“Among the Napoleonic legends, Lanfrey lets none subsist.” (Perrens, Histoire sommaire de la littérature française au XIXe siècle ) “History always has an answer for whoever questions her; there is not a situation that does not encounter, at every step, its precedent, its corrective or its example in history.” (Lanfrey, Preface to the last volume of Histoire de Napoléon Bonaparte ) In Lanfrey’s account, Napoleon belongs to those “privileged monsters,” those “crowned villains,” of history, whose career unfolded upon so much bloodshed, so many sacrifices, so many crimes conceived, committed, and persisted in with cool premeditation; in an unending series of “fearful holocaust consummated in cold blood,” he sent millions of men in France and Europe to the slaughterhouse of battlefields. Treating the impact of the Napoleonic era as a moral phenomenon, Lanfrey offers early examples of critiques of colonialism. The reader is invited to contemplate on what Lanfrey calls the “avenging light of history,” what it can do and in what it consists.