Napoleon, Georges Lefebvre, Routledge, 2011, paperback, 595 pp., ISBN 9780415610094

Napoleon Bonaparte continues to fascinate as a succession of bicentennial anniversaries recall his military exploits. This classic biographical study by one of France's pre-eminent twentieth century historians has now been published for the first time as a single volume in paperback with a new introduction written in 2009 and utilising a fresh translation of 2010 to extend the popularity of this classic text first published in 1935 into the second decade of the twenty-first century. In his new introduction, penned originally for a Folio Society edition, Andrew Roberts, draws attention to the incongruity of this study of Napoleon the great man with Lefebvre's Marxist principles and his now universally appropriated description of populist history as ‘history from below'. But Lefebvre's study was not one of uncritical admiration of his subject. It criticised Napoleon's lack of confidence in the general will of the French people, his disregard of the elective principle in his re-structuring of Napoleonic Europe and his readiness to engage in press censorship, though he largely exonerates Napoleon for the collapse of the Peace of Amiens in 1803. However Roberts is himself critical of Lefebvre's predominantly negative portrayal of Wellington, Napoleon's arch enemy and nemesis.  By Lefebvre's own admission, however, a conclusive verdict on his subject remains elusive since he concludes that Napoleon ‘served both the king and the Revolution without attaching himself to either'. This book not only presents a readable ‘biography that is almost as much a personal adventure story as an intellectual treatise' but it also stimulates reflection on how biography and indeed history more generally has come to be written.