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, and a general 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 Pope's hands 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.

Napoleon was a Corsican artillery officer whom the French Revolution's wars raised to general at 26, 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.