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External WebsitesAlso known as: Le Corse, Le Petit Caporal, Napoléon Bonaparte, Napoleone Buonaparte, the Corsican, the Little Corporal
Written by Jacques GodechotFormer Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and Dean, Faculty of Letters, University of Toulouse II, France. Author of Les Révolutions, 1770–1799; Napoléon; and others.
Jacques Godechot Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaEncyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Last Updated: Aug 11, 2024 • Article History Table of ContentsAsk the Chatbot a Question
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From 1803 to 1805 Napoleon had only the British to fight; and again France could hope for victory only by landing an army in the British Isles, whereas the British could defeat Napoleon only by forming a Continental coalition against him. Napoleon began to prepare an invasion again, this time with greater conviction and on a larger scale. He gathered nearly 2,000 ships between Brest and Antwerp and concentrated his Grand Army in the camp at Boulogne (1803). Even so, the problem was the same as in 1798: to cross the Channel, the French had to have control of the sea.
Still far inferior to the British navy, the French fleet needed the help of the Spanish, and even then the two fleets together could not hope to defeat more than one of the British squadrons. Spain was induced to declare war on Great Britain in December 1804, and it was decided that French and Spanish squadrons massed in the Antilles should lure a British squadron into these waters and defeat it, thus making the balance roughly equal between the Franco-Spanish navy and the British. A battle in the entrance to the Channel could then be fought with some chance of success.
The plan failed. The French squadron from the Mediterranean, under Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve, found itself alone at the appointed meeting place in the Antilles. Pursued by Nelson and not daring to attack him, it turned back toward Europe and took refuge in Cádiz in July 1805; there the British blockaded it. Accused of cowardice by the angry Napoleon, Villeneuve resolved to run the blockade, with the support of a Spanish squadron; but on October 21, 1805, he was attacked by Nelson off Cape Trafalgar. Nelson was killed in the battle, but the Franco-Spanish fleet was totally destroyed. The British had won a decisive victory, which eliminated the danger of invasion and gave them freedom of movement at sea.
The British had also succeeded in organizing a new anti-French coalition consisting of Austria, Russia, Sweden, and Naples. On July 24, 1805, three months before Trafalgar, Napoleon had ordered the Grand Army from Boulogne to the Danube (thus ruling out an invasion of England even if the French had won at Trafalgar). In the week preceding Trafalgar, the Grand Army won an outstanding victory over the Austrians at Ulm, and on November 13 Napoleon entered Vienna. On December 2, 1805, in his greatest victory, he defeated the combined Austrian and Russian armies in the Battle of Austerlitz. By the Treaty of Pressburg, Austria renounced all influence in Italy and ceded Venetia and Dalmatia to Napoleon, as well as extensive territory in Germany to his protégés Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden. The French then proceeded to dethrone the Bourbons in the Kingdom of Naples, which was bestowed on Napoleon’s brother Joseph. In July 1806 the Confederation of the Rhine was founded—soon to embrace all of western Germany in a union under French protection.
In September 1806 Prussia entered the war against France, and on October 14 the Prussian armies were defeated at Jena and at Auerstädt. The Russians put up a better resistance at Eylau in February 1807 but were routed at Friedland in June. In Warsaw Napoleon fell in love with Countess Marie Walewska, a Polish patriot who hoped that Napoleon would resurrect her country. Napoleon had a son by her.
The Russian emperor Alexander I could have continued the struggle, but he was tired of the alliance with the British. He met Napoleon at Tilsit, in northern Prussia near the Russian frontier. There, on a raft anchored in the middle of the Nemen River, they signed treaties that created the Grand Duchy of Warsaw from the Polish provinces detached from Prussia and, in effect, divided control of Europe between the emperors, Napoleon taking the west and Alexander the east. Alexander even made a vague promise of a land attack against the British possessions in India.
As Napoleon could no longer think of invading England, he tried to induce capitulation by stifling the British economy. By closing all of Europe to British merchandise, he hoped to bring about a revolt of the British unemployed that could force the government to sue for peace. He forbade all trade with the British Isles, ordered the confiscation of all goods coming from English factories or from the British colonies, and condemned as fair prize not only every British ship but also every ship that had touched the coasts of England or its colonies.
For the blockade to succeed, it had to be enforced rigorously throughout Europe. But, from the beginning, England’s old ally Portugal showed itself reluctant to comply, for the blockade would mean its commercial ruin. Napoleon decided to break down Portuguese opposition by force. Charles IV of Spain let the French troops cross his kingdom, and they occupied Lisbon; but the prolonged presence of Napoleon’s soldiers in the north of Spain led to insurrection. When Charles IV abdicated in favour of his son Ferdinand VII, Napoleon, seeing the opportunity to rid Europe of its last Bourbon rulers, summoned the Spanish royal family to Bayonne in April 1808 and obtained the abdication of both Charles and Ferdinand; they were interned in Talleyrand’s château. After the bloody suppression of an uprising in Madrid, insurrection spread across the whole country, for the Spaniards would not accept Joseph Bonaparte, king of Naples, as their new king.
The subsequent defeat of his forces in Spain and Portugal were sensational blows to Napoleon’s prestige. Soon the Iberian Peninsula, up in arms, became a bridgehead on the Continent for the British. Under the energetic Arthur Wellesley (later 1st duke of Wellington), in command from 1809, the Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese forces were to achieve decisive successes.
At the Congress of Erfurt (September–October 1808), a conference with Alexander I, Napoleon assembled a great concourse of princes to impress the Russian emperor in an attempt to extract promises of help. Whether impressed or not, Alexander would make no definite commitment. Alexander’s refusal, furthermore, was partly prompted by Talleyrand, who had become dismayed by Napoleon’s policies and was already negotiating with the Russian emperor behind his master’s back.
By early 1809, however, with most of the Grand Army thrown into Spain, Napoleon seemed on the point of overcoming the revolt. Then, in April, Austria launched an attack in Bavaria in the hope of rousing all of Germany against the French. Napoleon once again defeated the Habsburgs (July 6) and by the Treaty of Schönbrunn (October 14, 1809) obtained the Illyrian Provinces, thus rounding out the “Continental System.”
In 1810 Napoleon’s fortunes were at their zenith, despite some failures in Spain and Portugal. He considered himself Charlemagne’s heir. He repudiated Joséphine, who had not given him a child, so that he could marry Marie-Louise, daughter of the Austrian emperor Francis I. The birth of a son, the king of Rome, in March 1811 seemed to assure the future of his empire—now at its greatest extent, including not only the Illyrian Provinces but also Etruria (Tuscany), some of the Papal States, Holland, and the German states bordering the North Sea. The empire was surrounded by a ring of vassal states ruled over by the emperor’s relatives: the Kingdom of Westphalia (Jérôme Bonaparte); the Kingdom of Spain (Joseph Bonaparte); the Kingdom of Italy (with Eugène de Beauharnais, Joséphine’s son, as viceroy); the Kingdom of Naples (Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law); and the Principality of Lucca and Piombino (Félix Bacciochi, another brother-in-law). Other territories were closely bound to the empire by treaties: the Swiss Confederation (of which Napoleon was the mediator), the Confederation of the Rhine, and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Even Austria seemed bound to France by Napoleon’s marriage to Marie-Louise.
The political map of Europe, which had been so complicated before 1796, was now greatly simplified. Yet the frontiers did not coincide either with geographic features or with “nationalities.” Whatever he may later have said, Napoleon, while he was in power, was not interested in realizing either German or Italian unity. Yet, by reducing the number of states, by pushing the frontiers about, by amalgamating populations, and by propagating institutions like those that the Revolution and nationalism had created in France, he prepared the ground for German and Italian unification. National feeling in Europe, stirred by French ideas and by contact with Frenchmen, in turn gave rise to the first resistance against French domination. From 1809 onward, Spanish guerrillas, supported by British troops, were harassing the French, and the Spanish national Cortes (parliament), convened at Cádiz by the insurrectionaries, in 1812 promulgated a constitution inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution of 1789 and by British institutions.
Since the Congress of Erfurt, the Russian emperor had shown himself less and less inclined to deal with Napoleon as a trusted partner. In the spring of 1812, therefore, Napoleon massed his forces in Poland to intimidate Alexander. After some last attempts at agreement, in late June his Grand Army—about 600,000 men, including contingents extorted from Prussia and from Austria—began to cross the Nemen River. The Russians retreated, adopting a scorched-earth policy. Napoleon’s army did not reach the approaches to Moscow until the beginning of September. The Russian commander in chief, Mikhail I. Kutuzov, engaged it at Borodino on September 7. The fight was savage, bloody, and indecisive, but a week later Napoleon entered Moscow, which the Russians had abandoned. On that same day, a huge fire broke out, destroying the greater part of the town. Moreover, Alexander unexpectedly refused to treat with Napoleon. Withdrawal was necessary, and the premature onset of winter made it disastrous. After the difficult crossing of the Berezina River in November, fewer than 10,000 men fit for combat remained with Napoleon’s main force.
This catastrophe heartened all the peoples of Europe to defy Napoleon. In Germany the news unleashed an outbreak of anti-French demonstrations. The Prussian contingents deserted the Grand Army in December and turned against the French. The Austrians also withdrew their troops and adopted an increasingly hostile attitude, and in Italy the people began to turn their backs on Napoleon.
Even in France, signs of discontent with the regime were becoming more frequent. In Paris a malcontent general, Claude-François de Malet, nearly succeeded in carrying out a coup d’état after announcing on October 23, 1812, that Napoleon had died in Russia. This incident was a major factor in Napoleon’s decision to hasten back to France ahead of the Grand Army. Arriving in Paris on December 18, he proceeded to stiffen the dictatorship, to raise money by various expedients, and to levy new troops.
Thus, in 1813 the forces arrayed against France were no longer armies of mercenaries but were those of nations fighting for their freedom as the French had fought for theirs in 1792 and 1793; and the French themselves, for all their courage, had lost their former enthusiasm. The emperor’s ideal of conquest was no longer that of the nation.
In May 1813 Napoleon won some successes against the Russians and Prussians at the Battles of Lützen and Bautzen, but his decimated army needed reinforcements. The armed mediation of Austria induced Napoleon to agree to an armistice, during which a congress was held at Prague. There Austria proposed very favourable conditions: the French Empire was to return to its natural limits; the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and the Confederation of the Rhine were to be dissolved; and Prussia was to return to its frontiers of 1805. Napoleon made the mistake of hesitating too long. The congress closed on August 10 before his reply arrived, and Austria declared war.
The French were even worse off than in the spring. The allies were gaining new troops every day, as one German contingent after another left Napoleon to go over to the other side. The greatest debacle since Napoleon came to power was the Battle of Leipzig, or “Battle of the Nations” (October 16–19, 1813), in which the Grand Army was torn to shreds. That defeat degenerated fast into collapse. The French armies in Spain, forced to retreat, had been defeated in June, and by October the British were attacking their defenses north of the Pyrenees. In Italy the Austrians took the offensive, crossed the Adige River, and occupied Romagna. Murat, now openly a traitor to the emperor who had made him king of Naples, entered into negotiations with the Viennese court. The Dutch and the Belgians demonstrated against Napoleon.
