Curated category
Napoleonic Wars
- Malet coup of 1812Claude François de Malet was born in 1754. He distinguished himself in the French Revolutionary Wars and slowly became disenchanted with Napoleon Bonaparte.
- War of the Third CoalitionThe War of the Third Coalition was a conflict that remade Europe in the space of a few months in 1805 and into 1806. At its heart was a single breathtaking…
- War of the Second CoalitionOn the 11th of June 1798, General Louis Baraguey d'Hilliers directed a landing of several thousand French troops at strategic locations around the island of…
- War of the Fourth CoalitionThe War of the Fourth Coalition ended on the 7th of July 1807 at the edge of a raft anchored in the middle of the Niemen River, where Napoleon Bonaparte and…
- War of the Fifth CoalitionThe War of the Fifth Coalition began not with a formal declaration but with a terse note. On the 9th of April 1809, Archduke Charles of Austria sent a…
- Frankfurt proposalsAustrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich designed the peace proposal in November 1813. The document emerged after Napoleon suffered a decisive defeat…
- Continental SystemThe Continental System was Napoleon's grand attempt to strangle Britain without firing a single shot at sea. On the 21st of November 1806, he signed the…
- War of 1812The War of 1812 began on the 18th of June 1812, when President James Madison signed a declaration of war against Britain into law, setting off a conflict…
- Napoleonic WarsThe Napoleonic Wars killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of men at a single river crossing -- the Berezina -- and yet that disaster was only one episode…
- Hundred DaysThe Hundred Days is one of history's most compressed political and military dramas. On the 20th of March 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte rode back into Paris after…
- Peninsular WarThe Peninsular War was, by Napoleon Bonaparte's own admission, a wound that would not close. He called it the "Spanish ulcer." Between 1808 and 1814, France…
- War of the Sixth CoalitionThe War of the Sixth Coalition ended one of the most consequential military careers in history, and it did so not with a single catastrophic battle but with…
- Napoleonic tacticsNapoleonic tactics shaped the battlefield for roughly half a century, from the late 18th century until the rifled musket made them obsolete.
- Finnish WarThe Finnish War began on the 21st of February 1808, when 24,000 Russian troops crossed the Swedish-Russian border at Ahvenkoski.