The award-winning, New York Times bestselling biographer vividly captures how Napoleon Bonaparte and his team of rivals blazed a path onto the world stage.

After crowning himself Emperor in May 1804, Napoleon appointed twenty-six men Marshals of the Empire, a position he created to honor his most important generals. He encouraged competition among them for titles, for wealth, but above all, for glory. Only instead of creating a team of rivals, as Lincoln so famously did, he forged a nest of vipers. “A shrewd and experienced biographer” (The Christian Science Monitor) with a gift for capturing flawed heroes in all their vitality and self-delusion, Andrew Roberts invites us into the lives and loves of these elite warriors, whose rivalries shaped the fate of Europe.

The marshals were the swords behind Napoleon’s throne. Their valor burnished his aura of invincibility. Through their lives we follow the rise and fall of one of history’s most captivating leaders, who forged an empire greater than Caesar’s from the embers of France’s first failed effort at democracy. Napoleon rose to power amidst the fervor and mayhem of the French Revolution, bringing order after years of violence and upheaval. He established new laws, championed new technologies, and pioneered new approaches to government and education, but his defeat ushered in the return of autocratic absolutism. Was he a genius or a tyrant? From the vantage point of his marshals, the answer may be both.

A profound exploration of transformative leadership, Napoleon and his Marshals reveals how this uniquely gifted man, intoxicated by the myth of this own greatness, fatefully mistrusted those whose loyalty he most needed to survive.