Napoleon

The historiography on Napoleon rivals that of the French Revolution itself: his contemporaries and each generation since have endlessly reinterpreted the actions and motives of the man who so completely dominated his age. Geoffrey Ellis's eagerly awaited Profile examines our current understanding of Napoleon the man, and explores the hugely different responses he has provoked across the years. What he provides is not a standard biography, or indeed a narrative account at all, but a thematic reappraisal of Napoleon's life and career. It illuminates not only Napoleon's personality and policies, and the nature and aims of Napoleonic imperialism; it also throws light on the very process of history-making itself. The book covers old ground afresh, as well as new: for the first time since Pieter Geyl's celebrated study of 1949, Geoffrey Ellis reassesses all the "classic" themes of Napoleonic historiography in the light of the latest research into the political, military and social structures of the Consulate and Empire. Approaching his subject through a series of key topics, he presents Napoleon as the focus of an essentially personalized system of power - a system which was progressively embroidered for projection to the public at the time, and which then helped generate the prolific Napoleonic legend after his final defeat in 1815.