"Book Review: Napoleon, Spirit of the Age " Topic

by Michael Broers.

"There is a marked correlation between the clothes that Bonaparte the general wore & those worn by Napoleon the emperor. Even when he was first consul he wore the laurel edged uniform of a general in the republic, much like the one he wore when he stormed the bridge at Arcole. The distinctive olive grey coat & cocked hat over the undress uniform of the chasseurs a cheval de la Garde Imperiale came about around the time of Austerlitz.
That is to say before 1805 there was no Napoleon. Without Ulm & Austerlitz there could not have been a Napoleon. Without these events, Europe would have remembered a heroic revolutionary general who quietened the bloodlust of the revolution. A young soldier on a bridge with a flag, not an emperor on a horse with a hat.

The title for Broer's second volume comes from the pen of the German philosopher Hegel. Who saw the emperor pass by on his horse in 1806, the day before the battles of Jena & Auerschdat, and despite himself he found himself mesmerised by the sight of this tempest in human form. In his words Napoleon was not the underlying impetuous of the century, but the bestriding colossus, THE paramount spirit, which is from the Latin Genius, or creation of the age. And so we have our theme….."
Full review here

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