Napoleon and Marie Louise

This brilliantly researched and vividly narrated biography of Napoleon and his second, less famous wife fills a gap long overlooked in European history, as it examines the diplomatic and military dynamics that led to the marriage of France's most celebrated general and emperor to a political adolescent.

It begins in December 1791. The twenty-two-year-old Captain Napoleon Buonaparte is embroiled in political intrigue on Corsica. His wife, Josephine de Beauharnais, has recently returned to Paris from Martinique. Marie Antoinette is still the nominal queen of France, and in Vienna, on the twelfth of that month, her grand niece Marie-Louise is born. Two decades later -- after years of dissension that wrote the battles of Marengo, Austerlitz, and Wagram into French and Austrian history -- Marie-Louise has become Napoleon's second wife, and their destiny is wed to that of two of Europe's most powerful empires.

Not only following General Buonaparte to his wifeless exile and death in 1821, this vibrant volume also illuminates the frustrated but genuine romance that thrust the nineteen-year-old Marie-Louise onto the stage of international