Episode 11: Napoleon Bonaparte: Soldier, Strategist, Emperor

Napoleon is admired as one of the greatest strategists ever; he won most of his battles and dictated the terms of the peace treaties that ended his individual wars. Yet in the end, he was defeated, and his empire fell apart. So how great a strategist was he really?

Professor Alan Forrest joins Beatrice and Paul for this episode. A graduate of Aberdeen and Oxford, he was formerly the Chair of Modern History at York University, where he taught from 1989 to 2012. A prolific author, he is the general editor of a 2023 three-volume Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars.

Alan Forrest (ed.), Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars, Cambridge University Press. Vols. 1 & 3, 2022; Vol. 2, 2023.

Alan Forrest, “Napoleon”, in Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Beatrice Heuser Heuser (eds.): The Cambridge History of Strategy, Cambridge University Press, 2023, Vol. 2.

Marc Belissa & Patrice Leclerq, “The revolutionary period, 1789 – 1802” in Anja Hartmann, Anja & Beatrice Heuser Heuser (eds): War, Peace, and world orders in European History, Routledge, 2001.

Charles Esdaile, “De-constructing the French Wars: Napoleon as anti-Strategist”, Journal of Strategic Studies Vol. 31 No. 4, 2008, pp.512-552.

Franklin Ford, “The Revolutionary-Napoleonic Era: How Much of a Watershed?”, American Historical Review Vol. 69, 1963/64, pp.18-29.

Owen Connelly, The wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1792-1815 (London: Routledge, 2006)

Charles Esdaile, The Wars of Napoleon, Longman, 1995.