A dedicated career soldier and excellent division and corps commander, Dominique Vandamme was a thorn in the side of practically every officer he served. Outspoken to a fault, he even criticized Napoleon, whom he never forgave for not appointing him marshal. His military prowess so impressed the emperor, however, that he returned Vandamme to command time and again.

In this first book-length study of Vandamme in English, John G. Gallaher traces the career of one of Napoleon's most successful...

Born Thomas Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie in 1762 to an enslaved black woman and a white French nobleman, the young Thomas-Alexandre spent his first fourteen years on the island of Saint Domingue. Following his mother's death, Alexandre joined his father in Normandy in 1776. Later, he moved to Paris alone. In 1786, after losing financial support for his free Parisian life, Alexandre enlisted as a private in the French army under his mother's name - Dumas. Had his mother been white, he would have...

Drawing heavily on the original documents of the Archives de la guerre, John G. Gallaher has written the first complete account of the storied Irish Legion, which joined with Napoleon to fight England.
Following the failed Rebellion of 1798, hundreds of Irishmen fled to the Continent to avoid imprisonment or execution. As part of his planned campaign against England and Ireland in 1803, Napoleon authorized the creation of an Irish Legion to invade Ireland in order to tie down British forces that...

This first biography in English of Davout, the most successful of Napoleon’s commanders, made Marshal of the Empire, places the man in historical perspective.
Louis N. d’Avout (later Davout) was born in 1770. He died in 1823,having lived a life encompassing the span of French history from the Revolution to the restoration of Louis XVIII. He was born into an old and distinguished military Burgundian family and served France as a soldier all his life.
Gallaher pays particular attention to Davout’s...