Napoléon
I, the Great (Emperor of the French, 1804 – 1814 and 20 March – 8 July 1815)
(Napoléon Bonaparte; Napoléon I)
Born "Napoléone di Buonaparte" (15 August 1769
– 5 May 1821), in Corsica to a relatively modest family from the minor
nobility, was a French military and political leader who rose to prominence
during the French Revolution and led several successful campaigns during the
French Revolutionary Wars. As Napoléon I, he crowned himself Emperor of the
French from 1804 until 1814, and again in 1815. Napoléon dominated European and
global affairs for more than a decade while leading France against a series of
coalitions in the Napoléonic Wars. He won most of these wars and the vast
majority of his battles, building a large empire that ruled over continental
Europe before its final collapse in 1815. One of the greatest commanders in
history, his wars and campaigns are studied at military schools worldwide. Napoléon's
political and cultural legacy has ensured his status as one of the most
celebrated and controversial leaders in human history.
The French Revolution began 1789 and Napoléon rapidly
rose through the ranks of the military, becoming a general at age 24. At
age 26, he began his first military campaign against the Austrians and their
Italian allies—winning virtually every battle, conquering the Italian Peninsula
in a year, and becoming a national hero. In 1798, he led a military expedition
to Egypt that served as a springboard to political power. He engineered a coup
in November 1799 and became First Consul of the Republic. His ambition and
public approval inspired him to go further, and in 1804 he became the first
Emperor of the French.
The Allies invaded France and captured Paris in the
spring of 1814, forcing Napoléon to abdicate, signing the “Act of Abdication”
on 11 April 1814 at the Château de
Fontainebleau.
(Abdication table; Château de Fontainebleau )
He was exiled to the island of Elba which he escaped
from in February 1815 and took control of France once again. The Allies
responded defeating Napoléon at the Battle of Waterloo in June. The British
exiled him to the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he
spent the remainder of his years. His death in 1821 at the age of 51 was
received with surprise, shock, and grief throughout Europe, leaving behind a
memory that still persists.
In 1840, King Louis Philippe I obtained permission from
the British to return Napoléon's remains to France. On 15 December 1840 a state
funeral was held. The hearse proceeded from the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Élysées,
across the Place de la Concorde to
the Esplanade des Invalides and then
to the cupola in St Jérôme's Chapel,
where it remained until the tomb designed by Louis Visconti was completed. In
1861, Napoléon's remains were entombed in a porphyry stone sarcophagus in the
crypt under the dome at Les Invalides.
The Napoléonic code was adopted throughout much of
Europe, though only in the lands he conquered, and remained in force after Napoléon's
defeat. Napoléon said: "My true glory is not to have won forty battles ...
Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories. ... But ... what will live
forever is my Civil Code." The Code influences a quarter of the world's
jurisdictions such as that of in Europe, the Americas and Africa.
Napoléon directly overthrew feudal remains in much of
Western Europe. He liberalized property laws, ended seigneurial dues, abolished
the guild of merchants and craftsmen to facilitate entrepreneurship, legalized
divorce, closed the Jewish ghettos and made Jews equal to everyone else. The
Inquisition ended as did the Holy Roman Empire. The power of church courts and
religious authority was sharply reduced and equality under the law was
proclaimed for all men.
Additionally, Napoléon instituted various reforms, such
as higher education, a tax code, road and sewer systems, and established the Banque de France, the first central bank
in French history. He negotiated the Concordat of 1801 with the Catholic
Church, which sought to reconcile the mostly Catholic population to his regime.
It was presented alongside the Organic Articles, which regulated public worship
in France. He dissolved the Holy Roman Empire prior to German Unification later
in the 19th century. The sale of the Louisiana Territory to the United States
doubled the size of the United States. In May 1802, he instituted the Legion of Honour, a substitute for the
old royalist decorations and orders of chivalry, to encourage civilian and
military achievements; the order is still the highest decoration in France.
There are critiques of Napoléon. In the political realm,
historians debate whether Napoléon was "an enlightened despot who laid the
foundations of modern Europe or, instead, a megalomaniac who wrought greater
misery than any man before the coming of Hitler." Many historians have
concluded that he had grandiose foreign policy ambitions. The Continental
powers as late as 1808 were willing to give him nearly all of his gains and
titles, but some scholars maintain he was overly aggressive and pushed for too
much, until his empire collapsed.
Napoléon institutionalized plunder of conquered
territories: French museums contain art stolen by Napoléon's forces from across
Europe. Artefacts were brought to the Musée du Louvre for a grand central
museum.
Critics argue Napoléon's true legacy must reflect the
loss of status for France and needless deaths brought by his rule: historian
Victor Davis Hanson writes, "After all, the military record is
unquestioned—17 years of wars, perhaps six million Europeans dead, France
bankrupt, her overseas colonies lost." McLynn states that, "He can be
viewed as the man who set back European economic life for a generation by the
dislocating impact of his wars." Vincent Cronin replies that such
criticism relies on the flawed premise that Napoléon was responsible for the
wars which bear his name, when in fact France was the victim of a series of
coalitions which aimed to destroy the ideals of the Revolution.
After the fall of Napoléon, not only was Napoléonic Code
retained by conquered countries including the Netherlands, Belgium, parts of
Italy and Germany, but has been used as the basis of certain parts of law
outside Europe including the Dominican Republic, the US state of Louisiana and
the Canadian province of Quebec. The memory of Napoléon in Poland is favorable,
for his support for independence and opposition to Russia, his legal code, the
abolition of serfdom, and the introduction of modern middle class
bureaucracies.
Napoléon could be considered one of the founders of
modern Germany. After dissolving the Holy Roman Empire, he reduced the number
of German states from 300 to less than 50, prior to the German Unification. A
byproduct of the French occupation was a strong development in German
nationalism. Napoléon also significantly aided the United States when he agreed
to sell the territory of Louisiana for 15 million dollars during the presidency
of Thomas Jefferson. That territory almost doubled the size of the United
States, adding the equivalent of 13 states to the Union
The myth of the "Napoléon Complex"—named after
him to describe men who have an inferiority complex—stems primarily from the
fact that he was listed, incorrectly, as 5 feet 2 inches at the time of his
death. He was 168 centimeters (5 ft 6 in) tall, an average height for a man of
that period.
Napoléon
III (Emperor of the French, 1852-1870)
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (born Charles-Louis Napoléon
Bonaparte; 20 April 1808 – 9 January 1873) was the only President (1848–52) of
the French Second Republic and, as Napoléon III, the Emperor (1852–70) of the
Second French Empire. He was the nephew and heir of Napoléon I. He was the
first President of France, elected by a 74.2 percent of direct popular votes
cast in 1848. He was blocked by the Constitution and Parliament from running
for a second term, so he organized a coup d'état in 1851 and then took the
throne as Napoléon III on 2 December 1852, the forty-eighth anniversary of Napoléon
I's coronation. He remains the longest-serving French head of state since the
French Revolution.
During the first years of the Empire, Napoléon's
government imposed censorship and harsh repressive measures against his
opponents. Some six thousand were imprisoned or sent to penal colonies until
1859. Thousands more went into voluntary exile abroad, including Victor Hugo.
From 1862 onwards, he relaxed government censorship, and his regime came to be
known as the "Liberal Empire." Many of his opponents returned to
France and became members of the National Assembly.
Napoléon III is best known today for his grand
reconstruction of Paris, carried out by his prefect
of the Seine, Baron Haussmann. He launched similar public works projects in
Marseille, Lyon, and other French cities. Napoléon III modernized the French
banking system, greatly expanded and consolidated the French railway system,
and made the French merchant marine the second largest in the world. He
promoted the building of the Suez Canal and established modern agriculture,
which ended famines in France and made France an agricultural exporter. Napoléon
III negotiated the 1860 Cobden–Chevalier free trade agreement with Britain and
similar agreements with France's other European trading partners. Social
reforms included giving French workers the right to strike and the right to
organize. Women's education greatly expanded, as did the list of required
subjects in public schools
Beginning in 1866, Napoléon had to face the mounting
power of Prussia, as Chancellor Otto von Bismarck sought German unification
under Prussian leadership. In July 1870, Napoléon entered the Franco-Prussian
War without allies and with inferior military forces. The French army was
rapidly defeated and Napoléon III was captured at the Battle of Sedan. The
French Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris, and Napoléon went into exile in
England, where he died in 1873.
Among the commercial innovations encouraged by Napoléon
III were the first department stores. Bon
Marché opened in 1852, followed by Au
Printemps in 1865
One of the first priorities of Napoléon III was the
modernization of the French economy, which had fallen far behind that of the
United Kingdom and some of the German states. Political economics had long been
a passion of the Emperor: While in Britain he had visited factories and railway
yards, and in prison he had studied and written about the sugar industry and
policies to reduce poverty. He wanted the government to play an active, not a
passive, role in the economy. In 1839, he had written: "Government is not
a necessary evil, as some people claim; it is instead the benevolent motor for
the whole social organism." He did not advocate the government getting
directly involved in industry. Instead, the government took a very active role
in building the infrastructure for economic growth; stimulating the stock
market and investment banks to provide credit; building railways, ports, canals
and roads; and providing training and education. He also opened up French
markets to foreign goods, such as railway tracks from England, forcing French
industry to become more efficient and more competitive.
Beginning in 1852, he encouraged the creation of new
banks, such as Crédit Mobilier, which
sold shares to the public and provided loans to both private industry and to
the government. Crédit Lyonnais was
founded in 1863, and Société Générale
in 1864. These banks provided the funding for Napoléon III's major projects,
from railway and canals to the rebuilding of Paris.
New shipping lines were created and ports rebuilt in
Marseille and Le Havre, which connected France by sea to the USA, Latin
America, North Africa and the Far East. During the Empire the number of
steamships tripled, and by 1870 France possessed, after England, the
second-largest maritime fleet in the world.
The rebuilding of central Paris also encouraged
commercial expansion and innovation. The first department store, Bon Marché, opened in Paris in 1852 in a
modest building, and expanded rapidly, its income going from 450,000 francs a
year to 20 million. Its founder, Aristide Boucicaut, commissioned a new glass
and iron building, designed by Louis-Charles Boileau and Gustave Eiffel and
opened in 1869, that became the model for the modern department store. Other
department stores quickly appeared: Au
Printemps in 1865 and La Samaritaine
in 1870.
Napoléon III's program also included reclaiming farmland
and reforestation. One such project in the Gironde department drained and
reforested 10,000 square kilometers (3,900 square miles) of moorland, creating
the Landes forest, the largest
maritime pine forest in Europe
The Avenue de
l'Opéra, was one of the new boulevards created by Napoléon III. The new
buildings on the boulevards were required to be all of the same height and same
basic facade design, and all faced with cream colored stone, giving the city
center its distinctive harmony.
Napoléon III began his regime by launching a series of
enormous public works projects in Paris, hiring tens of thousands of workers to
improve the sanitation, water supply and traffic circulation of the city. To
direct this task, he named a new Prefect
of the Seine department, Georges Eugène Haussmann, and gave him
extraordinary powers to rebuild the center of the city. He installed a large
map of Paris in a central position in his office, and he and Haussmann planned
the new Paris.
To accommodate the growing population and those who
would be forced from the center by the new boulevards and squares Napoléon III
planned to build, he issued in 1860 a decree annexing eleven surrounding communes
(municipalities), and increasing the number of arrondisments (city boroughs)
from twelve to twenty, enlarging Paris to its modern boundaries with the
exception of the two major city parks (Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes)
which only became part of the French capital in 1920.
Napoléon III built two new railway stations: the Gare de Lyon (1855) and the Gare du Nord (1865). He completed Les Halles, the great cast iron and
glass pavilioned produce market in the center of the city, and built a new municipal
hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, in the
place of crumbling medieval buildings on the Ile de la Cité. The signature architectural landmark was the Paris Opera, the largest theater in the
world, designed by Charles Garnier, crowning the center of Napoléon III's new
Paris.
Napoléon III also wanted to build new parks and gardens
for the recreation and relaxation of the Parisians, particularly those in the
new neighborhoods of the expanding city. Napoléon III's new parks were inspired
by his memories of the parks in London, especially Hyde Park, where he had
strolled and promenaded in a carriage while in exile; but he wanted to build on
a much larger scale. Working with Haussmann and Jean-Charles Alphand, the
engineer who headed the new Service of
Promenades and Plantations, he laid out a plan for four major parks at the
cardinal points of the compass around the city. Thousands of workers and
gardeners began to dig lakes, build cascades, plant lawns, flowerbeds and
trees, and construct chalets and grottoes. Napoléon III transformed the Bois de Boulogne into a park (1852–58)
to the west of Paris: the Bois de
Vincennes (1860–65) to the east; he created the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (1865–67) to the north, and the Parc Montsouris (1865–78) to the south.
In addition to building the four large parks, Napoléon
had the city's older parks, including Parc
Monceau, formerly owned by the Orléans
family, and the superb Jardin du
Luxembourg, refurbished and replanted. He also created some twenty small
parks and gardens in the neighborhoods, as miniature versions of his large
parks. Alphand termed these small parks "Green and flowering salons."
The intention of Napoléon's plan was to have one park in each of the eighty
"quartiers" (neighborhoods) of Paris, so that no one was more than a
ten-minute's walk from such a park. The parks were an immediate success with
all classes of Parisians
Napoléon III also began or completed the restoration of
several important historic landmarks, carried out for him by Eugène
Viollet-le-Duc. He restored the flèche,
or spire, of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame
de Paris, which had been partially destroyed and desecrated during the
French Revolution. In 1855 he completed the restoration, begun in 1845, of the
stained glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle,
and in 1862 he declared it a national historical monument. In 1853, he approved
and provided funding for Viollet-le-Duc's restoration of the medieval town of Carcassonne. He also sponsored
Viollet-le-Duc's restoration of the Château
de Vincennes and the Château de
Pierrefonds. In 1862, he closed the prison which had occupied the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel since the
French Revolution, where many important political prisoners had been held, so
it could be restored and opened to the public
From the beginning of his reign Napoléon III launched a
series of social reforms aimed at improving the life of the working class. He
began with small projects, such as opening up two clinics in Paris for sick and
injured workers, a program of legal assistance to those unable to afford it,
and subsidies to companies which built low-cost housing for their workers. He
outlawed the practice of employers taking possession of or making comments in
the work document that every employee was required to carry; negative comments
meant that workers were unable to get other jobs. In 1866, he encouraged the
creation of a state insurance fund to help workers or peasants who became
disabled, and to help their widows and families.
His most important social reform was the 1864 law which
gave French workers the right to strike, which had been forbidden since 1810.
In 1866 he added to this an "Edict
of Tolerance," which gave factory workers the right to organize. He
issued a decree regulating the treatment of apprentices, limited working hours
on Sundays and holidays, and removed from the Napoléonic Code the infamous article 1781, which said that the
declaration of the employer, even without proof, would be given more weight by
the court than the word of the employee.
Napoléon III also directed the building of the French
railway network, which greatly contributed to the development of the coal
mining and steel industry in France, thereby radically changing the nature of
the French economy, which entered the modern age of large-scale capitalism. The
French economy, the second largest in the world at the time (behind the British
economy), experienced a very strong growth during the reign of Napoléon III.
Names such as steel tycoon Eugène Schneider or banking mogul James de
Rothschild are symbols of the period. Two of France's largest banks, Société Générale and Crédit Lyonnais, still in existence
today, were founded during that period. The French stock market also expanded
prodigiously, with many coal mining and steel companies issuing stocks.
Historians credit Napoléon III chiefly for supporting the railways, but not
otherwise building the economy.
Napoléon's military pressure and Russian mistakes, culminating
in the Crimean War, dealt a fatal blow to the Concert of Europe. It was based
on stability and balance of powers, whereas Napoléon attempted to rearrange the
world map to France's favor even when it involved radical and potentially
revolutionary changes in politics. A 12-pound cannon designed by France is
commonly referred to as a Napoléon cannon or 12-pounder Napoléon in his honor.
So, to answer the question that the title of
this blog asks – what happened to Napoléon II (Napoléon
II, King of Rome, “the Eaglet”) ….
Napoléon François Charles Joseph Bonaparte (20 March
1811 – 22 July 1832), Prince Imperial, King of Rome, was the son of Napoléon I,
Emperor of the French, and his second wife, Archduchess Marie Louise of
Austria.
By Title III, article 9 of the French Constitution of
the time, he was Prince Imperial, but he was also known from birth as the King
of Rome, which Napoléon I declared was the courtesy title of the heir apparent.
His nickname of L'Aiglon ("the
Eaglet") was awarded posthumously and was popularized by the Edmond
Rostand play, L'Aiglon.
When Napoléon I abdicated on 4 April 1814, he named his
son as Emperor. However, the coalition partners that had defeated him refused
to acknowledge his son as successor; thus Napoléon I was forced to abdicate
unconditionally a number of days later. Although Napoléon II never actually
ruled France, he was briefly the titular Emperor of the French in 1815 after
the fall of his father. When his cousin Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte became the
next emperor by founding the Second French Empire in 1852, he called himself Napoléon
III to acknowledge Napoléon II and his brief reign.
Ç'est tout avec les Napoléons
(special credit to Wikipedia for information on the Napoléons)
