Nathan Wailes - Blog - GitHub - LinkedIn - Patreon - Reddit - Stack Overflow - Twitter - YouTube

Napoleon Bonaparte

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Jan 26, 2018
5 min read

Table of contents

Child pages

Wikipedia

  • Napoleon
  • Le souper de Beaucaire (pamphlet)
    • Shortly after the events, possibly on the 29 July whilst still in Beaucaire, Napoleon wrote a political pamphlet titled Le souper de Beaucaire (The supper at Beaucaire) in which a soldier speaks with four merchants and sympathetic to their opinions attempts to dissipate their counter-revolutionary sentiments. The pamphlet was read by Augustin Robespierre, brother of Maximilien Robespierre, who was impressed by the revolutionary context. The pamphlet itself had little effect against the rebellious forces, but served to advance Napoleon's career. He soon became recognised for his political ambitions by a Corsica-born politician, and family friend, Christophe Saliceti, who arranged to have it published and distributed. Christophe's influence, along with fellow Convention deputy Augustin Robespierre, advanced Napoleon into the position of senior gunner, at Toulon.
    • This reminds me a lot of Andrew Carnegie's statement that if you can become the protege of someone who is already successful then you've already won half the battle.
    • This also reminds me of Warren Buffett working for Ben Graham.

Books

Memoirs

Biographies

  • Napoleon by Vincent Cronin
    • I found out about this book from some business website that was listing the favorite books of famous entrepreneurs. Oracle's founder (Larry Ellison) apparently listed this book as his favorite.
  • 2015 - Napoleon The Great - 4.5 stars, 31 reviews
  • 2015 - Napoleon, A Life - 4.5 stars, 458 reviews
  • Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life by Alan Schom (3/5 stars on Amazon)

    • It was at this time that Napoleon met Louis Frereon and Paul Francois de Barras...Napoleon avoided Freron while he encouraged the interest Barras showed in him. This was to pay unimaginable dividends, for Barras was a man on the rise, soon to become a member of the five-man Directory, which would replace the Committee of Public Safety. Indeed, it was thanks to this much tainted voluptuary that Napoleon's career was to skyrocket...
      [...]
      Napoleon never left his thundering guns, standing by them all day long, sleeping in or near the batteries every night, despite the heavy rain.
      [...]
      As for Citizen Buonaparte, who had arrived in Toulon a mere captain in charge of a wagon train en route for Nice back in mid-September, three months later, on December 22, 1793, he received a further promotion to brigadier general. For the first time in his military career, his name was briefly mentioned in every city and village of the land. "I cannot find praiseworthy enough words to describe Buonaparte's full worth," General du Teil wrote the war minister following the taking of Toulon. "He has a solid scientific knowledge of his profession and as much intelligence, if too much courage, voila--there you have but a scant sketch of the virtues of this rare officer. It now only remains for you, Minister, to consecrate his talents to the glory of the Republic!" At the age of twenty-five Napoleon had arrived--or nearly.

      Praise attracts praise, and Napoleon's critical role in defeating the British at Toulon was now echoed everywhere, even by the tyrannically powerful "representatives." These political commissaires of the Committee of Public Safety sent to subdue and administer Provence, from the Rhone River to the Var, had enormous powers to appoint and replace even the highest officials and officers. Two such representatives, Freron and Slicetti, wrote to Paris of their "satisfaction with the zeal and intelligence displayed by Citizen Buonaparte." Even more important to Napoleon, now at his new headquarters at Nice, were the reports sent by the more powerful and influential representatives of Paris in that city, Ricord and Maximilien Robespierre's twenty-nine-year-old brother, Augustin, who took up the cause of the hero of the day. Writing to his brother, the dreaded head of the Committee of Public Safety, after praising Napoleon to the hilt, Augustin declared him "to be worthy of rising merit."

Articles / Videos

  • 2007.07.07 - History Today - How Good Was Napoleon?
    • Napoleon was successful on many battlefields; and he may have been a master of campaigning. However, in strategic terms, he was a failure principally because he never succeeded in transforming a defeated enemy into a willing ally. He won wars, but he never won the peace.
    • Right before I skimmed this article I read another article about how these NASA guys had come up with a new method of getting to Mars by aiming the spaceship in a Mars orbit and waiting for Mars to catch up to the spaceship. I feel like that may serve as a good analogy for wars: when fighting, you want to always keep in mind what your desired end-situation is, and aim for that, instead of just aiming for the short-sighted goal of killing everyone who is acting against you. In other words, it may be smarter to not kill some people if doing so will make it harder for you to "get into orbit" of post-war peace. It would take me some time to smooth over that analogy but I wanted to record it before I forgot it.
  • 2018.01.25 - YouTube - Lindybeige - Napoleon's greatest foe
    • Great video. I should rewatch this while jotting down the different tactics used by both Napoleon and Smith.
    • One particularly memorable theme in the video is Napoleon's use of lies to advantage himself.
    • Another memorable part was Lloyd talking about Smith's philosophy of defense, which was to not simply wait for the enemy to arrive, but to dispatch attacks at weak spots in the approaching army to do things like capturing their guns, or denying them a particular route, etc.
    • Lloyd references Beware of Heroes: Admiral Sir Sidney Smith's War against Napoleon, and it seems like his talk is just a summary of the book.


Follow me on Twitter