Will and Ariel Durant began writing The Story of Civilization in 1935. Eleven volumes and forty years later, they finished with The Age of Napoleon, published when Will was ninety. It covers the period from the French Revolution through Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, a span of about twenty-five years that reshaped Europe’s political map, legal systems, and cultural assumptions.
The Durants were not specialists in any single period. They were synthesizers who read widely and wrote for a general audience. Their style is narrative rather than analytical. They tell stories, describe personalities, and paint scenes. Napoleon is not just a military strategist in their account. He is a husband, a reader, a lawmaker who personally supervised the drafting of the Napoleonic Code, and a man whose ambition outran his judgment in Russia.
The book covers more than Napoleon. The Durants give substantial space to the intellectual and cultural life of the period: Goethe, Beethoven, Byron, the Romantic movement, the philosophical aftermath of the Enlightenment. They trace how the ideas of the Revolution, liberty, equality, popular sovereignty, spread across Europe even as Napoleon’s armies spread by force. The two processes were related. Napoleon exported the Revolution’s legal and administrative reforms wherever he conquered, and many of those reforms outlasted his empire.
The writing is elegant and occasionally florid. The Durants belong to an older tradition of historical prose that aims for beauty as well as accuracy. Modern academic historians tend to find their work too focused on great individuals and not enough on structural forces. This is a fair criticism. The Story of Civilization is history told through personalities, not through institutions or economies. If you want a structural analysis of the Napoleonic period, you need other sources.
What the Durants offer instead is readability and scope. The Age of Napoleon can be read by anyone with a basic knowledge of European history. It moves through the period chronologically, pausing for character portraits and cultural set pieces. At nearly 900 pages, it is a commitment, but the Durants were skilled enough writers that the pages move.
Will Durant died in 1981, Ariel thirteen days later. The Story of Civilization won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968 (for Volume 10, Rousseau and Revolution). The series has sold millions of copies and remains the most widely read narrative history of Western civilization.
