Winner of the 2009 Literary Award, sponsored by the International
Napoleonic Society/La Societe Napoleonienne Internationale of Montreal,
Quebec's Literary Committee Napoleon's last campaign didn't end at
Waterloo. After that fateful day on June 1815, hundreds if not thousands
of veterans of Napoleon's army emigrated to America. Many went farther
south and joined the rebels fighting for independence in the Spanish
colonies, from Mexico to Buenos Aires. The Bonapartists roiled the
Western World as they sought fortune, fame, and glory in the expanding
United States and in the tumultuous Spanish Americas suffering from
repression and civil disorder, and even in the states of Europe. They
were joined by adventurers from other nations who shared their
admiration for the fallen emperor. This is the first full-length
examination of the Bonapartists who emigrated from France after
Napoleon's defeat and exile, who formed a loose confederation with
adventurers and romantics, and who contemplated a new empire in the
Western Hemisphere. The scheme had the support and encouragement of the
fallen emperor himself and his brother Joseph, former King of Spain, who
lived in exile in the United States. Emilio Ocampo has examined archives
on three continents and sources in several languages to ferret out the
evidence--a monumental task considering that conspirators tried to leave
no evidence of their plans, and that a failed plot, like failure in
general, leaves few claimants. Ocampo reinterprets Latin American
independence as an international event that drew in all the major
powers. By illuminating the complex connections between the shattered
France of the Bourbon restoration; an England threatened by radical
politician inspired by the French Revolution; Napoleon in exile at St.
Helena; the United States, where home-grown adventurers and French
émigrés alike saw opportunity; and the collapsing Spanish colonial
empire, where revolutionaries were allying themselves with the veterans
of Napoleon's Grande Armée, Ocampo brings together two bodies of
scholarship: Napoleonic history and Latin American independence. He does
so by tracing the steps of four of the most fascinating characters of
the era: two Britons disaffected with their own government--Lord Thomas
Cochrane and Sir Robert Wilson--and two former generals of Napolean's
army named Charles Lallemand and Michel Brayer. The Emperor's Last
Campaign is a fascinating story, well told, and peopled with all sorts
of improbable characters and schemes that perhaps just missed coming to
full fruition but that in the process contributed to one of the most
important events of the nineteenth century: the breakdown of the Spanish
empire in America and the rise of the United States as a world power.
