Origins
Napoleon Bonaparte was born Napoleone di Buonaparte on 15 August 1769 at Ajaccio, on the French-administered island of Corsica. Corsica had been transferred from the Republic of Genoa to France one year before his birth; his family belonged to the minor Corsican-Italian nobility. He was educated at French military academies (Brienne and the École Militaire in Paris), trained as an artillery officer, and commissioned in 1785 at age 16.
His early career was dominated by the French Revolution. He served in the Republican army through the 1790s, distinguished himself at the Siege of Toulon (1793) and the suppression of a Parisian Royalist insurrection (1795, the “whiff of grapeshot”), and obtained command of the Italian campaign in 1796 at age 26.
The Italian and Egyptian campaigns
The Italian campaign of 1796–1797 was a remarkable military success. Napoleon’s underfunded and ill-equipped Army of Italy defeated successive Austrian armies through a year of fast-moving operations in northern Italy, producing the Treaty of Campo Formio (October 1797) that effectively dissolved the medieval Republic of Venice and reorganized northern Italian politics under French influence.
The Egyptian campaign of 1798–1799 was less militarily successful but established Napoleon’s political-cultural reputation. The campaign reached Cairo, fought the Battle of the Pyramids (July 1798), and produced the rediscovery of the Rosetta Stone (which would eventually allow Champollion to decode hieroglyphics in 1822). The British naval victory at the Battle of the Nile (August 1798) stranded Napoleon’s army in Egypt. He abandoned his force and returned to France in autumn 1799.
The Consulate and Empire
Napoleon’s Coup of 18 Brumaire (9–10 November 1799) overthrew the Directory and established the Consulate, with himself as First Consul. He was 30. The political situation in France permitted (and substantially required) the consolidation of revolutionary institutional reform. Napoleon’s first years as First Consul produced the Concordat with the Catholic Church (1801, normalizing Catholic religious practice in France while subordinating the clergy to state authority), the Civil Code (Code Napoléon, 1804, the comprehensive codification of French civil law), the establishment of the Bank of France (1800), the reform of the French educational system (the Lycées, the École Polytechnique), and the institutional consolidation of the prefectures as the administrative units of departmental government.
He crowned himself Emperor of the French at Notre-Dame on 2 December 1804, with Pope Pius VII in attendance. The empire was a constitutional monarchy in the post-revolutionary tradition, not a return to Bourbon legitimist absolutism — Napoleon styled himself “Emperor by the Grace of God and the Constitutions of the Republic.”
The wars
The military campaigns of the empire — the Napoleonic Wars — dominated European politics from 1805 to 1815. The major engagements:
Austerlitz (2 December 1805) destroyed a combined Austrian-Russian army and produced the Treaty of Pressburg that ended the Holy Roman Empire (formally dissolved in 1806).
Jena and Auerstedt (14 October 1806) destroyed the Prussian army in a single afternoon.
Friedland (June 1807) and the Treaty of Tilsit (July 1807) brought Russia briefly into alliance with France and established Napoleonic political dominance from the Atlantic to the Russian frontier.
The empire reached its territorial maximum around 1810: France itself, the satellite kingdoms (Italy, Naples, Spain, Holland, Westphalia), the Confederation of the Rhine, the Duchy of Warsaw, and most of the Adriatic and Illyrian coasts. The continental population under direct or indirect Napoleonic control was approximately 80 million.
The collapse
The Napoleonic system collapsed in two stages. The Russian campaign of 1812 (June–December) was the decisive military disaster. Napoleon invaded Russia with approximately 685,000 troops — the largest army assembled in European history to that date. The army reached Moscow (which the Russians abandoned and burned) but could not force a political surrender. The retreat in winter destroyed the army; approximately 100,000 survivors returned across the Niemen.
The War of the Sixth Coalition (1813–1814) progressively pushed the depleted French armies back. The decisive engagement was the Battle of Leipzig (16–19 October 1813), the largest land battle in European history before WWI — approximately 600,000 troops engaged, approximately 100,000 casualties. The coalition forces entered Paris on 31 March 1814. Napoleon abdicated on 6 April and was exiled to Elba.
The Hundred Days (March–July 1815) was Napoleon’s brief return to power after escaping Elba. The Seventh Coalition assembled against him. The decisive engagement was the Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815), at which combined British-Dutch and Prussian forces under Wellington and Blücher defeated the French army in the rolling country south of Brussels. Napoleon abdicated for the second time and surrendered to the British. He was exiled to Saint Helena, a small British island in the south Atlantic.
Death and legacy
Napoleon died at Saint Helena on 5 May 1821, aged 51. The official cause was stomach cancer (which had also killed his father); a long-running alternative theory of arsenic poisoning has been variously revived and rejected by subsequent toxicological analysis of preserved hair samples. His body was returned to France in 1840 and interred at Les Invalides in Paris.
The substantive Napoleonic legacy is institutional. The Code Napoléon — codified French civil law published in 1804 — became the foundation of every civil-law tradition in continental Europe, Latin America, Louisiana, Quebec, parts of the Middle East, and Japan. The administrative system of the prefectures, the centralized French state, the unified national education system, the meritocratic civil service, and the secular relationship between church and state all date from the Napoleonic reorganization.
The Napoleonic European wars also produced the political-territorial map of 19th-century Europe (consolidated at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815) and the nationalist political ideologies that would shape European politics until the World Wars. The post-Napoleonic period inaugurated the European political-philosophical preoccupation with the figure of the great man — the individual whose personal capacity reshapes the institutional history of a continent.