Saint Helena

Napoleon went to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to.

Napoleon shared Paine’s stance and, early on in his rule, was the first Western leader openly to begin instituting what he was to term a system of ‘carrières ouvertes aux talents’, ‘careers open to talent’. ‘I made most of my generals de la boue,’ he proudly remarked on St Helena at the end of his life. ‘Whenever I found talent, I rewarded it.’ The

One consoles oneself for not knowing foreign lands by supposing that one knows one’s own country at least, and one is wrong; for there are always areas of one’s own land that one has not visited, and races of men who are new to one. I experienced this fully then. I felt that I was seeing these Montagnards for the first time, so greatly did their mo

Vassili leva la première chope. « À l’Empereur. – Puis-je vous poser une question ? dis-je. Pourquoi les Russes vénèrent-ils Napoléon ? – Parce qu’il était un chef, dit Vitaly le Moscovite. – Parce qu’il nous a soudés, dit Vassili le mécanicien. – Parce que vous l’avez battu », dis-je.

Napoléon, with his military genius, sailed through one battlefield victory after another, but in the countries he conquered, he botched the job of setting industry on the path of innovation. The result: the economies from which he drew the funds for nonstop warfare stagnated. Workers and bosses still mired in obsolete technologies could ill afford