Napoleon And The Hundred Days

A portrait of the general and self-made emperor who, in 1815, escaped captivity and fought his way across Europe for one hundred days, until meeting his match at Waterloo, a journey chronicled in a recreation of the rise and fall of an Empire.

Now in paperback, Napoleon’s return to the throne in Paris, as imagined by the incomparable Joseph Roth Joseph Roth paints a vivid portrait of Emperor Napoleon’s last grab at glory, the hundred days spanning his escape from Elba to his final defeat at Waterloo. This particularly poignant work, set in the first half of 1815 and largely in Paris, is told from two perspectives, that of Napoleon himself and that of the lowly, devoted palace laundress Angelica—an unlucky creature who deeply loves him. In The Hundred Days, Roth refracts the deep sorrow of their intertwined fates. Roth’s signature lyrical elegance and haunting atmospheric details sing in The Hundred Days. “There may be,” as James Wood has stated, “no modern writer more able to combine the novelistic and the poetic, to blend lusty, undamaged realism with sparkling powers of metaphor and simile.”

This book examines the politics of legitimacy as they played out across Europe in response to Napoleon’s dramatic return to power in France after his exile to Elba in 1814. Napoleon had to re-establish his claim to power with initially minimal military resources. Moreover, as the rest of Europe united against him, he had to marshal popular support for his new regime, while simultaneously demanding men and money to back what became an increasingly inevitable military campaign. The initial return – known as ‘the flight of the eagle’ – gradually turned into a dogged attempt to bolster support using a range of mechanisms, including constitutional amendments, elections, and public ceremonies. At the same time, his opponents had to marshal their resources to challenge his return, relying on populations already war-weary and resentful of the costs they had had to bear. The contributors to this volume explore how, for both sides, cultural politics became central in supporting or challenging the legitimacy of these political orders in the path to Waterloo.

Napoleon has escaped from Elba – the Hundred Days have begun.

In Vienna, 1815, as the political aristocrats of Europe assembled to determine the fate of the continent after the wars of the last twenty years, the news arrives that Napoleon has returned to France. Bonaparte -- the revolutionary turned emperor and 'disturber of the world's peace' -- had been defeated and exiled to Elba, but now he is fast advancing on Paris, gathering troops and taking cities without firing a single shot. Europe's peace is not to last. NAPOLEON AND THE HUNDRED DAYS brilliantly re-lives the rise and fall of Bonaparte's empire, and brings to life the characters who shaped it: Wellington, the Iron Duke; Napoleon's great love, Josephine; the duplicitous Tallyrand, his erstwhile foreign secretary; and, of course, Napoleon himself. Showing where the mistakes were made and how the path to war became inexorable, it culminates in a virtuoso description of the Battle of Waterloo itself. Displaying his customary blend of historian's and novelist's eye, Stephen Coote paints a vivid portrait of the legendary emperor and military genius, whose energy, courage and tenacity won -- and lost -- him a vast empire.

Illustrated with 30 maps, portraits and diagrams of the Waterloo Campaign Philip Guedalla was a British barrister, nut he was better known as a popular historical and biographical writer. His subjects were many and varied, but he had a noted inclination toward European subjects and particularly the history of France. For this volume he chose as his subject the “Hundred Days” — the return of the Emperor Napoleon from exile on Elba to his defeat at Waterloo and his final banishment to St. Helena. Eschewing national bias, the author sums up the dramatic events with wit, panache in his inimitable style.

This book is suitable for children age 9 and above. Napoleon Bonaparte was the first emperor of France. He was a very successful military general and he led his army into many victorious battles. This is the story of how a lawyer's son rose to become a powerful emperor.

'God was bored with Napoleon,' wrote Victor Hugo, and the Emperor was duly defeated at Waterloo in 1815 and exiled to St Helena, where he died an agonizing and horrifying death. The Emperor's real legacy is the modernizing and beautifying of Paris, the official promotion of religious tolerance, the current French legal and educational systems, and the European Union, to name but a few Napoleonic initiatives. And of course, the legend lives on. Drawing on new archival research, Hazareesingh traces not only the emergence of the Napoleonic myth and how it developed into a potent political culture, but also the amazing tenacity of popular affection for the Emperor, manifest in countless busts and portraits in ordinary citizens' homes, grass-roots political activism, miraculous apparitions reported after his death and the memories kept alive by thousands of imperial war veterans. This book is a timely study of why the fascination with Napoleon has endured for two centuries.