Napoleonic Wars, The

A complete history of the Napoleonic Wars, from their origins in the French Revolution, through Napoleon's fantastic victories at Austerlitz and Tulsit, to his defeats in the Iberian Peninsular, Russia, and finally at Waterloo. Napoleon, inheritor of the armies of the French Revolution, transformed inter-state warfare into a pan-continental system of conquest on a scale not seen since Alexander the Great and the Romans. The French Revolution had shown how a country's whole population and resources could be mobilized in the service of an ideal, and Napoleon extended this to embrace Europe itself. His model of a military superpower, though eventually defeated, set a pattern which was to be revived by totalitarian states, and their opponents, in the 20th century.