60 Battles · 7 Coalitions · 72 Million Governed · 1 Exile That Didn't Stick
August 15, 1769 - May 5, 1821 · Ajaccio, Corsica
A five-foot-seven Corsican with a provincial accent who seized control of the most powerful nation in Europe, crowned himself Emperor in front of the Pope, won sixty battles, lost two, rewrote the legal code of Western civilization, and died on a rock in the South Atlantic. He was either the greatest military genius since Alexander or history's most ambitious war criminal. He was probably both.
Six acts. Fifty-one years. Sixty battles. The most extraordinary career in military history.
A boy with a foreign accent at a French military school. They laughed at him. They would stop laughing.
Napoleon was born on August 15, 1769, in Ajaccio, Corsica — just fifteen months after France purchased the island from Genoa. He was Italian by blood, Corsican by birth, and French by accident of timing. His father Carlo obtained a scholarship to the Royal Military School at Brienne-le-Chateau, where the nine-year-old Napoleon endured five years of mockery for his accent and his origins. He excelled in mathematics and was commissioned as an artillery officer at age 16. When the Revolution erupted in 1789, he sided with the Jacobins. In December 1793, at the Siege of Toulon, the 24-year-old captain devised a brilliant artillery plan that drove the British fleet from the harbor. He went to bed a captain and woke up a brigadier general.
In eight years, he conquered Italy, invaded Egypt, overthrew the government, and crowned himself Emperor. They couldn't build coalitions fast enough to stop him.
The Italian Campaign of 1796-97 announced Napoleon to the world. With a ragged, starving army, he defeated the Austrians and Sardinians in a series of dazzling maneuvers — Lodi, Arcole, Rivoli. He invaded Egypt in 1798, bringing 167 scholars alongside his soldiers and discovering the Rosetta Stone. The British destroyed his fleet at the Battle of the Nile, stranding his army, but Napoleon slipped back to France and overthrew the Directory in the coup of 18 Brumaire on November 9, 1799. He became First Consul at 30. On December 2, 1804, in Notre-Dame Cathedral, he took the crown from Pope Pius VII's hands and placed it on his own head. No one would crown Napoleon but Napoleon.
Austerlitz. Jena. Wagram. Friedland. He broke every army Europe sent against him. Then he marched into Russia.
Austerlitz on December 2, 1805, was his masterpiece — the "Battle of the Three Emperors." He deliberately weakened his right flank to lure the Allies forward, then split their army in half with a devastating counterattack through the Pratzen Heights. 15,000 Allied casualties versus 1,300 French. He crushed Prussia at Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, destroyed the Russian army at Friedland in 1807, and defeated Austria again at Wagram in 1809. By 1810, he controlled or allied with every major state on the European continent. The Continental System blockaded Britain. The Napoleonic Code reformed law from Portugal to Poland. Then he invaded Russia.
All of Europe united against one man. It took every army on the continent to bring him down. And even then, they had to do it twice.
The Russian disaster emboldened Europe. Prussia, Austria, Russia, and Britain formed the Sixth Coalition — the largest alliance ever assembled against a single commander. Napoleon raised a new army of conscripts and fought brilliantly at Lutzen and Bautzen in 1813, but the weight of numbers was overwhelming. At Leipzig — the "Battle of the Nations" — 380,000 Allied soldiers faced 225,000 French across four days in October 1813. Napoleon lost. He retreated to France, fighting a desperate defensive campaign that military historians consider some of his finest generalship, but Paris fell on March 31, 1814. His marshals refused to march. He abdicated on April 6 and was exiled to Elba, a tiny island in the Mediterranean. He was 44 years old.
He escaped from an island, recaptured France without firing a shot, and lost everything at a crossroads in Belgium.
On March 1, 1815, Napoleon landed at Golfe-Juan with 1,000 men. The Bourbon king Louis XVIII sent an army to stop him. At Laffrey, the soldiers sent to arrest him instead joined him — Napoleon opened his coat and said "If there is any man among you who would shoot his Emperor, let him do it." Not a shot was fired. He entered Paris twenty days later. Louis fled. The Hundred Days had begun. Europe mobilized immediately. On June 18, 1815, at Waterloo in Belgium, Napoleon attacked Wellington's Anglo-Allied army. Wellington held all day. When Blucher's Prussians arrived on Napoleon's right flank at 4 PM, the battle was decided. The Imperial Guard charged and was thrown back. "La Garde recule!" — The Guard retreats! It had never happened before. The army broke. Napoleon fled. It was over.
They put the most dangerous man in Europe on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic and watched him die slowly.
Napoleon surrendered to the British aboard HMS Bellerophon, hoping for asylum in England. Instead, they sent him to Saint Helena — a volcanic island 1,200 miles from the nearest landmass. He spent six years there, dictating his memoirs to Las Cases, rewriting his legend, playing chess, and gardening. He died on May 5, 1821, at age 51. His last words were: "France, l'armee, tete d'armee, Josephine." France. The army. Head of the army. Josephine. The autopsy listed stomach cancer. Arsenic poisoning has been suspected but never proven. His body was returned to France in 1840 and placed in Les Invalides in Paris, where two million people came to pay respects.
The men who fought alongside him, the men who fought against him, and the woman who broke his heart.
He remade Europe. The question is whether that was a gift or a catastrophe.
Battle analyses, source verifications, scene pitches, and strategic debates from 274 contributors.
He dictated his legend. Now it's your turn to interrogate it.