Napoleons Library

Author : Digby Smith
Publisher : Pen and Sword
ISBN 13 : 178438027X
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Decline and Fall of Napoleon's Empire written by Digby Smith and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2005-06-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until now, there has been no study of the significant errors that Napoleon made himself which, though apparently trivial at the time, proved to be major factors in his downfall. Digby Smith tracks his rise to power, his stewardship of France from 180415, and his exile. He highlights his military mistakes, such as his unwillingness to appoint an effective overall supremo in the Iberian Peninsula, and the decision to invade Russia while the Spanish situation was spiralling out of control.

Author : Philip Haythornthwaite
Publisher : Pen and Sword
ISBN 13 : 1784380245
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Life in Napoleon's Army written by Philip Haythornthwaite and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 1995-02-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Napoleonic Library is an outstanding collection of seminal works on the Napoleonic Wars. It features evocative contemporary memoirs and makes available once again the classic works on the subject by military historians.

Author : Edward Ryann
Publisher : Frontline Books
ISBN 13 : 9781848328419
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Napoleon's Shield and Guardian written by Edward Ryann and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This outstanding biography is a story of courage. It charts the career of a superbly brave cavalryman against the rise and fall of his imperial master. Pierre Daumesnil was a loyal follower of Napoleon throughout his astonishing career. Enlisting as a private soldier in 1793, he was caught up in the tumult of the Napoleonic Wars, surviving campaign after campaign to emerge as a much-decorated general and Baron of the French Empire. Daumesnil served in Egypt in 1798, charged at Marengo in 1800, fought at Austerlitz and Eylau, campaigned in Spain and saw action in Wagram. Terribly wounded at that battle, losing a leg, Daumesnil became governor of the fortress of Vincennes. It was here that he played his most celebrated role in the wars of Napoleon by refusing to surrender the fortress to the Allies in 1814 and again in 1815. Daumesnil's life was an adventure and one which typifies the dash, color and verve of this astonishing period. This biography, by a leading author, will appeal to Napoleonic enthusiasts and those interested in the life and times of Napoleon's elite cavalrymen.

Author : Jean-Baptiste Barrès
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Memoirs of a Napoleonic Officer written by Jean-Baptiste Barrès and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Guy Dempsey
Publisher : Pen and Sword
ISBN 13 : 1784380199
Total Pages : 462 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Napoleon's Mercenaries written by Guy Dempsey and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2016-02-29 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This superb and comprehensive book details the foreign units which formed such an important part of Napoleon's forces. It examines each non-French unit in turn, giving an overview of the unit's origins, its organizational and combat history, its uniforms and standards, and details of the unit's eventual fate. Colourful accounts, taken from contemporary reports and memoirs, emphasize the qualities of the unit and throw light on what life was like for many of the foreign soldiers recruited into the Grande Armée. In total more than 100 different foreign units that served in the French Army are investigated in detail in this ambitious publication. Some foreign units fought and flourished throughout the Consulate and Empire, whilst others lasted for just a few months. Covers Polish, German, Swiss, Italian, Spanish, and other units in the French Army and presents a combat history and details uniforms for each regiment. Napoleon's Mercenaries is the best single-volume study of this aspect of Napoleon s army and a vital reference for every Napoleonic enthusiast. Little can be found on the foreign units that were an integral part of the French army ... For a long time a gap has existed, but now Napoleon s Mercenaries fills this gap. Robert Burnham, Napoleonic Series

Author : Betty Adcock
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807126653
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Intervale written by Betty Adcock and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a penetrating eye and a deep and spiritual intelligence, Betty Adcock writes poems that range from elegy to dark humor as they confront both loss and possibility. Intervale, selections from her first four books plus a new collection, traces the continuity of her vision and shows that lyric intensity can bring light to even the most obdurate darkness.Moving from the original loss of a world at her mother's death during the poet's sixth year to the world's loss of the arboreal leopards of Cambodia and Vietnam; from vanishing farmland to the endangered Sacred Harp music that once flourished in backwoods churches; from the difficult history of a little-known rural place to the weighted ruins of Greece -- these poems frame lessenings, divestations, and devastations in the midst of plenty. A wilderness disappears into cozy myth, farming into industry, tiger and elephant into zoos; the very ground underfoot, with its attendant necessities and contingencies, can seem to fade into fabrications we take for reality. The seam where such themes touch Adcock's personal history is the path these poems travel toward a harsh but luminous transcendence.

Author : Steven Englund
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1439131074
Total Pages : 602 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Napoleon written by Steven Englund and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sophisticated and masterful biography, written by a respected French history scholar who has taught courses on Napoleon at the University of Paris, brings new and remarkable analysis to the study of modern history's most famous general and statesman. Since boyhood, Steven Englund has been fascinated by the unique force, personality, and political significance of Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in only a decade and a half, changed the face of Europe forever. In Napoleon: A Political Life, Englund harnesses his early passion and intellectual expertise to create a rich and full interpretation of a brilliant but flawed leader. Napoleon believed that war was a means to an end, not the end itself. With this in mind, Steven Englund focuses on the political, rather than the military or personal, aspects of Napoleon's notorious and celebrated life. Doing so permits him to arrive at some original conclusions. For example, where most biographers see this subject as a Corsican patriot who at first detested France, Englund sees a young officer deeply committed to a political event, idea, and opportunity (the French Revolution) -- not to any specific nationality. Indeed, Englund dissects carefully the political use Napoleon made, both as First Consul and as Emperor of the French, of patriotism, or "nation-talk." As Englund charts Napoleon's dramatic rise and fall -- from his Corsican boyhood, his French education, his astonishing military victories and no less astonishing acts of reform as First Consul (1799-1804) to his controversial record as Emperor and, finally, to his exile and death -- he is at particular pains to explore the unprecedented power Napoleon maintained over the popular imagination. Alone among recent biographers, Englund includes a chapter that analyzes the Napoleonic legend over the course of the past two centuries, down to the present-day French Republic, which has its own profound ambivalences toward this man whom it is afraid to recognize yet cannot avoid. Napoleon: A Political Life presents new consideration of Napoleon's adolescent and adult writings, as well as a convincing argument against the recent theory that the Emperor was poisoned at St. Helena. The book also offers an explanation of Napoleon's role as father of the "modern" in politics. What finally emerges from these pages is a vivid and sympathetic portrait that combines youthful enthusiasm and mature scholarly reflection. The result is already regarded by experts as the Napoleonic bicentennial's first major interpretation of this perennial subject.

Author : J. M. Thompson
Publisher : Read Books Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1444659758
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Letters of Napoleon written by J. M. Thompson and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not that all Napoleons letters, or even many of them, are of a selfrevealing kind. In youth he had few confidants in middle age he had little to confide. la the stress of business and war he soon shed the idealism of the patriot, the fatalism of the f evolutionary, and the romanticism of the lover. Any sense he may once have had of the beauty, the pathos, or even the humour of life was coarsened by flattery and success. He can still declare, exhort, abuse, persuade, even charm but always in the interest of a policy, and to gain an end. He is wise, clearsighted, eloquent, heroic but hardly ever a human being in repose. Nevertheless, Napo leons letters remain, beyond anything written about him, or anything else he wrote or said about himself, by far his finest portrait. When he was a young man, Napoleon wrote in the rapid and already confused hand of the relatively rare letters signed Buonaparte or Bonaparte. With growing age and work, his handwriting became so slovenly as to be wellnigh illegible whilst his signature shortened from Napoleon to Napol., Nap., Np., and N. Though he still wrote some private letters, and the more important military and diplomatic despatches, he habitually employed secretaries, and carried on the bulk of his correspondence by dictation. Napoleon had three principal secretaries Bourrienne 1797-1802, Meneval 1802-13, and Fain 1806-14. All of them wrote Memoirs, and there is no lack of evidence as to how their work was done. In a rather unkind conversation at St. Helena, Napoleon said that Bourrienne wrote a good hand, and was active, tireless, and patriotic, but that he was a gambler, whose face lit up when his master dictated any thing dealing with big figures: he was in fact dismissed for becoming involved in financial speculation. His work was done partly at the Luxembourg, and partly at the Tuileries. In his Memoirs he describes Napoleons appear ance, dress, and habits in minute detail. From breakfast at 10 to dinner at 5 every hour was taken up with reading petitions, correcting letters, giving interviews, or attending meetings.

Author : Owen Connelly
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 9780742553187
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blundering to Glory written by Owen Connelly and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned for its accuracy, brevity, and readability, this book has long been the gold standard of concise histories of the Napoleonic Wars. Now in an updated and revised edition, it is unique in its portrayal of one of the world's great generals as a scrambler who never had a plan, strategic or tactical, that did not break down or change of necessity in the field. Distinguished historian Owen Connelly argues that Napoleon was the master of the broken play, so confident of his ability to improvise, cover his own mistakes, and capitalize on those of the enemy that he repeatedly plunged his armies into uncertain, seemingly desperate situations, only to emerge victorious as he "blundered" to glory. Beginning with a sketch of Napoleon's early life, the book progresses to his command of artillery at Toulon and the "whiff of grapeshot" in Paris that netted him control of the Army of Italy, where his incredible performance catapulted him to fame. The author vividly traces Napoleon's campaigns as a general of the French Revolution and emperor of the French, knowledgeably analyzing each battle's successes and failures. The author depicts Napoleon's "art of war" as a system of engaging the enemy, waiting for him to make a mistake, improvising a plan on the spot-and winning. Far from detracting from Bonaparte's reputation, his blunders rather made him a great general, a "natural" who depended on his intuition and ability to read battlefields and his enemy to win. Exploring this neglected aspect of Napoleon's battlefield genius, Connelly at the same time offers stirring and complete accounts of all the Napoleonic campaigns.

Author : Patrice Gueniffey
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674426010
Total Pages : 1037 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bonaparte written by Patrice Gueniffey and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-13 with total page 1037 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patrice Gueniffey is the leading French historian of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic age. This book, hailed as a masterwork on its publication in France, takes up the epic narrative at the heart of this turbulent period: the life of Napoleon himself, the man who—in Madame de Staël’s words—made the rest of “the human race anonymous.” Gueniffey follows Bonaparte from his obscure boyhood in Corsica, to his meteoric rise during the Italian and Egyptian campaigns of the Revolutionary wars, to his proclamation as Consul for Life in 1802. Bonaparte is the story of how Napoleon became Napoleon. A future volume will trace his career as emperor. Most books approach Napoleon from an angle—the Machiavellian politician, the military genius, the life without the times, the times without the life. Gueniffey paints a full, nuanced portrait. We meet both the romantic cadet and the young general burning with ambition—one minute helplessly intoxicated with Josephine, the next minute dominating men twice his age, and always at war with his own family. Gueniffey recreates the violent upheavals and global rivalries that set the stage for Napoleon’s battles and for his crucial role as state builder. His successes ushered in a new age whose legacy is felt around the world today. Averse as we are now to martial glory, Napoleon might seem to be a hero from a bygone time. But as Gueniffey says, his life still speaks to us, the ultimate incarnation of the distinctively modern dream to will our own destiny.