Doesn't surprise me. When you look at his other accomplishments, it's quite
amazing. They were both workoholics - Napoleon was known to dictate to
several secretaries on different subjects at once - a feat WSC didn't (to my
knowledge) attempt.
Jonathan Hayes
On Tuesday, September 17, 2019, 2:11:12 PM PDT, Richard Langworth
wrote:
On Monday, September 16, 2019 at 5:32:45 PM UTC-4, Keith Bleddyn wrote:
I’ve long been puzzled by Churchill’s admiration for Napoleon, a man he
described as “a great emperor and warrior..."
I forwarded your question to Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great, who
asks me to post this excerpt from his speech at the British Embassy in Paris on
being awarded the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoleon:
"As an English Tory, I was expecting not to like Napoleon when I took up my
pen, the man whom many Britons of the generation older than me still called
‘Bonaparte’, or even occasionally ‘Boney’. Yet it was one of the most enjoyable
parts of researching this book to discover that of course the Emperor had a
hugely engaging personality and attractive character, and particularly that he
had a deliciously dry, ironic wit. This made the job of researching his life a
great pleasure, as I was always looking to where the next Napoleonic joke would
come from. My favourite of them all was when the Grand Almoner of France, the
Archbishop de Rohan, wrote an extremely oleaginous letter to Napoleon at the
time of the Coronation, comparing him to Jesus and saying that he wished he had
the opportunity to die for the Emperor. ‘Please pay the Archbishop Fr.12,000,’
Napoleon noted in the margin of the letter, ‘out of the theatrical fund.'
"The reason that I entitled my book Napoleon the Great was because far too many
British historians persist in seeing only the dictator in his, and not the
positive aspects of the man I like to think of as the Enlightenment on
horseback. The builder, the educator, the encourager of science and industry,
the self-made man, the thinker, the writer, the giant and the genius. Instead
my countrymen only see the soldier, the conqueror, the invader. They blame all
the Napoleonic Wars on him – ignoring his pleas for peace and despite the fact
that many more wars were declared on France by the seven coalitions than he
declared against others.
"In the words of George Home, a midshipman aboard HMS Bellerophon,
Napoleon ‘showed us what one little human creature like ourselves could
accomplish in a span so short.’"
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