So great is the weight of reading on the subject of the Waterloo
campaign that it might be thought there is nothing left to say about it,
and from the military viewpoint, this is very much the case. But one
critical aspect of the story has gone all but untold - the French home
front. Little has been written about the topic in English, and few works
on Napoleon or Revolutionary and Napoleonic France pay it much
attention. It is this conspicuous gap in the literature that Charles
Esdaile explores in this erudite and absorbing study.
Drawing on the vivid, revealing material that is available in the French
archives, in the writings of soldiers who fought in France in 1814 and
1815 and in the memoirs of civilians who witnessed the fall of Napoleon
or the Hundred Days, he gives us a fascinating new insight into the
military and domestic context of the Waterloo campaign, the Napoleonic
legend and the wider situation across Europe.