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The rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. . Vol. 2, $p The fall / /

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In his early years, Napoleon was a Corsican nationalist who considered the French to be oppressors. Nevertheless,he was sent to military academies in France, and when he graduated in 1785, at the age of sixteen, he became a second lieutenant in the French army. Napoleon's military career presents a surprising paradox. His genius at tactical manoeuvring was dazzling, and if he were to be judged only by that, he might perhaps be considered the greatest general of all time. In the field of grand strategy, however, he was prone to making gross blunders, such as the invasion of Egypt and Russia. One criterion of a general's greatness is his ability to avoid disastrous errors. It is hard to second-guess the very greatest such as Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, whose armies were never defeated. Because Napoleon was defeated in the end, in 1815, all of his foreign conquests proved ephemeral. This second volume of Robert Asprey's long-awaited biography takes Napoleon from the zenith of his powers to their nadir, and brilliantly places Bonaparte in his full military context.