WHO WAS NAPOLEON? The train of events set in motion by the French Revolution also swept into power an obscure soldier, Napoleon Bonaparte, who for a brief hour on the stage of history controlled the destiny of all of Europe.

Throughout the 19th and early twentieth centuries, the spectre of Napoleon haunted Europe. The revolutionary changes brought by the French continued to shake the world order through the 1860's, with the unification of Italy and Germany, and the return of the Bonaparte family under the Second Empire in France. This dream was shattered by Bismark's policy of 'Blood and Iron' in 1871.

Suddenly, there was a burgeoning of interest in the career of Napoleon, and numerous monumental works of incredible depth of detail were published in the generation between 1880 and 1914. The material in these works forms the core of our own 'Operational Studies.'

With the coming of the World War, all sides realized, a new technologized form of mass death removed any relevance of Napoleon's methods for military strategists, and the publication of studies on Napoleon ceased. Yet the theorists of the 1920's sought ways of bringing back Napoleon's style of mobile warfare, and the advent of armor ended the era of trench warfare. Suddenly, Napoleon's campaigns were in style once again.