I just went to see Ridley Scott’s movie last month, I liked a lot and decided to write my own post about Napoleon. Hello, and be welcome to my new post and my first history post here.
“There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind.” – Napoléon Bonaparte in Le Mémorial
I was a little kid of eight years old when I first discovered who Napoleon was. I remember watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon and Bugs was dressed in a military uniform with a blue overcoat and a black big hat like the great general and emperor.
This is my first history post on this platform, it’s going to be a long one but it will be worth of your time, and you can always come back to it any time you like.
A man that will forever be equally admired as he is hated; a tyrant, a megalomaniac, a romantic, a great organizer, a military genius compared to Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, and a man beloved by his troops who took his country to the highest of its glory, but tore half a continent apart just to make himself a name in history, that was Napoleon Bonaparte, a fascinating character people can never get enough of even now, more than 200 years after his death.
So, without further ado, let’s begin:
A Brief Biography of Napoleon
A Corsican by birth, Napoleon was educated in France, becoming an army officer in 1785; he fought during the French Revolution and was promoted to brigadier general in 1793. The threat of revolt brought him the command of the army of the interior in 1795; he then commanded the army of Italy in several victorious campaigns. His expedition to Egypt and Syria in 1798-99 ended in defeats by the British, however, and he returned to France. A coup in 1799 brought him to supreme power as first consul, and he instituted a military dictatorship.
In the early 1800s, Napoleon made numerous reforms in government and education. He defeated the Austrians in 1800, went to war against Great Britain in 1803, and had himself crowned emperor in 1804. His greatest victory, the Battle of Austerlitz, against Austria and Russia, came in 1805, thereafter, except for temporary setbacks in Spain, he was successful, consolidating most of Europe as his empire about 1810. His downfall began with the disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. The Allied coalition revived, and in 1814 Napoleon was defeated and exiled to the island of Elba.
François Gérard – Napoléon Bonaparte Premier Consul (1803) (Via: wikipedia.org)
The next year Napoleon returned to France and regained power (for the period known as the Hundred Days) until defeated at Waterloo by the British (under the Duke of Wellington) and the Prussians. He was exiled again, to St. Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821.
And now, let’s see which ones were the bloodiest battles he ever fought. I ordered them in a chronological way.
3 - Battle of Borodino (1812)
Vasily Vereshchagin – Napoleon near Borodino (1897) (Via: wikipedia.org)
In the spring of 1812, Napoleon controlled a big portion of Europe and was at peace with Austria and England, the latter was fighting a second war against the former American colonies. But Napoleon accused the Russian Tsar of not backing his blockade against England, an agreement reached in Tilsit in 1807. Bonaparte spent a year planning his invasion of Russia and finally, on June 24, 1812, La Grande Armée crossed the Russian border.
The Russians retreated, just fighting small skirmishes. It was a tactic to not face Napoleon on an open battlefield, that way the emperor started losing men and horses and could not replace them so easily whereas the Russians, since they were in their own country, could replace their losses indefinitely.
N.S. Samokish – Russian Leib-Guard attacking at Borodino (1912) (Via: Wikipedia.org)
But eventually the Russians had to face Napoleon so the battle near the city of Borodino started on September 5 and lasted until September 7. The French and their allies had a total of 108,000 men and 587 cannons against the Russians and their Cossacks with a force of 96,800 men and 640 cannons. The Russian army was commanded by General Mikhail Kutuzov (1745-1813), whom Napoleon had already defeated at the battle of Austerlitz. Although the Russians resisted the attack they had to retreat later. The French ended up winning the battle, but the victory came with a high price, 30,000 men were dead or wounded; the Russians had 44,000 loses and 1,000 men were captured. Napoleon and the French entered Moscow on September 14; they found an empty city with no one to surrender to them. But the French had to leave on the 19th after the Russians started burning the city. During the Russian campaign, the heat, and later the winter, killed more men than the Russians; later, when they reached the German territories, typhus and cholera wreaked havoc among the survivors.
It has been estimated that Napoleon’s Russian campaign took the lives of a total of 410,000 men. The battle of Borodino represented a pyrrhic victory for Napoleon and only accelerated the decline of the French empire.
2 - Battle of Leipzig (1813)
January Suchodolski – Napoleon and Józef Antoni Poniatowski at the Battle of Leipzig (Date Unknown) (Via: wikipedia.org)
After the failed campaign in Russia, Napoleon managed to rebuild his army with new young recruits and some veterans from the Spanish War. To prevent an invasion, Napoleon decided to attack the combined forces of Austria, Prussia and Russia in Leipzig in what would also be known as the Battle of the Nations. He tried to apply his “divide and conquer” strategic and fought each army separately. He then agreed to a truce with the Austrians, but the other armies took advantage of this and regrouped themselves. Napoleon had an army of 195,000 men against a coalition of 350,000 men. The battle lasted from 16 to 18 October.
Vladimir Moshkov – The Battle of Leipzig (1815) (Via: Wikipedia.org)
The Austrians had artillery superiority and took many villages. Then, Napoleon was surrounded when the Prussians appeared to the North and the Austrians and Russians in the South. The French opened a way of retreat to the west and many were able to cross a bridge, but this bridge collapsed later killing thousands of French soldiers. At the end the French lost 75,000 men while the coalition lost 55,000. Napoleon managed to escape but his army was definitively weakened. On March 1814, the allies entered France and napoleon was forced to abdicate. In May he was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba. The Battle of Leipzig was the largest and bloodiest battle of the Napoleonic Wars and was the largest battle in Europe prior to World War I.
1 - Battle of Waterloo (1815)
Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux – The Battle of Waterloo: The British Squares Receiving the Charge of the French Cuirassiers (1874) (Via: Wikipedia.org)
In February 1815, aware of the unpopularity of King Louis XVIII, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, Napoleon escaped the island of Elba and went back to France in order to regain the empire he had lost. He faced little to no opposition and all the forces sent to prevent his return would end up joining him. Fearing the news of Napoleon's advance, King Louis XVIII packed his bags and fled to Belgium. By March 20, Napoleon entered Paris, reestablished the empire and organized a new army, thus starting the period known to history as The Hundred Days. The allies formed a new coalition to face Napoleon once again.
Napoleon set a plan to attack the allies in Belgium and sent an army of 74,000 men and 250 cannons. He had a small victory on June 15 against the Prussians at Ligny; it would be the last Napoleonic victory. Two days later, on June 18, Napoleon faced the Anglo-allied army, led by Sir Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) who commanded a force of 50,000 men and 160 cannons; there was a total of 30,000 horses on the field. The battle started at 11.25 and lasted until night, around 22.00. Napoleon gave orders from a wooden tower built by his engineers, but the rain, the fog and the smoke of the cannons didn’t provide a good view. Also his troops weren’t the same anymore, La Grande Armée was already a thing of the past.
Elizabeth Thompson – Scotland for Ever! (1881) (Via: wikipedia.org)
That morning Napoleon said at breakfast, which he took on silver plates, that the battle would be “facile comme manger le petit déjeuner”. The Duke of Wellington rode his small but strong horse Copenhagen from 0600 until 23.00. Going from one part of the battle to the other, Wellington took advantage of Napoleon’s mistakes. The emperor preferred to wait for the ground to dry; during that time new troops arrived to join Wellington. Finally, at 11.25, the French cannons opened fire. Another mistake Napoleon made was to send Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy (1766-1847) with 33,000 men to intercept the Prussian army lead by Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher (1742-1819); Grouchy couldn’t read the maps and didn’t find Blücher. Napoleon also didn’t expect the fierce resistance of the British. Also, there were bad communications between the Napoleonic lines.
The Prussians couldn’t be stopped and join the British at 16.30. The Prussians, now with 50,000 fresh new troops, attacked the right flank of the French army and made them retreat. The British infantry then formed into squares, with these walls of bayonets they continued firing and the French cavalry was massacred. By 19.00 Napoleon launched one final attack against the British and sent his Imperial Guard to attack. But the Imperial Guard, never defeated before, couldn’t beat the combined forces of the British and the Prussians. Ironically, Field Marshal Grouchy later managed to fight the Prussians at Wavre and even drove them out of the field which means that, technically, the French won the very last day of the campaign. But it was all in vain, the war was effectively lost. It was a definitive catastrophe. The victors, Wellington and Blücher met at an inn called La Belle Alliance that had been Napoleon's headquarters during the battle.
H. Baynes – The Meeting of Wellington and Blucher at ‘La Belle Alliance’ after the Battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815 (Via: artuk.org)
Napoleon didn’t abandon the battlefield, it would be his last battle and would also be the last battle for the Duke of Wellington. The French lost 41,000 men while the allies lost 32,000; it was a battle of attrition. Although history has glorified Wellington as victorious, the truth is that the intervention of the Prussians forces was decisive in defeating Napoleon. The Duke of Wellington said: “We were very close to losing. I was never so close to being defeated in my life. We wouldn't have won if I hadn't been there”, he was 46 years old at Waterloo and would live up until 1852; the battle of Waterloo was his greatest triumph. Back in Paris, Napoleon was forced to abdicate and spent his last days in exile on the island of St. Helena, in the southern Atlantic, where he died at age 51 on May 5, 1821.
Bonus
Didn’t I promise you a bonus at the beginning? Well, here it is in the form of 25 cool facts you probably didn’t know about Napoleon.
25 Cool Facts You Didn’t Know About Napoleon
1 - Napoleon was born in Ajaccio, on the island of Corsica, in 1769. His last name was originally spelled Buonaparte. He didn’t speak French until he was about 9 years old and always spoke with a distinctive Corsican accent and never learned to spell in French.
2 - From 1779 to 1784 Napoleon was sent to study in several military academies. He had a hard time trying to adjust to France. He spent a lot of time at the library and read the works of Plutarch, Caesar, Machiavelli and the 18th century philosophers.
The young Napoleon Bonaparte studying at the military academy at Brienne-le-Chateau, France, circa 1780. (1908) (Via: google.com)
3 - In 1793, at the Siege of Toulon, during the French Revolution, Napoleon managed to expel the Anglo-Spanish forces in the southern French city of Toulon. This engagement brought him his first victory and fame. He was only 24 years old.
4 - Napoleon met Joséphine de Beauharnais in 1795; he was 26, she was 32. Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie was born in the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1763, her family and friends used to call her Rose. She moved to France in 1779 where she married Viscount Alexandre de Beauharnais that year. She was sent to prison during The Terror and became a widow after her husband was guillotined in 1794. Napoleon married her in 1796. From then on, she was known as Joséphine, that’s how Napoleon used to call her.
Jean-Léon Gérôme – Bonaparte Before the Sphinx (1886) (Via: wikipedia.org)
5 - In 1798, after sailing from the port of Toulon, Napoleon landed in Egypt to continue the war against the British in the east part of the Mediterranean Sea. A group of 170 scientists, engineers and artists also were part of the expedition. Napoleon defeated the army of the local Mamluk rulers, wiping out almost the entire Ottoman army located in Egypt. In was during this expedition that the French discovered the famous Rosetta Stone.
6 - Napoleon returned to France in 1799 and on November 9 led a bloodless coup d'état that overthrew the Directory and replaced it with the French Consulate, then he was named as First Consul of France. This event marked the end of the nefarious French Revolution.
François Bouchot – General Bonaparte during the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire in Saint-Cloud (1840)
7 - Napoleon established the Bank of France in 1800 to help the country recover from a heavy economic and financial crisis caused by the French Revolution and its subsequent wars. Created as a private institution, it was the only bank authorized to issue monetary values. It was nationalized in 1936.
8 - Napoleon restricted freedom of the press. In January 1800, there were 73 newspapers in Paris that were reduced to 13; in 1811 there were only 4 newspapers left. All printers and booksellers had to swear oaths of allegiance to Napoleon.
Marlon Brando as Napoleon in Désirée (1954) (Via: gettyimages.com)
9 - The Napoleonic Code was enacted on March 21, 1804, and still extant, with revisions. Napoleon was very proud of his code and said about it: “My greatest tittle to glory is not the forty battles which I have won, Waterloo alone will wipe out the memory of so many victories. I have, however, one accomplishment to my credit which nothing can efface and which will live until time will be no more. It is my Civil Code.”
10 - Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804. He made Pope Pious VII come to France, took the crown from the Pope’s hands and place it over his head; then, he crowned Joséphine.
Jacques-Louis David – The Coronation of Napoleon (between 1805 and 1807) (Via: Wikipedia.org)
11 - Napoleon ended the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. After the successive defeats in the battles of Marengo and Austerlitz that greatly weakened Austria as a European power, Francis abdicated as Holy Roman Emperor; from then on he would be known as Francis I Emperor of Austria. Napoleon then formed the Confederation of the Rhine, a puppet state of France that comprised several German states that were part of the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire had lasted for almost 1000 years until its dissolution by Napoleon.
12 - Napoleon fought more than 60 battles and lost only seven of them. Austerlitz, now in the Czech Republic, was Napoleon’s greatest victory. In 1805 Napoleon commanded an army of 74,000 men and defeated the combined forces of Austria and Russia, with 86,000 men. After the defeat the Russians fled and Austria was forced to sign a shameful peace treaty.
Alexandre Veron-Bellecourt – Napoleon I visiting the infirmary at Les Invalides, February 11, 1808 (1809) (Via: commons.wikimedia.org)
13 - Napoleon was lucky on the battlefield. In the more than 60 battles he ever fought was only injured once. He also survived between 20 and 30 assassination attempts during his reign over France.
14 - Napoleon had a very efficient network of spies. He used to tell his spies to spy on everyone except for him. A German named Karl Ludwig Schulmeister (1770- 1853) was his top agent. Schulmeister, a former smuggler, has been referred to as Napoleon’s 007.
Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon in a depiction of the battle of Austerlitz in Ridley Scott’s 'Napoleon' (2023) (Via: screenrant.com)
15 - Napoleon loved going to the theater and tried to go at least once a week. In a fifteen-year period he saw 374 plays.
16 - Napoleon was very close to his mother and siblings; his father died in 1785 when Napoleon was not yet sixteen. Napoleon had four brothers and three sisters; he made them kings, queens, princes, and duchesses of the various lands under his control. Napoleon’s family was never fond of Joséphine.
17 - Napoleon had poor table manners. He used to eat until full, swallowed without chewing, and often had to change clothes since he ended up covered with stains. He used to eat alone and during his military campaigns sometimes without even getting off his horse. Among his favorite foods were ham and pork sausage.
Paul Delaroche – Napoléon Bonaparte abdicated in Fontainebleau (1845) (Via: timeout.com)
18 - Napoleon’s favorite wine was the Chambertin-Clos de Bèze, a red wine from the region of Burgundy. The emperor took his wine cut with water, otherwise he found it strong, dark and heavy. He always drank the Chambertin before starting a battle except in Waterloo, the battle in which he lost his empire.
19 - Napoleon was afraid of cats. It is unknown why the emperor was afraid of them, but what is known is that just the sight of a kitty was enough to put him in panic mode. And he wasn’t the only dictator afraid of cats, that phobia was also shared by Hitler, Mussolini and Julius Caesar. The fear of cats is called Ailurophobia, it is also called gatophobia or felinophobia.
20 - Unable to produce him an heir, Napoleon divorced Joséphine in 1809 and married the archduchess Marie Louise, daughter of emperor Francis I of Austria, in April next year. She gave birth to Napoleon’s only legitimate son in 1811; he would die of tuberculosis in 1832 at the age of 22. After her marriage to Napoleon was dissolved, Joséphine retired from public life. She would die at her Château de Malmaison in 1814.
Rod Steiger as Napoleon in 'Waterloo' (1970) (Via: filmfreedonia.com)
21 - The Napoleonic Wars, which took place from about 1800 to 1815, caused 3 million deaths, 800,000 just in France.
22 - “Napoleon at St. Helena” is a solitaire card game Napoleon used to play during his final exile in the remote island of St. Helena, located south of the Atlantic, where he was sent after his defeat in the battle of Waterloo. The game, also known as Forty Thieves, is played with two decks of cards and its objective is to get all eight foundations built up from ace through king. It is still frequently played.
23 - More books have been written about Napoleon than about anyone else in history, more than Christ, Mohammad, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great. The last estimate for the number of books written on Napoleon was over 300,000.
Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse – Napoléon sur son lit de mort (circa 1843) (commons.wikimedia.org)
24 - Napoleon died in St. Helena on May 5, 1821, at around 5.59 pm local time; he was buried on the island. His last words were: “La France, l’armée, tête d’armée, Joséphine …” (France, the Army, the Head of the Army, Josephine’). He was 51. His body was returned to France and in 1840 was interred in Les Invalides along with the bodies of his brothers and son.
25 - It was during Napoleon’s regime that France reached the pinnacle of its glory and splendor.
Jacques-Louis David – Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1805) (Via: theguardian.com)
So, there you have it, friends, my first history post here about one of the most fascinating and controversial men in history, a poor man born in a small island who conquered half of Europe, became an emperor, took his country to its greatest splendor, lost it all, and ended up his days in another remote small island. Carl von Clausewitz once called Napoleon "the god of war himself"; Napoleon’s legacy is still with us and it’s not going to go away anytime soon.
You may wonder where did I get all this information, well, I dug in my old books, my old history magazines, and also went online for further information. The books I used were the Encyclopedia Britannica, two books by the great British historian Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 and Heroes, and Asimov’s Chronology of Science & Discovery by Isaac Asimov. The websites I used are some of my favorites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, https://www.toptenz.net/, https://listverse.com/ and https://www.theguardian.com/international.
So, tell me what do you think? Did I forget something about Napoleon’s battles? Would you like to add another cool facts about his extraordinary life? If so, that’s what the comment section is for, I’ll be waiting for your thoughts.
(The image at the beginning is via: https://www.national-geographic.pl/artykul/napoleon-bonaparte-ciekawostki)
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Take care
Orlando Caine