Napoleon

Essay by shlazzCollege, UndergraduateA, January 2009

download word file, 11 pages 5.0

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio, on the island of Corsica, on Aug. 15, 1769. It was by chance that the future ruler of France was born a French citizen. His family had migrated to Corsica from the Italian mainland in the 16th century. The island had been transferred from the Republic of Genoa to France one year before Napoleon's birth. His christening name was Italian. It was spelled Napoleone Buonaparte. As a boy he hated the French, whom he considered oppressors of his native land.

A History are two recent additions to the growing literature that testifies to this interest. Both books make fascinating reading. Laqueur's Fascism is a sweeping overview of the two paradigmatic cases of "historical fascism", fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; of movements that identify themselves as neo-fascist around Western Europe; of extreme Right movements and recent Right-Left "post-fascist" alliances in Russia and Eastern Europe; and of "clerical fascism"--Islamic fundamentalism in particular in the Third World.

Orwell's Fascism tells the story of fascism in four countries: Italy, Germany, France, and Britain. It traces Italian fascism from its birth in the wake of the First World War to near-death experience in the Second World War to mature respectability today, and it follows Nazism and its posterity from Hitler's Munich days to post-reunification, French "Third Way" movements from Action franchise to Le Pen, and British "fascist" eccentrics on the "oneman-and-his-dog" fringe of British politics from Oswald Mosley in the 1930s to the present.

During Napoleon's rule between 1799 and 1815 the benefits did not outweighed the costs. Even though Napoleon temporarily ended the civil unrest caused by the Revolution he destroyed many of the Revolution's ideas and work. Also, his many military victories were not ultimately beneficial as it cost thousands of lives and dollars and Napoleon eventually...