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By Root 2376 0

figure in history, meanwhile, Napoleon has had the capacity to inspire a loyal band of followers to spend their lives in a crusade to defend his historical reputation. Armed with the ‘holy scripture’ handed down on the mount of St Helena, and aided by a variety of political and historical fellow travellers, these latterday soldiers of the grande armée have for generation after generation variously sought to persuade the world that their hero desired only to defend the honour of France, to preserve the French Revolution, to liberate the rest of Europe from the chains of the ancien régime and even to create a united Europe that would have been a precursor of the current European Union. By constantly returning to the charge, they have kept the debate alive and, amongst other things, made this book possible. Indeed, not just possible but essential: their arguments are so powerful and attractive that they have in effect won the battle for the public mind. People who have never heard of Brumaire, Marengo, Austerlitz or Wagram, nevertheless ‘know’ that Napoleon somehow stands for liberty, progress and the advancement of the ‘little man’. Hence the triumph of Napoleon as brand name, and the prominence his figure has achieved in the world of advertising (and perhaps the cinema: Napoleon is not just one of the most written about personalities in history, but is also reputed to be the one that, after Jesus Christ, has been the most portrayed on film).

The idea that any one book could possibly reverse this situation is laughable, but for all that the attempt must be made. Thus the Napoleon who stands so tall in the public mind, the Napoleon who to this day exerts so great a pull on the public imagination, is the Napoleon that the emperor himself wished us to see, the Napoleon who first emerged in the propaganda of a hundred imperial bulletins and a thousand copies of Le Moniteur and was then enshrined for all time in the legend of St Helena. By the same token, all the arguments that have been used - and are still used - to create a positive image of the emperor are in effect the arguments of Napoleon himself. Each and every one of those arguments, however, is open at the very least to serious question, and there are now few academic historians who accept them at anything like face value. Yet academic historians rarely attract the audience that they deserve, and the first purpose of this book is therefore to synthesize their work and insert it into a debate from which it is all too often absent.

But Napoleon’s Wars is not just one more contribution to the Napoleon controversy. It is also an attempt to approach the subject from a very different perspective. Hitherto the subject of the Napoleonic Wars has almost always been handled through one or other of two prisms: either as a biography of Napoleon or as a study of his campaigns. As historical genres there is nothing wrong with either of these approaches, but they do have certain limitations in that they concentrate on a story that is distinctly unidimensional and, worse, retell a story that has been told over and over again. In consequence, a survey of the historiography of the Napoleonic Wars cannot but leave the observer with a sense of dissatisfaction. What we have is invariably a litany of Napoleon’s battles, but the Napoleonic Wars did not solely consist of Napoleon’s battles, but were also waged in a series of theatres - the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, the Balkans, Scandinavia - which the emperor either never graced with his presence at all or only visited very briefly. Of these other theatres of war, all of them situated on the peripheries of the Continent, only the first has received detailed treatment (and even then in a fashion that has been just as skewed). We therefore come to the second purpose of Napoleon’s Wars: to write a history of the Napoleonic Wars that reflects their pan-European dimension and is not just francocentric. In doing so I have had to fill in many gaps, and the result is sometimes somewhat curious; I have had to expend far more ink on the Serbian revolt