Napoleon: Rise and Fall of One of the Most Influential Characters in History, in 5 Minutes!

Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military leader and emperor who conquered and dominated much of Europe for more than a decade in the early 19th century. His political and cultural legacy has made him one of the most celebrated and controversial leaders in human history. Born on the island of Corsica, Napoleon rapidly rose through the ranks of the military during the French Revolution despite his unimpressive physique. In 1796, he began his first military campaign against Austria that he defeated and forced to sign the Treaty of Campo Formio, resulting in territorial gains for the French. The following year, he rejected an offer to lead an invasion of Britain because he deemed the Royal Navy to be superior and proposed instead to weaken British access to India by invading Ottoman-ruled Egypt and Syria. Napoleon successfully invaded Egypt and the expedition eventually led to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, creating the field of Egyptology. The campaign however ended in defeat after the French naval fleet was nearly decimated by the British at the Battle of the Nile. Upon learning about the unstable situation back in France, the ever ambitious and cunning Napoleon abandoned his army in Egypt and returned to orchestrate a coup. After becoming the leading figure in France or first consul, he signed the Treaty of Amiens with Britain, ending the war of the Second Coalition and bringing a one-year-long peace in Europe. The following year, he sold France's Louisiana territory to the newly independent United States as a means to raise funds for wars, and that was before crowning himself Emperor of France in 1804 in a lavish ceremony. From then till the collapse of Napoleon's empire, France engaged in the Napoleonic Wars, a series of conflicts with various coalitions of European nations, many of them led or financed by Britain. In 1805, despite the annihilation of the French fleet by the Royal Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar, Napoleon emerged triumphant over the Third Coalition after one of his greatest victories at the Battle of Austerlitz against the Austrians and the Russians. The victory resulted in the dissolution of the 1,000-year-old Holy Roman Empire and the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine, which was an ally to France and a buffer zone with France's rivals, Prussia and Austria. Beginning in 1806, Napoleon waged economic warfare against Britain with the establishment of the Continental System, a large-scale embargo against British trade. In the same year, France defeated the Fourth Coalition by beating the Prussians and then annihilating the Russians at the Battle of Friedland in Eastern Europe, forcing them to sign an uneasy peace settlement of Tilsit. The Austrians and the British challenged the French again during the War of the Fifth Coalition, but Napoleon solidified his grip over Europe after winning the Battle of Wagram. Napoleon then started the Peninsular War to occupy the Iberian Peninsula, hoping to extend the embargo against Britain, and declared his brother King of Spain in 1808. The Russians' unwillingness to bear the economic consequences of reduced trade due to the blockade against Britain enticed Napoleon into a new major war. However, the French invasion of Russia in 1812 did not yield the quick decisive victory Napoleon wanted because of the country's sheer size and weather and the Russians' scorched earth policy. After the heavy casualties on both sides in the indecisive Battle of Borodino, the French march to Moscow revealed that the city was left in flames and totally evacuated. The Russian campaign resulted in the collapse of Napoleon's Grande Armée and inspired a renewed push against the French. Of Napoleon's 600,000 troops who began the campaign, only about 100,000 made it out of Russia. At the same time, increasing Spanish-Portuguese resistance and guerrilla warfare supported by the British finally drove the French forces out of Spain after a six-year-long Peninsular War. In 1813, Russia and Austria joined Russian forces in the War of the Sixth Coalition and defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig before capturing Paris, forcing Napoleon to abdicate and exiling him to the island of Elba off the coast of Italy. After less than a year in exile, however, Napoleon escaped Elba and was able to retake control of France once again. His new army defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Ligny before being crushed two days later by the British with assistance from the Prussians at the Battle of Waterloo near Brussels. Bonaparte was then exiled again, this time to the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died at the age of 51 from stomach cancer. His remains were later returned to France and entombed at Les Invalides in Paris, where France's war heroes are interred. Besides his military genius and expansion of the French Empire, Napoleon's many reforms left a lasting mark on the institutions of France and also of much of Western Europe. The ideas that underpin our modern world, including meritocracy, equality before law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on, were championed, consolidated, codified, and geographically extended by Napoleon. On the flip side, however, women lost almost all legal rights, slavery was reintroduced in French colonies, and Napoleon became an emperor with absolute power, overturning the French Revolution in some sense.