Word: napoleons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Louis Napoleon, nephew of the great Napoleon, spent some 35 years attempting to become Emperor of the French. He finally succeeded. But according to Historian Philip Guedalla he should have died on the day of his coronation. For the story which Guedalla told in his The Second Empire is one of anticlimax, of a nouveau riche court, a theme for irony and wisecracks, the Napoleonic legend reduced to farce. "The gaslit tragedy of the Second Empire," Guedalla contemptuously called the regime which was born in intrigue in the early 1850's, found its Empress in the granddaughter...
Alfred Neumann, German historical novelist, has evidently pondered Guedalla's book. Preferring heroics to irony, and following the career of a man who is one of the "outs," to satirizing the bigwigs of the "ins," Neumann has wisely terminated his story of Louis Napoleon in the early '50's. Another Caesar is the prelude to the "gaslit tragedy." It is a big, colorful, shrewd novel that sticks pretty closely to the actual course of history. Conversations may be invented, but the characters are all out of the past. And Neumann's analysis of personality and motive...
...story of the illegal search for political mastery followed the same course in the mid-19th Century that it follows today. Like Adolf Hitler, Louis Napoleon staged his own opéra boufle "beer hall putsch." Louis' fiasco consisted of a ridiculous attempt to rally the garrison town of Strasbourg behind him for an invasion of Louis Philippe's France. And, like Hitler, Louis spent a period in jail, at the French fortress of Ham, where he managed to be solaced by his serving maid. Again, like Hitler, Louis talked, before his term as President of the short...
Neumann, while alive to the contemporary parallels in the story of the third Napoleon, does not go out of his way to stress them. He is more concerned with the pernicious effects of an inherited legend upon a nice young man. Through Le Bas, the young Louis' Jacobin tutor, he dins it in that the boy had no chance to develop normally. All his life he was subjected to a forcing process, whether at home in Switzerland or at the Artillery School at Thun. Hortense, Louis' mother, was soaked in the Napoleonic idea. The daughter of Josephine...
...receive dividends. They receive a yearly dividend of some 300 francs on their 1,000 franc par shares which sell on the Bourse for some 10,000 francs. To the heirs of Frenchmen who bought a share at par and tucked it away in the family stocking when Napoleon I founded the Bank of France, the return on investment is thus at the rate of some 30%. Such shareholders would never have fired Governor Moret. They, too. gloomed as brisk Premier Flandin popped in as the new Governor of the Bank of France last week bland M. Jean Tannery. Since...