Napoleonic Wars
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The Napoleonic Wars were fought between 1803 and 1815, pitting Napoleonic France against a series of coalitions that finally included Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia. Napoleon Bonaparte, who had taken power in 1799 and crowned himself emperor in 1804, won a string of victories that redrew Europe: Austerlitz in 1805 destroyed the Holy Roman Empire, Jena in 1806 broke Prussia, and the peace of Tilsit in 1807 left him master of the continent west of the Vistula. He imposed the continental system, a blockade intended to ruin British trade, and that blockade led him to invade Spain in 1808 and Russia in 1812. The Russian campaign destroyed the grand army: about 600,000 men crossed the Niemen and fewer than 100,000 returned. The sixth coalition defeated him at Leipzig in 1813 and entered Paris in 1814, sending him to the island of Elba; he escaped, returned for the hundred days, and was beaten by Wellington and Blucher at Waterloo on 18 June 1815, after which he died in exile on St Helena. The congress of Vienna rebuilt the map with conservative intent, and the war's legacy was the Napoleonic code, mass conscription and the idea of nationalism across Europe.