Word: napoleons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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They may well have killed more than men, breaking up the rehearsal for one of the Red Napoleon's coveted set-piece strikes. If so, as is happening with increasing regularity to Giap's best-laid plans, another timetable must be destroyed, and all the meticulous, delicate structure of insurgency tactics be reassembled. It is General Vo Nguyen Giap's own aphorism that he may only attack when success is certain. Even more than his rice and his bullets, that certitude is in scarce supply in the new war the men from the North must endure...
Giap was an accomplished lecturer in French history who "could step to a blackboard and draw in the most minute detail every battle plan of Napoleon," one of his former students recalls. A passionate ascetic who could veer abruptly from violent emotion to icy control, he was early dubbed "The volcano and the snow" by his associates. "We were all intrigued," says one, "by his passion for Napoleon and the French Revolution. And we used to tease him when he railed against the French, by asking 'Are you sure you don't want to be Napoleon?' " Giap...
After that, the Bonapartes seem to have disappeared. In all branches of the family, almost all the children came up girls. The last of the American line, a descendant of Fifi and Betsy Patterson named Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, achieved some prominence as a Man of Distinction in the Calvert whisky ads, but he died in 1945 of injuries sustained in Central Park, where he tripped over the leash of his wife's dog. The only male Bonapartes alive today are a 16-year-old boy (Charles Napoleon Bonaparte) and his 52-year-old father (Napoleon Louis Jerome Victor Bonaparte...
...Aiglon, the only son of Napoleon and Empress Marie Louise, was the principal martyr of the Bonapartist tradition. The child was only four when his father was sent to St. Helena, but it was already clear, says Stacton, that he was "preternaturally intelligent, as precocious as Macaulay or J. S. Mill." In Austria, however, he was placed with tutors who were instructed to retard his development as much as possible. After a few years of repressive treatment, the boy became withdrawn and watchful. At 16, he developed tuberculosis. At 21, ignored by his mother and surrounded by doctors who tried...
...Louis Napoleon, son of Brother Louis, was the second and last of the Bonaparte emperors (L'Aiglon was proclaimed Emperor in 1815, but he never actually ruled). In Stacton's opinion, he was merely "a paper demagogue" who wrote lively pamphlets and had "the dignity of a toy lion." Carried into office on a flood tide of Bonapartism, he soon made it clear that his resemblance to Napoleon was merely nominal. He became a sort of Gallic Coolidge decorated with Continental charm, and he presided over an era of prosperous inanition that collapsed in the debacle...