SOURCE: “The Second Empire,” in The Nation, Vol. 144, No. 23, June 5, 1937, pp. 655-56.

In the following review, Radziwill offers a negative appraisal of The Gaudy Empire.

First of all, this [The Gaudy Empire] is, I must hasten to say, a typical German book, with all the pathetic features which accompany every German attempt to understand foreign psychology. Once this essential fact has been grasped, it becomes easier to judge of the value of Herr Neumann's description of the brilliant days of the Second French Empire. In many points this description is an excellent one. But the book is too long; it is boring in its endless explanations of things which can only be explained by intuition; and it gets completely off the track when it launches into imaginative stories of imagined things. In order to form a just idea of such conversations as took pace at Biarritz between Napoleon...