First published 2015
Andrew Roberts presents a comprehensive portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, examining how a young artillery officer transformed himself into Europe's most powerful ruler within two decades. Roberts draws on newly available French editions of Napoleon's correspondence and his personal visits to 53 of Napoleon's 60 battlefields to construct this modern biography. The author challenges common assumptions about the French emperor, including the romanticized version of his marriage to Josephine, revealing instead that she took a lover shortly after their wedding while Napoleon maintained far more extramarital relationships than previously acknowledged. Roberts emphasizes Napoleon's extraordinary energy and magnetic personality, qualities that inspired fierce loyalty even among exhausted troops facing defeat. The biography traces Napoleon's military innovations, his legal and administrative reforms, and his cultural patronage of Empire style arts, while also examining the fatal expeditions into Spain and Russia that cost half a million French lives and ultimately led to his downfall at Waterloo.
Genres: biography, history, 20th-century, military-fiction, military-history, 19th-century
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, unreliable-narrator
Setting: France, Europe, Russia, Spain
Period: 19th-Century, 20th-Century
976 pages · Paperback · Penguin UK