Napoleon: The Man Behind the Empire

Everyone has met Napoleon. The bicorne hat, the hand inside the coat, the small dark figure on the white horse, the porphyry sarcophagus beneath the gilded dome of the Invalides: the image is one of the most familiar in modern memory. And yet, behind the bronze, the man himself is one of the least examined of his rank. He has become, after two centuries of polishing on one side and debunking on the other, more easily named than known.

Napoleon: The Man Behind the Empire follows the actual life in order, from the small Italian-speaking child born in Ajaccio in 1769, the year after Corsica was sold to France, to the prisoner who died of stomach cancer in a damp room on a Saint Helena plateau in 1821.