Titans of History

NAPOLEON I

1769–1821

Napoleon was a man! His life was the stride of a demi-god.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann (1828)

Napoleon Bonaparte bestrode his era like a colossus. No one man had aspired to create an empire of such a magnitude since the days of Alexander the Great and Charlemagne. Napoleon’s ambition stretched from Russia and Egypt in the east to Portugal and Britain in the west, and even though he did not succeed to quite this extent, his brilliant generalship brought Spain, the Low Countries, Switzerland, Italy and much of Germany under French domination—albeit at the cost of two decades of war and some 6 million dead. Although his enemies regarded him as a tyrant—and indeed much about his rule was oppressive—Napoleon introduced to mainland Europe many of the liberal and rational values of the Enlightenment, such as the metric system of weights and measures, religious toleration, the idea of national self-determination, and the Napoleonic Code of civil law. He was the quintessential autocrat but he was tolerant of all beliefs and ideas, provided he enjoyed political control. He did not—with a few exceptions—abuse his power. He lacked malice and he was certainly no mass-murdering sadistic dictator in the mode of the 20th century. Yet millions died for the sake of his personal ambition in the wars that he promoted.

After an unruly childhood, a youthful military education, and service in his native Corsica during the French Revolution, Napoleon rose to prominence as an artillery expert in the defense of the town of Toulon against the British in 1793. Two years later he was in Paris, taking command of the artillery against a counter-revolutionary uprising. He boasted that he cleared the streets with “the whiff of grapeshot.”

In 1796 Napoleon led a French army into Italy, driving the Austrians out of Lombardy, annexing several of the Papal States, then pushing on into Austria, forcing her to sue for peace. The resulting treaty won France most of northern Italy, the Low Countries and the Rhineland. Napoleon followed this up by seizing Venice.

Napoleon was now regarded as the potential savior of France, and he ensured that the republic was reliant on his personal power within the army. The government welcomed the respite when Napoleon sailed to Egypt to bolster French interests there at the expense of the British. In the campaign of 1798–9 he seized Malta, then defeated an Egyptian force four times as large as his own at the Battle of the Pyramids. Though the French navy lost control of the Mediterranean after Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile, Napoleon pushed through Egypt into Syria, until his army succumbed to disease. The failure to take Acre marked the end of the war. In his advance and retreat, he showed his ruthless ambition: he massacred Ottoman prisoners and as he retreated, he ordered his doctors to kill some of his own wounded. Even though his dirty little Middle Eastern war had been a disaster, he abandoned his army and returned to France presenting the adventure as a success—indeed his tales of exotic glory now propelled him to power.

In 1799 Napoleon seized control of France in the Coup of 18 Brumaire. As first consul, he improved the road and sewerage systems and reformed education, taxes, banking and, most importantly, the law code. The Napoleonic Code unified and transformed the legal system of France, replacing old feudal customs with a systematized national structure and establishing the rule of law as fundamental to the state.

In 1804 Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French, ostensibly to prevent the Bourbon monarchy from ever being reestablished. His plan to invade Britain—which was funding his European enemies—was thwarted by Nelson’s destruction of Napoleon’s navy at Trafalgar. However, on land Napoleon seemed invulnerable, defeating the Austrians, Russians and Prussians in a series of stunning victories at Ulm (1805), Austerlitz (1805) and Jena (1806), ending the alliance of these powers with Britain and establishing the Confederation of the Rhine as a French satellite in much of Germany. The emperors of Austria and Russia, the king of Prussia all bowed before his power: only Britain held out against him.

After this, Napoleon began to overreach himself. He made his brothers into kings, his marshals into princes. In 1808 he imposed his brother Joseph (who had first been king of Naples) as king of Spain, provoking the Spanish to revolt. The British sent troops to support the Spanish, and for the next few years many French troops were tied up on the Iberian Peninsula fighting the Spanish and a British army under Wellington

He had married Josephine de Beauharnais, the widow of a French aristocrat, for love—but she had failed to give him an heir. He divorced her and hoped to marry a sister of the Russian Tsar Alexander I—a match both prestigious and politic, since the security of his precarious empire depended on his personal friendship with the tsar, as agreed at Tilsit. But Alexander, initially dazzled by Napoleon, was no longer so impressed: Russia was turning against French dominance. Alexander refused the marriage—and Napoleon instead married Grand Duchess Marie-Louise, the Habsburg daughter of Austrian Emperor Francis. She gave him a son, Napoleon, the king of Rome. But the Russians began to withdraw from Napoleon’s blockade of Britain.

In 1812 Napoleon amassed the Grande Armée of around 600,000 men to march on Russia. It was his moment of hubris. The Russians avoided engagement and retreated deep into the interior, implementing a scorched-earth policy as they went. When the Russians finally made a stand outside Moscow, at the Battle of Borodino, it was one of the bloodiest encounters in history. Though he took Moscow, Napoleon could not force the Russians to the negotiating table, and, with its lines of supply drastically over-extended, the Grande Armée was obliged to retreat through the bitter cold of the Russian winter. Only 40,000 men made it back to France.

Heartened by Napoleon’s humiliation, the other European powers formed a new alliance against the French. The allies defeated Napoleon’s forces in Spain and at Leipzig, taking Paris in 1814 and exiling Napoleon to the island of Elba.

But Napoleon was not done. Escaping from Elba in 1815, he made a triumphant progress north through France to Paris, telling the troops sent to stop him, “If any man would shoot his emperor, he may do so now.” His old generals and their armies rallied round him, but the glorious Hundred Days of his restoration came to an end on June 18, 1815 near the little settlement of Waterloo in what is now Belgium. As the duke of Wellington, the British commander, conceded, it was “the closest run thing”; but Napoleon’s defeat was decisive.

The emperor was exiled to St. Helena in the South Atlantic, dying of stomach cancer in 1821. Later, when Wellington was asked whom he reckoned to have been the best general ever, he answered: “In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.”