Few military or political figures have stamped their impression so strongly on an epoch than Napoleon, who rose from fairly humble origins on Corsica to the throne of France at the age of thirty-five. After schooling in France in the 1780s, he established a name for himself during the siege of Toulon in 1793. He played an instrumental role in protecting his political masters two years later when with his guns he swept the streets clear of a Royalist mob, in recognition for which in 1796 the government appointed him commander-in-chief of the army in Italy. In the course of his campaign against the Austrians Napoleon demonstrated both strategic and tactical brilliance, securing an exceptionally favourable peace settlement for his country – not to mention an enhanced military reputation for himself.
After an abortive campaign in Egypt and Palestine in 1798–99, the young general returned to France and instigated a coup d’état. After crossing the Alps in 1800 and drubbing the resurgent Austrians in a lightning campaign, he promulgated the Napoleonic Code and other social and political reforms before crowning himself emperor in 1804. His subsequent successes in the field – in which he decisively defeated the forces of Austria, Prussia and Russia in a series of brilliant campaigns between 1805 and 1807 – marked the high-water mark of his military career.
Blind ambition, however, soon got the better of him, and his ill-fated adventures, first in Iberia from 1808 and then in Russia four years later, opened cracks in Napoleon’s hitherto seemingly invulnerable empire, and in the campaigns fought successively in Germany and France in 1813–14, the beleaguered emperor found himself on the defensive, eventually overwhelmed by an irresistible coalition which captured Paris and forced the emperor’s abdication – albeit temporarily – for he returned briefly to power during the ‘Hundred Days’, when comprehensive defeat at Waterloo put a definitive end to the era that aptly bears his name.
Gregory Fremont-Barnes holds a doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford and serves as a Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. A prolific author, his books on this period include Waterloo 1815, The French Revolutionary Wars, The Peninsular War, 1807–14, The Fall of the French Empire, 1813–15, Nile 1798 and Trafalgar 1805. He also edited Armies of the Napoleonic Wars and the three-volume Encyclopedia of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. As an academic advisor, Dr Fremont-Barnes has accompanied several groups of British Army officers and senior NCOs in their visits to the battlefields of the Peninsula and to Waterloo.