Beschrijving

Austerlitz was Napoleon’s greatest victory, the battle of which he was most proud, the culmination of what is undisputedly one of the greatest campaigns of all time. It was also one of the last battles over which tactically he could exercise total control.
But the problem for Napoleon was that Austerlitz was too complete a victory. As with Hitler in 1940, the defeated were too humiliated, the victor given too great a sense of superiority for the long-term future to consolidate the victory. If Austerlitz raised Napoleon to the pinnacle of his success it also turned his head, and filled it with the delusion that no force, or combination of forces could now stop him conquering the world.
This is the central theme of this brilliantly written book, by an author described by C P Snow as ‘one of the best writers of history in the English-speaking; world’. Up to Austerlitz Napoleon’s success was prodigious. But Austerlitz despite all its dazzling effect was the beginning of the end. There were notable victories after Austerlitz, memorably described here, but the process had begun which resulted in the 1812 catastrophe in Russia and in Waterloo, Napoleon’s last battle.
Alistair Horne provides us with some of his inimitable and most vivid accounts of great land battles, set within the saga of Napoleon’s entire career, and illuminating the road that led from the triumph of Austerlitz to ultimate defeat.