J. Christopher Herold Quotes

#1. A provisional government was appointed on April 1 (it consisted mainly of Talleyrand's whist partners), and the following day the Senate, on Talleyrand's urging, declared Napoleon deposed.

J. Christopher Herold

#2. The Allies had made war on Napoleon as a tyrant and an oppressor of nations; yet once they had got him out of the way, they did him the favor of representing him as the torchbearer of the French Revolution. They did him the further favor of repeating his mistakes and besting him at them.

J. Christopher Herold

#3. Just as Napoleon was the sole authority in the state, so the husband and father was to exercise authority over his family. Unfortunately the only possible result of despotism on either level is hypocrisy.

J. Christopher Herold

#4. Those who mistake their good luck for their merit are inevitably bound for disaster.

J. Christopher Herold

#5. The war against Napoleon was won not by England but by Russia, Austria, and Prussia; but England won the last battle and she won the peace.

J. Christopher Herold

#6. The popular image [in England] of Bonaparte as a blood-stained tyrant and bandit was admittedly exaggerated, but instinct told even the most radical among the English that if liberty, equality, and justice were ever to come to their shores, it certainly was not Napoleon who would bring them there.

J. Christopher Herold

#7. Madame Tallien shared honors with Josephine Beauharnais in being mistress to Barras, an ex-nobleman and ex-terrorist whose appetite for beautiful women, beautiful young men, and money was the only wholesome trait in his character.

J. Christopher Herold

#8. Napoleon loved only himself, but, unlike Hitler, he hated nobody.

J. Christopher Herold

#9. Napoleon, who had an aversion to the moral laxity of the eighteenth century, which he blamed on the domination of society by women, was determined to reform family life on Roman, or perhaps rather on Corsican, principles. It was with him, not with Queen Victoria, that Victorian morality originated.

J. Christopher Herold

#10. There is, of course, nothing wrong in a program that aims to please everybody, except that as a rule it is a prelude to dictatorship.

J. Christopher Herold

#11. The English soldier was probably the worst-treated soldier in Europe, and judging from the English casualty rates during the Napoleonic wars, English generals were more lavish with their soldiers' lives than were their French and German colleagues.

J. Christopher Herold

#12. Historians are lenient to those who succeed and stern to those who fail; in this, and this alone, they display strong political sense.

J. Christopher Herold