Quatre Bras was the battle that turned a campaign - a tale of triumph and disaster. The Battle of Quatre Bras 1815 is not only a significant addition to the written history of the Napoleonic Wars, it is also the first English language account to focus solely on this crucial battle of the Waterloo campaign. Mike Robinson's compelling account is based on extensive original research and includes many unpublished personal accounts from all the participating nations. The author combines this testimony with an unparalleled study of the topography of the battlefield and deep knowledge of Napoleonic warfare to tell the story of a battle where commanders made errors of omission and commission and where cowardice rubbed shoulders with heroism. Above all, it is the story of the intense human experience of those who participated in the events of those two fateful days in June 1815.

At its height, the Napoleonic Empire spanned much of mainland Europe. Feted and feared by millions of citizens, Napoleon was the most powerful and famous man of his age. But following his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo the future of the one-time Emperor of France and master of Europe seemed irredeemably bleak. How did the brilliant tactician cope with being at the mercy of his captors? How did he react to a life in exile on St Helena - and how did the other inhabitants of that isolated and impregnable island respond to his presence there? And what tactics did he develop to preserve his legacy in such drastically reduced circumstances?

Tracing events from the dramatic defeat at Waterloo to his death six years later, this is the first modern comprehensive account of the last phase of Napoleon's life. Drawing on many previously overlooked journals and letters, Brian Unwin has pieced together a remarkably vivid account of Napoleon's final years which also offers fresh insights into the character of this giant of European history. 'Terrible Exile' brilliantly evokes the claustrophobic atmosphere of life on St Helena, offering a colourful and original history of the period as well as a persuasive psychological portrait of a great man in reduced circumstances. It will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in Napoleonic history and is an important addition to our understanding of the subject.

In 1798, the armies of the French Revolution tried to transform Rome from the capital of the Papal States to a Jacobin Republic. For the next two decades, Rome was the subject of power struggles between the forces of the Empire and the Papacy, while Romans endured the unsuccessful efforts of Napoleon's best and brightest to pull the ancient city into the modern world. Against this historical backdrop, Nicassio weaves together an absorbing social, cultural, and political history of Rome and its people. Based on primary sources and incorporating two centuries of Italian, French, and international research, her work reveals what life was like for Romans in the age of Napoleon.

"A remarkable book that wonderfully vivifies an understudied era in the history of Rome. . . . This book will engage anyone interested in early modern cities, the relationship between religion and daily life, and the history of the city of Rome."--"Journal of Modern History"

"An engaging account of Tosca's Rome. . . . Nicassio provides a fluent introduction to her subject."--"History Today"

"Meticulously researched, drawing on a host of original manuscripts, memoirs, personal letters, and secondary sources, enabling Nicassio] to bring her story to life."--"History"

Analyses the military tactics and methods adopted by Napoleon Bonaparte in the time leading up to, and during, the Jena Campaign of 1806. This book explores the elements that contributed to his success; from the organisation and movements of staff, to Napoleon's own strategic decision-making, and, more.

Naples and Napoleon rewrites the history of Italy in the age of the European revolutions from the perspective of the South. In contrast to later images of southern backwardness and immobility, Davis portrays the South as a precocious theatre for political and economic upheavals that sooner or later would challenge the survival of all the pre-Unification states. Focusing on the years of French rule from 1806 to 1815, when southern Italy became the arena for one of the most ambitious reform projects in Napoleonic Europe, Davis argues that this owed less to Napoleon than to the forces unleashed by the crisis of the Ancien Regime. However, an examination of the earlier Republic and the popular counter-revolutions of 1799, along with the later revolutions in Naples and Sicily in 1820-1, reveals that the impact of these changes was deeply contradictory.
This major reinterpretation of the history of the South before Unification significantly reshapes our understanding of how the Italian states came to be unified, while Davis also shows why long after Unification not just the South but Italy as a whole would remain vulnerable to the continuing challenges of the new age

In this groundbreaking work of literary and historical scholarship, Keith Gandal shows that Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner were motivated, in their famous postwar novels, not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences.
These "quintessential" male American novelists of the 1920s were all, for different reasons, deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command and the result was, Gandal contends, that they felt themselves emasculated--not, as the usual story goes, due to their encounters with trench warfare, but because they got nowhere near the trenches or the real action. By bringing to light previously unexamined archival records of the Army, The Gun and the Pen demonstrates that the frustration of these authors' military ambitions took place in the forgotten context of a whole new set of methods employed in the mobilization for the Great War--unprecedented procedures that aimed to transform the Army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class difference (though not racial, or black-white, difference). For these Lost Generation writers, the humiliating failure vis-a-vis the Army became a failure to compete successfully in a rising social order and against a new set of people. And it is that social order and those people--these effects of mobilization, and not other effects of the war--that the novels considered here both register and re-imagine.
Gandal's incisive readings of the famous fiction of this era against the backdrop of ethnicity, meritocracy, and sexuality closes with a coda on selected works from the 1930s, including prose by Djuna Barnes, Nathaniel West, and Henry Miller. Provocative and original, The Gun and the Pen restores these seminal novels to their proper historical context and proffers a radical revision of our understanding of the impact of World War I on twentieth-century American literature.

Great Generals of the Napoleonic Wars

'In war, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns. Thus it may be known that the leader of armies is the arbiter of the people's fate, the man on whom it depends whether the nation shall be in peace or peril...' ("Sun Tzu The Art of War"). We speak of Caesar who conquered Gaul, not the legions; MacArthur who landed at Inchon, not the Marines - and we speak of Napoleon, one of history's most successful generals. Major General Jonathon Riley is supremely well qualified to write on Napoleon's generalship and has written an informed and insightful account. He opens with a short treatise on generalship in order to define Napoleon's achievement before moving on to the man himself. He examines Napoleon as a strategist; as a coalition commander; Napoleon's campaigns and Napoleon on the battlefield. Areas often ignored in the context of pre-industrial warfare - logistics and counter-insurgency - are also examined. Riley proceeds to three specific case studies beginning with Napoleon's first essay in generalship and the conquest of Piedmont; Napoleon at the height of his powers at the conquest of Prussia, to Napoleon's final defeats and the Battle of the Nations in 1813.

In Naples and Napoleon John Davis takes the southern Italian Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as the vantage point for a sweeping reconsideration of Italy's history in the age of Napoleon and the European revolutions. The book's central themes are posed by the period of French rule from 1806 to 1815, when southern Italy was the Mediterranean frontier of Napoleon's continental empire. The tensions between Naples and Paris made this an important chapter in the history of that empire and revealed the deeper contradictions on which it was founded. But the brief interlude of Napoleonic rule later came to be seen as the critical moment when a modernizing North finally parted company from a backward South. Although these arguments still shape the ways in which Italian history is written, in most parts of the North political and economic change before Unification was slow and gradual; whereas in the South it came sooner and in more disruptive forms. Davis develops a wide-ranging critical reassessment of the dynamics of political change in the century before Unification. His starting point is the crisis that overwhelmed the Italian states at the end of the 18th century, when Italian rulers saw the political and economic fabric of the Ancien Regime undermined throughout Europe. In the South the crisis was especially far reaching and this, Davis argues, was the reason why in the following decade the South became the theatre for one of the most ambitious reform projects in Napoleonic Europe. The transition was precarious and insecure, but also mobilized political projects and forms of collective action that had no counterparts elsewhere in Italy before 1848, illustrating the similar nature of the political challenges facing all the pre-Unification states. Although Unification finally brought Italy's insecure dynastic principalities to an end, it offered no remedies to the insecurities that from much earlier had made the South especially vulnerable to the challenges of the new age: which was why the South would become a problem - Italy's 'Southern Problem'.

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.

Napoleon's soldiers marched across Europe from Lisbon to Moscow, and from Germany to Dalmatia. Many of the men, mostly conscripted by ballot, had never before been beyond their native village. What did they make of the extraordinary experiences, fighting battles thousands of miles from home, foraging for provisions or garrisoning towns in hostile countries? What was it like to be a soldier in the revolutionary and imperial armies? We know more about these men and their reactions to war than about the soldiers of any previous army in history, not just from offical sources but also from the large number of personal letters they wrote. Napoleon's Men provides a direct into the experiences and emotions of soldiers who risked their lives at Austerlitz, Wagram and Borodino. Not surprisingly, their minds often dwelt as much on what was happening at hime, and on mundane questions of food and drink as on Napoloen himself or the glory of France. Alan Forrest is Professor of Modern History at the University of York.Among his recent books are Paris, the Princes and the French Revolution (Arnold, 2004) and (co-authored with Jean-Paul Bertaud and Annie Jourdan), Napoleon, le monde et les Anglais (Paris, Autrement, 2004)

In August 1793 Republican France teetered on the brink of collapse. On every front her enemies' armies swept forwards across her borders - the very survival of the Revolution itself was at stake. In Toulon, the strategically vital home port of France's Mediterranean fleet, a coup had overthrown the Republican government and handed over the city to the blockading British navy. In this, perhaps her darkest hour, France's saviour was at hand in the shape of a Captain of Artillery whose name all Europe would soon know - Napoleon Bonaparte. This title describes the Republican victory at Toulon that not only saved the Revolution but also saw the young Napoleon Bonaparte begin his meteoric rise to power.

Poised to strike at England in the summer of 1805, Napoleon found himself facing a coalition of European powers determined to limit his territorial ambitions. Still, in less than one hundred days, Napoleon's armies marched from the English Channel to Central Europe, crushing the armies of Austria and Russia—the first step in his conquest of Europe. In this telling new account, Schneid demonstrates how this was possible. Schneid details how Napoleon's victory over the Third Coalition was the product of years of diplomatic preparation and the formation of French alliances. He played upon the prevailing conditions of the European state system and the internal politics of the Holy Roman Empire to improve France's strategic position. This war must be understood in the context of the French Revolution and its influence on major and minor European states. In some cases, Napoleonic diplomacy returned to France's traditional and historic relationships; in others, he capitalized upon longstanding competition and animosities to gather allies and create wedges. Schneid approaches the campaign from a broad diplomatic, economic, and military perspective, including not only the French perspective, but the points of view of the other powers involved as well. This telling account reveals that the road to Vienna was paved long before Napoleon's armies marched upon the enemies arrayed against them.

From the untimely demise of the 52-year-old Peter the Great in 1725 to nearly the end of that century, the fate of the Russian empire would rest largely in the hands of five tsarinas. This book tells their stories. Peter's widow Catherine I (1725-27), an orphan and former laundress, would gain control of the ancestral throne, a victorious army, and formidable navy in a country that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Next, Anna Ioannovna (1730-40), chosen by conniving ministers who sought an ineffectual puppet, would instead tear up the document that would have changed the course of Russian history forever only to rule Russia as her private fiefdom and hunting estate. The ill-fated Anna Leopoldovna (1740-41), groomed for the throne by her namesake aunt, would be Regent for her young son only briefly before a coup by her aunt Elizabeth would condemn Anna's family to a life of imprisonment, desolation, and death in obscurity. The beautiful and shrewd Elizabeth (1741-61) would seize her father Peter's throne, but, obsessed with her own fading beauty, she would squander resources in a relentless effort to stay young and keep her rivals at bay. Finally, Catherine the Great (1762-96) would overthrow (and later order the murder of) her own husband and rightful heir. Astute and intelligent, Catherine had a talent for making people like her, winning them to her cause; however, the era of her rule would be a time of tumultuous change for both Europe and her beloved Russia. In this vivid, quick-paced account, Anisimov goes beyond simply laying out the facts of each empress's reign, to draw realistic psychological portraits and to consider the larger fate of women in politics.Together, these five portraits represent a history of 18th-century court life and international affairs. Anisimov's tone is commanding, authoritative, but also convivial--inviting the reader to share the captivating secrets that his efforts have uncovered.

Osprey are confident in boasting that this remarkable three-part study will transform the research material available to the English-speaking student of the Peninsular War (1808-1814). Most know that Wellington's Portuguese troops were praised as the 'fighting cocks' of his army; fewer appreciate that they represented between half and one-third of his entire forces. Similarly, most uniform historians have been limited to a few half-understood paintings by Dighton, and brief notes from secondary sources. Rene Chartrand's recent primary research in Portuguese and British archives now offers a wealth of important new material. An excellent book - groundbreaking in its originality.

Describes the life, achievements, rise to power, and influences of the military leader who crowned himself Emperor of the French and established dominance over Europe.

It was not until the emergence of the ideologies of Zionism and Socialism at the end of the last century that the Jewish communities of the Diaspora were perceived by historians as having a genuine political life. In the case of the Jews of Russia, the pogroms of 1881 have been regarded as the watershed event which triggered the political awakening of Jewish intellectuals. Here Lederhendler explores previously neglected antecedents to this turning point in the history of the Jewish people in the first scholarly work to examine concretely the transition of a Jewish community from traditional to post-traditional politics.