A Life of Napoleon (french: Vie de Napoléon) is a book written by Marie-Henri Beyle, better known under his usual pseudonym of Stendhal, in 1817-1818.

He was appointed Consul at Civitavecchia after the 1830 revolution, but his health deteriorated and six years later he was back in Paris working on his Life of Napoleon.

[1] Around 1818, Beyle, who was thirty-three years old and living in Milan, began writing the Life of Napoleon to respond to Madame de Staël who, in a violent posthumous libel Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, had attacked the Emperor.

[2] Twenty years later, during the late 1830s, Stendhal returns to his project, encouraged by the new public provisions of the July Monarchy and the abundance of sources of information.

Napoleon represents for Stendhal the last grand figure in the second stage of history, the nineteenth-century tyrant who paradoxically brings about the third phase of civilization.