Tag Archive: 0Napoleon

This large coloured lithograph, published in 1827, satirises Sir Walter Scott and how the Irish poet Thomas Moore pipped him to the post.  BM Satires explains: ‘A pair of scales hands unevenly.  In the upper scale sits Scott … supporting on his knees the nine volumes of his “Napoleon”.  He looks down, absorbed and melancholy …  In […]

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a piece of music written in celebration of Russia’s victory over Napoleon in 1812.  Here’s another book produced in the wake of the campaign, but this time it’s a novel.  In fact, according to Anthony Cross (The Russian Theme in English Literature, p. 23), it’s the first English […]

The story goes that, after his defeat in 1814 when he was deliberating whether to contest his banishment to Elba or not, Napoleon was given a bunch of violets by a child.  Taking this to be a sign that he should accept exile meekly, as a ‘shrinking violet’, he declared the violet to be his […]

In the past, I’ve written about spies and translations and just recently I bought a book in which both interests converge: Die verrätherischen Plane Englands und der Jakobiner wider das Leben des Kaysers, und die Freyheit des franz. Volks (1804), an account of an anti-Napoleon British spy ring based in Europe. The author, Jean-Claude-Hippolyte Méhée de la […]

In 1800, the Journal des Débats politiques et littéraires, one of the most important French newspapers, politically and intellectually, of the time (by the end of the Empire, it had 23,000 subscribers), was the first paper to introduce a feuilleton, to provide its readers with non-political news, reviews, criticism and gossip.  It was the brainchild […]