Napoleon: A Biography

Jena he quickly tried to backtrack and even sent a Spanish army corps to the Baltic, but the Emperor was not deceived. Charles I ...

the mob. Historians have seen this as another manifestation of the hidalgo tradition: the grandees could stomach rule by bureauc ...

Savary to murder his wife and children, I know he would do it without a moment's hesitation.' This was the man whose blandishmen ...

Emperor concede that his Spanish policy was one of his greatest errors. It has been described, not unjustifiably, as an 'ambush' ...

opposition arose, the task of suppressing it would be a military walkover; and lack of imagination in that he could not understa ...

from local notables and commanders, since Ferdinand had instructed his junta in Madrid to cultivate the French at all costs. It ...

resulting from Napoleon's Continental System and (particularly on the part of the Church and the landowners) resistance to the k ...

obey the rules of war when dealing with a 'captain of bandits'. Zaragoza, having held out for two-and-a-half months against a la ...

fo r its full propaganda worth in the London broadsheets, where it was claimed that Napoleon himself had been worsted. A facile ...

tighten up the plans he had laid with Alexander at Tilsit for a Franco­ Russian pincer movement on India. But, the insincerity o ...

by insisting on two clauses: that he, not Alexander, should determine the criteria for Russia's going to war with Austria, and t ...

Talleyrand told Alexander that the tacit social alliance between Napoleon and the notables was at an end, that the notables want ...

else, but my family and Talleyrand and Fouche and all the politicians insist upon it in the name of France.' When the two autocr ...

making a fr ontal attack while Ney worked round to the rear - was more controversial. While Napoleon railed at Ney for incompete ...

deal decisively with the Spanish. Instead he opted to take out the British. Hearing that Sir John Moore had tried to fall on his ...

vtttate central control fr om Madrid and play into the hands of the Spanish guerrillas and, later, the British army under Wellin ...

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Joseph Fouche seems to have been the one man the Emperor genuinely feared, and with reason. The J. Edgar Hoover ...

declaration of war, Alexander declined to have anything to do with it. Thirdly, the Austrians knew, even before Talleyrand confi ...

supply infrastructure. By early I809 the Austrian commanders were itching for war. The cautious Emperor Francis was doubtful. To ...

stance in early I8og. On I I February Roederer recorded a conversation with the Emperor in which he stated: 'I have only one pas ...