One of the finest, most revealing and genuinely authentic accounts of the French Army of Napoleon Bonaparte (from May 18, 1804, Emperor Napoleon I) are the memoirs written by an officer who served in it as an infantry captain through numerous campaigns. Entering the French Army as a velite (elite infantryman named after those of ancient Rome) in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, Blaze gained an officer’s commission and then served mainly as a line infantry captain. He participated in the French Emperor’s series of wars waged upon France by a succession of coalitions formed by Europe’s kings and princes who were determined to stamp out the forces of change and reform unleashed by the 1789 French Revolution and spread by Napoleon’s conquests that threatened their regimes.
Blaze participated in numerous campaigns, from those in Poland (1807) through Napoleon’s defeat in March 1814 in the War of the Sixth Coalition leading to the Emperor’s first exile (to Elba). Particularly revealing to Napoleonic War scholars are Blaze’s recollections in his memoir of the Peninsular War (1807-1814), the brutal struggle fought on the Iberian Peninsula that pitted the occupying power, France, against
