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When Napoleons Grand Armee went to war against the might of the Habsburg empire in 1809, its forces included more than 100,000 allied German troops. From his earliest imperial campaigns, these troops provided played a key role as Napoleon swept from victory to victory and in 1809 their fighting abilities were crucial to the campaign. With Napoleons French troops depleted and debilitated after the long struggle in the Spanish War, the German troops for the first time played a major combat role in the centre of the battle line. Aiming at a union of German states under French protection to replace the decrepit Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon sought to expand French influence in central Germany ...
More than a third of a million men set out on that midsummer day of 1812: none can have imagined the terrors and hardships to come. They would be lured all the way to Moscow without having achieved the decisive battle Napoleon sought; and by the time they reached the city their numbers would already have dwindled by more than a third. One of the greatest disasters in military history was in the making. The fruit of more than twenty years of research, this superbly crafted work skilfully blends the memoirs and diaries of more than a hundred eyewitnesses, all of whom took part in the Grand Armys doomed march to Moscow, to reveal the inside story of this landmark military campaign. The result is a uniquely authentic account in which the reader sees and experiences the campaign through the eyes of participants at each stage of the advance in enthralling day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour detail.
Some 12 years ago it was estimated that well over 300,000 works existed on this period and since then several thousand more have appeared. Therefore, it might be reasonably argued that there is little room for another volume. Nonetheless, this vast outpouring of literature has usually dealt with major leaders, specific battles or campaigns, and with certain branches of the service. Moreover, at least in English, the literature tends to concentrate primarily on the French or British armies. There appears to be a lack of works combining a description of the major changes and trends in the art of war, especially at the cutting edge of events, with a discussion of the French military establishment and the armies of the major opponents, British as well as continental. And while this book is only a brief survey, I do believe that it may serve as a contribution towards filling this gap in our historical knowledge of military institutions and fighting men.
The first comprehensive history of the Fall Campaign that determined control of Central Europe following Napoleon's catastrophic defeat in Russia.
Major Louis Joseph Vionnet's memoirs of Napoleon's disastrous 1812 campaign in Russia are readable, detailed, and full of personal anecdote and vivid glimpses into the life of the nineteenth-century soldier. His account concentrates in particular on the retreat from Moscow, but he was present at all the major actions and followed the entire course of the campaign from the opening moves in July 1812 to being chased through Prussia by bands of Cossacks in early 1813. He was present at the destruction of Smolensk, toured the battlefield of Borodino and witnessed the great fire in Moscow. Vionnet was a major in the Fusiliers-Grenadiers, a regiment of veterans in the Imperial Guard, and his accou...
The second volume of a new and comprehensive biography about one of the history's most charismatic leaders 'a very fine book, which explains Napoleon's extraordinary rise to power and equally meteoric fall, with great erudition, skill and verve' Spectator 'Exemplary scholarship ... A book of meticulous research and beautifully detailed descriptions of Napoleon's military adventures, brings home the full horrific cost of the march on Russia' New Statesman 'Napoleon's legend is so persistent that it confounds the historical reality in the popular imagination. He himself contributed much towards the construction of his own myth, from his youth even until after he fell from power, when, while in...
One of the most influential women in French history was Germaine de Stal (1766-1817). Analyzing her novels, correspondence, and writings on politics and the intellectual trends of the time, Dixon presents an appealing portrait of the woman whose life and career bridged the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of Romanticism.
This in-depth study of The Battle of Austerlitz, considered Napoleon’s greatest victory, won the Napoleon Foundation’s History Grand Prize. Sometimes called The Battle of Three Emperors, Napoleon’s victory against the combined forces of Russia and Austria brought a decisive end to The War of the Third Coalition. The magnitude of the French achievement against a larger army was met by sheer amazement and delirium in Paris, where just days earlier the nation had been teetering on the brink of financial collapse. In 1805: Austerlitz, historian Robert Goetz demonstrates how Napoleon and his Grande Armée of 1805 defeated a formidable professional army that had fought the French armies on e...