The award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Churchill vividly captures the team of rivals who propelled history's greatest warrior to victory.
Napoleon appointed twenty-six men Marshals of the Empire, a position he created to honor his most important Generals. He encouraged competition among them for titles, for wealth, but above all, for glory. Only instead of creating a team of rivals, as Lincoln so famously did, he forged a nest of vipers. A masterful biographer with a gift for capturing flawed heroes in all their vitality and self-delusion, Andrew Roberts invites us into the lives and loves of these elite warriors, whose rivalries shaped the fate of Europe.
The marshals were the swords behind Napoleon's throne. Their valor burnished his aura of invincibility. Through their lives we follow the rise and fall of one of history's most captivating leaders, who forged an empire greater than Caesar's from the embers of France's first failed effort at democracy. Napoleon rose to power amidst the fervor and mayhem of the French Revolution, bringing order after years of violence and upheaval. He established new laws, championed new technologies, and pioneered new approaches to government and education, but his defeat ushered in the return of autocratic absolutism. Was he a genius or a tyrant? From the vantage point of his marshals, the answer may be both.
Over a quarter of Napoleon's Marshals died violent deaths. Only two would be at his side at Waterloo. But many would remember what it was like to be there, fighting to make a new world. Napoleon and his Marshals is a profound exploration of transformative leadership by a man uniquely gifted at rallying the troops, who fatefully mistrusted those whose loyalty he needed to survive.
Andrew Roberts is the author of four New York Times bestsellers: Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Napoleon: A Life, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, and Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare 1945 to Ukraine, co-authored with General David Petraeus. He is the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he hosts the podcast 'Secrets of Statecraft with Andrew Roberts'. A Distinguished Fellow at the New York Historical Society's Lehrman Institute and member of the House of Lords, he is the Chair of the Conservative Party's Committee on Teaching History in Schools and an Honorary Citizen of Texas.
Roberts will be in conversation with Michael F. Bishop, a historian, consultant, and ghostwriter. He is the former executive director of the International Churchill Society and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and his reviews and articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, National Review, and elsewhere.