Book
The invisible emperor : Napoleon on Elba from exile to escape
Publication Information
New York : Penguin Press, 2018.
Physical Description
xx, 360 pages : maps ; 25 cm
Summary
"Part forensic investigation, part dramatic jailbreak adventure, Mark Braude's The Invisible Emperor is a gripping narrative history of Napoleon Bonaparte's ten-month exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba In the spring of 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated. Having overseen an empire spanning half the European continent and governed the lives of some eighty million people, he suddenly found himself exiled to Elba, less than a hundred square miles of territory. This would have been the end of him, if Europe's rulers had had their way. But soon enough Napoleon imposed his preternatural charisma and historic ambition on both his captors and the very island itself, plotting his return to France and to power. After ten months of exile, he escaped Elba with just of over a thousand supporters in tow, landed near Antibes, marched to Paris, and retook the Tuileries Palace--all without firing a shot. Not long after, tens of thousands of people would die fighting for and against him at Waterloo. Braude dramatizes this strange exile and improbable escape in granular detail and with novelistic relish, offering sharp new insights into a largely overlooked moment. He details a terrific cast of secondary characters, including Napoleon's tragically-noble official British minder on Elba, Neil Campbell, forever disgraced for having let 'Boney' slip away; and his young second wife, Marie Louise who was twenty-two to Napoleon's forty-four, at the time of his abdication. What emerges is a surprising new perspective on one of history's most consequential figures, which both subverts and celebrates his legendary persona" --
Contents
- The morning of the poison lump
- A lodger in his own life
- Napoleon in rags
- This new country
- Gilded keys
- Rough music
- The Robinson Crusoe of Elba
- My island is very little
- Louis the Gouty and the weathervane man
- Pretty valley, trees, forest, and water
- The emperor is dead
- And every tuna bows to him
- A death, a treaty, and a celebration
- A ridiculous noise summer
- The more unfavorably does he appear
- Ubicumque Felix Napoleon
- Sirocco
- Sultry confinement
- The one-eyed count
- A perfectly bourgeois simplicity
- Tall Fanny and the two empresses Bonaparte
- Taking the cure
- Tourist season
- The politics of forgetting
- He is tolerably happy
- The vulgar details of married lives
- Don Giovanni, Cinderella, and Undine
- I think he is capable of crossing over
- The oil merchant and other visitors
- He had been called coward!
- Winter
- A last goodbye
- The sadness of my retirement
- The (near) wreck of the Inconstant
- Bourbon difficulties
- Nights at the theater
- Pietro St. Ernest, otherwise known as Fleury du Chaboulon
- The eagle prepares for flight
- The oil merchant returns
- Campbell in Florence
- Mardi Gras
- Tower of Babel
- Everything was quiet at Elba
- Inconstant
- At sea
- Campbell lands at Elba
- Our beautiful France
- The partridge in pursuit
- Golfe-Juan
- Most reluctantly I have felt called upon to mention it
- In an iron cage
- Urgent
- Laffrey
- To contemplate all objects at a certain angle
- Napoleon, Marie Louise, Campbell, and Elba.