14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
Readable but awful history, 29 Aug 2007
By Louis Davout (London, England) - See all my reviews
Robert Harvey writes well enough, as a former journalist should, but, on the basis of this book anyway, he is not much of a historian. Not only is the book littered with factual errors - incorrect dates, wrongly rendered names, false 'facts', etc. - but his interpretations and arguments leave a lot to be desired also. His treatment of Napoleon is a case in point. Harvey basically presents us with a rehash of the old black legend, belittling Napoleon's achievements wherever possible (no matter how implausibly) and besmirching his character at every turn. Napoleon was not without serious flaws, of course, but to present him as a grotesque caricature is poor history and does nothing to develop our understanding of him or the period he dominated. One presumes Harvey's loathing for Bonaparte comes in part from his equally evident 'little England' view of history, which is another major weakness of this book. The wars which raged from 1792 to 1815 were far more than just a struggle between Britain and France, yet the impression given by this book is that other states played bit parts at best. While occasionally critical of Britain and British figures, Harvey's patriotism (or should that be jingoism?) nevertheless shines through clearly and one gets the sense that he genuinely believes that Britain was almost solely responsible for 'saving' Europe from the 'nightmare' of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. As someone who has read a lot about the era covered by this book, I would warn fellow fans of the period to steer clear, as they will find little new or interesting in it. Even less would I recommend it to readers new to the subject. Instead, I would advise anyone looking for a single volume covering similar ground to consider David Chandler's authoritative 'The Campaigns of Napoleon' which is unsurpassed in its military detail, David Gates's shorter but still excellent 'The Napoleonic Wars' or Michael Adams's 'Napoleon and Russia', which, despite the title, effectively covers the whole of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and, by putting the relationship between France and Russia (instead of France and Britain) at the heart of the story, provides a host of interesting new insights.
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