Napoléon et Joseph Bonaparte : Le pouvoir et l’ambition (in French)

 
From the publishers:
A complex character, unfulfilled in his military career, and frequently misunderstood, the image of Joseph Bonaparte often pales in comparison with the legend that surrounds his younger brother, Napoleon. Nicknamed the “casual king” and portrayed as lazy, the “meilleur des frères” comes across as a weak individual who accepted the crowns “snatched away from two legitimate foreign families”. However, the French emperor's elder brother was to prove a pillar of the new regime introduced after the 18 brumaire coup d'état. Appointed king of Naples (and subsequently Spain), Joseph strove – fruitlessly it would prove – to combine the principle of familial solidarity with his own ideas regarding power. Unable to handle the fermenting tensions between him and the master of Europe, he transformed gradually into a determined opponent. It is this complex and, at times, violent relationship shared by the king and the emperor that this work explores. Using personal archives and a rich reserve of correspondence, Vincent Haegele investigates their upbringing, their development during the Revolution, the Neapolitan experiment and the Spanish failure, as well as the dark days of the French campaign. Analysing the ties that bound Joseph and Napoleon Bonaparte, this work is a fascinating history of two brothers whose lives were intimately intertwined with France's fate at the turn of the 19th century.
 
This book was awarded the 2010 Fondation Napoléon history prize for a work on the First Empire.

About the author:
Vincent Haegele is a graduate of the Ecole nationale des chartes and an archivist-paleographist. His work, Napoléon et Joseph. Correspondance intégrale, 1784-1818 was published by Tallandier in 2007. He is currently curator at the Bibliothèque universitaire de Lettres de Picardie.