In the century after the Napoleonic Wars ended, memories of these conflicts were regarded as an important part of the national heritage, especially in the countries that had fought in the coalition against Napoleon. In his bibliography of the Napoleonic era, published 100 years later, the German historian Friedrich M. Kircheisen estimated that 200,000 essays and books, including translations, appeared in Europe and beyond in the previous century. For his bibliography he selected 8,000 titles he considered ‘necessary for an understanding of the Napoleonic era’. He included only those texts that met his standards of scholarly historiography and biography, whose value as sources he acknowledged or which he deemed part of the literary canon. For that reason, he did not include thousands of popular memory texts – including commemorative broadsheets, autobiographies, war memoirs, biographies and novels, as well as pictorial volumes.1