New Work & Research

Napoleon's Officers: Uniforms and Equipment. Paul Dawson. Frontline. Nov. 2026 ISPN 9781036141844.

200 color illustrations.

I came across this interesting PhD: Fighting for the Habsburgs: Community, Patriotism and the kaiserlich-königliche Armee, 1788-1816 by Kurt J. G. Baird PhD of the University of York from 2022, which will be published in early 2027 as an academic book, so it is priced at £50. However, it is currently available for free on the Net at https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/31909/1/Baird_204038989_ThesisClean.pdf

After the recent thesis by Gramm on “the unfortunate General Mack” (in German) at https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/api/object/o:1249109/download , which also contains a lot of useful background political material, it is good to see increased interest in the Imperial Austrian army, especially in English. The book will include uniform plates, but also some of another set created in 1801, which illustrated various heroic acts during the Second Coalition.

The work of Ilya Berkowich and Michael Wenzel in the Vienna Kriegsarchivs, alongside printed material from a century ago, has produced a collection of statistical material,…

Due out in August, Andrew Roberts, Napoleon and His Marshals: Victory, Rivalry, Betrayal. ISBN: 97820241711354.

In view of current events in UK politics, I thought I would put up some research I have been doing on one of Austria’s shadowy figures: Matthias Von Fasbender. I was going to place this on Wiki, but they have said there is too much primary material and not enough “reliable secondary material” - the lack of the latter is why Fasbender is a shadowy figure! He is also called an ‘eminence guise’, so I was interested to read that this term does not derive from Cardinal Richelieu, but his own adviser, who as a Capuchin monk, work the grey robes of that order.

So, you will all be saying “Fasbender - who is he?”. He was the chief civilian adviser to Archduke Charles from 1796 to 1805 and did much of the implementation work in the First Reform Period (1801-5), before siding with the Archduke’s opponents in 1805 in…