Napoleon Bonaparte

A Corsican outsider

Napoleone Buonaparte was born at Ajaccio on 15 August 1769, the second surviving son of Carlo Buonaparte, a lawyer from the minor Corsican nobility, and Letizia Ramolino. Genoa had ceded Corsica to France only the year before, and the island's independence leader, Pasquale Paoli, had been defeated three months before the birth. Carlo made his peace with the new masters, and it paid: at nine the boy was sent to France, on a royal scholarship, to the military school at Brienne, and then to the École Militaire in Paris. In September 1785, at sixteen, he was commissioned a second lieutenant of artillery — a technical branch where skill counted for more than birth.

When the Revolution came he spent much of the next four years on long leaves in Corsica, pursuing local politics on the side of the Jacobins. That brought him into conflict with Paoli, back from exile and increasingly hostile to Paris. In 1793 the two camps broke for good; the Bonapartes were denounced, and in June the family fled to the mainland with almost nothing. From then on his future lay in France, and in its revolutionary army.

Toulon and Vendémiaire

Two sieges, one in a harbour and one in the streets of Paris, that made his name

In August 1793 royalists in Toulon handed the great naval base of the Mediterranean to the British and the Spanish. Bonaparte, a captain passing through, was given charge of the besiegers' artillery through a fellow Corsican, the deputy on mission Antoine Christophe Saliceti. He saw that the key was not the town but the heights above the harbour: guns there would make the anchorage untenable. The forts were stormed on the night of 16–17 December, the allied fleet sailed away, and the Republic retook the city on 19 December. Three days later he was a brigadier general, at twenty-four.

The fall of Robespierre in July 1794 nearly ended it. Bonaparte had been close to Augustin Robespierre, the Incorruptible's younger brother, and in August he was arrested and briefly held. He was saved by the next crisis. On 13 Vendémiaire Year IV — 5 October 1795 — royalist-leaning sections of Paris rose against the Convention. Paul Barras, charged with its defence, called on Bonaparte, who had cannon brought from the camp at Les Sablons and swept the insurgents from the streets around the church of Saint-Roch. The Convention survived, and its defender was given command of the Army of the Interior.

Italy and Egypt

On 2 March 1796 the Directory gave him the Army of Italy, ragged and unpaid. A week later he married Joséphine de Beauharnais, a widow whose husband had been guillotined in the Terror. Within a year he had beaten the Piedmontese and a succession of Austrian armies — at Lodi, Arcole and Rivoli — and taken Mantua. He sent home money and works of art the Directory badly needed, set up sister republics in northern Italy without waiting for orders, and in October 1797 dictated the peace of Campo Formio to Austria. At twenty-eight he was the most famous man in France.

Too popular to leave idle and too ambitious to keep in Paris, he sailed for Egypt in May 1798 with an army and more than a hundred and fifty scholars, meaning to threaten Britain's route to India. He beat the Mamluks at the Pyramids on 21 July, but on 1 August Nelson destroyed his fleet at anchor in Aboukir Bay, stranding the army. A march into Syria stalled before Acre in 1799. In August he slipped away with a few officers, leaving the army behind, and landed at Fréjus on 9 October to find the Directory discredited and much of France waiting for a saviour.

18 Brumaire

How a general ended the Revolution in its own name

The coup was planned by Emmanuel Sieyès, one of the five Directors, who wanted a general as his sword. On 18 Brumaire Year VIII — 9 November 1799 — the Council of Ancients was persuaded, on the pretext of a Jacobin plot, to move both legislative councils to Saint-Cloud, outside Paris. The next day Bonaparte's appearance before the Council of Five Hundred was met with cries that he be outlawed; his brother Lucien, the council's president, rallied the troops outside, and grenadiers cleared the hall.

A new constitution placed executive power in a First Consul, with two others at his side who could only advise. Bonaparte took the post, and a plebiscite approved the constitution early in 1800. Sieyès, who had meant to rule through him, was pushed aside. The consuls' proclamation to the French said plainly what the coup meant:

The Empire, and the end

As First Consul he made peace with the Church in the Concordat of 1801, was made consul for life in 1802, and in 1804 issued the Civil Code, which kept the Revolution's equality before the law and its abolition of feudal privilege. On 18 May 1804 the Senate proclaimed him Emperor of the French; on 2 December, at Notre-Dame, with Pope Pius VII present, he crowned himself.

A decade of war carried French rule across Europe as far as Moscow. The invasion of Russia in 1812 destroyed his Grande Armée; defeat at Leipzig in 1813 and the invasion of France forced him to abdicate in April 1814 and go into exile on Elba. He returned in March 1815 for the Hundred Days, was beaten at Waterloo on 18 June, and was sent by the British to Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died on 5 May 1821. In 1840 his remains were brought back to Paris, to the Invalides.

He remains the Revolution's great paradox, its child and its undertaker. He ended free elections, a free press and the Republic itself, yet preserved much of what 1789 had won — legal equality, the end of feudal dues, careers open to talent — and carried it across Europe in the wake of his armies.