Napoleon becomes emperor

The story

A young Corsican officer

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1769 at Ajaccio, in Corsica, an island that had passed to France only a few months earlier, having belonged to Genoa before. He studied at a military school in France and became an artillery officer. He was shy, studied hard, read a great deal, and spoke French with a strong Italian accent. He had great ambitions. The French Revolution, which stripped nobles of their privileges and opened careers to the ablest, was an opportunity for him: at twenty-four, at Toulon, an artillery plan of his made it possible to retake the city and made him a general.

In 1796 the government of the French Republic sent him to command the army in Italy. With tired and badly clothed soldiers, in a few weeks Napoleon defeated the Austrians and the Piedmontese in a series of quick, brilliant battles, at Lodi, Arcole and Rivoli. He entered Milan in triumph. In Italy, with French backing, new republics were born, such as the Cisalpine Republic, and with the Treaty of Campo Formio, in 1797, the ancient Republic of Venice came to an end. Then he went to Egypt, where his soldiers found the “Rosetta Stone”, which made it possible to decipher hieroglyphs.

The coup

When he returned to France, in the autumn of 1799, the government was weak and discredited, and many people wanted a “strong man”. On 9 November 1799 (18 Brumaire, by the revolutionary calendar), with the help of some politicians and his soldiers, Napoleon carried out a coup and took power as “First Consul”. He was thirty. In 1802 he had himself made consul for life.

Napoleon governed with energy and restored order in the country. He founded the Bank of France, reformed schools with the lycées, created the Legion of Honour to reward merit, and made peace with the Church through an agreement with the Pope, the Concordat of 1801. His most lasting work was the Civil Code, promulgated in 1804 and called the “Napoleonic Code”: a set of clear laws, the same for everyone, which established equality before the law, private property, freedom of work and civil marriage. It was still a code very harsh on women, who remained under their husbands' authority.

The emperor

On 2 December 1804, in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, in a grand ceremony in the presence of Pope Pius VII, Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French. He took the crown from the Pope's hands and put it on his own head, to show that his power came from himself. Then he also crowned his wife Josephine. The following year, in Milan Cathedral, he had himself crowned King of Italy, with the words: “God gave it to me, woe to anyone who touches it”.

The wars went on. In December 1805, at Austerlitz, in Moravia, Napoleon won his finest victory against the armies of Austria and Russia. Prussia was defeated in 1806, and Russia was forced to make peace in 1807. In 1806 the Holy Roman Empire, which had lasted a thousand years, came to an end. In 1810 the French empire included much of Europe. Napoleon placed brothers and relatives on the thrones of Europe, and introduced his code in many regions, abolished feudal privileges and created more modern schools and administrations.

The fall

But there were problems. Great Britain, strong at sea, was never defeated: the French fleet was destroyed at Trafalgar, in 1805, by Admiral Nelson. Napoleon tried to strangle Britain with a blockade of trade, but this harmed the countries of Europe. In Spain, from 1808, the population rose up in a long and hard war. Many peoples, even those who had first welcomed the French as liberators, began to see him as a ruler imposed on them, with heavy taxes, forced conscription and the plundering of art.

In 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia with an army of six hundred thousand men. He reached Moscow, but the Russians set it on fire, and without food or shelter, in the freezing winter, the retreat was a disaster: only a small part of the soldiers came back. After the defeat at Leipzig in 1813, he was forced to abdicate in 1814 and was sent into exile on the island of Elba. In March 1815 he escaped and returned to France, and took power again for a hundred days, but on 18 June 1815 he was defeated at Waterloo, in Belgium, by the British under Wellington and the Prussians. He was exiled for ever on the remote island of Saint Helena, in the Atlantic, where he died on 5 May 1821.