Napoleonic Era

The news of Waterloo shocked American readers, writes Donald D. Horward, and most writers and editors refused to believe Wellington’s famous dispatch of June 19th, 1815.

Ian Young explains the many guises of Russia's Romanov ruler: in Napoleon’s caustic phrase, “the Talma of the North”; according to Chateaubriand, “a strong soul and a feeble character”; styled by Pushkin as, “the Sphinx who took his riddle with him to the grave”; Alexander began his life as a liberal visionary and ended it as an impassioned champion of the autocratic principle.

David G. Chandler offers a study in fact and fiction about a famous Napoleonic campaign.

David G. Chandler describes how the trouble Napoleon took over the interpretation of events at Marengo shows how deeply they had disturbed him.

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, writes Arthur Calder-Marshall, London became a centre of reforming agitation against poverty and political mismanagement.

Michael Jenkins describes a reforming minister of genius and, according to Napoleon, ‘the only clear head in Russia’; Mikhail Speransky fell from power in the year 1812.

Harold Kurtz introduces one of the French Republic's most successful commanders, who kept his independence in relation to Napoleon and was adopted King of Sweden.

As King of Sweden, writes Harold Kurtz, the former Gascon sergeant never lost his popularity with the Army, middle classes and peasants of his adopted country.

Robert Gildea examines the enduring and divisive debate surrounding the reputation of the French emperor who anticipated the best and the worst of the 20th century.

Francis Austen served throughout the Napoleonic Wars and, writes David Hopkinson, lived until the age of ninety-one; an Admiral of the Fleet.