![]() ![]() ![]() Napoleon didn’t mean fatalism by this, rather that political action is unavoidable if you want personal and national glory. Such broad contours get at what Napoleon meant by saying to his literary hero Goethe at a meeting in Erfurt, “Politics is fate.” ![]() 2, 1804, he could say, “I am the Revolution.” It was, according to the historian Andrew Roberts’s epically scaled new biography, “Napoleon: A Life,” both the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, an outsider from Corsica who rose to the apex of French political life, and simultaneously a “defining moment of the Enlightenment,” fixing the “best” of the French Revolution through his legal, educational and administrative reforms. By the time he was crowned emperor on Dec. In a month.” His timing was off, but perhaps he took the misjudgment to heart because he spent the rest of his life trying to bring glory and order to France by building a new sort of empire. On July 22, 1789, a week after the storming of the Bastille in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to his older brother, Joseph, that there was nothing much to worry about. ![]()
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