor Corsican nobility that had long opposed Genoese rule and then resisted the French takeover as well. But Charles was a pragmatist. After the French established control, he switched sides, became a French citizen, and managed to have his children recognized as French nobles, which allowed Napoleon to attend French military school essentially for free. NOTE Pragmatism over principles. Napoleon himself later commented: "I was born when my country was dying. Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited onto our shores, drowning the throne of

Napoleon David A. Bell His life was enormously important, endlessly fascinating, and connected to some of the most controversial and constantly reinterpreted events in world history. NOTE Reading about Napoleon will increase ambition. Why, then, this book? While the current crop of biographies has many virtues, concision is not among them. Not only do many readers not have the time and patience for such tomes, but it is all too easy to get lost in the welter of details. NOTE Concision is a virtue. Napoleon was born in 1769, the year after France purchased Corsica from the Italian…

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