1769 · 1821 · Emperor of the French
Napoleone di Buonaparte was born on 15 August 1769 in Ajaccio, Corsica, barely a year after the island was ceded by Genoa to France. His father Carlo was a minor Corsican nobleman who secured a scholarship for his son at the Royal Military School at Brienne- le-Château on the French mainland. The boy arrived at ten, speaking heavily accented French; his classmates mocked his Corsican name and provincial manner.
He was solitary, bookish and combative. He excelled at mathematics and devoured history, particularly the campaigns of Alexander and Caesar. At fifteen he transferred to the École Militaire in Paris, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant of artillery in 1785, at sixteen. He was the first Corsican to graduate from the school.
The Revolution transformed his prospects. The old aristocratic officer corps emigrated or went to the guillotine, and the Republic needed men who could command. Bonaparte, a Jacobin sympathiser with technical skill and ferocious ambition, was perfectly placed. His outsider status, the very thing that had made him an object of contempt at Brienne, became an advantage: he owed nothing to the old order and everything to talent.
In 1793 the young Captain Bonaparte distinguished himself at the siege of Toulon, where his placement of artillery forced the British fleet to withdraw. Promoted to brigadier-general at twenty-four, he survived the fall of Robespierre and the political turmoil that followed, and in 1795 he saved the Directory by turning his guns on a royalist mob in the streets of Paris (the famous “whiff of grapeshot”).
The reward was command of the Army of Italy. In the campaigns of 1796-97 he defeated the Austrians and Piedmontese in a string of battles that made his name across Europe: Marengo, Lodi, Arcole, Rivoli. He returned to Paris a national hero. Egypt followed in 1798: a military adventure wrapped in scientific ambition, which ended in strategic failure but further burnished his legend.
In November 1799, Bonaparte overthrew the Directory in the coup of 18 Brumaire and installed himself as First Consul. Within five years he had promulgated the Civil Code (the legal foundation of modern France and much of continental Europe), signed a Concordat with the Pope, reorganised French education, centralised the administration, and crowned himself Emperor of the French at Notre-Dame on 2 December 1804. He was thirty-five years old.
General Bonaparte, aged twenty-six, took command of a starving, demoralised Army of Italy and in a year defeated the Austrians and Piedmontese in a sequence of battles: Montenotte, Lodi, Arcole, Rivoli. He dictated terms to Austria and returned to Paris a national hero.
Bonaparte invaded Egypt with 40,000 men, defeated the Mamluks at the Battle of the Pyramids, and brought a corps of scientists who produced the Description de l'Egypte. But Nelson destroyed his fleet at the Nile, stranding the army. Bonaparte abandoned his troops and sailed home to seize power in France.
Now First Consul, Bonaparte crossed the Alps and fought the Austrians at Marengo in northern Italy. The battle was nearly lost until Desaix's division arrived in the afternoon and Kellermann's cavalry charge shattered the Austrian line. Desaix was killed; the victory secured Bonaparte's political position.
The Battle of the Three Emperors. Napoleon drew the Allies off the Pratzen Heights, then seized the ground with Soult's corps and destroyed the Russo-Austrian army. It was his most complete tactical triumph and forced Austria out of the Third Coalition.
Two battles fought on the same day destroyed the Prussian army. Davout's single corps broke the main Prussian force at Auerstedt while Napoleon smashed the secondary army at Jena. Prussia collapsed in a fortnight; Napoleon entered Berlin.
Napoleon defeated the Russians at Friedland in East Prussia, ending the War of the Fourth Coalition. The resulting Treaty of Tilsit, signed on a raft in the River Niemen, divided Europe between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander. It was the high-water mark of the Empire.
Napoleon invaded Spain to enforce the Continental System and placed his brother Joseph on the throne. The resulting guerrilla war and British intervention under Wellington bled France of 300,000 casualties over six years. Napoleon himself fought in Spain only briefly in late 1808 and never returned.
Napoleon invaded Russia with over 600,000 men, the largest army Europe had seen. He fought a costly battle at Borodino, entered Moscow to find it burning, and was forced into a winter retreat that destroyed the Grande Armée. Fewer than 100,000 men returned. It was the beginning of the end.
The Battle of the Nations. Half a million men fought over four days around the Saxon city. Napoleon was outnumbered and outflanked by the combined armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden. The Confederation of the Rhine collapsed; Napoleon fell back to France with a shattered army.
After a brilliant but doomed defensive campaign in France, Napoleon's marshals refused to continue. He abdicated on 6 April 1814, was granted sovereignty of the island of Elba, and watched the Bourbons return to Paris. He would remain on Elba for less than a year.
Napoleon escaped from Elba, marched on Paris, and rebuilt an army in a hundred days. He defeated the Prussians at Ligny but was destroyed at Waterloo by Wellington and Blücher on 18 June 1815. He abdicated again four days later and surrendered to the British. He would never return to France.
Napoleon’s military system rested on speed, concentration and aggression. He organised his army into self-contained corps, each with its own infantry, cavalry and artillery, capable of marching independently and fighting alone until reinforced. This allowed him to advance on a broad front, screening his intentions, and then concentrate overwhelming force at the decisive point faster than his opponents could react. The strategy of the central position, his signature approach, meant placing his army between two enemy forces and defeating each in turn before they could unite.
He was a superb reader of terrain, choosing ground that multiplied his advantages: the Pratzen Heights at Austerlitz, the crossing at Arcole, the reverse slopes he used at Rivoli. His artillery background gave him an instinctive understanding of firepower and its concentration. He drove his men hard on the march but rewarded them with victory, promotion and plunder. His personal energy was extraordinary: he could work eighteen hours a day, dictate orders to multiple secretaries simultaneously, and retain the details of every regiment’s strength and position.
The counterarguments are substantial. After about 1807, some historians argue, his generalship became more rigid: he relied increasingly on frontal assault rather than manoeuvre, and his battles grew costlier. He struggled to delegate effectively, appointing marshals who excelled as corps commanders but faltered when given independent authority (Ney at Quatre Bras, Grouchy after Ligny). His strategic overreach in Spain and Russia, where he committed armies to campaigns he could not supervise in person, was catastrophic. Whether this represents a decline in ability or simply the impossibility of controlling an empire that stretched from Lisbon to Moscow remains debated by military historians. What is not disputed is that at his best, between 1796 and 1809, he was the most formidable battlefield commander in European history.
The Civil Code of 1804 remains Napoleon’s most durable achievement. It replaced the patchwork of feudal, Roman and customary law across France with a single, rational legal system guaranteeing equality before the law, property rights and secular authority over marriage and civil status. Versions of the Code still form the basis of law in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and much of Latin America.
He signed a Concordat with Pope Pius VII in 1801, restoring Catholicism as the majority religion of France while keeping the Church subordinate to the state. He reorganised French education around the lycée system and the grandes écoles. He created the Legion of Honour, the Bank of France and a centralised prefectoral administration. He placed his brothers on the thrones of Spain, Holland, Naples and Westphalia, building a dynasty that lasted only as long as his armies could sustain it. The Continental System, his attempt to strangle British trade by closing European ports, damaged France’s own economy and drove him into the disastrous wars in Spain and Russia.
His relationship with Josephine, his first wife, was passionate and turbulent. He divorced her in 1809 because she could not produce an heir, and married the Austrian Archduchess Marie Louise, who bore him a son. His marshals served him with varying degrees of loyalty and ability; he rewarded them with titles, estates and wealth, but never fully trusted any of them.
In 1808 Napoleon deposed the Spanish Bourbons and placed his brother Joseph on the throne of Spain. He expected a swift political settlement. Instead he provoked a national uprising, a six-year guerrilla war that tied down over 300,000 French troops, and gave Britain, under Wellington, a continental foothold from which to bleed France year after year.
Napoleon fought in Spain only once, in the winter campaign of 1808, when he smashed the Spanish regular armies and chased the British to Corunna. He then left for Austria and never returned. He left the war to his marshals, who quarrelled among themselves and could not suppress the guerrillas or defeat Wellington. The result was a slow, grinding attrition that drained French manpower and morale. Napoleon later called it his “Spanish ulcer.”
This is Bernard Cornwell’s war. The Sharpe novels follow a fictional rifleman through the Peninsular campaigns from 1809 to 1814, fighting alongside Wellington’s real army at Talavera, Badajoz, Salamanca and Vitoria. Napoleon is the shadow over every page: the absent Emperor whose strategic error created the war Sharpe fights.
The Russian campaign of 1812 destroyed the Grande Armée. Napoleon entered Moscow after Borodino and found it burning. The retreat through the Russian winter killed hundreds of thousands through cold, starvation and Cossack pursuit. At Leipzig in 1813 a coalition of all the European powers overwhelmed him. He abdicated in April 1814 and was exiled to the island of Elba.
He escaped in March 1815, marched on Paris, and rebuilt an army in a hundred days. He defeated the Prussians at Ligny but was destroyed at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 by the combined forces of Wellington and Blücher. He surrendered to the British and was exiled to Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he spent his last six years dictating his memoirs to the Comte de Las Cases.
The resulting Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, published in 1823, was Napoleon’s final campaign: the construction of his own legend. In it he presented himself as the champion of the Revolution, the liberator of Europe, the man betrayed by his marshals and defeated only by the Russian winter and British gold. The Memorial sold enormously and shaped the Napoleonic myth for the rest of the nineteenth century. He died on 5 May 1821, aged fifty-one.
The Napoleonic Code remains the foundation of civil law in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, much of Latin America, and parts of the Middle East and Asia. His reorganisation of the French state, from the prefectoral system to the lycées, endures largely intact. The corps system he perfected shaped military organisation for the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond.
He still divides opinion. To his admirers he was the son of the Revolution who carried its principles across Europe, abolishing feudalism and the Inquisition wherever his armies marched. To his critics he was a military dictator who plunged the continent into twenty years of war, re-established slavery in the French Caribbean in 1802, and governed by conscription, censorship and police surveillance. The truth, as most modern historians acknowledge, contains both. The Napoleonic myth endures because it answers a persistent human fascination with the idea of one extraordinary individual reshaping the world by force of will.
Fiction · Bernard Cornwell
Napoleon is the shadow over every Sharpe novel, but he is rarely seen directly. Sharpe fights against Napoleon’s armies for fourteen books without ever meeting the Emperor. He glimpses Napoleon at a distance during Waterloo, and encounters him briefly on St Helena in the final novel, Sharpe’s Devil. Cornwell portrays Napoleon as a genius whose hubris destroyed his own creation: brilliant at war, catastrophic in judgement, and always, to the riflemen who fought him, the distant cause of everything.
Genuine verbatim extracts from published public-domain sources
I come, like Themistocles, to seek the hospitality of the British nation. I place myself under the protection of their laws, which I claim from your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous, of my enemies.
SourceMémorial de Sainte-Hélène by Emmanuel de Las Cases, 1823. Napoleon’s letter of surrender to the Prince Regent, July 1815. Public domain.
If the fighting went against me, I should retire to Kamtchatka rather than cede provinces.
SourceWith Napoleon in Russia: The Memoirs of General de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza. Public domain.
Bonaparte dictated with great ease. He never wrote anything with his own hand. He spoke to the subalterns in a tone of good-fellowship, which delighted them all.
SourceMémoires de Madame de Rémusat, 1880. Available via Fordham University Modern History Sourcebook. Public domain.
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