Philip Mansel

Napoleon’s palaces reflected the power of the greatest empire in modern European history.

His military conquests changed the world and dominate most portraits of him, but it was through the splendour of his court, a world fashioned beyond the battlefield, that Napoleon governed his empire.

Using the unpublished papers of the Emperor's leading courtiers and his second Empress Marie Louise, Mansel brings to life the world of a court devoured by ambition as Stendhal called it; its visual magnificence and rigid hierarchy; mistresses, artists and manipulators.

The life of the court illuminates the life of the Emperor and the nature of a personality that conquered half the world yet, in the end, was abandoned by his dynasty and his courtiers.

Philip Mansel, who has lived and taught in Paris, is one of Britain's leading historians of France.