Review as featured in

The Journal of Military History

Guy Dempsey has once again written and delivered an authoritative work on the Napoleonic period. Having two excellent uniform studies already to his credit, this superb volume, in my opinion, establishes the author as one of the leading Napoleonic scholars that is writing today.

The Grande Armee was an army of many nations and myriad combat and support units that were not native Frenchmen. This volume lists them all, covering their history, colors, uniforms, and commanders, and gives the historian, enthusiast, and wargamer a ready reference that is both easy to use and packed full of useful information.

Relying on much primary source material, the author tells a factual, highly intricate tale of the non-French units that followed Napoleon's eagles across Europe. These units were an integral part of the Grande Armee and were not allied units. Well-known and famous outfits such as the Swiss, whom St. Cyr considered 'stronger than nature' for their epic stand in the Berezina in 1812, Berthier's private army, the Neuchatel Battalion of Swiss, the famous Tirailleurs do Po and the equally famous, and deadly, Tirailleurs Corses, to the lesser known units such as the Croatian provisional units that served in Russia in 1812 and exotic creations such as the Greek and Albanian crowd that served well, or not, beside their French comrades-in-arms.

I can think of no other publication in English that does such a thorough job of putting into print and logical order dozens of regiments, battalions, and detachments that made up the foreign contingent of the Grande Armee. This magnificent volume will be the standard work in English on this subject for years to come.

This book is enthusiastically recommended.
*****

Kevin F. Kiley, Amazon