Military career of Napoleon

• 1. Introduction

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  Napoleon Bonaparte fought more than 80 battles over a career spanning more than 20 years, and he lost only eleven of them. That record alone would place him among history's most formidable commanders. But the numbers alone don't capture what made him so feared. The historian Alexander Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky put it plainly: Napoleon was a "despotic sovereign of the battlefield, in whose presence but few generals ventured to maneuver, striving only to ward off his blows." Enemies didn't just try to defeat him. They tried to survive him.

  He led French armies first through the Revolutionary Wars, then, once he became emperor, through the Napoleonic Wars. His campaigns were studied in military schools long after his death, and battles like Austerlitz, Rivoli, and the Six Days' Campaign became textbook examples of operational genius. Yet for all his victories, Napoleon's career ended in defeat. The French dominion he had built across Europe collapsed after the invasion of Russia in 1812. He was exiled, returned, and was finally beaten at Waterloo in 1815. He spent the rest of his life in British custody on the remote island of Saint Helena. The story of how a man could win 75 battles and still lose everything is what this documentary sets out to understand.

• 2. The Italian Crucible

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  In the First Italian campaign of 1796-1797, Napoleon inherited an army in wretched condition. Its material support was deplorable, and its initial disposition was poor. What he did with it shocked the opposing powers. His method was to split two enemy armies apart, drive a gap between them, and then crush each one individually before they could reunite. The result was dozens of battles fought in rapid succession.

  First he knocked Piedmont, represented by the Kingdom of Sardinia, out of the war. Then he turned on Habsburg Italy and pushed the Austrian forces back through a series of engagements: Lodi, Borghetto, Castiglione, Bassano, Arcole, and finally Rivoli. At Rivoli, Napoleon noticed that the main Austrian column pressing his forces forward lacked sufficient artillery and cavalry support. He pulled what he identified as surplus French troops away from that front and redirected them to intercept an Austrian flanking column that was squeezing through a narrow passage. That flanking force met infantry, cavalry, and artillery from multiple directions at once. Napoleon then sent those same troops back to repel the main assault. The Austrian army was shattered. La Favorita, Valvasone, and Tarvis followed, and Austria was driven out of the campaign altogether.

  The siege of Toulon, earlier still, gave the first hint of what was coming. Napoleon identified and seized a key fortified position that allowed French artillery to shell the Allied fleet inside Toulon harbor. With the harbor no longer defensible, the Allies had no choice but to withdraw. Southern France was spared an invasion from the sea, and a young artillery officer had made his mark.

• 3. The Art of the Decisive Blow

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  Austerlitz is often cited as Napoleon's masterpiece, and the conditions under which it was fought make its outcome all the more striking. The Allied forces held a formidable defensive position. Fog covered the battlefield. Yet Napoleon's plan turned both of those factors into advantages. He deliberately weakened his own right flank. The Allies saw the weakness and moved to exploit it, advancing down from the heights. That movement was exactly what Napoleon had prepared for. He delivered a concentrated blow to the now-weakened high ground, drove his forces up the slopes, cut the Allied army in two, and routed it. Casualties on the Allied side were catastrophic. "The Sun of Austerlitz" became a phrase used to describe that morning light breaking through the fog as the French pushed upward. Austerlitz ended the War of the Third Coalition.

  At Friedland, the situation called for a different kind of precision. Marshal Jean Lannes managed to hold his ground on the first day against superior Russian forces without breaking. When Napoleon arrived with the main French army, he read the Russian position immediately. Their forces had their backs to a river and were divided internally by a stream. He struck at the separated segments one at a time, defeating them piecemeal. The War of the Fourth Coalition ended with that battle.

  Dresden came later, when Napoleon's manpower was already depleted by years of hard campaigning. His army was qualitatively inferior to the combined Austrian, Russian, and Prussian forces opposing it. He had been pursuing another Allied army from the east when he arrived unexpectedly at the fortified city with reinforcements, counterattacked forces that outnumbered him roughly two to one, and inflicted what the sources describe as relatively monstrous casualties. A brilliant tactical victory came from unfavorable circumstances.

• 4. Campaigns of Encirclement and Speed

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  The Ulm campaign showed Napoleon's corps system at its most destructive. His forces, organized into a newly configured corps structure, encircled an entire enemy army and destroyed it. The encirclement worked because the corps could move independently, converge rapidly, and cover more ground than a traditionally organized force.

  The Six Days' Campaign of the later war years showed what Napoleon could still do even as his resources dwindled. He faced an enemy army that outnumbered him by more than two to one, but that army was dispersed. He struck at Champaubert, Montmirail, Chateau-Thierry, and Vauchamps in quick succession. The enemy lost more than half its total strength across those engagements. At Montmirail and Chateau-Thierry, Napoleon deployed the Old Guard, which he called "the elite of the elite." At Vauchamps, only one of the Guard's battalions was engaged. The battle was smaller in scale than the others, but the ratio of forces to casualties, and the conditions under which it was won, led Napoleon to regard it as a masterpiece of tactical execution.

  A similar campaign known as the "four-day campaign" used the same principle of rapid maneuver to divide an Austrian army into two parts. Napoleon defeated it four times in four days at Teugen-Hausen, Abensberg, Landshut, and Eckmühl. Speed was not incidental to his method. It was the method itself.

• 5. Defeats and the End

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  Most of Napoleon's eleven defeats came toward the end of his career, when the French army was no longer the dominant force in Europe that it had once been. The invasion of Russia in 1812 was the turning point. The French dominion collapsed rapidly in its aftermath. The battles listed in his record from that campaign, including Borodino, the crossing at Berezina, and Maloyaroslavets, tell a story of an army pushed to its limits and beyond.

  Leipzig in 1813 became one of the costliest engagements. The War of the Sixth Coalition produced a string of battles across Saxony and the German lands, some won and some lost. By 1814, Allied forces had pushed into France itself, and Napoleon fought the Six Days' Campaign on his own soil. He was defeated in 1814 and exiled to the island of Elba.

  He returned to France and fought again in 1815 during the Hundred Days. Ligny was a victory. Waterloo was not. The battle against the forces of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands ended his military career. He was placed in British custody and sent to Saint Helena, a remote volcanic tropical island, where he spent his remaining days. His final tally stood at 75 victories, 11 defeats, and 7 battles with uncertain or inconclusive outcomes. Military schools worldwide continued to study his campaigns, with the Italian campaign of 1796-1797, the Ulm campaign, and the Six Days' Campaign among those most often cited as demonstrations of strategic and tactical thinking at the highest level.