A history of Napoleon’s marshals has all the dash and vigour of a cavalry charge
From our UK edition
In his fourth book on Napoleon, after Napoleon and Wellington (2001), Waterloo (2005) and Napoleon the Great (2014), Andrew Roberts focuses on the emperor’s relations with his 26 marshals. Writing with the dash and vigour of a cavalry charge, having walked 53 of Napoleon’s 60 battlefields, Roberts analyses campaigns and battles from Italy in 1796, through Austerlitz, ‘the greatest victory in the history of France’, and the retreat from Moscow (ten marshals served in the Russian campaign) to Waterloo in 1815. Accounts of marches and battles are interspersed with frequent quotations from the emperor’s letters, sent day and night to his marshals to micromanage their campaigns, as well as from the marshals’ personal correspondence with each other.
