The Mind of Napoleon - a Study of Napoleon, Mr. Roosevelt, and the Money Power by R. McNair Wilson

The Mind of Napoleon - a Study of Napoleon, Mr. Roosevelt, and the Money Power

This is a REPRINT of an exceedingly difficult book to find. 

Please allow two weeks for the book to be delivered.

Note: This book is a reproduction of the historical text for academic, historical, or collector purposes.

Originally published in XXXX; printed in 2026.

6" x 9" / 246 pages

Book description

R. McNair Wilson’s The Mind of Napoleon: A Study of Napoleon, Mr. Roosevelt, and the Money Power is an unusual combination of Napoleonic history, monetary criticism, and contemporary political commentary. Published by George Routledge & Sons in London in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression and early in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, the book runs xvi + 246 pages.

Summary

Wilson’s central argument is that Napoleon’s career should be understood not simply as a struggle for military and political domination, but as a struggle over who would control money, credit, and economic life. He portrays Napoleon as recognizing that political sovereignty was incomplete if governments remained dependent upon private financiers and creditors.

In Wilson’s interpretation, Napoleon sought to construct a political and economic order in which finance served the productive economy and the state rather than controlling them. Napoleon's administrative reforms, public works, financial policies, and efforts to stabilize post-Revolutionary France are therefore presented as parts of a larger attempt to create prosperity and social order.

Wilson calls the opposing force the “Money Power”—his term for the concentration of financial power among bankers, creditors, moneylenders, and other private financial interests capable of influencing governments through their control of credit. The book's contemporary dust-jacket description characterized it as a study of Napoleon's struggle against this “Money Power” and his attempt to establish a new economic regime of greater abundance.