1815, Waterloo battlefield: a messenger announces to Napoleon the appearance of the Prussians on the flank of his army, as he is about to attack Wellington's troops in front. It is the moment of truth for the Little Corporal who, while waiting for the battle, thinks back to all the times in which he challenged fate, transforming a defeat into a victory, a failure into a success, a disappointment into a joy. Like in Marengo, where his general Desaix arrives just when he is about to leave the field defeated and tells him: «This battle is lost, but we still have time to win another one». Or in Russia, when he was now surrounded by the Tsar's forces, he managed to free himself by crossing the Beresina bridge. Inside himself he repeats: «Dying means nothing, but living defeated and inglorious means dying every day».
Thus begins, from Bonaparte's last battle, the novel that Andrea Frediani dedicated to the great Corsican leader, " Napoleon " (Newton Compton, 2023, pp. 330, also Ebook).
A novel in which Frediani completely immerses himself in the shoes of a man with a daring, extraordinary life, eternally poised between passion and war . A legendary existence, capable of turning Europe upside down and changing its structures forever, which in the book is told by Napoleon Bonaparte in the first person, in a sort of long dialogue with himself.
Thanks to Frediani's sensitivity and great knowledge of history, a well-rounded and in some ways surprising intimate portrait of Napoleon is thus outlined. We capture the traits of a grumpy, introverted, taciturn man but endowed with enormous charisma and animated by the strength of a leader driven by boundless ambition and an absolute certainty of being predestined. His dreams of glory thus became the dreams of those around him too. The great military successes also gave him a license of invincibility and superiority that the great leader had already imprinted in his DNA. My entire rise took place, as Frediani well recounts when describing Napoleon's military exploits, under the sign of war: «Men like me take the lives of a million other men into little account» he loved to repeat and in these words there was all almost delirious awareness of the character.
In short, if Napoleon's ambition was enormous, his ego was immeasurable and he did not accept that anything cast the slightest shadow on him. Thus, in 1806 he forced Francis II of Habsburg to put an end to the Holy Roman Empire that had existed since the time of Charlemagne because there should be no imperial crown more blazoned than the one he had worn himself in 1804. An imperial crown that Napoleon had placed on himself on the head alone, saying among other things "God gave it to me, woe to anyone who touches it to me" and refusing that the coronation should take place at the hands of the pope or a bishop as had always happened up to that moment. Indeed, the pontiff, Pius VII, was forced to attend the ceremony but in the guise of a simple spectator.
Naturally, this absolute confidence in his own abilities and this brazen arrogance also led to exceptional results. His military genius and courage seduced his soldiers and intimidated his adversaries, and his resourcefulness fueled far-reaching projects. Napoleon was, in fact, an innovator in many fields : in military strategy, in weapons of war, in public administration, in urban planning, in the school system which he made state and no longer just private, available to the richest. Even outside the battlefield, the Corsican leader was absolutely certain that he could leave an indelible mark, so much so that, after having approved the Civil Code, he wrote the great collection of laws of the French State: «I have created a code that will eternalize my name until the centuries further away." And here he was not far wrong because the Napoleonic laws profoundly influenced the law of many European nations, including Italy. He made other mistakes, some enormous, as Frediani's novel recounts: he trusted his relatives too much, granting them titles and kingdoms and he never knew how to be a man of peace because he found his reason for existing in battle. However, he marked an era and is still at the center of not only historical debate today, as also demonstrated by "Napoleon", the film that Ridley Scott dedicated to him and which has recently been released in cinemas. He was a conqueror and a visionary, he lived surrounded by thousands of faithful, but he died alone, but not forgotten.