A vivid, illustrated history of the Napoleonic Wars, from their origins in the French Revolution, through Napoleon's fantastic victories at Austerlitz and Jena, to his defeats in the Iberian Peninsular, Russia and finally at Waterloo. Napoleon, inheritor of the armies of the French Revolution, transformed inter-state warfare into a pan-continental system of conquest on a scale not seen since Alexander the Great and the Romans. His model of a military superpower, though eventually defeated, set a pattern which was to be revived by totalitarian states, and their opponents, in the twentieth century.