Napoleon Bonaparte

August 15, 1769 – May 5, 1821

French general who rose from the Revolution to crown himself Emperor and conquer much of Europe.

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Napoleon Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769, on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, which France had taken over only the year before. Sent to military school on the mainland as a boy, he trained as an artillery officer and was still a young man when the French Revolution erupted in 1789 and turned Europe upside down. In the chaos and opportunity of the revolutionary years, a talented soldier could rise with astonishing speed, and Napoleon did exactly that. He first made his name defending the new French Republic, crushing a royalist uprising in Paris and then winning a dazzling series of battles as a young general in Italy. In 1798 he led an ambitious expedition to Egypt, hoping to threaten British power in the region. The campaign itself ended in failure, but the scholars he brought with him made a historic find: in 1799, French soldiers uncovered the Rosetta Stone, the slab whose matching inscriptions eventually allowed scholars to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. Explore that discovery in the Ancient Egypt journey. With France's government weak and divided, Napoleon seized power in a coup in 1799, making himself First Consul, and in 1804 he crowned himself Emperor of the French. He was far more than a soldier. He reorganized the French state from top to bottom, and his greatest lasting achievement was the Napoleonic Code, a clear, unified set of laws that guaranteed equality before the law and protected property. Versions of the Code still form the basis of the legal systems of dozens of countries today. At the height of his power, Napoleon dominated Europe. Through brilliant campaigns, such as his masterpiece at Austerlitz in 1805, he defeated one coalition of enemies after another and placed his relatives on thrones across the continent. He reformed education, finance, and religion at home, and spread many revolutionary ideas, and his system of laws, across the lands his armies conquered. But Napoleon's rule had a darker side that students should weigh honestly. He was an authoritarian who censored the press, built a secret police, and made himself a hereditary monarch, betraying some of the very revolutionary ideals of liberty that had raised him up. Most troubling of all, in 1802 he reinstated slavery in France's colonies, reversing the Revolution's abolition of it and fighting a brutal war to try to crush the free republic of Haiti. His endless wars, too, killed millions across Europe. His empire finally overreached. In 1812 he invaded Russia with a vast army, only to see it destroyed by battle, hunger, and the brutal winter during a catastrophic retreat. His enemies closed in, and in 1814 they forced him from power and exiled him to the small island of Elba. He escaped and briefly returned to rule during the dramatic Hundred Days of 1815, but his final defeat came at the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium. This time his enemies sent him far away, to the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821. Napoleon remains one of history's most debated figures. To some he was a heroic reformer who carried the best ideas of the Revolution across Europe and built institutions that outlasted him; to others he was a power-hungry conqueror whose wars and betrayals cost countless lives. Both pictures hold real truth, which is exactly why historians still argue about him two centuries later.

Napoleon Bonaparte

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