Napoleon by Paul Johnson

The latest in Weidenfeld's series of short biographies is a bit of a curate's egg. At its best it is a thoughtful and incisive essay, but at its worst it is a prosecution brief, with all the distortion and special pleading that implies.

Paul Johnson does not claim to be telling us anything new, but too often he uses Napoleon's life to insinuate a tendentious and teleological view of history. Its endpoint is very like Francis Fukuyama's, with the US as the summit of human achievement. In line with this view, Johnson is prepared to rank a mediocrity like George Washington above an authentic genius like Napoleon.

To Johnson's credit, he is not a Napoleon-basher of the radical and absurd variety. If anything, he overrates Bonaparte as a commander. "His record as a battle winner and conqueror, as a destroyer of armies and subjugator of governments, has never been equalled. Or rather, one has to go back to Alexander the Great..." Not quite. Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Tamburlaine and Genghis Khan's general Subedei were all greater military geniuses. However, with the possible exception of Caesar, none was as interesting a human being.

The tendentious side of Johnson emerges in his many asides designed to show Napoleon as a forerunner of totalitarianism. This is an old chestnut, and unconvincing. Napoleon was an old-style autocrat, with neither the temperament nor the technology to be a totalitarian dictator.

Thomas Mann, in his novel Dr Faustus, has much to answer for. He really began the vogue for such propositions as: Hegel led to Hitler, Marx led to Stalin or Napoleon led to Mao. Curiously, we never encounter the proposition that John D Rockefeller led to the Mafia.

Even on "pure" history, as a recent biographer of Napoleon (and therefore with an axe to grind) I find much to disagree with in Johnson's book. Nobody would guess from his bland account of Bernadotte that he was a duplicitous turncoat, promoted beyond his abilities as an anti-monarchist Jacobin, who traded in his "principles" to become king of Sweden.

As a historian, Johnson lets the disgusting Talleyrand get away with murder and states, to one's stupefaction, that he "put the interests of France beyond any other loyalty". He absurdly overrates Ney, who was brave but stupid and militarily inept.

The list of Johnsonian eccentricities is long, including an unconvincing defence of Napoleon's gaoler on St Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe, and a Catholic homily to round off the volume. He even invokes quasi-metaphysical explanations for Napoleon's downfall, as when he says: "By 1813 Napoleon was out of date."

This really explains explains nothing. Dictators are not removed from office by cultural forces or zeitgeists – otherwise Franco, for one, would have been swept away long before 1975. Alas, only brute force does the trick, and only brute force did it with Napoleon. Yet, for all its faults, this is a lucid, well-written volume that could confidently be put in the hands of anyone who knows nothing of Napoleon – if such there be.

The reviewer's new book, 'Wagons West', is published by Cape