Napoleon Bonaparte: How a Corsican Outsider Ate Europe

Napoleon's life is one of the easiest in history to misunderstand because his enemies wrote most of the English-language press about him. He wasn't unusually short. He wasn't a megalomaniac when he started. He didn't lose at Waterloo because of his hat. He just kept making the bet, every year for twenty years, that he was smarter than everyone else in the room — and for a long time he was right.

He was born Napoleone Buonaparte in Ajaccio, Corsica, in August 1769 — about eighteen months after France bought the island from Genoa. Italian was his first language. He didn't really learn French until he was nine. The boys at his French military school called him "the straw-nose" and made fun of his accent. He responded by becoming the best student in artillery. The pattern would repeat.

A junior officer in a country that was about to explode

He graduated 42nd of 58 in 1785 and went off to be a second lieutenant in the artillery. Four years later the French Revolution started. Most of the aristocratic officer corps fled into exile, leaving the army desperate for anyone who could read a map. Napoleon could read a map.

He spent the early 1790s reading Caesar and Alexander, writing terrible novels, and waiting for an opening. It came at Toulon in 1793 — a Royalist port city held by the British navy. He was 24, freshly promoted to captain by accident. He told the generals where to put the guns. The British fleet got out, but only just. He was promoted to brigadier general at 24.

Two years later, in October 1795, Royalist mobs were storming the National Convention in Paris. Napoleon was in town with no command. Asked to defend the government, he ordered cannons loaded with grapeshot — a "whiff of grapeshot," as Carlyle later called it — and shredded the mob in the rue Saint-Honoré. The Directory rewarded him with command of the army of Italy.

The Italian campaign that made him a celebrity

The army he inherited in March 1796 was barefoot, unpaid, and on starvation rations. Within a year he'd beaten four separate Austrian armies, conquered northern Italy, looted enough cathedrals to fund the Directory back home, and made himself the most famous general in Europe.

The Italian campaign is where he developed his real signature: speed. Roads other armies needed weeks to march, his army covered in days. He understood logistics better than any general of his era — he carried less, marched lighter, and arrived where the enemy didn't expect him. Then he attacked the weakest part of their line with everything he had.

He also wrote his own bulletins, sent them home, and ran his own publicity. By 1798 his face was on plates and snuffboxes from Marseille to Saint Petersburg.

The Egypt detour

In 1798 he sailed to Egypt with 35,000 troops and a small army of scientists, engineers, and Orientalists — the strangest invasion force ever assembled. Officially the goal was to threaten British India. Unofficially he wanted to copy Alexander.

He won the land battles. He lost the sea battle (Nelson destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir Bay), which stranded him in Egypt with no way home. So he kept marching — into Syria, where he failed to take Acre, then back to Egypt where he ate a plague of his own troops. In 1799, with the war back in France going badly, he abandoned the army, slipped past the British blockade, and arrived in Paris a hero anyway because his press had been so good.

The scientists he brought with him stayed and produced the Description de l'Égypte — twenty-three volumes of maps, botany, archaeology. They also stumbled on the Rosetta Stone, which the British took from them at the surrender of Alexandria. Egyptology as a field exists because Napoleon wanted to be Alexander.

First Consul, then Emperor

The Directory was hated and broke. In November 1799 Napoleon overthrew it in a coup so amateurish that he froze and stammered through his speech to the legislators, and his brother Lucien had to grab a sword and threaten the deputies before they'd vote. Within a month he was First Consul of France. Within five years he'd be Emperor.

And in those five years he reformed almost everything. The Civil Code — the Code Napoléon — replaced a mess of medieval laws with a single, readable, secular set of rules. It's still the basis of law in France, Belgium, Italy, much of Latin America, Louisiana, and Quebec. He centralised education with the lycée system. He created the Banque de France. He signed a Concordat with the Pope that ended the religious civil war. He invented the Légion d'honneur, the bureaucracy that ran French government for the next 150 years, and the metric system as the working national standard.

Then in December 1804, in Notre-Dame, with the Pope present, he took the imperial crown out of the Pope's hands and put it on his own head.

"I have fought sixty battles, and I have learned nothing which I did not know at the beginning." — Napoleon, on St. Helena

Austerlitz and the years he was unbeatable

From 1805 to about 1809 Napoleon was the best general anyone had ever seen. At Austerlitz in December 1805 — his birthday for the rest of his life — he beat the Austrians and Russians together by faking weakness on his right flank and waiting for them to take the bait. Their entire centre collapsed. It's still taught at every war college on earth.

Jena in 1806 destroyed the Prussian army in a single morning. Friedland in 1807 brought the Russians to the table. By 1809, after Wagram, only Britain was still in the war against him, and Britain didn't have an army that mattered on the continent. He had brothers on the thrones of Spain, Holland, and Westphalia. He'd married a Habsburg.

The mistake that ended everything

Tsar Alexander I started ignoring the trade blockade against Britain. Napoleon, instead of fixing the diplomatic problem, invaded with the largest army Europe had ever assembled — 615,000 men. He took Moscow in September 1812 and waited for Alexander to surrender. Alexander didn't. The Russians had burned their own capital. There was nothing to eat.

The retreat through the Russian winter killed about 400,000 of his soldiers. The army that crossed back into friendly territory was 25,000 men. Europe noticed.

Within eighteen months he'd been pushed back into France, his old enemies marching through Paris. He was exiled to Elba in April 1814 with a budget, a personal guard of 600 men, and the title "Emperor of Elba." He paced the island for ten months. Then he escaped.

Waterloo

Wellington's British and Dutch army held a ridge near a Belgian village called Waterloo on June 18, 1815. Napoleon attacked late — the ground was muddy from rain — and frittered the day away on assaults that didn't work. The Prussians under Blücher arrived in the late afternoon. The Imperial Guard, attacking up the ridge in the evening, broke for the first time in their history. The cry "La Garde recule!" rolled down the line. After that the army dissolved.

He surrendered to a British warship four weeks later, hoping for asylum in England. The British sent him to Saint Helena, a volcanic rock in the South Atlantic, where he spent six years dictating his memoirs and arguing with the governor. He died there in May 1821, probably of stomach cancer (some still argue arsenic poisoning), at 51.

What he actually left behind

The wars killed somewhere between three and six million people, depending on whose count you trust. The legend killed truth-telling about him for a century afterwards.

But the Code Napoléon is still law in 70 countries. The metric system, the lycée, civil marriage, secular registry, the modern European nation-state — all of those are partly his fingerprints. He freed the Jews of every country his armies entered. He also reinstated slavery in the French colonies, which is the part of his legacy that doesn't make it onto the postage stamps.

The English-speaking world inherited the British view of him: a tyrant who almost conquered Europe. The French-speaking world inherited a different one: the genius who made the Revolution permanent and almost united the continent. The truth is that he was both, and that he changed the rules of war, government, and ambition for the next 200 years.

For further reading: Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life; Adam Zamoyski, 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow.