Napoleon Bonaparte

1. Who was Napoleon Bonaparte, and why does he matter?

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 to 1821) was a Corsican-born French general who rose from obscurity to become Emperor of the French and the dominant figure in European politics for nearly two decades. He matters on several levels at once. As a military commander he stands in the company of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and his campaigns are still studied at military academies around the world. As a statesman he gave France the administrative and legal structures that still underpin its institutions today, most notably the Civil Code that bears his name. As a historical force he accelerated the spread of the ideals of the French Revolution across Europe, dismantling feudal structures and ancient privileges wherever his armies went. And as a subject of historical fascination, the French Napoleonic scholar Jean Tulard has observed that more books have been written about him than days have passed since his death in 1821, a measure of the degree to which his story, of a man of no particular advantages rising to reshape a continent, continues to compel.

2. What were Napoleon’s origins, and how did he reach the French army?

Napoleon was born on 15 August 1769 in Ajaccio, on the island of Corsica, which had been transferred from the Republic of Genoa to France just the year before. His family were minor Corsican nobles, sufficiently connected to secure him a place at a French military school on the French mainland at the age of nine. He completed his education at the École Militaire in Paris in 1785 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the artillery, a branch of the military that rewarded technical knowledge and mathematical precision more than aristocratic birth. He was an outsider in the French army by accent, origin, and temperament, a voracious reader who studied the campaigns of the great commanders of antiquity, and he compensated for his peripheral status with furious intellectual preparation. The French Revolution, which began in 1789, transformed the army in which he served: the old aristocratic officer class was decimated by emigration and execution, and the path upward was suddenly clear for men of ability regardless of birth. Napoleon was twenty years old when the Revolution broke out, and the timing could not have been more perfectly suited to what he was.

3. How did Napoleon rise to prominence during the Revolutionary Wars?

Napoleon’s first major opportunity came at the Siege of Toulon in 1793, where royalist forces and their British allies had seized the city and its vital harbour. The young artillery officer devised the plan that drove the British fleet from the harbour, making the city untenable for the royalists and ending the siege. He was promoted to brigadier general at twenty-four. In October 1795, having been passed over for commands and briefly under arrest for suspected Jacobin sympathies, he was given the task of suppressing a royalist insurrection in Paris. He cleared the streets around the Convention with artillery fire, the famous whiff of grapeshot, and was rewarded with command of the Army of Italy. His Italian campaign of 1796 to 1797 was a revelation. Leading an underfed, underequipped force against the Austrians and their allies, he won a succession of engagements through speed, deception, and the concentration of force at precisely the right point, and within a year had compelled Austria to sign the Treaty of Campo Formio and cede much of northern Italy to France. He was twenty-seven years old.

4. What was the Egyptian campaign, and what did it reveal about Napoleon?

In 1798 Napoleon led an expedition to Egypt, ostensibly to strike at British trade routes to India and to spread revolutionary influence in the Ottoman Empire. He took with him not only thirty-five thousand soldiers but a Commission of Sciences and Arts, a body of 167 scholars, scientists, artists, and engineers whose task was to study and document Egyptian civilisation. The campaign produced one of the founding documents of modern Egyptology, the monumental Description de l’Égypte, and it announced to the world that Napoleon understood conquest as a cultural as well as military project. Militarily the results were more mixed. His army won on land, including a famous victory at the Battle of the Pyramids in July 1798, but Admiral Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile left the army stranded. Napoleon fought on for another year, including a failed siege of the Ottoman-held city of Acre, before slipping away secretly to France in August 1799, leaving his army behind. The Egyptian adventure was strategically inconclusive, but it revealed the combination of ambition, showmanship, and cold ruthlessness that defined everything Napoleon did.

5. How did Napoleon seize power in France, and what did he do with it?

On 18 and 19 Brumaire 1799 (9 and 10 November in the revolutionary calendar), Napoleon carried out a coup against the Directory, the five-man executive that had been governing France. He replaced it with a three-man Consulate in which he held the position of First Consul and effectively all executive authority. He then moved with extraordinary speed to consolidate his position and to address the multiple crises that had been degrading France for a decade. He reformed the tax system, creating a professional tax collection bureaucracy, and established the Bank of France. He reorganised the educational system, creating the lycées that still form the backbone of French secondary education. He negotiated the Concordat of 1801 with Pope Pius VII, healing the catastrophic breach between the French state and the Catholic Church that the Revolution had opened. He ended the wars of the Second Coalition through the Treaties of Lunéville and Amiens, giving France its first period of genuine peace since 1792. By 1802 he had been declared Consul for Life, and on 2 December 1804, in a ceremony at Notre-Dame de Paris in which he took the crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII and placed it on his own head, he was proclaimed Emperor of the French.

6. What was the Napoleonic Code, and why does it still matter?

The Civil Code, formally adopted on 21 March 1804 and known ever since as the Napoleonic Code, was Napoleon’s most enduring achievement and arguably the most influential piece of legislation in the history of Western law. Before the Revolution, France was governed by a patchwork of hundreds of different regional legal systems, a confusion of Roman law, customary law, and feudal privilege that varied from province to province. The Code replaced this chaos with a single, clear, systematic body of civil law applying equally to every citizen, covering property rights, inheritance, contracts, and family relations. It codified many of the principles of the Revolution: equality before the law, freedom of religion, the abolition of feudal privilege, and the right to own property regardless of birth. Napoleon exported it across his empire, and it was adopted by or influenced the legal systems of Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Louisiana, Quebec, and dozens of other territories. Legal scholars regard it as the foundation of the civil law tradition that now governs approximately 1.5 billion people. The Code is a more durable legacy than any of his victories.

7. What were the Napoleonic Wars at their height, and what was Austerlitz?

From 1803 onward, Britain and France were almost continuously at war, and successive coalitions of European powers formed against Napoleon. His response was a series of campaigns whose tactical brilliance has never been surpassed. The campaign of 1805 stands as his masterpiece. After the destruction of the French fleet by Admiral Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 ended any prospect of invading Britain, Napoleon wheeled his Grande Armée eastward with astonishing speed and trapped an entire Austrian army at Ulm before it could unite with its Russian allies. On 2 December 1805, the anniversary of his coronation, he met the combined Austrian and Russian forces under Emperors Francis II and Alexander I at Austerlitz in Moravia. He deliberately weakened his own right flank to invite an attack there, then drove his strongest forces through the centre of the allied line as it stretched to exploit the perceived weakness, splitting the coalition army and destroying it in detail. It was perhaps the greatest single tactical performance in the history of warfare. Prussia was crushed the following year at Jena and Auerstedt, and Russia was brought to terms at Tilsit in 1807. At that moment Napoleon controlled or dominated most of the European continent.

8. What were the Continental System and the Peninsular War, and why did they drain Napoleon’s strength?

Unable to defeat Britain militarily after Trafalgar, Napoleon attempted to strangle it economically. The Continental System, announced in the Berlin Decree of 1806, closed all European ports under French control or influence to British trade, aiming to bankrupt Britain and force it to make peace. The strategy had a fatal internal logic: to enforce it completely, Napoleon needed to control every European coastline. Portugal refused to comply, drawing him into an invasion that triggered the Peninsular War of 1808 to 1814, in which French forces became entangled in a grinding counter-insurgency against Spanish and Portuguese guerrillas backed by a British expeditionary force under the Duke of Wellington. Wellington’s campaigns drew off resources that France could not afford to lose, and the guerrilla war, which Napoleon called the Spanish ulcer, tied down over two hundred thousand French troops at its height. Meanwhile the Continental System failed on its own terms: Britain found new markets, continental industries suffered from the loss of British goods they needed, and smuggling was rampant. The strategy that was meant to break Britain ended up alienating Napoleon’s reluctant allies and pushing them toward the coalitions against him.

9. What happened in Russia in 1812, and how did it destroy the Grande Armée?

When Tsar Alexander I withdrew Russia from the Continental System in 1810, Napoleon began planning the campaign that would end his empire. On 24 June 1812 he crossed the Niemen river into Russia at the head of a force of around 615,000 men drawn from across his empire, the largest army assembled in European history to that point. The Russians refused to give battle and retreated, drawing the French deeper into their vast territory and depriving Napoleon of the decisive engagement he needed. He fought the bloody Battle of Borodino on 7 September and took Moscow two weeks later, only to find it abandoned and burning, set alight by the Russians themselves. He waited five weeks in the ruined city for a peace offer that never came, then began the catastrophic retreat in October as the Russian winter closed in. The combination of cold, hunger, disease, and relentless Cossack harassment was annihilating. By the time the remnants of the Grande Armée crossed back into friendly territory in December, perhaps as few as 120,000 of the original force remained effective. The defeat shattered the myth of French invincibility and brought the whole of Europe’s powers together against him in the Coalition of 1813.

10. How did Napoleon fall, and what is his legacy?

Defeated by the allied coalition in 1814, Napoleon abdicated and was exiled to the island of Elba. He returned in March 1815, the episode known as the Hundred Days, raising an army and briefly regaining power before his final defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 at the hands of Wellington and the Prussian general Blücher. He was exiled to the remote Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he spent his final six years dictating his memoirs and carefully constructing the legend of himself that would shape how France remembered him. He died on 5 May 1821. In 1840 his remains were returned to Paris with enormous ceremony and interred in a monumental tomb beneath the dome of Les Invalides, where they rest today. His legacy is among the most contested in history. The legal, educational, and administrative reforms he introduced transformed France and much of Europe. His military campaigns spread the principles of the Revolution, including equality before the law, across a continent that still bore the structures of feudalism. At the same time he created a conscript army that caused millions of deaths, imposed French hegemony on unwilling peoples, reinstated slavery in the French colonies in 1802, and ultimately left France smaller and more exhausted than he had found it. He remains France’s most studied, most debated, and most claimed historical figure, an inexhaustible subject because the questions he raises about ambition, power, and what constitutes greatness have no settled answers.