Napoleon’s Letters to Josephine, 1796-1812

Written across sixteen years, from the young general’s first Italian campaign to the eve of his Russian disaster, these letters trace Napoleon Bonaparte’s stormy marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais. The early ones burn with impatience and longing as he writes from the field, begging for her replies; the later ones cool into duty and the hard arithmetic of an empire that needed an heir. Read together, they reveal a side of the emperor rarely visible in the histories of his battles: possessive, insecure, and often wounded. The collection doubles as a personal chronicle of the Napoleonic years, seen through one turbulent relationship. This edition presents the correspondence in English translation, free as a PDF and EPUB edition.