Haiti and the Colonial Predicament of Language in Zamoyski’s Napoleon, A Life
Nathan H. Dize
"According to Zamoyski, historians often judge Napoleon for his colonial endeavors, which presumably blurs our understanding and the conditions of his epoch. In the introduction to his nearly 800-page biography, Zamoyski argues that Napoleon “is regularly blamed for re-establishing slavery in Martinique, while Britain applied it in its colonies for a further thirty years, and every other colonial power for several decades after that.” Despite the fact that Zamoyski abandons the question of slavery in Martinique in the body of the text, the most significant source of historical tension in the book is whether or not Napoleon meant to restore slavery in Saint-Domingue through the Leclerc expedition. The reason for this tension is not incidental. It is, as I argue, part and parcel of Zamoyski’s choice to rely on one secondary source for all of his information on colonial Haiti, namely, Pierre Branda and Thierry Lentz’s 2006 volume, Napoléon, l’esclavage et les colonies (Napoleon, Slavery and the Colonies)."
I would say that the main problem with Zamoyski's book is his reliance throughout on not only secondary sources, but recent secondary sources, so that the book reads like précis of recent scholarship with Zamoyski's spin on it.