Note · History
Who was Napoleon? How a general became an emperor
Napoleon Bonaparte was a Corsican-born general who seized power in France in 1799, crowned himself emperor in 1804 and remade Europe before his defeat at Waterloo in 1815.
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Contents · 6 sections
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) was a French general who rose through the wars of the French Revolution, seized power in a coup in 1799 and crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804. At its height his empire ruled or controlled most of western and central Europe. He was defeated in Russia in 1812, at Leipzig in 1813 and finally at Waterloo in 1815, and died in exile on Saint Helena, an island in the South Atlantic.
In short
- Napoleon was a product of the Revolution: its wars made his name, and its chaos gave him the opening to take power.
- He kept some of the Revolution's changes, such as legal equality for men and the end of feudal privilege, while ending elected government and a free press.
- His wars cost millions of lives and his empire collapsed within ten years, but his law code and several of his institutions outlasted him by centuries.
Where did Napoleon come from?
He was born Napoleone di Buonaparte on 15 August 1769 in Ajaccio, on Corsica, a year after the island passed from the Republic of Genoa to France. His family belonged to the minor Corsican nobility, which won him a place at French military schools, where he was mocked for his accent. He trained as an artillery officer, the branch of the army that rewarded mathematics more than birth.
The French Revolution of 1789 made his career possible. Many noble officers fled, and the new republic, at war with most of Europe from 1792, promoted men on merit and results. Bonaparte's artillery plan helped retake the port of Toulon from the British in December 1793, and he was made a brigadier general at 24. In October 1795 he used cannon fire to scatter a royalist crowd in Paris, which made him useful to the government of the day.
How did a general become an emperor?
Victories did it, and then a coup. In 1796 and 1797 he led the French army in Italy, beat the Austrians in a run of battles and dictated the peace himself. In 1798 he invaded Egypt, then a province of the Ottoman Empire, to threaten Britain's route to India and to win glory in the East, as Alexander the Great, whom he admired, had done. His fleet was destroyed at the Battle of the Nile within weeks, but the scholars he brought along studied the country, and his soldiers found the Rosetta Stone in 1799.
He slipped back to France in 1799, where the government, called the Directory, was unpopular, broke and divided. On 9 November 1799, a date the revolutionary calendar called 18 Brumaire, he and his allies overthrew it. A new constitution made him First Consul, in practice the ruler of France. He was made consul for life in 1802, and on 2 December 1804, in Notre-Dame in Paris, he crowned himself emperor in front of the Pope. Each step was approved in a referendum, with counts that historians regard as inflated.
Napoleon ended the Revolution's experiment with elected, quarreling assemblies while keeping many of its results. He made peace with the Catholic Church in the Concordat of 1801, censored the press, ran a police network that watched critics, and let back noble titles of his own creation. In 1802 he restored slavery in French colonies where it had been abolished in 1794, and sent an army to retake Saint-Domingue, where it failed: the colony became independent Haiti in 1804. Short of money and unable to hold its colonies in America, he sold the vast Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803 for $15 million, as the US State Department's historians record.
What were his wars, and why did he lose?
From 1803 to 1815 France fought a series of coalitions of Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia and others, known as the Napoleonic Wars. He was a brilliant commander of fast-moving armies, and for a decade he beat almost everyone who faced him on land. At sea, Britain's victory at Trafalgar in 1805 settled who ruled the oceans for the rest of the century.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1799 | Coup of 18 Brumaire; Napoleon becomes First Consul |
| 1804 | Civil Code takes effect in March; crowned emperor in December |
| 1805 | British fleet wins at Trafalgar; Napoleon crushes Austria and Russia at Austerlitz |
| 1806 | Holy Roman Empire dissolved; Prussia beaten at Jena |
| 1807 | Treaty of Tilsit with Russia; Napoleon at the peak of his power |
| 1808 | Invades Spain, beginning a draining six-year war |
| 1812 | Invades Russia with more than 450,000 men; most never return |
| 1813 | Defeated at Leipzig, the "Battle of the Nations" |
| 1814 | Allies take Paris; Napoleon abdicates and is exiled to Elba |
| 1815 | Returns for the Hundred Days; defeated at Waterloo on 18 June |
| 1821 | Dies on Saint Helena on 5 May, aged 51 |
Three things wore him down. Britain could not be beaten, and his attempt to strangle its trade by closing Europe's ports, the Continental System, hurt his allies and pushed him into wars to enforce it. Spain and Portugal tied down hundreds of thousands of troops against guerrillas and a British army. And in 1812 he invaded Russia. The Russians retreated, fought at Borodino and gave up Moscow, but would not make peace; the retreat through the winter destroyed the Grande Armée through cold, hunger, disease and attacks, with estimates that only tens of thousands of the force that crossed in June made it out in fighting condition.
He came back once more. Escaping Elba, he landed in France on 1 March 1815 and was in Paris within three weeks. At Waterloo, in what is now Belgium, he faced a British-led allied army under the Duke of Wellington and a Prussian one under Marshal Blücher. According to the National Army Museum, he brought 72,000 men and 246 guns against Wellington's 68,000, and the arrival of the Prussians through the afternoon decided the day. He abdicated a second time and was sent to Saint Helena, where he died in 1821.
What did Napoleon leave behind?
His empire vanished, but much of what he built inside it stayed. The clearest way to see the legacy is to sort it.
| What lasted | What didn't |
|---|---|
| The Civil Code of 1804, still France's civil law, much amended, and a model for codes across Europe, Latin America and beyond | The empire itself, and the kingdoms he handed to his brothers |
| The end of the Holy Roman Empire, dissolved on 6 August 1806 after a thousand years, and a simpler map of German states | The Continental System, his trade war on Britain |
| Prefects running each French department, the Bank of France, the elite high schools called lycées, and the Legion of Honor | Slavery's restoration in the French colonies, abolished again in 1848 |
| The metric system's spread with French rule, though its path was bumpy | The Bonaparte dynasty, except for a nephew's Second Empire from 1852 to 1870 |
The civil law tradition that most of the world's countries follow owes much to his Code. It set out property, contracts and family law in plain written articles, made all men equal before the law and ended feudal privileges. It also made wives legally subordinate to their husbands. The metric story shows how mixed the record can be: France had adopted the metric system in the 1790s, and French rule carried it to the Low Countries and Italy, but in 1812 Napoleon himself allowed traditional unit names back, and France made the metric system compulsory again only in 1840.
Was Napoleon really short?
No. At about 168 centimeters, roughly 5 feet 6 inches, he was of average height for a Frenchman of his time. The myth has several sources. His height was recorded as 5 feet 2 inches in old French units, and a French inch was longer than an English one, so read in English units the figure made him sound small. His soldiers called him "le petit caporal", the little corporal, as a term of affection rather than a measurement. And British cartoonists, above all James Gillray, drew him as a tiny, tantrum-prone "Little Boney". Later still, the psychologist Alfred Adler used Napoleon as an example of a short man overcompensating for an inferiority complex, which inspired the term "Napoleon complex" and keeps the myth alive.
Still argued
Historians still argue over what Napoleon was. Admirers see the man who saved the Revolution's gains in equality and modern government from chaos and spread them across Europe. Critics see a military dictator whose wars killed millions, who restored slavery, and who used revolutionary language to cover personal ambition. Most modern biographers hold both views at once, and the debate is a good example of how history is argued from the same evidence.
His career also bent the word democracy in a way that recurred: a strong leader who keeps the forms of popular consent, through plebiscites, while removing the substance.
Check yourself
- How did the French Revolution make Napoleon's rise possible, step by step from 1793 to 1804?
- Name two reasons his empire wore down after 1807, and say how each one drained him.
- What from his rule still shapes Europe, and what disappeared with him?
Sources
- Napoleon — Wikipedia
- Napoleon Bonaparte — Harrison W. Mark, World History Encyclopedia, 2023
- Napoleonic Code — Wikipedia
- Battle of Waterloo — National Army Museum
- Louisiana Purchase, 1803 — Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State