ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies the essential features of Napoleon's ambition and concept of power, as he himself defined them. It offers a brief appraisal of his own recorded statements on those closely related subjects at different stages of his career. The chapter outlines what might be called the 'classic' images of power in the writings on Napoleon which preceded the new 'revisionist' approach of the past forty years or so. It reviews the most recurrent themes in the first century or more of Napoleonic historiography. The first multi-volume history of the Napoleonic period was published in stages only after a gap of some years, at the end of the Restoration and then a decade later during the July Monarchy. The chapter sets the polemical rhetoric of that historiographical debate against the more factual historical record, to distinguish the reality of Napoleonic power, as it was implemented and experienced at the time, from the myths with which it was later embroidered.
