This concise biography is written with great wit and panache, but also has a serious purpose: to make us face up to the moral bankruptcy of Napoleon's dictatorship. Johnson tells the whole story: his astonishing gift for figures and calculation, his mastery of cannon; his audacious, hyperactive and aggressive generalship and his simple battle tactics; his complete control of propaganda and the success of the cultural presentation of the Empire; the Code Napoleon; his failure as an international statesman, as Europe grew to hate him; his marshals and ministers; his wives, mistresses, personal style and working methods; the British blockade and the Continental System; the mistakes in Spain and Russia. The escape from Elba, the events leading up to Waterloo and the battle itself, which gets a full treatment, is particularly riveting.
- ISBN10 0670030783
- ISBN13 9780670030781
- Publish Date 13 May 2002
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Viking Books
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 190
- Language English