David A. Bell

Princeton historian of early modern France and the Napoleonic era — author of a noted concise Napoleon biography and studies of French nationalism and political culture.

Bell's Napoleon: a concise, interpretive biography that synthesizes recent scholarship on Napoleon's political and military significance. His broader work — The Cult of the Nation in France, The First Total War — examines how the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars transformed political culture, nationalism, and the concept of war. Bell represents the tradition of cultural-intellectual history applied to the Revolutionary-Napoleonic period.