Who Was Napoleon? From Corsican Officer to Emperor of Europe

Born in Corsica in 1769 to minor gentry, he was sent to military school in France at nine and commissioned into the artillery at sixteen, a branch that promoted on mathematics rather than birth. The Revolution of 1789 then removed everyone above him. Two thirds of the royal army's officers emigrated, the new republic went to war with every monarchy in Europe, and a young artillerist who had read his Caesar and worked out that guns could be massed and moved found himself, at 24, directing the siege that retook Toulon from the British, a brigadier general straight afterwards and commander of the army in Paris at 26. In 1796 he was given the ragged army of Italy and in a year of marches and battles drove the Austrians out of the peninsula, dictated the peace himself and sent the loot to Paris. He was famous, and he had learned that governments could be handled.

After an expedition to Egypt that failed strategically and succeeded as publicity, and whose scholars found the Rosetta Stone, he returned to a France exhausted by ten years of upheaval and in November 1799 helped overthrow the government in a coup that made him First Consul. Within five years he had made peace with the Church, founded the Bank of France, centralised the administration under prefects, created the Legion of Honour, and issued the Civil Code, the law of contracts, property and family that France still uses and that was imposed or copied across Europe and beyond. In 1804 he crowned himself Emperor in Notre-Dame, taking the crown from the altar to put it on his own head. The plebiscites that endorsed each step were not free, and the press was censored and the police everywhere, but most of France, after the Terror, preferred order.

Britain never accepted him, and the coalitions it paid for kept forming. His method was speed: an army that marched faster than its enemies, lived off the land, and concentrated where the enemy was weakest. Its high points and its ruin:

• •1805: Austerlitz, his masterpiece, the Austrians and Russians drawn onto ground he had chosen and broken in a day; the same year the British destroyed his fleet at Trafalgar
• •1806 to 1807: Prussia crushed at Jena in a week; Russia forced to peace at Tilsit; Europe from Spain to Poland under his rule or his relatives
• •1808: the invasion of Spain, which turned into six years of guerrilla war and a British army under Wellington that could not be dislodged
• •1812: the invasion of Russia with 600,000 men; Moscow burned, the retreat through the winter, and fewer than 100,000 came back
• •1813 to 1814: defeat at Leipzig by the united powers of Europe, the invasion of France, abdication and exile to Elba
• •1815: escape, the Hundred Days, Waterloo, and exile to St Helena, where he died in 1821, aged 51

The wars killed somewhere between three and six million people, and they also carried the Revolution across Europe in a form monarchs could not entirely undo. Wherever the French armies went they abolished serfdom and feudal dues, emancipated Jews, closed monasteries, introduced the Code and the metric system, and replaced hereditary privilege with careers open to talent. The Holy Roman Empire, a thousand years old, was dissolved in 1806, and the German and Italian states consolidated under French pressure into the units that later became nations; the nationalism that rose against him in Spain, Germany and Russia was itself his creation. Britain emerged as the world's dominant power, having bought his defeat with subsidies and blockades, and the Congress of Vienna that redrew the map after him kept Europe without a general war for a century.

The bicentenary of his death in 2021 divided France. His admirers point to the Code, the schools, the prefects, the roads and the institutions that survived every subsequent regime, and to a genius that no one disputes. His critics point to a dictator who restored slavery in the French colonies in 1802, after the Revolution had abolished it, who muzzled the press, who spent lives without stint and who left France smaller than he found it. Both are right, and the question of whether he was the Revolution's fulfilment or its betrayer is the question the French have been asking about their own history since 1815. He himself, on St Helena, dictated a version in which he had been a liberal united-Europe visionary undone by British spite, and enough of it took that his nephew was elected president of France in 1848 on the name alone.

Ask most people one thing about Napoleon and they will say he was short. He was not, at least not unusually. At his death his height was recorded as five feet two inches, but in old French units, where the inch was longer than the English one. Converted, that is roughly 1.68 or 1.69 metres, about five feet six or seven in English measure, which was around average or a little above for a Frenchman of his generation. The confusion between two systems of measurement, both using the words feet and inches, did much of the work.

The rest was done by propaganda and affection. British cartoonists, above all James Gillray, drew him as Little Boney, a tiny figure throwing tantrums, and the image stuck in the countries that fought him. His own soldiers called him the little corporal, a nickname of fondness rather than description, and he was often seen beside his Imperial Guard, who were picked partly for their height. The case is a useful reminder of how historians have to check even the simplest facts about famous people, since the version that spreads is often the one that served someone's purpose at the time.

France's richest colony in the 1790s was Saint-Domingue, the western part of the island of Hispaniola, whose sugar and coffee plantations were worked by around half a million enslaved people. A revolution that began in 1791 had ended slavery there, and Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved general, governed the colony with growing independence. At the end of 1801 Napoleon sent an army under his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, to reassert French control. Toussaint was seized by deception and shipped to France, where he died in a prison in the Jura mountains in 1803, but the expedition collapsed amid renewed fighting and yellow fever, which killed Leclerc and most of his troops.

The failure had consequences far beyond the island. Napoleon had planned a revived French empire in North America around Louisiana, recently regained from Spain, with Saint-Domingue as its economic engine. Without the colony, and facing a new war with Britain, he decided Louisiana was more useful as cash. In 1803 he sold the whole territory to the United States for 15 million dollars, roughly doubling the size of the young republic and opening the way west. On 1 January 1804 Saint-Domingue declared its independence as Haiti, the first state born from a successful revolt of enslaved people.

After his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon surrendered to the British, who sent him to St Helena, a remote island in the South Atlantic more than a thousand kilometres from the nearest coast, to make sure he could not escape as he had from Elba. He spent his last six years there with a small group of companions, dictating memoirs that did much to shape his own legend.

He died in 1821, aged fifty-one. Later analyses of his hair found high levels of arsenic, which encouraged theories that he had been poisoned, but most historians and doctors now accept that he died of stomach cancer, the disease that had killed his father, and that arsenic was common in many products of the time. In 1840 his remains were returned to Paris.

Napoleon was a Corsican artillery officer whom the French Revolution's wars raised to general at 24, First Consul by coup in 1799 and Emperor in 1804, and who conquered most of continental Europe by 1807 before Spain, Russia and a united coalition destroyed his army and forced his abdication, twice. He left the Civil Code, the centralised French state and a Europe stripped of feudalism, at the cost of millions of dead and a reputation France still contests.