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208 pages, Hardcover
First published March 27, 2002
... the fate of Corisca enabled him to give a purpose to power. Winning a battle, a campaign, a war was not an end in itself but an opportunity to impose a new order on the old corrupt and inefficient systems. He was to be a Paoli for all Europe, but in an incomparably larger mould and operating on a continental, perhaps a world scale, for the better governance of mankind. (14)
Taking the fight to the Austrians, he crossed the Alps and fell upon them “like a thunderbolt”. It was a risky move and a difficult crossing, but it paid off; the Austrians were caught off-guard and scrambled to respond. They suffered two fateful losses at Marengo and Hohenlinden; with Vienna exposed, they had to concede land in northern Italy. France also annexed territory up to the Rhine and established new Dutch and German client states.
If Bonaparte had been married earlier, to a fertile woman, and produced children to succeed and assist him, who could be trained to rule, he would have looked at the empire as a long- term investment to be treated and coaxed and cherished accordingly. (76-7)
[Russia and Spain] had untamed, often unbridged rivers, poor or nonexistent roads, subsistence economies that could not support unsupplied armies, and extremes of climate that made both summers and winters perilous for troops without barracks. (125-6)