Napoleon: His Wives and Women

by Christopher Hibbert (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.25

  A masterly biography of Napoleon, concentrating on his private life, by the historian described by Stella Tillyard as 'a master portraitist of great men's private lives' and by Amanda Foreman as 'one of England's greatest living historical writers'. Modern history has produced one single myth on a heroic scale to rival those of Alexander and Caesar - that of Napoleon. The continuing fascination of this astonishingly gifted man is reflected in the number of books published each year on various aspects of the Napoleonic legend: some 250,000 volumes in all since Napoleon's mysterious death in 1821. What is still needed is now provided by Christopher Hibbert: an authoritative up-to-date account of Napoleon's private life at all stages of his developing and extraordinary career, based on the fruits of modern research, his character, interests and tastes, his friendships, enmities and love affairs, his relations with the members of his remarkable family, the impressions he made on his contemporaries away from the council chamber and the battlefield, his personal life at war, in exile and as emperor in peacetime, the mystery surrounding his death: in short, the man revealed behind the soldier, statesman and legend.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $3.25

  This fresh account of the private life of Napoleon provides an authoritative, up-to-date account of the women in Napoleon's life at all stages of his developing and extraordinary career, based on the fruits of modern research. Hibbert looks at Napoleon's marriages to the charming Creole from Martinique, Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie, and the plain and pliant Austrian Archduchess Marie Louise, as well as his affairs with his various mistresses, from the pretty, 20-year-old milliner's apprentice Pauline Foures, who was smuggled out to Egypt wearing the uniform of her husband's regiment, to the young Polish Countess Marie Walewska who resisted him at first but, persuaded by her elderly husband and other Polish patriots to submit, eventually fell in love with him. From his time as an unknown young Corsican officer to First Consul, Emperor and finally exile on St Helena, Napoleon's string of brief liaisons led him to proclaim to Josephine that the ordinary rules of morality and propriety did not apply to him. As well as the wives and mistresses, the book examines Napoleon's relationship with the women of his family, all of whom disliked and envied Josephine: his beloved, parsimonious mother and his three sisters, Elisa, Caroline and Pauline.