Word: napoleons
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Burned Out. In Herzl, the central figure moves through Europe and the Middle East like a Jewish Napoleon, rallying the poor, converting the rich, negotiating with sultans, papal nuncios and Cabinet ministers. Yet the great adventure, in the book as in life, ends before the goal is reached. Herzl died in 1904, burned out by the age of 44. It was literally in the middle of the journey. He had aroused the Jews of Eastern Europe-including a ten-year-old named David Ben-Gurion. Slowly they began the trek to Ottoman-controlled Palestine. The new Exodus was under...
...before in the continental U.S. It was indeed present and, as if on cue, put on a show for the hundreds of bird watchers by feeding three times each day with a flock of Bonaparte's gulls (named after Charles Lucien Bonaparte, an ornithologist and a nephew of Napoleon) making their accustomed annual visit...
Epic Greed. It was there that the tremendous vitality of 19th century French painting would henceforth be nourished. Napoleon's art adviser, Dominique Vivant Denon, a man so feared for his rapacity that he was known throughout Europe as l'emballeur (the packer), set out to bring back to Paris every portable masterpiece he could lay hands on in conquered territory. This exercise in epic greed was an unqualified success. It assured the dominance of French art for another hundred years...
Meanwhile, the seeds of "romanticism" were being laid within the authoritarian gloire of the Empire. Where did the impulse toward exotic subjects, far travel and weird archaeologies, which would propel Delacroix to Algiers, begin? The show's thesis is that it was fixed in the French imagination by Napoleon's campaigns, especially by the invasion of Egypt. The lure of the crag and the mystery of the Pyramids were Napoleonic properties; and when Hubert Robert, in 1798, took a maypole dance in Arcady and transformed it into a ring of nymphs dancing around an eroded and indecently suggestive...
...might be expected. Napoleon also takes several curtain calls. The great British historian G.M. Trevelyan (in a 1906 essay that gave the other writers the idea for this collection) has Bonaparte win at Waterloo, then plunge Europe into decades of troublesome peace. England is unable to disarm because of the danger that he still represents and is ruined by the cost of its huge military establishment. (The ubiquitous Byron, in this version, leads an unsuccessful workers' rebellion against George IV and is executed.) H.A.L. Fisher's Napoleon is a bit more believable. At 46, he escapes to America...