Napoleon

Napoleone di Buonaparte was born at Ajaccio on 15 August 1769, barely a year after Genoa ceded Corsica to France and only months after Pasquale Paoli's independence movement was crushed at Ponte Novu. His father, Carlo Buonaparte, a lawyer of minor Tuscan-descended nobility, had followed Paoli before making peace with the new French administration — a pragmatic reversal that won him the patronage of the island's governor, the Comte de Marbeuf. That protection, together with certified proof of noble descent, secured royal scholarships for his sons, opening a career otherwise closed to a provincial family of modest means.¶

Sent to Autun to learn French and then, in May 1779, to the military school at Brienne-le-Château, the boy endured five years of isolation among wealthier classmates who mocked his accent and Corsican patriotism, retreating into mathematics and history. Selected for the École Militaire in Paris in 1784, he compressed the course into a single year after Carlo's death from stomach cancer at Montpellier in February 1785 left the family impoverished. In September 1785 he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the La Fère artillery regiment, garrisoned at Valence.¶

The Corsican artillery officer Napoleon Bonaparte emerged from obscurity in the crucible of the Terror. In December 1793, at the Siege of Toulon, where the port had surrendered to a British and Spanish fleet, the young captain replaced a wounded commander and argued that the key to the city lay not in its walls but in the promontory of L'Éguillette, whose batteries could make the harbour untenable. The plan, backed by the representatives-on-mission Saliceti and Augustin Robespierre, worked: the allied fleet withdrew, Toulon fell, and Bonaparte was made brigadier general at twenty-four. Thermidor nearly destroyed him — his Robespierrist patronage brought brief arrest and a period of unemployment — but the collapse of the Jacobins also cleared his path. In October 1795 (13 Vendémiaire), when royalist sections of Paris marched against the Convention, Paul Barras entrusted the defence to Bonaparte, who used cavalry under Murat to fetch cannon from the Sablons and swept the rue Saint-Honoré with grapeshot. The “whiff of grapeshot” made him the sword of the new Directory and commander of the Army of the Interior.¶

Barras's salon also brought Joséphine de Beauharnais, widow of a guillotined general, into his life; their civil marriage in March 1796 came days before he departed to take command of the Army of Italy — a ragged, unpaid force of some 40,000 men that the Directory regarded as a diversion from Jourdan's and Moreau's Rhine offensives. Bonaparte, aided by chief of staff Berthier and divisional commanders Masséna, Augereau and Sérurier, reversed that calculus. Advancing through the Ligurian passes, he drove a wedge between Beaulieu's Austrians and Colli's Piedmontese, winning at Montenotte in April, then defeating the Piedmontese in a rapid series of blows that forced the Armistice of Cherasco upon Victor Amadeus III and, in May, the Treaty of Paris with Sardinia ceding Savoy and Nice. Turning east, he forced the crossing of the Adda at Lodi, an assault celebrated in propaganda as the moment he first felt himself “no ordinary man” and which earned him the soldiers' nickname “le petit caporal”. His triumphal entry into Milan on 15 May, staged as a liberation of Lombardy, established a pattern: republics organised under French tutelage, contributions and art treasures extracted, and dispatches to Paris written to shape his own legend.¶

The siege of Mantua then anchored a year of Austrian relief attempts. Bonaparte defeated Wurmser at Castiglione in August 1796 by exploiting the dispersal of Austrian columns, and in November wrested a hard, marshy victory from Alvinczi at Arcole, where the fight for the causeways lasted three days. The decisive blow came at Rivoli in January 1797, where converging Austrian columns were destroyed piecemeal; Mantua capitulated in February, ending Habsburg power in northern Italy. Meanwhile the general conducted his own diplomacy: the Armistice of Bologna in June 1796 and the Treaty of Tolentino in February 1797 stripped Pius VI of Bologna, Ferrara, the Romagna and Avignon and levied heavy indemnities and artworks, a settlement Bonaparte imposed against Directorial hopes of abolishing the papacy outright, judging a chastened pope more useful than a martyr.¶

Driving north through the Alps toward Vienna against Archduke Charles, and increasingly exposed at the end of long communications, Bonaparte concluded the Preliminaries of Leoben in April 1797 on his own authority. The definitive Treaty of Campo Formio in October confirmed it: Austria surrendered Belgium and recognised the Cisalpine Republic, receiving Venice — a neutral state Bonaparte had extinguished — in compensation. Family fortunes rose with him; his brother Joseph's 1794 marriage to Julie Clary, daughter of a wealthy Marseille merchant, had already given the clan capital and connections. By 1797 Bonaparte was not merely a general but an autonomous political force whom the Directory could neither control nor dispense with.¶

The Egyptian expedition was conceived as a blow against British commerce and the route to India, but it also suited the Directory's wish to remove a dangerously popular general from Paris; Talleyrand, as foreign minister, lent the scheme diplomatic cover, promising to soothe the Ottoman Porte, nominal suzerain of Egypt. Sailing from Toulon in May 1798 with some 35,000 troops and a corps of 160 savants, Bonaparte first seized Malta in June, exploiting the decayed state of the Knights of St John under Grand Master von Hompesch, who capitulated after token resistance. Evading Nelson's searching squadron, the fleet reached Egypt and stormed Alexandria on 2 July 1798, after which the army marched up the Nile through desert heat to confront the Mamluk beys. At the Battle of the Pyramids on 21 July, French infantry squares shattered Murad Bey's cavalry, and Cairo fell.¶

The triumph was hollow. On 1–2 August Nelson found Brueys' fleet moored in Aboukir Bay and annihilated it at the Battle of the Nile, the flagship L'Orient exploding in the night. Stranded, Bonaparte reinvented himself as an administrator and patron of learning, founding the Institut d'Égypte, while his engineers uncovered the Rosetta Stone. Ottoman entry into the war provoked his pre-emptive invasion of Syria in 1799: Jaffa was stormed and its garrison massacred, plague thinned the ranks, and before Acre the campaign broke. Ahmed al-Djezzar Pasha, supplied and stiffened by Commodore Sidney Smith and the royalist engineer Phélippeaux — who had captured the French siege train at sea — held the walls through two months of assaults. Though Bonaparte relieved Kléber's outnumbered division at Mount Tabor on 16 April, defeating a Damascene relief army, Acre could not be taken, and in May the French retreated to Egypt.¶

Bonaparte restored his reputation on 25 July 1799 at Aboukir, destroying Mustafa Pasha's Anglo-Ottoman landing force with Murat's cavalry charge. Reading in captured newspapers of French reverses in Italy and Germany and of the Directory's collapsing authority, he resolved to return. On 22 August he slipped aboard the frigate Muiron with Berthier, Lannes, Murat, Monge and Berthollet, leaving Kléber a written command he had not requested. Elsewhere, events were reshaping his world: Désirée Clary, his discarded fiancée, married General Bernadotte in August 1798, binding a future rival — and a future Swedish dynasty — into his orbit; and Pope Pius VI, carried off by French troops from Rome, died a prisoner at Valence in August 1799, leaving a religious rupture that Bonaparte would later exploit and repair.¶

The period opened on 18–19 Brumaire Year VIII (9–10 November 1799), when General Bonaparte, freshly returned from Egypt and cloaked in the prestige of the Pyramids, joined the abbé Sieyès and Roger Ducos in overthrowing the Directory. The plot depended less on the general's rhetoric — he faltered badly before the Council of Five Hundred at Saint-Cloud — than on the nerve of his brother Lucien, presiding over the chamber, who summoned the grenadiers to clear the hall, and on the complicity of Talleyrand, Fouché and Barras, who was bought off into resignation. Sieyès expected to supply the constitutional theory and reduce the soldier to a figurehead; instead the Constitution of Year VIII, drafted by Daunou and hurried through in December, invested a First Consul with the sole right to initiate legislation, appoint ministers and command the armies, while the Senate, Tribunate and Legislative Body were reduced to filters of an emasculated sovereignty. A plebiscite, its figures massaged by Lucien at the Interior Ministry, ratified the arrangement. In February 1800 Bonaparte quit the Luxembourg for the Tuileries, deliberately occupying the palace of kings.¶

Consolidation at home proceeded with extraordinary speed. The law of 28 pluviôse Year VIII created the prefects, agents of the centre placed over every department and answerable to Paris alone, completing the administrative centralisation that revolutionary assemblies had begun and monarchy had only sketched. In January 1800 the Bank of France was founded, its shareholders drawn from the Parisian banking milieu — Perregaux, Le Couteulx — that had financed Brumaire; in 1803 the germinal franc gave France a silver-based currency that would survive until 1914. A consular decree of January 1800 suppressed sixty of the seventy-three Paris newspapers, and special criminal tribunals, sitting without juries, were created in 1801 to crush brigandage and chouannerie in the west. Institutions of consent balanced these instruments of control: chambers of commerce for the merchant class, lycées (1802) to train a disciplined administrative and military elite, a reorganised Institut de France purged of its ideological turbulence, and — for the worker — the compulsory livret, which tied labour to employers. The Civil Code, promulgated in March 1804 after Bonaparte personally chaired dozens of sessions of the Council of State, fixed the social settlement of the Revolution: equality before the law, secure property, secular marriage and divorce, and the restored authority of husbands and fathers.¶

Abroad, the Consulate needed victory to legitimise itself. In May 1800 Bonaparte led the Reserve Army over the Great St Bernard pass to fall on the Austrian rear in Lombardy; at Marengo on 14 June a battle nearly lost was retrieved by Desaix's counter-attack and Kellermann's cavalry charge, Desaix dying in the moment of triumph and leaving the glory undivided. The Convention of Alessandria evacuated the Austrians from northern Italy. But it was Moreau's far more complete victory at Hohenlinden in December — the achievement of a republican general Bonaparte distrusted — that forced Vienna to sign the Treaty of Lunéville in February 1801, confirming the Rhine frontier and French hegemony in Italy. A diplomatic offensive dismantled the Second Coalition piece by piece: the Convention of Mortefontaine ended the naval quasi-war with the United States; the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso secured the retrocession of Louisiana from Spain; Aranjuez erected the kingdom of Etruria for a Bourbon client; Florence subdued Naples and Badajoz humbled Portugal after the brief War of the Oranges. The murder of Tsar Paul I in March 1801 removed a mercurial admirer but his successor Alexander concluded peace at Paris in October. Isolated, Britain signed the preliminaries of London and then, in March 1802, the Peace of Amiens — the only general peace of the era, and one both sides treated as an armistice.¶

Peace made possible the religious settlement. Negotiated with Cardinal Consalvi and signed in July 1801, the Concordat recognised Catholicism as the religion of the majority of Frenchmen, restored public worship and had bishops nominated by the state and instituted by the pope, while guaranteeing the buyers of Church lands. When it was promulgated at Easter 1802, Bonaparte unilaterally appended the Organic Articles, subordinating the clergy to police supervision and infuriating Rome. The same season brought an amnesty recalling most émigrés, the Legion of Honour to reward merit in a society without ancient nobility, and — at Lyons — Bonaparte's election as President of the Italian Republic. In August 1802 a further plebiscite made him Consul for life with the right to name his successor. In the colonies the restoration of slavery in May 1802 shattered the Republic's emancipationist promise, provoked the war that destroyed Leclerc's army in Saint-Domingue, and led to Toussaint Louverture's death in the fortress of Joux in April 1803. That failure, and the imminent renewal of war, persuaded Bonaparte to sell Louisiana to the United States; in Switzerland the Act of Mediation imposed a federal order under French protection.¶

Royalist conspiracy supplied the final impulse to monarchy. The Rue Saint-Nicaise infernal machine of December 1800, though the work of chouans, was used by Fouché's rival ministers as a pretext to deport Jacobins. In 1804 the Cadoudal–Pichegru plot was uncovered, implicating Moreau; Pichegru was found strangled in his cell, Cadoudal went to the guillotine, and to terrify the Bourbons Bonaparte had the duc d'Enghien abducted from neutral Baden and shot at Vincennes on 21 March — an act Fouché reputedly called worse than a crime, a blunder. Security now demanded heredity. On 18 May 1804 the Senate proclaimed Napoleon Emperor of the French, eighteen marshals were named the next day, a plebiscite ratified the dynasty, and the first Legion of Honour crosses were distributed at the Invalides. Family politics kept pace: Caroline had married Murat, Louis had married Hortense de Beauharnais, while Lucien's and Jérôme's defiant marriages broke them from the imperial project. On the eve of the coronation Cardinal Fesch quietly married Napoleon and Joséphine religiously, at her insistence; on 2 December 1804, in Notre-Dame, before Pius VII, Napoleon crowned himself.¶

The years between 1805 and 1809 saw Napoleon transform a French republic-turned-empire into a continental hegemony without precedent since Charlemagne, and the same years planted the causes of its undoing. The period opened with a coronation: on 26 May 1805, in the Duomo of Milan, Napoleon placed the Iron Crown of Lombardy on his own head and proclaimed himself King of Italy, appointing his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais as viceroy to govern Lombardy and Venetia in his name. The gesture, together with the annexation of Genoa, convinced Vienna and St Petersburg that no negotiated equilibrium was possible, and William Pitt's British subsidies knitted together the Third Coalition. Napoleon abandoned the invasion camp at Boulogne and marched the Grande Armée across the Rhine in a matter of weeks. The manoeuvre that followed was the purest expression of his operational art: by swinging the corps of the army around the Bavarian flank, he cut General Mack's communications and forced the Capitulation of Ulm on 20 October, taking an army almost without a battle. The next day, off Cape Trafalgar, Nelson annihilated the Franco-Spanish fleet under Villeneuve, and with it any realistic hope of contesting British sea power — a defeat whose consequences Napoleon would spend the rest of his reign trying to circumvent by economic rather than naval means. On land, however, the campaign reached its climax with the French occupation of Vienna in November and the Battle of Austerlitz on 2 December 1805, the first anniversary of the coronation, where the deliberate abandonment of the Pratzen Heights lured the Allied centre into a fatal advance. The Treaty of Pressburg stripped Austria of Venetia, Tyrol and its Swabian lands; a separate Treaty of Schönbrunn bound a hesitant Prussia, which had mobilised too late, into an alliance and a compromising exchange of territory including Hanover. At home the symbolic break with the Revolution was completed when the Republican calendar was abolished on 1 January 1806, and family discipline was enforced when Jérôme's American marriage to Elizabeth Patterson was annulled to keep the Bonapartes available for dynastic use.¶

With Austria humbled, Napoleon reorganised Germany. The Confederation of the Rhine, created in July 1806, gathered the middle-sized German states under French protection; on 6 August Francis II laid down the imperial crown, ending the Holy Roman Empire after eight centuries. The Bonapartes became a dynasty of client sovereigns: Joseph was made King of Naples, Louis King of Holland, Murat Grand Duke of Berg, Pauline Duchess of Guastalla; Stéphanie de Beauharnais was married to the heir of Baden, Eugène was formally adopted and wed to Princess Augusta of Bavaria, cementing the Bavarian alliance. The death of Pitt in January 1806 briefly raised hopes of peace with Britain, but negotiations failed. Prussia, alarmed by French bargaining over Hanover and by the Confederation, went to war alone; the twin Battles of Jena and Auerstedt on 14 October destroyed the Frederician army in a single day, and Napoleon made his entry into Berlin on 27 October. From the Prussian capital he issued the Berlin Decree, proclaiming the Continental System: since Britain could not be invaded, it would be strangled by the closure of European ports to its trade. Saxony was detached by the Treaty of Posen and raised to a kingdom, while the Treaty of Paris and later arrangements bound a truncated Prussia. Domestically, 1806 was a year of institution-building — the Feast of Saint Napoleon fixed on 15 August, the Imperial Catechism teaching obedience to the emperor as a religious duty, the first conseils de prud'hommes at Lyon to arbitrate labour disputes, the Code of Civil Procedure, and the founding of the Imperial University to place teaching under state monopoly. That year too saw the birth of Charles Léon, Napoleon's first natural son, proof that the emperor's childlessness with Joséphine was not his own.¶

The Polish campaign of 1807 tested the limits of the system. The winter Battle of Eylau in February was a bloody stalemate fought in snow, the first check to the legend; the fall of Danzig in May restored momentum, and on 14 June the Battle of Friedland shattered Bennigsen's Russian army. On a raft at Tilsit, Alexander I and Napoleon divided Europe into spheres: Russia joined the Continental System, Prussia lost half its territory, and from its Polish spoils arose the Duchy of Warsaw, for which Napoleon dictated a constitution abolishing serfdom. Westphalia received a constitution and a king in Jérôme, who was compensated with a Württemberg princess for his annulled marriage. Diplomacy reached further still: the Treaty of Finckenstein courted Persia against Russia and Britain, while the Treaty of Fontainebleau with Spain arranged the partition of Portugal and gave Junot's army passage through the peninsula. The Milan Decree tightened the blockade to neutral shipping. Legally, the year was a monument: the Civil Code was renamed the Code Napoléon, the Commercial Code was promulgated, the Cour des comptes established to audit state finances, and the Tribunate — the last body capable of public criticism — abolished. Yet the death in May of Napoléon-Charles, Louis and Hortense's son and the designated heir presumptive, reopened the dynastic wound that would eventually cost Joséphine her crown.¶

Spain proved the fatal overreach. The Fontainebleau intervention degenerated into occupation; the riot of Aranjuez in March 1808 toppled Godoy and forced Charles IV to abdicate in favour of his son Ferdinand. Napoleon summoned both to Bayonne and extracted the Abdications of Bayonne, transferring the crown to Joseph, with Murat compensated by the throne of Naples. A Bayonne Statute promised reform, but on 2 May Madrid rose, and the insurrection spread as a national and religious war supported by British expeditionary forces. The capitulation of Dupont's corps at Bailén in July was the first surrender of a Napoleonic army in the field; the Convention of Cintra in August evacuated Junot's men from Portugal. Having secured Alexander's benevolent neutrality at the Erfurt Convention, Napoleon led the Grande Armée into Spain in person: the Polish light horse's charge at Somosierra opened the road, and he retook Madrid in December, issuing the Chamartín decrees to abolish the Inquisition, feudal rights and internal customs. The same year brought the creation of the imperial nobility — a hierarchy of princes, dukes, counts and barons endowed with revenues from conquered lands — the organisation of the Imperial University, the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the ambivalent decrees on the Jews of the Empire, which restricted credit and residence for a decade while requiring the adoption of fixed surnames.¶

Austria seized the moment. In April 1809 Archduke Charles invaded Bavaria; Napoleon, hurrying from Paris, restored the situation and won at Eckmühl, occupying Vienna a second time. But at Aspern-Essling in May the Danube floods broke his bridges and he suffered his first personal defeat, losing Marshal Lannes, the most outspoken of his companions, to a cannonball. Six weeks of methodical preparation on the island of Lobau produced the Battle of Wagram on 5–6 July, an artillery-heavy victory of attrition that forced the Treaty of Schönbrunn, stripping Austria of Illyria, Galician lands and its access to the sea. In Britain's favour, Moore's stand at Corunna in January and Wellesley's defensive victory at Talavera in July showed that the Peninsula would not be pacified. Meanwhile Napoleon annexed the Papal States, provoking his excommunication by Pius VII and the pope's arrest, and Elisa was made Grand Duchess of Tuscany, completing the family's dominion over Italy. The year closed with a calculated act of dynastic ruthlessness: in December 1809 Napoleon divorced Joséphine, seeking a legitimate heir and an alliance with one of the old ruling houses. The empire stood at its territorial and institutional zenith, but the Spanish ulcer, the resentment stirred by the Continental System, and the awakening of national feeling in Germany were already eroding its foundations.¶

The period opened in apparent triumph. Having divorced Joséphine to secure an heir, Napoleon obtained from a compliant ecclesiastical court in Paris an annulment of his religious marriage in January 1810, and in March a marriage by proxy was celebrated in Vienna, where Archduke Charles stood in for the absent bridegroom and Marie Louise of Austria, daughter of Francis I and great-niece of Marie Antoinette, was handed over to her new dynasty. The union, brokered by Metternich as a means of buying Austria time to recover from the catastrophe of 1809, made the Corsican upstart the nephew by marriage of the Habsburgs and seemed to close the revolutionary parenthesis. On 20 March 1811 the birth of a son, immediately styled King of Rome and baptised with imperial pomp at Notre-Dame in June, appeared to guarantee the succession. Yet the same year saw the Empire's internal machinery hardening: the new Penal Code was adopted, printing and bookselling were placed under a strict licensing regime with a drastically reduced number of authorised presses, and a decree formally legalised the state prisons in which suspects could be detained without trial. The Empire was becoming what its founder had promised to replace — an arbitrary regime resting on police, censorship and conscription.¶

The cause of most of this was the Continental System, and its failure. The Trianon tariff of August 1810 imposed crushing duties on colonial goods, effectively taxing smuggled British produce rather than excluding it, while the Fontainebleau decree of October ordered the seizure and public burning of British manufactures across Europe, alienating merchants from Hamburg to Naples. Enforcement demanded ever more territory: Louis Bonaparte, unwilling to ruin Dutch commerce, was pushed from his throne and the Kingdom of Holland annexed outright; the North German coast, including the Hanseatic cities and part of the Duchy of Oldenburg, was absorbed to close the last gaps in the blockade; Rome, seized from the Pope, was declared the second city of the Empire and the title of King of Rome given to the heir. The annexation of Oldenburg, whose duke was Alexander I's brother-in-law, was a direct affront to St Petersburg, which had already begun trading with neutrals in defiance of the blockade. In Spain, meanwhile, Wellington's lines of Torres Vedras — a triple belt of fortifications north of Lisbon built in secrecy — halted Masséna's invasion of Portugal in 1810 and condemned the French to a wasting war in the Peninsula that drained perhaps a quarter of a million men from the imperial reserve.¶

Diplomatic preparation for the eastern war was thorough but brittle. Treaties in 1812 bound Prussia and Austria to furnish auxiliary corps, though both courts hedged; the Franco-Swedish rapprochement of 1810 collapsed once Marshal Bernadotte, elected Swedish crown prince that year by a Riksdag seeking a soldier to recover Finland, chose Swedish interests over French. In June 1812 the Grande Armée, some 600,000 strong and more than half non-French, crossed the Niemen. Barclay de Tolly's retreat denied Napoleon the decisive battle he needed; Smolensk in August was taken but the Russian army escaped. At Borodino on 7 September, Kutuzov finally stood, and the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic wars cost some 70,000 casualties without destroying the Russian force. Moscow was occupied a week later and promptly burned, probably on the orders of Governor Rostopchin, depriving the invaders of winter quarters and of any negotiating leverage; Alexander refused to answer. From the ashes of the city Napoleon issued the decree reorganising the Comédie-Française, an act of surreal administrative normality. The retreat began in October; blocked at Maloyaroslavets from turning south into unravaged country, the army was forced back along the devastated Smolensk road. Cold, Cossacks and starvation dissolved it. At the Berezina in late November, engineers under General Éblé built two trestle bridges in freezing water, saving the core of the army at appalling cost. On 5 December, news of General Malet's conspiracy in Paris — which had briefly succeeded by simply announcing the Emperor's death, without anyone thinking to proclaim the King of Rome — convinced Napoleon that his presence in the capital mattered more than his army; he left Murat in command and travelled by sledge to Paris.¶

The Empire's German scaffolding then collapsed. In December 1812 General Yorck signed the Convention of Tauroggen, neutralising the Prussian contingent on his own authority and forcing Frederick William III's hand; the Treaty of Kalisz in February 1813 sealed the Russo-Prussian alliance. Napoleon rebuilt an army of conscripts and returned to Saxony, winning at Lützen and Bautzen in May, victories rendered barren by his want of cavalry — and dearly bought: Marshal Bessières was killed at Rippach and Grand Marshal Duroc, his closest companion, mortally wounded after Bautzen. The Armistice of Pläswitz gave the allies more breathing space than it gave him. Metternich's mediation at the Congress of Prague failed when Napoleon would not part with his conquests, and in August Austria joined the coalition. Vitoria in June had already destroyed French power in Spain and encouraged Austria to move. Napoleon's brilliant defensive victory at Dresden in August was offset by the defeats of his marshals under the Trachenberg plan of avoiding the Emperor himself. At Leipzig in October, the Battle of the Nations, Saxon and other German troops defected in mid-battle and Prince Poniatowski, made a Marshal days earlier, drowned in the Elster covering the retreat; the Treaty of Ried had already taken Bavaria into the allied camp, and Wrede's attempt to bar the way at Hanau was brushed aside. The Confederation of the Rhine dissolved. Domestically, the coerced Concordat of Fontainebleau with the captive Pius VII was soon repudiated by the Pope; the Treaty of Valençay released Ferdinand VII in a futile attempt to close the Spanish front; and the Frankfurt proposals, offering France its natural frontiers, were rejected until too late.¶

In 1814 the allies crossed the Rhine. Marie Louise, appointed Regent, presided over a hollow government while Napoleon fought his most admired campaign with 70,000 men against three times that number. Beaten at La Rothière in February, he struck back in the Six Days Campaign, shattering Blücher's strung-out columns at Champaubert, Montmirail, Château-Thierry and Vauchamps. But the Congress of Châtillon showed him unwilling to accept the 1792 frontiers, and the Treaty of Chaumont bound the four powers for twenty years. After Arcis-sur-Aube he gambled on manoeuvring against allied communications; the allies marched instead on Paris, which capitulated on 31 March as the Empress and the King of Rome fled. The Senate, prompted by Talleyrand, deposed the Emperor. At Fontainebleau, Marmont's defection ended hope; a conditional abdication in favour of his son on 4 April was refused, and on 6 April Napoleon abdicated unconditionally. In the night of 12–13 April he swallowed poison carried since Russia, which failed to kill him. The Treaty of Fontainebleau granted him sovereignty over Elba and a pension; the First Treaty of Paris restored France to its 1792 borders under Louis XVIII. Joséphine died at Malmaison in May, and the exile sailed to his miniature island empire.¶

On 26 February 1815 Napoleon slipped away from Elba with some 1,100 men of his guard, exploiting the negligence of his British watchdog Sir Neil Campbell and the collapse of the pension promised him at Fontainebleau). Landing at Golfe-Juan on 1 March, he avoided royalist Provence and took the Alpine road; at Laffrey the troops sent to stop him crossed over, Grenoble and Lyon opened their gates, and Marshal Ney, who had promised to bring his old master back in an iron cage, joined him at Auxerre. Louis XVIII fled to Ghent, and on 20 March Napoleon resumed residence in the Tuileries without a shot fired. Yet the diplomatic ground had already collapsed beneath him: on 13 March the powers at Vienna declared him an outlaw beyond the protection of the law, and on 25 March they renewed the Treaty of Chaumont as the Seventh Coalition, each of Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia pledging 150,000 men and refusing all negotiation.¶

Denied peace, Napoleon sought legitimacy at home. Wooing former critics, he had the liberal publicist Benjamin Constant draft the Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire (22 April), which established a hereditary chamber and an elected assembly and press guarantees, and which was ratified in a plebiscite of thin turnout; on 29 March a decree abolished the slave trade, partly from Enlightenment conviction, partly to court British opinion. The Champ de Mai ceremony of 1 June, staged on the Champ de Mars amid federated volunteers and clergy, was intended as a fusion of empire and nation but struck many observers as hollow theatre. That same week Marshal Berthier, his indispensable chief of staff for two decades, fell to his death from a window at Bamberg, an incalculable loss for the campaign that followed.¶

Outnumbered in the long run, Napoleon struck first in Belgium to divide Wellington's Anglo-Dutch army from Blücher's Prussians. At Ligny on 16 June he beat the Prussians but failed to destroy them, while Ney's indecision at Quatre Bras left the victory incomplete; Gneisenau's retreat northward to Wavre, rather than eastward, preserved the alliance. Entrusted with the pursuit, Marshal Grouchy marched slowly and, on 18 June, engaged only Thielmann's rearguard at Wavre while three Prussian corps marched to Waterloo. There, on the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean, Wellington's squares held through the afternoon; the arrival of Blücher's men on the French right and the repulse of the Imperial Guard broke the army utterly.¶

Back in Paris, Fouché and the chambers turned on him, and on 22 June Napoleon abdicated in favour of his son. The infant Napoleon II's nominal reign was ended by the provisional government on 7 July, the eve of Louis XVIII's second restoration; the Convention of Saint-Cloud of 3 July had already surrendered the capital, Davout withdrawing the army behind the Loire. Hoping for asylum in America and then in England, Napoleon boarded HMS Bellerophon at Rochefort on 15 July, appealing to the Prince Regent as the "most constant" of his enemies. The cabinet instead transferred him to the Northumberland, and on 15 October he reached the volcanic rock of Saint Helena, coming ashore at Jamestown two days later.¶

The reckoning in France and Italy was bloody. Fouché's proscription lists opened the White Terror: Marshal Brune was lynched by a royalist mob at Avignon on 2 August, Colonel Charles de La Bédoyère, first to defect at Grenoble, was shot on 19 August, and Ney, condemned by the Chamber of Peers, faced a firing squad near the Luxembourg on 7 December. Murat, who had rashly tried to reclaim Naples, was shot at Pizzo on 13 October. The Second Treaty of Paris (20 November) reduced France to her 1790 frontiers, imposed an indemnity and an occupation, and closed the Napoleonic wars.¶

Napoleon's last year at Longwood House was a slow decline overseen by his gaoler, Governor Hudson Lowe, whose petty restrictions had long poisoned relations with the exiled emperor's small suite. By the spring of 1821 he was bedridden with severe abdominal pain and vomiting, symptoms his Corsican physician Francesco Antommarchi struggled to relieve. Between 15 and 26 April Napoleon dictated his will and codicils to his valet Louis Marchand, disposing of a largely notional fortune, distributing keepsakes to his companions Bertrand, Montholon and Marchand, and asking that his ashes rest "on the banks of the Seine, among the French people I have loved so much" — a testamentary act designed to shape his legend as much as to settle his estate.¶

He died on 5 May 1821. The following day Antommarchi performed an autopsy at Longwood before British officers, identifying a cancerous ulceration of the stomach, the same disease that had killed Napoleon's father — though later arsenic theories would fuel enduring controversy. Denied burial in France, and with Lowe refusing the simple inscription "Napoleon", he was interred on 9 May beneath willows in the Valley of the Geraniums, under an anonymous stone.¶