First French Empire

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The First French Empire was proclaimed on the 18th of May 1804, when the French Senate granted Napoleon Bonaparte the title Emperor of the French. Six months later, on the 2nd of December 1804, he was crowned at Notre-Dame de Paris by Pope Pius VII himself after receiving the Iron Crown of the Lombard kings. The state he now commanded had a population of over 44 million people and would eventually rule over 90 million subjects across Europe. What kind of empire could rise so far and fall so completely in little more than a decade? How did one man reshape the map of a continent, install his own family on the thrones of European kingdoms, and then watch it all unravel from the frozen outskirts of Moscow? The answers lie in a story that stretches from a coup in Paris to a remote island in the South Atlantic.

• 2. The Road to the Throne

  ›

  In 1799, it was Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, one of five Directors running the French government, who first approached Napoleon Bonaparte seeking his support for a coup. The plot also involved Napoleon's brother Lucien, then serving as speaker of the Council of Five Hundred, along with fellow Director Roger Ducos and the wily diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. On the 9th of November 1799, troops under Napoleon's command seized control and dispersed the legislative councils. Sieyès had expected to dominate the new Consulate, but Napoleon outmaneuvered him by drafting the Constitution of the Year VIII and securing his own election as First Consul.

  The Constitution of the Year X went further still, making him First Consul for life. On the 12th of May 1802, the French Tribunat voted unanimously in favor of this change, with Lazare Carnot the sole dissenter. A national plebiscite followed: 3,653,600 voted in favor and just 8,272 against. On the 2nd of August 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte was formally proclaimed Consul for life. The Battle of Marengo on the 14th of June 1800 had already established the political logic that would carry him forward. Two years after that battle, the plebiscite had confirmed it in numbers that left little room for doubt.

• 3. A Continent Remade

  ›

  At the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, French armies scored a decisive victory against Austrian and Russian forces that became the defining symbol of Napoleon's military dominance. The Treaty of Pressburg, signed on the 26th of December 1805, extracted large territorial concessions from Austria along with a significant financial indemnity. Napoleon swept away the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire in the south of Germany, organizing Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Saxony into the Confederation of the Rhine as French vassal states.

  To secure these gains, Napoleon installed his relatives across Europe. His older brother Joseph replaced the Bourbons in Naples. His younger brother Louis was placed on the throne of the Kingdom of Holland. His brother-in-law Marshal Joachim Murat became Grand-Duke of Berg. His youngest brother Jérôme was made King of Westphalia. His adopted son Eugène de Beauharnais served as Viceroy of Italy, and his adopted daughter Stéphanie de Beauharnais married Karl, the son of the Grand Duke of Baden. On the 6th of August 1806, the Habsburgs abdicated the title of Holy Roman Emperor to prevent Napoleon from claiming it, ending a political structure that had endured for over a thousand years.

  Prussia's attempt to resist ended at the battles of Jena and Auerstedt, where Napoleon destroyed its armies. The resulting Treaties of Tilsit stripped Prussia of roughly half its territory, reduced its army to 40,000 men, and imposed an indemnity of 100,000,000 francs. Observers in Prussia called the terms a national humiliation. Talleyrand had urged milder conditions, and Napoleon's refusal to listen marked the beginning of a lasting estrangement between the two men.

• 4. The Empire at Its Widest

  ›

  By 1812, the French Empire had expanded to 130 departments. Beyond France's borders, Napoleon's influence extended through satellite states into Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland, with Austria and Prussia counted as nominal allies. The Treaties of Tilsit had created a secret pact between France and Russia: France pledged support against the Ottoman Empire; Russia agreed to join the Continental System aimed at strangling British trade. Russia also evacuated Wallachia and Moldavia, while the Ionian Islands and the port of Cattaro, taken by Russian admirals Fyodor Ushakov and Dmitry Senyavin, were handed over to France.

  At home, the Concordat of 1801 had restored the Catholic Church as the majority church of France, granting it some civil status while preserving Napoleon's authority over it. When he realized the arrangement had elevated papal power too far, he issued the Articles Organiques in 1802 to reassert his position as the Church's legal protector. The Pope was later forcibly deported to Savona, and his domains were absorbed into the Empire. The Senate's decision on the 17th of February 1810 created the title King of Rome and made Rome the capital of Italy.

  Napoleon's marriage to Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria and the birth of their son marked the personal apex of his ambitions. He began withdrawing power from his siblings, concentrating his hopes on his son as the guarantee of dynastic continuity. At the peak of the Empire, French victories had also carried Napoleonic legal reforms across the continent: the Napoleonic Code introduced legal equality, established jury systems, legalized divorce, and abolished seigneurial dues and aristocratic privileges in most of the territories France controlled.

• 5. Fault Lines and Betrayal

  ›

  Spain proved the first great wound. When Napoleon exiled the Spanish Royal Family to Bayonne and crowned his brother Joseph as King, Spanish resistance turned immediate and fierce. After the Dos de Mayo riots and their reprisals, local juntas organized a guerrilla campaign that tied down French forces from the Pyrenees to the Straits of Gibraltar. General Pierre Dupont capitulated at Bailén to General Francisco Castaños, while General Junot surrendered at Cintra, Portugal, to General Arthur Wellesley. Spain's resistance was doing something beyond draining armies: it was demonstrating to the rest of Europe that Napoleon's forces could be beaten.

  Within the imperial household, betrayals accumulated. Talleyrand shared Napoleon's plans with Klemens von Metternich and was dismissed. Joseph Fouché corresponded with Austria in 1809 and 1810 while also negotiating with Britain. Louis Antoine de Bourrienne was convicted of financial speculation. Caroline Bonaparte conspired against both her brother and her husband Murat. Louis, the Dutch king, had grown so sympathetic to Dutch interests that Napoleon stripped him of responsibility for enforcing the blockade. Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who had helped Napoleon to the Consulate, abandoned him entirely to win the crown of Sweden.

  The economic strain amplified everything. The crisis of 1811 ruined the bourgeoisie who depended on trade. The relentless demand for conscripts turned populations against the regime. The press and the assemblies were silenced, which only concentrated resentment. Even Napoleon's Six Days' Campaign, later regarded as among his greatest feats of military leadership, came at the very end of the War of the Sixth Coalition, when the coalition had already grown too large and too motivated to be stopped by any single sequence of victories.

• 6. Russia and the Long Retreat

  ›

  Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 hoping to force a decisive confrontation, end Tsar Alexander's refusal to maintain the Continental System, and secure his own access to the Mediterranean. His armies took Smolensk, won on the Moskva, and entered Moscow. But Alexander refused to negotiate, and what followed was a catastrophic retreat through the Russian winter. The crossing of the Berezina became one of the defining disasters of the campaign. The near-total loss of the army began the unraveling of the empire.

  At the Congress of Prague, held between the 4th of June and the 10th of August 1813, Austria offered peace terms. Napoleon refused, fearing the loss of Italy. His defeat at Leipzig cost him the loyalty of Saxony and Bavaria, and Bernadotte, now Crown Prince of Sweden, turned against him. General Jean Moreau also joined the Allied side. By December 1813 the manifesto of Frankfurt had proclaimed an organized Allied invasion. Paris capitulated on the 30th of March 1814, and Napoleon abdicated at Fontainebleau on the 11th of April 1814.

  Exile to the island of Elba lasted less than a year. Napoleon escaped with a thousand men and four cannons. King Louis XVIII sent Marshal Michel Ney to arrest him. When Napoleon walked into the firing range of Ney's troops and called out "If one of you wishes to kill his emperor, here I am!", the soldiers instead joined him, shouting "Vive l'Empereur!" The restored empire lasted only the Hundred Days before the Seventh Coalition defeated him at Waterloo. He surrendered to the British and was exiled to Saint Helena, a remote island in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821.