An Authentic Narrative of the Campaign of 1815, comprising a Circumstantial Detail of the Battle of Waterloo.; By a Staff Officer in the French Army. Forming a Sequel to the History of the Campaign of 1814, by M. De Beauchamp.
London: Henry Colburn, 1815. Second Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing thus. Wraps, string-tied. RARE. Format is approximately 5.75 inches by 8.75 inches (some pages slightly smaller). [4], 52, [4 of advertisements] pages. Item has some wear and soiling, with some edge wear and some discoloration. Alphonse de Beauchamp entered the Sardinian military service in 1784. Beauchamp commenced his Histoire de la Vendée et des Chouans (three volumes, Paris, 1806), which depicted the cruelties of the Fouché regime. Under the Restoration, he received a pension and wrote for the Moniteur and the Gazette de France. The Waterloo campaign (15 June – 8 July 1815) was fought between the French Army of the North and two Seventh Coalition armies, an Anglo-allied army and a Prussian army. Initially the French army was commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte. The Anglo-allied army was commanded by the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian army by Prince Blücher. The war between France and the Seventh Coalition came when other European Great Powers refused to recognize Napoleon as Emperor of the French upon his return from exile on Elba, and declared war on him, rather than France, as they still recognized Louis XVIII as the king of France and considered Napoleon a usurper. Rather than wait for the Coalition to invade France, Napoleon decided to attack his enemies and hope to defeat them in detail before they could launch their combined and coordinated invasion. He chose to launch his first attack against the two Coalition armies cantoned in modern-day Belgium, then part of the newly formed United Kingdom of the Netherlands, but until the year before part of the First French Empire. More