Napoleon I (born August 15, 1769, Ajaccio, Corsica—died May 5, 1821, St. Helena Island) French general, first consul (1799–1804), and emperor of the French (1804–1814/15), one of the most celebrated personages in the history of the West. He revolutionized military organization and training; sponsored the Napoleonic Code, the prototype of later civil-law codes; reorganized education; and established the long-lived Concordat with the papacy.
The true story of Napoleon BonaparteIt's no wonder that the man called the Little Corporal has captivated the public for two hundred years.(more)
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Napoleon’s many reforms left a lasting mark on the institutions of France and of much of western Europe. But his driving passion was the military expansion of French dominion, and, though at his fall he left France little larger than it had been at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he was almost unanimously revered during his lifetime and until the end of the Second Empire under his nephew Napoleon III as one of history’s great heroes.

Ajaccio, Corsica, FranceStatue of Napoleon Bonaparte in Ajaccio, Corsica, France.
Napoleon was born on Corsica shortly after the island’s cession to France by the Genoese. He was the fourth, and second surviving, child of Carlo Buonaparte, a lawyer, and his wife, Letizia Ramolino. His father’s family, of ancient Tuscan nobility, had emigrated to Corsica in the 16th century.
Carlo Buonaparte had married the beautiful and strong-willed Letizia when she was only 14 years old; they eventually had eight children to bring up in very difficult times. The French occupation of their native country was resisted by a number of Corsicans led by Pasquale Paoli. Carlo Buonaparte joined Paoli’s party, but, when Paoli had to flee, Buonaparte came to terms with the French. Winning the protection of the governor of Corsica, he was appointed assessor for the judicial district of Ajaccio in 1771. In 1778 he obtained the admission of his two eldest sons, Joseph and Napoleon, to the Collège d’Autun.

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A Corsican by birth, heredity, and childhood associations, Napoleon continued for some time after his arrival in Continental France to regard himself a foreigner; yet from age nine he was educated in France as other Frenchmen were. While the tendency to see in Napoleon a reincarnation of some 14th-century Italian condottiere is an overemphasis on one aspect of his character, he did, in fact, share neither the traditions nor the prejudices of his new country: remaining a Corsican in temperament, he was first and foremost, through both his education and his reading, a man of the 18th century.

Napoleon was educated at three schools: briefly at Autun, for five years at the military college of Brienne, and finally for one year at the military academy in Paris. It was during Napoleon’s year in Paris that his father died of a stomach cancer in February 1785, leaving his family in straitened circumstances. Napoleon, although not the eldest son, assumed the position of head of the family before he was 16. In September he graduated from the military academy, ranking 42nd in a class of 58.

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He was made second lieutenant of artillery in the regiment of La Fère, a kind of training school for young artillery officers. Garrisoned at Valence, Napoleon continued his education, reading much, in particular works on strategy and tactics. He also wrote Lettres sur la Corse (“Letters on Corsica”), in which he reveals his feeling for his native island. He went back to Corsica in September 1786 and did not rejoin his regiment until June 1788. By that time the agitation that was to culminate in the French Revolution had already begun. A reader of Voltaire and of Rousseau, Napoleon believed that a political change was imperative, but, as a career officer, he seems not to have seen any need for radical social reforms.

The Revolutionary period
The Jacobin years

When in 1789 the National Assembly, which had convened to establish a constitutional monarchy, allowed Paoli to return to Corsica, Napoleon asked for leave and in September joined Paoli’s group. But Paoli had no sympathy for the young man, whose father had deserted his cause and whom he considered to be a foreigner. Disappointed, Napoleon returned to France, and in April 1791 he was appointed first lieutenant to the 4th regiment of artillery, garrisoned at Valence. He at once joined the Jacobin Club, a debating society initially favouring a constitutional monarchy, and soon became its president, making speeches against nobles, monks, and bishops. In September 1791 he got leave to go back to Corsica again for three months. Elected lieutenant colonel in the national guard, he soon fell out with Paoli, its commander in chief. When he failed to return to France, he was listed as a deserter in January 1792. But in April France declared war against Austria, and his offense was forgiven.

Apparently through patronage, Napoleon was promoted to the rank of captain but did not rejoin his regiment. Instead he returned to Corsica in October 1792, where Paoli was exercising dictatorial powers and preparing to separate Corsica from France. Napoleon, however, joined the Corsican Jacobins, who opposed Paoli’s policy. When civil war broke out in Corsica in April 1793, Paoli had the Buonaparte family condemned to “perpetual execration and infamy,” whereupon they all fled to France.
Napoleon Bonaparte, as he may henceforth be called (though the family did not drop the spelling Buonaparte until after 1796), rejoined his regiment at Nice in June 1793. In his Le Souper de Beaucaire (Supper at Beaucaire), written at this time, he argued vigorously for united action by all republicans rallied round the Jacobins, who were becoming progressively more radical, and the National Convention, the Revolutionary assembly that in the preceding fall had abolished the monarchy.
At the end of August 1793, the National Convention’s troops had taken Marseille but were halted before Toulon, where the royalists had called in British forces. With the commander of the National Convention’s artillery wounded, Bonaparte got the post through the commissioner to the army, Antoine Saliceti, who was a Corsican deputy and a friend of Napoleon’s family. Bonaparte was promoted to major in September and adjutant general in October. He received a bayonet wound on December 16, but on the next day the British troops, harassed by his artillery, evacuated Toulon. On December 22 Bonaparte, age 24, was promoted to brigadier general in recognition of his decisive part in the capture of the town.

Maximilien Robespierre
Augustin de Robespierre, the commissioner to the army, wrote to his brother Maximilien, by then virtual head of the government and one of the leading figures of the Reign of Terror, praising the “transcendent merit” of the young republican officer. In February 1794 Bonaparte was appointed commandant of the artillery in the French Army of Italy. Robespierre fell from power in Paris on 9 Thermidor, year II (July 27, 1794). When the news reached Nice, Bonaparte, regarded as a protégé of Robespierre, was arrested on a charge of conspiracy and treason. He was freed in September but was not restored to his command.
The following March he refused an offer to command the artillery in the Army of the West, which was fighting the counterrevolution in the Vendée. The post seemed to hold no future for him, and he went to Paris to justify himself. Life was difficult on half pay, especially as he was carrying on an affair with Désirée Clary, daughter of a rich Marseille businessman and sister of Julie, the bride of his elder brother, Joseph. Despite his efforts in Paris, Napoleon was unable to obtain a satisfactory command, because he was feared for his intense ambition and for his relations with the Montagnards, the more radical members of the National Convention. He then considered offering his services to the sultan of Turkey.

The Directory of Napoleon I

Bonaparte was still in Paris in October 1795 when the National Convention, on the eve of its dispersal, submitted the new constitution of the year III of the First Republic to a referendum, together with decrees according to which two-thirds of the members of the National Convention were to be reelected to the new legislative assemblies. The royalists, hoping that they would soon be able to restore the monarchy, instigated a revolt in Paris to prevent these measures from being put into effect. Paul Barras, who had been entrusted with dictatorial powers by the National Convention, was unwilling to rely on the commander of the troops of the interior; instead, knowing of Bonaparte’s services at Toulon, he appointed him second in command. Thus, it was Napoleon who shot down the columns of rebels marching against the National Convention (13 Vendémiaire year IV; October 5, 1795), thereby saving the National Convention and the republic.
JoséphineJoséphine, lithograph, c. 1830.
Bonaparte became commander of the Army of the Interior and, consequently, was henceforth aware of every political development in France. He became the respected adviser on military matters to the new government, the Directory. Also at this time, he came to know an attractive Creole, Joséphine Tascher de La Pagerie, who was the widow of General Alexandre de Beauharnais (guillotined during the Reign of Terror), the mother of two children, and a woman of many love affairs.
From every point of view, a new life was opening for Bonaparte. Having proved his loyalty to the Directory, he was appointed commander in chief of the Army of Italy in March 1796. He had been trying to obtain that post for several weeks so that he could personally conduct part of the plan of campaign adopted by the Directory on his advice. He married Joséphine on March 9 and left for the army two days later.

Arriving at his headquarters in Nice, Bonaparte found that his army, which on paper consisted of 43,000 men, numbered scarcely 30,000 ill-fed, ill-paid, and ill-equipped men. On March 28, 1796, he made his first proclamation to his troops:

Soldiers, you are naked, badly fed.…Rich provinces and great towns will be in your power, and in them you will find honour, glory, wealth. Soldiers of Italy, will you be wanting in courage and steadfastness?

Battle of LodiThe Battle of Lodi, painting by Louis-François, Baron Lejeune, 1804.
He took the offensive on April 12 and successively defeated and separated the Austrian and the Sardinian armies and then marched on Turin. King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia asked for an armistice; and, at the peace treaty in Paris on May 15, Nice and Savoy, occupied by the French since 1792, were annexed to France. Bonaparte continued the war against the Austrians and occupied Milan but was held up at Mantua. While his army was besieging this great fortress, he signed armistices with the duke of Parma, with the duke of Modena, and finally with Pope Pius VI.

Napoleon IBonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole, 17 November 1796, oil on canvas by Antoine-Jean Gros, 1796; in the Versailles Museum.(more)
At the same time, he took an interest in the political organization of Italy. A plan for its “republicanization” by a group of Italian “patriots” led by Filippo Buonarroti had to be shelved when Buonarroti was arrested for complicity in François-Noël Babeuf’s conspiracy against the Directory. Thereafter, Bonaparte, without discarding the Italian patriots altogether, restricted their freedom of action. He set up a republican regime in Lombardy but kept a close watch on its leaders, and in October 1796 he created the Cisalpine Republic by merging Modena and Reggio nell’Emilia with the papal states of Bologna and Ferrara occupied by the French army. Then he sent an expedition to recover Corsica, which the British had evacuated.

Austrian armies advanced four times from the Alps to relieve Mantua but were defeated each time by Bonaparte. After the last Austrian defeat, at Rivoli in January 1797, Mantua capitulated. Next he marched on Vienna. He was about 60 miles (100 km) from that capital when the Austrians sued for an armistice. By the preliminaries of peace, Austria ceded the southern Netherlands to France and recognized the Lombard republic but received in exchange some territory belonging to the old Republic of Venice, which was partitioned between Austria, France, and Lombardy. Bonaparte then consolidated and reorganized the northern Italian republics and encouraged Jacobin—radical republican—propaganda in Venetia. Some Italian patriots hoped that these developments would soon lead to the formation of a single and indivisible “Italian Republic” modeled on the French.
Meanwhile, Bonaparte grew uneasy at the successes of the royalists in the French elections in the spring of 1797 and advised the Directory to oppose them, if necessary, by force. He sent General Pierre Augereau to Paris, along with several officers and men to back the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor, year V (September 4, 1797), which eliminated the royalists’ friends from the government and legislative councils and also enhanced Bonaparte’s prestige. Thus, Bonaparte could conclude the Treaty of Campo Formio with Austria as he thought best. The Directory was displeased, however, because the treaty ceded Venice to the Austrians and did not secure the left bank of the Rhine for France. On the other hand, it raised Bonaparte’s popularity to its peak, for he had gained victory for France after five years of war on the Continent.

TalleyrandTalleyrand, detail of a portrait by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, 1809; in a private collection, Paris.(more)
Only the war at sea, against the British, continued. The directors, who wanted to launch an invasion of the British Isles, appointed Bonaparte to command the army assembled for this purpose along the English Channel. After a rapid inspection in February 1798, he announced that the operation could not be undertaken until France had command of the sea. Instead, he suggested that France strike at the sources of Great Britain’s wealth by occupying Egypt and threatening the route to India. This proposal, seconded by Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the foreign minister, was accepted by the directors, who were glad to get rid of their ambitious young general.

The expedition, thanks to some fortunate coincidences, was at first a great success: Malta, the great fortress of the Hospitallers, was occupied on June 10, 1798, Alexandria taken by storm on July 1, and all of the delta of the Nile rapidly overrun. On August 1, however, the French squadron at anchor in Abū Qīr Bay was completely destroyed by Admiral Horatio Nelson’s fleet in the Battle of the Nile, so that Napoleon found himself confined to the land that he had conquered. He proceeded to introduce Western political institutions, administration, and technical skills in Egypt; but Turkey, nominally suzerain over Egypt, declared war on France in September. To prevent a Turkish invasion of Egypt and also perhaps to attempt a return to France by way of Anatolia, Bonaparte marched into Syria in February 1799. His progress northward was halted at Acre, where the British withstood a siege, and in May Bonaparte began a disastrous retreat to Egypt.
The Battle of the Nile showed Europe that Bonaparte was not invincible, and Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and Turkey formed a new coalition against France. The French armies in Italy were defeated in the spring of 1799 and had to abandon the greater part of the peninsula. These defeats led to disturbances in France itself. The coup d’état of 30 Prairial, year VII (June 18, 1799), expelled the men of moderate views from the Directory and brought into it men who were considered Jacobins. Yet the situation remained confused, and one of the new directors, Emmanuel Sieyès, was convinced that only military dictatorship could prevent a restoration of the monarchy: “I am looking for a sabre,” he said. Bonaparte did not take long to make up his mind. He would leave his army and return to France—in order to save the republic, of course, but also to take advantage of the new circumstances and to seize power. The Directory had, in fact, ordered his return, but he had not received the order, so that it was actually in disregard of his instructions that he left Egypt with a few companions on August 22, 1799. Their two frigates surprisingly escaped interception by the British, and Bonaparte arrived in Paris on October 14.

By this time French victories in Switzerland and Holland had averted the danger of invasion, and the counterrevolutionary risings within France had more or less failed. A coup d’état could therefore no longer be justified by any need to save the republic. Sieyès, however, had not given up his project, and now he had his “sabre.” From the end of October he and Bonaparte were in league together planning the coup, and on 18–19 Brumaire, year VIII (November 9–10, 1799), it was carried out: the directors were forced to resign, the members of the legislative councils were dispersed, and a new government, the Consulate, was set up. The three consuls were Bonaparte and two of the directors who had resigned, Sieyès and Pierre-Roger Ducos. But it was Bonaparte who was henceforth the master of France.

The Consulate
Consolidation of power

Napoleon IFirst Consul Bonaparte, oil on canvas by Antoine-Jean Gros, c. 1802; National Museum of the Legion of Honor, Paris.(more)
Discover whether French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was really as short as once believedLearn why Napoleon I came to have a reputation for being short even though he was of average height for his time and place.(more)
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Bonaparte, now 30 years old, was thin and short and wore his hair cut close—le petit tondu, the “little crop-head,” as he was called. Not much was known about his personality, but people had confidence in a man who had always been victorious (the Nile and Acre were forgotten) and who had managed to negotiate the brilliant Treaty of Campo Formio. He was expected to bring back peace, to end disorder, and to consolidate the political and social “conquests” of the Revolution. He was indeed exceptionally intelligent, prompt to make decisions, and indefatigably hardworking but also insatiably ambitious. He seemed to be the man of the Revolution because it was due to the Revolution that he had climbed at so early an age to the highest place in the state. He was not to forget it; but, more than a man of the Revolution, he was a man of the 18th century, the most enlightened of the enlightened despots, a true son of Voltaire. He did not believe in the sovereignty of the people, in the popular will, or in parliamentary debate. Yet he put his confidence more in reasoning than in reason and may be said to have preferred “men of talent”—mathematicians, jurists, and statesmen, for instance, however cynical or mercenary they might be—to “technicians” in the true sense of the word. He believed that an enlightened and firm will could do anything if it had the support of bayonets; he despised and feared the masses; and, as for public opinion, he considered that he could mold and direct it as he pleased. He has been called the most “civilian” of generals, but essentially he never ceased to be a soldier.

Bonaparte imposed a dictatorship on France, but its true character was at first disguised by the constitution of the year VIII (4 Nivôse, year VIII; December 25, 1799), drawn up by Sieyès. This constitution did not guarantee the “rights of man” or make any mention of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” but it did reassure the partisans of the Revolution by proclaiming the irrevocability of the sale of national property and by upholding the legislation against the émigrés. It gave immense powers to the first consul, leaving only a nominal role to his two colleagues. The first consul—namely, Bonaparte—was to appoint ministers, generals, civil servants, magistrates, and the members of the Council of State and even was to have an overwhelming influence in the choice of members for the three legislative assemblies, though their members were theoretically to be chosen by universal suffrage. Submitted to a plebiscite, the constitution won by an overwhelming majority in February 1800.

Program of reforms

The Consulate’s work of administrative reform, undertaken at Bonaparte’s instigation, was to be more lasting than the constitution and so more important for France. At the head of the government was the Council of State, created by the first consul and often effectively presided over by him; it was to play an important part both as the source of the new legislation and as an administrative tribunal. At the head of the administration of the départements were the prefects, who carried on the tradition of the intendants of the ancien régime, supervising the application of the laws and acting as the instruments of centralization. The judicial system was profoundly changed: whereas from the beginning of the Revolution judges had been elected, henceforth they were to be nominated by the government, their independence assured by their irremovability from office. The police organization was greatly strengthened. The financial administration was considerably improved: instead of the municipalities, special officials were entrusted with the collecting of direct taxes; the franc was stabilized; and the Banque de France, owned partly by shareholders and partly by the state, was created. Education was transformed into a major public service; secondary education was given a semimilitary organization, and the university faculties were reestablished. Primary education, however, was still neglected.

Bonaparte shared Voltaire’s belief that the people needed a religion. Personally, he was indifferent to religion: in Egypt he had said that he wanted to become a Muslim. Yet he considered that religious peace had to be restored to France. As early as 1796, when he was concluding the armistice in Italy with Pope Pius VI, he had tried to persuade the pope to retract his briefs against the French priests who had accepted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which in practice nationalized the church. Pius VII, who succeeded Pius VI in March 1800, was more accommodating than his predecessor, and, 10 months after negotiations were opened with him, the Concordat of 1801 was signed reconciling the church and the Revolution. The pope recognized the French republic and called for the resignation of all former bishops; new prelates were to be designated by the first consul and instituted by the pope; and the sale of the property of the clergy was officially recognized by Rome. The concordat, in fact, admitted freedom of worship and the lay character of the state.
Napoleonic CodeEarly version of the Code Civil des Français (“Civil Code of the French”; known as the Napoleonic Code), dated 1803 (year XI of the French republican calendar). The code was promulgated in its entirety in 1804 (year XII) by First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte.(more)
The codification of the civil law, first undertaken in 1790, was at last completed under the Consulate. The code, promulgated on March 21, 1804, and later known as the Napoleonic Code, gave permanent form to the great gains of the Revolution: individual liberty, freedom of work, freedom of conscience, the lay character of the state, and equality before the law; but, at the same time, it protected landed property, gave greater liberty to employers, and showed little concern for employees. It maintained divorce but granted only limited legal rights to women.

The army received the most careful attention. The first consul retained in outline the system instituted by the Revolution: recruitment by forced conscription but with the possibility of replacement by substitutes; the mixing of the conscripts with old soldiers; and the eligibility of all for promotion to the highest ranks. Nevertheless, the creation of the Academy of Saint-Cyr to produce infantry officers made it easier for the sons of bourgeois families to pursue a military career. Moreover, the École Polytechnique, founded by the National Convention, was militarized in order to provide officers for the artillery and engineers. Yet Bonaparte was not concerned about introducing new technical inventions into his army. He put his trust in the “legs of his soldiers”: his basic strategic idea was a fast-moving army.

Military campaigns and uneasy peace

The first consul spent the winter and spring of 1799–1800 reorganizing the army and preparing for an attack on Austria alone, Russia having withdrawn from the anti-French coalition. With his usual quick assessment of the situation, he saw the strategic importance of the Swiss Confederation, from which he would be free to outflank the Austrian armies either in Germany or in Italy as he might see fit. His past successes made him choose Italy. Taking his army across the Great St. Bernard Pass before the snow melted, he appeared unexpectedly behind the Austrian army besieging Genoa. The Battle of Marengo in June gave the French command of the Po valley as far as the Adige, and in December another French army defeated the Austrians in Germany. Austria was forced to sign the Treaty of Lunéville of February 1801, whereby France’s right to the natural frontiers that Julius Caesar had given to Gaul—namely, the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees—was recognized.
Great Britain alone remained at war with France, but it soon tired of the struggle. Preliminaries of peace, concluded in London in October 1801, put an end to hostilities, and peace was signed at Amiens on March 27, 1802.
General peace was reestablished in Europe. The first consul’s prestige increased still more, and his friends—at his suggestion—proposed that a “token of national gratitude” should be offered to him. In May 1802 it was decided that the French people should vote in referendum on the following question: “Shall Napoleon Bonaparte be consul for life?” In August an overwhelming vote granted him the prolongation of his consulate as well as the right to designate his successor.

Bonaparte’s conception of international peace differed from that of the British, for whom the Treaty of Amiens represented an absolute limit beyond which they were under no circumstances prepared to go. The British even hoped to take back some of the concessions they had been forced to make. For Bonaparte, on the other hand, the Treaty of Amiens marked the starting point for a new French ascendancy. He was, first of all, intent on reserving half of Europe as a market for France without lowering customs duties—to the indignation of British merchants. To revive France’s expansion overseas, he also intended to recover Saint-Domingue (Haiti; governed from 1798 by the black leader Toussaint Louverture), to occupy Louisiana (ceded to France by Spain in 1800), perhaps to reconquer Egypt, and at any rate to extend French influence in the Mediterranean and in the Indian Ocean. In continental Europe he advanced beyond France’s natural frontiers, incorporating Piedmont into France, imposing a more centralized government on the Swiss Confederation, and in Germany compensating the princes dispossessed of territory on the Rhine under the Treaty of Lunéville with shares of the secularized ecclesiastical states.
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Great Britain was alarmed by this expansion of France in peacetime and found it scarcely tolerable that one state should command the coastline of the Continent from Genoa to Antwerp. The immediate occasion of Franco-British rupture, however, was the problem of Malta. According to the Treaty of Amiens, the British, who had taken the island on the collapse of the French occupation, should have restored it to the Hospitallers; but the British, on the pretext that the French had not yet evacuated certain Neapolitan ports, refused to leave the island. Franco-British relations became strained, and in May 1803 the British declared war.

The empire

The peace settlement had brought about the life consulate; the return of war was to stimulate the formation of the empire. The British government, which would have been glad to see Bonaparte deposed or removed by assassination, renewed its subsidies to the French royalists, who resumed their agitation and plotting. When a British-financed assassination plot was uncovered in 1804, Bonaparte decided to react vigorously enough to deter his opponents from any more such attempts. The police believed that the real head of the conspiracy was the young duc d’Enghien, a scion of the royal house of Bourbon, who was residing in Germany, a few miles across the frontier. Accordingly, with the agreement of Talleyrand and the police chief Joseph Fouché, the duke was kidnapped on neutral soil and brought to Vincennes, where he was tried and shot (March 21). This action provoked a resurgence of opposition among the old aristocracy but enhanced the influence of Fouché.

Founding the empire

François Gérard: Napoleon in His Imperial RobesNapoleon in His Imperial Robes, oil on canvas by François Gérard, 1805; in the National Museum of Versailles and Trianons.(more)
In the hope of consolidating his own position, Fouché now suggested to Bonaparte that the best way to discourage conspiracy would be to transform the life consulate into a hereditary empire, which, because of the fact that there would be an heir, would remove all hope of changing the regime by assassination. Bonaparte readily accepted the suggestion, and on May 18, 1804, the empire was proclaimed.

Though there was little change in the organization of the government of France, Napoleon as emperor revived a number of institutions similar to those of the ancien régime. In the first place, he wanted to be consecrated by the pope himself, so that his coronation should be even more impressive than that of the kings of France. Pius VII agreed to come to Paris, and the ceremony, which seemed equally outrageous to royalists and to the old soldiers of the Revolution, took place in Notre-Dame on December 2, 1804. At the last moment, the emperor took the crown from the pope and set it on his own head himself.