At the beginning of 1806, Napoleon could feel rather satisfied with his conquests, although the Russian Bear had been brutally beaten and the Austrian Eagle damaged beyond repair after the carnage of Austerlitz. However lurking to the north were the inheritors of Frederick the Great’s legacy of Rossbach and Leuthen, their sullen neutrality during 1805 had been bought by the price of the annexation of Hanover, the Prince-elector of which sat on the British throne. It would only be a matter of time before the Prussian army tested their might against Napoleon’s legions, young Prussians could be found outside the French embassy in Berlin sharpening their swords against its steps, Queen Luise was a vocal focus for the war party. With the most positive expectations for the campaign, the lumbering Prussian army, led by veterans in their sixties, seventies and even eighties, groped to find Napoleon and his much faster moving corps d’armée. Napoleon’s Marshals and generals were mostly, apart from a few notable exceptions, one bordering on treason, at the top of their professional competency. Few if any however would have expected the campaign to unfold as it did, as Napoleon actively searched for the main Prussian army, he found and destroyed a significant portion of the army at Jena, a single of his corps, under Davout, faced and defeated the majority at Auerstädt. What followed thereafter was the most relentless pursuit of the Napoleonic Wars, combined with a number of capitulations which did not honour to Prussian arms. Prussia was defeated completely, with a scant regard to future relations with this state, Napoleon dismembered the state, imposed war reparations that would have made the French at Compiegne, a century, later blush, allowed his soldiers to pillage on an unheard of scale. Not that he himself was immune to the tendency to take what might allowed, he took amongst other trophies, Frederick the Great’s own sword. Reduced to a second rate power Prussia, occupied by French soldiers, would look to the crumbs that Napoleon might hand out and hope that other powers might topple the mighty Napoleon. As with all of Petre’s books on the Napoleonic period, his work is well written, scrupulously researched and balanced. We have taken the liberty as diacritics appear in Petre’s book to change Blucher to Blücher. Author – Francis Lorraine Petre OBE - (1852–1925) Plans – ALL included – 7 total Portraits and Illustrations – ALL included - 19 total

Wawro describes the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1, that violently changed the course of European history.

In 1870 Bismarck ordered the Prussian Army to invade France, inciting one of the most dramatic conflicts in European history. It transformed not only the states-system of the Continent but the whole climate of European moral and political thought. The overwhelming triumph of German military might, evoking general admiration and imitation, introduced an era of power politics, which was to reach its disastrous climax in 1914. First published in 1961 and now with a new introduction, The Franco-Prussian War is acknowledged as the definitive history of one of the most dramatic and decisive conflicts in the history of Europe.

Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the places most closely associated with the era of the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this period of nearly continuous conflict affect the world beyond Europe? The immensity of the fighting waged by France against England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and the immediate consequences of the tremors that spread throughout the world. In this ambitious and far-ranging work, Alexander Mikaberidze argues that the Napoleonic Wars can only be fully understood in an international perspective. France struggled for dominance not only on the plains of Europe but also in the Americas, West and South Africa, Ottoman Empire, Iran, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Taking specific regions in turn, Mikaberidze discusses major political-military events around the world and situates geopolitical decision-making within its long- and short-term contexts. From the British expeditions to Argentina and South Africa to the Franco-Russian maneuvering in the Ottoman Empire, the effects of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars would shape international affairs well into the next century. In Egypt, the wars led to the rise of Mehmed Ali and the emergence of a powerful state; in North America, the period transformed and enlarged the newly established United States; and in South America, the Spanish colonial empire witnessed the start of national-liberation movements that ultimately ended imperial control. Skillfully narrated and deeply researched, here at last is the global history of the period, one that expands our view of the Napoleonic Wars and their role in laying the foundations of the modern world.

Europe was forged out of the ashes of the Napoleonic wars by means of a collective fight against revolutionary terror. The Allied Council created a culture of in- and exclusion, of people that were persecuted and those who were protected, using secret police, black lists, border controls and fortifications, and financed by European capital holders.