HISTORY
J. Christopher Herold
Also known as: J. Christopher Herold, J.Christopher Herold
Jean Christopher Herold was a Czech American university press editor and author from the 1940s to 1960s. While editing at Columbia University Press and Stanford University Press, Herold primarily wrote French history books on Napoleon Bonaparte while also covering Joan of Arc and Madame de Staël. Herold won the 1959 National Book Award for Nonfiction for his book, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960.
GERMAINE DE STAEL was the daughter of Jacques Necker.
— from Mistress to an Age
Most acclaimed
The Battle of Waterloo
From a period that reveled in portraying splendor and heroism has come massive, often magnificent documentation--portraits, battle panoramas, caricatures, quick sketches--for Christopher Herold's crisp account of the Hundred Days in the context of Napoleon's career; as with his (and their) earlier Horizon Book of the Age of Napoleon, the format is the function. It works well: here (in prose and pictures) is Napoleon cowering on the way to Elba, cocking an ear to the Congress of Vienna, turning young lads into military marionettes; here are the heavily cloaked wounded led through the streets, a conscript laden with plunder, still, pale faces on the battlefield at midnight. This has a larger historical interest and less immediate, tactical involvement than the volume in the Macmillan Battle Books series, but the maps assist the narrative in following the action.
Mistress to an Age
J. Christopher Herold vigorously tells the story of the fierce Madame de Stael, revealing her courageous opposition to Napoleon, her whirlwind affairs with the great intellectuals of her day, and her idealistic rebellion against all that was cynical, tyrannical, and passionless. Germaine de Stael's father was Jacques Necker, the finance minister to Louis XVI, and her mother ran an influential literary-political salon in Paris. Always precocious, at nineteen Germaine married the Swedish ambassador to France, Eric Magnus Baron de Stael-Holstein, and in 1785 took over her mother's salon with great success. Germaine and de Stael lived most of their married life apart. She had many brilliant lovers. Talleyrand was the first, Narbonne, the minister of war, another; Benjamin Constant was her most significant and long-lasting one. She published several political and literary essays, including "A Treatise on the Influence of the Passions upon the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations," which became one of the most important documents of European Romanticism. Her bold philosophical ideas, particularly those in "On Literature," caused feverish commotion in France and were quickly noticed by Napoleon, who saw her salon as a rallying point for the opposition. He eventually exiled her from France. This winner of the 1959 National Book Award is "excellent ... detailed, full of color, movement, great names, and lively incident" -- The New York Times "Mr. Herold's full-bodied biography is clear-eyed, intelligent, and written with abundant wit and zest."
The Age of Napoleon
This third munificent Horizon book which represents a great deal of work by a great many people is, quite frankly, an idea-project-production job with a mass market gift book designation. There are 330 pictures, 117 in full color, some double spreads, and the color is not subtle. Throughout there are insets on special features of the period, its intellectual cadre, its fashions, arts, society, Napoleon's family, his loves, his son, and ultimately extending to vistas of other parts of the world -- England, America, Russia, etc. The main narrative, the parabola of the rise of Le Petit Caporal to Emperor, to his expensive defeat and downfall, has been written by that master of this age-J. Christopher Herold. One follows the little ""Corsican savage"" from his early years to the tyrant's progress on the road to ""la gloire"". And his legacy, spread eagled across the centuries, is evaluated in terms of real contributions (Code Napoleon, etc.) and apocryphal associations.