On April 6, , Napoleon, then in his mids, was forced to abdicate the throne. With the Treaty of Fontainebleau, he was exiled to Elba, a Mediterranean island off the coast of Italy. He was given sovereignty over the small island, while his wife and son went to Austria.
On February 26, , after less than a year in exile, Napoleon escaped Elba and sailed to the French mainland with a group of more than 1, supporters. On March 20, he returned to Paris, where he was welcomed by cheering crowds. Napoleon raised a new army and planned to strike preemptively, defeating the allied forces one by one before they could launch a united attack against him.
In June , his forces invaded Belgium, where British and Prussian troops were stationed. However, two days later, on June 18, at the Battle of Waterloo near Brussels, the French were crushed by the British, with assistance from the Prussians. He died there on May 5, , at age 51, most likely from stomach cancer.
During his time in power, Napoleon often posed for paintings with his hand in his vest, leading to some speculation after his death that he had been plagued by stomach pain for years. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Napoleone di Buonaparte was born on Corsica on August 15, , just 15 months after France had purchased the island from the Italian city-state of Genoa. After taking power in , French leader Napoleon Bonaparte won a string of military victories that gave him control over most of Europe.
He annexed present-day Belgium and Holland, along with large chunks of present-day Italy, Croatia and Germany, and he set up dependencies in When British writer William Crackanthorpe visited the Mediterranean island of Elba in , he was wildly curious about its most famous resident: the disgraced emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Few things are as closely linked as the Bonapartes and France. But after some of his most audacious expansionist Between the hours of 2 and 3 on the morning of July 6, , French troops under the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte scaled the walls of the gardens of the Quirinal Palace in Rome and penetrated into the part of the palace occupied by papal servants.
After an hour of violent Also known as the Battle of Nations, Leipzig was, In terms of numbers of troops engaged and amount of artillery, the biggest battle of the Napoleonic Wars. Separate but coordinated armies of Russians, Prussians, Swedes, and Austrians brought , troops and 1, guns to the The young couple soon came to symbolize all of the excesses of the reviled French monarchy, and Marie Antoinette herself became the target of a great deal His supposedly small stature and fiery temper has inspired the term the Napoleon Complex, a popular belief that short men Live TV.
This Day In History. History Vault. One had seen this in his dealings with the troops—his troops in northern Italy, his troops in Egypt—and also, all sorts of contemporary evidence suggests that in dealing with people individually he exerted an enormous amount of charm, power, and charisma.
It was hardly a mystery that he would very quickly outmaneuver his two partners in this triumvirate, as well as the legislative bodies of the regime. In , Napoleon had himself elected consul for life. And in a step that was really quite remarkable and was a preview of the way Napoleon wanted to reign, this step was to be ratified by a national plebiscite.
The people were now called in to vote to ratify this step taken by the regime, taken by Napoleon. The outcome of the vote was 3,, in favor, 8, against. One might suspect that there was a certain amount of manipulation and influence brought to bear on the outcome, but Napoleon was quite clearly very popular in France at this time. In , he used a trumped up royalist plot to declare himself emperor. He claimed that there was a conspiracy to return the Bourbon monarchy, to overthrow the Revolution.
Napoleon constantly talked about the Revolution, even the Republic at times and saw the great danger. But he always tried to present himself on the one hand as a military man, a man of affairs, a pragmatist in some ways, but also as the legitimate heir of the Revolution.
What sort of empire was this? What sort of state was this to be? Was he, as Napoleon claimed, the legitimate heir of the Revolution, or was he, as his critics certainly claimed, simply a military tyrant, reminiscent of the worst aspects of the Roman Empire? Or does his regime represent a really uniquely new political synthesis of both democratic forms and authoritarian control? To answer these questions, we need to turn to the basic elements of the regime itself: its constitution, its administration, the domestic achievements of the regime.
The Constitution of had been based on universal suffrage. There was universal suffrage to elect electors, who would then elect a final legislature. This was the usual kind of compromised solution.
Learn more about the economic problems of France in the s. Napoleon insisted upon the codification of law; the Napoleonic Code would become one of the great achievements of his regime, implemented not only in France, but also in the countries of Europe occupied by the French armies.
That new code imposed upon France a uniform system of justice. It called for equality before the law. This was a major step. One thing that equality before the law meant to the Napoleonic regime was that no one would be tax-exempt.
All French citizens were now going to bear the financial burdens of state. Freedom of religion was guaranteed under the new constitution; Protestants would be able to practice their religion, and Napoleon took steps to emancipate the Jews.
This had been done initially during the Revolution itself in the first constitution. Napoleon would take additional steps in this direction. The new constitution also called for freedom of profession. It dealt the final deathblow to the old guilds, and it was a bow toward the new forces of commercial capitalism and industrialization in France. What it did was to signal to liberal economic elements that this was going to be a regime that would adopt policies that were favorable to business, favorable to trade, to commerce, to break whatever residual powers lingered of the old guild system in France.
Having obtained power Napoleon now needed to consolidate it. He believed the best way to accomplish that would be through a general European peace. Since Austria was the only state that was still a belligerent against France, in order to secure peace Napoleon had to lead another campaign against the Austrians in Italy. Napoleon crossed the Alps again in May , and within a month defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo. This staggering victory assured what the royalist agent Hyde de Neuville deemed 'the baptism of Napoleon's personal power.
Peace was then made with Britain in March with the Treaty of Amiens, ending their warring, and briefly bringing Europe to peace, a rare occurrence in this violent period. Of course, during this brief European peace, there still were conflicts going on in other parts of the world: notably, France was desperately trying to control the situation in Saint-Domingue today Haiti , where Toussaint l'Ouverture was disobeying Napoleon's orders. As war gradually gave way to peace Napoleon and his supporters started the work of reforming France.
Almost all of Napoleon's constructive work, i. His purpose and historical role as he saw it was to bring the Revolution to an end, to draw a line ending the turbulence and chaos of the revolutionary decade and place French government on new, stable ground under his control. Paradoxically, as Napoleon hoped to end the revolution in favor of order, some of the reforms he made were reforms advocated by the most radical of the revolutionaries.
He also made statements such as "I am the Revolution. Napoleon applied his own peculiar idea of the democratic legacy of the Revolution to his reforms: 'My policy is to govern men as the greater number wish to be governed. That, I think, is the way to recognize the sovereignty of the people.
The administration was centralized, with prefects appointed to rule the new departments, i. Work on new law codes began in August , and the final Civil Code, known as the Code Napoleon, ensured that those who profited most from the Revolution, the peasants and bourgeois who had acquired confiscated noble and Church lands, held onto their gains. Also, in line with Napoleon's interest in establishing a meritocracy in France, Napoleon established the lycee system for secondary education.
The Lycees were meant to be the cornerstone of the new French educational systems, which also included the national Universities, such as Polytechnique.
Each court of appeal, a smaller administrative district inside the various departments that Napoleon created, was to have at least one lycee, while the principle of equality of opportunity was honored by the provision of scholarships.
A common curriculum was imposed in , along with the baccalaureate examination that is still a prerequisite for entry into higher education in France today. Napoleon also stabilized the currency by using a gold and silver standard to back money, rather than paper. He also created the Bank of France, to regulate the economy in hopes of avoiding financial crises like the one which prompted Louis XVI to call the Estates General in Napoleon also enacted reforms directed at imposing order and stability on society through authoritarian means.
For instance, Napoleon put down many royalist and pro-Church rebellions in the provinces of France. He created the first modern secret police, led by Fouche. Also, to reduce the number of potential revolutionaries floating around Europe, he issued a general amnesty allowing exiles, aristocrats to Jacobins, to return, believing that he can watch people more closely if they are in France, rather than abroad.
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