Napoleon: A Biography

Barras, in exile at Grosbois, appealed to Napoleon but foolishly tempered his appeal by reproaching him with ingratitude, Napole ...

after all, here was a man who had delivered economic prosperity, the peace of Amiens, a religious settlement and a new deal for ...

do anything; first there was his military talent, then his diplomatic skill, next his administrative ability and finally his pro ...

class chauvinism, so that the proletariat always listened to Bonapartist propaganda rather than the criticisms of the liberal op ...

insinuated the oldest dodge in the book of right-wing theorists: the notion that equality before the law is in some sense real e ...

ascending class (the bourgeoisie) not yet quite strong enough. Napoleon held the ring, so to speak, by a trans-class coalition o ...

society, in which money rather than rank was the salient consideration, were laid, although in some ways, as will become clear, ...

Yet Napoleon was a clever politician who liked to camouflage and obfuscate what he was doing. The most consummate act of mystifi ...

principles. It is possible to see him as a man of the Revolution only if one ignores the social and political tendencies of the ...

talents was largely a meaningless slogan. As he once told Mole explicitly, the ideas of 1789 were 'nothing but weapons in the ha ...

CHAPTER THIRTEEN During the years of peace (I8oi--oJ), sightseers and tourists thronged Paris, which became the same kind of Mec ...

to the Roman republican qualities of thrift, austerity and asceticism. Instead Napoleon spent millions on the fountains, waterfa ...

Charles Emanuel to return to his throne so as to ensure stability in northern Italy. Charles Emanuel refused, so Napoleon, not w ...

her treaty obligations, France might be forced to reconquer Egypt. This, an attempt by Napoleon to apply pressure on the recalci ...

years, after which the island would be occupied by Russia. Naturally Whitworth turned this down, for London was set on war, and ...

1803 and why, despite this, has the responsibility so often been pinned on Bonaparte? Some of the explanations for war in 1803 c ...

as provocative, how much more provocative was England's refusal to evacuate Malta and Alexandria and to return Pondicherry and o ...

happy in his alliance with Talleyrand and content to grow fat on his real­ estate investments. Joseph was full of a sense of his ...

delusions; the evidence does not permit us to correlate it exactly with a mysterious physical malady, from which he suffered, po ...

set much later. Two pieces of circumstantial evidence seem to support this idea. One was Louis's honeymoon tirade, when he threa ...