Napoleon's Stolen Army

Napoleon's Stolen Army PDF Author: John Marsden
Publisher: From Reason to Revolution
ISBN: 9781913118983
Category : Napoleonic Wars, 1800-1815
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the story of how, in 1808, the Royal Navy used its dominance in the Baltic to rescue the Spanish Army of the Marqués de La Romana.

Napoleon's Stolen Army

Napoleon's Stolen Army PDF Author: John Marsden
Publisher: From Reason to Revolution
ISBN: 9781913118983
Category : Napoleonic Wars, 1800-1815
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the story of how, in 1808, the Royal Navy used its dominance in the Baltic to rescue the Spanish Army of the Marqués de La Romana.

Plunder

Plunder PDF Author: Cynthia Saltzman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374710392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of The Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of May "A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two.” —Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal A captivatingstudy of Napoleon’s plundering of Europe’s art for the Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from Venice Cynthia Saltzman’s Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers’ space opened onto a biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder; soon after, artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought into Paris. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings. As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon’s looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of the Louvre, she reveals the contradictions of his character: his thirst for greatness—to carry forward the finest aspects of civilization—and his ruthlessness in getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the Louvre’s plundered paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa. Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history, one that sheds light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the great museums of the world.

Napoleon's Invasion of Russia

Napoleon's Invasion of Russia PDF Author: Charles River Charles River Editors
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781983754975
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Get Book Here

Book Description
*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the campaign written by French soldiers *Includes a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "The thunderstorms of the 24th turned into other downpours, turning the tracks--some diarists claim there were no roads in Lithuania--into bottomless mires. Wagon sank up to their hubs; horses dropped from exhaustion; men lost their boots. Stalled wagons became obstacles that forced men around them and stopped supply wagons and artillery columns. Then came the sun which would bake the deep ruts into canyons of concrete, where horses would break their legs and wagons their wheels." - Richard K. Riehn French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was not a man made for peacetime. By 1812, he had succeeded in subduing most of his enemies - though in Spain, the British continued to be a perpetual thorn in his flank that drained the Empire of money and troops - but his relationship with Russia, never more than one of mutual suspicion at best, had now grown downright hostile. At the heart of it, aside from the obvious mistrust that two huge superpowers intent on dividing up Europe felt for one another, was Napoleon's Continental blockade. Russia had initially agreed to uphold the blockade in the Treaty of Tilsit, but they had since taken to ignoring it altogether. Napoleon wanted an excuse to teach Russia a lesson, and in early 1812 his spies gave him just that: a preliminary plan for the invasion and annexation of Poland, then under French control. Napoleon wasted no time attempting to defuse the situation. He increased his Grande Armee to 450,000 fighting men and prepared it for invasion. On July 23rd, 1812, he launched his army across the border, despite the protestations of many of his Marshals. The Russian Campaign had begun, and it would turn out to be Napoleon's biggest blunder. Russia's great strategic depth already had a habit of swallowing armies, a fact many would-be conquerors learned the hard way. Napoleon, exceptional though he was in so many regards, proved that even military genius can do little in the face of the Russian winter and the resilience of its people. From a purely military standpoint, much of the campaign seemed to be going in Napoleon's favor since he met with little opposition as he pushed forwards into the interior with his customary lightning speed, but gradually this lack of engagements became a hindrance more than a help; Napoleon needed to bring the Russians to battle if he was to defeat them. Moreover, the deeper Napoleon got his army sucked into Russia, the more vulnerable their lines of supply, now stretched almost to breaking point, became. The Grande Armee required a prodigious amount of material in order to keep from breaking down, but the army's pace risked outstripping its baggage train, which was constantly being raided by Cossack marauders. Moreover, Napoleon's customary practice of subsisting partially off the land was proving to be ineffective: the Russians were putting everything along his line of advance, including whole cities, to the torch rather than offer him even a stick of kindling or sack of flour for his army. Napoleon was sure that taking Moscow would prompt the Russians to surrender. Instead, with winter on the way, the Russians appeared more bellicose than ever. Napoleon and his army lingered for several weeks in the burnt shell of Moscow but then, bereft of supplies and facing the very real threat of utter annihilation, Napoleon gave the order to retreat. By the time the Grande Armee had reached the Berezina, it had been decimated: of the over 450,000 fighting men that had invaded Russia that autumn, less than 40,000 remained. Napoleon's Invasion of Russia details the background leading up to the campaign, the fighting, and the aftermath of France's catastrophic defeat. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the French invasion of Russia like never before.

Napoleons Plunder and the Theft of Veroneses Feast

Napoleons Plunder and the Theft of Veroneses Feast PDF Author: Saltzman Cynthia
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500776547
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Get Book Here

Book Description
Napoleons Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history and, in doing so, sheds new light on the complex origins of what was once called the Musée Napoléon, now known as the Louvre. In 1796, four years after the founding of the First French Republic and only two days after his marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais, Napoleon Bonaparte left Paris to take command of his first campaign in Italy, aged only twenty-six. One year later, Napoleons army was in Venice and his commissioners were determining which great Renaissance artworks to bring back to France. Among the paintings the French chose was The Wedding Feast at Cana by Paolo Veronese, a vast masterpiece that had hung in the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore since it was painted in 1563. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean packed among paintings commandeered from Venice and made its way by river and canal to Paris where Napoleon gathered his spoils of war treasures from the cities of Rome, Milan, and later Berlin and Vienna. In 1801 the Veronese was placed on triumphant display in the Louvre, the former palace of the French kings, which had been transformed into a public museum that ostensibly belonged to the French people, but which also functioned as a monument to Napoleons power. Saltzman interweaves the stories of Napoleons military campaigns, uncovering the treaties through which he obtained his loot, with the histories of the plundered works themselves, exploring how these masterpieces came into being. As much as a story of military might, this is an account of one of the most ambitious cultural projects ever conducted.

1812

1812 PDF Author: Paul Britten Austen
Publisher: Frontline Books
ISBN: 1848327048
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book Here

Book Description
More than a third of a million men set out on that midsummer day of 1812: none can have imagined the terrors and hardships to come. They would be lured all the way to Moscow without having achieved the decisive battle Napoleon sought; and by the time they reached the city their numbers would already have dwindled by more than a third. One of the greatest disasters in military history was in the making. The fruit of more than twenty years of research, this superbly crafted work skilfully blends the memoirs and diaries of more than a hundred eyewitnesses, all of whom took part in the Grand Army’s doomed march to Moscow, to reveal the inside story of this landmark military campaign. The result is a uniquely authentic account in which the reader sees and experiences the campaign through the eyes of participants at each stage of the advance in enthralling day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour detail.

Napoleon and his Marshals

Napoleon and his Marshals PDF Author: A. G. Macdonell
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 147334087X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
This vintage book contains a detailed account of the Napoleonic Wars by A. G. Macdonell. A. G. Macdonell (1895-1941) was a Scottish novelist and journalist. His most famous works include: "The Autobiography of a Cad", arguably amongst the funniest books ever written; "Lords and Masters", a blunt and prescient satire, and "England, Their England" (1933) a classic satirical novel that affectionately explores English urban and rural society. "Napoleon and his Marshals" is widely considered to be one of the best accounts of the Napoleonic Wars ever written and is highly recommended for those with an interest in this chapter of history. Contents include: Contents include: The Army of Italy", "The Old Republicans", "Egypt", "Massena and Suvorov", "The Great Coup", "Marengo", "Making the Grande Armee", "Austerlitz", "Jena and Auserwstadt", "Eylau and Friedland", "The First Triumphs in Spain", "Aspern-Essling and Wagram", et cetera. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with its original artwork and text. First published in 1934.

NAPOLEON'S PLUNDER

NAPOLEON'S PLUNDER PDF Author: CYNTHIA. SALTZMAN
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500252574
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


DIARY OF A NAPOLEONIC FOOT SOLDIER

DIARY OF A NAPOLEONIC FOOT SOLDIER PDF Author: Jakob Walter
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0307817563
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book Here

Book Description
A grunt’s-eye report from the battlefield in the spirit of The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front—the only known account by a common soldier of the campaigns of Napoleon’s Grand Army between 1806 and 1813. When eighteen-year-old German stonemason Jakob Walter was conscripted into the Grand Army of Napoleon, he had no idea of the trials that lay ahead. The long, grueling marches in Prussia and Poland sacrificed countless men to Bonaparte’s grand designs. And the disastrous Russian campaign tested human endurance on an epic scale. Demoralized by defeat in a war few supported or understood, deprived of ammunition and leadership, driven past reason by starvation and bitter cold, men often turned on one another, killing fellow soldiers for bread or an able horse. Though there are numerous surviving accounts of the Napoleonic Wars written by officers, Walter’s is the only known memoir by a draftee, and as such is a unique and fascinating document—a compelling chronicle of a young soldier’s loss of innocence as well as an eloquent and moving portrait of the profound effects of war on the men who fight it. Professor Marc Raeff has added an Introduction to the memoirs as well as six letters home from the Russian front, previously unpublished in English, from German conscripts who served concurrently with Walter. The volume is illustrated with engravings and maps, contemporary with the manuscript, from the Russian/Soviet and East European collections of the New York Public Library. Honest, heartfelt, deeply personal yet objective, The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier is more than an informative and absorbing historical document—it is a timeless and unforgettable account of the horrors of war.

The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte

The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 16

Get Book Here

Book Description


NAPOLEON

NAPOLEON PDF Author: Anonymous
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781371131951
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Get Book Here

Book Description