4 ideas
In Geoffroy's 1836 counter-history, Napoleon leaves Moscow before the winter can destroy his army, crushes Russia, and in the following years invades and conquers England. He then subdues the rest of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, founding a single world monarchy that he rules until his death in 1832. The book narrates this in the dry, dated style of an official history, making it the first novel-length alternate history.
The book presents invented history as a correction of real history. Waterloo and Saint Helena are treated as an unworthy ending, so the author supplies the destiny he thinks Napoleon's genius deserved. On this view a counterfactual is not a prediction of what would have happened but a consolation: a record of what should have happened, written to repair a collective disappointment.
Treating history this way makes world-historical outcomes depend on one leader's decisions at critical moments. Mass forces like economics, logistics, or nationalism drop out of view, and the great man becomes the sole lever of causation.
Once one sovereign rules every nation, there are no rivals left to fight, so conquest itself becomes the route to permanent peace. With war abolished, the unified world's resources flow into science, invention, and cultural unification under one center. Total domination is thus imagined as a utopian end-state rather than a tyranny.