Word: napoleons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Whether or not the battle which was in progress last week would be remembered in history above the great battles of Lord Nelson-the Nile (1798), which broke Napoleon's Oriental ambitions, and Trafalgar'(1805), which limited his ambitions in Europe-remained to be seen. Those affairs exposed the marrow of British power. One summer evening at Abukir Bay, after a maddening two months' search in which his fleet had been without benefit of speedy frigates for scouting, Nelson with his 14 ships of the line came on the fleet of 15 Frenchmen at anchor. Moving down...
...Middle Ages. Degraded courtiers wasted themselves lewdly in fashionable excesses copied from the French court of Louis XVI. The harlot Queen Maria Luisa, a green-complexioned, toothless masterpiece of stale flesh, wore herself out with dissipation, while her doltish husband hunted serving wenches and rabbits. (Of Maria Luisa Napoleon said: "Her character is written on her face; it surpasses anything you dare imagine.") Spain's strong man was Don Emmanuel Godoy, a half-educated, country-born ex-guardsman, who had become Prime Minister through his prowess as Queen Maria Luisa's lover...
...Maria Luisa as a superannuated barmaid, made her portraits glow with the oily iridescence of decay. When he drew the peasants, soldiers, beggars and trollops who swarmed in Madrid's dusty streets, he was less subtle, but no less furious. When, on the bloody Second of May (1808) Napoleon's General Murat. with 25,000 French soldiers, massacred the rioting civilians of Madrid, Goya calmly started to work with his hot etching needle, setting down a record of butchery that still horrifies queasy eyes...
...censor-ridden Spain of the early 1800s, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes could say in paint what few dared say in words. But, for all his bitter satire and savage realism, Goya was no reforming idealist. When Napoleon kicked out Goya's Bourbon patrons and set his own brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne, Goya quickly came to terms with the new regime, and took to painting Bonapartist officials, as he had previously painted Bourbon courtiers. When, a few years later, the Bourbons were restored. Goya changed his coat again. Roared Bourbon Ferdinand VII: "You deserve...
Robespierre did not make the Revolution, as Napoleon said, but he did "drive many people to madness who without him merely would have been fools." He followed the now-familiar course-from reformer to revolutionist. Like Lenin he transmuted a rabid hatred of his own class into a social system based (at first) on a sentimental love for the proletariat. Like both Lenin and Hitler, Robespierre knew that revolutions never stop at the point where reformers would like to freeze them. And he thoroughly understood revolutionary politics. "To dare!" he said, "is all the politics of the Revolution." His attitude...