Napoleon Bonaparte is a human Rorschach test. For liberals, he is the man who put down royalists and sponsored the first modern pan-European legal code. For reactionaries, he is the self-styled Emperor, Carlyle’s “hero as king”, whatever his pretentions to republicanism. But who was he really?

In this first entry in the Imperium Press Great Men series, the life and character of Napoleon is presented clearly and concisely, to give the reader a picture of one of the greatest military geniuses of all time and a true great man of history, what Hegel called the “world-soul on horseback”.