Examines the life of Napoleon after the Battle of Waterloo, his fall from power, and the politics surrounding his surrender.

In this ambitious book, Girard employs the latest tools of the historian's craft, multi-archival research in particular, and applies them to the climactic yet poorly understood last years of the Haitian Revolution. Haiti lost most of its archives to neglect and theft, but a substantial number of documents survive in French, U.S., British, and Spanish collections, both public and private. In all, this book relies on contemporary military, commercial, and administrative sources drawn from nineteen archives and research libraries on both sides of the Atlantic.

Discover why Napoleon really lost Waterloo, the campaign that ended it all. This is the inside story of the deceit that brought down an Emperor and an era, and how the fate of the battle was written months before it ever began. This masterful plot has stood hiding in plain sight for two hundred years. No more. Now, for the first time, the suspicions of many of Napoleon's veterans and inner circle are proved by citing the hundreds of documents that only came to light after their deaths. A behind-the-scenes tour of Waterloo like you've never seen before.Presented here in luminous detail, with:* Over 100 pieces of correspondence in both the original French and translated English, many entirely unknown to the English-speaking world, alone making the book an invaluable resource. * English Translations of rarely referenced but key primary sources, conclusively demonstrating that which anti-Napoleon historians have negligently dismissed.* Hundreds of contemporaneously unavailable documents cited.Think you know Waterloo? This is the book that rewrites the campaign.

The full story of Napoleon’s legendary escape from Russia under seemingly impossible odds is recounted in this thrillingly vivid military history. In the winter of 1812, Napoleon's army retreated from Moscow under appalling conditions, hunted by three separate Russian armies. By late November, Napoleon had reached the banks of the River Berezina—the last natural obstacle between his army and the safety of the Polish frontier. But instead of finding the river frozen solid enough to march his men across, an unseasonable thaw had turned the Berezina into an icy torrent. Having already ordered the burning of his bridging equipment, Napoleon's predicament was serious enough: but with the army of Admiral Chichagov holding the opposite bank, and those of Kutusov and Wittgenstein closing fast, it was critical. In a gripping narrative that draws on contemporary sources—including letters, diaries and memoirs—Alexander Mikaberidze describes how Napoleon rose from the pit of despair to execute one of the greatest escapes in military history.

From Roger Knight, established by his multi-award winning book The Pursuit of Victory as 'an authority ... none of his rivals can match' (N.A.M. Rodger), Britain Against Napoleon is the first book to explain how the British state successfully organised itself to overcome Napoleon - and how very close it came to defeat. For more than twenty years after 1793, the French army was supreme in continental Europe, and the British population lived in fear of French invasion. How was it that despite multiple changes of government and the assassination of a Prime Minister, Britain survived and won a generation-long war against a regime which at its peak in 1807 commanded many times the resources and manpower? This book looks beyond the familiar exploits of the army and navy to the politicians and civil servants, and examines how they made it possible to continue the war at all. It shows the degree to which, as the demands of the war remorselessly grew, the whole British population had to play its part. The intelligence war was also central. Yet no participants were more important, Roger Knight argues, than the bankers and traders of the City of London, without whose financing the armies of Britain's allies could not have taken the field. The Duke of Wellington famously said that the battle which finally defeated Napoleon was 'the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life': this book shows how true that was for the Napoleonic War as a whole. Roger Knight was Deputy Director of the National Maritime Museum until 2000, and now teaches at the Greenwich Maritime Institute at the University of Greenwich. In 2005 he published, with Allen Lane/Penguin, The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson, which won the Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military History, the Mountbatten Award and the Anderson Medal of the Society for Nautical Research. The present book is a culmination of his life-long interest in the workings of the late 18th-century British state.

On July 15th, 1815, after being defeated at Waterloo and deposed in Paris, the former Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte presented himself to Captain Frederick Maitland, commander of HMS Bellerophon, which was blockading the exit from Rochefort on the French Atlantic coast. This peaceful surrender precipitated one of the most complex and unresolved issues in British law and politics. In modern parlance, the British were faced with the prospect of making Napoleon the subject of 'extraordinary rendition'.