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History Books » Historical Figures

The best books on napoleon, recommended by andrew roberts.

Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

How did Napoleon Bonaparte, an upstart Corsican, go on to conquer half of Europe in the 16 years of his rule? Was he a military genius? And was he really that short? Historian Andrew Roberts , author of a bestselling biography of Napoleon , introduces us to the books that shaped how he sees l'Empereur —including little-known sources from those who knew Napoleon personally. Read more history book recommendations on Five Books

Interview by Charles J. Styles

The Campaigns of Napoleon by David G Chandler

Talleyrand by Duff Cooper

With Eagles to Glory: Napoleon and His German Allies in the 1809 Campaign by John H Gill

Private Memoirs Of The Court Of Napoleon by Louis François Joseph Bausset-Roquefort

With Napoleon in Russia: Memoirs of General de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza by Armand de Caulaincourt

1 The Campaigns of Napoleon by David G Chandler

2 talleyrand by duff cooper, 3 with eagles to glory: napoleon and his german allies in the 1809 campaign by john h gill, 4 private memoirs of the court of napoleon by louis françois joseph bausset-roquefort, 5 with napoleon in russia: memoirs of general de caulaincourt, duke of vicenza by armand de caulaincourt.

I f you were to explain the significance of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) to someone who knew nothing about him, what would you say?

I argue that although he didn’t have much to do with the French Revolution itself, as he was too young, he nonetheless kept the best bits of the Revolution—equality before the law, religious tolerance, meritocracy—for France and the countries that France conquered. The Code Napoleon was still in effect in the Rhineland until 1900, for example, and it underlies modern European legal systems to this day.

He got rid of the worst bits, like the mass guillotining, the Reign of Terror, the various mad ideas they had like the ten-day week, abolishing Christianity, and so on. He was the person who brought France into the 19th century with huge reforms of administration and finance. He was a moderniser.

You mentioned his relationship with the Revolution. I think there’s something paradoxical about it. He’d declare things like “I am the Revolution”, and the Napoleonic Code did enshrine revolutionary principles like civic equality into law. But didn’t he also curtail the rights of women and reinstate slavery in the Caribbean sugar colonies? Some would argue that the main constitution itself was structurally undemocratic, with an unelected senate, even if it was put to the people in a plebiscite.

The Code Napoleon was not good for women , but then they were hardly over-endowed with rights before the Revolution. He went on to abolish slavery , of course, not once but twice. He did reinstitute it in 1802, but abolished it again in 1814. So, he had an in-out/in-out policy with slavery. When I say a ‘moderniser’, I mean a moderniser in the context of the times, not a moderniser in the context of Tony Blair.

Joining the dots between the French Revolution and Napoleon’s ascendency, how did France go from establishing a Republic and executing their king to welcoming an emperor barely a decade later?

I think his military successes first in Italy in 1796 and also in 1800 as well as his creation of the civil code were essential to understanding how they able to recognise that he wasn’t a king . Being an emperor and being a king were very different things. They were perfectly happy to have an empire, which they saw as being based on republican principles, with a Napoleon rather than Bourbon at the top of the tree.

So, there wasn’t any lingering republican resistance?

No, there was—especially in the army. The French army was considered to be highly republican. There was resistance from people like Marshal Bernadotte to Napoleon calling himself an emperor in December 1804. But it was not unpopular in the rest of the country.

I really enjoyed your own biography of Napoleon , which was awarded the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoléon. It’s an excellent read and continues to be an international bestseller in both UK and US editions. It was also one of the first books to build upon the publication of some 33,000 of Napoleon’s letters. I’m curious to know what you found to be the most striking revelations from them. Did they overturn any major myths?

There are still dozens of myths and misconceptions about Napoleon. But what I came across most powerfully among the letters was his capacity for compartmentalising his mind. He could completely ignore what was happening at the time, even during or after battles or when the Kremlin was burning, and concentrate on running parts of his empire, or on setting up the rules of a girls’ school, or on telling a prefect that he shouldn’t be seen at the opera with his mistress. He had this incredible capacity for, as he put it, pulling out a drawer in his mind, dealing with whatever was in it, and then closing it again.

If we’re talking about myths, I suppose the main one to get out of the way is his height!

Your first book choice is The Campaigns of Napoleon by David Chandler. Can you tell us about this one and why you’ve recommended it?

It’s a totally comprehensive history of all of Napoleon’s campaigns. Chandler wrote it, I think, in the late 60s, and yet it still holds up very well as an overall history of Napoleon’s fighting. Perfectly understandably, it doesn’t include everything else about Napoleon—the politics, the personality, the 27 mistresses and all the rest of it—nor is it intending to do that. It’s just doing the military side of it all. But it is an absolutely encyclopaedic run-through of all of Napoleon’s battles.

So, this is a must-have for military history buffs?

It is indeed. David Chandler reissued it several times and updated it with the latest thought on Napoleon’s battles. If there was something new said on the Battle of Austerlitz or something like that, he would then reissue the book with that new information in it. So, you want to buy the last iteration of it before David died.

Napoleon is often labelled a “military genius”. Notwithstanding his ultimate defeat, what is the best way to support that judgement?

I think the fact that he was able to fight so many different kinds of battles. The reason that he’s a genius is that he managed to win battles whether he outnumbered the enemy or was outnumbered by the enemy, whether he was moving forwards or backwards, whether or not he was having his right or left flank enveloped, or whether he was enveloping the enemies. Or sometimes he could do a double-envelopment, which is one of the most difficult manoeuvres in warfare. He managed to pull that off.

“It is an absolutely encyclopaedic run through of all of Napoleon’s battles”

Napoleon had equal dexterity when it came to commanding infantry, cavalry, and artillery, even though he was himself educated as an artilleryman. He’s also extremely good in coalition warfare—in striking at the hinge between his enemies but also keeping his own coalitions in order. His invasion of Russia involved something like 20 countries. You have, therefore, a commander who is incredibly dextrous and capable of adapting to whatever military circumstance he’s facing.

In terms of his military weaknesses, we undoubtedly have naval warfare, but he also had difficulty with guerrilla insurgencies in the Peninsular War.

That’s right and, of course, the guerrilla insurgencies in the Russian campaign as well. He was no good at sea. At all. He just didn’t understand how ships worked. That was a huge lacuna in his capacity and his knowledge. As is what we now call “asymmetrical warfare”, where the enemy doesn’t actually put up an army in the field.

Would you say Napoleon was deluded about his own naval capabilities?

Yes. He didn’t recognise that he was rubbish at sea at all. He thought that you could tell an admiral to do things at sea in much the same way that you could tell a general to do things on land. But, of course, the whole process is very very different—not least because of the wind!

There were various points in your book where Napoleon is still trying to fund naval expansion and is putting men out in ships for warfare despite them never having been at sea before.

That’s right. To give him his due, though, he was up against the Royal Navy which was at the peak of its efficiency. Britain was putting one third of its national spend into the navy. With admirals like the Earl of St Vincent and Collingwood and obviously Nelson, they had endless extremely talented admirals and an extremely can-do attitude towards maritime fighting in the period of fighting sail. Napoleon was really up against an absolutely superb organisation in the Royal Navy. One has to give him his due, but there are no Napoleonic naval victories.

The Napoleonic Wars are very complex and involve coalitions taking on Napoleon at different points. How much can we say with generality about what provoked them?

Here was somebody who was a profoundly radical force that each of these legitimist monarchies like the Hapsburgs of Austria and the Romanovs of Russia and the Hohenzollerns of Prussia were extremely nervous about. They saw what had happened to the Bourbons in France, and they didn’t want it to happen at home. So, this cold wind of modernisation that Napoleon unleashed on Europe was something that they were very keen to try to . . . whatever you do to a wind. That’s the reason.

So, he has inherited international hostility already because of the Revolution?

That’s right, yes. But also, they didn’t see him as a legitimate monarch. There were no ‘Bonapartes’ before him. His statement that he wanted to be the Rudolf of his dynasty, i.e. the founding father like Rudolf Hapsburg had been, was seen to be impossibly pretentious—not least because Rudolf came from the 13th century and they were in the 18th century.

There are two cases of Napoleon launching an offensive war. The rest of the time, people are declaring war on him. So, would you say this image of Napoleon stomping across Europe, declaring war on everybody, annexing their territory and so on, is completely wrong?

Yes, completely wrong. He started the Peninsular War and he started the 1812 Russian campaign. Other than that, each of the wars was started by the coalitions against him.

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And the cases where Napoleon does initiate a war seem largely to do with enforcing the ‘Continental System’—his attempt to weaken Britain economically by blocking trade—rather than building an empire for empire’s sake.

Precisely, yes. He didn’t believe in empire for empire’s sake; he recognised that he could overstretch French resources very dangerously and very easily. But he did want to try to force England to the negotiating table. The way he thought he could do that was to hit us in our pocket and try to cut us off from all European markets.

That’s why he invaded Portugal, which was unwilling to take part in the Continental System—being a very old ally of England’s, going back to 1383—and it’s also why, ultimately, he invaded Russia after the tsar ripped up the Tilsit agreement and started trading openly with Britain. It’s a fascinating thing that, as you say, the two aggressive wars that Napoleon started began for mercantile protectionist reasons. It was to try to force the merchants of London to put pressure on the Whig and Tory governments to make peace with him.

But the problem with enforcing this policy of economic strangulation against the Brits was their sea power.

Exactly. When you can land anywhere at all, when you can set up various places off the coast of Italy and off the coast of Germany which are effectively massive freebooting piracy operations of free-trade in everything, it’s just something that is not going to work. His attempt to stimulate local production and an industrial revolution in France was also something that never truly got off the ground.

Britain and France are continuously at war from 1803 onwards until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, a period of war unmatched in any of the other coalitions. What do you think is the main motivation for why the Brits are so uncompromising?

Let’s move on to your next book. This is Duff Cooper’s biography of the diplomat Talleyrand, whose political life encompasses the rise and fall of Napoleon and beyond.

Talleyrand had a totally extraordinary political life. He supported six different separate regimes in his career and, naturally, got a reputation for being a turncoat. Some people have argued, including Duff Cooper in this brilliant biography, that he did have some central messages that he believed all his life—like liberalism and an affection for the English-style constitution. But the key reason to read this book is that it’s literature as much as history. It’s a beautifully written evocation of an era that Duff Cooper, having been British ambassador to Paris, knew well and actually saw the last glimmers of.

It’s incredible that Talleyrand flees the Reign of Terror, goes to England and then to America, returns to France in 1796 and manages to become foreign minister within a year.

And stays foreign minister or in the diplomatic sphere in some way or another for the rest of his life. He thereby met almost all the important people in Europe and was at the table when all the great decisions were made. He was born an aristocrat and was later an unfrocked bishop. He had a lame foot rather like Byron and Goebbels which apparently turns you into a sex maniac; he turned his niece into his mistress which I think today would have him defenestrated but, nonetheless, no one seemed to hold that against him either.

What does the book tell us about the relation between Talleyrand and Napoleon? What are the main ways we can trace his influence on Napoleon as foreign minister or vice-elector?

It tells us that it was always rocky. Napoleon, quite rightly, didn’t trust him. Talleyrand was working especially with the Russians behind Napoleon’s back. Despite being extremely witty and obviously wonderful company, he was a dangerous person to have working for you. Talleyrand generally thought that France should be at peace and, of course, that’s very difficult when you’re the foreign minister of a conqueror.

I don’t see that you can call Napoleon a warmonger given that, as we’ve said, of the seven wars of the coalitions he only started two. But I think there was a legitimist jihad against him and against the French Revolution. And he had to fight those. But, overall, Talleyrand was someone who, as a good negotiator and a diplomat, wanted peace.

And was willing to betray Napoleon’s military secrets in the process?

He was willing to betray absolutely everybody in the process. It wasn’t just Napoleon; he betrayed five different regimes in the course of his life. I’m certain that had he lived any longer, he would have betrayed the July Monarchy as well.

It’s surprising that when Napoleon found out Talleyrand was selling military secrets to his enemies, he didn’t exile or execute him.

This is another reason to recognise that Napoleon is not a proto-Hitler in the way he’s been portrayed by many British historians. If he were a proto-Hitler, he would have shot Talleyrand and Fouché (his police minister) years before. Napoleon was a dictator politically, in that he dictated the laws of France and what happened. But I don’t think he has anything in common with the 20th-century dictators like Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler , and Stalin.

But what about atrocities like executing thousands of prisoners of war in Jaffa, for instance?

When you say “for instance”, that implies that there were 20 or 30 Jaffas but there weren’t. There’s one at Jaffa and then, after that, in 1796 in Padua, Italy, he also let the troops run riot. But other than that, there just aren’t the mass executions. There aren’t the 40,000 people who died during the Reign of Terror, for example.

“Napoleon was a dictator politically in that he dictated the laws of France and what happened. But I don’t think he has anything in common with the 20th-century dictators”

I go into Jaffa in some detail in my book about how the men who he executed had earlier promised to fight against France. And then, six weeks later, they were captured fighting against France. According to the very harsh rules of law in the late eighteenth century, they forfeited their lives.

There’s a stereotype about Napoleon being indifferent to the immense human cost incurred by trying to establish French hegemony in Europe. Do you think this is misguided?

Yes, I think it’s hugely misguided. I think that commanders throughout history have had to harden their hearts to the inevitable losses made, but I don’t think he ever threw men into battle willy-nilly. He was one of the great commanders in history and one of the great soldiers of all time. Great soldiers don’t do that. And he was personally affected. There are times when he’s in tears in his tent after a battle, in the same way that Wellington was.

The idea of him being some cold-hearted unemotional figure profoundly misunderstands him, as does the idea of him being humourless. Throughout my book, there are something like 80 or 90 Napoleon jokes. He was constantly making humorous remarks that even 200 years later remain extremely funny.

I enjoyed the one where, in the midst of battle, an officer has his helmet thrown off by the impact of a cannonball, only for Napoleon to casually remark “It’s a good job you’re not any taller.”

Let’s move on to your third book. This is With Eagles to Glory: Napoleon and His German Allies in the 1809 Campaign by John H. Gill.

This is a tremendously detailed military history of the Danube campaign of 1809. This was a very important campaign because it knocked the Austrians out of the Napoleonic Wars for the third time. The only way for them to deal with Napoleon after that was for the archduchess Marie-Louise to marry Napoleon and try to bring him into the system like that. He fought a lightning campaign up the Danube, capturing Vienna, fighting battles such as Aspern-Essling and Wagram. This is Napoleon at his classic best. You can see him in this book just outmaneuvering the Austrian army again and again.

One of the distinctive things about this book is that it drew a lot of attention to the 30,000 German troops fighting on behalf of Napoleon.

Yes, this book is an important corrective to the idea that Napoleon’s forces were all French. They certainly weren’t. When Napoleon invaded Russia, only something like 55% of his army were French. He invaded Russia with 615,000 men which was the same size as Paris at the time. It’s very important to see the Napoleonic Wars as coalition wars, both on his side and against him. The book does lots of other things as well, but it certainly underlines that very important factor about Napoleon’s wars.

These soldiers were all supplied from the Confederation of the Rhine. Can you tell us about that and when it was established?

It was established at the time of the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in August 1806. After the Holy Roman Empire vaporised out of existence, it became Napoleon’s tool—his vehicle—for bringing together the north German states. He called himself the “Protector” of the Confederation. They stayed as such for nine years or so before it itself collapsed at the time of the 1813 campaign. The battles of Leipzig and Dresden were pretty much the death-knell for the Confederation of the Rhine.

I want to ask about military culture and attitudes towards Napoleon among soldiers from the client states. Presumably the German troops didn’t have the same patriotic fervour motivating them as French soldiers, but they weren’t indifferent either.

There’s a huge difference. Some of them some of the time are just as enthusiastic about Napoleon as the French. The Polish lancers, for example, believed that Napoleon was going to make Poland an independent state and give it its own sovereignty for the first time since it had been sliced up in the partitions. And so, they were incredibly excited about fighting for Napoleon. In fact, Napoleon is the only individual named in the Polish national anthem. That’s a good one for a pub quiz!

Your last two books are written by people who had great proximity to Napoleon. Let’s look at Private Memoirs Of The Court Of Napoleon by Louis François Joseph Bausset-Roquefort. This seems a fairly unknown book.

Yes, it’s a very little-known book but an extremely interesting one. Bausset was Napoleon’s palace chamberlain who followed him around the campaigns and lived in his palaces. He knew the family very well indeed and wrote these memoirs even though it was dangerous to do that once the Bourbons had been restored. He was still an admirer of Napoleon and is the living personification of the untruth of the epithet that “no man is a hero to his valet.”

Bausset definitely did admire Napoleon—not blind hero-worship by any means, but he was somebody who saw Napoleon for what he was. This book explodes many of the myths about Napoleon being a vicious and unpleasant individual. Instead, he comes across as a good employer, a witty man, and someone who had normal human emotions.

I suppose it says a lot about a person when all of your personal servants are begging to go into exile with you.

Well, exactly. And not just any old exile. One could understand why they might have wanted to go to Elba, which is a perfectly nice, warm, pleasant place. One would go on holiday to Elba, but nobody would go on holiday to Saint Helena. This is a windswept, godforsaken, tiny, eight-by-ten-mile island plopped bang in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It takes six days by boat to get there from Cape Town, or at least it did before the airport came in. And a very boring journey it is too, I can tell you. And these 21 servants were basically fighting each other for the right to accompany into exile. It shows the charisma of the man.

You mentioned that Bausset goes with him on the campaigns, but what do we find out about Napoleon in a more domestic setting?

That he was a kind husband and a loving father. He was not the domestic monster that the Bourbon literature has been so keen to present him as; many books, I’m afraid, have taken it for granted to be true.

There are some quite eccentric arrangements in Napoleon’s imperial household as well. I’m thinking of his first wife Josephine’s menagerie.

Yes, having orangutans around at lunchtime, zebras in the fields, and black swans at Malmaison. That was her idea, of course, but he indulged it and paid for it. But having exotic animals at that time was very much a royal pursuit and it had been for years. I think Cosimo III de’ Medici had a hippopotamus or something along those lines. It was a way of proving your wealth and status to have unusual animals around. Josephine did actually dress the orangutan in a chemise and have it come to tea parties.

You mentioned that this was to flaunt wealth and status. Was that a slightly sore thing to do considering the tensions building up to the Revolution?

Let’s go on to your final choice. This is the Memoirs of General de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza.

These are fascinating. Caulaincourt was the ambassador to Russia and was also Napoleon’s master of the horse. He was an aristocrat, born and bred. At least according to his memoirs, he was the person who informed Napoleon not to invade Russia. The memoirs were only published in 1935, and there’s no reason why he should have lied in them, owing to the fact that they were never going to be published in his lifetime.

Once he had warned Napoleon, he came with him and was the only person on the sledge that accompanied Napoleon back to France from the catastrophe of the 1812 campaign. It’s in his sledge that we get Napoleon saying “from the sublime to the ridiculous is just one small step.” The memoirs are immensely well-written, encapsulating and pretty crushing for Napoleon’s reputation with regard to the 1812 campaign.

So, it’s not a panegyric?

Not in the slightest. But equally it’s not a denunciation. Caulaincourt stayed with Napoleon up until the 1814 abdication and is a trustworthy source. He’s not anti-Napoleon. It seems that he kept scraps of paper that he used as his notes for this book. It’s a pretty fabulous and invaluable source for the period.

The Russia campaign is regarded as one of the worst defeats in military history. Can you give an outline of the factors that made it so catastrophic?

Napoleon went into Russia on June 21, 1812 with 615,000 men, and by the time he crossed the river Niemen back in the other direction in December, he had lost over half a million of those men. In that sense, you have to go back to the ancient world to see such an enormous military catastrophe.

“Napoleon went into Russia on 21 June 1812 with 615,000 men. By the time he crossed the river Niemen back in the other direction in December, he had lost over half a million of those men”

In a nutshell, the reason was that he was drawn further and further into Russia. He captured Moscow, something that Hitler never did, but he stayed there too long. He won a battle called Maloyaroslavets and decided the next day to retreat back via Borodino, which was a big battle that he’d won on 7 September. It turned out to be the wrong route back and his army was encompassed by blizzards. Although he won each of the formal engagements, the army was swallowed up by the snows of Russia. It’s a story of cannibalism and utter despair and disaster, with a few flashes of redemption such as the crossing of the Berezina river. Otherwise, it’s up there with Xenophon.

We’ve mentioned it already, but it’s important to keep in mind that Napoleon wasn’t marching on Russia to try and annex it. He was trying to force Russia’s compliance with the Continental System.

Yes, he had no territorial desires. He had an army twice the size of the Russian one, and had defeated the Russians twice before. Napoleon only intended to fight on the outskirts; he only intended to go in 50 miles or so and wanted a three-week campaign. Instead, it turned out to be a six-month campaign and carried on for literally thousands of miles there and back. It’s a classic example of mission creep.

The Russians also pursued a scorched earth policy, rather like they did in 1941 and 1942, which meant that there was mass starvation. Napoleon lost 100,000 of the troops of his central thrust to typhus—a horrible disease where a louse will bury itself into your skin and then defecate in your skin and then die. You then die about four days later in immense pain. It’s a horrible way to go.

With armies in those days, everyone had lice. If the weather’s too cold for you to change your clothes more than once every six weeks or so, then you’re going to get lice. The soldiers all huddled together, very close to one another, because it was so cold outside. So, their lice jumped from one soldier to another. There wasn’t a single person, including the emperor, who didn’t have lice. They didn’t work out a cure for typhus until 1911; it wasn’t properly diagnosed until over a century later. It was, in every way, an absolute nightmare of a campaign.

It’s largely remembered for the merciless winter, but the immense heat of the summer advance was almost as damaging.

That killed a lot of horses. And, of course, it’s almost entirely a horse-and-bullock-drawn invasion. The heat and the thirst were appalling on the way into Russia, yes. It was biblical.

There are three more years before Waterloo in 1815 but, in your view, was the Russian campaign the turning point?

Yes. Up until 1811, Napoleon was the master of Europe. From December 1812 onwards, he was on the skids. You can’t lose half a million men and not expect your throne to topple.

But he went out fighting.

He did. The 1814 campaign involved small numbers of men but, nonetheless, he won four battles in five days there. He was back to his old form. These were significant, rather brilliant military victories. But, in the end, with the whole of Europe against him and invading, he was fought to a standstill and then very comprehensively defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.

Just to end, what do you consider to be Napoleon’s greatest achievements that have endured?

I think the beauty of Paris is very largely down to him. He rebuilt Paris. We love going and taking our loved ones there and crossing the four bridges that he built and seeing the fountains and great buildings like the Madeleine Church. That’s a testament to him. He designed the Arc de Triomphe , but it was only built after his death. Although as an Englishman I prefer English common law, nonetheless the whole of French and European law is much more closely built on the Napoleonic Code than anything that had gone before, including Roman law. Napoleon is someone who every Frenchman should be proud of. Other things like the Légion d’honneur and the Conseil d’État are still around. In fact, the numbering of its houses in its streets from the Seine outwards is all down to him. There are also the reservoirs. Even 200 years after his death, it’s difficult to imagine Paris or France without the influence of Napoleon Bonaparte.

October 28, 2019

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Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts is a British historian and journalist. He is a Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, a Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New York Historical Society. He has written or edited nineteen books—including internationally bestselling biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill—which have been translated into 23 languages.

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Top Ten Books on Napoleon Bonaparte

• Napoleon: A Concise Biography by David A. Bell

David Bell emphasizes the astonishing sense of human possibility--for both good and ill--that Napoleon represented. By his late twenties, Napoleon was already one of the greatest generals in European history. At thirty, he had become an absolute master of Europe's most powerful country. In his early forties, he ruled a European empire more powerful than any since Rome, fighting wars that changed the shape of the continent and brought death to millions. Then everything collapsed, leading him to spend his last years in miserable exile in the South Atlantic.

Bell emphasizes the importance of the French Revolution in understanding Napoleon's career. The revolution made possible the unprecedented concentration of political authority that Napoleon accrued, and his success in mobilizing human and material resources. Without the political changes brought about by the revolution, Napoleon could not have fought his wars. Without the wars, he could not have seized and held onto power. Though his virtual dictatorship betrayed the ideals of liberty and equality, his life and career were revolutionary.

• Napoleon: The Path to Power by Philip Dwyer

Philip Dwyer sheds new light on Napoleon’s inner life—especially his darker side and his passions—to reveal a ruthless, manipulative, driven man whose character has been disguised by the public image he carefully fashioned to suit the purposes of his ambition. Dwyer focuses acutely on Napoleon’s formative years, from his Corsican origins to his French education, from his melancholy youth to his flirtation with radicals of the French Revolution, from his first military campaigns in Italy and Egypt to the political-military coup that brought him to power in 1799. One of the first truly modern politicians, Napoleon was a master of “spin,” using the media to project an idealized image of himself. Dwyer’s biography of the young Napoleon provides a fascinating new perspective on one of the great figures of modern history.

• Napoleon: A Life by Adam Zamoyski

The story of Napoleon has been written many times. In some versions, he is a military genius, in others a war-obsessed tyrant. Here, historian Adam Zamoyski cuts through the mythology and explains Napoleon against the background of the European Enlightenment, and what he was himself seeking to achieve. This most famous of men is also the most hidden of men, and Zamoyski dives deeper than any previous biographer to find him. Beautifully written, Napoleon brilliantly sets the man in his European context.

• The Campaigns of Napoleon by David G Chandler

The Napoleonic wars were nothing if not complex—an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of moves and intentions, which by themselves went a long way towards baffling and dazing his conventionally-minded opponents into that state of disconcerting moral disequilibrium which so often resulted in their catastrophic defeat.

The Campaigns of Napoleon is an exhaustive analysis and critique of Napoleon's art of war as he himself developed and perfected it in the major military campaigns of his career. Napoleon disavowed any suggestion that he worked from formula (“Je n'ai jamais eu un plan d'opérations”), but military historian David Chandler demonstrates this was at best only a half-truth. To be sure, every operation Napoleon conducted contained unique improvisatory features. But there were from the first to the last certain basic principles of strategic maneuver and battlefield planning that he almost invariably put into practice. To clarify these underlying methods, as well as the style of Napoleon's fabulous intellect, Mr. Chandler examines in detail each campaign mounted and personally conducted by Napoleon, analyzing the strategies employed, revealing wherever possible the probable sources of his subject's military ideas.

Unfortunately, this is an older book and it only comes in hardcover. Due to its high price, we recommend that you check it out from a library.

• With Eagles to Glory: Napoleon and His German Allies in the 1809 Campaign by John H Gill

When Napoleon’s Grand Armee went to war against the might of the Habsburg empire in 1809, its forces included more than 100,000 allied German troops. From his earliest imperial campaigns, these troops provided played a key role as Napoleon swept from victory to victory and in 1809 their fighting abilities were crucial to the campaign. With Napoleon’s French troops depleted and debilitated after the long struggle in the Spanish War, the German troops for the first time played a major combat role in the center of the battle line.

In this epic work, John Gill presents an unprecedented and comprehensive study of this year of glory for the German soldiers fighting for Napoleon, When combat opened they were in the thick of the action, fighting within French divisions and often without any French support at all. They demonstrated tremendous skill, courage and loyalty.

• The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba From Exile to Escape by Mark Braude

In the spring of 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated. Having overseen an empire spanning half the European continent and governed the lives of some eighty million people, he suddenly found himself exiled to Elba, less than a hundred square miles of territory. Braude dramatizes this strange exile and improbable escape in granular detail and with novelistic relish, offering sharp new insights into a largely overlooked moment. He details a terrific cast of secondary characters, including Napoleon’s tragically-noble official British minder on Elba, Neil Campbell, forever disgraced for having let “Boney” slip away; and his young second wife, Marie Louise who was twenty-two to Napoleon’s forty-four, at the time of his abdication. What emerges is a surprising new perspective on one of history’s most consequential figures, which both subverts and celebrates his legendary persona.

• Waterloo by Alan Forrest

The Battle of Waterloo has cast a long shadow over Europe. It ended the French Empire and Napoleon's aspirations and it significantly altered the direction of Europe. Unsurprisingly, the meaning and significance of Waterloo are different for all of the countries that participated in the battle. Alan Forrest walks through the reader through the battle but explores the consequences and the interpretations of Waterloo. Forrest answers how we remember Waterloo. Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands all view Waterloo through different a lens.

• The End of the Old Order (Vol.1) by Frederick Kagan

Perhaps no person in history has dominated his or her own era as much as Napoleon. Despite his small physical stature, the shadow of Napoleon is cast like a colossus, compelling all who would look at that epoch to chart their course by reference to him. For this reason, most historical accounts of the Napoleonic era-and there are many-tell the same Napoleon-dominated story over and over again or focus narrowly on special aspects of it.

Frederick Kagan, a distinguished historian and military policy expert, has tapped hitherto unused archival materials from Austria, Prussia, France, and Russia, to present the history of these years from the balanced perspective of all of the major players of Europe. In The End of the Old Order readers encounter the rulers, ministers, citizens, and subjects of Europe in all of their political and military activity-from the desk of the prime minister to the pen of the ambassador, from the map of the general to the rifle of the soldier.

• The Great Retreat: Napoleon's Grand Armée in Russia by Alexander Korolev

The Great Retreat is an unprecedented, visually rich account of Napoleon’s march back from Moscow, built on a remarkable discovery of newly unearthed artifacts and archival sources. It tells the story of how Napoleon lost nearly 400,000 men to the brutal cold, poor planning, and effectively destructive harrying of the Russian army at his heels. Featuring more than 1,600 illustrations and detailed biographies of all 289 regiments and units involved in the retreat, supplemented by unforgettable eyewitness accounts, this book brings Napoleon’s retreat, and its unfathomable human cost, to life in a wholly new way. No student of Napoleon or fan of military or Russian history will want to miss it.

• The Fatal Knot: The Guerrilla War in Navarre and the Defeat of Napoleon in Spain by John Lawrence Tone

John Tone recounts the dramatic story of how, between 1808 and 1814, Spanish peasants created and sustained the world's first guerrilla insurgency movement, thereby playing a major role in Napoleon's defeat in the Peninsula War. Focusing on the army of Francisco Mina, Tone offers new insights into the origins, motives, and successes of these first guerrilla forces by interpreting the conflict from the long-ignored perspective of the guerrillas themselves.

Only months after Napoleon's invasion in 1807, Spain seemed ready to fall: its rulers were in prison or in exile, its armies were in complete disarray, and Madrid had been occupied. However, the Spanish people themselves, particularly the peasants of Navarre, proved unexpectedly resilient. In response to impending defeat, they formed makeshift governing juntas, raised new armies, and initiated a new kind of people's war of national liberation that came to be known as guerrilla warfare. Key to the peasants' success, says Tone, was the fact that they possessed both the material means and the motives to resist. The guerrillas were neither bandits nor selfless patriots but landowning peasants who fought to protect the old regime in Navarre and their established position within it.

• Talleyrand by Duff Cooper

While this book is not specifically about Napoleon, it examines the early 19th century through Tallyrand. Tallyrand was the French Foreign Minister for multiple French regimes and one of the most interesting and remarkable diplomats of the 19th century. Unique in his own age and a phenomenon in any, Charles-Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand, was a statesman of outstanding ability and extraordinary contradictions. He was a world-class rogue who held high office in five successive regimes. A well-known opportunist and a notorious bribe taker, Talleyrand’s gifts to France arguably outvalued the vast personal fortune he amassed in her service.

Once a supporter of the Revolution, after the fall of the monarchy, he fled to England and then to the United States. Talleyrand returned to France two years later and served under Napoleon, and represented France at the Congress of Vienna. Duff Cooper’s classic biography contains all the vigor, elegance, and intellect of its remarkable subject.

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‘Napoleon: A Life,’ by Andrew Roberts

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By Duncan Kelly

• Nov. 13, 2014

On July 22, 1789, a week after the storming of the Bastille in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to his older brother, Joseph, that there was nothing much to worry about. “Calm will return. In a month.” His timing was off, but perhaps he took the misjudgment to heart because he spent the rest of his life trying to bring glory and order to France by building a new sort of empire. By the time he was crowned emperor on Dec. 2, 1804, he could say, “I am the Revolution.” It was, according to the historian Andrew Roberts’s epically scaled new biography, “Napoleon: A Life,” both the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, an outsider from Corsica who rose to the apex of French political life, and simultaneously a “defining moment of the Enlightenment,” fixing the “best” of the French Revolution through his legal, educational and administrative reforms. Such broad contours get at what Napoleon meant by saying to his literary hero Goethe at a meeting in Erfurt, “Politics is fate.”

Napoleon didn’t mean fatalism by this, rather that political action is unavoidable if you want personal and national glory. It requires a mastery of fortune, and a willingness to be ruthless when necessary. If this sounds Machiavellian, that’s because it is — Machiavelli’s arguments about politics informed Napoleon’s self-consciousness, whether in appraising fortune as a woman or a river to be tamed and harnessed, or assuming that in politics it is better to be feared than loved. Such views went hand in hand with the grand visions of politics outlined in the ancient histories and biographies Napoleon revered as a young man. “Bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine” was Napoleon’s cool if brutal reminder of an ever-present item on his exhausting schedule.

His strategy always included dashing off thousands of letters and plans, in a personal regime calling for little sleep, much haste and a penchant for being read to while taking baths so as not to waste even a minute. He compartmentalized ruthlessly, changing tack between lobbying for more shoes and brandy for the army at one minute, to directing the personal lives of his siblings or writing love letters to the notorious Josephine at another; here ensuring extravagant financial “contributions” from those whom he had vanquished, there discussing the booty to send back to Paris, particularly from the extraordinary expedition in Egypt where his “ savants had missed nothing.” The personal and the political ran alongside each other in his mind.

Yet when his longtime collaborator but fair-weather political friend, the diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, suggested that Napoleon try to make those he conquered learn to love France, Napoleon replied that this was an irrelevance. “ Aimer : I don’t really know what this means when applied to politics,” he said. Still, if grand strategy and national interest lay behind foreign affairs, there were nevertheless personal rules of conduct to uphold. Talleyrand was a party to Napoleon’s strategy since supporting his coup d’état against the French Directory in 1799. That was O.K. And by short-selling securities he made millions for himself. But he was called out by Napoleon and dismissed as vice grand elector when found facing both ways politically at a crucial moment.

Napoleon understood those temptations because he was also flexible enough to tilt toward the winning side, regularly supporting any form of local religion that could help him militarily. Nonetheless, Roberts’s Napoleon is a soldier, statesman and “bona fide intellectual,” who rode his luck for longer than most intellectuals in politics ever do.

Testing himself against fate seems to have been his mantra. A relative outsider to the French elite, he forced his way up its ranks through ferocious hard work, making the best of his natural talents, particularly in mathematics and artillery. He was among the few selected for the prestigious École Militaire in Paris, and there he grasped every opportunity. He was a severe young man with little small talk. “His favorite entertainments were intellectual rather than social,” though he eventually cultivated a happy marriage with Josephine, only later to annul it for strategic reasons.

Having arrived early at the view that political life needed to be determined by an all-powerful state, he was delighted when first appointed to a part of it in the Historical and Topographical Bureau of the War Ministry, which was described as “the most sophisticated planning organization of its day.” But before gaining state power for himself, Napoleon first had to suppress the many enemies of revolutionary France, particularly Austria and what one observer called the “geopolitical expression” known as Italy.

Roberts brilliantly conveys the sheer energy and presence of Napoleon the organizational and military whirlwind who, through crisp and incessant questioning, sized up people and problems and got things done. His rapport with soldiers was unparalleled, and his ability to cultivate a stable image of authority while taking advantage of shifting situations made him not only an astonishing soldier but a terrific statesman as well. He was as comfortable in dramatic nine-hour diplomatic encounters with Prince Metternich of Austria at the Marcolini Palace, or on a raft with Czar Alexander in the middle of the Neman River discussing the reorganization of Europe, as he was slicing through enemy lines. His dynamism shines in Roberts’s set-piece chapters on major battles like Austerlitz, Jena and Marengo, turning visionary military maneuvers into politically potent moments that could bolster the four pillars of his rule at home — low taxes, property rights, centralized authority and national glory.

When his political antennas ultimately deserted him, it proved fatal. He attempted to impose, through the “continental system,” a blockade on English goods to damage an enemy he could not beat at sea, which led him toward a form of imperial overreach that backfired. England built continual coalitions against France, and eventually Napoleon fell into a coalition trap as messy as the bogs and marshes that slowed him up on his ill-fated Russian campaign. Napoleon was outthought and outmaneuvered as Moscow burned. Meanwhile, typhus wiped out nearly a fifth of his men. He was a master tactician of relatively localized battlefields, but one of his generals put his finger on Napoleon’s Russian problem. Here was “a man annihilated by the presence of space.”

In the retreat his enemies struck hard, but even then his engineers were able to pioneer an astonishing escape, erecting flexible bridges across the freezing Berezina River, hidden from the advancing Russian Army. Even this, however, couldn’t thwart the inevitable, and Napoleon tasted defeat in Leipzig. Simultaneously, Wellington entered France. The devious Talleyrand supported the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, and Napoleon was forced into exile on Elba. Though he soon retook Paris in another coup, his ultimate defeat at Waterloo was, as Roberts implies, tragic because it was so odd, the result of some elementary mistakes. During his second exile, on Saint Helena, he died of stomach cancer in 1821, at the age of 51, finally falling victim to a fate not even he could master.

By Andrew Roberts

Illustrated. 926 pp. Viking. $45.

Duncan Kelly teaches political thought at the University of Cambridge.

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• "It is the outstanding merit of Adam Zamoyski's fine new biography, Napoleon: A Life , that he insists on treating his subject as neither a superman nor a monster, but as a creature of his troubled age...Zamoyski gives us...a vivid sense of Napoleon as a protean chancer, outwardly self-confident as any man who ever lived, inwardly always wondering when his 'star' would finally set." New York Review of Books
• "Zamoyski...attempts to cut through the fantasy and retrospective exaggeration to tell the story of an extraordinary, but certainly not superhuman life.... Napoleon emerges from Mr. Zamoyski's book a willful, self-made opportunist...gifted, energetic, brave, lucky, but also a bit ridiculous." Wall Street Journal
• "Magnificent...Napoleon was neither demon nor deity. He was a man, with great talents and great flaws, often intertwined...[Mr. Zamoyski] writes beautifully." Economist
• "Zamoyski tells the personal side of Napoleon's life...his hopes, his dreams, his self-doubts." New York Journal of Books
• "Zamoyski's book is one of the finest biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte ever written." MHQ: Quarterly Journal of Military History
• "A lifetime's diligent research and profound thinking about Napoleon and his times has gone into this hugely readable, highly enjoyable and well-balanced biography. Zamoyski is at the top of his game as a biographer." Andrew Roberts, Visiting Professor, Department of War Studies, King's College, London
• "A biography of Napoleon Bonaparte that avoids the well-established military details and gives us the story of a singular man...Illuminating." Kirkus
• "Engaging and highly readable.... An inclusive life of a historical dynamo." Washington Times
• "Adam Zamoyski's 700-plus-page but very readable Napoleon: A Life ...shows how France's tired post-revolutionary leaders in 1796 recognized they were riding a tiger---but didn't expect him to eat them." World Magazine
• "A superb history of a complicated man and time." Choice
• A success in all respects, rivaling Andrew Roberts's Napoleon: A Life in astuteness and thoroughness.... The picture that emerges is of an extraordinarily gifted leader who increasingly sought short-term gain at the expense of long-term stability.... Exhaustively researched and engagingly written." Library Journal, starred review
• " Napoleon is an out and out masterpiece and a joy to read." Sir Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege
• "Always elegant in style and original in analysis. Zamoyski, a master of the sources and of the culture and politics that created his subject, produces a fresh, nuanced, beautifully written, gripping, and outstanding biography of Napoleon that reveals him to be a triumph of luck and accident as much as the invincible genius of the legend." Simon Sebag-Montefiore, author of The Romanovs and Jerusalem: the Biography
• "Adam Zamoyski has retold a story that we thought we knew and made it fresh: Stripping away two centuries of mythology, discarding the apocryphal stories and legends, he finally brings us the real Napoleon." Anne Applebaum, author of Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
• "Zamoyski sticks close to verifiable primary sources...What we get is more a historical Napoleon than the colossus of cultural memory, but a figure no less fascinating for that. Napoleon's life was a rollercoaster and Zamoyski takes us along for the ride." Toronto Star
• "A masterful historian, Zamoyski fulfills his task eloquently. Napoleon is often called a military and political genius, but in reading Zamoyski, the question arises: how much of Napoleon's perceived greatness was owing...to timing and circumstance in the stormy political world of 18th-century revolutionary France?" Winnipeg Free Press

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Napoleon the Great by Andrew Roberts review – a ‘marvellously readable’, if partial, biography

What sort of Napoleon does our generation want? This is a fast-paced account, written from inside the imperial entourage

W ill publishers still be churning out dozens of books a year about Hitler or Stalin two centuries after their deaths? Hitler took the most powerful country in Europe and wrecked it for a generation, demonstrating in the process how not to run acontinent. The one debt we owe Stalin is that he ensured Hitler’s defeat; apart from that, it is hard to think of much he did that could not have been done more effectively and more humanely in other ways. But Napoleon – another case entirely. He took a country in the throes of acute fiscal crisis and social unrest and made it the dominant power in Europe; he oversaw the shattering of the old ruling order across the continent; he reformed the government; and he transformed the very idea of what politics could be and man could do. All of these achievements proved to be irreversible. Those historians who over the past decade or so have had fun denouncing him as the first totalitarian dictator have it all wrong: no angel, to be sure, he ended up doing far more at far less cost than any modern despot.

One proof of this is his immortality. After Hitler’s death, there was mostly an embarrassed silence; after Stalin’s, little but denunciation. But when Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821, much of Europe and the Americas could not help thinking of itself as a post-Napoleonic generation. His presence haunts the pages of Stendhal and Alfred de Vigny. In a striking and prescient phrase, Chateaubriand prophesied the “despotism of his memory”, a despotism of the fantastical that in many ways made Romanticism possible and that continues to this day.

The raw material for the future Napoleon myth was provided by one of his St Helena confidants, the Comte de las Cases, whose account of conversations with the great man came out shortly after his death and ran in repeated editions throughout the century. De las Cases somehow metamorphosed the erstwhile dictator into a herald of liberty, the emperor into a slayer of dynasties rather than the founder of his own. To the “great man” school of history Napoleon was grist to their mill, and his meteoric rise redefined the meaning of heroism in the modern world. The Marxists, for all their dislike of great men, grappled endlessly with the meaning of the 18th Brumaire; indeed one of France’s most eminent Marxist historians, George Lefebvre, wrote what arguably remains the finest of all biographies of him. It was on this already vast Napoleon literature, a rich terrain for the scholar of ideas, that the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was lecturing in 1940 when he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. There he composed what became one of the classics of historiography, a book entitled Napoleon: For and Against , which charted how generations of intellectuals had happily served up one Napoleon after another. Like those poor souls who crowded the lunatic asylums of mid-19th century France convinced that they were Napoleon, generations of historians and novelists simply could not get him out of their head.

The debate runs on today no less intensely than in the past. Indeed, the man and his times are very much in fashion and we are living through something of a new golden age of Napoleonic literature. Andrew Roberts’s marvellously readable and sumptuously illustrated new book is the second of two major studies of his life to appear this year. So what kind of Napoleon does our generation need? The last one tried to pull him down off his pedestal, to emphasise the violence and the love of power that drove him, even to represent him as precursor to the dictators of the 20th century. This rather silly approach has thankfully now largely been abandoned. The title of Roberts’s book indicates the positive attitude that it shares with other current works: Roberts is keen to stress the ruler’s achievements not his crimes; he wants us to like – or at least respect – the man.

There are good reasons to go along with this. After all, although Roberts does not dwell on this point, Napoleon did more than anyone to redefine the meaning of greatness itself – by showing to later generations not only that the individual counted, but more importantly to most of our predecessors, that talent mattered more than birth. Glory depended on achievements not status, and no one worked more tirelessly than Napoleon to have an effect on the world.

Roberts demonstrates this very well. One might describe Napoleon at the start as a hard-working artillery officer, except that it was so much more than just hard work. The graft, the hours spent in meticulous preparation, were always there.

But his embrace of details was allied to an instinctive understanding of the larger picture, great personal courage, historical insight based on his constant reading, and, above all, perhaps, an appreciation of the moral and psychological dimensions of command and government. These qualities emerged first on the battlefield – and Roberts’s account of the engagements at Toulon and Marengo that propelled him to eminence are gripping – but, most unusually, they transferred equally to the realm of government. He chose his advisers well, and eclectically, and he understood that the best treatment for opposition was to absorb it rather than to crush it.

But not everything was hard work and, as Bonaparte was the first to admit, luck too favoured him at crucial moments. Because Roberts is impressive on the battles, he highlights the combination of skill and good fortune that turned the first consul into the emperor. But once we leave the battlefield, we tend to get the somewhat partial view from the court. His treatment of the civil code, for instance, is far more uncritical than it need have been. One could present Napoleon not simply as the great institution-builder he was, but as the man who ensured the French male property-owner would sleep easily at night in coming decades. That women’s rights were drastically curtailed in the new code, for instance, is not something dwelt on here, nor the immense powers it gave the state. Amid the pomp and circumstance that Roberts has such a keen eye for, the figure of Napoleon the hero of the emergent bourgeoisie passes us by. Similarly, the larger impact of Napoleonic administration on law and politics across Europe – the subject of an excellent recent book by Charles Esdaile – gets relatively short shrift.

Perhaps the best way to think of this book is as a view – essentially positive – from inside the imperial entourage. Roberts has been indefatigable in tracking down memorabilia and visiting the sites of battles, palaces and places of exile. This is all richly depicted and woven into a narrative that is told with the aplomb of an accomplished historical storyteller. But underlying structures and more long-term shifts do not seem to attract the author’s interest in the same way. The financing of war is touched on, but the difficulty Napoleon faced in matching France against the fiscal superpower across the Channel is not discussed in any detail. The same can be said for Roberts’s treatment of the complex sources of political support for and opposition to Napoleon – complex in the sense that they cannot be reduced simply to the question of whether or not one was for the ancien regime. Did Napoleon really usher in a new bourgeois order that his nephew would then clamber to power to defend 25 years later? For such questions, it is probably better to read other works. But for a fast-paced and comprehensive narrative, told with affection and sympathy, many readers will want to turn to Napoleon the Great . It is a book that sets out for a new generation exactly why he mattered and will continue to matter so long as people argue about faith, and property, and kings, and the future of Europe.

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Napoleon Bonaparte

French military general Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself the first emperor of France in 1804. His Napoleonic Code remains a model for governments worldwide.

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Napoleon has received some flack for its historical inaccuracies , such as showing the titular character shooting at pyramids. “If you want to really understand Napoleon, then you should probably do your own studying and reading,” Phoenix previously told Empire magazine . “Because if you see this film, it’s this experience told through Ridley’s eyes... What we were after was something that would capture the feeling of this man.”

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French General Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the world’s greatest military leaders who became the first emperor of France, from 1804 to 1815. Born on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, he attended military schools in France and eventually embraced his adopted home. Bonaparte steadily rose to power in the tumult of the French Revolution before seizing power in a 1799 coup. He was elected consul for life in 1802, then proclaimed the French emperor two years later. As a political leader, Bonaparte broadly transformed French society, most notably ushering in the Napoleonic Code that still serves as the basis of civil codes around the world today. During the Napoleonic Wars, the famed military tactician expanded France’s footprint before a string of critical losses forced him into exile. Bonaparte spent the final years of his life on the remote island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821 at age 51.

FULL NAME: Napoleon Bonaparte BORN: August 15, 1769 DIED: May 5, 1821 BIRTHPLACE: Ajaccio, Corsica SPOUSES: Josephine de Beauharnais (1796-1809) and Archduchess Marie-Louise (1810-1821) CHILDREN: Charles, Alexandre, and Napoleon II ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo HEIGHT: 5 ft. 7 in.

Napoleon Bonaparte was born Napoleone Buonaparte in Ajaccio, on the French island of Corsica, on August 15, 1769. He was the fourth, and second surviving, child of Carlo Buonaparte, a lawyer, and his wife, Letizia Ramolino. Napoleon eventually had seven surviving siblings.

Around the time of Napoleon’s birth, the French’s occupation of Corsica had drawn considerable local resistance. Napoleon’s father had at first supported the nationalists, siding with their leader, Pasquale Paoli. But after Paoli was forced to flee the island, Carlo switched his allegiance to the French. After doing so, he was appointed assessor of the judicial district of Ajaccio in 1771, a plush job that eventually enabled him to enroll his two sons, Joseph and Napoleon, in France’s College d’Autun.

In 1779, young Napoleon began attending the military college of Brienne, where he studied for five years. He excelled as a student yet struggled to fit in with his classmates who were the children of French nobles and bullied Napoleon for being a foreigner.

At age 15, Napoleon moved on to the military academy in Paris. While Napoleon was still there, his father died of stomach cancer in 1785. This propelled Napoleon to take the reins as the head of the family. Graduating early from the military academy, Napoleon, now second lieutenant of artillery, returned to Corsica in 1786.

Back home, Napoleon got behind the Corsican resistance to the French occupation, siding with his father’s former ally, Pasquale Paoli. But the two soon had a falling out, and when a civil war in Corsica began in April 1793, Napoleon—now an enemy of Paoli—and his family relocated to France, where they assumed the French version of their name: Bonaparte.

Napoleon stood about 5 feet, 7 inches tall, making him slightly taller than the average Frenchman of his time.

Much has been made of Napoleon’s height, and legends claim that he was unusually short, giving rise to the term “Napoleon complex,” an inferiority complex sometimes associated with people of short stature. Some historians attribute the myths about Napoleon’s height to British propaganda.

Napoleon’s return to France began with a service with the French military, where he rejoined his regiment at Nice in June 1793. The turmoil of the French Revolution , which began four years prior, created opportunities for ambitious military leaders like Napoleon. The young leader quickly showed his support for the Jacobins, a far-left political movement and the most well-known and popular political club from the French Revolution.

A year after France was declared a republic, King Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. Ultimately, these acts led to the rise of Maximilien de Robespierre and what became, essentially, the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety. The years of 1793 and 1794 came to be known as the Reign of Terror , in which as many as 40,000 people were killed. Eventually, the Jacobins fell from power, and Robespierre was executed.

Trusted Military Leader

In 1795, the French revolutionary government known as the Directory took control of the country. Napoleon, who had previously fallen out of favor with Robespierre, came into the good graces of the Directory that same year after he saved the government from counter-revolutionary forces. For his efforts, Napoleon was soon named commander of the Army of the Interior. In addition, he was a trusted advisor to the Directory on military matters.

In 1796, Napoleon took the helm of the Army of Italy, a post he’d been coveting. The army—just 30,000 strong, disgruntled, and underfed—was soon turned around by the young military commander. Under his direction, the reinvigorated army won numerous crucial victories against the Austrians, greatly expanded the French empire, and squashed an internal threat by the royalists, who wished to return France to a monarchy. All of these successes helped make Napoleon the military’s brightest star.

Failed Egypt Campaign

On July 1, 1798, Napoleon and his army traveled to the Middle East to undermine Great Britain’s empire by occupying Egypt and disrupting English trade routes to India. But his military campaign proved disastrous: On August 1, Admiral Horatio Nelson’s fleet decimated Napoleon’s forces in the Battle of the Nile.

Napoleon’s image and that of France were greatly harmed by the loss, and in a show of newfound confidence against the commander, Britain, Austria, Russia, and Turkey formed a new coalition against France. In the spring of 1799, French armies were defeated in Italy, forcing France to give up much of the peninsula. That October, Napoleon returned to France as his troops continued fighting.

Coup of 18 Brumaire

Shortly after his return to France, Napoleon participated in an event known as the Coup of 18 Brumaire. The bloodless coup d’etat, heavily orchestrated by Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, overthrew the newly Jacobin-controlled Directory on November 9, 1799. Napoleon and Sieyès ushered in a new government called the Consulate to be led by three members—themselves and Pierre-Roger Ducos. Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte also assisted the cause.

When Napoleon was named first consul, he became France’s leading political figure in a position that amounted to nothing less than a dictatorship. Under the new guidelines, the first consul was permitted to appoint ministers, generals, civil servants, magistrates, and even members of the legislative assemblies. Sieyès and Ducos were reduced to figureheads. In February 1800, the new constitution was easily accepted.

At the Battle of Marengo in June 1800, Napoleon’s forces defeated the Austrians and drove them from the Italian peninsula. This military victory cemented Napoleon’s authority as first consul.

Napoleon proceeded to transform France’s economy, legal and educational systems, and even the Church, as he reinstated Roman Catholicism as the state religion through the Concordat of 1801. He also negotiated a European peace, partially through the 1802 Treaty of Amiens that struck a (short-lived) truce with the war-weary British.

His reforms proved popular: In 1802, he was elected consul for life, and two years later, he was proclaimed emperor of France on May 18, 1804. He was officially crowned Napoleon I during his coronation at Notre Dame Cathedral on December 2 of that year.

As Napoleon was rising in the ranks, his personal life was also taking shape. He met Josephine de Beauharnais, the widow of General Alexandre de Beauharnais (guillotined during the Reign of Terror) and a mother of two children, at a party in 1795. He was quickly smitten and despite her initial reservations— Josephine described Napoleon as “altogether strange in all his person”—they married on March 9, 1796, in a civil ceremony.

Their union was tempestuous from the outset, with Napoleon’s military campaigns forcing him away from home for long periods. Although he often complimented Josephine in letters from the battlefield, both of them engaged in extramarital affairs. Napoleon had at least two children out of wedlock—Charles Léon Denuelle in 1806 and Alexandre Walewski in 1810.

Josephine was known for holding lavish parties and spending money on clothing and property, including the Malmaison estate near Paris in 1799. Despite their arguments, the two stayed together as Josephine maintained a positive perception among the public. When Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, he insisted upon placing a crown upon Empress Josephine as well.

Despite his new title, not all was going to plan for Napoleon. He faced mounting pressure from his family to separate from Josephine, who was in her 40s by this point, because she was unable to give him a legitimate son and, thus, an heir. So in December 1809, Napoleon arranged for the annulment of their marriage.

Following the annulment, Napoleon searched in haste for a new bride. His first choice was Anna Pavlovna, the 15-year-old sister of Russian Tsar Alexander I. But after delays and excuses, he instead selected Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, 18, due largely to political motivations. Marie-Louise was the great-niece of Marie Antoinette . She dreaded the idea , writing in her diary that just looking at Napoleon would be the “worst form of torture.” However, she complied and married Napoleon by proxy in a civil ceremony in March 1810.

Marie-Louise gave Napoleon the heir he desired, as the couple had a son—Napoleon II, King of Rome—on March 20, 1811.

Despite his marriage to Marie-Louise, Napoleon continued his correspondence with Josephine and made unannounced personal visits to Malmaison. In 1813, he even brought his young son to meet her, as their struggle to produce an heir “had cost her so many tears.” This stoked jealousy in Marie-Louise, who remained married to Napoleon until his death.

Continuing the societal reforms he made, Napoleon instituted the Napoleonic Code, otherwise known as the French Civil Code, on March 21, 1804. The sweeping set of laws ended the feudal system and addressed property rights, family law, and individual freedoms. It forbade privileges based on birth, declaring all men to be equal and stating that government jobs must be given to the most qualified. Men were entitled to religious freedom and placed in charge of the women and children in their families. Women were largely left without rights, though they did have limited liberties in divorce proceedings.

The Napoleonic Code applied in France and its growing number of territories. Napoleon correctly predicted that his code, more so than his many military victories, would have a lasting legacy. Parts of it are still in use around the world today. The terms of the code are the main basis for many other countries’ civil codes throughout Europe and North America.

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of European wars lasting from 1803 to Napoleon’s permanent abdication of power in 1815.

In 1803, in part to raise funds for war, France sold its North American Louisiana Territory to the United States for $15 million, a transaction known as the Louisiana Purchase . Napoleon then returned to war with Britain, Russia, and Austria.

In 1805, the British registered an important naval victory against France at the Battle of Trafalgar , which led Napoleon to scrap his plans to invade England. Instead, he set his sights on Austria and Russia, beating back both militaries in the Battle of Austerlitz.

Other victories soon followed, allowing Napoleon to greatly expand the French empire and paving the way for loyalists to his government—including his brothers and other family members—to be installed in Holland, Italy, Naples, Sweden, Spain, and Westphalia.

Invasion of Russia

In 1812, France was devastated when Napoleon’s invasion of Russia turned out to be a colossal failure—and the beginning of the end for Napoleon. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Napoleon’s Grand Army were killed or badly wounded: Out of an original fighting force of some 600,000 men, just 10,000 soldiers were still fit for battle.

News of the defeat reinvigorated Napoleon’s enemies, both inside and outside of France. Some attempted a failed coup while Napoleon led his charge against Russia and as the British began to advance through French territories. With international pressure mounting and his government lacking the resources to fight back against his enemies, Napoleon surrendered to allied forces on March 30, 1814.

First Exile

About a week later, on April 6, Napoleon was forced to abdicate power and went into exile on the island of Elba off the Italian coast in the Mediterranean Sea. His exile didn’t last long, as he watched France stumbled forward without him.

In March 1815, Napoleon escaped the island and quickly made his way back to Paris. King Louis XVIII fled, and Napoleon triumphantly returned to power. But the enthusiasm that greeted Napoleon when he resumed control of the government soon gave way to old frustrations and fears about his leadership.

On June 16, 1815, Napoleon led French troops into Belgium and defeated the Prussians; two days later, he was defeated by the British, reinforced by Prussian fighters, at the Battle of Waterloo .

It was a humiliating loss, and on June 22, 1815, Napoleon abdicated his powers for good. In an effort to prolong his dynasty, he pushed to have his young son, Napoleon II, named emperor, but the coalition rejected the offer.

After Napoleon’s abdication from power in 1815, fearing a repeat of his earlier return from exile on Elba, the British government sent Napoleon to the remote island of St. Helena in the southern Atlantic Ocean. He lived there for the rest of his life.

For the most part, Napoleon was free to do as he pleased at his new home. He had leisurely mornings, wrote often, and read a lot. But the tedious routine of life soon got to him, and he often shut himself indoors.

According to historian Kate Williams’ 2014 book Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte , Napoleon continued to show great affection for his ex-wife , who died of pneumonia at her Malmaison estate in May 1814. He had portraits of Josephine placed throughout his residence and even ate off plates with her likeness on them.

Starting in 1817, Napoleon’s health began to deteriorate. In early 1821, he was bedridden and growing weaker by the day. That April, he dictated his last will: “I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of that French people which I have loved so much. I die before my time, killed by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins.”

Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, on the island of St. Helena at age 51. Allegedly, he uttered his ex-wife Josephine’s name as his final word.

During his final weeks, he experienced symptoms such as vomiting, incessant hiccups, and blood clots. Physicians who conducted his autopsy ruled stomach cancer, exacerbated by bleeding gastric ulcers, as the cause of Napoleon’s death. According to PBS News Hour , Napoleon’s cancer was in an advanced state, and his family history of gastric carcinomas supported the autopsy results.

However, researchers have posited alternative theories regarding his demise. In 1961, Swedish dentist Sten Forshufvud and Drs. Hamilton Smith and Anders Wassen analyzed a sample of his hair and published an article suggesting he might have died from arsenic poisoning. Although other experts have rebuffed this theory, it has led to conspiracies surrounding Napoleon’s death.

Despite what he requested in his last will, Napoleon was initially buried on St. Helena on May 9, 1821, in the Geranium Valley, now known as the Valley of the Tomb. In 1840, he was exhumed by order of French King Louis-Phillippe , and Bonaparte’s remains were transferred back to mainland France, arriving on December 15 .

Napoleon’s tomb is located in Paris in the Dôme des Invalides . Originally a royal chapel built between 1677 and 1706, the Invalides were turned into a military pantheon under Napoleon’s reign. In addition to Napoleon Bonaparte, several other French notables are buried there, including: Napoleon II, the King of Rome and Napoleon’s son; Napoleon’s brothers Joseph and Jérôme Bonaparte; Generals Henri-Gratien Bertrand and Géraud-Christophe-Michel Duroc; and the French Marshals Ferdinand Foch and Hubert Lyautey.

Not surprising given his place in world history, Napoleon has appeared on the big screen many times with depictions ranging from purposefully humorous to based in realism.

Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper were cast as Bonaparte in the 1950s movies Désirée (1954) and The Story of Mankind (1957), respectively. The general also appears in films such as Waterloo (1970), Time Bandits (1981), and The Count of Monte Cristo (2002).

In terms of more fantastical portrayals, Napoleon is a character in the 1989 cult comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, in which the title characters played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves decide to abduct historical figures for their high school project through the use of time travel. He also appears as an antagonist in the 2009 sequel Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian .

In 2023, director Ridley Scott helmed a new biopic simply titled Napoleon that released in theaters on November 22. The movie stars Joaquin Phoenix as the French emperor and Vanessa Kirby as Josephine and focuses heavily on their tumultuous relationship. Napoleon marked a reunion for Phoenix and Scott, who worked on the 2000 classic Gladiator also starring Russell Crowe .

• I am never angry when contradicted; I seek to be enlightened.
• I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of that French people which I have loved so much. I die before my time, killed by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins.
• A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.
• A great people may be killed, but they will not be intimidated.
• He who fears being conquered is certain of defeat.
• Love does more harm than good.
• A man is not dependent upon his fellow creature, when he does not fear death.
• It is the cause, and not the death that makes the martyr.
• Even when I am gone, I shall remain in people’s minds the star of their rights, my name will be the war cry of their efforts, the motto of their hopes.
• Men of genius are meteors, intended to burn to light their century.
• Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
• In choosing a wife, a man does not renounce his mother, and still less is he justified with breaking her heart.

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Napoleon Bonaparte

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 24, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), also known as Napoleon I, was a French military leader and emperor who conquered much of Europe in the early 19th century. Born on the island of Corsica, Napoleon rapidly rose through the ranks of the military during the French Revolution (1789-1799). After seizing political power in France in a 1799 coup d’état, he crowned himself emperor in 1804. Shrewd, ambitious and a skilled military strategist, Napoleon successfully waged war against various coalitions of European nations and expanded his empire. However, after a disastrous French invasion of Russia in 1812, Napoleon abdicated the throne two years later and was exiled to the island of Elba. In 1815, he briefly returned to power in his Hundred Days campaign. After a crushing defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, he abdicated once again and was exiled to the remote island of Saint Helena, where he died at 51.

Napoleon’s Education and Early Military Career

Napoleon Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769, in Ajaccio, on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. He was the second of eight surviving children born to Carlo Buonaparte (1746-1785), a lawyer, and Letizia Romalino Buonaparte (1750-1836). Although his parents were members of the minor Corsican nobility, the family was not wealthy. The year before Napoleon’s birth, France acquired Corsica from the city-state of Genoa, Italy. Napoleon later adopted a French spelling of his last name.

As a boy, Napoleon attended school in mainland France, where he learned the French language, and went on to graduate from a French military academy in 1785. He then became a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment of the French army. The French Revolution began in 1789, and within three years revolutionaries had overthrown the monarchy and proclaimed a French republic. During the early years of the revolution, Napoleon was largely on leave from the military and home in Corsica, where he became affiliated with the Jacobins, a pro-democracy political group. In 1793, following a clash with the nationalist Corsican governor, Pasquale Paoli (1725-1807), the Bonaparte family fled their native island for mainland France, where Napoleon returned to military duty.

In France, Napoleon became associated with Augustin Robespierre (1763-1794), the brother of revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), a Jacobin who was a key force behind the Reign of Terror (1793-1794), a period of violence against enemies of the revolution. During this time, Napoleon was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the army. However, after Robespierre fell from power and was guillotined (along with Augustin) in July 1794, Napoleon was briefly put under house arrest for his ties to the brothers.

In 1795, Napoleon helped suppress a royalist insurrection against the revolutionary government in Paris and was promoted to major general.

Did you know? In 1799, during Napoleon’s military campaign in Egypt, a French soldier named Pierre Francois Bouchard (1772-1832) discovered the Rosetta Stone. This artifact provided the key to cracking the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics, a written language that had been dead for almost 2,000 years.

Napoleon’s Rise to Power

Since 1792, France’s revolutionary government had been engaged in military conflicts with various European nations. In 1796, Napoleon commanded a French army that defeated the larger armies of Austria, one of his country’s primary rivals, in a series of battles in Italy. In 1797, France and Austria signed the Treaty of Campo Formio, resulting in territorial gains for the French.

The following year, the Directory, the five-person group that had governed France since 1795, offered to let Napoleon lead an invasion of England. Napoleon determined that France’s naval forces were not yet ready to go up against the superior British Royal Navy. Instead, he proposed an invasion of Egypt in an effort to wipe out British trade routes with India. Napoleon’s troops scored a victory against Egypt’s military rulers, the Mamluks, at the Battle of the Pyramids in July 1798; soon, however, his forces were stranded after his naval fleet was nearly decimated by the British at the Battle of the Nile in August 1798. In early 1799, Napoleon’s army launched an invasion of Ottoman Empire -ruled Syria , which ended with a failed siege of Acre, located in modern-day Israel . That summer, with the political situation in France marked by uncertainty, the ever-ambitious and cunning Napoleon opted to abandon his army in Egypt and return to France.

The Coup of 18 Brumaire

In November 1799, in an event known as the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon was part of a group that successfully overthrew the French Directory.

The Directory was replaced with a three-member Consulate, and 5'7" Napoleon became first consul, making him France’s leading political figure. In June 1800, at the Battle of Marengo, Napoleon’s forces defeated one of France’s perennial enemies, the Austrians, and drove them out of Italy. The victory helped cement Napoleon’s power as first consul. Additionally, with the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, the war-weary British agreed to peace with the French (although the peace would only last for a year).

Napoleon worked to restore stability to post-revolutionary France. He centralized the government; instituted reforms in such areas as banking and education; supported science and the arts; and sought to improve relations between his regime and the pope (who represented France’s main religion, Catholicism), which had suffered during the revolution. One of his most significant accomplishments was the Napoleonic Code , which streamlined the French legal system and continues to form the foundation of French civil law to this day.

In 1802, a constitutional amendment made Napoleon first consul for life. Two years later, in 1804, he crowned himself emperor of France in a lavish ceremony at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

Napoleon’s Marriages and Children

In 1796, Napoleon married Josephine de Beauharnais (1763-1814), a stylish widow six years his senior who had two teenage children. More than a decade later, in 1809, after Napoleon had no offspring of his own with Empress Josephine, he had their marriage annulled so he could find a new wife and produce an heir. In 1810, he wed Marie Louise (1791-1847), the daughter of the emperor of Austria. The following year, she gave birth to their son, Napoleon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte (1811-1832), who became known as Napoleon II and was given the title king of Rome. In addition to his son with Marie Louise, Napoleon had several illegitimate children.

The Reign of Napoleon I

From 1803 to 1815, France was engaged in the Napoleonic Wars, a series of major conflicts with various coalitions of European nations. In 1803, partly as a means to raise funds for future wars, Napoleon sold France’s Louisiana Territory in North America to the newly independent United States for $15 million, a transaction that later became known as the Louisiana Purchase .

In October 1805, the British wiped out Napoleon’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar . However, in December of that same year, Napoleon achieved what is considered to be one of his greatest victories at the Battle of Austerlitz, in which his army defeated the Austrians and Russians. The victory resulted in the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine.

Beginning in 1806, Napoleon sought to wage large-scale economic warfare against Britain with the establishment of the so-called Continental System of European port blockades against British trade. In 1807, following Napoleon’s defeat of the Russians at Friedland in Prussia, Alexander I (1777-1825) was forced to sign a peace settlement, the Treaty of Tilsit. In 1809, the French defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Wagram, resulting in further gains for Napoleon.

During these years, Napoleon reestablished a French aristocracy (eliminated in the French Revolution) and began handing out titles of nobility to his loyal friends and family as his empire continued to expand across much of western and central continental Europe.

Napoleon’s Downfall and First Abdication

In 1810, Russia withdrew from the Continental System. In retaliation, Napoleon led a massive army into Russia in the summer of 1812. Rather than engaging the French in a full-scale battle, the Russians adopted a strategy of retreating whenever Napoleon’s forces attempted to attack. As a result, Napoleon’s troops trekked deeper into Russia despite being ill-prepared for an extended campaign.

In September, both sides suffered heavy casualties in the indecisive Battle of Borodino. Napoleon’s forces marched on to Moscow, only to discover almost the entire population evacuated. Retreating Russians set fires across the city in an effort to deprive enemy troops of supplies. After waiting a month for a surrender that never came, Napoleon, faced with the onset of the Russian winter, was forced to order his starving, exhausted army out of Moscow. During the disastrous retreat, his army suffered continual harassment from a suddenly aggressive and merciless Russian army. Of Napoleon’s 600,000 troops who began the campaign, only an estimated 100,000 made it out of Russia.

At the same time as the catastrophic Russian invasion, French forces were engaged in the Peninsular War (1808-1814), which resulted in the Spanish and Portuguese, with assistance from the British, driving the French from the Iberian Peninsula. This loss was followed in 1813 by the Battle of Leipzig , also known as the Battle of Nations, in which Napoleon’s forces were defeated by a coalition that included Austrian, Prussian, Russian and Swedish troops. Napoleon then retreated to France, and in March 1814 coalition forces captured Paris.

On April 6, 1814, Napoleon, then in his mid-40s, was forced to abdicate the throne. With the Treaty of Fontainebleau, he was exiled to Elba, a Mediterranean island off the coast of Italy. He was given sovereignty over the small island, while his wife and son went to Austria.

HISTORY Vault: Napoleon Bonaparte: The Glory of France

Explore the extraordinary life and times of Napoleon Bonaparte, the great military genius who took France to unprecedented heights of power, and then brought it to its knees when his ego spun out of control.

Hundred Days Campaign and Battle of Waterloo

On February 26, 1815, after less than a year in exile, Napoleon escaped Elba and sailed to the French mainland with a group of more than 1,000 supporters. On March 20, he returned to Paris, where he was welcomed by cheering crowds. The new king, Louis XVIII (1755-1824), fled, and Napoleon began what came to be known as his Hundred Days campaign.

Upon Napoleon’s return to France, a coalition of allies–the Austrians, British, Prussians and Russians–who considered the French emperor an enemy began to prepare for war. Napoleon raised a new army and planned to strike preemptively, defeating the allied forces one by one before they could launch a united attack against him.

In June 1815, his forces invaded Belgium, where British and Prussian troops were stationed. On June 16, Napoleon’s troops defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Ligny. However, two days later, on June 18, at the Battle of Waterloo near Brussels, the French were crushed by the British, with assistance from the Prussians.

On June 22, 1815, Napoleon was once again forced to abdicate.

Napoleon’s Final Years

In October 1815, Napoleon was exiled to the remote, British-held island of Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean. He died there on May 5, 1821, at age 51, most likely from stomach cancer. (During his time in power, Napoleon often posed for paintings with his hand in his vest, leading to some speculation after his death that he had been plagued by stomach pain for years.) Napoleon was buried on the island despite his request to be laid to rest “on the banks of the Seine, among the French people I have loved so much.” In 1840, his remains were returned to France and entombed in a crypt at Les Invalides in Paris, where other French military leaders are interred.

Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

• “The only way to lead people is to show them a future: a leader is a dealer in hope.”
• “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
• “Envy is a declaration of inferiority.”
• “The reason most people fail instead of succeed is they trade what they want most for what they want at the moment.”
• “If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.”

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Past Factory

The Life Of Napoleon

Posted: May 2, 2024 | Last updated: May 3, 2024

Born August 15, 1769, Napoleon Bonaparte was an incredibly ambitious politician and political leader who rose to power during the French Revolution, shaping the nation and successfully leading several military campaigns. His leadership and military prowess led to him becoming the Emperor of France and dominating the vast majority of Europe for over a decade.

Read on through this article to take a look at the kind of man Napoleon was, his strengths, weaknesses, and what made him one of the most controversial yet revered leaders in human history.

He Didn't Grow Up Wealthy

While Napoleon's parents, Carlo Maria Bonaparte and Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte, were members of minor Corsican nobility, Napoleon's family wasn't affluent like most might assume. Although Napoleon attended French military academies, he wasn't admitted due to his parent's wealth but was admitted through scholarships.

This made Napoleon significantly less privileged compared to his other classmates who came from rich and well-connected families. Furthermore, having grown up in Corsica, Napoleon's first language was Italian, not French. Supposedly, he was teased by his classmates for sounding like a peasant.

The Truth About His Height

One of the most common known "facts" about Napoleon was that he was short. It was reported that Napoleon stood at 5'2" at the time of his death, which might seem small in stature, but was the average height of a French male at the time.

However, he was measured in French units, which were smaller than today, so it's assumed that he was around 5'6" or 5'7", which would have made him above average height. This would also make him taller than Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, as well as the same height as Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini.

He Oversaw An Impressive Architectural Achievement

Between 1801 and 1857, Napoleon was involved in the building of a large fort in the Atlantic Ocean on the west coast of France. Named Fort Boyard, the structure stands 65-feet tall out of the ocean and stands as its own island. Although the building was originally used as a defense fort, it was eventually turned into a prison.

The Boyard was also considered to be an incredible architectural feat. When the idea was originally proposed in 1692, Louis XIV was told, "Your Majesty, it would be easier to seize the moon with your teeth than to attempt such an undertaking in such a place."

He Helped Invent Canning

During his military campaign into distant regions such as Russia and Egypt, Napoleon understood that he needed a better way of preserving his army's food. So, he offered a reward to anyone that could come up with a solution.

Then, in 1908, Nicolas Appert discovered that if you cooked food inside of a sealed glass jar, it wouldn't spoil unless the jar leaked. Little did Appert or Napoleon know it, but Appert had invented the process of canning and was paid 12,000 francs for his work. It wouldn't be for another 50 years until Louis Pasteur understood the scientific reasoning behind how canning works.

An Emperor And A Writer

During his time in exile, Napoleon published a series of memoirs, as well as a book about the life of Julius Caesar. However, this was by no means a new hobby. Before his life became dominated by his military career, and before he even married his wife, Napoleon dabbled, as a romance novelist.

Around 1795, he wrote a romantic novella titled Clisson et Eugénie, a fictional story about a soldier and his lover, which is believed to reflect Napoleon's relationship with Eugénie Désirée Clary. Although the book was never published during his lifetime, it was translated in 2009 and is available today.

He Emancipated Numerous Religious Groups

Under his rule, Napoleon emancipated several religious groups, including Jews, Protestants in Catholic countries, and Catholics in Protestant countries. He abolished laws that restricted oppressed religious groups to ghettos and gave them rights to property, worship, and work.

He was met with resistance when it came to integrating Jewish people into French society but pushed back hard. He stated, "I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country." However, this all came crumbling down just one year later.

Beethoven Planned To Dedicate His Third Symphony To Him

Earlier in Napoleon's life, composer Ludwig van Beethoven greatly admired the general, even when he was First Consul after overthrowing the government. When he began working on Symphony 3, he claimed that the music was inspired by Napoleon's military exploits and the ideals that he had in terms of government.

Yet, in 1804, after naming himself First Consul for life and crowning himself the emperor of France, Beethoven was devastated. According to Beethoven biographer, Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven "flew into a rage and cried out: 'Is he too, then, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on the rights of man, and indulge only his ambition!'"

He Attempted To Take His Own Life Before Exile

After Napoleon's disastrous campaign in Russia, and being forced to abdicate as part of the Treaty of Fontainebleau on April 11, 1814, he was sentenced to exile on the island of Elba. Yet, at first, Napoleon decided that he would rather die than be forced to live in exile.

Ever since his failure in Russia, he began carrying a poisonous pill with him in case he needed to take his own life. He then took it on April 12, 1814. It's assumed that the pill lost its potency over time and made Napoleon incredibly ill, although it did not kill him.

There Were Elaborate Plans To Rescue Napoleon From St. Helena

Napoleon's final exile location was the South American island of St. Helena. The sheer cliffs of the island were heavily guarded with around 2800 men at arms and around 500 cannons. On top of that, the surrounding sea was heavily patrolled by a Royal Navy squadron of 11 ships, with an island 12000 miles away prepared in case of an attempted escape.

The British were justified in their security, however. In Napoleon's last six years of his life on St. Helena, escape plans consisted of boats, balloons, and even possibly early concepts for submarines. In 1820, British smuggler Tom Johnson claimed he was approached with the offer for £40,000 to rescue Napoleon using a pair of submerged boats with collapsible masts.

His Army Discovered The Rosetta Stone

Alongside being an incredibly successful political and military commander, earlier in his life, Napoleon saw himself as a scientist and was even elected membership to the National Institute. During his travels to Egypt to cut off Britain's trade route, Napoleon brought along over one hundred scientists, engineers, scholars, and historians along with him.

During their expedition, vast amounts of information were recorded regarding Egypt's typography, history, and culture, along with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Captain Pierre François-Xavier Bouchard discovered it, who immediately had the artifact shipped to Cairo. It would later help to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

A House Was Bult For Him In New Orleans

The fifth neighbor of New Orleans, Nicholas Girod, was a Frenchman and a staunch supporter of Napoleon. After Napoleon's defeat and abdication at Waterloo, Girod assisted in aiding several of Napoleon's Imperial Guard in escaping to the United States. The former mayor also intended to help smuggle Napoleon to New Orleans.

After having retired from his position as mayor, in 1821, he began renovating a house on the corner of Chartres and St. Louis Street, where he planned for Napoleon to live. After Napoleon died that same year, Girod and his family moved into the house, although it is still referred to today as the Napoleon House.

He Was Involved In The Creation Of Braille

While in power, for tactical purposes, Napoleon insisted on the creation of a type of communication that would not require either light or sound. Napoleon's request was successfully met by Charles Barbier, who invented a tactile military code.

Unfortunately, the method proved to be too difficult for Napoleon's troops to learn, and the idea was abandoned. Then, in 1821, on a visit to the Royal Institute for the Blind, Barbier met Louis Braille, who was interested in Barbier's unique form of communication. Together, the two developed the reading and writing system for braille.

The Mystery Surrounding His Death

When Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, on St. Helena, it was concluded that his cause of death had been stomach cancer. Strangely, Napoleon's body remained unnaturally well-preserved, something that occurs when someone has arsenic poisoning. An experiment was conducted in 1961, in which researchers tested Napoleon's hair, which demonstrated a high level of arsenic.

An even more in-depth study was performed in 2008 that showed Napoleon had high levels of arsenic in his body throughout his entire life. So, it's assumed that he had been constantly exposed to lead-based paint and other toxic substances at the time, that might have hastened his death but didn't kill him.

He Wasn't Actually Afraid Of Cats

Another common misconception about Napoleon was that he had ailurophobia or was afraid of cats. Although there were rumors that he was attacked by a bobcat as a child, this is most likely a myth. It's even known that his wife often kept cats in their house.

In reality, it was Napoleon's nephew, Napoleon III, who had a deep fear of felines. It's reported that he would jump onto a chair whenever one entered the room.

His Wife Narrowly Escaped Execution

At the age of 16, Napoleon's future wife, Joséphine, became a member of the French aristocracy after marrying Alexandre de Beauharnais. She was eventually imprisoned in La Carmes as the French Revolution erupted in Paris. Her husband was executed at the guillotine, with Joséphine doomed to the same fate.

However, the day before her trial, the government was overthrown, and the executions ended. Narrowly escaping with her life, she became a well-known socialite, meeting Napoleon at a party in 1795 while she was 32 and he was 26. The two changed their ages on their marriage certificate to make them closer to the same age.

His Army Was Destroyed In Russia Without Losing A Battle

After taking power, Napoleon had countless military victories, slowly taking over Europe. Feeling invincible, in 1812, he invaded Russia after Czar Alexander I refused to comply with his embargo of British trade. He took with him between 450,000 to 650,000 troops, forcing the Russians to retreat deeper into their country. However, in doing so, they also left nothing behind for Napoleon's army, burning all of the crops, cities, and bridges.

Napoleon continued his pursuit, eventually occupying Moscow. When he realized that his already struggling army wouldn't be able to survive the winter, he ordered a retreat. By the time he made it out of Russia, the weather and constant assaults by the Russians had decimated his army. This led to Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813.

He Would Disguise Himself And Go Out In Public

As a ruler, Napoleon would often disguise himself in common clothes and other disguises to avoid being recognized. He would then walk among the ordinary people. There, he would gather information about what people really thought of him as well as his policies and ambitions.

This proved to be an effective method because people weren't afraid to be honest with a stranger. If they had known it was him, they would be more likely to tell him exactly what he would want to hear.

His Brother Settled In New Jersey

Although Napoleon's brother, Joseph Bonaparte, wasn't very much like his ambitious and determined younger brother, he was named the King of Spain and King of Sicily by Napoleon.

After the Napoleonic Wars came to an end, in 1817, he moved to the United States, where he settled in New Jersey. There, he lived off of the Jewelry that he had taken with him from Spain. At the end of his life, he moved back to Europe where he was buried next to his brother after his death in 1844.

He Lost A Game Of Chess To What He Thought Was A Machine

Although Napoleon won his fair share of battles, he also lost a decent amount of them as well. One of the most ridiculous losses of his life, however, didn't come in the form of an army, but an automatic chess-playing machine known as "The Turk."

Supposedly, Napoleon played multiple games against the machine, losing each one. What Napoleon didn't know was that the machine wasn't real. There was actually a human chess master inside of the device that was manipulating the machine.

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While there is no reigning emperor or king of France today, there are still descendants of the House of Bonaparte: the former imperial and royal European dynasty founded by Napoleon I in 1804, when he transformed the First French Republic into the First French Empire. 37-year-old Jean-Christophe Napoleon Bonaparte is the great-great-great nephew of Napoleon I via the Emperor’s youngest brother, Jérôme, King of Westphalia. Because Napoleon has no legitimate direct descendants, Jean-Christophe is the current disputed head of the Imperial House of France and heir of Napoleon Bonaparte.

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Prince Napoleon Louis Bonaparte, his wife Countess Alix de Foresta and Princess Clementine of Belgium near Lausanne. 1949

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Clementine of Belgium and Victor Napoléon, Princess and Prince Napoléon, during their wedding, 1910 in Moncaliéri, Italy

Intriguingly, Jean-Christophe also has links to the very royal house that his Corsican-born great-great-great uncle helped bring down, as a descendant of King Louis XIV of France, who reigned from 1643 until 1715, via his mother’s side. He is also related to Leopold II of Belgium; William IV, Prince of Orange; Charles III of Spain; Frederick William I of Prussia and George II of Britain via his great-grandmother, Princess Clémentine of Belgium. It is through Clémentine that Jean-Christophe additionally has ties to Louis Philippe I, the last king to officially rule France; and his great-great-grandfather was Prince Napoléon Bonaparte, a cousin of the Emperor Napoleon III (the last monarch of France from the House of Bonaparte, under the Second French Empire).

Charles Napoléon, the father of Jean-Christophe, in Corse in France, 2001

Jean-Christophe became head of the defunct Imperial House of France at the age of just 11 after his grandfather, Louis, Prince Napoléon, a pretender to the Imperial throne of France, said in his will that he wished the succession to bypass his son, Prince Charles Napoléon. The Independent reported in 1997: ‘Louis Napoleon disapproved of the fact that his eldest son had divorced and re-married without his permission. He also detested his political views, which were, by his admission, “republican and democratic”.’ Jean-Christophe’s father was quoted, however, in Nicolas Enache’s 1999 book on the descendants of Marie-Thérèse of Habsburg, that there ‘will never be conflict’ between Charles and his son over the matter.

Princess Beatrice de Bourbon Siciles and her son Prince Jean-Christophe Napoleon

Born in the picturesque resort town of Saint-Raphaëla on the Côte d’Azur, Jean-Christophe is the son of Charles Napoléon and his first wife, Princess Béatrice of Bourbon-Two Sicilies (herself tied to a former royal line as daughter of the late Prince Ferdinand of Bourbon, Duke of Castro, a claimant to headship of the defunct Royal House of the Two Sicilies).

Following his childhood and education in France, Jean-Christophe undertook an MBA at Harvard Business School from 2015 to 2017. His career to date has included stints as an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley in New York, and a private equity associate at Advent International and The Blackstone Group in London, before climbing to become a private equity principal at Blackstone, according to his LinkedIn page . In 2022, he co-founded Leon Capital, a private equity boutique that ‘partners with leading mid-market European tech-enabled services companies’, where he serves as managing partner.

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Archduke Otto of Austria (1912 - 2011) and Alix, Princess Napoleon, attend a banquet given by the Belgian government at the Royal Palace of Brussels, 14th December 1960

The fairytale wedding took place at Cathedral of Saint-Louis des Invalides in Paris, where the bride donned a spectacular Oscar de la Renta gown, crowning her outfit with the Savoy-Aosta Bandeau Tiara. High-society attendees included Princess Beatrice and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, Sabine Getty, Crown Prince Pavlos and Princess Maria-Olympia of Greece. The day’s festivities were followed with a grand ball at the Château de Fontainebleau, which fittingly once served as a residence for French monarchs.

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Princess Caroline Marie Constance Napoleon, Prince Jean-Christophe Napoleon, Prince Charles Napoleon, Princesse Alix Napoleon attend the mass given in memory of the emperor Napoleon at Les Invalides, 1993

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Prince Jean-Christophe Napoleon and Countess Olympia Arco-Zinneberg leave the Saint-Louis-des-Invalides Cathedral after their wedding ceremony

The couple, sometimes styled as Prince and Princess Napoléon, share one son, Louis Charles Riprand Victor Jérôme Marie Napoléon, who was born on 7 December 2022.

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