Description

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"When I think of the great Emperor, in my mind's eye it is summer again, all gold and green." Heinrich Heine

The court of Napoleon I, in its grandeur and extravagance, surpassed even that of that the Sun King. Napoleon's palaces at Saint-Cloud and the Tuileries were the centres of his power, the dazzling reflection of the greatest empire in modern European history.

Napoleon's military conquests changed the world and dominate most portraits of him, but it was through the splendour of his court - a world fashioned beyond the battlefield - that Napoleon governed his empire. Using the unpublished papers of the Emperor's leading courtiers, and his second Empress Marie Louise, Philip Mansel brings to life the intoxicated world of a court 'devoured by ambition' as Stendhal called it: its visual magnificence and rigid hierarchy, mistresses, artists and manipulators. The life of the court illuminates the life of Napoleon himself and the nature of a personality that conquered half the world. Yet, he was in the end abandoned by his dynasty and courtiers, his past glories fading into lonely and ignominious exile.

About the Author

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Philip Mansel, who has lived and taught in Paris, is one of Britain's leading historians of France and the Ottoman Empire. He currently lives in London, and is editor of The Court Historian, the journal of the Society for Court Studies (www.courtstudies.org).

Praise For…

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“Clear, well-researched, always interesting.” —History Today

“Napoleon is presented in a new guise: the Eagle both in splendour and as chie-en-lit... The author's urbane and witty style [gives a] vivid description of the Napoleonic Court.” —Journal of Modern History

“Mansel's book derives from a sound archival and bibliographical base... It is hard not to agree with [his] perceptive comment
that it has really been the manufactured splendour of style which accounts for the continuing fascination with the Emperor, of which this is a not unworthy example.” —British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies