The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte: Emperor of the French

Author(s) : MICHAELIS Richard (ed.), SCOTT Walter
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The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte: Emperor of the French

From the Publishers:
“Six years after the death of Napoleon, Sir Walter Scott wrote the first, hugely successful biography of Napoleon. It has never before appeared in an edited paperback edition and was last published in 1857. Scott's journalistic portrait riveted Britain and the continent, and led to him being challenged to a duel by one of Napoleon s closest generals. Full of embarrassing revelations, the work became a publishing phenomenon and possibly the first book ever to be extracted in a newspaper. Scott' bracing but fair portrait of his contemporary by two years was written as a gripping page-turning history with evocative anecdotes. Inventing a new way of writing history and the first modern biography, Scott was to inspire eminent writers such as Carlyle and Macaulay to engage with the past. Today Scott's lively portrait remains as fresh as it was then, and as thought-provoking as Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Based on interviews with the Duke of Wellington and key French generals as well as access to secret government archives, Scott s is a unique instance of Napoleonic reportage. Touring European battle sites, his narrative is also a travelogue of a lost Europe that was then still a patchwork of fragmented local cultures and customs. As deeply curious as he was about Scotland, Scott painted highly individual cities and regions rather than the few nationalities we now regard as set as Napoleon envisaged them”.
 
The new edition has been edited by Dr Richard Michaelis, who teaches European and British history at Hertford College, Oxford. He was approached by Martin Rynja, publisher at Gibson Square, to edit the book, which he began working on in 2001.
Rynja said: “[Michaelis] set out to cut all the scenes that are now well-known to modern historians or instances where new knowledge has superseded Scott's version, but to leave all the stories and anecdotes that would delight even Napoleonic experts by their rarity.”

For a history of this work by Walter Scott see our article by Peter Hicks and Chantal Prévot.

Year of publication :
2015
Place and publisher :
London, Gibson Square
Number of pages :
448
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