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Hall of Military Commanders
Napoleon Bonaparte
Emperor of the French; Austerlitz, the Napoleonic Code
- 1769 – 1821
- Military Commanders · 1 of 10
Hall of Military Commanders
Emperor of the French; Austerlitz, the Napoleonic Code
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Napoleon Bonaparte (born Napoleone di Buonaparte; 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821), was Emperor of the French from 18 May 1804 until his first abdication in 1814, with a brief restoration during the Hundred Days in 1815. He rose to prominence as a general during the French Revolution and led a series of military campaigns across Europe and the Middle East during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. As a statesman, he implemented numerous legal and administrative reforms in France and Europe.
Born on the island of Corsica to a family of Italian origin, Napoleon moved to mainland France in 1779 and was commissioned as an officer in the French Royal Army in 1785. He supported the French Revolution in 1789 and promoted its cause in Corsica. He rose rapidly through the ranks after winning the siege of Toulon in 1793 and defeating royalist insurgents in Paris on 13 Vendémiaire in 1795. In 1796 he commanded a military campaign against the Austrians and their Italian allies in the War of the First Coalition, scoring decisive victories and becoming a national hero. He led an invasion of Egypt and Syria in 1798, which served as a springboard for his rise to political power. In November 1799 Napoleon engineered the Coup of 18 Brumaire against the French Directory and became First Consul of the Republic. He won the Battle of Marengo in 1800, which secured France's victory in the War of the Second Coalition, and in 1803 he sold the territory of Louisiana to the United States. In December 1804 Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French, further consolidating his power.
The breakdown of the Treaty of Amiens led to the War of the Third Coalition by 1805. Napoleon shattered the coalition with a decisive victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, which led to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. In the War of the Fourth Coalition, Napoleon defeated Prussia at the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt in 1806, marched his Grande Armée into Eastern Europe, and defeated the Russians in 1807 at the Battle of Friedland. Seeking to extend his trade embargo against Britain, Napoleon invaded the Iberian Peninsula and installed his brother Joseph as King of Spain in 1808, provoking the Peninsular War. In 1809 the Austrians again challenged France in the War of the Fifth Coalition, during which Napoleon consolidated his dominance over Europe after winning the Battle of Wagram. In the summer of 1812 he launched an invasion of Russia. After forcing the Russians to abandon Moscow following the Battle of Borodino, Napoleon briefly occupied the city before conducting a catastrophic retreat of his army that winter. In 1813 Prussia and Austria joined Russia in the War of the Sixth Coalition, in which Napoleon was decisively defeated at the Battle of Leipzig. The coalition invaded France and captured Paris, forcing Napoleon to abdicate in April 1814. He was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba and the Bourbons were restored to power. Ten months later Napoleon escaped from Elba with around a thousand men and marched on Paris, reclaiming control of the country. His opponents responded by forming a Seventh Coalition, which defeated him at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. Napoleon was exiled to the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died of stomach cancer in 1821, aged 51.
Since his death, Napoleon has maintained a prominent place in historical research and popular culture. He is considered one of the greatest military commanders in history, and Napoleonic tactics are still studied at military schools worldwide. His legacy endures through the legal and administrative reforms he enacted in France and Western Europe, most notably the Napoleonic Code. He established a system of public education, abolished the vestiges of feudalism, emancipated Jews and other religious minorities, abolished the Spanish Inquisition, enacted the principle of equality before the law for an emerging middle class, and centralized state power at the expense of religious authorities. His conquests also acted as a catalyst for political change and the development of nation-states. However, he remains controversial because of his role in wars that devastated Europe, his looting of conquered territories, and his mixed record on civil rights. He abolished the free press, ended directly elected representative government, exiled and imprisoned critics of his regime, reinstated slavery in French colonies, banned the entry of black people and mulattos into France, reduced the civil rights of women and children, reintroduced a hereditary monarchy and nobility, and violently repressed popular uprisings against his rule.
Napoleon's family was of Italian origin. His paternal ancestors, the Buonapartes, descended from a minor Tuscan noble family who emigrated to Corsica in the 16th century. His maternal ancestors, the Ramolinos, descended from a noble family from Lombardy. Napoleon's parents, Carlo Maria Buonaparte and Maria Letizia Ramolino, lived in the Maison Bonaparte in Ajaccio, where Napoleon was born on 15 August 1769. He had an elder brother, Joseph, and six younger siblings: Lucien, Elisa, Louis, Pauline, Caroline, and Jérôme. Five more siblings were stillborn or did not survive infancy. Napoleon was baptized as a Catholic under the name Napoleone di Buonaparte. In his youth, his name was also spelled as Nabulione, Nabulio, Napolionne, and Napulione.
Napoleon was born one year after the Republic of Genoa ceded Corsica to France through the Treaty of Versailles. His father supported Pasquale Paoli during the Corsican war of independence against France. After the Corsican defeat at the Battle of Ponte Novu in 1769 and Paoli's exile to Britain, Carlo became friends with the French governor Charles Louis de Marbeuf, who became his patron and a godfather to Napoleon. With Marbeuf's support, Carlo was named Corsican representative to the court of Louis XVI, and Napoleon obtained a royal bursary to a military academy in mainland France.
The dominant influence of Napoleon's childhood was his mother, whose firm discipline restrained a rambunctious child. Later in life, Napoleon said, "The future destiny of the child is always the work of the mother." Napoleon's noble, moderately affluent background afforded him greater opportunities to study than were available to a typical Corsican of the time.
In January 1779, aged 9, Napoleon moved to the French mainland and enrolled at a religious school in Autun to improve his French, his mother tongues being Corsican and Italian. Although he eventually became fluent in French, he spoke it with a Corsican accent, and his French spelling was poor. In May he transferred to the military academy at Brienne-le-Château where he was routinely bullied by his peers for his accent, birthplace, short stature, mannerisms, and poor French. He became reserved and melancholic, applying himself to reading. An examiner observed that Napoleon "has always been distinguished for his application in mathematics. He is fairly well acquainted with history and geography ... This boy would make an excellent sailor".
One story of Napoleon at the school is that he led junior students to victory against senior students in a snowball fight, which allegedly showed his leadership abilities. But the story was told only after Napoleon had become famous. In his later years at Brienne, Napoleon became an outspoken Corsican nationalist and admirer of Paoli.
In September 1784 Napoleon was admitted to the École militaire in Paris where he trained to become an artillery officer. He excelled at mathematics and read widely in geography, history and literature. However, he was poor at French and German. His father's death in February 1785 cut the family income and forced him to complete the two-year course in one year. In September he was examined by the famed scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace and became the first Corsican to graduate from the École militaire.
Upon graduating in September 1785, Bonaparte was commissioned a second lieutenant in La Fère artillery regiment. Bonaparte served in Valence and Auxonne until after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 but spent long periods of leave in Corsica, which fed his Corsican nationalism. In September 1789 he returned to Corsica and promoted the French revolutionary cause. Paoli returned to the island in July 1790, but he had no sympathy for Bonaparte, as he deemed his father a traitor for having deserted the cause of Corsican independence.
Bonaparte plunged into a complex three-way struggle among royalists, revolutionaries, and Corsican nationalists. He became a supporter of the Jacobins and joined the pro-French Corsican Republicans who opposed Paoli's policy and his aspirations to secede. He was given command over a battalion of Corsican volunteers and promoted to captain in the regular army in 1792, despite exceeding his leave of absence and a dispute between his volunteers and the French garrison in Ajaccio.
In February 1793 Bonaparte took part in the failed French expedition to Sardinia. Following allegations that Paoli had sabotaged the expedition and that his regime was corrupt and incompetent, the French National Convention outlawed him. In early June, Bonaparte and 400 French troops failed to capture Ajaccio from Corsican volunteers, and the island came under the control of Paoli's supporters. When Bonaparte learned that the Corsican assembly had condemned him and his family, the Buonapartes fled to Toulon on the French mainland.
Bonaparte returned to his regiment in Nice and was made captain of a coastal battery. In July 1793 he published a pamphlet, Le souper de Beaucaire (Supper at Beaucaire), demonstrating his support for the National Convention which was heavily influenced by the Jacobins.
In September, with the help of his fellow Corsican Antoine Christophe Saliceti, Bonaparte was appointed artillery commander of the republican forces sent to recapture the port of Toulon, which was occupied by allied forces. He quickly increased the available artillery and proposed a plan to capture a hill fort where republican guns could dominate the city's harbour and force the allies to evacuate. The successful assault on the position on 16–17 December led to the capture of the city.
Toulon brought Bonaparte to the attention of powerful men including Augustin Robespierre, the younger brother of Maximilien Robespierre, a leading Jacobin. He was promoted to brigadier general and put in charge of defences on the Mediterranean coast. In February 1794 he was made artillery commander of the Army of Italy and devised plans to attack the Kingdom of Sardinia.
The French army carried out Bonaparte's plan in the Second Battle of Saorgio in April 1794 and then advanced to seize Ormea in the mountains. From Ormea it headed west to outflank the Austro-Sardinian positions around Saorge. After this campaign, Augustin Robespierre sent Bonaparte on a mission to the Republic of Genoa to determine the country's intentions towards France.
After the Fall of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794, Bonaparte's association with leading Jacobins made him politically suspect to the new regime. He was arrested on 9 August but released two weeks later. He was asked to draw up plans to attack Italian positions as part of France's war with Austria, and in March 1795 he took part in an expedition to take back Corsica from the British, but the French were repulsed by the Royal Navy.
From 1794 Bonaparte was in a romantic relationship with Désirée Clary, whose sister Julie Clary had married Bonaparte's elder brother Joseph. In April 1795 Bonaparte was assigned to the Army of the West, which was engaged in the War in the Vendée—a civil war and royalist counter-revolution in the Vendée region. As an infantry command, it was a demotion from artillery general, and he pleaded poor health to avoid the posting. During this period he wrote the romantic novella Clisson et Eugénie, about a soldier and his lover, in a clear parallel to Bonaparte's own relationship with Clary.
In August he obtained a position with the Bureau of Topography, where he worked on military planning. On 15 September he was removed from the list of generals in regular service for refusing to serve in the Vendée campaign. He sought a transfer to Constantinople to offer his services to Sultan Selim III. The request was eventually granted, but he never took up the post.
On 3 October royalists in Paris declared a rebellion against the National Convention. Paul Barras, a leader of the Thermidorian Reaction, knew of Bonaparte's military exploits at Toulon and made him second in command of the forces defending the convention in the Tuileries Palace. Bonaparte had seen the massacre of the king's Swiss Guard during the Insurrection of 10 August 1792 three years earlier and realized that artillery would be the key to its defence. He ordered a young cavalry officer, Joachim Murat, to seize cannons, and Bonaparte deployed them in key positions. On 5 October 1795—13 Vendémiaire An IV in the French Republican calendar—he fired on the rebels with canister rounds (described by Thomas Carlyle as "the whiff of grapeshot"). About 300 to 1,400 rebels died in the uprising. Bonaparte's role in defeating the rebellion earned him and his family the patronage of the new government, the French Directory. On 26 October he was promoted to commander of the Army of the Interior, and in January 1796, he was appointed head of the Army of Italy.
Within weeks of the Vendémiaire uprising, Bonaparte was romantically involved with Joséphine de Beauharnais, the former mistress of Barras. Josephine had been born in the French colonies in the Lesser Antilles, and her family owned slaves on sugar plantations. The couple married on 9 March 1796 in a civil ceremony. Bonaparte began to habitually style himself "Napoleon Bonaparte" rather than using the Italian form "Napoleone di Buonaparte."
Two days after the marriage, Bonaparte left Paris to take command of the Army of Italy. He went on the offensive, hoping to defeat the Kingdom of Sardinia in Piedmont before their Austrian allies could intervene. In a series of victories during the Montenotte campaign, he knocked the Piedmontese out of the war in two weeks. The French then focused on the Austrians, laying siege to Mantua. The Austrians launched offensives against the French to break the siege, but Bonaparte defeated every relief effort, winning the Battle of Castiglione, the Battle of Bassano, the Battle of Arcole, and the Battle of Rivoli. The French triumph at Rivoli in January 1797 led to the collapse of the Austrian position in Italy. At Rivoli Austria lost 43% of its soldiers dead, wounded or taken prisoner.
The French then invaded the heartlands of the House of Habsburg. French forces in southern Germany had been defeated by Archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen in 1796, but Charles withdrew his forces to protect Vienna after learning of Bonaparte's assault. In their first encounter, Bonaparte pushed Charles back and advanced deep into Austrian territory after winning the Battle of Tarvis in March 1797. Alarmed by the French thrust that reached Leoben, about 100 km from Vienna, the Austrians sued for peace. The preliminary peace of Leoben, signed on 18 April, gave France control of most of northern Italy and the Low Countries and promised to partition the Republic of Venice with Austria. Bonaparte marched on Venice and forced its surrender, ending 1,100 years of Venetian independence. He authorized the French to loot treasures such as the Horses of Saint Mark.
In this Italian campaign, Bonaparte's army captured 150,000 prisoners, 540 cannons, and 170 standards. The French army fought 67 actions and won 18 pitched battles through superior artillery technology and Bonaparte's tactics. Bonaparte extracted an estimated 45 million French pounds from Italy during the campaign, another 12 million pounds in precious metals and jewels, and more than 300 paintings and sculptures.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Napoleon”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.