Masters of War: Joachim Murat - Masters of War, #50

He was born in a provincial inn and died before a firing squad.

In between, he changed the history of Europe.

The eleventh child of a Quercy innkeeper, Joachim Murat rose through the ranks of Revolutionary France to become Marshal of the Empire, Grand Duke of Berg, and King of Naples, the supreme cavalry commander of the Napoleonic age and one of the most extraordinary military figures in the history of European warfare. He secured the cannon that allowed Napoleon to seize power on 13 Vendémiaire. He led eighty squadrons through a February blizzard at Eylau to save an army at the edge of annihilation. He unleashed the most devastating cavalry pursuit in modern history after the twin victories at Jena and Auerstedt, destroying a proud Prussian military machine in three relentless weeks. And through it all, riding always at the head of his men in the most magnificent uniforms any European battlefield had ever seen, he transformed what the cavalry arm could mean, in the charge, the pursuit, and the crisis intervention, into something no previous commander had fully achieved.

This volume in the Masters of War series is a comprehensive account of Murat's life and military genius, from his origins in the French countryside through the great campaigns of the Consulate and Empire, Italy, Egypt, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Russia, to his kingship of Naples, his defection, and his final, fatal gamble on the Calabrian coast. Written without judgment of the cause he served, it examines with unflinching honesty both the qualities that made him one of the finest cavalry commanders who ever lived and the limitations that accompanied and ultimately destroyed him. It is the story of a man whose gifts were immense, whose flaws were inseparable from those gifts, and whose death, standing before a firing squad on his forty-eighth birthday, refusing a blindfold, giving the order to fire himself, was the last and most complete expression of everything he had been.