Napoleon Bonaparte

The eagerness of the Prussians and the Austrians to grant an armistice was at first due to the belief that Caulaincourt’s request was a confession of exhaustion; the Czar’s assent to reopening the congress on the 18th was wrung from him by the military operations between the fourteenth and that date. Convinced that Paris was […]

The year 1814 is the most astonishing of Napoleon’s military life. He first conceived a plan for combining the resources of Italy, Switzerland, Naples, and France. This failed by Augereau’s sloth and Murat’s ingratitude. Nothing daunted, the fertile brain then outlined schemes for meeting the quick advance of the allies through the Netherlands, for defending

What happened in France between the first days of November, 1813, when Napoleon reached St. Cloud, and the close of the year, is so incredible that it scarcely seems to belong in the pages of sober history. Of 575 thousand Frenchmen, strictly excluding Germans and Poles, who had been sent to war during 1812 and

The battle of Leipsic is one of the most important in general history. Apparently it was only the offset to Austerlitz, as the Beresina had been to Friedland. In reality it was far more, because it gave the hegemony of continental Europe to Prussia. French imperialism in its death-throes wiped out the score of royal

But how should the retreat be conducted? Napoleon’s habit of reducing his thoughts to writing for the sake of clearness remained strong upon him to the last, and in the painstaking notes which he made with regard to this important move he outlined two alternatives: to garrison Dresden with two corps, send three to reconnoiter

Throughout the night after the victory at Dresden, Napoleon believed that the enemy would return again to battle on the morrow. This is conclusively shown by the notes which he made for Berthier during the evening. These were based on the stated hypothesis that the enemy was not really in retreat, but would on the

In later years Napoleon confessed that during the interval between the first and second Saxon campaigns he had been outwitted. His antagonists had, in his own language, ‘changed for the better’; at least they secured the war they so earnestly desired under conditions vastly more favourable to themselves than to their opponent. Both parties had

The most famous Frenchman in history was born at Ajaccio, Corsica on 15 August, 1769. Consequently Napoleon Bonaparte was not, in fact French. He was, though, a French subject as a result of the ceding of Corsica to France by the Genoese in 1768. His family was upper-middle class. His father Carlo was a political