BONAPARTE'S SONS

by
Richard Howard

1997 1st. published by Little, Brown and Company (UK)

ISBN 0 316 88159 7

BONAPARTE'S SONS
Richard Howard

With the Bourbon monarchy a distant memory, confusion reigns in the
French Republic of 1795. Betrayed, disillusioned, the Paris mob has won the battle of words with the Directory, the nation's new rulers, but its six-year-war for bread and democracy ends in bloody defeat on the streets and the guillotine. While her troops face starvation and annihilation on three European fronts, France is killing her patriots ...
In a desperate move to save the Italian campaign, newly commanded by the young Napoleon Bonaparte, the Directory begins to enlist condemned criminals into the army. Out of the miserable depths of Paris's most infamous prison emerge not only murderers,
rapists and thieves, but men like Alain Lausard, an aristocrat forced to live as a peasant after fleeing his family's massacre during The Terror and imprisoned — like thousands of others — amid the hysteria of revolution. For every man awaiting execution, freedom's arrival is sudden but ominous. For Lausard — racked by the guilt of his past — the promise of death on the battlefield is freedom.

Trained as a soldier, Lausard commands from his superiors both fear and respect for turning this ragged mass of miscreants into a ruthless cavalry unit at the spearhead of Bonaparte's drive through Piedmont and Northern Italy. A series of stunning French victories leaves the Austrian army broken and Lausard the hero of his regiment. Yet tensions between the ranks remain, and when the unit falls under the command of the despotic Cezar, a hazardous mission behind enemy lines threatens to shuttle the mutinous atmosphere to the very brink of anarchy ... The opening volume in a major historical trilogy, Bonaparte's Sons is the powerful chronicle of one man and one regiment's blood-soaked odyssey through the horror of the Napoleonic Wars.