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.

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.

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 form 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 south-western 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.

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, first published in 2009, studies the French republican myth that the nation can be adequately defended only by its own citizens.

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.

La première guerre médiatique de l'histoire a démarré sous Napoléon Ier, à travers les caricatures parues dans les journaux de l'époque. Décortique les sentiments qui ont agité les Anglais et les Français qui ont vécu sous l'Empire.