Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Curator Bazin utters a proud Frenchman's protest against comparing Napoleon's vacuum-cleaner sweep of European art with the wholesale robbery by Hitler and Goring. Napoleon, Bazin insists, was motivated by the lofty ideal of creating a new and universal European culture, and was within the ethics of his time. But after Waterloo, Napoleon's conquerors saw Napoleon's operation uplift in another light, stripped the Louvre of 5,233 precious art objects, left little more than 100 canvases and 800 drawings...
...NAPOLEON'S RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN (306 pp.)-Philippe-Paul de Ségur-Hough-ion Mifflin...
Count de Ségur's famed diary of Napoleon's Russian campaign is not just another book about Bonaparte; it is the main source of a thousand schoolbooks, cartoons, legends, sermons and second thoughts for would-be conquerors. Nor is it simply a great and exciting war story. To Ségur, as it did to most who survived it, the retreat from Moscow had a deeper personal and political meaning. As a ruined aristocrat who embraced the French Revolution and became aide-decamp to the Emperor, Ségur took the long, cold view...
...After fifteen hundred years of victories, the Revolution of the fourth century (that of the kings and nobles against the people) had been overthrown by the Revolution of the nineteenth century (that of the people against the kings and nobles). Napoleon was born of this conflagration, and he had allied himself so closely with it that it seemed as if the great convulsion had been nothing more than the labor pains of the birth of one man. He commanded the Revolution as if he were the genius of that terrible element...
Copy for Tolstoy. Ségur was seldom far from the Emperor's side during the five fearful months that it took to unravel Napoleon's grand design. He was close enough to hear Napoleon exclaim as he came within sight of the Muscovite capital of logs and gilded domes: "So here at last is that famous city! It was high time!" The remark was used by Tolstoy in War and Peace; probably one of the original French editions of Ségur's journal (first in 1824) was before Tolstoy as he wrote his masterpiece...