Napoleon Bonaparte

About this figure

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was a French military and political leader who rose from relatively modest origins on the island of Corsica to become one of the most consequential figures in modern European history. Trained as an artillery officer, he distinguished himself during the French Revolutionary Wars, and after seizing power in the coup of 18 Brumaire (November 1799), he governed France first as First Consul and then, from 1804, as Emperor of the French. Over the following decade he led French armies to a series of major victories, most notably at Austerlitz in 1805, and brought much of continental Europe under direct French control or the influence of allied and client states, while also reorganizing French law through the Napoleonic Code, a body of civil law that influenced legal systems across Europe and beyond.

His fortunes turned after the catastrophic invasion of Russia in 1812; defeated by a coalition of European powers, he abdicated in 1814 and was exiled to the island of Elba, only to return to France for the Hundred Days before his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. He spent his remaining years in exile on the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died in 1821. In 1796, early in his career, Napoleon married Joséphine de Beauharnais, a widow several years his senior, and his surviving letters to her from the Italian campaign of that period reveal an intensity of feeling at odds with his later public image as a cool strategist, full of impatience, jealousy, and longing during their frequent separations. The marriage was dissolved in 1810 after it produced no heir, and Napoleon subsequently married the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise, with whom he had a son. Napoleon's military campaigns reshaped the map of Europe and inspired both admiration and lasting resentment among the nations he conquered, and his reforms to administration, law, and education left an imprint on French and European institutions that outlasted his empire by generations.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.