The Age of Napoleon

The Story of Civilization #11

by Will Durant, Ariel Durant, Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator)

An engrossing volume on European civilization by Pulitzer Prize-winning historians Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, the eleventh and final volume of the Story of Civilization, surveys the amazing chain of events that wrenched Europe out of the Enlightenment and into the age of democracy:
* The French Revolution---from the storming of the Bastille to the guillotining of the King
* The revolution's leaders Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre, Saint-Just---all cut down by the reign of terror they inaugurated.
* Napoleon's meteoric rise---from the provincial Corsican military student to the Emperor commanding the largest army in history
* Napoleon's fall---his army's destruction in the snows of Russia, his exile to Elba, escape and reconquest of the throne, and ultimate defeat at Waterloo by the combined forces of Europe.
* The birth of romanticism and the dawning of a new age of active democracy and a rising middle class, laying the foundation for our own era.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World History, France, Biography, Philosophy, Politics

Audiobook

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

William James Durant was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for the 11-volume The Story of Civilization, written in collaboration with his wife Ariel and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for his book, The Story of Philosophy, written in 1926, which was considered "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy."

They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1967 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.

Reviews

[Roy Lotz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally I have come to the last book in this series. It was four long years ago when I first read The Life of Greece; and these have been the four most educational years of my life, in part thanks to The Story of Civilization. Though I have had some occasions to criticize Durant over the years, the fact that I have dragged myself through ten lengthy volumes of his writing is compliment enough. Now all I need to do is to read the first volume of the series, Our Oriental Heritage, in order to bring my voyage to its end. (I originally skipped it because it struck me as absurd to squeeze all of Asia into one volume and then cover Europe in ten; but for the sake of completion I suppose I will have to read it.)

Durant did not plan to write this volume. His previous book, Rousseau and Revolution, ends with a final bow. But Durant lived longer than he anticipated (he died at 96), so he decided to devote his final years to a bonus book on Napoleon. It is extraordinarily impressive that he and his wife, Ariel, could have maintained the same high standard of writing for so many decades; there is no notable decline in quality in this volume, which makes me think that Durant should have written a book on healthy living, too.

The Age of Napoleon displays all of Durant’s typical merits and faults. The book begins with a bust: Durant rushes through the French Revolution, seeming bored by the whole affair, seeing the grand drama only as a disruptive prelude to Napoleon. This showcases Durant’s inability to write engagingly about processes and events; when there is no central actor on which to focus his attention, the writing becomes colorless and vague. Further, it also shows that Durant, while a strong writer, was a weak historian: he provides very little analysis or commentary on what is one of the most important and influential events in European history.

When Napoleon enters the scene, the book becomes appreciably more lively. For reasons that largely escape me, Durant was an unabashed admirer of the diminutive general, and sees in Napoleon an example of the farthest limits of human ability. Though normally uninterested in the details of battles and campaigns, Durant reveals a heretofore hidden talent for military narration as he covers Napoleon’s military triumphs and defeats. Some parts of the book, particularly near the end, are genuinely thrilling—an adjective that rarely comes to mind with Durant’s staid and steady style. Granted, he had an extraordinary story to tell; Napoleon’s rise, fall, rise again, and fall again are as epic as anything in Plutarch.

But as usual Durant shines most brightly in his sections on artists, poets, and philosophers. The greatest section of this book is that on the Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron. (For some reason, Durant sees fit to exclude Keats, even though the scope of Keats’ life falls entirely within that of Napoleon.) Less engaging, though still worthwhile, was Durant’s section on the German idealist philosophers; and his miniature biography of Beethoven was a stirring tribute. Many figures who properly belong in this volume were, however, paid their respects in the previous, most notably Goya and Goethe, since Durant thought that this volume would never appear.

Though I am happy to reach the end, I am saddened that I cannot continue the story of Europe’s history any further forward with Durant. He is an inspiring guide to the continent's cultural treasures.

[Helga · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The French revolution made Napoleon possible; that is its justification."
-Nietzsche

This is the final volume in the great historians, Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization series.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

The end of the Durant's Story of Civilization. What the hell am I going to do with my time now?

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I finished it, the 11th and final book in the Durants' magisterial "Civilizations" series. I wish I could say I finished the entire series, but, no, this is the only book of the series that I have finished. This one covers Europe from 1789 to 1815, from the French Revolution to Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo. While the main focus is on France and its Revolution and then the Napoleonic Empire, the Durants give us an overview of all the European nations--their economies, political systems, arts, science, and philosophy.
While Napoleon is the towering figure dominating Europe in this period, there are many other great men that the Durants cover. England, the island nation that most steadfastly opposed Bonaparte, had a number of significant figures, such as military giants Nelson and Wellington. There was Erasmus Darwin in biology and Jenner in medicine. In philosophy, there was Malthus and Bentham. In literature, a woman-finally!-Jane Austen, also William Blake. And not to forget the Lake poets-Wordsworth and Coleridge. And a Napoleon of poetry--Lord Byron, the English aristocrat with "godlike" looks and a clubfoot, a man who defied the conventions of his time. He died in Greece, having joined the Greeks in their war of independence against the Turks. With his story and others, we go beyond the Age of Napoleon. But, if there had been a succeeding book covering the period, say, 1816-1871, we would see the Napoleonic shadow continue to extend over Europe, with revolutions and nationalist movements...
The rise of Germany would be central in 19th C. Europe-- and it was due to Napoleon's bringing down the Holy Roman Empire and then Prussia becoming one of the victors over the Great Corsican. In the book, two German giants are covered-- the incredible genius of Beethoven in music and Hegel, a great figure in German philosophy. However, Hegel, to me, is mainly significant as the philosopher whose ideas were used by Karl Marx. So the way is pointed to the Twentieth Century.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this era of professional historians, who, in their haste to be seen as "scholarly oxen," focus in on narrower and narrower subjects, it is delightful to look back at Will and Ariel Durant's incredible The Story of Civilization. In eleven volumes, ending with this one, the two attempted to cover the history of Western Civilization from the beginnings to the death of Napoleon on St. Helena.

What I admire most about the Durants is their concentration on the cultural history of the era. Instead of describing battles in loving detail, they dispense quickly with them -- with not a single battle map. On the other hand, there are fascinating whole chapters dedicated to the Lake Poets and the "Rebel Poets" of England, Beethoven, and German Philosophy.

I undertook to read The Age of Napoleon not to evade the academic rigors of more scholarly works, but to provide a good base for their more detailed work. Although a history buff, I had never read a good general study of the era. Fortunately, that's what the Durants are all about.

On the other hand, I felt that the French Revolution deserved more than the 155 pages dedicated to it. As I read on, I began to realize that the Napoleonic Wars were in fact the original world war. Involved were not only all the countries of Europe, but Turkey and the United States. (The War of 1812 was largely caused by impressment of American sailors by a Royal Navy pressed to stop Napoleon at all costs.) To be true to their original intent, they had to discuss the affects of Napoleon not only on France, but on England, Scotland, Ireland, the German states including Prussia, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Poland, Russia, Denmark, and Sweden. As a result, the French Revolution got short shrift.

Still, I am mightily impressed by what they have accomplished. Even this seeming flaw served only to emphasize the massive extent of the Napoleonic moment in history.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book completes my journey through Will and Arial Durant’s Story of Civilization, eleven volumes, ten thousand pages, four million words. And worth it. The Durants weave politics, religion, art, science, economics and more into their history. The result is not just an account of times past, but insights into the warp and weft of civilization, and in particular focusing on the timeless qualities of humanity, both the noble and the base, the things that are as true today as they were when people were using a reed stylus to scratch marks into tablets of river mud.

As I have done with the previous volumes I will let them speak for themselves, for there is little I can add to their descriptions of history, society, and human nature.

Napoleon Bonaparte

He was Cesare Borgia with twice the brains, and Machiavelli with half the caution and a hundred times the will.

Tocqueville put it well: he was as great as a man can be without virtue, and he was as wise as a man can be without modesty.

Napoleon, like most rulers and revolutionists, never allowed morality to hinder victory, and he trusted to success to whitewash his sins.

Napoleon, himself a skeptic, concluded that social order rested ultimately on the human animal’s natural and carefully cultivated fear of supernatural powers. He came to look upon the Catholic Church as the most effective instrument ever devised for the control of men and women, for their grumbling or silent habituation to economic, social, and sexual inequality, and for their public obedience to divine commandments uncongenial to human flesh.

Realizing that England, controlling the seas, could at will take any French colony, Napoleon sold the territory of Louisiana to the United States for eighty million francs (May 3, 1803). England, still technically at peace, instructed its naval force to capture any French vessel they might encounter. War was officially declared on May 16, 1803, and continued for twelve years.

Napoleon expressed part of his strategy in a mathematical formula: “The strength of an army, like the amount of momentum in mechanics, is estimated by the mass times the velocity.”

By 1804 France was a police state. By 1810 it had a new supply of minor Bastilles—state prisons in which political offenders could be “detained” by imperial order, without a regular procedure in the courts.

Religion was one of the fields in which the ideologues had floated on a film of notions instead of grounding themselves in history. Only a logician, Napoleon felt, would bother long with the question, Does God exist? The real philosopher, schooled in history, would ask, why has religion, so often refuted and ridiculed, always survived, and played so notable a role in every civilization?

He was an exhausting force, a phenomenon of energy contained and explosive, a rising, burning, waning flame that consumed those who touched him intimately. We have not found in history another soul that burned so intensely and so long.


Society

All government is by a minority or by a despot, and the ruling minority is either an aristocracy of birth or a plutocracy of wealth. Democracy, of course, is the latter, for only wealth can finance campaigns, or pay the cost of persuading the people to vote for the moneyed minority’s candidate.

Men democratically chosen are rarely equipped, by birth and training, to deal successfully with the problems of government, much less with international relations.

So despotism tried to suppress the human hunger for freedom; the hunger broke out in revolt; their synthesis was constitutional monarchy.

As free enterprise progressively enriched the clever, some men perceived that equality withers under liberty, and that a laissez-faire government allows the concentration of wealth to exclude half of the population from the fruits of invention and the graces of civilization.

Revolution—or legislation—repeatedly redistributes concentrated wealth, and the inequality of ability or privilege concentrates it again.

The French Revolution, and the American Revolution as interpreted by Jefferson, carried liberty to excess, freeing individualism to the point of a destructive disorder, and freeing superior ability to repeated crises of concentrated wealth.

The hunger for liberty, to the detriment of equality, was the recurrent theme of the nineteenth century in Europe and America; the hunger for equality, at the cost of liberty, has been the dominant aspect of European and American history in the twentieth century.

Intellectual and political turmoil will undermine European civilization, and return it to the barbarism from which it emerged; peoples now savage will rise to civilization, go through successive grandeurs and revolutions, and sink into barbarism in their turn.

Liberty and equality are enemies: the more freedom men enjoy, the freer they are to reap the results of their natural or environmental superiorities; hence inequality multiplies under governments favoring freedom of enterprise and support of property rights. Equality is an unstable equilibrium, which any difference in heredity, health, intelligence, or character will soon end. Most revolutions find that they can check inequality only by limiting liberty, as in authoritarian lands.

The state supported the Church because statesmen generally agreed that the clergy gave them indispensable aid in preserving social order. In their view the natural inequality of human endowment made inevitable an unequal distribution of wealth.

the Convention (1793) abolished primogeniture, and ruled that property must be willed in equal shares to all the testator’s children, including those born out of wedlock but acknowledged by the father. This legislation had important results, moral and economic: reluctant to condemn their heirs to poverty by periodic divisions of the patrimony among many children, the French cultivated the old arts of family limitation. The peasants remained prosperous, but the population of France grew slowly during the nineteenth century—from 28 million in 1800 to 39 million in 1914, while that of Germany rose from 21 million to 67 million.

Prospering on the land, French peasants were slow to move into towns and factories; so France remained predominantly agricultural, while England and Germany developed industry and technology, excelled in war, and dominated Europe.

The bourgeoisie triumphed in the Revolution because it had more money and brains than either the aristocracy or the plebs. It purchased from the state the most lucrative portions of the property that had been confiscated from the Church.

The French excelled in pure science, and made France the most intellectual and skeptical of nations; the English encouraged applied science, and developed the industry, commerce, and wealth that made them the protagonists of world history during the nineteenth century.

In the Britain of 1750 there had been two cities with fifty thousand inhabitants; in 1801 there were eight; in 1851 there would be twenty-nine.

women were preferred to men as factory workers, and children were preferred to women, as requiring less pay. In 1816, of 10,000 employees in forty-one Scottish mills, 3,146 were men, 6,854 were women, 4,581 were under eighteen.

The Constitution of England is the whole body of unrepealed enactments of Parliament and unrevoked decisions of the courts. By such precedents the full authority of the government resided in the Crown (king or queen) and the Parliament acting in concert; usually, since 1688, the monarch accepted what Parliament legislated.

Excluded from the electorate were women, paupers, Roman Catholics, Quakers, Jews, agnostics, and, in general, anyone who could not swear allegiance to the authority and doctrines of the Church of England. All in all, there were 245,000 eligible voters in England’s nine million souls.

In trials the jurors heard the evidence, the speeches of contending counsel, and the judge’s summing up; after this they retired to an adjoining room, where, “in order to avoid intemperance and causeless delay,” they were kept without meat, drink, fire, or candle (unless by permission of the judge) “till they were unanimously agreed.”

Oxford was Tory, Cambridge was Whig.

England was now leading in [the slave] traffic. In 1790 British vessels transported 38,000 slaves to America, French ships 20,000, Portuguese 10,000, Dutch 4,000, Danish 2,000; each nation contributed according to its ability in what was probably the most criminal action in history.

Germany in 1800 was a loose concatenation of some 250 “states,” each with its own laws and taxes, many with their own army, coinage, religion, customs, and dress, and some speaking a dialect unintelligible to half the German world. However, their written language was the same, and gave their writers a third of the Continent for their potential audience.

Almost any Russian was at heart kind and hospitable, perhaps from seeing others as fellow sufferers in a hard world; but barbarism simmered in the soul, remembering times when one had to kill or be killed.

Nationalism, large or small, grew as religion declined, for some creed -- political or social—must hold a society together against the centrifugal egoism of its constituent souls.

Sismondi rejected socialism (which was then called communism); it would put both economic and political power into the same hands, and would sacrifice individual liberty to an omnipotent state.

Since states are as acquisitive as their component citizens, and send out prehensile pseudopodia, called armies, to seize delectable objects,

The Winter Palace, begun in 1755 by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, and completed in 1817 by Giacomo Quarenghi and C. J. Rossi, was the most imposing royal house in Europe, dwarfing and outshining Versailles: fifteen miles of corridors, 2,500 rooms, countless columns of marble, a thousand famous paintings; on the lowest floors, two thousand servants, and, in one wing, hens, ducks, goats, and pigs,

Louis XVIII, himself a reasonable man, touched with the Enlightenment, had allowed his court to be dominated by royalists who had forgiven nothing and wanted everything, including their old estates and authority, and a government unhampered by representative institutions.

Philosophy

it is good that a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.

But individual freedom contains its own nemesis; it tends to increase until it overruns the restraints necessary for social order and group survival; freedom unlimited is chaos complete.

History is a circle, or an enlarged repetition of the same circle, with frills that make the old seem new; the same good and the same evil survive in men despite such mighty overturns. There is no real progress; knowledge grows, but merely to serve instincts that do not change.

Thomas Malthus, in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), explained that it is useless to raise wages, for this would lead to larger families, increasing the pressure of population upon the food supply, and would soon restore the poverty that must forever result from the natural inequality of men.

It warned against revolutions as feeding on revolutionists.

Augustus and Charlemagne, those great restorers, had no faith in democracy; they could not subject their trained and considered judgments, their far-reaching plans and policies, to carping criticism and inconclusive debate by the corruptible delegates of popular simplicity.

In modern philosophy Bacon stressed knowledge of the world, Descartes began with the thinking self. Hobbes reduced everything to matter, Berkeley to mind. Kant gave German philosophy its distinctive character by arguing that its prime task is the study of the process by which we form ideas. He admitted the reality of external objects, but insisted that we can never know what they objectively are, since we know them only as changed by the organs and processes of perception into our ideas.

the study of a soul picking its way through the labyrinth of life is a living lesson in philosophy, an ever moving picture of experience molding character and transforming thought.

individualism is the snake in every socialist paradise.

Karl Marx, a disciple of Hegel, thought that capitalism contained the seeds of socialism; that the rival forms of economic organization must clash in a war to the death; and that socialism would prevail. A more consistent Hegelian would have predicted a union of both, as in Western Europe today.

utopias of equality are the consolatory myths of the weak; anarchist cries for freedom from laws and government are the delusions of immature and autocratic minds; and democracy is a game used by the strong to conceal their oligarchic rule.


Religion
Aside from that small minority which had received a college education, and that upper middle class which had been touched by the Enlightenment, most Frenchmen, and nearly all Frenchwomen, preferred the saints and ceremonies of the Catholic calendar to the rootless festivals and formless Supreme Being of Robespierre.

For all men are born unequal, and become more unequal with every advancement in technology and specialization; a civilization must elicit, develop, use, and reward superior abilities, and it must persuade the less fortunate to accept peaceably this inequality of rewards and possessions as natural and necessary. How can this be done? By teaching men that it is the will of God.

the deepest division was between those who treasured religious faith as their final support in a world otherwise unintelligible, meaningless, and tragic and those who had come to think of religion as a managed and costly superstition blocking the road to reason and liberty.

[Thomas] Paine rejected [Christianity] as a tale fit for nurseries, and for adults too busy with bread and butter, sickness and mortality, to question the promissory notes sold to them by the theologians.

the Papacy entered into a slow decay as the advances of science and the inroads of philosophy left the Church with a dangerously reduced support in the influential classes of Western Europe;

Most parents and teachers were glad to have the help of religious faith in rearing or training children—to counter the natural anarchism of youth with a moral code based upon religious and filial piety, and presented as coming from an omnipotent God watchful of every act, threatening eternal punishments, and offering eternal rewards.

[Jonathan Mckay · Rating 3 out of 5]

First Durant history that I've been able to compare to similar books elsewhere, and #11 doesn't come out well in the comparison. Covers Europe from 1789-1814, and essentially focuses on Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars.

Biographical focus is too tight - the affairs and dalliances of the great man in charge rather than the context of a given court or culture. Yet by combining biography and history, ends up a cursory sketch. Gives paragraph level details of battles, but nothing that imparts wisdom beyond facts.

Historical focus is nearly non-existent. No connecting of the dots or helping the reader understand the broad sweep. By focusing on a time period shorter than a life, constantly bouncing around in history and pushing the edges time through biographies rather than through events. As a work of history, Age of Revolution offered far more insight.

[Tom Brennan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have come to the end. Finished all eleven volumes. Wow, what a life's work... This particular volume was classic Durant - detailed, well-written, increasingly liberal. Where else are you going to find scores of pages on the Romantic poets right alongside discussions of Danish politics? Of course, I've read biographies of Napoleon, but never such a wide ranging history that sets his actions so beautifully within his own time and place. Over ten thousand pages of Durant, give or take, I found him always careful with the facts, relatively accurate in his analysis, interesting (most of the time) to read, and as he aged increasingly tolerant of immorality and liberalism.

For better or worse, that is my takeaway. Well, that, and a boatload of information and context that will help me better understand why and how history shapes and influences our own time. I probably will never read such a long series again. I'm going to miss it.

[Johnny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some people say that Will and Ariel Durant’s magnum opus is dry. They say that this shotgun approach to civilization, known as The Story of Civilization, is too full of names, dates, and factoids, but not enough analysis and narrative. I that is one’s criterion for judging a book on history, the Durants have definitely fallen short in this best-selling series (nearly every member of the Book of the Month Club has a set) and my slow pilgrimage through this tome (across several months) would be testimony to the criticism. However, what the Durants (accused of being talented amateurs as opposed to authentic historians) have amassed is an amazing outline concern what was happening on the “world stage” during various epochs and added the advantage of being able to peruse sources which are not available (or readily available) in English. Personally, I always learn a lot from these volumes.

The volume in question is, of course, The Age of Napoleon: A History of European Civilization from 1789-1815. The books begins with a summary of the French Revolution, represented as a “…Golgotha of carnage…” (quoted on p. 66) and filled with horrors such as the mitraillades (“showers” of grapeshot used to make mince-meat out of first 60 political prisoners and later, circa 200 more—p. 71). Though the book provided a sketch of Austrian, English, Prussian, and Russian arts, literature, philosophy, and politics (as well as those of the French, of course), there was never any doubt but which this era was centered on Bonaparte himself. Indeed, the Durants begin their summary of the book with Hegel’s observation that Napoleon was a “…world force—the compulsion of events and circumstances through a man—forging fragments into a unity, and chaos into effective significance.” (p. 776) Even though it may be apocryphal, I liked being reminded of the story that William Pitt the Younger (the great English statesman) had the European map removed from his death-bed because he protested that Napoleon had remade it (p. 205). Or, how about Lord Byron’s statement upon hearing of Napoleon’s death? “His overthrow was a blow on the head to me. Since that period we have been the slaves of fools.” (p. 491) Indeed, I loved the Durants’ observation that Napoleon had “…after the Peace of Tilsit (1807), carried order to excess, subordinating statesmanship to the will to power, he no longer represented the spirit of the time. He imitated and joined the absolute Continental monarchies that he had fought; …” (p. 777).

Yet, even after his brief exile to Elba (well after he had failed them as emperor), we read that the revolutionists of Lyons, “…many of them ardent Jacobins, part of an underground current that now rose to the surface to welcome Napoleon in the hope that he would lead them back to 1789.” (p. 738) Frankly, I find this amazing (rekindling memories of standing in front of the monument in Cannes where his return was immortalized) that this de facto monarch should engender such loyalty—even enough that Marshal Ney would first promise to bring Napoleon back to Paris as a prisoner and then, transfer his loyalty and his men to the former Emperor.

Reading descriptions of the Emperor’s death on St. Helena makes me understand even more how the slow poisoning with cyanide theory gained such credibility over the years—all that vomiting, stomach pain, and inability to ingest/digest food. Yet, the Durants do not address this conspiracy theory and judging from recent forensic efforts, it now seems unlikely that Lowe really did poison the Emperor with a slow increase in cyanide.

There is no way for me to summarize the scope of this book, but I will attempt to share some of the insights that took me aback in my pilgrimage through this book. I liked the line, “…statesmen weigh words by counting guns.” (p. 170) I also liked Gen. Desaix’s line: “Yes, the battle is lost, but it is only 3 o’ clock in the afternoon. There is time to win another.” (p. 174) I loved Napoleon’s reputed observation that, at least in politics, a straight line is the longest distance between two points (p. 243). I laughed at the Byronic comment about immodest dress, quoted in the chapter on “English Life,” that reads: “Like Mother Eve our maids may stray unblamed / For they are naked, and are not ashamed.” (p. 369) I also mused over Napoleon’s claim to quote a Roman emperor by saying, “The smell of a corpse of an enemy is always sweet.” (p. 702) That one’s right up there with Apocalypse Now and the smell of napalm in the morning (“smells like victory”).

In reality, people who think the Durants are dry and boring will think that The Age of Napoleon is dry and boring. In terms of the series, I think it is one of the more enjoyable volumes to read (my second favorite was The Age of Faith). But if you don’t already see the value in this grand schematics of historical ages as etched by gifted amateurs drawing from rare sources, this one isn’t going to change your mind.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me – or didn’t. Will and Ariel Durant intended for Rousseau and Revolution to be the final volume in their epic history of Western Civilization, but grew bored waiting for the Grim Reaper to show up and claim them. They decided, therefore, to scratch an itch, and devote a final volume to Europe in the age of Napoleon. No individual has ever dominated a single volume in this fashion; even Charles the Fifth, in The Reformation, would disappear in chapters chronicling Persia and Arabia. But Napoleon’s story encompasses not just France and England, but Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Russia. The emperor does move backstage at times – in the chapters on English poetry and novels, for instance – but he is never completely gone. This final volume manages through Napoleon’s person to be just as comprehensive, but more tightly bound.

The Durants open with a more involved chronicle of the French revolution that concluded Rousseau and Revolution, this one making more obvious that the revolution was a slow but quickening crumbling of royal legitimacy that collapsed into the chaos of revolution after a few sudden shocks. The king’s decision to attempt to escape France in fear of his life was one such shock, demonstrating that he was and remained an actor – not a prop. From here, the Durants follow the Wars of the Coalitions, as the various nations of Eurrope fell in to and out of alliances with or against France, with the enmity between England and France being the only fixed point. In 1807, with Napoleon enjoying one of his greatest triumphs – the subjugation of Prussia, and the pretended friendship of Russia – the Durants pause to cover both French and English culture, including one hundred pages on English poetry alone. They then alternate sections on the culture of Germany, Russia, Italy, Iberia, etc and sections on the Napoleonic wars as they encompassed these regions.

Related to this volume’s unusual dominance by one person is the unusually heavy amount of military coverage here. The Durants typically dispatch wars in a few sentences, concerned with them only as a background to the social or political events that develop as a consequence. There’s no getting away from battles and Napoleon, though, even considering the energy he poured into the political administration of France and Europe, and the long-term effects that energy would have. The result is not a military history, however; there are no maps of battles. Instead, the Durants treat the readers with their usual balance of literature, science, economics, etc. there is a section on Jane Austen, for instance. Another prominent author, Germaine de Staël, maintained a long rivalry with Napoleon; she wrote a celebratory survey of German culture that pined for more amity between France and the Germans, and was present in Russia when Napoleon drove towards Moscow. Beethoven, of course, merits a full section of his own.

Napoleon reliably described himself as a Son of the Revolution, even though his policies ended some revolutionary dreams. His concordant with Rome, for instance, re-established the Catholic Church in France, albeit in a corralled form. That was a far cry from the total secularization (or de-christianization, depending on the revolutionary), dreamed of by many – those who redrew the calendar and butchered France's artistic legacies, those who in a just heaven will be consigned to war forever with the whitewashing Puritans and the sculpture-smashing Wahhabis, as well as others who would destroy art and heritage for ideology. Napoleon did apply much of the revolutionary, modernizing spirit to those parts of Europe he conquered -- overwriting their ancient laws and traditions with constitutions from his own pen. Although Napoleon kept faith with some of the past as convenient -- his concordant with Rome, for instance -- the Durants observe that in his army and state, merit reigned, allowing even commoners to advance.

Although the Napoleonic wars have never been of great interest to me, the Durants' volume created an actual enthusiasm in me about the subject. As usual, I was impressed with their critical but forgiving evaluation of Napoleon, whom they regard as one of the singular men of history. His reputation owes not just to his role in closing the violence of the revolution, or in his spectacular battles -- but pouring so much energy into his work, and being so successful in combat and in administration, that he transformed Europe, planting seeds that would flourish throughout the 19th century. A century after his final defeat at Waterloo, an even greater war -- one spurred by changes Napoleon wrought -- would be harrowing the soil of France in blood, bones, and cannon once more.

And now, dear readers, what's next in Will Durant's Story of Civilization?


C'EST FINI!

[Jonny Andres · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finishing this eleven volume set in less than a month has been quite the undertaking. In addition to these I had to mingle in about 6 other books to keep my sanity and not get burned out.

The Durant's depiction of civilization from the beginning to the end of the reign of Napoleon was simply amazing. With such a wide array of history to deal with, they managed to not only give us a broad outlook on this the histories if a great many eras while throwing in an understanding of the philosophies, arts and social aspects of them as well. The Durants took me on a journey of eyes wide open discovery and review of our humble beginnings.

Thank you thank you thank you.

[Builyyy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has had a profound effect on me. I read it in university for fun and I have to say it really changed the way I view history. Napoleon's life is one of a kind and stretches to the limit what a man can achieve in life. The Durant's really bring the time and people to life. It is exciting and riveting, tragic and triumphal.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Durant. Exhaustively detailed, delightfully opinionated. Read it in pieces and if you're feeling a bit sleepy, don't even bother.

[Steve R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certainly one of the better works in this series, which I have now completed - all eleven volumes! - after approximately two and a half years at the rate of a minimum of ten pages a day. The Durants spent the better part of at least four decades completing this massive undertaking, and their achievement is, as far as I'm aware, an unparalleled one.

The organization of this particular work is its crowning feature. The life of Napoleon encompasses his rise to power through the consulship and the Directory, his Egyptian and Italian campaigns, then his wars with Prussia, Austria and Spain, the intent to invade England and the disastrous invasion of Russia, all leading to his exile to the island of Elba, the hundred days of his bloodless return to power, and the final defeat at Waterloo and exile and death on the remote island of St. Helena. While familiar with all these highlights, the detail brought to each interlude by the Durants in the fascinating career of this capable, complex, and always fascinating personality was quite engaging.

The fact that his army was really trapped in Egypt, with British control of the Mediterranean preventing its return return to France, and that he left it there; that he really didn't know who started the fires in Moscow which burned down most of the city; that he personally marched alongside his soldiers during both their retreats from Russia and from Waterloo; that he never understood why he was not killed at Waterloo; that he wasn't allowed to ride around the St. Helena without a British military guard; and that his funeral procession in 1840, after the return of his body, lasted over two months, were all things of which I was unaware and which were of consuming interest to learn.

However, the Napoleon story merely serves as the backdrop for what I came to realize was the true love of the Durants: the development of cultural expression and philosophical thought. As in previous volumes, these break down into bite-sized short stories of personal anecdotes and artistic analysis. The stories on Shelley and Byron were poignant and gripping. The narrative of the development of German philosophy, particularly of Fichte and Hegel was, as in Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, eminently readable and understandable.

Individuals from this period whose stories as told by the Durants prompt me to want to read more extensively about them: Marat, Talleyrand, Mirabeau, Brissot, Robespierre, Danton, Saint Just, Danton, Barras, Babeuf, Lucien Bonaparte, Therese de Mericourt, David, Chenier, Mme.de Stael, Francois-Dominique Toussaint, Arthur Wellesley (Wellington), Fouche, Charles III, Paisiello, Cherubini, Benjamin Constant, Chateaubriand, Laplace, Pinel, Cuvier, Lamarck, Robert Owen, Mary Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Wilberforce, Aphra Behn, Beau Brummell, Sarah Siddon, Edmund Kean, Robert Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Benjamin West, Thomas Lawrence, John Singleton Copley, Erasmus Darwin, Caleb Williams, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, William Blake ('a temporarily vegetarian-Whitmanic-Freudian-Nietzschian radical'), Lamb, Hazlitt, de Quincey, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Hogg, Edward Trelawney, James Mill, James Mackinnon, Wolfe Tone, Nelson, Emma Hamilton, Ferdinand IV, Maria Carolina, Pius VII, Clementi, Foscolo, Canova, Houdon, Beethoven, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, Abt Vogler, von Weber, Deverient, Kleist, Holderin, Schlegel, Sismondi, Paul I, Alexander I, Karamzin, Speransky, Jerome Bonaparte, Pauline Bonaparte and Maria Louise, his second wife.

Books to read: de Stael, Delphine; Constant, Adolphe;, Chateubriand, Atala and Rene; Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance; Fanny Burney, Evelina; Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent; and Shelley, Queen Mab.

Events I am urged to investigate more thoroughly: the September Massacres, the Feast of the Supreme Being, Napoleon's retreat from Syria, Toussaint's revolt in Hispaniola, the Dos de Mayo in Spain, the Luddite revolts in England, the Hundred Days and the Battle of Waterloo (which was supposedly very close, with only the late arrival of the Prussians tipping the outcome in favor of the Allied forces).

Generalizations thrown out in passing throughout the work: 'Revolution is a prerogative of youth', 'power dements even more than it corrupts', 'most rulers and revolutionaries never allow morality to hinder victory', 'agitations of governments and heroes are the incidental and evanescent contours of a dream compared to the life of the common people', 'it is good that a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating an infinity', 'immortals die soon after death', 'statesmen weigh words by counting guns', 'moderation and perspective - without which genius skirts the edge of madness', 'in politics a straight line is the longest distance between two points', 'all government is by a minority or by a despot, and the ruling minority is either an aristocracy of birth or a plutocracy of wealth. Democracy, of course, is the latter.', 'men and women are not naturally moral; social instincts to cooperate are less strong than the selfish instincts; therefore law, custom, religion exist', 'there is nothing so absurd that couturiers and haberdashers cannot make it an imperative of fashion', 'in truth, there has been romanticism in every age, in every age; classicism is a precarious structure of rule and restraint overlaid upon impulses and passions running like liquid fire in the blood', 'greed and inequality are in the structure of man', 'the romantics die young, for in two score years they live their three score and ten', 'physical force is seldom victorious unless accompanied by mental power, 'truth is seldom simple; often it has a right and a left hand, and moves on two feet'; and in partial rebuff of Shelley: 'a man should not wear his grievances on his sleeve' and 'odes become odious and lyrics lose their lure when they fall upon the reader with confusing profusion; beauty unending becomes a bore',

The main theme of the work, an analysis the Durants again seem to leave up to the reader to develop on his or her own, I came to believe was based on another of their generalizations: 'one mood, passionately sustained, wears out its welcome, begets its opposite, and is revived, across the generations, through the embattled immoderation of mankind'. The Reformation and the Enlightenment had severely weakened the power of religious institutions on mankind's government, culture and moral values. Reason had, by and large, replaced faith, at least among the educated minority of most western European societies. This freedom of thought and expression had its natural climax in the French Revolution. Then, the pendulum swing back. Napoleon's Concordat with the Catholic Church, his assumption of nigh-on monarchical powers, the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, Goethe's abandonment of his earlier romanticism and assumption of a conservative outlook, even Shelley's despondency over the prospects of living an authentically atheistic life and doubts about the omnipotence of reason as well as Byron's admission that of all religions, the Catholic church was probably the best - all these and many, many other instances, betoken the inevitable reactionary backlash of conservatism against the heady liberty of the late eighteenth century. Reaction sets in after liberty is attained. We can see this today. The know-nothing traditionalists: those who vote for Brexit, elect Trump, manifest themselves in right wing, anti-immigrant movements in Europe and promote dictatorial leaders in Turkey, the Philippines and Brazil, all work to swing the tide of history back to their imagined elysium of 'the good old days' since they are, frankly, too scared of what the future might hold should man be truly liberated. Sorry to talk so much about today, but it's roughly the same as what I saw as transpiring throughout Europe in the early nineteenth century.

Let the Durants themselves summarize. Their definition of civilization: 'A civilization is a people given social order by government, law, religion, morals, customs, and education, and left sufficiently free to invent and experiment, to develop friendship, charity and love, and to beget art, literature, science and philosophy.' And finally, as a fitting epitaph for a volume beginning with , sustained by and culminating largely in war, let us remember, with them, that 'battles are the technical fireworks of the historical drama; behind them are the loves and hates of men and women, the toil and gambles of economic life, the defeats and triumphs of science, literature and art, the desperate longings of religious faith'.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lifetime of work culminates with a final volume on the Age of Napoleon, but how could it have ended otherwise? While the Durants originally planned to end with The Age of Rousseau, that volume left the stage set for the French Revolution, and not pressing through with it would have left the entire set giving off a sense that something was missing, and countless readers wondering what the hypothetical volume would have been like.

It must be a definitive challenge for any historian to write about something so well known as the French Revolution. Perhaps this is why the Durants initially stopped short of it. Yet in the end, they did a lovely job in their characteristically comprehensive and literary style. The key figures of the King and Queen, Mirabeu: the liberal nobleman who tried to save the monarchy, Marat: the physician turned radical journalist advocating for a revolutionary dictatorship, Danton: the lawyer and revolutionary minister of justice who would lose his life for attempting to restrain the Terror, and of course the head of the Terror himself Robespierre, indeed the entire Committee of Public Safety get their due focus, a few miniature biographies, while other minor revolutionaries are mentioned in passing, sometimes only slightly more.

It is very much events driven, and while one must remember that this was not a book about the French Revolution, it still gets about one hundred and fifty pages. Whatever you have heard about the Revolution it is likely to be here, and covered in at least introductory detail with a final chapter on culture to boot. Who were the writers, musicians, sculptors, artists and scientists active during that upheaval. Well you will learn about them here.

Bonaparte is introduced poignantly without even mentioning his name, immediately after a section on the failed radical Babeuf: “[The communists'] plan... was so impracticable, so innocent of the nature of man, that even the proletariat of Paris had not taken it seriously. Besides, by 1797, poor and rich alike, in France, had found a new hero, the most fascinating dreamer and doer in the political history of mankind.”

The narrative will then follow Napoleon’s rise, his government, his conquests, his personal life, and the people of France, up until right before the invasion of Russia, before detouring into the rest of Europe and then covering the final drama: the catastrophe of the Moscow retreat, the glorious Hundred Days, Waterloo, denouement and death.

Napoleon, born into an aristocratic Corsican family was a military student from a very young age and he showed enough talent that he gained the opportunity of pursuing advanced studies in Paris. “He was of the Italian Renaissance in character, and of the French Enlightenment in mind.” It is impressive to see how the young Napoleon devoured books on mathematics, history, and politics. “He took notes as he read, and made summaries of the major works; 368 pages of these notes survive from his youth.”

He was thoroughly an intellectual. Even before his fame he contributes a submission to the Academy of Lyons regarding the happiness of man. During the Consulate, the military man adapts rather quickly to the tediousness of legislation. At the drafting of the Constitution of the Year VIII, he was 'punctual at every sitting, prolonging the session five or six hours....subjecting each question to exact and elaborate analysis, obtaining information about bygone jurisprudence, the laws of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great.” At the drafting of his magnum opus, the Code Napoleon, the task is delegated to a committee which reads and reviews the entire code, every single title, through eighty seven sittings, thirty five of which, almost half, Napoleon presides over. “[The sessions] were inspired by his ardor and determination, and readily accorded with his prolongation of their sessions from 9 a.m. To 5 p.m...some members drowned with fatigue. Napoleon called them to consciousness...Come, gentlemen we have not yet earned our stipends.” “He did not consider his day finished until he had read the memoranda and documents that almost daily came to him from the various departments of his government.”

Napoleon reorganized and was even a member of the Institut National, the national society of scholars. He instituted awards for cultural achievements and gave most of them to scientists. “Periodically he invited [scientists] to meet with him and report on work done or in progress in their respective fields.” He remarked to Laplace how perhaps under different circumstances, he hoped to have been a scientist himself. After Waterloo, and inspired by Humboldt, he comes up with a very whimsical scheme of fleeing to America to spend the rest of his life peacefully studying the flora, fauna, and geology of the continent. The French educational system was also reorganized with an Imperial University meant to be the source of every single teacher in the secondary schools throughout the country, and with a system of ranks nobody being able to hold a post without first having held the one below it.

Napoleon was active economically, engaging in public works, constructing roads, bridges and canals, controlling prices, and granting government loans. He also reorganized the Bank of France, under partial state ownership in an arrangement that more or less lasted well into the twentieth century. His most ambitious economic scheme was the Continental Blockade which attempted to blockade Britain from trading with any territory controlled by France. It has to be a credit to Anglo ingenuity that such a measure lead to massive collateral damage, and a decline in living standards all throughout Europe. There was much smuggling and even official exemptions but it also almost worked. Prices rose, imports plummeted, employment fell, taxes rose, the famous Luddite uprising broke out, the opposition cried for peace at any price, and Prime Minister Perceval was assassinated by a ruined broker. Britain was on the edge of revolution.

Napoleon’s ambition and arguably his downfall was provoked by the pursuit of one of the most sought after achievements in modern history, the unification of Europe. “His political ideal was a federation of European...states governed in their external relations from Paris as the ‘capital of the world.” All of the component states would have “the same money, weights, measures, and basic laws, with no political barriers to travel, transport, and trade” Durant opines that Napoleon “underestimated the centrifugal power of national differences.” It is staggering, however that he united as much as he did. Paris directly ruled a realm larger than Louis XIV ever came close to conquering and held on to the long sought strategic control of the Rhine. A series of client states, effectively gave France control over most of Germany and Italy with a few of Napoleon’s own siblings serving as monarchs. A system of alliances would cover most of the remainder of mainland Europe. Many nations welcomed enlightened kings and the Napoleonic code, but as always the colors on the map could be deceitful. A decisive military victory and national dismemberment could rearrange lines on the map, but not erase the people or their sense of national feeling. “Why did he fail? Because his grasp exceeded his reach, his imagination dominated his ambition, and his ambition dominated over his body, mind, and character...the Powers would never be content to have France rule half of Europe...it was beyond him, or any man at the time, to bring into a lasting federation an area long since partitioned into states each with its jealous traditions, dialect, manners, creed, and government...the rooted force of national character defeated the great dictator’s will to power”

The defeats did not even begin with Russia. When in 1808, the French attempted turn regime change in Spain, one of the poorest nations in Europe, they were bogged down in guerilla warfare, which was successful enough to warrant British intervention, and while in of itself this struggle did not bring down Napoleon, it proved to be a costly and ultimately pointless diversion that was poor for morale and support of the Empire.

A wonderful survey of politics and thought overall accompanies each national narrative. De Bonald, de Maistre, and Burke assail the revolution and its results. It’s amusing to when de Maistre at Lausanne finds that the exiled aristocrats are all still fans of Enlightenment philosophy, perhaps not willing to see in it any role in their overthrow.

Madame de Stael, daughter of Necker, the finance minister of Louis XIV, was a woman who maintained her progressive beliefs while still being horrified by the excesses of the revolution, and initially intrigued by Napoleon, grew to be one of his most prominent enemies as he became increasingly autocratic. She finds time to establish a literary career, and writes a famous, detailed survey of the German states. She takes as a lover Benjamin Constant, who “littered his life with unpaid debts, discarded mistresses, and political somersaults” but who also authored in fifteen days, no less, the novel Adolphe, the “first psychological novel of the 19th century,” and opposed Napoleon with Stael.

Durant covers whom he calls the ‘rebel poets’ Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley, and also what he refers to as the ‘lake poets:’ Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Jane Austen is raised in rural England that inspires in her novels a “fresh air of peace, health,and goodwill,” and Durant recognizes her domestic topics as even more fundamental to the human experience than the powerful political themes which were shaking the era.

Hegel defines logic as studying the meaning and operation of anything. Things are given meaning by studying their relationship to other things, and these relationships had been defined by Kant as the twelve categories of “unity, plurality, totality, reality, negation, limitation, cause, effect, existence, non existence, contingency, and necessity.” Hegel adds more categories and focuses on the phenomenon of change and development through a resolution of internal contradictions, the so called dialectic, with due credit here given to Fichte. Whether you find the man a sage or an arrogant madman this is a fine introduction including all his major works, and it is amusing to see Durant defending Hegel from having contributed to the rise of totalitarianism.

Jeremy Bentham and William Godwin discard God, religion, and free will to be replaced with an optimistic hedonism and faith in human progress, which rather well sets the tone for the history of Europe up until the present.

There is so much here on literature, science, and the arts from Iberia to Russia, from Norway to Turkey, that I have no room for, but I’d like to mention a lovely quote by Jean Paul Richter who summarized the era by saying that “Providence has given to the English the empire of the sea, to the French that of the land, and to the Germans that of the air”

The narrative here more than in any other volume in this series, has a habit of extending past the eponymous timespan, sometimes well into to the mid nineteenth century, and it was very interesting to see that Napoleon’s brother Jerome lived long enough to see his nephew revive the Bonapartist French Empire in 1851.

The Durant couple planned to continue the series as long as they lived. They would go no further than Age of Napoleon and yet there were plans for two future volumes: the Age of Darwin and the Age of Einstein, a hint at their conviction that there can be forces out there more powerful than politics. Age of Darwin presumably would have covered the era from 1815 to 1871 and Age of Einstein from 1871 to 1945. The Durants' advanced age made further progress impossible, but I wonder with several decades of hindsight what could have come after. Despite many increasingly distant but lovely detours throughout, especially regarding Islamic civilization, this series in the end turned out to be focused not even on Western Civilization but specifically on European Western Civilization. Perhaps the third hypothetical volume could have covered the Cold War from 1945-1991: an Age of Marx, and that era is even alluded to in this volume, as during the section on Hegel, as Durant personally opines in a brief aside that the result of the dialectic of capitalism and communism would be social democracy.

Not enough time has passed for an additional hypothetical volume to be completed, but I think the Age of Globalization, with a Europe now facing decolonization, mass non-European immigration, global organizations, telecommunications, climate change, and worldwide proliferation of the same businesses, media, and fashions would be the right direction. It is an era that even men from the Age of Napoleon, such as the internationalist Condorcet or the anti-colonialist Raynal could have hoped for and be said in part to have predicted. We are still in the midst of this new, daily compiled volume. How and when it will end is difficult to tell.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a very in-depth overview of 1792-1820 or so. The most complete section is Book 1, which covers the French revolution. It's often very dry, but the best part is this passage in 1815 when Napoleon returns from exile in Elba, and a battalion is sent by Louis XVIII to arrest him:

"Nearing them, [Napoleon] stopped and addressed them: "Soldiers of the Fifth, I am your Emperor; do you recognize me?" He opened his military greatcoat, and said, "If there is among you a soldier who would like to kill his Emperor, here I am." Almost to a man the battalion lowered its arms, and cried out, "Vive l'Empereur!"... [Napoleon] told them, "Everything is settled, in ten days we shall be in the Tuileries."

And he was right.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

After spending over 40 years writing a prelude to your major work on Napoleon Bonaparte, you finish what you believe that last book you’ll be able to complete before you die but when the reaper doesn’t show up what do you do? The Age of Napoleon is the concluding volume of The Story of Civilization series written by Will & Ariel Durant not only detailing the life and career of the titular historical personage along with his place and roll in the history of the times but also the cultural history of Europe during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

Unlike any of the previous volumes of the series that featured a person in the title—Louis XIV, Voltaire, or Rousseau—the life and actions of Napoleon Bonaparte felt like it was central to all the historical, cultural, and other events during the quarter century is covered. To be clear this was not a biography of Napoleon, as for nearly a third of the book he is only a shadow looming over other areas of Europe or just out of vision as a threat or inspiration depending on the individual. Yet as Napoleon dominates politically and militarily, the Durants sweep of cultural history features the dominance of Beethoven in music, the beginning dominance of German philosophers but mainly focusing on Hegel, and the variety of English poetry from Wordsworth and Coleridge with Southey on one end of the spectrum to Bryon and Shelley on the other. The 80 odd pages of the volume goes over Napoleon’s fall, but even though the reader knows how it ends the Durants write so engagingly that one keeps on turning the page. As a historical synopsis of a hectic quarter century that set the stage for the modern world, this book is a worthy concluding volume to an over 3000-year long biography of Western—i.e. European—civilization.

The Age of Napoleon features as the Durants’ put it a “once in a millennium” individual that showcases the “power and limits of the human mind”, it is up to the reader to determine if a great man shapes history or if events produce a great man.

[Henrik Haapala · Rating 5 out of 5]

On Napoleons mind:

“He was curious and asked thousands of questions, read hundreds of books, studied maps and histories, visited factories and farms; Las Cases was amazed at the range of his interest, the scope of his knowledge about countries and centuries. He had a memory made tenacious and selective by the intensity and character of his aims; he knew what to forget and what to retain. He was orderly: The unity and hierarchy of his desires, impose a clarifying and directive order upon his ideas actions policies and government. He required from his aides reports and recommendations compose note of eloquent, abstractions and admirable ideals, but definitive objectives, factual information, practical measures, and calculable results; He studied, checked and classified this material in the light of his experience and purposes and issued instructions, decisive and precise. We know of no other government in history that worked with such orderly preparation to such orderly administration. With Napoleon the ecstasy of liberty yielded to the dictatorship of order.” 240

[Ryan Winfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best history books I've read. On par with Gibbon in writing and scope. Durant covers the lives of influential people impacted by Napoleon, giving almost a series of mini biographies, and a great feel for the overall landscape, before diving in to the man himself. If you haven't read this, you don't know what you think you know about Napolean or the French Revolution. Adding the rest of this series to my shelf for sure.

[Ciro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did not read entire book, probably 70%. The breadth of information in this book is staggering. I was frequently thinking of the author while reading, that to condense history into 750+ pages would have required 10 times that amount.

This book weaves Napoleon in and out of the various countries, political movements, economies art, science, literature, and everything in between over his lifetime

[Jonathan Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

We come to it at last, the final volume. I started this series in May 2020.
I think the first volume was a bit unnecessary and they didn't really hit their stride until we got to the reformation, but it's a great - if outdated - series and goes into a good amount of detail if you're looking for a general and not-too-dry history of western civilization.

[Thomas Cleckler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awestruck.

The writing and organization and wealth of information is fantastic. If you want it straight, Durant delivers. As far as Napoleon himself, I hope I'm reincarnated as one of his secretaries.

If you are averse to history, this book will cure you.

[Tom Baikin-O'hayon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great ending for a great masterpiece.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The series ends with the bang of the Napoleonic Wars it was well worth it the only question remains whats next ?

[J. Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with many other folks here, finishing this book is an accomplishment, the culmination of a few years’ investment into the Durant series.

The content drags, but it is always worth the effort for the nuggets of wit and quality of writing we find nowhere else.

I still hate Napoleon.

[Umar Farooq · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is a long one but once you get into it, its amazing. Napoleon is one of those rare humans who just did not know how to give up. His ambition knew no bounds and effected the rest of entire humanity, even us today. The time period from 1789-1815 is full of extremely talented and ruthless men (and some women) who made Europe their pet (kindly use your imagination here for a suitable pet genre). My personal favorite are Napoleon, Ney, Bernadotte, Talleyrand, Murat, Nelson, Lord Byron and Madame de Staël. Each one of them is with an extremely interesting yet bizarre life story that sounds like part of a fairy tale. I can not think of another time when so many interesting characters gathered in such short time at the historical stage.

And its full of artillery fire and Napoleon running out of family members to make kings and queens out of them and Austria along with poor old pope being bullied every single day and English and their complete defiance to give a damn about anything but afternoon tea and Russian winter and their willingness to sacrifice half their population to later astonishingly marching onto enemy capital and take it and German ability to stand up again after being utterly beaten and Spanish chaos and Italian leisure. Basically how it goes down in almost any other European war. Except this time there is a special twist that the Russian Tsar is the most sensible leader in Europe.

The book also discusses culture, art and literature in detail. There are several chapters on William Wordsworth. Its strange that you were reading about people being guillotined a couple of chapters earlier and then the writer talk on and on about Wordsworth and his poetry like nothing happened. But its nice. Overall a treasure of knowledge about human nature in its most ambitious form.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did it! I finished all 11 volumes - 483 hours, 38 minutes of audiobooks - completed in 5 years.
Starting with Ancient history and ending with Europe at the time of Napoleon's death.
Will and Ariel Durant spent 40 years compiling this not-so-brief story of civilization which is amazing in and of itself. There are so many moving factors and intertwined storylines, but they did an incredible job breaking it up and giving a closeup look from different perspectives. Their writing style completely immerses you in the period and allows you to walk through history as it plays out.
This only covers European history through the ages though so now I'm on to other parts of the world...

[Dovofthegalilee · Rating 5 out of 5]

After about two and a half years I finished the series with this volume. Phew, that was a job. I think I liked this final volume the best not because it was the last but it some how spoke to me more than all the others. Worst volume for me was the Reformation second best was the Oriental Heritage. You're surely in for an education if you read the whole series. Now with a small break it's off to Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

[Eddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Durant foi o ultimo dos historiadores com abrangencia total e entendivel pelo grande publico. Lamentavel a nao reedicao de sua obra. Alto custo ou desinteresse dos leitores. A historia pelos academicos nao da o prazer que a leitura de WD nos da

[Spencer Reads Everything · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finishing The Age of Napoleon is both a satisfying conclusion and a genuinely moving experience. This final volume brings the Durants’ enormous, decades-long project to an elegant close, and it reminded me once again why I have spent so much time reading these books. The Durants are at their best when they weave politics, art, literature, education, and philosophy into a single narrative, and here they give one of history’s most written-about figures the full cultural treatment he deserves.
On Napoleon himself, the Durants are neither hagiographers nor demolitionists. They present him as an extraordinary figure whose rise and fall cannot be separated from the upheavals of the French Revolution. Many biographies focus narrowly on his military achievements or his political ambitions.

The Durants cast a wider net. They frame Napoleon as a product of a specific intellectual and cultural moment, shaped by Enlightenment ideals, European monarchies in crisis, and a society exhausted by revolutionary instability. Their chapters on his administrative reforms, his complex relationship with religion, and his ambition to refashion Europe into a modern state give this biography a richness that goes far beyond the battlefield.

What impressed me most about this volume is that it refuses to treat the Napoleonic era as a purely political story. The Durants devote enormous space to the Lake Poets, the rebel energy of Byron and Shelley, the evolution of German philosophy, the achievements of British science, the visual revolution in landscape painting, the dying gasp of old monarchies, and the social transformations brought by industrialization. Beethoven receives an entire chapter, and rightfully so, because he is as essential to understanding the emotional landscape of the era as Napoleon is to understanding its politics. The book’s breadth is astonishing.

At the same time, this final volume reminded me of the limitations I have felt throughout the series. I have learned firsthand that the Durants have very ardent supporters, and even gentle criticism tends to produce spirited responses. But I stand by my observations. The series is undeniably Eurocentric, especially in the early volumes. Entire civilizations outside Europe are often summarized quickly or filtered through Western historiographical frameworks. There is also a tendency toward broad cultural generalizations in the early books that can feel dated compared to contemporary scholarship. And although the Durants range widely, no two authors could ever be fully conversant with the specialized academic research that now defines the study of history.

Still, these limitations never overshadow the immense achievement of The Story of Civilization. Reading all eleven volumes has been rewarding and illuminating. The Durants write with a lyrical style that is elevated yet accessible, and they draw from primary sources with genuine appreciation for the voices of the past. Their prose is consistently engaging, and their curiosity is infectious. They emphasize the human story behind every political transformation, treating ideas, institutions, and artistic movements with equal seriousness. Even when I disagreed with their interpretations, I admired their commitment to synthesis and storytelling.

The Age of Napoleon is, in many ways, the perfect ending to the series. It ties together the intellectual, cultural, and political threads of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while offering a poignant portrait of a man whose ambition reshaped Europe and whose failures transformed it again. The final chapters on St. Helena have a quiet gravity that feels like a natural conclusion not only to Napoleon’s life but to the Durants’ project as a whole.

I am grateful to have read this series. It is not flawless, and it does not replace the depth of focused academic work, but it remains one of the most impressive narrative histories available. It is sweeping, elegant, and consistently thought provoking. For readers who love big history, wide-ranging cultural analysis, and beautifully crafted prose, The Story of Civilization remains a monumental achievement. And The Age of Napoleon is a fitting final chapter.

For more of my thoughts, check out my video:
https://youtu.be/04_mqT3SCWo
For more reviews, check out my channel:
http://www.youtube.com/@SpencerReadsE...