Books by Alan Forrest

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had an enduring influence on the collective memory of all European nations and regions, and have given them an international dimension. These essays look at how the French Wars were remembered in personal diaries, paintings and literature, allowing a comparative analysis with atransnational perspective.

Brings together some of the research on the Revolutionary army that has been undertaken on both sides of the Atlantic by younger historians, many of whom look to the influential work of Braudel for a model.

A major contribution to the study of collective identity and memory in France, this book examines a French republican myth: the belief that the nation can be adequately defended only by its own citizens, in the manner of the French revolutionaries of 1793. Alan Forrest examines the image of the citizen army reflected in political speeches, school textbooks, art and literature across the nineteenth century. He reveals that the image appealed to notions of equality and social justice, and with time it expanded to incorporate Napoleon's victorious legions, the partisans who repelled the German invader in 1814 and the people of Paris who rose in arms to defend the Republic in 1870. More recently it has risked being marginalized by military technology and by the realities of colonial warfare, but its influence can still be seen in the propaganda of the Great War and of the French Resistance under Vichy.

This volume's juxtaposition of the empires of Germany and France in 1806, at the dissolution of The Holy Roman Empire, allows a comparison of their transition towards modernity, explored through the themes of Empire, monarchy, political cultures, feudalism, war and military institutions, nationalism and identity, and everyday experience.

An engaging and myth-free biography of Napoleon.