Napoleon’s Fictional Romance Novel Published In English!

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

Now the man the world knows as emperor, war hero and bogeyman, the ruthlessly ambitious Little Corporal who rose from provincial obscurity in Corsica to become the terror or ruler of half the world, will be revealed in a surprising new guise: Napoleon the failed romantic novelist.

I’ve been waiting to read Clisson and Eugénie for 20 years! This is very exciting news! Click on the link above to read more!

The Artist-as-Napoleon

In the comments section, Simon Abrahams writes:

Thought you might be interested in how the iconic portraits of Napoleon – by Ingres, David, Gros and others – almost all resemble the artist’s self-portrait. These are not portraits of Napoleon, as most scholars imagine, but portraits of the artist-as-Napoleon, as a few alert viewers at the time did recognize. Take a look at the comparisons on my website:
http://www.artscholar.org

They are really quite fascinating! I think there might be a whole episode of the podcast on the portraits, something we should do sometime. Thanks Simon!

Napoleon at the Bridge of the Arcole

A big shout out to listener John Holloway who writes:

Monsieur Reilly,

I recently discovered that I could acquire high resolution images of
various artworks from Artstor.org. Considering my love of Napoleonic
imagery I could hardly resist finding myself a detailed scan of
Napoleon at the Bridge of Arcole. I trudged through the laborious task
of zooming in and saving high-resolution samples, then followed
reconstructing the 43 images into a perfectly aligned, high-definition
Jpeg file.

The scan is 2917 X 4187 pixel; 30.38 X 43.61 Inch

A store near my house will take images and mount then onto a fake
canvas. I’ve done this with other posters and images and they look
very nice. I am sure there are places down under that do the same.
I would like to share the image so that you – or anyone on Napoleon101 –
could have a copy or, if one is like me, print it out. Such a
masterpiece of Bonaparte propaganda is too difficult to hold to
myself.

-John Holloway

Thanks John! Everyone can download the high res version from my server here.

Happy Birthday El Presidente!

Today (Dec 26) is David’s birthday! I would tell you his actual age but I wouldn’t want to get myself into trouble. Please raise your glasses in a toast – to the President!

Napoleon’s Trip to St Helena – The Weekly Aurora

My Xmas present from my awesome little sister Anita today was a newspaper called the “Weekly Aurora” from Pennsylvania and dated September 22, 1815. The back two pages, in a section called “Latest Foreign Intelligence”, contain detailed news of Napoleon’s exile to St Helena, including accounts of Napoleon’s response to the news of his destination, as we as detailed account of St Helena. I’ve scanned these pages, and the masthead, for your enjoyment. I always find it exciting to read accounts of Napoleon’s activities from contemporary newspapers. This particular newspaper doesn’t seem too fond of the Emperor. I love this sentence:

“At length, after a career of insolent pretensions on one hand, and of strange and ungovernable curiosity on the other, the departure of this disturber of the world has taken place.”

Foreign Intelligence Page 1
Foreign Intelligence Page 2

TPN Server Issues

In case you didn’t notice, we’ve been down for a couple of days. As you can read on the TPN blog, it was due to a hard drive failure on one of the servers. We’re in the process of re-building and it might take a few more days. At the moment we’re missing all of the media files (audio and video). I’ll get these re-uploaded asap. Stay tuned.

NAP 01




NAP 01

Originally uploaded by cameronreilly

Do you think a fan of The Emperor owns this Brisbane Benz I spotted yesterday?

As Nicholas Stark pointed out in the comments to the last show, December 2 was the 204th anniversary of Napoleon and Josephine’s coronation. I hope you all raised a glass of your finest medication in his honour. I did!

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