About
Method & sources
A history of the Napoleonic era told through maps, period art and the words of people who were there. This is a prototype covering one campaign: France, 1814.
Facts and figures
Strengths, losses and movements come mainly from F. Loraine Petre's Napoleon at Bay, 1814 (1914). It is a careful staff history that compares French, Prussian and Russian accounts. Where Petre gives no figure, the site uses a common estimate and marks it "est.". Where accounts disagree, it shows a range and says so.
Battle figures from this period are uncertain. Armies counted differently, reports were written to impress, and bulletins were propaganda. Treat every number as approximate.
Quotations
Period texts are quoted from public-domain editions, mainly Bourrienne's Memoirs in R. W. Phipps's edition. Bourrienne was not with the army in 1814, so anecdotes he heard from others are labelled as second-hand. Some popular "Napoleon quotes" are of doubtful origin and are left out. One example is the set of 1814 letters to Joséphine, which the editor of Napoleon's Letters to Josephine lists as spurious.
Images
Every image is public domain or CC0 and comes from Wikimedia Commons. The licence is checked automatically when the site is built, and anything that isn't public domain is left out. Each image links to its Commons page, which credits the holding museum or library.
Maps
Rivers and town positions come from OpenStreetMap. The roads are simplified to the main routes of 1814. The positions of armies and the arrows are schematic: they show corps-level locations taken from the narrative, not surveyed deployments. A battle that sprawled over several kilometres is represented by a handful of markers.
Influences
The approach owes a debt to the animated-map storytelling of channels like Epic History and History Marche. The aim is to share their clarity and pace. All the maps, text and design here are original.
Source list
- F. Loraine Petre, Napoleon at Bay, 1814 (London: John Lane, 1914) · Public domain. The main source for strengths, losses and movements on this site.
- L. A. F. de Bourrienne, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, ed. R. W. Phipps, vol. 12 (1891 edition) · Public domain. Bourrienne was Napoleon’s former secretary. He was not with the army in 1814, so his anecdotes are second-hand.
- L. A. F. de Bourrienne, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, ed. R. W. Phipps, vol. 13 (1891 edition) · Public domain.
- Wikimedia Commons (image files, licence metadata verified at build time)
- Wikidata (dates of birth and death, portrait identifiers)
- © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL (river courses and place coordinates)