The French Imperial Guard Vol.1

“The Guard charges”

Napoleon gave his special attention to this splendid unit – the Imperial Guard – and it became a sort of little army within the “Grande Armée”. This study of its organisation is here at its most erudite, like the one on the uniforms and equipment.

Volume 1: Discover the uniforms, the equipment, and the weapons used by all those “Grognards”, who were launched into a battle as a last resort, at the decisive moment. Explaining how the Guard was organised into Old, Middle and Young Guards, the illustrator-researcher André Jouineau in this volume shows the colonel-generals, the grenadiers, the chasseurs à pied, fusiliers, velites, flanqueurs, wards, workmen, sappers, doctors, magis- trates and foot gunners; in the second volume he shows the cen- taurs of the Guard’s cavalry. This small practical, clear, concise, logical and visual tool is a real vade mecum, directed at imperial history buffs as well as figurine makers.

This book is a new, completely redrawn, reviewed and greatly enlarged version – with almost 50% extra charac- ters – of the one published several years ago by the same authors. In 176 pages, these two specialists’ texts are illustrated with a thousand or so pictures.