Napoleon and Josephine: When Power Met Passion - Softcover

Bruce, Evangeline

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0806522615 ISBN 13: 9780806522616

Publisher: Citadel Press, 2001

Synopsis

Provides a colorful richly textured dual portrait of the flamboyant French emperor, his sensual Creole wife, and the turbulent social, political, and cultural world in which Napoleon and Josephine lived. Reprint.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Antonia Fraser explains why this is one of her favourites...
The marriage of the Corsican-born Napoleon, then a young army officer, to the languid, promiscuous Creole beauty, Josephine de Beauharnais, brought together two complete opposites. Josephine, the widow of a man guillotined in the Terror, was indeed extremely reluctant to take the plunge and it was only the need for a protector which swayed her. Napoleon on the other hand was physically obsessed by Josephine, but also believed that her political influence in the salons of Paris would help him in his urgent struggle to succeed. What is so compelling about this book - apart from the tempestuous love story it tells - is the brilliant use Evangeline Bruce makes of the contrast between to the two worlds from which the couple came. Her acute sense of social observation recreates the background of the Napoleons, explains the hostility to Josephine, the power of Napoleon's mother, before passing to Josephine's own exotic early life and then, unforgettably, the Paris of the Directorate and the Empire.

Synopsis:

Set against the pomp and splendor of prerevolutionary France, Napoleon and Josephine is an enthralling tale of desire, betrayal, and ambition. It chronicles Napoleon's rise to power and ascent to the imperial throne; the first meeting between Napoleon and Josephine; and the subsequent stormy marriage and Josephine's inability to produce an heir, their divorce...and wrenching separation. Drawn from the lovers' private letters and journals, this biography brings to life a tumultuous era and two of history's most fascinating people in a story so compelling, romantic, and compulsively readable it could be fiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Citadel Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0806522615
• ISBN 13: 9780806522616
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 574