Napoleon Bonaparte: England's Prisoner - Hardcover

Giles, Frank

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841193909 ISBN 13: 9781841193908

Verlag: Constable, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Napoleon Bonaparte: England's Prisoner The Emperor in Exile, 1816-21

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Críticas:

"* The Locust Years: Well researched, clearly written and, above all, scrupulously fair.' - Times Literary Supplement * Sundry Times 'elegant and lucid prose...humorous, entertaining, and enomously likeable' - Clive Davies, Yorkshire Post

Reseña del editor:

'My political life is over, and I proclaim my son Emperor of the French under the title of Napoleon II.' It was not to be. Napoleon's hopes, expressed in his declaration to the French people after his defeat at Waterloo, were vain.

On 13 July 1815, after the great battle, Napoleon dictated his famous letter to the Prince Regent from a French frigate lying off Rochefort. Avoiding any hint of surrender, still less acceptance of responsibility for the defeat, he said he came 'like Themistocles to throw myself upon the hospitality of the British people - I put myself under the protection of their laws, which I claim from Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most constant and the most generous of my enemies.'

Napoleon's idea of living peacefully in the English countryside was a pipedream. The island of St Helena, to which the Royal Navy brought him, was a desolate and unappealing home. The respect accorded to him by the officers and crew of the ship revealed, however, his sure touch with fighting men, and the magnetism he exerted even in defeat.

Once in his 'prison' of Longwood, Napoleon came under the supervision of its Governor Sir Hudson Lowe. What really happened there? Was the fallen Emperor badly treated - perhaps even poisoned? Speculation has been rife for years. Lowe has been reviled by some historians, but looking afresh at the evidence Frank Giles portrays him, though unattractive in many ways, in a more favourable light. He gives a thought-provoking insight into British attitudes towards Napoleon in defeat, both at the
time and in the writings of later literary figures.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Constable
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1841193909
• ISBN 13: 9781841193908
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288