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Napoleon is born
Napoleon was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, on August 15th 1769 to Carlo Marie. The Buonaparte's were a wealthy family from the Corsican nobility. -
Storming of the Bastille
July 14th, 1789, a group formed of craftsmen and salesmen decided to fight back and ran to the Invalides to steal some weapons. The mob stole 28,000 riffles there, however no powder was to be found. The crowd knew that a pile of powder was stocked in the Bastille, a prison that was a symbol of the King's absolute and arbitrary power. So they decided to attack it. -
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Battle of Toulon
After setting up his family in La Valette, near Toulon, Napoleon rejoined his artillery regiment in Nice. Napoleon and his men threw themselves against the fort of Malbosquet, gained entrance, took control of the cannons and once more turned them against the enemy vessels. The victory had been won. Toulon was liberated and everyone was looking for Napoleon to congratulate him and carry him off in triumph -
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Egyptian Campaign
July 1, 1798, landed with 35,000 soldiers in Egypt. Bonaparte quickly captured Alexandria, and then on July 3, led his soldiers across the desert toward Cairo — and a looming battle. Bonaparte and 35,000 soldiers were trapped in Egypt. -
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18 Brumaire Coup
The legislative Council of Ancients voted to have both the Ancients and the lower house, the Council of Five Hundred, meet the next day in the palace at Saint-Cloud, ostensibly in order to render the councils safe from a purported in Paris.The next day, Bonaparte blundered through a speech before the Ancients and later was met by a storm of abuse in the meeting place of the Five Hundred, whose members, hearing rumours and seeing troops all about. -
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First Consul for life
on 12 December 1799 and subsequently approved by plebiscite instituted a complex governmental system, but First Consul Bonaparte ruled. Having obtained power Napoleon now needed to consolidate it. February 1801 with the French, reaffirming the terms of the earlier Treaty of Campo Formio. Continental Europe to this day, was either completed or commenced in the years before the declaration of the Empire in 1804. -
Napoleonic code
In 1800, General Napoleon Bonaparte, as the new dictator of France, began the arduous task of revising France’s outdated and muddled legal system. He established a special commission, led by J.J. Cambaceres, which met more than 80 times to discuss the revolutionary legal revisions, and Napoleon presided over nearly half of these sessions. In March 1804, the Napoleonic Code was finally approved. -
Battle of Trafalgar
The Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 halted Napoleon’s plans to conquer Europe, established Britain as the dominant world naval power for the next century and confirmed Nelson’s reputation as one of the greatest military strategists of all time. Under the command of Admiral Nelson, 27 ships engaged 33 vessels of both the French and Spanish navies at Cape Trafalgar, off the coast of Spain. The flagship of Nelson’s navy was victory -
Battle of Austerlitz
The first engagement of the War of the Third Coalition and one of Napoleon’s greatest victories. The battle took place near Austerlitz in Moravia. The allies decided to fight Napoleon west of Austerlitz and occupied the Pratzen Plateau, which Napoleon had deliberately evacuated to create a trap. -
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Continental System
The Continental System hurt English industries and helped spur the Luddite protest movement against unemployment in England. Although it stimulated manufacturing in some parts of France, the system damaged regions dependent on overseas commerce. Because the British had an overwhelming superiority at sea, though, enforcing the system proved disastrous for Napoleon. His efforts to halt evasions of his blockade stretched French forces too thin, and ultimately provoked his calamitous invasion of Rus -
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Peninsular War
By the year 1808 France had achieved domination over the great majority of continental Europe. The road to war began in the autumn of 1807 when Napoleon moved French troops through Spain to invade Portugal. t can well be argued that the seeds of Napoleon's defeat and abdication in 1814 were sown by the Emperor himself six years earlier when he usurped the Spanish throne for his brother Joseph and, in so doing, alienated the Spanish nation. -
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Invasion of Russia
began on 24 June 1812 when Napoleon's Grande Armée crossed the Neman River in an attempt to engage and defeat the Russian army. The campaign effectively ended on 14 December 1812, not quite six months from its outset, with the last French troops leaving Russian soil. The campaign was a turning point in the Napoleonic Wars. -
Retreats from Moscow
On September 14, Napoleon arrived in Moscow intending to find supplies but instead found almost the entire population evacuated, and the Russian army retreated again. During the disastrous retreat, Napoleon’s army suffered continual harassment from a suddenly aggressive and merciless Russian army. Stalked by hunger and the deadly lances of the Cossacks, the decimated army reached the Berezina River late in November but found its route blocked by the Russians. -
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Battle of Leipzig
Defeat for Napoleon, resulting in the destruction of what was left of French power in Germany and Poland. The allied attack on the 18th, with more than 300,000 men, converged on the Leipzig perimeter. on October 19, Napoleon began the retreat westward over the single bridge across the Elster River. -
Exile to Elba
On April 20, 1814, the dethroned Emperor left France for the isle of Elba, where he was exiled under the terms of the Treaty of Fontainebleau. Napoleon would be allowed to rule Elba, which had 12,000 inhabitants.Napoleon actually worked hard to improve Elba, and to all observers, it seemed as though Napoleon was content to a life of relative retirement. All the while, however, he was plotting his return to Europe. -
Exile to St. Helena
When he was defeated in 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte was given the Mediterranean island of Elba to rule with an army of 1,000 men. He escaped the next year, only to be defeated at Waterloo.
This time, his enemies wanted to incarcerate him in a place from which he could definitely not escape. They chose St Helena.In 1815, the British Royal Navy controlled the Atlantic, making escape from St Helena virtually impossible. -
Battle of Waterloo
On June 18, Napoleon led his army of some 72,000 troops against the 68,000-man British army, which had taken up a position south of Brussels near the village of Waterloo. Napoleon waited until midday to give the command to attack in order to let the waterlogged ground dry after the previous night’s rainstorm. Although Napoleon’s troops mounted a strong attack against the British, the arrival of the Prussians turned the tide against the French. Final defeat of Napoleon. -
Napoleons death
Exiled to the island of Elba, he escaped to France in early 1815 and raised a new Grand Army that enjoyed temporary success before its crushing defeat at Waterloo against an allied force under Wellington on June 18, 1815. Napoleon was subsequently exiled to the island of Saint Helena off the coast of Africa. Six years later, he died, most likely of stomach cancer, and in 1840 his body was returned to Paris, where it was interred in the Hotel des Invalides.
