Napoleon - A Concise Biography PDF

Napoleon Bonapartes astounding life and military genius have captured imaginations for two centuries. Now award-winning historian David A. Bell provides this succinct and elegant portrait, offering an original and lively account of Napoleons dazzling career and firmly situating him in the historical context of revolutionary France. Bell emphasizes the astonishing sense of human possibility—for both good and ill—that Napoleon represented. By his Tate twenties, he was already one of the greatest generals in European history. At thirty, he had become absolute master of Europes most powerful country. In his early forties, he ruled a European empire mightier than any rince Rome, fighting wars that changed the shape of the continent. But his fall was epic as well, leading him to spend his last years in miserable exile in the South Atlantic. Out of Bells engaging analysis emerges the image of an ambitious and charismatic man, one who affirmed his right to rule in the narre of the revolutionary principles of popular sovereignty and civic equality, but also as a conquering hero. Highlighting the importance of the 1789 French revolution in Napoleons political formation, this concise biography offers a new interpretation of his life and rule. The revolution made possible.

The task is magnified considerably when the era of Revolutionary France is included—any discussion of Napoleon must include the Revolution. As Bell points out, it produced the social and political environment through which Napoleon’s opportunity to change Europe emerged. On all counts, Napoleon: A Concise Biography is a thought provoking success. Not only is the book succinct, informative, and meticulously …