Napoleon: His Wives and Women - Hardcover

A fresh and masterly account of the private life of Napoleon – his wives and women – by the historian described by Stella Tillyard as ‘a master portraitist of great men’s private lives’ and by Amanda Foreman as ‘one of England’s greatest living historical writers’.

· Modern history has produced one single myth on a heroic scale to rival those of Alexander and Caesar – that of Napoleon. The continuing fascination of this astonishingly gifted man is reflected in the number of books published each year on various aspects of the Napoleonic legend: some 250,000 volumes in all since Napoleon’s mysterious death in 1821.
· What is still needed is now provided by Christopher Hibbert: an authoritative up-to-date account of the women in Napoleon’s life at all stages of his developing and extraordinary career, based on the fruits of modern research: in short, the private figure revealed behind the soldier, statesman and legend.
· The book covers in detail Napoleon’s marriages to the charming Creole from Martinique, Josephine Tascher de La Pagerie, and the plain and pliant Austrian archduchess Marie Louise, as well as his affairs with his various mistresses, from the pretty, 20-year-old milliner’s apprentice Pauline Fourès, who was smuggled out to Egypt wearing the uniform of her husband’s regiment, to the young Polish Countess Marie Walewska who resisted him at first but, persuaded by her elderly husband and other Polish patriots to submit, eventually fell in love with him.
· From his time as an unknown young Corsican officer to First Consul, Emperor and finally exile on St Helena, Napoleon’s string of brief liaisons led him to proclaim to Josephine that the ‘ordinary rules of morality and propriety’ did not apply to him.
· As well as the wives and mistresses, the book examines Napoleon’s relationship with the women of his family, all of whom disliked and envied Josephine: his beloved parsimonious mother and his three sisters, Elisa, Caroline and Pauline.

'Bah! Women!' Napoleon declared one day during his exile on the remote island of St. Helena. 'When you don't think of them you don't need them.'

In this absorbing and original book, Christopher Hibbert investigates the sincerity of this misogynistic exclamation and presents and aspect of Napoleon both unusual and revealing. He throws fresh light onto his relationships with the women in his family – his resourceful and strong-willed mother and his three sisters: Caroline, who became Queen of Naples, the beautiful and sensual Pauline, Princess Borghese, and the bossy Elisa whom he created the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Equally illuminating are the author's accounts of the two women whom he married and successfully crowned Empress: Josephine, the charming and wildly extravagant Creole from the West Indian island of Martinique, who had been imprisoned during the revolutionary Terror, and Marie-Louise, the Austrian Emperor's daughter, who gave birth to Napoleon's unfortunate heir, the King of Rome.

The book also records the parts played by the many mistresses in Napoleon's life. Notorious for his rudeness to the ladies of his court and for his habit of pinching their cheeks or noses, he would complain to their faces how plain or ill-dressed they were, telling one that he had heard she was 'quick and good in bed'. From his wife he would brook no complaints about his sexual escapades. 'I am not like other men', he said. 'The commonly accepted rules of morality and propriety do not apply to me.'

Basing his book on a wide variety of sources, Christopher Hibbert, 'our outstanding popular historian', in A.N. Wilson's words, has provided portraits of Napoleon and the many women in his life as illuminating as they are compelling.