From the young general's Italian campaign to Austerlitz, the invasion of Russia and Waterloo: twenty years of war that redrew the map of Europe.
Stop 01 · April 1796 – October 1797
The General of the Revolution: Italy, 1796–1797
Revolutionary France was at war with a coalition of monarchies. In 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte, a 26-year-old Corsican general who had first made his name at the siege of Toulon in 1793, took command of the French Army of Italy. Opening his campaign on 10 April, he came down from the Alps, knocked Piedmont-Sardinia out of the war within weeks and chased the Austrians across Lombardy, winning at Lodi on 10 May. While besieging Mantua he beat four Austrian relief armies, at Arcole in November and Rivoli in January 1797, and Mantua surrendered in February. Pushing into Austria, he forced peace: the Treaty of Campo Formio, in October 1797, left France dominant in northern Italy and made his name.
Jacques-Louis David - The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries - Google Art ProjectJacques-Louis David · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Revolutionary France was at war with a coalition of monarchies. In 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte, a 26-year-old Corsican general who had first made his name at the siege of Toulon in 1793, took command of the French Army of Italy. Opening his campaign on 10 April, he came down from the Alps, knocked Piedmont-Sardinia out of the war within weeks and chased the Austrians across Lombardy, winning at Lodi on 10 May. While besieging Mantua he beat four Austrian relief armies, at Arcole in November and Rivoli in January 1797, and Mantua surrendered in February. Pushing into Austria, he forced peace: the Treaty of Campo Formio, in October 1797, left France dominant in northern Italy and made his name.
BattlesMontenotte: the campaign opens, April 1796 · Lodi, 10 May 1796 · Arcole, 15–17 November 1796 · Rivoli, 14 January 1797
In May 1798 Napoleon sailed from Toulon with about 36,000 troops to invade Ottoman Egypt, hoping to threaten Britain's trade and its route to India. He seized Malta on the way, landed near Alexandria at the end of June and on 21 July routed the Mamluk rulers of Egypt at the Battle of the Pyramids, opening the road to Cairo. Eleven days later the British admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed the French fleet in Aboukir Bay, trapping the army. Scholars studied Egypt, and one of his soldiers' finds was the Rosetta Stone. A march into Syria failed at Acre in May 1799. In August Napoleon slipped back to France, and in November he seized power in a coup.
BattlesBattle of the Pyramids, 21 July 1798 · Battle of the Nile, Aboukir Bay, 1–3 August 1798 · Acre: siege fails, March–May 1799
The coup of 18 Brumaire, on 9 November 1799, overthrew the Directory and made Napoleon First Consul, in practice France's ruler. Austria had meanwhile retaken much of Italy and in April 1800 trapped a French force in Genoa. In mid-May Napoleon led a new Reserve Army over the Great St Bernard Pass, entered Milan on 2 June and cut the Austrian supply lines. On 14 June General Melas surprised him at Marengo, near Alessandria, and by mid-afternoon the French were falling back. The late arrival of General Desaix, who was killed, and a cavalry charge turned the day. Beaten again at Hohenlinden in December, Austria made peace at Lunéville in 1801; Britain followed at Amiens in 1802.
On 2 December 1804, in Notre-Dame de Paris and in the presence of Pope Pius VII, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French. Peace with Britain had collapsed in 1803; in 1805 Austria and Russia joined Britain in a Third Coalition. Napoleon marched his Grande Armée, some 210,000 men, from the Channel coast to the Danube and on 20 October captured General Mack's Austrian army at Ulm. The next day Nelson destroyed the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar, dying in his victory. Vienna fell in November. At Austerlitz, in Moravia, Napoleon lured the Russians and Austrians into attacking his weakened right, then broke their centre on the Pratzen Heights. Austria made peace at Pressburg.
BattlesUlm, 20 October 1805 · Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 · Austerlitz, 2 December 1805
In 1806 Napoleon made his brothers Joseph and Louis kings of Naples and Holland, and grouped his German allies into the Confederation of the Rhine. In August Francis II gave up the title of Holy Roman Emperor, ending the Holy Roman Empire. Prussia went to war in October, and on 14 October Napoleon at Jena and Marshal Davout at Auerstedt destroyed its armies; Napoleon entered Berlin on 27 October. His Berlin Decree in November launched the Continental System to ruin Britain by banning its trade with Europe. After beating the Russians at Friedland on 14 June 1807, he met Tsar Alexander I on a raft in the Niemen. The Treaties of Tilsit stripped Prussia of about half its territory.
BattlesJena, 14 October 1806 · Friedland, 14 June 1807
In 1807 French armies crossed Spain, then an ally, to occupy Portugal. In 1808 Napoleon forced the Spanish king Charles IV and his heir, Ferdinand VII, to abdicate and put his brother Joseph on the throne. Madrid rose on 2 May and was crushed with mass executions; revolt spread, and in July a Spanish army beat the French in open battle at Bailén. English took the word 'guerrilla', 'little war', from this conflict. In August 1808 British troops under Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, landed in Portugal, and over six years his allied army fought across the peninsula, winning at Salamanca and Vitoria. By 1810 the war tied down some 325,000 French soldiers. Napoleon called it his 'Spanish ulcer'.
BattlesBailén, July 1808 · Salamanca, 22 July 1812 · Vitoria, 21 June 1813
With French troops tied down in Spain, Austria invaded Bavaria, France's ally, in April 1809. Napoleon recovered and occupied Vienna in May. When he tried to cross the Danube, Archduke Charles threw him back at Aspern-Essling on 21–22 May, the first time Napoleon had been personally defeated in a major battle; the French lost about 23,000 men, including Marshal Lannes. Six weeks later he crossed again with over 150,000 men and, on 5–6 July, beat Charles at Wagram, then the largest battle in European history. By the Treaty of Schönbrunn in October, Austria lost Salzburg, its Adriatic coast and Polish lands. In 1810 Napoleon divorced Joséphine and married the Austrian emperor's daughter, Marie Louise.
BattlesAspern-Essling, 21–22 May 1809 · Wagram, 5–6 July 1809
To force Russia back into the Continental System, Napoleon invaded. From 24 June 1812 a multinational Grande Armée, eventually some 600,000 men, crossed the Niemen. The Russians retreated, burning what they left; Smolensk fell in August. At Borodino, about 110 kilometres west of Moscow, on 7 September, the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic Wars brought terrible losses on both sides, yet Kutuzov's army survived. Napoleon entered a deserted Moscow on 14 September, but fires set on its governor's orders burned the city, and the Tsar would not negotiate. Leaving on 19 October, the army retreated through snow, hunger, typhus and Cossack raids. Of over 450,000 men in the first invasion force, about 120,000 survived.
BattlesSmolensk, August 1812 · Borodino, 7 September 1812 · Berezina, 26–29 November 1812
After the disaster in Russia, Prussia and then Austria changed sides, and all of Europe turned against Napoleon. From 16 to 19 October 1813 at Leipzig, in Saxony, the armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden, under Tsar Alexander, Schwarzenberg, Blücher and the Swedish Crown Prince, defeated him in the 'Battle of the Nations'. About 560,000 soldiers fought there and some 133,000 became casualties, making it the largest battle of the Napoleonic Wars. The Confederation of the Rhine collapsed, and early in 1814 the allies invaded France. Paris capitulated on 31 March. Napoleon abdicated on 6 April and, under the Treaty of Fontainebleau, was exiled to the island of Elba, landing at Portoferraio on 4 May.
BattlesLeipzig, 16–19 October 1813 · Paris capitulates, 31 March 1814
While the victors met at Vienna, Napoleon slipped away from Elba with about 1,000 men and landed at Golfe-Juan on 1 March 1815. Marching through the Alps, he found that the army sent to stop him joined him: at Grenoble a whole royalist regiment went over. King Louis XVIII fled, and on 20 March Napoleon entered Paris. For a hundred days, in fact 110, he ruled again. In June he struck into Belgium, beating the Prussians at Ligny. On 18 June at Waterloo, south of Brussels, Wellington's British-allied army held until Blücher's Prussians fell on the French flank. He abdicated on 22 June and was exiled to the remote Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died in 1821.
BattlesLigny, 16 June 1815 · Waterloo, 18 June 1815