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976 pages, Hardcover
First published October 2, 2014
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. A French army under the command of Napoleon was defeated by the armies of the Seventh Coalition, comprising an Anglo-allied army under the command of the Duke of Wellington combined with a Prussian army under the command of Gebhard von Blücher. (wiki sourced)
Much has been written about his Corsicanness, his origins in the petit noblesse, his absorption of the ideas of the Enlightenment, and his inspiration by the ancient world, but the years he spent in military schooling at Brienne and the École Militaire affected him even more than any of these, and it was from the ethos of the Army that he took most of his beliefs and assumptions.
[Pauline Fourès] later made a fortune in the Brazilian timber business, wore men’s clothing and smoked a pipe, before coming back to Paris with her pet parrots and monkeys and living to be ninety.
With the Emperor riding beside him, Desvaux was cut in half by a cannonball.
[..] where a howitzer shell disembowelled a horse [Napoleon] was riding but left him unscathed.
Napoleon’s life and career stand as a rebuke to determinist analyses of history which explain events in terms of vast impersonal forces and minimize the part played by individuals. We should find this uplifting, since, as George Home, that midshipman on board HMS Bellerophon, put it in his memoirs, ‘He showed us what one little human creature like ourselves could accomplish in a span so short.’
Only those openly denouncing Napoleon were liable to arrest, and even this mild crackdown was carried out in a classically French eighteenth-century manner. When the royalist Charles de Rivière ‘proclaimed his hopes a little too spitefully and prematurely’, he was sent to La Force prison, but was later released when a friend won his freedom in a game of billiards against Savary.