Masters of War

He was born André Masséna, a merchant’s orphan in a Savoyard port town, without wealth, without connections, without a name that carried weight beyond the narrow streets of Nice. The army he joined at seventeen kept him in the ranks for fourteen years, the rigid hierarchy of the Ancien Régime ensuring that his formidable gifts reached precisely the ceiling his birth permitted. Then the Revolution broke the cage. And what emerged from it changed the history of Europe. From the Maritime Alps to the plains of the Danube, from the frozen passes above Zürich to the starving streets of besieged Genoa, André Masséna forged one of the most extraordinary military careers of the modern age. He saved the French Republic at the Second Battle of Zürich. He held Genoa for fifty-nine days of starvation so that Napoleon could cross the Alps and win Marengo. He commanded the rearguard at Aspern-Essling from an open carriage under artillery fire, with a damaged leg, and brought an army home across the Danube when its destruction had seemed inevitable. At Wagram he marched an entire corps across the front of the largest battle of the era under fire, and Napoleon, who had watched fifteen years of the finest warfare in history, declared he had never seen anything more brave. Of all my generals, Masséna was the one who revealed himself most brilliantly in the most desperate situations. At the moment when everything seemed lost, it was then that his talents truly shone. - Napoleon Bonaparte · Saint Helena This volume in the Masters of War series offers a complete and unflinching account of Masséna’s life and campaigns, from the Mediterranean voyages of his boyhood to the Lines of Torres Vedras, from the night march before Rivoli to the long twilight of the Restoration years. It is a biography that measures its subject by the only honest standard: what he produced, in the most desperate situations, against the most formidable opposition, with whatever the campaign had left him. Wellington called him the ablest general he faced in the Peninsula. Suvorov was outmanoeuvred by him at Zürich. Napoléon named him l’enfant chéri de la victoire, the dear child of victory. The record of his campaigns makes clear why all three assessments were earned.