The Hundred Days

by Joseph Roth

Translation by Richard Panchyk

In The Hundred Days, Joseph Roth provides a poignant look at Napoleon’s seemingly triumphant return to Paris from exile in March 1815. The story of Napoleon’s last grasp at glory is framed both through the eyes of the Emperor himself and an infatuated young imperial laundress named Angelina Pietri. Before long, one hundred days have elapsed and war and truth have crushed the lofty dreams of both Napoleon and little Angelina. Originally published in 1935, and out of print in English for seventy years, The Hundred Days achieves Roth’s aim of sending the legendary Napoleon Bonaparte out of the lofty clouds and crashing down to earth.

'This is not perhaps the real Napoleon, but it’s certainly a remarkable creation that leaps off the page.' – Jack Kerridge, The Sunday Telegraph  

JOSEPH ROTH was born in Brody, Galicia then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in the Ukraine in 1894. He served in the Austrian army between 1916 and 1918 and worked as a journalist from 1923 to 1932 in Berlin and Vienna. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he emigrated to Paris, where he drank himself into an early grave in 1939. Roth also wrote The Antichrist, Weights and Measures, Flight Without End, The Silent Prophet (also published by Peter Owen),The Radetzky March, String of Pearls and The Legend of the Holy Drinker.