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 Maria Buonaparte, a lawyer who had served as Paoli's secretary, made his peace with the new regime; cultivating the French governor, the Comte de Marbeuf, he secured formal recognition of the family's minor nobility. That certificate was decisive, for it entitled his sons to royal scholarships in France, an opportunity closed to the island's ordinary gentry.

In 1779 the nine-year-old, after a few months at Autun learning French, entered the military academy at Brienne-le-Château. There he endured five years as an outsider, mocked for his Italianate accent and provincial poverty, and consoled himself with mathematics, history and dreams of Corsican liberty. Selected for the École Militaire in Paris in 1784, he chose the artillery, the arm most open to talent rather than birth.

The year 1785 brought both promotion and loss: Carlo died of a stomach tumour at Montpellier in February, leaving the family indebted, while in September Napoleon was commissioned second lieutenant in the La Fère regiment at Valence. Though his elder brother Joseph was nominally head of the house, the young officer increasingly shouldered its affairs, spending long leaves in Corsica reading Rousseau and Raynal. When revolution erupted in 1789, he saw in it the chance to remake both his island and himself.

The war against the First Coalition transformed an obscure Corsican artillery captain into a general. Sent to the siege of Toulon in September 1793 after the wounding of the artillery commander Dommartin, Bonaparte owed his opportunity to the patronage of his compatriot Antoine Saliceti, the Convention“s representative on mission. Against the caution of General Carteaux, he argued that the port need not be stormed at all: seizing the heights of L”Éguillette and Fort Mulgrave, dubbed "Little Gibraltar", would place British and Spanish shipping under his guns and force Admiral Hood to evacuate. The city fell in December 1793, and on the recommendation of the deputies, including Augustin Robespierre, the 24-year-old was promoted brigadier general.

Such closeness to the Robespierres became dangerous. After the coup of 9 Thermidor and the execution of Maximilien and Augustin in July 1794, Bonaparte was briefly arrested at Antibes as a suspected terrorist, then left unemployed for refusing an infantry command in the Vendée. Salvation came from Paul Barras, who on 13 Vendémiaire (5 October 1795) entrusted him with defending the Convention; artillery hurried up by Murat dispersed the royalist columns near Saint-Roch, the celebrated "whiff of grapeshot" that won him command of the Army of the Interior.

The Consulate began with a gamble. On 18–19 Brumaire Year VIII (9–10 November 1799), Napoleon Bonaparte, freshly returned from Egypt and cloaked in the prestige of victory, joined the abbé Sieyès, Roger Ducos, Talleyrand and Fouché in a plan to "revise" the Directory out of existence. The councils were moved to Saint-Cloud on the pretext of a Jacobin plot; when the deputies of the Five Hundred turned on Bonaparte, it was his brother Lucien, presiding over the chamber, who saved the day by denouncing the deputies as terrorists and calling in Murat's grenadiers. The Constitution of the Year VIII, drafted in December largely by Daunou but reshaped by Bonaparte, buried Sieyès's own scheme: instead of a decorative Grand Elector there would be a First Consul with the initiative in law, the appointment of officials and command of the army, flanked by two consultative colleagues, Cambacérès and Lebrun. A plebiscite in February 1800, whose figures Lucien inflated as Minister of the Interior, ratified the new order by an implausible margin. Bonaparte moved into the Tuileries that same month, a deliberately monarchical gesture, and in January he had already reduced the Parisian press from some sixty titles to thirteen, all of them supervised. Power was to be exercised through new machinery: the prefects, created in February 1800, made each department the extension of the Interior Ministry, while the Bank of France, founded the same year, gave the state a disciplined credit instrument to complement Gaudin's reform of tax collection.

Legitimacy, however, still rested on the sword. In the spring of 1800 Bonaparte crossed the Great St Bernard into Italy and on 14 June, at Marengo, converted near-defeat into triumph when Desaix's arriving division and Kellermann's cavalry charge broke the Austrians; Desaix's death made the victory a founding legend, and the Convention of Alessandria drove the Austrians behind the Mincio. Moreau's triumph at Hohenlinden and the Armistice of Steyr in December forced Vienna to the Treaty of Lunéville (February 1801), which confirmed the Rhine frontier and French hegemony in Italy. Diplomacy widened the settlement: the Convention of Mortefontaine ended the quasi-war with the United States; the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso and the Treaty of Aranjuez secured Louisiana and Tuscany from Spain; Naples submitted at Florence, Portugal at Madrid after the brief War of the Oranges. The assassination of Tsar Paul I in March 1801 briefly threatened the design, but Alexander I signed peace at Paris in October, and the Ottomans followed in 1802. With the Peace of Amiens in March 1802, France had peace with all Europe for the first time in a decade—and Bonaparte had the credit for it.

He used that credit to reconcile France with itself. The Concordat, negotiated with Pius VII through Cardinal Consalvi and the abbé Bernier and promulgated in April 1802, recognised Catholicism as the religion of the majority while keeping church lands sold as national property and giving the state the nomination of bishops; the Organic Articles, attached unilaterally, subordinated worship to police regulation and outraged Rome. An amnesty in April 1802 brought back all but a few hundred émigrés; the Legion of Honour, created in May over Republican protests that it revived aristocracy, rewarded merit of every kind; the lycées, established by Fourcroy“s law, trained a disciplined administrative and military elite; chambers of commerce were restored, and the law of germinal Year XI imposed the workers” livret and banned combinations, binding labour to employers. The franc germinal of 1803 gave France a bimetallic currency that lasted a century. Crowning it all, the Civil Code promulgated in March 1804—drafted by Portalis, Tronchet, Bigot de Préameneu and Maleville, and debated in Council of State sessions Bonaparte himself chaired—fused revolutionary equality before the law and secure property with paternal and marital authority. The counterpart was reaction elsewhere: colonial slavery was restored in May 1802, Leclerc's expedition to Saint-Domingue lured Toussaint Louverture into captivity, and the black general died at Fort de Joux in April 1803, while the colony was lost to yellow fever and insurrection. That failure, and the imminent renewal of war, persuaded Bonaparte to sell Louisiana to Jefferson's envoys Livingston and Monroe in 1803, Barbé-Marbois arranging the finance.

Each conspiracy against him became a rung upward. The Rue Saint-Nicaise "infernal machine" of 24 December 1800, though royalist in origin, was used by Bonaparte to deport more than a hundred Jacobins, Fouché's evidence notwithstanding. When British subsidies revived royalist plotting after Britain declared war again in May 1803, the police uncovered the schemes of Georges Cadoudal and the exiled general Pichegru; on Talleyrand's and Savary's advice the young Duc d'Enghien was seized in neutral Baden and shot at Vincennes on 21 March 1804, a judicial murder that bound the regicide elite to Bonaparte and horrified the courts of Europe. Pichegru was found strangled in the Temple in April, Cadoudal guillotined in June. The argument that only a hereditary dynasty could secure the settlement had already produced the life consulship of 1802, reinforced by the presidency of the Italian Republic and the Act of Mediation that reordered Switzerland; it now produced the Empire, proclaimed on 18 May 1804 and endorsed by plebiscite in November. Eighteen Marshals were created, imperial titles distributed to Joseph and Louis—Lucien excluded for his defiant remarriage to Alexandrine Jouberthon, while Louis's loveless marriage to Hortense de Beauharnais served dynastic calculation—and a minute palace etiquette imposed. On 1 December Joséphine secured a religious marriage to secure her position; on 2 December 1804, in Notre-Dame, before Pius VII, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French.

The years between 1805 and 1809 mark the apogee of Napoleonic power: four years in which the Emperor of the French remade the map of Europe, converted his family into a royal caste, and built the administrative scaffolding of an empire he expected to outlast him. The period opened in Milan, where on 26 May 1805 Napoleon placed the Iron Crown of the Lombards on his own head and proclaimed himself King of Italy, appointing his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais as Viceroy to govern in his name; the same year his mother Letizia was formally styled Madame Mère, and Jérôme's inconvenient American marriage to Elizabeth Patterson was annulled by imperial decree when the Pope refused to oblige. The elevation of Italy, together with the annexation of Genoa, shattered the Peace of Amiens settlement and gave William Pitt the Younger the material for a Third Coalition binding Britain, Austria and Russia. Napoleon, who had spent two years assembling flat-bottomed boats and an invasion army at Boulogne, abandoned the descent on England in August 1805 and swung the newly christened Grande Armée eastwards in a march of extraordinary logistical precision. The manoeuvre closed on Mack's Austrians at Ulm, where some 27,000 men capitulated in October almost without a battle; the day after, at Trafalgar, Nelson annihilated the Franco-Spanish fleet, sealing a permanent British command of the sea that would drive Napoleon towards economic rather than naval warfare. On 2 December, the anniversary of his coronation, he destroyed the combined Russo-Austrian army at Austerlitz by feigning weakness on his right and shattering the allied centre on the Pratzen heights. The Treaty of Pressburg stripped Austria of Venetia, Tyrol and its Swabian lands; the Treaty of Schönbrunn bound a hesitant Prussia to a French alliance and the poisoned gift of Hanover; and a curt decree announced that "the Bourbon dynasty has ceased to reign in Naples." On 1 January 1806 the Republican calendar lapsed, a symbolic burial of the Revolution's chronology.

The reordering of Germany followed. In July 1806 sixteen princes seceded from the Holy Roman Empire to form the Confederation of the Rhine under Napoleon's protectorate, obliging Francis II to lay down the imperial crown; Bavaria and Württemberg became kingdoms, and Baden's heir was married to Napoleon's adoptive relative Stéphanie de Beauharnais, one of several dynastic bindings that included Eugène's marriage to a Bavarian princess and his formal adoption. Thrones were distributed within the clan: Joseph to Naples, Louis to Holland, Murat to the Grand Duchy of Berg, Pauline to Guastalla. Pitt's death in January 1806 briefly raised hopes of peace, but negotiations foundered, and Prussia, humiliated by French duplicity over Hanover, mobilised alone. The campaign lasted a fortnight. Prince Louis Ferdinand fell at Saalfeld; on 14 October the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt destroyed the Prussian army, the Duke of Brunswick being mortally wounded; Napoleon entered Berlin in triumph on 27 October. From the Prussian capital he issued the Berlin Decree, declaring the British Isles in a state of blockade and inaugurating the Continental System, an attempt to defeat Britain through the exclusion of her commerce that would in time corrode French relations with every satellite and neutral. Saxony changed sides at Posen and became a kingdom. The execution of the Nuremberg bookseller Johann Philipp Palm for distributing an anti-French pamphlet showed the harsher face of occupation and helped germinate German patriotic resentment.

The Russian war that followed was harder. At Eylau in a February blizzard Augereau's corps was mauled and the battle ended in a bloody stalemate that cost perhaps 40,000 casualties. Napoleon regrouped, reduced the fortress of Danzig in May, and on 14 June 1807 crushed Bennigsen at Friedland with a hammer-blow from Ney against the Russian left pinned in the loop of the Alle. The Treaties of Tilsit, negotiated on a raft in the Niemen with a fascinated Tsar Alexander I, divided Europe into spheres: Russia joined the Continental System, Prussia lost half its territory, and from its Polish spoils Napoleon carved the Duchy of Warsaw, endowing it in July with a constitution abolishing serfdom and importing the Civil Code. He had already reached further east, signing the Treaty of Finkenstein with Fath-Ali Shah of Persia against Russia and Britain. The Milan Decree of December 1807 tightened the blockade by declaring neutral shipping that submitted to British search liable to seizure. Enforcement demanded the closing of the last European gap: by the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau, Spain agreed to the partition of Portugal, and Junot's exhausted columns entered Lisbon in November days after the Braganza court sailed for Brazil under British escort.

Behind the campaigns, the machinery of the regime was elaborated with remarkable speed. The Code of Civil Procedure (1806), the Commercial Code (1807) and the Code of Criminal Procedure (1808), with its blend of inquisitorial investigation and jury trial, completed the Napoleonic legal edifice; the first conseil de prud'hommes, created at Lyon in 1806 to arbitrate disputes in the silk trade, gave industrial relations a corporatist frame. The Cour des comptes (1807) restored a supreme audit of public accounts, and a finance law launched the immense parcel-by-parcel cadastral survey that would underpin the land tax for a century. The Imperial University, created by law in 1806 and organised by decree in 1808, gave the state a monopoly of teaching and a uniform, disciplined corps of professors. The Tribunate, the last body capable of debating legislation critically, was suppressed in 1807, and in March 1808 an imperial nobility of princes, dukes, counts and barons, endowed with entailed estates from conquered lands, fused old and new elites in service to the throne. Religious policy was equally instrumental: the Imperial Catechism of 1806 taught French children that obedience to Napoleon was a duty owed to God, while an Assembly of Jewish Notables and then the Grand Sanhedrin, convened in Paris in 1807, were used to extract declarations subordinating rabbinical law to the civil code, before the "Infamous Decree" of 1808 imposed discriminatory restrictions on Jewish commerce in the eastern departments.

Ambition then overreached. Exploiting the dynastic feud between Charles IV and his son Ferdinand, which erupted in the Aranjuez riot and the king's abdication in March 1808, Napoleon lured both to Bayonne, extorted their renunciations, and installed Joseph as King of Spain, transferring Naples to Murat and Caroline. A Bayonne Statute promised constitutional government, and Madrid decrees abolished the Inquisition and feudal dues, but reform imposed by foreign bayonets provoked insurrection. Dupont's corps capitulated at Bailén in July, an unprecedented humiliation that echoed across Europe; Junot, defeated at Vimeiro, evacuated Portugal under the Convention of Cintra. Napoleon secured his rear by squeezing Prussia in the Convention of Paris and courting Alexander at the Erfurt congress—where Talleyrand secretly advised the Tsar to resist—then led 200,000 veterans across the Ebro, forcing the Somosierra pass with a suicidal charge of Polish light horse and retaking Madrid. Sir John Moore's diversion drew him north before he handed pursuit to Soult; Moore died winning the embarkation battle at Corunna, and Zaragoza fell in February 1809 after a second siege of appalling ferocity. Spain, however, became an ulcer that never healed.

Austria seized the moment. Archduke Charles invaded Bavaria in April 1809, but Napoleon's improvised concentration and the victory at Eckmühl drove him across the Danube, and Vienna was occupied a second time in May. The reverse at Aspern-Essling, where Marshal Lannes—perhaps the Emperor's closest companion in arms—was mortally wounded, was avenged in July at Wagram, a grinding two-day battle of massed artillery that pointed to the attritional warfare to come. The Treaty of Schönbrunn amputated a further 3.5 million subjects from Austria. That same spring Napoleon had annexed the Papal States, provoking his excommunication and Pius VII's arrest. Yet the empire lacked an heir: the death in 1807 of Napoléon-Charles, Louis and Hortense's son and presumptive successor, and the birth of a natural son in 1806 that proved the Emperor's fertility, made the childlessness of his marriage intolerable. In December 1809 he divorced Joséphine, sacrificing affection to dynasty and opening the search for a Habsburg bride.

The years 1810–1812 opened in apparent triumph and closed in ruin. Having divorced Joséphine for want of an heir, Napoleon secured from a compliant Paris diocesan court the annulment of his religious marriage in January 1810, on the technical ground that the hasty ceremony of 1804 had lacked a parish priest and witnesses — a verdict Pius VII, already a prisoner of the Empire, refused to recognise, and which thirteen cardinals boycotted. The dynastic prize was Habsburg: Metternich, seeking breathing space for a defeated Austria, offered the Archduchess Marie Louise, daughter of Francis I. She was married by proxy in Vienna on 11 March 1810, with Archduke Charles standing in for the absent groom, and the union was solemnised at Saint-Cloud and the Louvre in April. Napoleon's confidence in his own fertility had been confirmed a year earlier by his Polish mistress Maria Walewska, whose son Alexandre was born in May 1810. On 20 March 1811 Marie Louise bore the long-desired heir, styled King of Rome and baptised with immense ceremony at Notre-Dame in June. The title itself expressed the Empire's absorption of the papacy: a senatus-consulte had declared Rome the second city of the Empire, and the Papal States were annexed outright.

Behind the dynastic pageantry, the regime hardened. The Penal Code of 1810 completed the Napoleonic legal edifice while retaining branding and the death penalty for a wide range of offences; a decree of March 1810 legalised administrative detention in "state prisons" without trial; and press regulations reduced Paris to a handful of censored newspapers under a state directorate of printing. Coercion also drove economic policy. The Continental System was failing through smuggling, so the Trianon Decree of August 1810 imposed prohibitive tariffs on colonial goods — turning blockade into a revenue device — while the Fontainebleau Decree of October ordered confiscated British manufactures publicly burned and set up special customs tribunals. Enforcement demanded territory: the Kingdom of Holland was annexed in July 1810 after Louis Bonaparte, refusing to ruin his subjects, abdicated; in December the entire North German coast, including the Hanseatic cities and the Duchy of Oldenburg, was swallowed. Sweden had been coerced into the system by the Treaty of Paris of January 1810. The Oldenburg annexation, dispossessing Tsar Alexander I's brother-in-law, became a personal affront that fused with Russia's economic grievances. Meanwhile the execution of the Tyrolean innkeeper Andreas Hofer at Mantua in February 1810 signalled how the Empire would answer popular resistance.

By 1812 Napoleon had concluded that Alexander must be compelled back into obedience. Alliance treaties extracted from Prussia in February and Austria in March supplied auxiliary corps and secured his flanks, and in June the Grande Armée — over half a million men, barely half of them French — crossed the Niemen. The campaign became a pursuit of an enemy who would not stand: Barclay de Tolly withdrew, the fighting at Smolensk in August yielded a burning city but no decisive victory, and only at Borodino on 7 September did Kutuzov give battle, at a cost of some seventy thousand casualties on both sides. Moscow fell on 14 September and burned; from the Kremlin, in a gesture of surreal normality, Napoleon issued the Moscow Decree reorganising the Comédie-Française while awaiting a peace offer that never came. The check at Maloyaroslavets in October forced the retreat back along the devastated Smolensk road, where cold, hunger and Cossacks destroyed the army; only General Éblé's pontooneers saved a remnant at the Berezina in late November. Learning of General Malet's conspiracy in Paris and needing to raise fresh armies, Napoleon abandoned the survivors at Smorgoni on 5 December, admitting the disaster in his blunt 29th Bulletin. On 30 December, at Tauroggen, the Prussian general Yorck von Wartenburg neutralised his corps by convention with the Russians — the first crack in the imperial alliance system, and the seed of Germany's war of liberation.

The Russian catastrophe of 1812 destroyed the Grande Armée's veteran core but not Napoleon's will to fight. Racing back to Paris, he conscripted the classes of 1813 and 1814, stripped the National Guard and the Spanish theatre of cadres, and by spring had improvised an army of some 200,000 raw recruits—short of cavalry, the arm he could not replace. Meanwhile the coalition against him hardened: Prussia's General Yorck had already defected at Tauroggen, and in February 1813 Frederick William III sealed the Treaty of Kalisz with Tsar Alexander I, binding Prussia to Russia in a war of national liberation. Napoleon's victories at Lützen (2 May) and Bautzen (20–21 May) drove the allies back through Saxony but proved indecisive precisely because he lacked horsemen to convert them into pursuit; at Bautzen he lost his intimate friend Grand Marshal Géraud Duroc to a stray shot, a blow that reportedly left him weeping in his tent. The allies too suffered loss, with Field Marshal Kutuzov, the architect of Russia's attritional strategy, dying at Bunzlau in April.

The Armistice of Pläswitz (June) has often been judged Napoleon's gravest error: it gave the coalition breathing space, allowed British subsidies and Bernadotte“s Swedes to arrive, and permitted Metternich, who preferred a weakened but surviving France as a counterweight to Russia, to test Napoleon's flexibility at Dresden. When Napoleon refused meaningful concessions, Austria joined the war in August. Simultaneously the periphery collapsed: Wellington shattered the French in Spain at Vitoria (21 June), and Bavaria abandoned the Confederation of the Rhine by the Treaty of Ried (8 October). Napoleon's tactical brilliance at Dresden (26–27 August) could not offset the allies” Trachenberg Plan, which avoided him while crushing his marshals—Oudinot, Macdonald, Vandamme, Ney. At Leipzig (16–19 October), the Battle of the Nations, over half a million men fought; Saxon troops defected mid-battle, the retreat over the Elster turned to disaster when a bridge was blown prematurely, and Marshal Józef Poniatowski, ennobled a marshal only days before, drowned attempting to swim the river. Germany was lost, the Kingdom of Westphalia of Napoleon's brother Jérôme dissolved, and by the Treaty of Valençay Napoleon released Ferdinand VII to liquidate the Spanish ulcer—too late to matter.

In January 1814 the allies crossed the Rhine. Leaving Empress Marie Louise as regent with Joseph as lieutenant-general, Napoleon opened the French campaign with a check at La Rothière (1 February), then conducted the celebrated Six Days Campaign (10–14 February), destroying Blücher's dispersed columns at Champaubert, Montmirail, Château-Thierry and Vauchamps with barely 30,000 men. Brilliance no longer sufficed. At Chaumont (9 March) Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria pledged themselves to a twenty-year alliance and no separate peace, funded by Castlereagh's subsidies; Napoleon's rejection of the Châtillon terms—France within her 1792 frontiers—closed the diplomatic door. Mauled at Arcis-sur-Aube (20–21 March), he gambled on threatening allied communications, but Alexander marched instead on Paris, which Marmont and Mortier surrendered on 30–31 March; the allies entered on 31 March.

With Talleyrand orchestrating events in the capital, the Senate declared Napoleon deposed on 3 April. At Fontainebleau his marshals—Ney, Lefebvre, Oudinot—refused to march on Paris; Napoleon's conditional abdication of 4 April in favour of his son, the King of Rome, collapsed when Marmont's corps defected to the allies. On 6 April he abdicated unconditionally. In the following nights, reportedly despairing, he swallowed poison carried since Russia; it failed, and he survived. The Treaty of Fontainebleau (11 April) granted him sovereignty over Elba, a pension and the imperial title, while the First Peace of Paris (30 May) restored the Bourbons under Louis XVIII on generous terms. Marie Louise and his son went to Austria; Joséphine, his discarded first wife, died at Malmaison on 29 May, having entertained the Tsar in the gardens of the empire's ruins.

The Treaty of Fontainebleau) of April 1814 left Napoleon a sovereign in miniature: the island of Elba, some 12,000 subjects, a token guard and a pension from the restored Bourbons that Louis XVIII never paid. For ten months he governed with characteristic energy — road-building, mining reforms, fortifications — while brooding over reports from the mainland. Those reports were encouraging. The returned émigrés alienated the peasantry who feared the loss of church lands bought in the Revolution; half-pay officers seethed at the humiliation of the army; and at Vienna the victorious powers quarrelled so bitterly over Poland and Saxony that a rupture seemed possible. Fearing rumours that he would be deported to a remote Atlantic island, and separated from Marie Louise and his son, Napoleon slipped away aboard the brig Inconstant on 26 February 1815.

Landing near Antibes on 1 March, he made the celebrated march north through Grenoble and Lyon, where the troops sent to arrest him — most famously Marshal Ney's command — defected en masse. Louis XVIII fled to Ghent; Napoleon entered the Tuileries on 20 March, beginning the Hundred Days. Aware that bayonets alone could not sustain him, he courted liberal opinion: Benjamin Constant was enlisted to draft the Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire, granting a two-chamber legislature, press freedom and ministerial responsibility, ratified in a plebiscite of low turnout. On 29 March a decree abolished the French slave trade, a gesture aimed as much at British opinion as at principle. Diplomacy failed utterly: on 13 March the powers at Vienna declared him an outlaw beyond the protection of law, and on 25 March Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia bound themselves in the Seventh Coalition, each pledging 150,000 men.

Outnumbered in the long run, Napoleon struck first. In mid-June he invaded the Netherlands (present-day Belgium), aiming to destroy Wellington's Anglo-Dutch-German army and Blücher's Prussians before they united. He mauled Blücher at Ligny on 16 June, but the Prussians retreated in good order toward Wavre rather than eastward, while Ney's indecision at Quatre Bras and Grouchy's sluggish pursuit squandered the advantage. On 18 June at Waterloo, the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean held against successive French assaults — Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte, the great cavalry charges, finally the Imperial Guard — until Prussian corps arriving from Plancenoit turned exhaustion into rout.

The collapse was swift. Returning to Paris, Napoleon found the Chambers, led by Lafayette and Fouché, unwilling to grant dictatorial powers; on 22 June he abdicated in favour of his four-year-old son, proclaimed Napoleon II, whose purely nominal reign ended on 7 July when the provisional government yielded and the Allies entered the capital. Paris capitulated on 3 July under the Convention of Saint-Cloud, and blocked from sailing to America by British cruisers, Napoleon surrendered at Rochefort on 15 July to Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon, appealing to the "hospitality" of the British people; the cabinet answered with Saint Helena.

A second, harsher Peace of Paris followed on 20 November: reduced frontiers, an indemnity of 700 million francs and years of occupation. The restoration's White Terror claimed the Emperor's lieutenants. Joachim Murat, who had lost Naples after his rash campaign in Italy, was shot at Pizzo in Calabria on 13 October. Marshal Ney, condemned for treason by the Chamber of Peers, was executed by firing squad in Paris on 7 December, refusing a blindfold. Marshal Brune was murdered by a royalist mob at Avignon on 2 August. In the memory of the Bonapartists these deaths, and the exile in the South Atlantic, became the foundation of the Napoleonic legend.

After Waterloo and his second abdication, Napoleon surrendered to Captain Frederick Maitland of HMS Bellerophon) in July 1815, hoping for asylum in England. Instead the British cabinet, led by Lord Liverpool and Lord Bathurst, resolved that only remoteness could guarantee Europe against a third return: in October 1815 he was landed on Saint Helena, a volcanic island 1,900 kilometres off the African coast, and installed at Longwood House on a damp windswept plateau. There he was watched by Governor Sir Hudson Lowe, whose petty rigour over expenses, correspondence and the denial of the title "Emperor" produced a running feud that Napoleon exploited for propaganda, dictating his memoirs to Las Cases, Gourgaud, Montholon and Bertrand and so laying the foundations of the Napoleonic legend.

His dynastic hopes withered simultaneously. The Congress of Vienna and the 1816 settlement gave Marie Louise the duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla for life, where she lived with Count Adam Albert von Neipperg and never returned to her husband. Their son, the former King of Rome, was raised in Vienna under Metternich's supervision and in 1818 was stripped of Italian expectations and made Duke of Reichstadt, a deliberately modest Austrian title designed to detach him from Bonapartist claims.

Napoleon's health collapsed from 1817, with abdominal pain, vomiting and wasting. In April 1821 he dictated his will, distributing legacies among his companions and servants, invoking his son, and asking to be buried on the banks of the Seine "amidst the French people". He died on 5 May 1821. The following day an autopsy at Longwood, conducted by his physician Francesco Antommarchi before British medical witnesses, recorded an ulcerated cancer of the stomach, the disease that had also killed his father, though rumours of arsenic poisoning persisted. Denied Paris, he was buried on 9 May in the Valley of the Geranium under a nameless slab, remaining there until the 1840 retour des cendres.