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Napoleon and his Marshals
  • Published: 8 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781802068238
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: Justin Avoth
  • RRP: $32.00
Categories:

Napoleon and his Marshals

Victory, Rivalry, Betrayal

Formats & editions
Hardback
13 Oct 2026
EBook
8 Oct 2026
Audiobook
8 Oct 2026
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The story of the elite generals who built up – and ultimately ruined – one of the greatest warriors in history, from the award-winning, Sunday Times bestselling author of Churchill and Napoleon

In 1804, immediately after his coronation as Emperor, Napoleon created the Marshalate, the supreme martial rank of the empire. Over the next decade, he elevated to it some of his most outstanding generals, who played leading roles in his extraordinary campaigns – including the brave Ney, the flamboyant Murat, the vain Massena, the iron Davout and the logistics master Berthier.

Some of them were son of aristocrats, others of innkeepers or coopers, but all carried the baton of a Marshal of France. Andrew Roberts masterfully captures their personalities and ambitions, capacities and rivalries. But unlike Lincoln, who forged a team of rivals, Napoleon created a nest of vipers whose lust for glory descended into destructive competitiveness and mutual recrimination. For all his inspiring qualities as a leader, he manipulated and controlled those whose loyalty he most needed to survive, and ultimately only two of them rode beside him at Waterloo.

This dramatic and hugely enjoyable book by one of Britain's most admired historians is by far the fullest account of these brilliant figures and their fiery relationships with their master.
  • Published: 8 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781802068238
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Narrator: Justin Avoth
  • RRP: $32.00
Categories:

About the author

Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts (Lord Roberts of Belgravia) is an award-winning historian and author of Salisbury (Wolfson Prize for History), Masters and Commanders (Emery Reves Award), The Storm of War (British Army Book Prize), Napoleon the Great (Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoléon and the Los Angeles Times Biography Prize), George III (Elizabeth Longford Prize), and Churchill: Walking with Destiny (Council on Foreign Relations Book Prize). An Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is currently the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, as well as Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London.
portrait photo of Andrew Roberts

Also by Andrew Roberts

Leadership in War
George III
Churchill
Napoleon The Great
The Storm of War
Masters and Commanders
See all

Praise for Napoleon and his Marshals

A lively work of unashamed military rivalry ... rattles along like a gun carriage charging into action

Jonathan Boff, Literary Review

Napoleon and his Marshals recounts, in sometimes gruesome detail, the violence and emotions of the relationships that turned shared ambition into rivalry, and teamwork and honour into naked greed. It’s the personal stories that come out so clearly in this book, the politics of people and place

Tom Tugendhat, Financial Times

Ambitious ... an epic tale. Roberts brings his gift for synthesis to bear on a colossal mass of material with admirable, if not infallible, panache. One gets multiple fascinating stories for one’s money in this book … But the story that binds the whole together remains the most compelling: that of the pettiness of soul that, paradoxically, was the ultimate undoing of Europe’s paradigmatic "Great Man", Napoleon himself

George Owers, The Times

First rate … The book draws on impressively hard and lonely work that can be underrated by those who shun the archives … Well-written, consistently interesting, and a marvellous guide to the flaws of military leadership, this is a book to enjoy

Jeremy Black, Critic

Writing with the dash and vigour of a cavalry charge, having walked 53 of Napoleon’s 60 battlefields, Roberts analyses campaigns and battles from Italy in 1796, through Austerlitz, ‘the greatest victory in the history of France’, and the retreat from Moscow (ten marshals served in the Russian campaign) to Waterloo in 1815 ... a great military history

Philip Mansel, Spectator

Roberts is perhaps our greatest expert on how leaders – and their empires – rise and fall. Napoleon and his Marshals, which draws on Napoleon’s vast personal correspondence – much of which only recently became available – to assess in more detail why such a charismatic and generous leader (Napoleon showered his 26 marshals with riches, titles and properties) found himself so fatefully abandoned by those very same people at Waterloo

Claire Allfree, Telegraph