A concise biography of the world’s prototypical dictator, the first to embody Rousseau’s general will. Skillful at artillery and cartography, favoring speed and attack borne of interior lines, Bonaparte rode his 1796 Italian campaign to power, thereby ending France’s revolutionary era and creating the first 20th-century authoritarian government, replete with repressive state machinery and cultural propaganda. As a military leader, he squandered men and horses – though soldiers were permitted to pillage – while as head of state he roused nationalist resentment against France. Military failure in Spain and Russia, the British blockade, and resurgent German nationalism (newly shorn of the Holy Roman Empire), caused his downfall. Ironically, this period created, via the Congress of Vienna, an absolutist coda which survived until 1914. The short form diminished the tendency to glorify a monstrous figure.