Napoleon I Encyclopedia PDF

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Napoleon I
Napoleon I, French in full Napoléon Bonaparte, original
Italian Napoleone Buonaparte, byname the Corsican or the TABLE OF CONTENTS
Little Corporal, French byname Le Corse or Le Petit Caporal,
Introduction
(born August 15, 1769, Ajaccio, Corsica—died May 5, 1821, St.
Helena Island), French general, rst consul (1799–1804), and The Revolutionary period
emperor of the French (1804–1814/15), one of the most The Consulate
celebrated personages in the history of the West. He The empire
revolutionized military organization and training; sponsored
Elba and the Hundred Days
the Napoleonic Code, the prototype of later civil-law codes;
Exile on St. Helena
reorganized education; and established the long-lived
Concordat with the papacy. The Napoleonic legend
Napoleon’s many reforms

left a lasting mark on the institutions of France and of
much of western Europe. But his driving passion was the
military expansion of French dominion, and, though at
his fall he left France little larger than it had been at the
outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he was almost
unanimously revered during his lifetime and until the
end of the Second Empire under his nephew Napoleon
III as one of history’s great heroes.
Napoleon was born on Corsica shortly after the island’s

cession to France by the Genoese. He was the fourth, and
second surviving, child of Carlo Buonaparte, a lawyer,
and his wife, Letizia Ramolino. His father’s family, of
ancient Tuscan nobility, had emigrated to Corsica in the
The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the
16th century.
Tuileries, oil on canvas by Jacques-Louis
David, 1812; in the National Gallery of Art,
Carlo Buonaparte had married the beautiful and strong-
Washington, D.C.
© Photos.com/Jupiterimages willed Letizia when she was only 14 years old; they
eventually had eight children to bring up in very dif cult
times. The French occupation of their native country was resisted by a number of Corsicans
led by Pasquale Paoli. Carlo Buonaparte joined Paoli’s party, but, when Paoli had to ee,
Buonaparte came to terms with the French. Winning the protection of the governor of
Corsica, he was appointed assessor for the judicial district of Ajaccio in 1771. In 1778 he
obtained the admission of his two eldest sons, Joseph and Napoleon, to the Collège d’Autun.
https://www.britannica.com/print/article/402943 1/23
A Corsican by birth, heredity, and childhood associations, Napoleon continued for some time
after his arrival in Continental France to regard himself a foreigner; yet from age nine he was
educated in France as other Frenchmen were. While the tendency to see in Napoleon a
reincarnation of some 14th-century Italian condottiere is an overemphasis on one aspect of
his character, he did, in fact, share neither the traditions nor the prejudices of his new
country: remaining a Corsican in temperament, he was rst and foremost, through both his
education and his reading, a man of the 18th century.
Napoleon was educated at three schools: brie y at Autun, for ve years at the military college
of Brienne, and nally for one year at the military academy in Paris. It was during Napoleon’s
year in Paris that his father died of a stomach cancer in February 1785, leaving his family in
straitened circumstances. Napoleon, although not the eldest son, assumed the position of
head of the family before he was 16. In September he graduated from the military academy,
ranking 42nd in a class of 58.
He was made second lieutenant of artillery in the regiment of La Fère, a kind of training
school for young artillery of cers. Garrisoned at Valence, Napoleon continued his education,
reading much, in particular works on strategy and tactics. He also wrote Lettres sur la Corse
(“Letters on Corsica”), in which he reveals his feeling for his native island. He went back to
Corsica in September 1786 and did not rejoin his regiment until June 1788. By that time the
agitation that was to culminate in the French Revolution had already begun. A reader of
Voltaire and of Rousseau, Napoleon believed that a political change was imperative, but, as a
career of cer, he seems not to have seen any need for radical social reforms.
The Revolutionary period
The Jacobin years
When in 1789 the National Assembly, which had convened to establish a constitutional
monarchy, allowed Paoli to return to Corsica, Napoleon asked for leave and in September
joined Paoli’s group. But Paoli had no sympathy for the young man, whose father had
deserted his cause and whom he considered to be a foreigner. Disappointed, Napoleon
returned to France, and in April 1791 he was appointed rst lieutenant to the 4th regiment of
artillery, garrisoned at Valence. He at once joined the Jacobin Club, a debating society initially
favouring a constitutional monarchy, and soon became its president, making speeches
against nobles, monks, and bishops. In September 1791 he got leave to go back to Corsica
again for three months. Elected lieutenant colonel in the national guard, he soon fell out with
Paoli, its commander in chief. When he failed to return to France, he was listed as a deserter
in January 1792. But in April France declared war against Austria, and his offense was
forgiven.
Apparently through patronage, Napoleon was promoted to the rank of captain but did not
rejoin his regiment. Instead he returned to Corsica in October 1792, where Paoli was
exercising dictatorial powers and preparing to separate Corsica from France. Napoleon,
however, joined the Corsican Jacobins, who opposed Paoli’s policy. When civil war broke out
in Corsica in April 1793, Paoli had the Buonaparte family condemned to “perpetual execration
and infamy,” whereupon they all ed to France.
Napoleon Bonaparte, as he may henceforth be called (though the family did not drop the
spelling Buonaparte until after 1796), rejoined his regiment at Nice in June 1793. In his Le
Souper de Beaucaire (Supper at Beaucaire), written at this time, he argued vigorously for
united action by all republicans rallied round the Jacobins, who were becoming progressively
more radical, and the National Convention, the Revolutionary assembly that in the preceding
fall had abolished the monarchy.
At the end of August 1793, the National Convention’s troops had taken Marseille but were
halted before Toulon, where the royalists had called in British forces. With the commander of
the National Convention’s artillery wounded, Bonaparte got the post through the
commissioner to the army, Antoine Saliceti, who was a Corsican deputy and a friend of
Napoleon’s family. Bonaparte was promoted to major in September and adjutant general in
October. He received a bayonet wound on December 16, but on the next day the British
troops, harassed by his artillery, evacuated Toulon. On December 22 Bonaparte, age 24, was
promoted to brigadier general in recognition of his decisive part in the capture of the town.
Augustin de Robespierre, the commissioner to the army, wrote to his brother Maximilien, by
then virtual head of the government and one of the leading gures of the Reign of Terror,
praising the “transcendent merit” of the young republican of cer. In February 1794
Bonaparte was appointed commandant of the artillery in the French Army of Italy.
Robespierre fell from power in Paris on 9 Thermidor, year II (July 27, 1794). When the news
reached Nice, Bonaparte, regarded as a protégé of Robespierre, was arrested on a charge of
conspiracy and treason. He was freed in September but was not restored to his command.
The following March he refused an offer to command the artillery in the Army of the West,
which was ghting the counterrevolution in the Vendée. The post seemed to hold no future
for him, and he went to Paris to justify himself. Life was dif cult on half pay, especially as he
was carrying on an affair with Désirée Clary, daughter of a rich Marseille businessman and
sister of Julie, the bride of his elder brother, Joseph. Despite his efforts in Paris, Napoleon was
unable to obtain a satisfactory command, because he was feared for his intense ambition
and for his relations with the Montagnards, the more radical members of the National
Convention. He then considered offering his services to the sultan of Turkey.
The Directory
Bonaparte was still in Paris in October 1795 when the National Convention, on the eve of its
dispersal, submitted the new constitution of the year III of the First Republic to a referendum,
together with decrees according to which two-thirds of the members of the National
Convention were to be reelected to the new legislative assemblies. The royalists, hoping that
they would soon be able to restore the monarchy, instigated a revolt in Paris to prevent these
measures from being put into effect. Paul Barras, who had been entrusted with dictatorial
powers by the National Convention, was unwilling to rely on the commander of the troops of
the interior; instead, knowing of Bonaparte’s services at Toulon, he appointed him second in
command. Thus, it was Napoleon who shot down the columns of rebels marching against
the National Convention (13 Vendémiaire year IV; October 5, 1795), thereby saving the National
Convention and the republic.
Bonaparte became commander of the Army of the Interior and, consequently, was
henceforth aware of every political development in France. He became the respected adviser
on military matters to the new government, the Directory. Also at this time, he came to know
an attractive Creole, Joséphine Tascher de La Pagerie, who was the widow of General
Alexandre de Beauharnais (guillotined during the Reign of Terror), the mother of two
children, and a woman of many love affairs.
From every point of view, a new life was opening for

Bonaparte. Having proved his loyalty to the Directory, he
was appointed commander in chief of the Army of Italy
in March 1796. He had been trying to obtain that post for
several weeks so that he could personally conduct part of
the plan of campaign adopted by the Directory on his
advice. He married Joséphine on March 9 and left for the
army two days later.
Arriving at his headquarters in Nice, Bonaparte found

that his army, which on paper consisted of 43,000 men,
numbered scarcely 30,000 ill-fed, ill-paid, and ill-
equipped men. On March 28, 1796, he made his rst
Joséphine, lithograph, c. 1830. proclamation to his troops:
Photos.com/Jupiterimages
Soldiers, you are naked, badly fed.…Rich provinces

and great towns will be in your power, and in them you will nd honour, glory,
wealth. Soldiers of Italy, will you be wanting in courage and steadfastness?
He took the offensive on April 12 and successively defeated and separated the Austrian and
the Sardinian armies and then marched on Turin. King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia asked
for an armistice; and, at the peace treaty in Paris on May 15, Nice and Savoy, occupied by the
French since 1792, were annexed to France. Bonaparte continued the war against the
Austrians and occupied Milan but was held up at Mantua. While his army was besieging this
great fortress, he signed armistices with the duke of Parma, with the duke of Modena, and
nally with Pope Pius VI.
At the same time, he took an interest in the political organization of Italy. A plan for its
“republicanization” by a group of Italian “patriots” led by Filippo Buonarroti had to be shelved
when Buonarroti was arrested for complicity in François-Noël Babeuf’s conspiracy against
the Directory. Thereafter, Bonaparte, without discarding the Italian patriots altogether,
restricted their freedom of action. He set up a republican regime in Lombardy but kept a
close watch on its leaders, and in October 1796 he created the Cisalpine Republic by merging
Modena and Reggio nell’Emilia with the papal states of Bologna and Ferrara occupied by the
French army. Then he sent an expedition to recover Corsica, which the British had evacuated.
Austrian armies advanced four times from the Alps to

relieve Mantua but were defeated each time by
Bonaparte. After the last Austrian defeat, at Rivoli in
January 1797, Mantua capitulated. Next he marched on
Vienna. He was about 60 miles (100 km) from that capital
when the Austrians sued for an armistice. By the
preliminaries of peace, Austria ceded the southern
Netherlands to France and recognized the Lombard
republic but received in exchange some territory
belonging to the old Republic of Venice, which was
partitioned between Austria, France, and Lombardy.
Bonaparte then consolidated and reorganized the
northern Italian republics and encouraged Jacobin—
radical republican—propaganda in Venetia. Some Italian
patriots hoped that these developments would soon
Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole, 17
lead to the formation of a single and indivisible “Italian
November 1796, oil on canvas by Antoine-
Jean Gros, 1796; in the Versailles Museum. Republic” modeled on the French.
© Photos.com/Thinkstock
Meanwhile, Bonaparte grew uneasy at the successes of
the royalists in the French elections in the spring of 1797 and advised the Directory to oppose
them, if necessary, by force. He sent General Pierre Augereau to Paris, along with several
of cers and men to back the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor, year V (September 4, 1797), which
eliminated the royalists’ friends from the government and legislative councils and also
enhanced Bonaparte’s prestige. Thus, Bonaparte could conclude the Treaty of Campo Formio
with Austria as he thought best. The Directory was displeased, however, because the treaty
ceded Venice to the Austrians and did not secure the left bank of the Rhine for France. On
the other hand, it raised Bonaparte’s popularity to its peak, for he had gained victory for
France after ve years of war on the Continent.
Only the war at sea, against the British, continued. The directors, who wanted to launch an
invasion of the British Isles, appointed Bonaparte to command the army assembled for this
purpose along the English Channel. After a rapid inspection in February 1798, he announced
that the operation could not be undertaken until France had command of the sea. Instead,
he suggested that France strike at the sources of Great Britain’s wealth by occupying Egypt
and threatening the route to India. This proposal, seconded by Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand,
the foreign minister, was accepted by the directors, who were glad to get rid of their
ambitious young general.
The expedition, thanks to some fortunate coincidences, was at rst a great success: Malta,
the great fortress of the Hospitallers, was occupied on June 10, 1798, Alexandria taken by
storm on July 1, and all of the delta of the Nile rapidly overrun. On August 1, however, the
French squadron at anchor in Abū Qīr Bay was completely destroyed by Admiral Horatio
Nelson’s eet in the Battle of the Nile, so that Napoleon found himself con ned to the land
that he had conquered. He proceeded to introduce Western political institutions,
administration, and technical skills in Egypt; but Turkey, nominally suzerain over Egypt,
declared war on France in September. To prevent a Turkish invasion of Egypt and also
perhaps to attempt a return to France by way of Anatolia, Bonaparte marched into Syria in
February 1799. His progress northward was halted at Acre, where the British withstood a
siege, and in May Bonaparte began a disastrous retreat to Egypt.
The Battle of the Nile showed Europe that Bonaparte was not invincible, and Great Britain,
Austria, Russia, and Turkey formed a new coalition against France. The French armies in Italy
were defeated in the spring of 1799 and had to abandon the greater part of the peninsula.
These defeats led to disturbances in France itself. The coup d’état of 30 Prairial, year VII (June
18, 1799), expelled the men of moderate views from the Directory and brought into it men
who were considered Jacobins. Yet the situation remained confused, and one of the new
directors, Emmanuel Sieyès, was convinced that only military dictatorship could prevent a
restoration of the monarchy: “I am looking for a sabre,” he said. Bonaparte did not take long
to make up his mind. He would leave his army and return to France—in order to save the
republic, of course, but also to take advantage of the new circumstances and to seize power.
The Directory had, in fact, ordered his return, but he had not received the order, so that it was
actually in disregard of his instructions that he left Egypt with a few companions on August
22, 1799. Their two frigates surprisingly escaped interception by the British, and Bonaparte
arrived in Paris on October 14.
By this time French victories in Switzerland and Holland had averted the danger of invasion,
and the counterrevolutionary risings within France had more or less failed. A coup d’état
could therefore no longer be justi ed by any need to save the republic. Sieyès, however, had
not given up his project, and now he had his “sabre.” From the end of October he and
Bonaparte were in league together planning the coup, and on 18–19 Brumaire, year VIII
(November 9–10, 1799), it was carried out: the directors were forced to resign, the members of
the legislative councils were dispersed, and a new government, the Consulate, was set up.
The three consuls were Bonaparte and two of the directors who had resigned, Sieyès and
Pierre-Roger Ducos. But it was Bonaparte who was henceforth the master of France.
The Consulate
Consolidation of power
Bonaparte, now 30 years old, was thin and short and

wore his hair cut close—le petit tondu, the “little crop-
head,” as he was called. Not much was known about his
personality, but people had con dence in a man who
had always been victorious (the Nile and Acre were
forgotten) and who had managed to negotiate the
brilliant Treaty of Campo Formio. He was expected to
bring back peace, to end disorder, and to consolidate the
political and social “conquests” of the Revolution. He was
indeed exceptionally intelligent, prompt to make
decisions, and indefatigably hardworking but also
insatiably ambitious. He seemed to be the man of the
Revolution because it was due to the Revolution that he
had climbed at so early an age to the highest place in
the state. He was not to forget it; but, more than a man
First Consul Bonaparte, oil on canvas by
of the Revolution, he was a man of the 18th century, the
Antoine-Jean Gros, c. 1802; National
Museum of the Legion of Honor, Paris. most enlightened of the enlightened despots, a true son
Photos.com/Thinkstock of Voltaire. He did not believe in the sovereignty of the
people, in the popular will, or in parliamentary debate.
Yet he put his con dence more in reasoning than in reason and may be said to have
preferred “men of talent”—mathematicians, jurists, and statesmen, for instance, however
cynical or mercenary they might be—to “technicians” in the true sense of the word. He
believed that an enlightened and rm will could do anything if it had the support of
bayonets; he despised and feared the masses; and, as for public opinion, he considered that
he could mold and direct it as he pleased. He has been called the most “civilian” of generals,
but essentially he never ceased to be a soldier.
Bonaparte imposed a dictatorship on France, but its true character was at rst disguised by
the constitution of the year VIII (4 Nivôse, year VIII; December 25, 1799), drawn up by Sieyès.
This constitution did not guarantee the “rights of man” or make any mention of “liberty,
equality, and fraternity,” but it did reassure the partisans of the Revolution by proclaiming the
irrevocability of the sale of national property and by upholding the legislation against the
émigrés. It gave immense powers to the rst consul, leaving only a nominal role to his two
colleagues. The rst consul—namely, Bonaparte—was to appoint ministers, generals, civil
servants, magistrates, and the members of the Council of State and even was to have an
overwhelming in uence in the choice of members for the three legislative assemblies,
though their members were theoretically to be chosen by universal suffrage. Submitted to a
plebiscite, the constitution won by an overwhelming majority in February 1800.
Program of reforms
The Consulate’s work of administrative reform, undertaken at Bonaparte’s instigation, was to

be more lasting than the constitution and so more important for France. At the head of the
government was the Council of State, created by the rst consul and often effectively
presided over by him; it was to play an important part both as the source of the new
legislation and as an administrative tribunal. At the head of the administration of the
départements were the prefects, who carried on the tradition of the intendants of the ancien
régime, supervising the application of the laws and acting as the instruments of
centralization. The judicial system was profoundly changed: whereas from the beginning of
the Revolution judges had been elected, henceforth they were to be nominated by the
government, their independence assured by their irremovability from of ce. The police
organization was greatly strengthened. The nancial administration was considerably
improved: instead of the municipalities, special of cials were entrusted with the collecting of
direct taxes; the franc was stabilized; and the Banque de France, owned partly by
shareholders and partly by the state, was created. Education was transformed into a major
public service; secondary education was given a semimilitary organization, and the university
faculties were reestablished. Primary education, however, was still neglected.
Bonaparte shared Voltaire’s belief that the people needed a religion. Personally, he was
indifferent to religion: in Egypt he had said that he wanted to become a Muslim. Yet he
considered that religious peace had to be restored to France. As early as 1796, when he was
concluding the armistice in Italy with Pope Pius VI, he had tried to persuade the pope to
retract his briefs against the French priests who had accepted the Civil Constitution of the
Clergy, which in practice nationalized the church. Pius VII, who succeeded Pius VI in March
1800, was more accommodating than his predecessor, and, 10 months after negotiations
were opened with him, the Concordat of 1801 was signed reconciling the church and the
Revolution. The pope recognized the French republic and called for the resignation of all
former bishops; new prelates were to be designated by the rst consul and instituted by the
pope; and the sale of the property of the clergy was of cially recognized by Rome. The
concordat, in fact, admitted freedom of worship and the lay character of the state.
The codi cation of the civil law, rst undertaken in 1790, was at last completed under the
Consulate. The code, promulgated on March 21, 1804, and later known as the Napoleonic
Code, gave permanent form to the great gains of the Revolution: individual liberty, freedom
of work, freedom of conscience, the lay character of the state, and equality before the law;
but, at the same time, it protected landed property, gave greater liberty to employers, and
showed little concern for employees. It maintained divorce but granted only limited legal
rights to women.
The army received the most careful attention. The rst consul retained in outline the system
instituted by the Revolution: recruitment by forced conscription but with the possibility of
replacement by substitutes; the mixing of the conscripts with old soldiers; and the eligibility
of all for promotion to the highest ranks. Nevertheless, the creation of the Academy of Saint-
Cyr to produce infantry of cers made it easier for the sons of bourgeois families to pursue a
military career. Moreover, the École Polytechnique, founded by the National Convention, was
militarized in order to provide of cers for the artillery and engineers. Yet Bonaparte was not
concerned about introducing new technical inventions into his army. He put his trust in the
“legs of his soldiers”: his basic strategic idea was a fast-moving army.
Military campaigns and uneasy peace
The rst consul spent the winter and spring of 1799–1800 reorganizing the army and
preparing for an attack on Austria alone, Russia having withdrawn from the anti-French
coalition. With his usual quick assessment of the situation, he saw the strategic importance
of the Swiss Confederation, from which he would be free to out ank the Austrian armies
either in Germany or in Italy as he might see t. His past successes made him choose Italy.
Taking his army across the Great St. Bernard Pass before the snow melted, he appeared
unexpectedly behind the Austrian army besieging Genoa. The Battle of Marengo in June
gave the French command of the Po valley as far as the Adige, and in December another
French army defeated the Austrians in Germany. Austria was forced to sign the Treaty of
Lunéville of February 1801, whereby France’s right to the natural frontiers that Julius Caesar
had given to Gaul—namely, the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees—was recognized.
Great Britain alone remained at war with France, but it soon tired of the struggle.
Preliminaries of peace, concluded in London in October 1801, put an end to hostilities, and
peace was signed at Amiens on March 27, 1802.
General peace was reestablished in Europe. The rst consul’s prestige increased still more,
and his friends—at his suggestion—proposed that a “token of national gratitude” should be
offered to him. In May 1802 it was decided that the French people should vote in referendum
on the following question: “Shall Napoleon Bonaparte be consul for life?” In August an
overwhelming vote granted him the prolongation of his consulate as well as the right to
designate his successor.
Bonaparte’s conception of international peace differed from that of the British, for whom the
Treaty of Amiens represented an absolute limit beyond which they were under no
circumstances prepared to go. The British even hoped to take back some of the concessions
they had been forced to make. For Bonaparte, on the other hand, the Treaty of Amiens
marked the starting point for a new French ascendancy. He was, rst of all, intent on
reserving half of Europe as a market for France without lowering customs duties—to the
indignation of British merchants. To revive France’s expansion overseas, he also intended to
recover Saint-Domingue (Haiti; governed from 1798 by the black leader Toussaint-
Louverture), to occupy Louisiana (ceded to France by Spain in 1800), perhaps to reconquer
Egypt, and at any rate to extend French in uence in the Mediterranean and in the Indian
Ocean. In continental Europe he advanced beyond France’s natural frontiers, incorporating
Piedmont into France, imposing a more centralized government on the Swiss Confederation,
and in Germany compensating the princes dispossessed of territory on the Rhine under the
Treaty of Lunéville with shares of the secularized ecclesiastical states.
Great Britain was alarmed by this expansion of France in peacetime and found it scarcely
tolerable that one state should command the coastline of the Continent from Genoa to
Antwerp. The immediate occasion of Franco-British rupture, however, was the problem of
Malta. According to the Treaty of Amiens, the British, who had taken the island on the
collapse of the French occupation, should have restored it to the Hospitallers; but the British,
on the pretext that the French had not yet evacuated certain Neapolitan ports, refused to
leave the island. Franco-British relations became strained, and in May 1803 the British
declared war.
The empire
The peace settlement had brought about the life consulate; the return of war was to
stimulate the formation of the empire. The British government, which would have been glad
to see Bonaparte deposed or removed by assassination, renewed its subsidies to the French
royalists, who resumed their agitation and plotting. When a British- nanced assassination
plot was uncovered in 1804, Bonaparte decided to react vigorously enough to deter his
opponents from any more such attempts. The police believed that the real head of the
conspiracy was the young duc d’Enghien, a scion of the royal house of Bourbon, who was
residing in Germany, a few miles across the frontier. Accordingly, with the agreement of
Talleyrand and the police chief Joseph Fouché, the duke was kidnapped on neutral soil and
brought to Vincennes, where he was tried and shot (March 21). This action provoked a
resurgence of opposition among the old aristocracy but enhanced the in uence of Fouché.
Founding the empire
In the hope of consolidating his own position, Fouché now suggested to Bonaparte that the
best way to discourage conspiracy would be to transform the life consulate into a hereditary
empire, which, because of the fact that there would be an heir, would remove all hope of
changing the regime by assassination. Bonaparte readily accepted the suggestion, and on
May 28, 1804, the empire was proclaimed.
Though there was little change in the organization of the

government of France, Napoleon as emperor revived a
number of institutions similar to those of the ancien
régime. In the rst place, he wanted to be consecrated
by the pope himself, so that his coronation should be
even more impressive than that of the kings of France.
Pius VII agreed to come to Paris, and the ceremony,
which seemed equally outrageous to royalists and to the
old soldiers of the Revolution, took place in Notre-Dame
on December 2, 1804. At the last moment, the emperor
took the crown from the pope and set it on his own head
himself.
The imperial regime also instituted its symbols and titles.

Princely titles were brought back for the members of
Napoleon in His Imperial Robes, by François
Napoleon’s family in 1804, and an imperial nobility was
Gérard, 1805; in the National Museum of
created in 1808. As opposition was still lively, Napoleon
Versailles and Trianons.
Photos.com/Thinkstock intensi ed his propaganda and imposed an increasingly
strict censorship on the press. A dictatorial regime
allowed him to carry on his wars for years without worrying about French public opinion.
Having been president of the Italian Republic (as the Cisalpine Republic was renamed) since
January 1802, Napoleon in March 1805 was proclaimed king of Italy and crowned in Milan in
May.
War with Britain
From 1803 to 1805 Napoleon had only the British to ght; and again France could hope for
victory only by landing an army in the British Isles, whereas the British could defeat Napoleon
only by forming a Continental coalition against him. Napoleon began to prepare an invasion
again, this time with greater conviction and on a larger scale. He gathered nearly 2,000 ships
between Brest and Antwerp and concentrated his Grand Army in the camp at Boulogne
(1803). Even so, the problem was the same as in 1798: to cross the Channel, the French had to
have control of the sea.
Still far inferior to the British navy, the French eet needed the help of the Spanish, and even
then the two eets together could not hope to defeat more than one of the British
squadrons. Spain was induced to declare war on Great Britain in December 1804, and it was
decided that French and Spanish squadrons massed in the Antilles should lure a British
squadron into these waters and defeat it, thus making the balance roughly equal between
the Franco-Spanish navy and the British. A battle in the entrance to the Channel could then
be fought with some chance of success.
The plan failed. The French squadron from the Mediterranean, under Admiral Pierre de
Villeneuve, found itself alone at the appointed meeting place in the Antilles. Pursued by
Nelson and not daring to attack him, it turned back toward Europe and took refuge in Cádiz
in July 1805; there the British blockaded it. Accused of cowardice by the angry Napoleon,
Villeneuve resolved to run the blockade, with the support of a Spanish squadron; but on
October 21, 1805, he was attacked by Nelson off Cape Trafalgar. Nelson was killed in the battle,
but the Franco-Spanish eet was totally destroyed. The British had won a decisive victory,
which eliminated the danger of invasion and gave them freedom of movement at sea.
The British had also succeeded in organizing a new anti-French coalition consisting of
Austria, Russia, Sweden, and Naples. On July 24, 1805, three months before Trafalgar,
Napoleon had ordered the Grand Army from Boulogne to the Danube (thus ruling out an
invasion of England even if the French had won at Trafalgar). In the week preceding Trafalgar,
the Grand Army won an outstanding victory over the Austrians at Ulm, and on November 13
Napoleon entered Vienna. On December 2, 1805, in his greatest victory, he defeated the
combined Austrian and Russian armies in the Battle of Austerlitz. By the Treaty of Pressburg,
Austria renounced all in uence in Italy and ceded Venetia and Dalmatia to Napoleon, as well
as extensive territory in Germany to his protégés Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden. The
French then proceeded to dethrone the Bourbons in the Kingdom of Naples, which was
bestowed on Napoleon’s brother Joseph. In July 1806 the Confederation of the Rhine was
founded—soon to embrace all of western Germany in a union under French protection.
In September 1806 Prussia entered the war against France, and on October 14 the Prussian
armies were defeated at Jena and at Auerstädt. The Russians put up a better resistance at
Eylau in February 1807 but were routed at Friedland in June. In Warsaw Napoleon fell in love
with Countess Marie Walewska, a Polish patriot who hoped that Napoleon would resurrect
her country. Napoleon had a son by her.
The Russian emperor Alexander I could have continued

the struggle, but he was tired of the alliance with the
British. He met Napoleon at Tilsit, in northern Prussia
near the Russian frontier. There, on a raft anchored in the
middle of the Nemen River, they signed treaties that
created the Grand Duchy of Warsaw from the Polish
provinces detached from Prussia and, in effect, divided
Napoleon on the Battlefield at Eylau, control of Europe between the emperors, Napoleon
February 1807, oil painting by Antoine-Jean taking the west and Alexander the east. Alexander even
Gros, 1808; in the Louvre, Paris.
made a vague promise of a land attack against the
Photos.com/Thinkstock
British possessions in India.
Blockade and the peninsular campaign
As Napoleon could no longer think of invading England, he tried to induce capitulation by

sti ing the British economy. By closing all of Europe to British merchandise, he hoped to
bring about a revolt of the British unemployed that could force the government to sue for
peace. He forbade all trade with the British Isles, ordered the con scation of all goods
coming from English factories or from the British colonies, and condemned as fair prize not
only every British ship but also every ship that had touched the coasts of England or its
colonies.
For the blockade to succeed, it had to be enforced rigorously throughout Europe. But, from
the beginning, England’s old ally Portugal showed itself reluctant to comply, for the blockade
would mean its commercial ruin. Napoleon decided to break down Portuguese opposition by
force. Charles IV of Spain let the French troops cross his kingdom, and they occupied Lisbon;
but the prolonged presence of Napoleon’s soldiers in the north of Spain led to insurrection.
When Charles IV abdicated in favour of his son Ferdinand VII, Napoleon, seeing the
opportunity to rid Europe of its last Bourbon rulers, summoned the Spanish royal family to
Bayonne in April 1808 and obtained the abdication of both Charles and Ferdinand; they were
interned in Talleyrand’s château. After the bloody suppression of an uprising in Madrid,
insurrection spread across the whole country, for the Spaniards would not accept Joseph
Bonaparte, king of Naples, as their new king.
The subsequent defeat of his forces in Spain and Portugal were sensational blows to
Napoleon’s prestige. Soon the Iberian Peninsula, up in arms, became a bridgehead on the
Continent for the British. Under the energetic Arthur Wellesley (later 1st duke of Wellington),
in command from 1809, the Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese forces were to achieve decisive
successes.
At the Congress of Erfurt (September–October 1808), a conference with Alexander I,

Napoleon assembled a great concourse of princes to impress the Russian emperor in an
attempt to extract promises of help. Whether impressed or not, Alexander would make no
de nite commitment. Alexander’s refusal, furthermore, was partly prompted by Talleyrand,
who had become dismayed by Napoleon’s policies and was already negotiating with the
Russian emperor behind his master’s back.
By early 1809, however, with most of the Grand Army thrown into Spain, Napoleon seemed
on the point of overcoming the revolt. Then, in April, Austria launched an attack in Bavaria in
the hope of rousing all of Germany against the French. Napoleon once again defeated the
Habsburgs (July 6) and by the Treaty of Schönbrunn (October 14, 1809) obtained the Illyrian
Provinces, thus rounding out the “Continental System.”
Consolidation of empire
In 1810 Napoleon’s fortunes were at their zenith, despite some failures in Spain and Portugal.
He considered himself Charlemagne’s heir. He repudiated Joséphine, who had not given him
a child, so that he could marry Marie-Louise, daughter of the Austrian emperor Francis I. The
birth of a son, the king of Rome, in March 1811 seemed to assure the future of his empire—
now at its greatest extent, including not only the Illyrian Provinces but also Etruria (Tuscany),
some of the Papal States, Holland, and the German states bordering the North Sea. The
empire was surrounded by a ring of vassal states ruled over by the emperor’s relatives: the
Kingdom of Westphalia (Jérôme Bonaparte); the Kingdom of Spain (Joseph Bonaparte); the
Kingdom of Italy (with Eugène de Beauharnais, Joséphine’s son, as viceroy); the Kingdom of
Naples (Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law); and the Principality of Lucca and
Piombino (Félix Bacciochi, another brother-in-law). Other territories were closely bound to
the empire by treaties: the Swiss Confederation (of which Napoleon was the mediator), the
Confederation of the Rhine, and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Even Austria seemed bound to
France by Napoleon’s marriage to Marie-Louise.
The political map of Europe, which had been so complicated before 1796, was now greatly
simpli ed. Yet the frontiers did not coincide either with geographic features or with
“nationalities.” Whatever he may later have said, Napoleon, while he was in power, was not
interested in realizing either German or Italian unity. Yet, by reducing the number of states,
by pushing the frontiers about, by amalgamating populations, and by propagating

institutions like those that the Revolution and nationalism had created in France, he
prepared the ground for German and Italian uni cation. National feeling in Europe, stirred by
French ideas and by contact with Frenchmen, in turn gave rise to the rst resistance against
French domination. From 1809 onward, Spanish guerrillas, supported by British troops, were
harassing the French, and the Spanish national Cortes (parliament), convened at Cádiz by the
insurrectionaries, in 1812 promulgated a constitution inspired by the ideas of the French
Revolution of 1789 and by British institutions.
Disaster in Russia and its aftermath
Since the Congress of Erfurt, the Russian emperor had

shown himself less and less inclined to deal with
Napoleon as a trusted partner. In the spring of 1812,
therefore, Napoleon massed his forces in Poland to
intimidate Alexander. After some last attempts at
agreement, in late June his Grand Army—about 600,000
men, including contingents extorted from Prussia and
Statistical map of Napoleon's Russian
from Austria—began to cross the Nemen River. The
campaign of 1812
Russians retreated, adopting a scorched-earth policy.
The size of Napoleon's army during the
Napoleon’s army did not reach the approaches to
Russian campaign of 1812 is shown by the
Moscow until the beginning of September. The Russian
dwindling width of the lines of advance
(green) and retreat (gold). The retreat commander in chief, Mikhail I. Kutuzov, engaged it at
information is correlated with a temperature Borodino on September 7. The ght was savage, bloody,
scale shown along the lower portion of the
and indecisive, but a week later Napoleon entered
statistical map. Published by Charles Minard
Moscow, which the Russians had abandoned. On that
in 1869.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. same day, a huge re broke out, destroying the greater
part of the town. Moreover, Alexander unexpectedly
refused to treat with Napoleon. Withdrawal was
necessary, and the premature onset of winter made it
disastrous. After the dif cult crossing of the Berezina
River in November, fewer than 10,000 men t for combat
remained with Napoleon’s main force.
This catastrophe heartened all the peoples of Europe to

defy Napoleon. In Germany the news unleashed an
outbreak of anti-French demonstrations. The Prussian
contingents deserted the Grand Army in December and
turned against the French. The Austrians also withdrew
their troops and adopted an increasingly hostile attitude,

and in Italy the people began to turn their backs on
Napoleon.
Even in France, signs of discontent with the regime were

becoming more frequent. In Paris a malcontent general,
Claude-François de Malet, nearly succeeded in carrying
out a coup d’état after announcing on October 23, 1812,
that Napoleon had died in Russia. This incident was a
major factor in Napoleon’s decision to hasten back to
France ahead of the Grand Army. Arriving in Paris on
December 18, he proceeded to stiffen the dictatorship, to
raise money by various expedients, and to levy new
troops.
Napoleon I looking on as Moscow burns,
illustration by Vasily V. Vereshchagin, c.
Thus, in 1813 the forces arrayed against France were no
1890.
© Photos.com/Jupiterimages
longer armies of mercenaries but were those of nations
ghting for their freedom as the French had fought for
theirs in 1792 and 1793; and the French themselves, for all their courage, had lost their former
enthusiasm. The emperor’s ideal of conquest was no longer that of the nation.
In May 1813 Napoleon won some successes against the Russians and Prussians at the Battles
of Lützen and Bautzen, but his decimated army needed reinforcements. The armed
mediation of Austria induced Napoleon to agree to an armistice, during which a congress
was held at Prague. There Austria proposed very favourable conditions: the French Empire
was to return to its natural limits; the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and the Confederation of the
Rhine were to be dissolved; and Prussia was to return to its frontiers of 1805. Napoleon made
the mistake of hesitating too long. The congress closed on August 10 before his reply arrived,
and Austria declared war.
The French were even worse off than in the spring. The allies were gaining new troops every
day, as one German contingent after another left Napoleon to go over to the other side. The
greatest debacle since Napoleon came to power was the Battle of Leipzig, or “Battle of the
Nations” (October 16–19, 1813), in which the Grand Army was torn to shreds. That defeat
degenerated fast into collapse. The French armies in Spain, forced to retreat, had been
defeated in June, and by October the British were attacking their defenses north of the
Pyrenees. In Italy the Austrians took the offensive, crossed the Adige River, and occupied
Romagna. Murat, now openly a traitor to the emperor who had made him king of Naples,
entered into negotiations with the Viennese court. The Dutch and the Belgians
demonstrated against Napoleon.
Downfall and abdication
In January 1814 France was being attacked on all its frontiers. The allies cleverly announced
that they were ghting not against the French people but against Napoleon alone, since in
November 1813 he had rejected the terms offered by the Austrian foreign minister Klemens,
Fürst (prince) von Metternich, which would have preserved the natural frontiers of France.
The extraordinary strategic feats achieved by the emperor during the rst three months of
1814 with the army of young conscripts were not enough; he could neither defeat the allies,
with their overwhelming numerical superiority, nor arouse the majority of the French people
from their resentful torpor. The Legislative Assembly and the Senate, formerly so docile, were
now asking for peace and for civil and political liberties.
By the Treaty of Chaumont of March 1814, Austria, Russia,

Prussia, and Great Britain bound themselves together for
20 years, undertook not to negotiate separately, and
promised to continue the struggle until Napoleon was
overthrown. When the allied armies arrived before Paris
on March 30, Napoleon had moved east to attack their
rear guard. The Parisian authorities, no longer overawed
1814, the Campaign of France, by Ernest by the emperor, lost no time in treating with the allies. As
Meissonier, 1864; in the Louvre, Paris.
president of the provisional government, Talleyrand
© Photos.com/Jupiterimages
proclaimed the deposition of the emperor and, without
consulting the French people, began to negotiate with
Louis XVIII, the brother of the executed Louis XVI. Napoleon had only reached Fontainebleau
when he heard that Paris had capitulated. Persuaded that further resistance was useless, he
nally abdicated on April 6.
By the Treaty of Fontainebleau, the allies granted him the island of Elba as a sovereign
principality, an annual income of two million francs to be provided by France, and a guard of
400 volunteers. Also he retained the title of emperor. After unsuccessfully trying to poison
himself, Napoleon spoke his farewell to his “Old Guard,” and after a hazardous journey, during
which he narrowly escaped assassination, he arrived at Elba on May 4.
Elba and the Hundred Days
“I want from now on to live like a justice of the peace,” Napoleon declared on his little island.
But a man of such energy and imagination could hardly be expected to resign himself to
defeat at age 45.
In France, moreover, the Bourbon Restoration was soon exposed to criticism. Though in 1814
the majority of the French people were tired of the emperor, they had expressed no wish for
the return of the Bourbons. They were strongly attached to the essential achievements of the
Revolution, and Louis XVIII had come back “in the baggage train of the foreigners” with the
last surviving émigrés who had “learnt nothing and forgotten nothing” and whose in uence
seemed to threaten most of the Revolution’s achievements. The apathy of April 1814 quickly
gave way to mistrust. Old hatreds were revived, resistance organized, and conspiracies
formed.
From Elba Napoleon kept a close watch on the Continent. He knew that some of the
diplomats at Vienna, where a congress was deciding the fate of Europe, considered Elba,
between Corsica and Italy, too close to France and to Italy and wanted to banish him to a
distant island in the Atlantic. Also he accused Austria of preventing Marie-Louise and his son
from coming to join him (in fact, she had taken a lover and had no intention of going to live
with her husband). In addition, the French government refused to pay Napoleon’s allowance,
so that he was in danger of being reduced to penury.
All these considerations drove Napoleon to action. Decisive as ever, he returned to France like
a thunderbolt. On March 1, 1815, he landed at Cannes with a detachment of his guard. As he
crossed the Alps, the republican peasants rallied round him, and near Grenoble he won over
the soldiers dispatched to arrest him. On March 20 he was in Paris.
Napoleon was brought back to power as the embodiment of the spirit of the Revolution
rather than as the emperor who had fallen a year before. To rally the mass of Frenchmen to
his cause, he should have allied himself with the Jacobins, but this he dared not do. Unable
to escape from the bourgeoisie whose predominance he himself had assured and who
feared above all else a revival of the radical experiments of 1793 and 1794, he could only set up
a political regime scarcely distinguishable from that of Louis XVIII. Enthusiasm ebbed fast,
and the Napoleonic adventure seemed a dead end.
To oppose the allied troops massing on the frontiers, Napoleon mustered an army with
which he marched into Belgium and defeated the Prussians at Ligny on June 16, 1815. Two
days later, at Waterloo, he met the British under Wellington, the victor of the Peninsular War.
A savage battle followed. Napoleon was in sight of victory when the Prussians under Gebhard
Blücher arrived to reinforce the British, and soon, despite the heroism of the Old Guard,
Napoleon was defeated.
Back in Paris, the parliament forced Napoleon to

abdicate; he did so, in favour of his son, on June 22, 1815.
On July 3 he was at Rochefort, intending to take ship for
the United States, but a British squadron prevented any

French vessel from leaving the port. Napoleon then
decided to appeal to the British government for
protection. His request granted, he boarded the
Bellerophon on July 15. The allies were agreed on one
point: Napoleon was not to go back to Elba. Nor did they
like the idea of his going off to America. It would have
suited them if he had fallen a victim to the “White Terror”
Napoleon I fleeing the battlefield of of the returned counterrevolutionaries or if Louis XVIII
Waterloo, engraving, 1817. had had him summarily tried and executed. Great Britain
© Photos.com/Thinkstock
had no choice but to send him to detention in a far-off
island. The British government announced that the
island of St. Helena in the southern Atlantic had been chosen for his residence; because of its
remote position, Napoleon would enjoy much greater freedom than would be possible
elsewhere. Napoleon protested eloquently: “I appeal to history!”
Exile on St. Helena
On October 15, 1815, Napoleon disembarked in St. Helena with those followers who were
voluntarily accompanying him into exile: General Henri-Gratien Bertrand, grand marshal of
the palace, and his wife; the comte Charles de Montholon, aide-de-camp, and his wife;
General Gaspard Gourgaud; Emmanuel Las Cases, the former chamberlain; and several
servants. After a short stay at the house of a wealthy English merchant, they moved to
Longwood, originally built for the lieutenant governor.
Napoleon settled down to a life of routine. He got up late, breakfasting about 10:00 AM, but
seldom went out. He was free to go anywhere on the island so long as he was accompanied
by an English of cer, but he soon refused to comply with this condition and so shut himself
up in the grounds of Longwood. He wrote and talked much. At rst Las Cases acted as his
secretary, compiling what was later to be the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène ( rst published in
1823). From 7:00 to 8:00 PM Napoleon had dinner, after which a part of the evening was spent
in reading aloud—Napoleon liked to hear the classics. Then they played cards. About
midnight Napoleon went to bed. Some of his time was devoted to learning English, and he
eventually began reading English newspapers; but he also had a large number of French
books sent from Europe, which he read attentively and annotated.
St. Helena had a healthful climate, and Napoleon’s food was good, carefully prepared, and
plentiful. His inactivity undoubtedly contributed to the deterioration of his health. The man
who for 20 years had played so great a role in the world and who had marched north, south,
east, and west across Europe could hardly be expected to endure the monotony of existence
on a little island, aggravated by the self-imposed life of a recluse. He had also more intimate
reasons for unhappiness: Marie-Louise sent no word to him, and he may have learned of her
liaison with the Austrian of cer appointed to watch over her, Adam, Graf (count) von
Neipperg (whom she eventually married in secret without waiting for Napoleon’s death). Nor
did he have any news of his son, the former king of Rome, who was now living in Vienna with
the title of duke of Reichstadt. Though the severity of Sir Hudson Lowe has been much
exaggerated, it is certain that this “jailer,” who arrived as governor of St. Helena in April 1816,
did nothing to make Napoleon’s life easier. Napoleon from the start disliked him as the
former commander of the Corsican rangers, a band of volunteers composed largely of
enemies of the Bonaparte family. Always anxious to carry out his instructions exactly, Lowe
came into con ict with Las Cases. He saw Las Cases as Napoleon’s con dant and had him
arrested and expelled. Thenceforward, relations between the governor and Napoleon were
limited strictly to those stipulated by the regulations.
Napoleon showed the rst signs of illness at the end of 1817; he seems to have had an ulcer or
a cancer of the stomach. The Irish doctor Barry O’Meara, having asked in vain for a change in
the conditions under which Napoleon lived, was dismissed; so also was his successor John
Stokoe, who was likewise thought to be well-disposed toward Napoleon. The undistinguished
Corsican doctor who took their place, Francesco Antommarchi, prescribed a treatment that
could do nothing to cure his patient. It is uncertain, however, whether Napoleon’s disease
was curable at all, even by 21st-century methods. There has been continuing controversy
about the cause of his death, but the evidence used by some to support the theory that
Napoleon was poisoned is not considered conclusive by many scholars.
From the beginning of 1821, the illness became rapidly worse. From March, Napoleon was
con ned to bed. In April he dictated his last will:
I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of that French
people which I have loved so much.…I die before my time, killed by the English
oligarchy and its hired assassins.
On May 5 he spoke a few coherent phrases: “My God…the French nation…my son…head of the
army.” He died at 5:49 PM on that day, not yet 52 years old. His body was dressed in his
favourite uniform, that of the Chasseurs de la Garde, covered by the gray overcoat that he
had worn at Marengo. The funeral was conducted simply, but with due propriety, in the
Rupert Valley, where Napoleon had sometimes walked, beside a stream in which two willows
were re ected. The stone covering his tomb bore no name, only the words “Ci-Gît” (“Here
Lies”).
The Napoleonic legend

Napoleon’s fall set loose a torrent of hostile books designed to sully his reputation. One of the
least violent of these was the pamphlet De Buonaparte, des Bourbons, et de la nécessité de
se rallier à nos princes légitimes, pour le bonheur de la France et celui de l’Europe (1814; On
Buonaparte and the Bourbons, and the Necessity of Rallying Around Our Legitimate
Princes, for the Safety of France and of Europe) by the vicomte de Chateaubriand, a well-
known writer of royalist sympathies. But this anti-Napoleonic literature soon died down,
while the task of defending Napoleon was taken up. Lord Byron had published his “Ode to
Napoleon Buonaparte” as early as 1814; the German poet Heinrich Heine wrote his ballad “Die
Grenadiere”; and in 1817 the French novelist Stendhal began his biography Vie de Napoléon
(Life of Napoleon). At the same time, the emperor’s most faithful supporters were working
toward his rehabilitation, talking about him, and distributing reminders of him, including
engravings. They idealized his life (“What a novel my life is!” he himself had said) and began
to create the Napoleonic legend.
As soon as the emperor was dead, the legend grew rapidly. Memoirs, notes, and narratives by
those who had followed him into exile contributed substantially to it. In 1822 O’Meara, in
London, had his Napoleon in Exile; or, A Voice from Saint Helena published; in 1823 the
publication of the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France sous Napoléon, écrits à Sainte-
Hélène sous sa dictée (Memoirs of the History of France During the Reign of Napoleon,
Dictated by the Emperor at St. Helena) by Montholon and Gourgaud, began; Las Cases, in his
famous Mémorial, presented the emperor as a republican opposed to war who had fought
only when Europe forced him to ght in defense of freedom; and in 1825 Antommarchi
published his Derniers moments de Napoléon (The Last Days of Emperor Napoleon).
Thereafter the number of works in Napoleon’s honour increased continually; among them
were Victor Hugo’s “Ode à la Colonne” (“Ode to the Column”), the 28 volumes of the Victoires
et conquêtes des Français (“Victories and Conquests of the French”), edited by Charles-Louis-
Fleury Panckoucke, and Sir Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the
French. Neither police action nor prosecutions could prevent books, pictures, and objects
evoking the imperial saga from multiplying in France.
After the July Revolution of 1830, which created the “Bourgeois Monarchy” under Louis-
Philippe, thousands of Tricolor ags appeared in windows, and the government had not only
to tolerate the growth of the legend but even to promote it. In 1833 the statue of Napoleon
was put back on the top of the column in the Place Vendôme in Paris, and in 1840 the king’s
son François, prince de Joinville, was sent in a warship to fetch the emperor’s remains from
St. Helena to the banks of the Seine in accordance with his last wishes. A magni cent funeral
was held in Paris in December 1840, and Napoleon’s body was conveyed through the Arc de
Triomphe in the Place de l’Étoile to entombment under the dome of the Invalides.
Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoléon exploited the

legend in order to seize power in France. Though his
attempts at Strasbourg in 1836 and at Boulogne in 1840
were failures, it was chie y because of the growth of the
legend that he won election to the presidency of the
Second Republic with an overwhelming majority in 1848
and was able to carry out the coup d’état of December
1851 and make himself emperor in 1852.
The disastrous end of the Second Empire in 1870

damaged the Napoleonic legend and gave rise to a new
anti-Napoleonic literature, best represented by Hippolyte
Taine’s Origines de la France contemporaine (1876–94;
Dôme des Invalides, Paris, designed by
Jules Hardouin-Mansart, c. 1675. The Origins of Contemporary France). World Wars I and
J. Messerschmidt/Leo de Wys Inc. II, however, together with the experience of the 20th-
century dictatorships, made it possible to judge
Napoleon more fairly. Any comparison with Stalin or Hitler, for instance, can only be to
Napoleon’s advantage. He was tolerant; he released the Jews from the ghettos; and he
showed respect for human life. Brought up on the rationalist Encyclopédie and on the
writings of the philosophes of the Enlightenment, he remained above all a man of the 18th
century, the last of the “enlightened despots.” One of the gravest accusations made against
Napoleon is that he was the “Corsican ogre” who sacri ced millions of men to his ambition.
Precise calculations show that the Napoleonic Wars of 1800–15 cost France itself about
500,000 casualties—i.e., about one-sixtieth of the population—with another 500,000
imprisoned or missing. The loss of these young men did not greatly affect the growth of the
population, however.
The social structure of France changed little under the First Empire. It remained roughly
what the Revolution had made it: a great mass of peasants comprising three-fourths of the
population—about half of them working owners of their farms or sharecroppers and the
other half with too little land for their own subsistence and hiring themselves out as
labourers. Industry, stimulated by the war and the blockade of English goods, made
remarkable progress in northern and eastern France, whence exports could be sent to
central Europe; but it declined in the south and west because of the closing of the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The great migrations from rural areas toward industry in the
towns began only after 1815. The nobility would probably have declined more swiftly if
Napoleon had not restored it, but it could never recover its former privileges.
Above all, Napoleon left durable institutions, the “granite masses” on which modern France
has been built up: the administrative system of the prefects, the Napoleonic Code, the
judicial system, the Banque de France and the country’s nancial organization, the
centralized university, and the military academies. Napoleon changed the history both of
France and of the world.
Jacques Godechot
CITATION INFORMATION
ARTICLE TITLE: Napoleon I
WEBSITE NAME: Encyclopaedia Britannica
PUBLISHER: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
DATE PUBLISHED: 17 May 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Napoleon-I
ACCESS DATE: June 08, 2019

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6/9/2019 Napoleon I -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Napoleon’s many reforms

Napoleon was born on Corsica shortly after the island’s

The Revolutionary period

The Jacobin years

From every point of view, a new life was opening for

Arriving at his headquarters in Nice, Bonaparte found

Soldiers, you are naked, badly fed.…Rich provinces

Austrian armies advanced four times from the Alps to

Bonaparte, now 30 years old, was thin and short and

The Consulate’s work of administrative reform, undertaken at Bonaparte’s instigation, was to

Military campaigns and uneasy peace

Founding the empire

Though there was little change in the organization of the

The imperial regime also instituted its symbols and titles.

War with Britain

The Russian emperor Alexander I could have continued

Blockade and the peninsular campaign

As Napoleon could no longer think of invading England, he tried to induce capitulation by

At the Congress of Erfurt (September–October 1808), a conference with Alexander I,

by pushing the frontiers about, by amalgamating populations, and by propagating

Disaster in Russia and its aftermath

Since the Congress of Erfurt, the Russian emperor had

This catastrophe heartened all the peoples of Europe to

their troops and adopted an increasingly hostile attitude,

Even in France, signs of discontent with the regime were

Downfall and abdication

By the Treaty of Chaumont of March 1814, Austria, Russia,

Elba and the Hundred Days

Back in Paris, the parliament forced Napoleon to

the United States, but a British squadron prevented any

Exile on St. Helena

The Napoleonic legend

Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoléon exploited the

The disastrous end of the Second Empire in 1870

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