Occasionally one comes across a book that gives a sense of how much fun it must have been to do the research and write the narrative. Bonapartists in the Borderlands is such a book. In pursuit of the human flotsam spit out by Europe after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Rafe Blaufarb (professor of history at Florida State University) tracks a medium-sized group of French exiles who ended up in the United States and were at loose ends in their country of refuge. They had a few things in common. First of all, they did not particularly want to be in the United States (they were refugees, not immigrants), and secondly, they needed to keep busy, either to counteract boredom or more commonly to support themselves. These twin motives produced activity that made Blaufarb’s Gauls momentarily important in American, Latin American, and ultimately French history.In the United States, their activity created the Society for the Cultivation of the Vine and Olive in 1817. This group of Frenchmen, composed partly of prominent Bonapartists and partly of Saint-Domingue survivors, lobbied Congress to pass an act awarding them a large land grant in western Alabama to grow grapes for wine and olives for oil. How much of a market there was for wine and olive oil in the United States in the second decade of the nineteenth century could be questioned, but other issues played a more important role. For the grantor, the United States government, the willingness to place Napoleonic veterans in Alabama had a lot to do with American concern about the threat of Spanish Florida to the security of the slaveholding South, according to Professor Blaufarb. Veterans of Napoleon’s campaigns in Europe would compose a military colony that could mobilize against any invasion by hostile Florida Indians, escaped slaves, and even the British (should Spain allow Britannia access to that territory). For the grantees, the French petitioners, here was an opportunity not only to grow grapes and olives but, more enticing, the opportunity to jump into the booming cotton revolution then sweeping the South. Even more promising was the chance to become real estate agents and sell this prime farmland to eager Americans.A portion of the Society’s Frenchmen, especially those from Saint-Domingue, did attempt to settle on their grants in Alabama. Interestingly enough, most turned immediately to slave labor to work their land, apparently seeing no possibility that a slave insurrection like the one they had fled from could take place in the clay fields of Alabama. The Bonapartists, however, were men of the sword. To them, the Alabama land had a value primarily in funding their efforts to participate in the numerous rebellions south of the United States against Spain and her empire. Under the leadership of General Charles-François Antoine Lallemand, a Napoleonic officer who served the Emperor against the slave insurrection in Haiti and later in Spain against those opposing Joseph Bonaparte, a French filibustering expedition set off to invade Texas in 1818. Setting up a fortified position called Camp d’Asile not too far from modern Galveston, the French invaders provoked hostility from the Lafitte brothers, the American government, and finally the Spanish viceroyalty, which had just faced and dispatched a more threatening invasion of filibusterers under Francisco de Mina in 1817. Camp d’Asile barely survived a year.By the standards of academic history, Professor Blaufarb has written a rip-roaring, intriguing study in the mold of older works such as Harris Gaylord Warren’s The Sword Was Their Passport (1943). Blaufarb’s work will appeal to students and scholars alike. The author demonstrates what interesting work can emerge from someone who is firmly grounded in European history and able to manipulate New World source materials as well.