Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Volume 02

There is no substitute for having been there. Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne was Napoleon's private secretary from the Italian campaigns through the Emperor's final exile on St. Helena, and this volume offers the kind of access that no historian could manufacture. Beginning in 1797, as Bonaparte stands at the threshold of legend after the Treaty of Leoben, Bourrienne records the inner workings of a mind that reshaped Europe. We see Napoleon not as the marble monument of official histories, but as a man scheming, dissatisfied with his masters at the Directory, calculating his next move toward Vienna and beyond. The memoir captures the machinery of ambition: the relationships with contemporaries, the political discord, the tension between military genius and institutional obstruction. But the true power lies in what Bourrienne witnessed later, the Hundred Days' desperate gamble, the surrender to the English, the long dying on a remote Atlantic rock. This is history told from the antechamber, where the great decisions were prepared and the great man was, at last, merely human.