Happy Birthday Napoleon

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To celebrate Napoleon's birthday on 15 August, I present to you a brief synopsis of one of the first works of alternate history to be published, a work titled [i]Napoleon and the Conquest of the World 1812-1832: A Fictional History[/i] published in 1841 by Louis Geoffroy. It truly is a wonderful testament to the power of the French imagination:

In Geoffroy's alternate version of events, Napoleon did not pause in Moscow in 1812 but marched north. He came up against an army of Russians, Swedes, and 25,000 British under the command of Alexander and Bernadotte, and defeated them outside Novgorod on 8 ocotber. A week later he made a triumphal entry into St Petersburg. He forced Alexander to bring the Russian empire into the fold of the Catholic Church, which earned him the forgiveness and wholehearted support of the Pope. He sacked Bernadotte and made Poniatowski King of a restored Poland. He then went to Spain, where, at Segovia on 13 July 1813 he defeated and captured Wellington. The Pope persuade the Spaniards to accept Joseph Bonaparte as their King, and peace descended on the Iberian peninsula. In April 1814 Napoleon invaded England, landing in East Anglia and defeating the British army under the Duke of York outside Cambridge. He then marched on London, where he stormed into the House of Commons and informed the astonished MPs that Britain was abolished before ordering his troops to clear the chamber. Once this had been done he locked the doors, took the keys and, riding onto Westminster Bridge, cast them into the Thames. While George III was allowed to reign in Glasgow as a vassal King of Scotland and Ireland, England was divided up into twenty-two departements and incorporated into the French empire.