The fighting between the French and the Haitians was very bloody. When the French tried to put down Toussaint in 1802, it took them some five months with an expeditionary force of 23,000. Supplied by locals, the French seized the towns, gradually…
The French government used its Bulletins of the Grand Army to report official versions of the course of military campaigns. In a rare admission of problems, Bulletin no. 29 reported the French losses in Russia.
The memoirs of Claire, Countess of Rémusat provide a bird’s-eye view into the operation of Napoleon’s imperial household. Rémusat was a lady-in-waiting to Napoleon’s first wife Josephine. Napoleon wanted an elaborate court to underline his imperial…
In this excerpt, Rainsford continues to exhalt the qualities of L’Ouverture while criticizing French behavior in the attempted reconquest of the island under Napoleon.
Napoleon brought to completion a project dear to the hearts of the revolutionaries, the drafting of new law codes. The civil code was the most important of them because it institutionalized equality under the law (at least for adult men), guaranteed…
Napoleon spent ten months on this island in the Mediterranean. He was able to follow events in France without much difficulty. This initial exile was part of a relatively lenient settlement granted by the allies in 1814 after Napoleon’s initial…
Even in death Napoleon was controversial. Many questions surrounded his death: Was he poisoned? His hair had high levels of arsenic in it. Did he have stomach cancer? He certainly had stomach ulcers and suffered from severe intestinal pain and…
The Council of Five–Hundred, the lower house of the legislature under the Directory’s constitution, put up only token resistance to the coup of 18 Brumaire [9 November 1799]. By the following day, this body—in principle, made up of the…
