Napoleon Bonaparte: The Politician

On August 15, 1769, on the island of Corsica — recently transferred from the Republic of Genoa to the Kingdom of France, a transfer that made its new inhabitants French citizens by an accident of geopolitical timing — a boy was born to a minor noble family of Italian descent. His name was Napoleone di Buonaparte, and within thirty years he would be master of France. Within forty, he would be the most powerful individual in Europe. Within fifty, he would be defeated, exiled, and dead on a remote Atlantic island — but the world he had shaped in his brief decades of power would persist long after him, in the legal codes, the administrative structures, the educational systems, and the political ideas of virtually every nation in Europe and beyond.
Napoleon Bonaparte is the most written-about individual in human history. More books have been published about him than about any other person who has ever lived. This is not accidental. He represents, in concentrated form, the possibilities and the dangers of political genius — the capacity to understand power with unusual clarity, to organise human institutions with exceptional effectiveness, and to pursue ambitious goals with a combination of intelligence, will, and charismatic force that the world had rarely seen assembled in a single individual.