Ebook: The eagle in splendour: inside the court of Napoleon

Napoleons military conquests changed the world and dominate most portraits of him, but it was through the splendour of his court a world fashioned beyond the battlefield that Napoleon governed his empire. Using the unpublished papers of the Emperors leading courtiers, and his second Empress Marie Louise, Philip Mansel brings to life the intoxicated world of a court devoured by ambition as Stendhal called it : its visual magnificence and rigid hierarchy; mistresses, artists and manipulators. The life of the court illuminates the life of Napoleon himself and the nature of a personality that conquered half the world yet, in the end, was abandoned by his dynasty and his courtiers, his past glories fading into lonely and ignominious exile.