On a cold December day in 1840 Parisians turned out in force to watch as the body of Napoleon was solemnly carried on a riverboat from Courbevoie on its final journey to the Invalides. The return of their long-dead Emperor's corpse from the Island of St Helena was a moment that Paris had eagerly awaited, though many feared that the memories stirred would serve to further destabilize a country that had struggled for order and direction since he had been sent into exile. In this book, Alan Forrest, tells the remarkable story of how the son of a Corsican attorney became the most powerful man in Europe, a man whose charisma and legacy endured after his lonely death many thousands of miles from the country whose fate had become so entwined with his own. Along the way, Alan Forrest also cuts away the many layers of myth and counter myth that have grown up around Napoleon, a man who mixed history and legend promiscuously and, drawing on original research and his own distinguished background in French history, demonstrates that Napoleon was as much a product of his times as their creator.
From Alan Forrest, a preeminent British scholar, comes an exceedingly readable account of the man and his legend On a cold December day in 1840 Parisians turned out in force to watch as the body of Napoleon was solemnly carried on a riverboat from Courbevoie on its final journey to the Invalides. The return of their long-dead emperor's corpse from the island of St. Helena was a moment that Paris had eagerly awaited, though many feared that the memories stirred would serve to further destabilize a country that had struggled for order and direction since he had been sent into exile. In this book Alan Forrest tells the remarkable story of how the son of a Corsican attorney became the most powerful man in Europe, a man whose charisma and legacy endured after his lonely death many thousands of miles from the country whose fate had become so entwined with his own. Along the way, Forrest also cuts away the many layers of myth and counter myth that have grown up around Napoleon, a man who mixed history and legend promiscuously. Drawing on original research and his own distinguished background in French history, Forrest demonstrates that Napoleon was as much a product of his times as their creator.
On a cold December day in 1840 Parisians turned out in force to watch as Napoleon's coffin was solemnly borne down the Champs-Elysées on its final journey to the Invalides. The return of the Emperor's body from the island of St Helena, nearly twenty years after his death, was a moment they had eagerly awaited, though there were many who feared that the memories stirred would only further destabilize a country that had struggled for order and direction since 'the little corporal' was sent into exile after Waterloo. Alan Forrest tells the remarkable story of how the son of a Corsican attorney became the most powerful man in Europe, a man whose political legacy endured long after his lonely death many thousands of miles from France. Along the way, he cuts away the layers of myth and counter-myth that have grown up around Napoleon, a man who mixed history and legend promiscuously, and shows how he was as much a product of his times as he was their creator. The convulsive effect of the Revolution on French society, and the new meritocracy it ushered in, afforded men of this generation opportunities that were unimaginable under the Ancien Régime. Napoleon seized every chance that was offered him, making full use of his undoubted abilities and charismatic presence. But the Empire he created, stretching across most of the European continent, was not the work of one man. It was a collective enterprise that depended on the work and vision of thousands of administrators, army officers, jurists and educators, and The Age of Napoleon is as much their story as his. In a book that takes in everything from Napoleon's ill-fated expedition to Egypt to the festivals that punctuated the Imperial calendar, Alan Forrest draws on original research and recent scholarship to draw a fresh and compelling picture of one of the most dramatic periods in the history of Europe.
The story of Waterloo, the battle that finally ended Napoleon's imperial dreams: how it was fought, how it has been remembered, and what it has come to mean.
The Death of the French Atlantic examines the sudden and irreversible decline of France's Atlantic empire in the Age of Revolution, and shows how three major forces undermined the country's competitive position as an Atlantic commercial power. The first was war, especially war at sea against France's most consistent enemy and commercial rival in the eighteenth century, Great Britain. A series of colonial wars, from the Seven Years' War and the War of American Independence to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars did much to drive France out of the North Atlantic. The second was anti-slavery and the rise of a new moral conscience which challenged the right of Europeans to own slaves or to sacrifice the freedom of others to pursue national economic advantage. The third was the French Revolution itself, which not only raised French hopes of achieving the Rights of Man for its own citizens but also sowed the seeds of insurrection in the slave societies of the New World, leading to the loss of Saint-Domingue and the creation of the first black republic in Haiti at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This proved critical to the economy of the French Caribbean, driving both colons and slaves from Saint-Domingue to seek shelter across the Atlantic world, and leaving a bitter legacy in the French Caribbean. It has also created an uneasy memory of the slave trade in French ports like Nantes, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux, and has left an indelible mark on race relations in France today.
This book provides an interpretation of the French Revolution that is both thematic and accessible to the general reader. The discussion includes an analysis of the historiography of the subject, and reviews the range of literature produced around the recent Bicentenary. Insisting that the French Revolution had an important social dimension, Alan Forrest demonstrates that the revolutionaries, even the most extreme of them, were committed to an ordered society. He argues that in destroying the political institutions and the corporate structures of the Ancien Regime, they were conscious of the need to invent a new order of their own, one that would be consistent with their ideology. Chapters focus on the initial crisis of 1789, on the political and social experiments of the revolutionary years, and on the impact of war and counter-revolution. The study covers the period up to 1799, looking forward where appropriate to the Napoleonic Empire. The author's succinct and penetrating overview of events ensures that The French Revolution will be welcomed by all students of this fascinating and turbulent period in European history.
Napoleon's soldiers marched across Europe from Lisbon to Moscow, and from Germany to Dalmatia. Many of the men, mostly conscripted by ballot, had never before been beyond their native village. What did they make of their extraordinary experiences, fighting battles thousands of miles from home, foraging for provisions or garrisoning town in hostile countries? What was it like to be a soldier in the revolutionary and imperial armies? We know more about these men and their reactions to war than about the soldiers of any previous army in history, not just from official sources but from the large number of personal letters they wrote. Napoleon's Men provides a direct insight into the experiences and emotions of soldiers who risked their lives at Austerlitz, Wagram and Borodino. Not surprisingly, their minds often dwelt as much on what was happening at home, and on mundane questions of food and drink, as on Napoleon himself or the glory of France.
This book presents a provincial view of the French Revolution and assesses the experience of revolution across a broad swathe of southwestern France, in an area which increasingly looked to Bordeaux as its capital city. Here the Revolution was not simply a pale reflection of events in Paris. Local conflicts and personal rivalries are vital to our understanding of the shape of events in the region, as are contrasting traditions of religious affiliation, peasant radicalism, and obedience to the state. The book examines the Revolution within a thematic framework, and discusses such aspects as the growth of a local political culture, the incidence of rural insurrection, religious responses to the Revolution, the chequered appeal of federalism, and the uneven experience of Terror and political repression.
Between the outbreak of war with Austria in 1792 and Napoleon's final debacle in 1814, France remained almost continously at war, recruiting in the process some two to three million frenchmen--a level of recruitment unknown to previous generations and widely resented as an attack on the liberties of rural communities. Forrest challenges the notion of a nation heroically rushing to arms by examining the massive rates of desertion and avoidance of service as well as their consequences on French society--on military campaigns and the morale of armies, on political opinion at home, on the social fabric of local villages, and on the Napoleonic dream of bringing about a coherent and centralized state.
Escape from Zoomanity is about one man’s awakening to the reality of the repeatist conditioning that takes place to all human beings. This transformed humanity into the state known as Zoomanity. Escape from Zoomanity is about a moment when man realizes life isn’t what we had expected and offers observations why. The only way to escape is looking back on life and the messages that have been passed on from the natural laws of creation itself. Once these laws of change are discovered there is no turning back, this leads to the Zooman returning to his humanity and his eventual escape from their own Zoomanity.
A major contribution to the study of collective identity and memory in France, this book examines a French republican myth: the belief that the nation can be adequately defended only by its own citizens, in the manner of the French revolutionaries of 1793. Alan Forrest examines the image of the citizen army reflected in political speeches, school textbooks, art and literature across the nineteenth century. He reveals that the image appealed to notions of equality and social justice, and with time it expanded to incorporate Napoleon's victorious legions, the partisans who repelled the German invader in 1814 and the people of Paris who rose in arms to defend the Republic in 1870. More recently it has risked being marginalized by military technology and by the realities of colonial warfare, but its influence can still be seen in the propaganda of the Great War and of the French Resistance under Vichy.
In this work Alan Forrest brings together some of the recent research on the Revolutionary army that has been undertaken on both sides of the Atlantic by younger historians, many of whom look to the influential work of Braudel for a model. Forrest places the armies of the Revolution in a broader social and political context by presenting the effects of war and militarization on French society and government in the Revolutionary period. Revolutionary idealists thought of the French soldier as a willing volunteer sacrificing himself for the principles of the Revolution; Forrest examines the convergence of these ideals with the ordinary, and often dreadful, experience of protracted warfare that the soldier endured.
This book is structured around a number of important themes which run across the revolutionary decade, most notably the themes of political and social change. Alan Forrest's book oers an interpretation of the historiography of the subject and reviews the copious literature resulting from the recent Bicentenary. Unlike some recent histories, it insists that the Revolution had a significant social dimension. Divided into five main sections, the book examines the ideals which informed the work of the revolutionaries and the process by which they sought to dismantle the ancient regime and build a new order in France. It assesses the impact of war and counter-revolution, which in their different ways distorted the revolutionary agenda and contributed to the mood of nationalism, intolerance and terror that characterized the months of the Jacobin Republic.
This memoir develops, discusses and compares a range of commutative and non-commutative invariants defined for projection method tilings and point patterns. The projection method refers to patterns, particularly the quasiperiodic patterns, constructed by the projection of a strip of a high dimensional integer lattice to a smaller dimensional Euclidean space. In the first half of the memoir the acceptance domain is very general - any compact set which is the closure of its interior - while in the second half the authors concentrate on the so-called canonical patterns. The topological invariants used are various forms of $K$-theory and cohomology applied to a variety of both $C DEGREES*$-algebras and dynamical systems derived from such a p
Originally published in 1988, this book offers the first comprehensive and critical analysis of the privatisation of public housing in Britain. It outlines the historical background to the growth of public housing and the developing political debatea surrounding its disposal. The main emphasis in the book, however, is on the ways in which privatisation in housing links to other key changes in British society. The long trend for British social housing to become a welfare housing sector is related to evidence of growing social polarisation and segregation. Within this overall context, the book explores the uneven spatial and social consequences of the policy.
A classic Christmas story. God wants to end Christmas. Thomas the little angel asks God for a final chance to prove the Christmas spirit exists. Thomas is sent to Earth. If he fails he will lose his wings, Christmas will be no more and Thomas will end his days as a human.
Originally published in 1990 and drawing on extensive research, this book provides an evaluation of the impact of the growth of home ownership in the UK, and of the claims and counter-claims made for its social significance. The book examines critically the evidence for and against the proposition that mass home ownership is contributing towards a more equal society. Wide-ranging in its coverage, the book discusses the changing nature and role of home ownership, wealth accumulation and housing, the relationship between social class and housing tenure, and policy development.
This volume's juxtaposition of the empires of Germany and France in 1806, at the dissolution of The Holy Roman Empire, allows a comparison of their transition towards modernity, explored through the themes of Empire, monarchy, political cultures, feudalism, war and military institutions, nationalism and identity, and everyday experience.
Analyzes the role of the government in promoting social reform, suggests ways it should respond to the changing characteristics of its citizens, and looks at social and economic change in the U.S
I was a full-time hairdresser for over twenty years. One day a client asked me who writes my ads? I then wrote an ad for him. He paid me £1500 for one hours work. This is a true (and mesmerising) story and a journey that took me from the salon floor to high-demand copywriter.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.