The Reign of Napoleon Bonaparte
By Robert Asprey
Basic Books, 480 pages, $35
Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin
By Sebag Montefiore
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, 634 pages, $45
With some books it’s hard to know whether the praise or the niggling should come first, especially when both are well-deserved. (It’s commonly known that if you use the word “turgid” in the first third of a book review, people stop reading.)
For instance, heaps of praise could be placed on some aspects of Robert Asprey’s “The Reign of Napoleon Bonaparte,” a minutely detailed history of the French emperor’s political and military life from 1805 to his death in 1821 on the island of St. Helena, a dreary and damp little dot in the Atlantic where he spent the remainder of his life in exile after abdication.
Asprey, a former Marine captain and veteran of two wars, is a military historian whose previous books include “The Guerrilla in History,” “Frederick the Great” and “The German High Command at War.” When it comes to war, he knows his stuff.
Asprey is also the author of the first volume of this two-volume biography (the first being “The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte,” which appeared in 2000), and though the dust-jacket copy says he’s the author of that earlier book, what’s not clear is that reading the second volume without reading the first feels as if you’ve parachuted into the middle of a vast landscape with a deep and lengthy history about which you’re relatively ignorant, yet in which you must somehow survive.
From the first sentence of Chapter 1 — “Napoleon deemed Austerlitz a ‘decisive victory’ without perhaps realizing that decisive is a finite adjective with a limited lifespan.” — Asprey assumes his readers know an awful lot, and he’s not going to waste anyone’s time, especially his, in explaining much. (You do know the history of Austerlitz, n’est ce pas? ) He throws names and places and battles about like a juggler, and keeping track of them will be difficult at best for all but the most obsessive-compulsive.
Here’s a fairly typical few lines that will give you some idea of the out-of-the-blue and choppy tenor and tone of the book. (And remember, if you didn’t know much about the people and places mentioned before reading this, you wouldn’t know much afterward either, because they’re not explained anywhere):
“To complicate matters, Napoleon in May received a friendly letter from the Russian foreign minister, Prince Czartoryski, which seemed to be a peace tentative. Czar Alexander followed up by agreeing to remove his troops from Cattaro on the Montenegrin coast. . . . Alexander next dispatched a special envoy, one Oubril, to Paris to open peace negotiations. . . . Napoleon meanwhile was secretly urging the Turkish sultan to close the Bosphorus to Russian ships in order to isolate the Russian garrison on Corfu, and he also urged Selim to regain control of the lower Danube principalities of Moldavia and Valachia recently occupied by the Russians, promising as much support as possible. Russia simultaneously was carrying on secret negotiations with Prussia and Austria in order to fashion a new anti-French coalition.”
And on and on and on for almost 450 action-packed pages of narrative until, at the end, Napoleon dies.
A far more invigorating read is “The Life of Potemkin,” by British journalist Sebag Montefiore, who spent much of the last decade traipsing around the former Soviet empire, especially Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia, and has produced a lively, highly unturgid biography of someone about whom most of us know little.
Potemkin was not the poet you read in high school Russian lit (that’s Pushkin), nor is he the histrionic Broadway singer (that’s Patinkin). In fact, if you know the name Potemkin at all, it’s probably from the phrase “Potemkin village,” which derived from a claim by his enemies that he created fake villages to impress his lover, Catherine the Great, as she toured the Crimean countryside (Montefiore goes on to dispute that allegation, insisting the accusation was merely a smear campaign against him), or from “The Battleship Potemkin,” Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film.
But Prince Grigory Potemkin was, in fact, a key figure in Russian history, not only as the lover of Catherine the Great but as a statesman who held positions of importance for almost two decades in the late 18th Century. In addition to winning the Crimea, founding the Black Sea Fleet and reforming the Cossacks (no mean feat), he planned new cities that still thrive today, such as Odessa and Sebastopol. He was handsome, ebullient and volatile, like the country from which he hailed, and he was a great romantic. (He was also well-dressed; a typical ensemble included ” ‘green coat with red collar, braided with gold lace, red breeches, high boots, sword, hat with gold border and white feathers.’ “) So charismatic and engaging was he that English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, a contemporary, called Potemkin a “Prince of Princes.”
Unlike Napoleon, about whom many books have been written, Potemkin has been largely ignored. But in this smoothly readable biography, Montefiore sets out to place him at the forefront of our interest, and in that he succeeds.
Luckily for the author, and us, Potemkin led a life full of drama, flair and intrigue — being Catherine the Great’s lover didn’t hurt, of course. But Montefiore goes further than saying they were merely lovers, claiming they were wed in a clandestine ceremony. After the ceremony was over and marriage certificates were signed, Montefiore says, all were sworn to silence. Potemkin, he writes, “had become the secret consort of Catherine II.”
Still, Montefiore admits, there is no conclusive proof the two married. It’s a fairy tale perhaps, he says, but “secret marriages have always been the stuff of royal myth,” like Russia’s Empress Elizabeth was said to have married Alexei Razumovsky, and the English prince who was to become George IV was said to have been married to Maria Fitzherbert.
When Potemkin died at 52, in 1791, Catherine was devastated. Upon learning of his death, Montefiore writes:
“The Empress fainted away. Her courtiers thought she had suffered a stroke. Her doctors were called to bleed her.”
While his death might not inspire such grief in you, coming to the end of a grand, epochal yarn of a life like Potemkin’s will surely cause some dispirit. After spending so much time with him (the book is more than 600 pages), you’ll feel the loss as well.
