I'm looking for a book I read as a teenager. 

I read it in French. I seem to recall it was written by a well-known
author, so chances are it was translated in English, but I'm not sure.
The title, in French, was something like "Les quinze minutes les plus
importantes de l'histoire de l'humanit?" (History's fifteen most
important minutes).

The book is a series of chapters recounting 15 minutes (or 12, or 13,
not sure) that changed history.

One chapter was about Marshal Ney's mistake at Waterloo that caused
Napoleon to be defeated.

One chapter was about Handel writing the Messiah.

One chapter was about the guy who wrote La Marseillaise in one night.

I can't recall the other chapters...

Caveat: I am pretty good at searching on Google, so I'm guessing only
someone who has read this book will be able to help me.

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Request for Question Clarification by juggler-ga on 18 Apr 2004 21:18 PDT

Salut,

Could it be "Douze minutes de vérité" (1966)?
http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v3=1&DB=local&CMD=010a+67078066&CNT=10+records+per+page

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Clarification of Question by frenchy_al-ga on 20 Apr 2004 10:06 PDT

I spent a few hours looking for it and finally found! The examples I
cited are not mentioned in the summary, but they are in the book.

Stefan Zweig
Decisive Moments in History
Twelve Historical Miniatures
Translated and with an Afterword by Lowell A. Bangerter
253 pages; ISBN 1-57241-067-1; $21.50

The factors that dictate and change the course of history are
primarily the product of the contributions made by individual lives to
the broad pattern of mortal existence. In his collection of
"historical miniatures," Stefan Zweig celebrates the monumental power
of the spirit to dis-cover, to create, to transcend the limits imposed
by the temporal and physical environment, while at the same time
underlining man's inability to escape from the realities of his own
nature. Among Zweig's illustrations of decisive moments in human
experience are the stories of a siege during wich seventy ships are
moved across a mountainous headland in a single night, a love affair
between a seventy-four-year old poet and a nineteen-year-old girl, and
a man who legally owned much of the state of California, only to have
it taken from him because the government would not defend his rights.