The Best Books on Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars

One biography to read first, one history that blames him for everything, the campaign narratives that still stand, and the novel that turned the whole thing into literature

The best single-volume life of Napoleon for most readers is Andrew Roberts's Napoleon: A Life (2014). It is long, it is openly admiring, and it was among the first major English biographies written with the modern French edition of Napoleon's letters to hand, which is why it reads as a portrait of a working ruler rather than a parade of battles. If you want the opposite case, that the wars of 1803 to 1815 were the product of one man's refusal to accept any limit, read Charles Esdaile's Napoleon's Wars (2007). The two books disagree about almost everything except the facts, and reading both is the honest way into the subject.

The rest of the list covers what a biography cannot. David Chandler's The Campaigns of Napoleon is still the standard military account sixty years after it was written; Adam Zamoyski's Moscow 1812 is the finest narrative of a single campaign; Dominic Lieven's Russia Against Napoleon explains how the Russians actually won; Alexander Mikaberidze's The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History follows the fighting to India, the Americas and the Ottoman frontier; Michael Broers's Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny is the scholarly biography that treats him as an administrator first. And War and Peace is on the list because Tolstoy's version of 1812 shaped how everyone since has imagined it, including several of the historians above who wrote partly to correct him.

Every title below is checked against Open Library and publisher records, with editions, years and ISBNs verified rather than scraped. Where historians genuinely disagree, above all on whether Napoleon caused the wars or inherited them, the guide says so rather than picking a side.

The books

Which Napoleon book to start with

Start with Roberts. Napoleon: A Life is over eight hundred pages and it does not feel it, because Roberts writes with the momentum of a man who has walked most of the battlefields and read the correspondence in full. Its argument, that Napoleon was the Enlightenment carried into law and administration by a soldier of genius, is stated plainly and defended throughout, and the reader is never in doubt where the author stands. That is a virtue in a first book: you know what you are being sold, and you can argue back. The military chapters are clear enough to follow without maps, though the Penguin paperback has them, and the account of the Hundred Days and Waterloo is as good as any single-volume treatment.

Read Esdaile second, and read him as a corrective. Napoleon's Wars: An International History is not a biography; it is a history of the wars as a European system, told from the capitals that fought France as much as from Paris, and its case is that peace was available at several points and Napoleon refused it every time. Esdaile is a specialist in the Peninsular War and the Spanish chapters are the best in the book. He is also, by his own account, hostile to the Napoleonic legend, and he says so in the introduction, which is the right way to do it.

If you would rather begin with a campaign than with a life, begin with Zamoyski's Moscow 1812. It is a narrative in the old sense, built from the memoirs of the soldiers of a dozen nations who marched into Russia and the far smaller number who marched out, and it is the most affecting book on this list. Lieven's Russia Against Napoleon is the book to read straight afterwards, because it tells the same campaign, and the two that followed in 1813 and 1814, from the Russian side, and argues that Russia's victory was a matter of planning, horses and supply rather than of snow.

Chandler's The Campaigns of Napoleon is the reference: over a thousand pages, campaign by campaign, with the operational logic of each explained. It is not a book to read cover to cover, but it is the one to have open beside any of the others. Broers's Soldier of Destiny is the first volume of a three-part scholarly life that stops in 1805, and it is the book for the reader who wants to know how the Consulate governed France rather than how the Grande Armée won at Austerlitz. Mikaberidze widens the frame further than any other book here, and is the right choice for a reader who already knows the European story and wants to see what the wars did to the rest of the world.

Then read the novel. War and Peace covers 1805 to 1812 with an epilogue, and it is the source of the picture most people carry of the Russian campaign: the burning of Moscow, the retreat, Kutuzov's patient refusal to fight. Read it after Zamoyski and Lieven rather than before, so that you can see what Tolstoy invented and what he took from the memoirs, and read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which keeps the French passages in French as Tolstoy wrote them.

A word on length, because it matters here more than in most subjects. Roberts, Chandler, Mikaberidze and War and Peace are each the better part of a thousand pages, and Zamoyski and Lieven are both over five hundred. A reader with limited time should take Roberts and Zamoyski and stop; that pair gives the life and the best campaign, and between them they cover most of what the others argue about. A reader with a year should take the list in the order given. Nothing here is a textbook and nothing needs a prior course in the period, but Chandler and Broers both assume the reader can hold a map of Europe in their head, and Esdaile assumes a working knowledge of the French Revolution, which our separate guide to the Revolution supplies.

What the historians argue about

The oldest argument is responsibility, and it has not been settled. Roberts's position, which descends from the French tradition and from Napoleon's own account of himself on St Helena, is that the wars were forced on France by coalitions that would not accept the Revolution's settlement, and that Napoleon fought them better than anyone else could have. Esdaile's position is that the coalitions formed because Napoleon gave them no choice: that the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 could have held, that the Continental System and the invasion of Spain were unforced errors, and that every peace offered after 1812 was rejected by a man who could not imagine himself as one monarch among several. Lieven, writing from the Russian archives, sits closer to Esdaile on the diplomacy but is more generous to Napoleon as a commander. A reader who finishes Roberts and Esdaile will know the shape of the disagreement and will have to decide for themselves.

The second argument is about Russia in 1812, and here the historians are more united than the popular picture suggests. The picture, which is Tolstoy's, is of an army destroyed by winter and by the Russian people's refusal to submit, with the generals almost beside the point. Zamoyski's memoir-based narrative shows that the Grande Armée was already wrecked by heat, disease and the collapse of its supply before the first snow fell. Lieven goes further and argues that Russia's strategy of retreat was deliberate, that its logistics were better than France's, and that the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 which finished Napoleon are the ones history has unfairly forgotten. Both books are in part a reply to War and Peace, which is one reason to read the novel alongside them.

The third argument is about what Napoleon was for. Broers, working from the correspondence and the administrative record, sees a ruler whose real work was the Civil Code, the prefects, the concordat with the Church and the machinery of a modern state, and whose wars were the price of holding that settlement. Esdaile sees the same institutions as tools of a military dictatorship. Roberts, characteristically, sees both and prefers the first. Mikaberidze's contribution is to point out that whatever Napoleon was for in Europe, the wars he fought reshaped the Americas, opened India to British rule and set the Ottoman decline in motion, and that a history confined to Europe misses half the consequences.

A fourth argument, smaller but persistent, concerns Spain. The Peninsular War has been remembered in Britain as Wellington's war and in Spain as the people's war, the guerrilla struggle that bled the French army for six years. Esdaile, who has spent his career on the Spanish archives, argues that the guerrillas mattered less than the legend says and that the regular Anglo-Portuguese army under Wellington did the decisive work, while the guerrilla bands were as often bandits as patriots. Not every specialist agrees, and Spanish historians in particular have pushed back. Roberts treats Spain as the mistake that opened the second front Napoleon could not close, which is closer to Napoleon's own verdict on St Helena than to either modern camp.

Behind all of this stands the legend itself, and it is worth knowing where it came from. Napoleon spent his last years on St Helena dictating his own version of events to the companions of his exile, and the account published after his death by Emmanuel de Las Cases became the most influential book of the nineteenth century in France: the emperor as the peace-loving heir of the Revolution, forced into war by English gold and Bourbon spite. Every biography since has had to decide how much of that to believe. Roberts believes more of it than Esdaile does, and says so; Broers treats it as a source to be handled with tongs; Zamoyski and Lieven, working from the memoirs of the men who marched, are largely outside it. A reader who knows the legend exists will find it easier to see when a book is arguing with it.

None of these books is a whitewash and none is a hatchet job. The good ones, and all eight are good, keep the general, the lawgiver and the despot in view at the same time, which is the only way to read Napoleon honestly.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best single-volume biography of Napoleon?

Andrew Roberts's Napoleon: A Life (2014). It is among the first major English biographies written with the modern French edition of Napoleon's correspondence to hand, it covers the whole life from Corsica to St Helena, and it is openly admiring, which makes its argument easy to follow and easy to argue with. Michael Broers's Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny is the scholarly alternative, but it is the first of three volumes and stops in 1805. If a single long book is too much, Adam Zamoyski's Napoleon: A Life (2018) is a shorter and more sceptical biography by the author of Moscow 1812, though it is not on this list because Roberts and Broers between them cover the same ground with more depth.

What is the best book on the Napoleonic Wars themselves rather than on Napoleon?

For the wars as a system of European politics, Charles Esdaile's Napoleon's Wars: An International History (2007). For the campaigns as military operations, David Chandler's The Campaigns of Napoleon (1966), which is still the standard reference. For the wars as a global event that reached India and the Americas, Alexander Mikaberidze's The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (2020). Esdaile and Roberts disagree sharply on who caused the wars, and reading both is the honest approach.

What is the best book on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812?

Adam Zamoyski's Moscow 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March (2004) for the narrative, told from the memoirs of soldiers on both sides, and Dominic Lieven's Russia Against Napoleon (2009) for the Russian view, which argues that the campaign was won by Russian strategy and supply rather than by winter. Read them together, then read War and Peace to see what Tolstoy made of the same events. Chandler's Campaigns of Napoleon has a long section on 1812 for readers who want the operational detail.

Is War and Peace worth reading as history?

As a novel it is unmatched, and as a picture of how Russians of Tolstoy's generation understood 1812 it is a historical document in its own right. As an account of what happened it should be read with care: Tolstoy's theory that individuals do not make history, and his portrait of Kutuzov as passive wisdom, are arguments rather than findings, and Lieven's Russia Against Napoleon was written in part to answer them. Read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which is the most faithful to Tolstoy's own texture, or the older Louise and Aylmer Maude translation if you prefer smoother English; both are complete, and the difference is one of taste rather than accuracy.

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Related guides

Sources consulted

• Napoleon: A Life (Roberts), Open Library record
• Napoleon's Wars: An International History, Open Library record
• Moscow 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March, Open Library record
• The Campaigns of Napoleon, Open Library record
• Russia Against Napoleon, Open Library record
• The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History, Open Library record
• Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny, Open Library record
• War and Peace (Pevear and Volokhonsky), Open Library record

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