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Defeat
  • Published: 15 October 2008
  • ISBN: 9781590172827
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 328
  • RRP: $65.00
Categories:

Defeat

Napoleon's Russian Campaign

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In the summer of 1812 Napoleon gathered his fearsome Grande Armée, more than half a million strong, on the banks of the Niemen River. He was about to undertake the most daring of all his many campaigns: the invasion of Russia. Meeting only sporadic opposition and defeating it easily along the way, the huge army moved forward, advancing ineluctably on Moscow through the long hot days of summer. On September 14, Napoleon entered the Russian capital, fully anticipating the Czar’s surrender. Instead he encountered an eerily deserted city—and silence. The French army sacked the city, and by October, with Moscow in ruins and his supply lines overextended, and with the Russian winter upon him, Napoleon had no choice but to turn back. One of the greatest military debacles of all time had only just begun.

In this famous memoir, Philippe-Paul de Ségur, a young aide-de-camp to Napoleon, tells the story of the unfolding disaster with the keen eye of a crack reporter and an astute grasp of human character. His book, a fundamental inspiration for Tolstoy’s War and Peace, is a masterpiece of military history that teaches an all-too-timely lesson about imperial hubris and its risks.
  • Published: 15 October 2008
  • ISBN: 9781590172827
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 328
  • RRP: $65.00
Categories:

Praise for Defeat

  • "Count de Ségur's famed diary of Napoleon's Russian campaign is not just another book about Bonaparte; it is the main source of a thousand schoolbooks, cartoons, legends, sermons and second thoughts for would-be conquerors...Ségur wonderfully evokes the opening scenes of the disastrous war...[he] was a war chronicler ranking with Herodotus and Bernal Díaz." --Time magazine
  • "Although all that these books contain has been published before, republication is admirable, for it draws attention strongly to the rawness of life and the tragedies of history that are so easily glossed over. Men are still screaming in their death agonies as they did at Borodino, and death by napalm is no easier than death by bayonet. May each of these books sell in their tens of thousands." --The New York Review of Books (with 1812)
  • "The book is valuable...a most entertaining and interesting work." --The New York Times
  • "Ségur served throughout the Napoleonic era as an aide-de-camp to the Emperor, becoming a brigadier on the eve of the Russian campaign. His memoirs remain the classic account of the destruction of the Grand Army." --Parameters, War College Quarterly