the campaigns of napoleon by david g chandler

Chandler examines in detail each campaign mounted and personally conducted by Napoleon, analyzing the strategies employed, revealing wherever possible the probable sources of his subject's military ideas. To clarify these underlying methods, as well as the style of Napoleon's fabulous intellect, Mr. But there were from the first to the last certain basic principles of strategic maneuver and battlefield planning that he almost invariably put into practice. To be sure, every operation Napoleon conducted contained unique improvisatory features. Napoleon disavowed any suggestion that he worked from formula (“Je n'ai jamais eu un plan d'opérations”), but military historian David Chandler demonstrates this was at best only a half-truth. The Campaigns of Napoleon is an exhaustive analysis and critique of Napoleon's art of war as he himself developed and perfected it in the major military campaigns of his career. Of course Chandler wrote many other books, both about the Napoleonic Wars and other conflicts, but this one is undoubtedly his masterpiece.Napoleonic war was nothing if not complex-an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of moves and intentions, which by themselves went a long way towards baffling and dazing his conventionally-minded opponents into that state of disconcerting moral disequilibrium which so often resulted in their catastrophic defeat.

The sheer number of engagements that Napoleon fought between the siege of Toulon in 1793-after which he became a general at the age of 24-and his disaster at Waterloo twenty-two years later makes this book weighty physically as well as intellectually, but it’s well worth the long route marches.

Although it assumes no prior military knowledge on behalf of the reader, the many hundreds of pages detailing the movements of virtually every demi-brigade in the French army require a good memory and strong interest in the subject. Do not read this book in order to get a sense of Napoleon the man, or indeed the politician and Emperor, but solely of Napoleon the soldier, as the reader is taken minutely through every one of Bonaparte’s sixty battles in campaign after campaign.Īlong with dozens of excellent maps, Chandler’s terse prose explains the military situation in great detail, in the old-fashioned way of military historians who fully intend to inform but do not deign to entertain.

Although David Chandler’s The Campaigns of Napoleon was written nearly half a century ago, it remains the standard work on the subject and represents a monumental work of scholarship.

The campaigns of napoleon by david g chandler