Download Free La Grande Armee Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online La Grande Armee and write the review.

This tour de force of Napoleonic study is made available in the English language for the first time since its original French publication in 1979. The author is a respected historian, and this description of one of history's most famous fighting forces is amongst his finest works. From Boulogne and Austerlitz to Spain and Moscow, and the dramatic conclusion at Waterloo, the reader is taken through the career of Napoleon's Grande Armée in thorough, well researched detail. The result is an account that, for completeness and value to a diverse audience, ranks with the best of military literature. - Back cover.
“A fascinating study exploring the motivation of French soldiers during the Napoleonic Era, and the process through which they became Napoleon’s men.”—Frederick C. Schneid, author of Napoleon’s Conquest of Europe The men who fought in Napoleon’s Grande Armée built a new empire that changed the world. Remarkably, the same men raised arms during the French Revolution for liberté, égalité, and fraternité. In just over a decade, these freedom fighters, who had once struggled to overthrow tyrants, rallied to the side of a man who wanted to dominate Europe. What was behind this drastic change of heart? In this ground-breaking study, Michael J. Hughes shows how Napoleonic military culture shaped the motivation of Napoleon’s soldiers. Relying on extensive archival research and blending cultural and military history, Hughes demonstrates that the Napoleonic regime incorporated elements from both the Old Regime and French Revolutionary military culture to craft a new military culture, characterized by loyalty to both Napoleon and the preservation of French hegemony in Europe. Underscoring this new, hybrid military culture were five sources of motivation: honor, patriotism, a martial and virile masculinity, devotion to Napoleon, and coercion. Forging Napoleon’s Grande Armée vividly illustrates how this many-pronged culture gave Napoleon’s soldiers reasons to fight. “Hughes offers a tight and well-grounded exposition and analysis of French military culture in the Napoleonic period in which military honour is presented as a dynamic element.” —Journal of European Studies “Hughes’s book not only contributes to our understanding of the military success of Napoleon’s army, but also elegantly employs cultural history methods to better understand army operations and sustained troop motivations.” —Julia Osman, History: Reviews of New Book
Armies of the Napoleonic Wars Research Series is a factual in-depth study of the armies, battles, and leaders of the Age of Napoleon. "The principal purpose of the volume is to bring together the most information practical on the raising and formation of Napoleon's war machine, its level of training, combat effectiveness and the opinions of strengths and weaknesses made by the people closest to the army - the officers and ministers themselves." This volume includes extensive, detailed parade states of the army throughout 1813 and is purposely written in a succinct manner which relates to the subject matter. A detailed history of Napoleon's Grand Armee of 1813, this volume is an absolute must for any Napoleonic enthusiast, historian or wargamer; a gold mine of information, insights, and the key for understanding the crucial campaign of 1813.
This authoritative, comprehensive, and enthralling book describes and analyzes Napoleon's most powerful weapon -- the Grande Armee which at its peak numbered over a million soldiers. Elting examines every facet of this incredibly complex human machine: its organization, command system, logistics, weapons, tactics, discipline, recreation, mobile hospitals, camp followers, and more. From the army's formation out of the turmoil of Revolutionary France through its swift conquests of vast territories across Europe to its legendary death at Waterloo, this book uses excerpts from soldiers' letters, eyewitness accounts, and numerous firsthand details to place the reader in the boots of Napoleon's conscripts and generals. In Elting's masterful hands the experience is truly unforgettable.
The best single-volume reference book on the regiments of Napoleon's army, with details of unit organization and history plus biographies of 200 regimental officers.
If there was one man, other than Napoleon himself, who determined the course of the Napoleonic Wars, it was Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, comte de Guibert, the foremost military theorist in France from 1770 to his death in 1790. Taking in the full scope of the times, from the ideas of the Enlightenment to the passions of the French Revolution, Jonathan Abel’s Guibert is the first book in English to tell the remarkable story of the man who, through his pen and political activity, truly earned the title of Father of the Grande Armée. In his Essai général de tactique, published in 1771, Guibert set forth the definitive institutional doctrine for the French army of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. But unlike many other martial theorists, Guibert, who served in the French Ministry of War from 1775 to 1777 and again from 1787 to 1789, was able to put his ideas into practice. Drawing on a wealth of primary source documents—including Guibert’s own papers and the letters and memoirs of his friends and associates—Jonathan Abel re-creates the temper of an era of great turbulence and remarkable creativity. More than a military theorist, Guibert was very much a man of his day; he attended salons, wrote poetry and plays, and was inducted into the Académie française. A fiery figure, he rose and fell from power, lived and loved fiercely, and died swearing that he would “find justice.” In Abel’s account, Guibert does at last receive a measure of justice: a thorough, painstakingly documented picture of this complex man in the thick of extraordinary times, building the foundation for Napoleon's success between 1796 and 1807—and in significant ways, changing the course of European history.
As they march into Poland, an exhausted Grand Armeé must battle both enemies and the elements in this epic adventure of the Napoleonic Wars. Poland, 1807: Sergeant Alain Lausard and his loyal dragoons have never known a campaign like it. Already spent from their victory over Prussia, they must now march into Poland and battle General Bennigsen’s Russian troops. And the Tsar is not the only enemy that must be overcome: country and climate conspire to make conditions impossible. The Grande Armeé may be renowned for its ability to move with speed and purpose, but as torrential rain turns Polish roads to quagmires, they face a battle-hardened foe just as their strength reaches its lowest ebb. Perhaps not even Bonaparte’s tactical brilliance will be enough to save Lausard and his men from a deadly debacle . . .
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.
In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.