Napoleon: The Path to Power (2008) by Philip Dwyer

For those who love to read biographies, there is nothing as satisfying as a deep and richly textured accounting of the formative years of great figures in history, and that’s exactly what Philip Dwyer delivers here in a marvelous first volume biography covering the first three decades of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Dwyer describes a serious young man of conspicuous talent and boundless energy who experiences a string of painful let downs in adolescence and young adulthood that rob him of his idealism, if not his fierce ambition. If anything, Napoleon’s disillusionment in the high-minded goals of his youth only serves to fire his determination to advance to the front rank of French society, and then on to heights not attained or even dreamed of by the Bourbons.

Dwyer suggests that Napoleon experienced several critical inflection points in his life. First was his falling out with Corsican freedom fighter Pascale Paoli and the exile of the Bonaparte family to mainland France, so long the object of Napoleon’s scorn and even hatred. Napoleon held a deep and romantic attachment to Corsica and was vehemently supportive of independence from France even while serving on a French scholarship at Brienne and as a young artillery officer in the French army. He idolized the great Corsican nationalist, Paoli, and the rupture of that relationship, which he at once went to tremendous lengths to cultivate, left a lasting and bitter impression.

The second inflection point as told by Dwyer was Napoleon’s precipitous courting and honeymoon period with Josephine. Dwyer suggests that nothing motivated Napoleon more during his first major command in Italy as the desire to impress his new wife, for whom he held an ardent, almost unnatural passion. Napoleon’s letters to Josephine are legendary, and Dwyer quotes from some of the best, although they are not for the prudish. That Josephine had already taken the young, handsome Hippolyte Charles as a lover would not be confirmed by Napoleon for some time to come, but Dwyer’s narrative makes the military genius appear a pathetic cuckold and fool.

The third period of personal development – and fundamentally attached to the second – was Napoleon’s discovery of his own military talent while in Italy and as demonstrated by brilliant victories at Rivoli, Castiglione, etc. Dwyer writes that Napoleon was likely as surprised as anyone else by his stunning martial achievements and undeniable leadership abilities.

The final point of character shaping described by Dwyer was Napoleon’s campaign to Egypt. On the one hand, it was his first experience with defeat and the strategic military consequences of the campaign were all undeniably negative. Dwyer writes that we first glimpse the future dictator and gambler Napoleon was to become in Egypt where he showed a willingness to expend thousands of his men in a hopeless cause and began to demonstrate the cynicism that would mark his later years. On the other hand, Egypt also showcased Napoleon’s remarkable ability to portray even the most humiliating defeat in a positive light back in France and how the romantic notion of the whole Egyptian campaign catapulted him to the front-rank of political leadership once he returned to France, despite the fact he essentially abandoned his own army in the desert.

What makes this biography shine is the wide lens through which Dwyer views the period. His writing and focus on forms and methods of artistic expression during the late 1790s are redolent of the masterful Simon Schama. Yet, for all that Dwyer delivers from the perspective of high culture and political philosophy, his work is conspicuously light on military history. For those looking to explore the details of Napoleon’s early military triumphs in France and Italy and the frustrations of Egypt and Syria will be disappointed with this volume. In fact, Dwyer seems to argue that Napoleon’s true genius lay in the field of what we today would call marketing, rather than war. For whether Napoleon’s victories were sweeping, like Rivoli, or non-existent, like Acre, he had the ability to convey the image of dramatic and unmitigated success, which served him well throughout most of his career. After reading Dwyer, one also gets the sense that Napoleon would not have been as successful in the open information age in which we currently live.

In closing, this is an immensely satisfying first volume of one of the greatest personalities in Western history. I’m looking forward to the next volume.