Napoleon

Early life and background

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, on 15 August 1769, a year after Genoa ceded the island to France. His family was minor nobility of Italian descent, and his father's patronage won him a royal bursary to the military academy at Brienne and then to the École militaire in Paris, where he trained as an artillery officer. His father died in 1785, leaving him poor and responsible for a large family. The Revolution opened a career that the old monarchy would have closed: he was in Corsica during the early years of the Revolution, then at Toulon in 1793, where his plan for the siege made him a brigadier general at twenty-four. In October 1795 he defended the Convention with cannon on the streets of Paris, and in March 1796 he married Joséphine de Beauharnais.

Career and power

The Italian campaign of 1796–97 made Napoleon the Republic's most successful general: he knocked Piedmont out of the war, broke successive Austrian relief armies, and forced the peace of Campo Formio. Egypt followed in 1798, with a fleet lost at the Nile but a scientific expedition that produced the Rosetta Stone's decipherment. He returned to France in 1799, overthrew the Directory in the coup of 18 Brumaire, and became First Consul. Marengo and Hohenlinden secured his power; the Concordat and the Napoleonic Code gave it shape. In 1804 he crowned himself Emperor. Austerlitz in 1805, Jena in 1806 and Friedland in 1807 destroyed the old coalitions, but Spain, Russia in 1812, and Leipzig in 1813 reversed the tide. He abdicated in 1814, returned for the Hundred Days, and lost at Waterloo in 1815; he died a British prisoner on Saint Helena in 1821.

Ideas and works

Napoleon's lasting work was administrative rather than doctrinal. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 unified civil law, confirmed property and the secular state, and spread across Europe with his armies; its descendants still shape legal systems from France to Latin America. He created the prefects, the Banque de France, the lycées and the Legion of Honour, and centralized taxation, policing and education. The Concordat of 1801 ended the religious war with the Church while keeping the state supreme. Yet the same system was authoritarian: censorship, secret police, conscription and the reintroduction of slavery in the colonies in 1802. He was not a systematic political thinker but a state-builder who turned revolutionary fragments into durable institutions.

Times and rivals

Napoleon was a product of the Revolutionary Wars and of the fragility of the coalitions against France. Britain's sea power, Austria's and Prussia's armies, and Russia's manpower could not be coordinated for long, and his corps system let him defeat them one by one. His family kingdoms and client states turned conquest into a European order, but they also bred resentment and nationalism. The Continental System, designed to strangle British trade, hurt Europe more than Britain. Spain became a running sore, and the invasion of Russia in 1812 destroyed the Grande Armée. His rivals learned from him; the Sixth Coalition adopted his concentration of force and finally outnumbered him.

Legacy and assessment

Napoleon left Europe a double inheritance. His Code, his administration and his idea of the career open to talent survived his empire; his wars and his example of a nation in arms shaped the nineteenth century. He also left a template for modern dictatorship: plebiscites, police, censorship and the cult of the leader. In France, his memory is claimed by republicans and authoritarians alike; in Europe, he is both the man who spread the Revolution's laws and the conqueror who was finally defeated at Waterloo. His exile and death on Saint Helena completed a legend that has never stopped being useful to writers, generals and politicians.