Life of Napoleon Bonaparte

by Walter Scott

Overview

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) first published his influential biography on Napoleon in 1827. The work represents an important contemporary contribution to the study of France during the Napoleonic Era. Sir Walter Scott had the advantage of visiting the field of Waterloo, and of conversing with officers engaged in the battle -thus his narrative may be accepted as essentially accurate. The British government had granted him free access to archives dealing with Napoleon's exile in St. Helena.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781023380829
Publisher:	Anson Street Press
Publication date:	03/29/2025
Pages:	420
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) stands among the foremost literary figures of the nineteenth century, distinguished for his fusion of narrative art, historical scholarship, and national mythmaking. A native of Edinburgh and the scion of a distinguished legal family, Scott emerged first as a poet of the Scottish borderlands before turning to prose fiction, where he would pioneer the historical novel with a breadth and depth previously unseen in English literature. His Waverley (1814), often cited as the first historical novel in the modern sense, inaugurated a remarkable series of novels—including Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, Old Mortality, and The Heart of Midlothian—that reshaped how readers engaged with the past.

Educated in both the classics and the law, Scott maintained a lifelong fascination with history, antiquities, and oral tradition. He was as much an archivist as a bard, meticulously collecting ballads, editing medieval romances, and preserving cultural memory through literature. His literary method was to blend the real and the imagined, to craft fictional characters whose fates unfolded against the grand backdrop of national or continental events. This blending of personal drama and historical crisis became his signature technique, and it deeply influenced later Victorian and European fiction.

Beyond his achievements in fiction, Scott was a formidable public intellectual, serving as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. He also undertook large-scale editorial projects and wrote biographies, of which Life of Napoleon Bonaparte was his most ambitious. Composed in the wake of Napoleon’s death and Scott’s own financial ruin, the biography was a deeply personal act of historical inquiry and moral reflection. In it, Scott turned the same powers he brought to fiction—careful characterization, attention to context, and a profound interest in the interplay of fate and choice—toward the real-life figure who had most dramatically altered the European landscape.

Scott’s literary influence is profound and far-reaching. His exploration of history as a living narrative helped shape nineteenth-century ideas of nationhood, memory, and cultural identity. That he could turn from Jacobite rebels and Crusading knights to a towering figure of revolutionary Europe with equal facility is testament to his range and intellectual ambition.