Napoleon Bonaparte
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who he was
Napoleon Bonaparte was born on Corsica on August 15, 1769, a year after the island passed to France, and died in exile on St. Helena on May 5, 1821. His family was minor nobility with little money. He went to military school in France as a scholarship boy, mocked for his accent, and commissioned into the artillery at sixteen.
He was a general at twenty-four, First Consul at thirty, and Emperor of the French at thirty-five. He fought roughly sixty battles and lost about seven. He also left behind the Civil Code, which still underlies the law of much of Europe and beyond, and which he considered the more durable achievement.
Why the maxims exist
The Maxims of War are not a book he sat down to write. They are his working rules of command, drawn from his orders, correspondence, dictated commentary and conversation, and gathered by others into the form read today.
Their authority comes from the fact that he had tested every one of them on real ground, at scale, and had paid in full for the ones that failed him. Russia in 1812 is in that account as surely as Austerlitz.
The book we publish, and why
We publish the Maxims of War inside Mastery of the Military Mind, beside Sun Tzu's Art of War, so a reader can see two commanders twenty-three centuries apart reaching the same conclusions from different worlds.
Decide quickly. Concentrate your strength at the point that matters rather than spreading it thin everywhere. Move before the other man is ready. Keep your supply honest, because an army that cannot eat cannot fight. Never do what your enemy wants you to do, for the single reason that he wants it.
The benefit for a civilian reader is organizational. You watch a mind stay ordered when everything is going wrong at once, and you learn the discipline of deciding on incomplete information rather than waiting for certainty that will not arrive.
How to read it
Read it against Sun Tzu rather than on its own. In the same volume you can take one maxim and find its Chinese counterpart written twenty-three centuries earlier. Where they agree, you are looking at something close to a permanent feature of conflict. Where they differ, the difference is usually about the century, not the principle.
Expect technical detail. Several maxims concern artillery placement, lines of operation and the handling of fortresses, in terms meant for men who commanded them. Read them literally first; the general principle shows through on the second pass.
It is worth keeping one fact in view throughout: the man setting out these rules broke several of them in Russia and destroyed an army of half a million doing it. The maxims are not a record of invincibility. They are what he knew, including what he failed to obey.
Pair it with
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War, in the same volume. The pairing is the point.
- Machiavelli, The Prince. Machiavelli wrote about how power is seized and held; Napoleon is what that looks like carried out by a man of genius, including the ending.
- Plutarch, Parallel Lives. Napoleon read Plutarch and consciously measured himself against the men in it. Reading them together shows you what he was trying to be.
His works
He was not an author by trade, and most of what carries his name was compiled from his dictation or his papers.
- Correspondence and orders, 1793 to 1815. Tens of thousands of letters and dispatches, the primary source for everything else.
- The Maxims of War, compiled from his writings and sayings, published in French in 1827 and widely translated after.
- The Memoirs dictated at St. Helena, 1815 to 1821, taken down by Las Cases, Montholon and Gourgaud, including his commentaries on the campaigns of Caesar and others.
- Clisson et Eugénie, around 1795. A short romantic novella written as a young officer, published in full only in modern times.
- The Civil Code, 1804. Not written by him, but driven by him and debated in sessions he chaired personally.
General reference on Napoleon Bonaparte. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions featuring Napoleon