The impossibility of defeating his most persistent enemy, Great Britain, led him to make draining and ultimately fatal expeditions into Spain and Russia, where 750,000 Frenchmen were killed or wounded and his empire began to unravel.Īndrew Roberts conveys Napoleon's tremendous energy, both physical and intellectual, and the attractiveness of his personality, even to his enemies. In a series of dazzling battles he reinvented the art of warfare in peace, he completely remade the laws of France, modernized her systems of education and administration, and presided over a flourishing of the beautiful ‘Empire style' in the arts. After seizing power in a coup d'état he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the Revolution had descended. In the space of just twenty years, from October 1795 when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. “Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the most extraordinary men who ever lived.
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