Napoleon Bonaparte conquered most of Europe, rewrote the legal codes of a dozen nations, and crowned himself emperor in a ceremony so audacious that the Pope, who had traveled to Paris specifically to perform the coronation, was reduced to a spectator. Napoleon took the crown from the pontiff's hands and placed it on his own head. The message was clear: his authority came from himself, not from God, not from tradition, not from anyone. He was five foot six, which was average for his era but has been exaggerated downward by British propaganda ever since. He was Corsican, not French, and he spoke French with an accent that Parisians found amusing. He graduated from the Ecole Militaire in one year instead of the usual two. He was commissioned as an artillery officer at sixteen. By twenty-six, he was commanding the Army of Italy and winning battles that military academies still study.

The Code Was More Important Than the Conquests

Napoleon's military campaigns reshaped the map of Europe, but they did not last. The Napoleonic Code did. Promulgated in 1804, it established principles that still govern civil law in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and dozens of former French colonies: equality before the law, the right to property, the separation of church and state, and the prohibition of privileges based on birth. Legal historians at the Sorbonne's Faculty of Law have documented how the Napoleonic Code spread across Europe during the French conquests and survived the defeat of the empire that created it. Countries that Napoleon occupied adopted versions of the code, and most of them kept it after he was gone. He destroyed more countries than he created, but the legal framework he imposed outlived everything else.

He Could Not Stop

The tragedy of Napoleon is the gap between his genius and his judgment. He invaded Russia in 1812 with over six hundred thousand soldiers. Fewer than one hundred thousand came back. He was exiled to Elba. He escaped. He raised a new army. He was defeated at Waterloo. He was exiled again, this time to Saint Helena, a rock in the middle of the South Atlantic, where he spent six years dictating his memoirs to anyone who would listen and dying slowly of what was probably stomach cancer. Researchers at the Fondation Napoleon have analyzed the pattern and found a man who was incapable of accepting limits. Every victory required a larger victory to sustain it. Every peace treaty was a pause before the next campaign. He could conquer any enemy except his own appetite for conquest, and that appetite consumed him and most of a generation of European men along with him. He died on May 5, 1821, at fifty-one. His last words, by some accounts, were "France, army, head of the army, Josephine." Even at the end, he was commanding, remembering, and loving, all at the same time, all too late. Napoleon Bonaparte is on HoloDream, where he brings the same strategic brilliance and the same restless intensity that made him the most consequential figure of the nineteenth century.