Napoleon Bonaparte

The coup of 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799) made Napoleon First Consul, then Consul for Life, and finally, in 1804, Emperor of the French. Each step consolidated power while maintaining revolutionary rhetoric about the people's will.

His domestic achievements rivaled his military ones. The Napoleonic Code systematized French law, establishing principles of equality before the law, property rights, and secular governance that spread across Europe and influenced legal systems on every continent. The Bank of France stabilized the currency; the Concordat with the Pope settled religious conflicts; educational reforms created the lycee system.

Yet these reforms served centralization and control. The secret police monitored dissent; censorship muzzled the press; the "continental system" tried to strangle British trade at the cost of economic distress. Napoleon's reforms were real, but so was his authoritarianism.

His coronation in Notre-Dame, where he famously placed the crown on his own head rather than accepting it from the Pope, symbolized his relationship with legitimacy. He drew authority from revolutionary principles but expressed it in imperial forms. The tension between these never resolved.

Napoleon's military campaigns from 1805 to 1812 produced some of history's most studied battles. Austerlitz (1805) destroyed the Third Coalition through a masterpiece of deception and timing. Jena-Auerstedt (1806) shattered Prussia in a single day. Wagram (1809) forced Austria to submit once more.

His operational genius combined strategic vision with tactical flexibility. He moved armies faster than opponents believed possible, concentrated superior force at the decisive point, and exploited victory ruthlessly. The corps system, the use of artillery as a mass weapon, and the integration of all arms set standards that military professionals still study.

But hubris followed triumph. The Peninsular War in Spain became a bleeding ulcer, tying down hundreds of thousands of troops in a guerrilla conflict that could not be won. The invasion of Russia in 1812 brought the Grand Army of 600,000 to Moscow - and brought perhaps 100,000 back, the rest dead from battle, cold, starvation, and disease.

The campaigns of 1813-14 showed Napoleon's tactical brilliance undiminished even as strategic reality closed in. He won battles but could not win the war. Paris fell; he abdicated; the allies exiled him to Elba. His escape, return, and final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 produced the Hundred Days - one last burst of drama before the curtain fell.

The British exiled Napoleon to St. Helena, a volcanic island in the South Atlantic, two thousand miles from anywhere. He would spend his last six years there, dictating memoirs, quarreling with his British jailer, and crafting the legend that would shape his posthumous reputation.

The "Memorial of St. Helena," recorded by Las Cases, presented Napoleon as the champion of revolutionary principles betrayed by reactionary monarchs, the unifier of Europe thwarted by British jealousy. This narrative, however self-serving, influenced generations of admirers from Ludwig van Beethoven (who initially dedicated the Eroica symphony to him) to twentieth-century strongmen who saw themselves as his heirs.

He died on May 5, 1821, probably of stomach cancer, though arsenic poisoning theories persist. His body was returned to France in 1840, interred beneath the dome of Les Invalides in Paris, where visitors still queue to see the red porphyry sarcophagus containing the remains of the little Corsican who conquered a continent.

Napoleon was famously short - except he wasn't, really. At five feet six inches by French measurement of the time, he was average height; British propaganda and confusion over measurement systems created the enduring myth of the "little corporal." What was unusual was his energy. He could work eighteen-hour days, dictate to multiple secretaries simultaneously, and sleep in fifteen-minute increments when campaigns demanded.

His personal relationships were complicated. Josephine remained his great love even after he divorced her for her inability to produce an heir. His second marriage to the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise was political; their son, styled King of Rome, would die young in Vienna. Brothers and sisters were installed as puppet monarchs across Europe, with decidedly mixed results.

He read voraciously - history, mathematics, law - and corresponded with scientists and scholars. He took savants to Egypt, founded the Institut d'Egypte, and retained genuine intellectual interests throughout his life. The man who reshaped Europe through war was also, paradoxically, a creature of the Enlightenment.

His legacy remains contested. Did he spread revolutionary ideals or betray them? Did he modernize Europe or devastate it? The millions of dead, the nations remade, the legal and administrative structures that endured - all these invite judgments that depend as much on the judge as on the evidence. What's clear is that for two decades, one man's will shaped history in ways that seemed impossible before and have rarely been matched since.