For several years, University of Iowa literature professor Anna Barker has produced a steady blizzard of commentary on classic French literature: Hugo, Stendahl, Dumas, Balzac. In her debut book, 13 Notes from Napoleon, Iowa: Musings of the Edge of the French Empire (Ice Cube Press), Barker follows the trail of arguably the most important individual for the global spread of French culture: the emperor Napoleon.
The trail begins in Iowa City, spans the breadth of Europe’s Schengen Area, and finds times for excursions to St. Petersburg and the Aegean Sea. The essay collection emerges from Barker’s Press-Citizen column, in which, as she puts it, Barker has “proceed[ed] to hyperventilate on Napoleon-related subjects” on a monthly basis.
As this book chronicles, Iowa maintains many signs of its former inclusion in the French colonial territory of Louisiana (named after Louis XIV): the tricolor flag, the towns named after French explorers and miners (see: Dubuque) and battles fought by Napoleon (see: Marengo, the Italian village where, in 1800, the Austrian army had its collective Hintern decisively handed to it by everyone’s favorite emperor). This is to say nothing of the original name of the French settlement that would become Iowa City: the name was Napoleon, of course.
Barker is lovingly attentive to the state of Iowa, perhaps most of all in her coverage of Marengo, which was part of the same Napoleonic naming spree that bequeathed us chicken marengo (recipe included). Yet the French Midwest is far from the sole focus. This book, like Napoleon himself, likes to get out there and see things.
To that end Anna Barker hits the road with her sidekick, an exceedingly photogenic yorkie named Watson. The reader joins Barker on the drive “from the French city of La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, on the eastern edge of the European Union.”
In my favorite chapter, Anna and Watson visit the Garden of Heroes Monument to the English celebrity poet Lord Byron, in the Greek coastal city of Missolonghi. Where Byron died of illness while encamped with Greek independence fighters combating Ottoman rule. Byron had a long and fond relationship with Greece and Albania, his visits to which helped fertilize his breakout work, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
Much like Barker’s book, Bryon’s poetry weds encyclopedic enthusiasm for geopolitics with the Romantic exaltation of the sublimely individual, over and against rationalizing bureaucracy. The sultry poetic persona with which Byron achieves this fusion is an early example of the imprint of Napoleon and his great love, Joséphine, on 19th century European literature.
Barker connects the Napoleon-Joséphine paradigm not only to the protagonists of Stendahl novels, but to the saga of Barbie and Ken in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie. She also makes room for Gladiator II and — how could she not? — Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023), which is interpreted as a proud continuation of the tradition of Napoleonic propaganda.
I haven’t even gotten to the discussion of opera, Dostoevsky or the empire waist design (on which Barker offers what one might call “flowing” prose). Nor have I doted on the book’s lavish full-color illustrations, which consist of reproductions of paintings and Barker’s travel photography. Like its namesake ruler, its namesake town (today’s Iowa City), and its soon-to-be iconic yorkie, 13 Notes from Napoleon, Iowa is small, but mighty.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2025 issue.
