People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 November 1894 — THE NAPOLEON REVIVAL [ARTICLE]

THE NAPOLEON REVIVAL

Wliy the Emperor la the Most Popular Character In History. Within the past year there has been B revival of interest in the career of Napoleon Bonaparte that is almost phenomenal. In literature he has figured in the pagjs of memoirs and reminiscences by those who came into more and less intimate contact with him. In art not only has he been a potent inspiration to modern painters and sculptors, but he has made priceless all pictorial records of his time. In the drama he poses as the most picturesque figure that has been brought upon the stage within the century. Personal relics of the man are held as sacred and beyond all price. As Paul Bourget aptly says, “Napoleon has hypnotized the French people again.” In France the sting of defeat after the Franco-Prussian war turned the thoughts of all to their period of greatest glory, and so it needed but time to see Napoleon enshrined as an idol. An equally logical explanation is found for the most notable feature of the Napoleon revival in this country. • The Century's life of the emperor was projected five or six years ago, before anyone could have foreseen the present attitude of the public mind. It was undertaken solely with the idea that Napoleon was one of the greatest, most forceful and picturesque characters in the entire range of history, and that hitherto he had been inadequately represented. For that reason Prof. William M. Sloane, the greatest American student of French history, was commissioned to write the life, and his years of study among unpublished archives have brought out his completed labor at the most opportune moment. And Prof. Sloane shows us a new Napoleon, a devourer of books, an Unsuccessful literary aspirant, an ineffectual Corsican political agitator, but the new Napoleon certainly makes the old Napoleon more easily comprehended.