NAPOLEON I, EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH. — Napoleon Buonaparte, born in Ajaccio on 15 Aug. 1769; his mother was Letizia Ramolino (d. 1836), his father, Carlo (d. 1785), of Tuscan origin, by profession a lawyer. After taking part in the resistance led by Pasquale Paoli against the French invaders, the Buonaparte family adhered, after the battle of Pontenuovo (9 May 1769), to the new rulers; in recompense, the sons were admitted to French military schools. N. entered in 1778 the College of Autun, then attended the military schools of Brienne and Paris. In 1785 he became a lieutenant of artillery in the La Fère regiment at Valence and then at Auxonne; he greeted the Revolution of 1789 with sympathy, hoping it would benefit the autonomist aspirations of his island. His long stays in Ajaccio between 1789 and 1793, however, only served to bring him into violent conflict with the party of the independents. In June 1793 he returned to France and took part in the siege operations of Toulon: rapidly promoted to battalion chief, then brigadier general, and after the siege, to commander of the artillery of the Army of Italy (Feb. 1794).
Dismissed for his good relations with the Robespierrists after Thermidor (28 July 1794), he also suffered arrest and the disorders of demagogic rule. Reinstated in service, on the 13th Friday of San Nicolò he thwarted a reactionary attempt. In reward he was named commander of the Paris garrison, then commander of the Army of Italy (2 March 1796). He then married Joséphine Tascher de la Pagerie, widow of General Beauharnais, guillotined by the Jacobins (9 March 1796), and two days later he left for Nice to assume command of the army. The military operations in Italy were meant to flank the advance of Moreau in the Danube Valley; N. instead, on 27 March, issued a famous proclamation to his troops and immediately began his advance. Crossing the Col di Cadibona, he broke through the Austro-Piedmontese line at the point of junction, defeating the Austrians at Montenotte, Dego, the Piedmontese at Millesimo, Ceva, S. Michele (12–19 Apr. 1796), and forced Piedmont to the armistice of Cherasco (18 Apr.), then pursuing the Austrians, he defeated them at Lodi, at Borghetto, and on 15 May occupied Milan. The resistance of the fortress of Mantua forced him to abandon a rapid march on Vienna; he subsequently won at Castiglione and Rivoli against the Austrian columns descending to relieve Mantua, imposed armistices and war contributions on the dukes of Parma and Modena, the King of Naples, and the Pope, and organized a harsh system of requisitions. After the surrender of Mantua (2 Feb. 1797), he advanced through Friuli and the Tarvisio Pass toward Vienna, forcing the emperor to the preliminaries of Leoben (18 Apr. 1797), converted into the Peace of Campoformio on 18 Oct. following. Austria ceded Belgium to France, recognized the independence of a new Lombard State, and in exchange occupied the territories of the Republic of Venice, cynically sacrificed by N. At the same time he organized in Emilia the Cisalpine Republic with Reggio, Modena, Bologna, and Ferrara, later uniting Lombardy to it (June 1797).
The Directory, ill-disposed toward the popularity of a general who already dared to speak of reforming the French government, gave him command of the army tasked with operating on the Channel against England, then consented to his plan to carry the war into Egypt to make it a base of operations against India. N. left Toulon on 19 May 1798; on 11 June he took Malta from the Knights and on 19 July 1798 disembarked at Alexandria. The battle near the Pyramids gave N. possession of Egypt, but Admiral Nelson destroyed his fleet in Abukir Bay and organized an attack on the French through Turkish columns: leaving command of the army to Kléber, he hastened back to France (9 Oct. 1799), where the Directory, after the coups of Fructidor and Prairial, no longer had prestige. N. negotiated with the various factions, and on 18 Brumaire (9 Nov. 1799) he attacked and dispersed by force the legislative councils, imposed the resignation of the Directory, and with Sieyès and Roger-Ducos formed an executive consular commission to organize a new government with the task of ensuring order and peace for France. The new Constitution drafted by Sieyès was revised by N. according to his interests and ambitions. In the commission of the three consuls with decennial powers, he shaped the figure of the First Consul as almost omnipotent, above the other two whose offices were purely consultative. The legislative power was diffused among various councils (Tribunate, Legislative Body, Senate, Council of State) with distinct functions operating only at the impulse of the First Consul. Citizens no longer elected deputies but only contributed to the formation of lists of notables from which, from above, prudent choices were made of reliable people. Thus the principles of man and of the citizen of 1789 in practice disappeared with a constitution that sanctioned a bureaucratic-military dictatorship. The French people, after so much violence and bloodshed, lost interest in liberty and equality before the promise of peace. In reality, after a brief period of urgent reforms, N. could provide for the defense of France: the victories of Marengo (14 June 1800) and Hohenlinden (3 Dec. 1800) flattered the country’s amour-propre; the peace of Lunéville with Austria (19 Feb. 1801) and of Amiens with England (25 March 1802) gave him the long-awaited tranquility.
In his work of internal reorganization, N. immediately understood, although his religiosity was very superficial, that a rapprochement with the Church was necessary. The negotiations were not easy; with
NAPOLEON I, Emperor of the French — Autograph fragments collected in the study of N. at St Helena. The annotation at the bottom is by Count Primoli — Rome, Museo napoleonico.
of the secondary schools, a nursery for government personnel; the fundamental institutions were the lycées, based on the teaching of Latin but semi-militarized. To control intellectual life, in 1803 he reorganized the Institut de France and excluded the moral and political sciences; to reward loyal service among civil and military officials, he established the Legion of Honour, despite protests from circles faithful to the egalitarian revolution.
Around N. an adroit propaganda was cultivated to secure for the First Consul a demonstration of national gratitude. The machinations of the pure republicans on one side and the royalists on the other led first to ferocious repression (the shooting of the Duke of Enghien), then to the realization that it was necessary to save the Revolution, incarnate in a providential man, by entrusting him with the governance of the Republic under the title of Emperor. The senatus-consultum of 18 May 1804, approved by popular plebiscite (again only three and a half million voters out of seven and a half million electors), founded the Empire, sustained by the Senate and a High Court of Justice, and from then on public acts bore the double inscription: “French Republic — N. Emperor.” At his coronation (performed in Paris by Pope Pius VII) N. swore fidelity to the principles of the Revolution (2 Dec. 1804). Thus arose a sumptuous court, an imperial nobility composed of marshals of the Empire, prefects, officials, to whom hereditary titles fortified by entails were granted (princes, dukes, counts, barons); N. demanded absolute obedience from officials, zealous interpretation of his demands for discipline and order. For education he organized the Imperial University, a body of professors charged with teaching and civic education throughout the Empire, with political obligations taking precedence over scientific ones, presided over by a Grand Master directly dependent on the Emperor; for religious instruction, the younger generations were to study the principles of faith in the Imperial Catechism, which taught that Christians owed loyalty to the Emperor because he was the minister of divine power and the image of God on earth. The press, theatre, and literature were supervised, controlled, and directed to serve as instruments of domination.
Inevitably the Peace of Amiens and the Peace of Luneville could not last. In 1805 N. began the war to defend the conquests made against a new European coalition (III). France followed him, convinced that its very existence was at stake: N. won at Ulm (15 Oct. 1805), at Austerlitz (2 Dec. 1805), and forced Austria to the Peace of Pressburg, which marked the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire (26 Dec. 1805).
N. reorganized Italy, transforming the Italian Republic, created in 1802 (Consulta of Lyon) and of which he was president, into the Kingdom of Italy and assumed the crown at Milan (25 May 1808), placing his brother Joseph on the throne of Naples; his sister Elisa Baiocchi at Lucca; and his other sister Pauline Borghese at Guastalla. In Germany he created the Confederation of the Rhine; in Holland he made his brother Louis king.
Yet peace eluded N.: at Trafalgar (21 Oct. 1805) England destroyed the French fleet and dominated the seas. A new coalition formed against French hegemony; N. crushed Prussia at Jena and Auerstädt (14 Oct. 1806), Russia at Eylau (8 Feb. 1807) and Friedland (14 June 1807). On 25 June 1807 N. met with Tsar Alexander I at Tilsit: the partition of Europe into two spheres of influence took shape. Now England was isolated; by crushing its economy N. believed he could dominate II. From Berlin on 21 Nov. 1806 he issued the first decree for the Continental System; further decrees followed from Fontainebleau (13 Oct. 1807), Milan on 23 Nov. and 17 Dec. 1807. Europe, however, sought to evade the enforcement of the blockade, and N. felt compelled to occupy all the ports of the continent. Hence the occupation of Portugal (Nov. 1807), the occupation of Rome (Feb. 1808), and the invasion of Spain, where N.’s brother Joseph became king, replaced at Naples by his brother-in-law Joachim Murat (June 1808). But Spain rose in revolt; in Portugal English columns gravely threatened the French occupation; insurrections broke out in the Tyrol and Westphalia. In Rome the Pope, held virtually prisoner, protested and launched a bull of excommunication against the Emperor, whom in 1809 he had taken to Savona.
A general restiveness in France in 1809 enabled Austria to take up arms in agreement with England (V Coalition). N. drove the Austrians out of Bavaria, occupied Vienna, but the battles of Aspern and Essling marked a bloody setback for N., and the victory at Wagram (6 July) was won only at a terrible cost. N. forced Austria to the Peace of Schönbrunn (14 Oct. 1809) and stripped it of the Illyrian provinces. At this moment N. turned to the problem of succession; he divorced Joséphine, by whom he had no children, and resolved to marry Marie Louise of Austria, offered to him by Metternich. The first religious marriage was dissolved by the Curia of Paris on the grounds of nullity deriving from the fact that both parties had been constrained to consent by external (political) circumstances, and the civil marriage was annulled by a senatus-consultum (16 Dec. 1809); on 2 Apr. 1810 N. married Marie Louise, and on 20 March 1811 she gave birth to N.’s son, who was called the King of Rome.
During 1810–11 N. displayed a frenetic activity to confront the terrible difficulties arising on all sides. Apparently he remained master of the West, but the crisis of industry, the decline of agricultural production, and economic distress intensified moral unease. N.’s relations with the Pope, confined at Savona, were bitter, and the application of the Concordat was paralyzed. N. appointed bishops and forced them into sees without canonical investiture. In 1811 he convened a national council and had it decree that investiture could be conferred by the metropolitan or the senior bishop. To the Pope’s protests he responded by persecuting those who defended the Roman conception and had the Pope transferred to Fontainebleau, where he hoped to subdue him. To resolve the latent conflict with Russia he organized an expedition: the Russian winter forced him to commit fully. He crossed the Niemen on 24 June 1812, entered Moscow on 14 Sept., but failed both in his attempt to destroy Russian forces and in reaching an agreement. On 13 Oct. he began the retreat: the Grande Armée vanished. At Smorgoni he dictated the famous 29th Bulletin, which revealed the catastrophe, and rushed back to Paris to confront secret internal enemies and prepare for defence. At Fontainebleau he sought an agreement with Pius VII and wrested from him a new concordat system (25 Jan. 1813) that approved the decisions of the national council, but when the cardinals protested, on 24 March the Pope withdrew his consent.
NAPOLEON I, Emperor of the French — Troops of N. crossing the Great St Bernard (14 May 1800). Lithograph.
NAPOLEON I, EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH — Portrait of Marie Louise and the King of Rome. Work by F. Gérard — Château of Versailles.
He strove with great skill to defend France against the new European coalition on German soil, but the Saxon campaign ended in the defeat at Leipzig (16–18 Oct. 1813) and he had to retreat to defend the frontier. The campaign of Feb.–Mar. 1814 did not save France from invasion. On 4 Apr. he abdicated in favour of his son NAPOLEON II; two days later he abdicated unconditionally. The Treaty of Fontainebleau (11 Apr. 1814) assigned him Elba as his residence, with an annual stipend of two million francs and the retention of his immediate title. On 20 Apr. he set out; on 6 May he landed at Portoferraio. Taking advantage of the widespread discontent in France with Bourbon policy, he landed on 19 Mar. in the Gulf of Juan and by 20 Mar. was again in the Tuileries. He then attempted to organise a new constitutional regime through the Additional Act of 22 Apr. But war-weary France deserted him: the plebiscite yielded only one and a half million votes, with massive abstention. The military campaign against the European powers ended in defeat at Waterloo (18 June 1815). Isolated, he abdicated again on 22 June and withdrew to Rochefort, intending to cross to America; on 15 July, however, he appealed to British hospitality and boarded the *Bellérophon*. Transferred to St Helena, he there wrote in his defence the history of his wars, the *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de France*, the *Commentaires* and other works. He died on 5 May 1821, possibly of cancer. His remains were returned by England to France in 1840; on 15 Dec. they were triumphantly conveyed to the Hôtel des Invalides.