Napoleon: A Life - Andrew Roberts  ## Metadata - Author: **Andrew Roberts** - Full Title: Napoleon: A Life - Category: #books ## Highlights -    ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jas2caday3db32szgw8pg6s4)) - When the mob gains the day, it ceases to be any longer the mob. It is then called the nation. If it does not, why, then some are executed, and they are called the canaille, rebels, thieves and so forth ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jat8cv6x6d7q78xa1pykyx25)) - Napoleon was a discerning connoisseur of the music of Giovanni Paisiello, whom the Bonapartes had employed in Paris and Rome, composing works almost continuously between 1797 and 1814.) Napoleon’s letters to Désirée were not particularly flowery or even romantic, but his interest in her was palpable, and to be the object of his concentrated attention was pleasing to her, even if, despite the new republican informality, he insisted on addressing her as ‘vous’. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01javsb94q0w0e3famfymepdn1)) - He seems to have enjoyed her playful chastisement. ‘If you could witness, mademoiselle,’ he wrote in February 1795, ‘the sentiments with which your letter inspired me, you would be convinced of the injustice of your reproaches . . . There is no pleasure in which I do not desire to include you, no dream of which you do not furnish half. Be certain then that “the most sensible of women loves the coldest of men” is an iniquitous and ill-judged, unjust phrase which you did not believe in the writing. Your heart disavowed it even as your hand wrote it.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01javsddvxr2nd0xccdsfe2wgz)) - Désirée’s rejection of Napoleon contributed to his deep cynicism about women and even about love itself. On St Helena he defined love as ‘the occupation of the idle man, the distraction of the warrior, the stumbling block of the sovereign’, and told one of his entourage: ‘Love does not really exist. It’s an artificial sentiment born of society.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jaws68aaf3rz8q11c1j4k33s)) - Then he formed up Dallemagne’s column of 3,500 men in the backstreets of Lodi and gave them an inspirational harangue. (‘One must speak to the soul,’ he once said of his battlefield speeches, ‘it is the only way to electrify the men.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jayc1banrgf9bv30jnsts287)) - Colonel Pierre-Louis Dupas’ combined companies of carabiniers had actually volunteered to lead the attack, an almost suicidal mission and certainly foreign to any natural instinct for self-preservation. Yet it was this frenzied spirit – known as ‘the French fury’ – that often gave Napoleon an edge in battle once his harangue had played on regimental pride and whipped up patriotic fervour. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jayc4bejd63gdgw37nkqb2sh)) - ‘I no longer regarded myself as a simple general,’ Napoleon later said of his victory, ‘but as a man called upon to decide the fate of peoples. It came to me then that I really could become a decisive actor on our national stage. At that point was born the first spark of high ambition.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jaycbaec3q895pq8cxspm850)) - Napoleon has been criticized for lying in his post-battle reports, but it is absurd to ascribe conventional morality to these reports since disinformation has been an acknowledged weapon of war since the days of Sun-tzu. (Winston Churchill once observed that in wartime, truth is so precious that she needs to be defended by a bodyguard of lies.) Where Napoleon did err, however, was in making the exaggerations so endemic that in the end even genuine victories came to be disbelieved, or at least discounted; the phrase ‘to lie like a bulletin’ entered the French language. When he could, Napoleon gave the French people hard evidence, sending captured enemy standards to be displayed at the military church of Les Invalides, but throughout his career he displayed an extraordinary ability to present terrible news as merely bad, bad news as unwelcome but acceptable, acceptable news as good, and good news as a triumph. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jaycq1pr400aah7yqg8y659t)) - Fouché recruited spies from, among many others, pedlars, butchers, hairdressers, locksmiths, wigmakers, perfumers, bartenders, Louis XVI’s former valet, an ex-Jacobin known as ‘Wooden-Leg Collin’, the Baroness Lauterbourg, and the madame of the brothel at No. 133 Palais-Royal. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jb53cqz967q9ac6bn29rsz2j)) - As always, Napoleon required more than warfare and politics for his mental nourishment. On October 1 he thanked the American physicist Sir Benjamin Thomson, who was living in Paris, for his dissertation on heat conservation, and commented: The rough surface of unpolished bodies is mountainous compared to the extreme attenuation of calorific molecules; their total surface area is much greater than that of the same body when polished, and from the area of the surface used for measuring the number of issues or accesses of calories, it follows that this number must be greater, and therefore, temperature changes should be faster for an unpolished body than for a body that is polished. These are the ideas that I formulated, and that were confirmed by your paper. It is through many experiments made with precision, in order to arrive at the truth . . . that we advance gradually and arrive at simple theories, useful to all states of life.[20](private://read/01jas26sbjjrcgycpv7a35qbhy/#EndnoteNumber_1199) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jbb59rqnqtjx6ayfhxaqw78m))