Napoleon

• 1. Introduction

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  Napoleon Bonaparte was born Napoleone di Buonaparte on the 15th of August 1769, on the island of Corsica, to a family of Italian origin. As a boy at the military academy in Brienne-le-Chateau, he was bullied for his accent, his birthplace, his short stature, and his poor French. He grew reserved and melancholic and buried himself in books. One examiner wrote that he was always distinguished for his application in mathematics, and added a strange prediction: this boy would make an excellent sailor. He did not become a sailor. He became Emperor of the French, a man who once approached a battalion sent to arrest him and said, "Here I am. Kill your Emperor, if you wish." How did a bullied Corsican outsider come to rule roughly 40% of Europe's population? Why did he crown himself with a replica of Charlemagne's crown rather than let the pope do it? And how did the same man who emancipated Jews and abolished the Spanish Inquisition also reinstate slavery and silence the press? This is the story of his rise, his reforms, his wars, and his two exiles.

• 2. A Corsican Outsider

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  Corsica had been ceded by the Republic of Genoa to France through the Treaty of Versailles just one year before Napoleon was born. His father, Carlo Maria Buonaparte, had supported Pasquale Paoli in the Corsican war of independence against France. After the Corsican defeat at the Battle of Ponte Novu in 1769 and Paoli's exile to Britain, Carlo befriended the French governor Charles Louis de Marbeuf, who became his patron and a godfather to Napoleon. That patronage opened doors. With Marbeuf's support, Carlo was named Corsican representative to the court of Louis XVI, and the young Napoleon won a royal bursary to a military academy on the mainland.

  Napoleon's mother, Maria Letizia Ramolino, was the dominant influence of his childhood, and her firm discipline restrained a rambunctious child. Later in life he said, "The future destiny of the child is always the work of the mother." His mother tongues were Corsican and Italian, and when he moved to the French mainland in January 1779, aged 9, he first enrolled at a religious school in Autun simply to improve his French. He never quite mastered it. He spoke French with a Corsican accent and his spelling was poor.

  Napoleon had an elder brother, Joseph, and six younger siblings who survived: Lucien, Elisa, Louis, Pauline, Caroline, and Jerome. Five more were stillborn or did not survive infancy. In September 1784 he was admitted to the Ecole militaire in Paris to train as an artillery officer. His father's death in February 1785 cut the family income and forced him to finish a two-year course in a single year. He was examined by the famed scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace and became the first Corsican to graduate from the Ecole militaire.

• 3. The Whiff Of Grapeshot

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  In July 1793 a young officer published a pamphlet called Le souper de Beaucaire, declaring his support for the National Convention, which was heavily influenced by the Jacobins. That September, with the help of his fellow Corsican Antoine Christophe Saliceti, Bonaparte was appointed artillery commander of the republican forces sent to recapture Toulon from allied forces. He proposed seizing a hill fort from which republican guns could dominate the harbour and force the allies to evacuate. The assault succeeded on the 16th and the 17th of December, and the city fell. Toulon brought him to the attention of powerful men, including Augustin Robespierre, and he was promoted to brigadier general.

  The Fall of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794 made Bonaparte's Jacobin ties dangerous. He was arrested on the 9th of August and released two weeks later. The next year his fortunes turned again. On the 3rd of October 1795 royalists in Paris declared a rebellion against the National Convention. Paul Barras, who knew of Bonaparte's exploits at Toulon, made him second in command of the forces defending the convention at the Tuileries Palace. Bonaparte remembered the massacre of the king's Swiss Guard there three years earlier and understood that artillery would decide the day. He ordered a young cavalry officer, Joachim Murat, to seize cannons.

  On the 5th of October 1795, known as 13 Vendemiaire in the French Republican calendar, he fired on the rebels with canister rounds, a moment Thomas Carlyle later called "the whiff of grapeshot." Somewhere between about 300 and 1,400 rebels died. The reward was patronage from the new government, the French Directory. Within weeks he was romantically involved with Josephine de Beauharnais, the former mistress of Barras. The couple married in a civil ceremony on the 9th of March 1796, and around this time he began styling himself "Napoleon Bonaparte" rather than the Italian "Napoleone di Buonaparte."

• 4. Plunder And The Press

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  Two days after his marriage, Bonaparte left to command the Army of Italy. In a series of victories during the Montenotte campaign he knocked the Piedmontese out of the war in two weeks, then turned on the Austrians and laid siege to Mantua. He defeated every relief effort, winning at Castiglione, Bassano, Arcole, and Rivoli. At Rivoli in January 1797, Austria lost 43% of its soldiers dead, wounded, or taken prisoner, and its position in Italy collapsed.

  The scale of the Italian campaign was staggering. Bonaparte's army captured 150,000 prisoners, 540 cannons, and 170 standards. It fought 67 actions and won 18 pitched battles. He extracted an estimated 45 million French pounds from Italy, a further 12 million pounds in precious metals and jewels, and more than 300 paintings and sculptures. When he forced Venice to surrender, he ended 1,100 years of Venetian independence and authorized the looting of treasures such as the Horses of Saint Mark.

  Bonaparte understood power beyond the battlefield. During the campaign he founded two newspapers, one for the troops in his army and one for circulation in France. When royalists in Paris attacked him for looting Italy and warned he might become a dictator, he sent General Charles-Pierre Augereau to back a coup that purged royalists from the legislative councils, the Coup of 18 Fructidor. He finalized peace with Austria through the Treaty of Campo Formio and returned to Paris on the 5th of December 1797 as a hero.

• 5. The Egyptian Gamble

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  France's navy was not yet strong enough to face the Royal Navy directly, so in 1798 Bonaparte chose a different target: Egypt. By seizing it he hoped to undermine Britain's access to its trade interests in India and even join forces with Tipu Sultan, the Sultan of Mysore. He assured the Directory that once he had conquered Egypt, he would establish relations with the Indian princes and attack the English in their possessions. In May 1798 he was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and his expedition carried 167 scientists, among them mathematicians, naturalists, chemists, and geodesists.

  The expedition produced both conquest and scholarship. His scientists' discoveries included the Rosetta Stone, and their work appeared in the Description de l'Egypte in 1809. En route, Bonaparte took Hospitaller Malta on the 9th of June 1798 with the loss of only three men, then landed at Alexandria on the 1st of July. At the Battle of the Pyramids on the 21st of July, his force of 25,000 roughly matched the Mamluk cavalry. Twenty-nine French and about 2,000 Egyptians were killed.

  The campaign also revealed brutality and disaster. On the 1st of August 1798 the British fleet under Sir Horatio Nelson destroyed or captured all but two vessels of the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile. Marching into Syria with 13,000 men, Bonaparte took Arish, Gaza, Jaffa, and Haifa. At Jaffa, discovering many defenders were former prisoners of war, he ordered the garrison and some 1,500 to 5,000 prisoners executed by bayonet or drowning. He failed to take the fortress of Acre and marched back to Egypt. On the 24th of August 1799, fearing for the Republic's future, he abandoned his army to Jean-Baptiste Kleber and sailed for France without explicit orders from Paris.

• 6. First Consul To Emperor

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  By October 1799 the Republic was bankrupt and the ineffective Directory was unpopular. Bonaparte formed an alliance with Talleyrand and leading figures including his brother Lucien, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, Roger Ducos, and Joseph Fouche. On the 9th of November 1799-18 Brumaire in the revolutionary calendar, the conspirators launched their coup. Backed by grenadiers with fixed bayonets, they forced the Council of Five Hundred to dissolve the Directory and appoint Bonaparte, Sieyes, and Ducos as provisional consuls.

  Real power lay with Bonaparte as first consul. The Constitution of the Year VIII was approved by plebiscite on the 7th of February 1800, with over three million in favour and 1,562 against, though Lucien doubled the count of the yes vote to fake a majority of eligible voters. Historians have called the regime a "dictatorship by plebiscite" and "soft despotism." Bonaparte introduced censorship and closed most opposition newspapers. To secure his rule he sought a victorious peace, crossing the Swiss Alps into Italy and winning the Battle of Marengo on the 14th of June 1800, when General Louis Desaix arrived late in the afternoon and reversed the battle.

  The road to the throne ran through a killing. In February 1804 his police uncovered a royalist plot, and on Talleyrand's advice Napoleon ordered the kidnapping of the Duke of Enghien, violating the sovereignty of Baden. The duke was executed after a secret military trial despite no proof of his involvement. On the 18th of May the senate proclaimed Napoleon Emperor of the French, and the next day he named 18 of his generals Marshals of the Empire. His coronation took place at Notre Dame de Paris on the 2nd of December 1804, where, after being anointed by Pope Pius VII, he crowned himself with a replica of Charlemagne's crown, then crowned Josephine.

• 7. The Sun Of Austerlitz

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  On the 2nd of December 1805, exactly one year after his coronation, Napoleon deployed his army below the Pratzen Heights at Austerlitz. He ordered his right wing to feign retreat, luring the allies down from the heights, then seized the heights and caught them in a pincer. Thousands of Russians fled across a frozen lake, and between 100 and 2,000 of them drowned. About a third of the allied force was killed, captured, or wounded. By the Treaty of Pressburg, Austria left the coalition and paid an indemnity of 40 million francs. Napoleon later said, "The battle of Austerlitz is the finest of all I have fought."

  The victories built an empire across the map of Europe. In 1806 Napoleon deposed the Bourbon king of Naples and installed his brother Joseph, made his brother Louis king of Holland, and established the Confederation of the Rhine, ending the Holy Roman Empire. At the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt on the 14th of October 1806 the French crushed Prussia, and in the following month captured 140,000 soldiers and over 2,000 cannon. On the 14th of June 1807 he beat the Russians at Friedland.

  Peace was made on a raft. The two emperors began negotiations on the 25th of June 1807 at Tilsit, on a raft floating in the middle of the River Niemen. Napoleon offered Tsar Alexander relatively lenient terms but treated Prussia harshly, taking half its territory and population and imposing a two-year occupation costing about 1.4 billion francs. From former Prussian land he created the Kingdom of Westphalia for his brother Jerome and the Duchy of Warsaw. He had not seen France in over 300 days.

• 8. The Roads To Ruin

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  "The unlucky war that ruined me." That was how Napoleon described the Peninsular campaign. It began when he sent troops across the Pyrenees in 1807 to enforce his blockade against Britain through Portugal, then forced the Spanish king Carlos IV and his son Fernando VII to relinquish the throne at Bayonne, installing his brother Joseph as King of Spain. An uprising broke out in Madrid on the 2nd of May 1808 and spread across Spain. A brutal guerrilla war engulfed the countryside, with atrocities on both sides, tying up some 300,000 French-led troops from 1808 to 1812 and eventually costing over 150,000 casualties.

  Russia proved deadlier still. In the summer of 1812 Napoleon's multinational grande armee of around 450,000 frontline troops crossed the Nieman, of whom only about a third were native French speakers. The Russians retreated and burned their own land in a scorched earth policy. At Borodino on the 7th of September the battle left 44,000 Russian and 35,000 French dead, wounded, or captured. Napoleon called it the most terrible of all his battles, saying the French showed themselves worthy of victory and the Russians worthy of being invincible.

  The retreat destroyed the army. Napoleon entered Moscow on the 14th of September, but the city was set ablaze on the orders of Governor Feodor Rostopchin, and Alexander refused to negotiate. After six weeks the army evacuated. Cossacks, peasants, cold, disease, and hunger tore at the column. About 40,000 to 50,000 troops reached Smolensk on the 9th of November, a loss of roughly 60,000 in three weeks. At the Berezina river the survivors crossed pontoon bridges in temperatures reaching -40C. On the 5th of December Napoleon left his disintegrating army for Paris. Only about 75,000 troops crossed back into allied territory.

  At Leipzig in October 1813, the largest battle of the Napoleonic wars, the coalition won and the French lost 38,000 killed or wounded and 15,000 taken prisoner. The allies crossed the Rhine into France on the 1st of January 1814 and moved on Paris, whose defence fell to Joseph Bonaparte with only 38,000 men. The marshal Auguste de Marmont capitulated on the 31st of March, and on the 2nd of April the French Senate declared Napoleon deposed. He abdicated unconditionally on the 6th of April. In his farewell to the Old Guard on the 20th of April he said, "Farewell, my children."

  Elba was meant to be the end. By the Treaty of Fontainebleau of the 11th of April 1814, the allies made Napoleon sovereign of Elba, an island of 12,000 inhabitants off the Tuscan coast. The night after the treaty he attempted suicide with poison carried since the retreat from Moscow, but its potency had weakened and he survived. He learned that Josephine had died in France on the 29th of May and locked himself in his room for two days. Cut off from his promised allowance and fearing banishment to a remote Atlantic island, he escaped in the brig Inconstant on the 26th of February 1815 with about 1,000 men.

  The Hundred Days ended at Waterloo. Landing at Golfe-Juan on the 1st of March 1815, he won over the troops sent to stop him, and Marshal Michel Ney, who had boasted he would bring Napoleon to Paris in an iron cage, joined him with an army of 6,000. On the 18th of June 1815, Wellington's army held against repeated French attacks until Blucher's Prussians arrived on Napoleon's right flank and broke his lines. He abdicated again on the 22nd of June and surrendered to Frederick Lewis Maitland on the 15th of July.

  Saint Helena lay 1,870 kilometres from the west coast of Africa. Napoleon and 27 followers arrived at Jamestown in October 1815 aboard HMS Northumberland, guarded by a garrison of 2,100 soldiers while a squadron of 10 ships patrolled the waters. After two months at a pavilion in Briars he was moved to Longwood House, a 40-room wooden bungalow that was damp, windswept, rat-infested, and unhealthy.

  Even in captivity Napoleon insisted on imperial formality. At his dinner parties men wore military dress and women appeared in evening gowns and gems, in what one account called an explicit denial of the circumstances of his captivity. He read, formally received visitors, and dictated his memoirs and commentaries on military campaigns. He tried to study English under Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases, but gave up, being poor at languages. His complaints about poor treatment were aimed at swaying public opinion against his exile, and in March 1817 they reached the British Parliament, where Henry Vassall-Fox, 3rd Baron Holland, called for a public inquiry.

  In March 1821 Napoleon was confined to bed. In April he wrote two wills declaring that he had been assassinated by the "English oligarchy," that the Bourbons would fall, and that his son would rule France. He died on the 5th of May 1821 at age 51. Both Antommarchi and the British concluded in their autopsy reports that he had died of internal bleeding caused by stomach cancer, the disease that had killed his father, and a 2021 study by gastrointestinal pathologists reached the same conclusion. In 1840 his remains were returned to France, where a state funeral on the 15th of December 1840 drew between 700,000 and 1,000,000 mourners, and in 1861 he was entombed in a sarcophagus under the dome at Les Invalides.

  Napoleonic tactics are still studied at military schools worldwide, and Napoleon is considered one of the greatest military commanders in history. Yet his deepest mark on Europe was made not by cannon but by law. His legacy endures most notably through the Napoleonic Code, the body of legal and administrative reforms he enacted in France and Western Europe.

  His reforms reshaped society. He established a system of public education, abolished the vestiges of feudalism, emancipated Jews and other religious minorities, abolished the Spanish Inquisition, and enacted the principle of equality before the law for an emerging middle class. He centralized state power at the expense of religious authorities, and his conquests acted as a catalyst for political change and the development of nation-states.

  The same hands that freed also bound. He abolished the free press, ended directly elected representative government, and exiled and imprisoned critics of his regime. In May 1802 he reintroduced slavery in recovered French colonies, banned the entry of black people and mulattos into France, reduced the civil rights of women and children, and reintroduced a hereditary monarchy and nobility. He remains controversial for the wars that devastated Europe and his looting of conquered territories. His attitude to religion is often described as utilitarian, and in 1800 he put it plainly: he won the war in the Vendee by making himself a Catholic, and established himself in Egypt by making himself a Moslem.