Napoleon's wars
Charles J. Esdaile · 2007 · 621 pages
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About this book
No other soldier has provoked as much argument as Napoleon Bonaparte. Was Napoleon a monster, driven on by an endless, ruinous quest for military glory - or was he a social and political visionary brought down by the petty, reactionary kings and emperors, clinging to their privileges?Napoleon's Wars is a book which has no doubt about Napoleon's insatiable greed for military glory, but it is interested in far more than that. Charles Esdaile is profoundly interested in a pan-European context: what was it that made the countries of Europe fight each other, for so long and with such devastating results. The battles themselves he sees as almost side-effects; the consequence of rulers being willing to take the immense risks of fighting or supporting Napoleon - risks which resulted in the extinction of entire countries.This is history on the grandest and most ambitious scale: a superb reassessment of a tumultuous era. Napoleon Bonaparte was not just the ultimate warlord -- a man who would have been nothing without war and conquest -- but he was never capable of setting the same limits on himself as the rulers and statesmen who had waged the conflilct of the eighteenth century. However the Napoleonic Wars are explained, it was the emperor's determination to eschew compromise, to flex his muscles on every possible occasion and to push matters to extremes that made them what they were. No military figure in history has been quite as polarizing as Napoleon Bonaparte. Was he a monster dr
Appears in these reading paths
The Napoleonic Wars explained: essential books from Austerlitz to Waterloo
The French Revolution & Napoleon, in order
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