Captain Jean-Roch Coignet was born a month after the American Declaration of Independence, and lived through three French Revolutions, two Republics, one Empire, and four Kingships. He writes truthful
In 1795 – the year Napoleon Bonaparte was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the French army in Italy – the seventeen-year-old Jean-Nicolas-Auguste Noël entered the Artillery School at Châlons. A year la
In this wide-ranging study of the Napoleonic regime, Digby Smith tracks Napoleon’s rise to power, his stewardship of France from 1804–15, and his exile. He highlights his military mistakes, such as hi