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Searching... Hillcrest Library | 944.05092 NAPO/HIBB | Non Fiction | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
This fresh account of the private life of Napoleon provides an authoritative up-to-date account of the women in Napoleon's life at all stages of his developing and extraordinary career, based on the fruits of modern research.
Author Notes
Christopher Hibbert: March 5, 1924 -- December 21, 2008
Historian Christopher Hibbert was born as Arthur Raymond Hibbert in Enderby, England in 1924. He dropped out of Oriel College to join the Army. He served with the London Irish Rifles and won the Military Cross. He earned a degree in history in 1948. Before becoming a full-time nonfiction writer, he worked as a real estate agent and a television critic for Truth magazine.
He wrote more than 60 books throughout his lifetime including The Road to Tyburn (1957), Il Duce: The Life of Benito Mussolini(1962), George IV: Prince of Wales, 1762-1811 (1972), and George IV: Regent and King, 1812-1830 (1973). Hibbert was awarded the Heinemann Award for Literature in 1962 for The Destruction of Lord Raglan. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Geographical Society, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Literature by the University of Leicester. He died from bronchial pneumonia on December 21, 2008 at the age of 84.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hibbert is both eclectic and prolific, and his energies are hardly flagging; in the last few years, he has produced well-regarded biographies of Wellington, Queen Victoria and George III. Hibbert has a talent for visiting old ground with a fresh eye, and as he crosses the Channel, he does not disappoint. The Napoleon who emerges is not the victor, the emperor nor even the hero brought low, but the man as revealed in his relations with the numerous women in his life: his wives, his mistresses, his sisters and his mother. It is, on the whole, not a pretty sight. Napoleon was often crude, rude, insulting and even violent toward women, some of whom unaccountably found him irresistible. Marie Walewska, the teenaged wife of a Polish count offered to Napoleon to avert the destruction of Poland, fainted at their first private encounter and was raped while unconscious. Still, she appears to have fallen in love with him, and bore his child. Poland, however, was not saved. Napoleon demanded that he be first in the heart of any woman close to him and was ruthless when he detected divided loyalties. He upbraided his stepdaughter, Hortense, for mourning the death of her little boy excessively, and saw to it that Mme. Rcamier's banker husband was ruined and she herself banished because she virtuously preferred her husband to him. Through all of this, Hibbert remains studiously nonjudgmental, allowing readers to form their own conclusions about the character of the great man. 16 pages color, 8 pages b&w illus. not seen by PW. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Despite the various romantic legends ("Not tonight, Josephine"), Napoleon was generally awkward and insecure in his relationships with women. He did, however, manage to attract a wide variety of desirable women through a combination of dogged determination and the aphrodisiac of power. Hibbert is the author of numerous widely praised historical narratives and biographies, and in this survey of Napoleon's wives and lovers he displays his usual gift for integrating personal stories with broader historical context. Hibbert (to his credit) does not claim that any of these women were powers behind the throne, but this is still an involving look at some interesting women and their relationships with a historical giant. While some--such as Josephine and Marie Louise of Austria--are well known, it is the more obscure objects of Napoleon's desire that are particularly interesting. All subjects seem to have approached their relationships in a manipulative, almost predatory, manner. While we don't learn anything new here about the affairs of state, Napoleon's state of affairs provides good, clean fun. --Jay Freeman