The Rise Of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte | History Hit | Timeline

this channel is part of the history hit network [Music] he was the man who would define the start of the 19th century he has more documented victories than any other battlefield commander in history i guess one would think you know in terms of people like julius caesar or alexander and i would say in many ways he's he's greater he's one of the most influential military leader of all time napoleon was exceptional in that he was genuinely loved by his men [Music] from a relatively humble background he rose to become master of europe somebody like that to become emperor ruler of the largest empire that europe has seen really since the middle ages is is just amazing this is the rise of napoleon [Music] [Applause] [Music] this government feels obliged to report this new crisis to you in fullest [Applause] what matters is that russia has been wrong in its response [Music] with this faith we will be able to transform the dangling discourse of our nation [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] napoleon bonaparte began his life in relatively modest circumstances he was born on the 15th of august 1769 on the island of corsica france had only acquired the island from the republic of genoa the previous year bringing it under french rule prior to the french revolution napoleon is someone who is essentially condemned to mediocrity he comes from the minor gentry of a part of france which has only been incorporated into france shortly before his birth his family are moderately influential on a local level he has a large number of siblings a lot of outdoor activities not a lot of luxury a mother leticia who's very much down to earth and a father who is involved in politics but many ways is a bit useless when it comes to things like you know running the family finances gambling you know he leaves the family impoverished so carlo is probably not somebody that a young boy would necessarily look up to carlo bonaparte and his wife letitia pregnant with napoleon had resisted the french takeover alongside the corsican nationalist leader pasquale paoli this however ultimately failed and carlo bonaparte reading the writing on the wall decided to change tack the french they take over cause record it takes them about a year to more or less assert their control and carlo bonaparte and by extension of bonaparte family they switch from being sort of pro-powerly freedom fighters for causing an independence to being collaborators and i think that's that's something which troubles napoleon as he grows up but the french monarchy is very keen to integrate corsica so a great way of integrating any new territories to get you know prominent families to send their sons either into a civil service or in napoleon's case uh into the army he manages to become a military officer but an artillery officer which is not a particularly socially distinguished thing to be because to be an artillery officer you have to know things and knowing things is very lower class as far as the aristocracy you're concerned so in a world of france in the 1780s which is highly aristocratic in its outlook napoleon is the kind of person who is really stewing his own ambitions in a society which is deeply hierarchical and isn't ever going to let someone like him ascend to greatness napoleon not satisfied with his position in the army decided that instead he would return to corsica he was still a fervent believer in corsican independence and sought out pascually paulie the leader of corsican nationalism napoleon goes back to corsica but he's not welcomed by powerless he hero worships powerly but probably i guess possibly that sort of cause he can clan mentality says you're a bonaparte you're a collaborator i don't really trust you so he he gets really cold shoulder and i think that's quite devastating for what he's a teenager at this point um to be kind of like just rejected there by his hero if you're enjoying this documentary and you want to see more you can check out the rest of the rise of series on history hit including the brand new episode rise of cleopatra here's a sneak preview it's a great story of a great individual undoubtedly it's also absolutely pivotal in the history of egypt and in the history of the ancient world from caesar to shakespeare to modern cinema her story has remained as popular as ever her name despised idolized and mythologized cleopatra start your free trial today by clicking on the link in the description and there's a special introductory offer for timeline viewers if you use the code timeline checkout it's quite clear that he the bonaparte's haven't got a great future in corsica napoleon is ultimately a pragmatist if you want to make a career if you want a future if you want to do something big you do it via the french route corsica isn't going to get you anywhere because paulie is that sort of buffer he's that roadblock what napoleon needed would be a world shaking political and societal upheaval that would remove the existing system of power and enable him to rise rapidly through the ranks of the french military as it turned out he would get his wish the people of france were rising up disillusioned with their out of touch monarchy france was going to revolution so the revolution of 1789 has some really deep roots it's rooted in the dysfunction of the french monarchy its inability to fund its ambitions to be a world power while having a very hierarchical internal social structure where being rich and powerful essentially means that you don't have to pay very much tax and this comes to a tremendous climax in the 1780s ironically after the french have been on the winning side of the war of american independence but they've built up such an enormous burden of state debt by that point that their rickety tax collecting mechanisms just cannot cope anymore the only way of reforming the tax system is to reform the entire structure the political and social structure of france and it's you know i suppose analogy i would use this is like if you're picking at a woolen sweater if you sort of start pulling about fred the whole thing unravels so the french revolution starts out with tremendous optimism it starts out with the belief that huge changes can be affected in society but it also starts out with with fear and paranoia and conspiracies the reason why the parisians stormed the bastille on the 14th of july is that three days earlier the king's brothers and other high-ranking aristocrats had sacked the reformist government and were trying to do away with the changes that had already been pushed through and after july of 1789 the national assembly that's been gathered together spends two years trying to put together a monarchical constitution to have lou the 16th on the throne to have political participation to have rights to have everyone paying their taxes and everything be good and great but it continually runs into deeper and deeper problems and crises that enlightenment rationalism that told people they could make reform it also tells them they can reform the catholic church for example but trying to reform the catholic church runs into the opinion of the upper echelons of society and this is one of the profound chasms that opens up within french society so by 1791 1792 you have a state really of latent civil war all these tensions that have been brought out through the previous three years are still brewing at the center of this civil war were the jacobins led by maximilian robespierre well the jacobians are republicans and they are republicans of us the radical bent these are people who wanted the execution of louis xvi and they are looking really for a very profound political transformation of france they don't just want a sort of change at the top but keeping the existing system pretty much as is they're very happy to use kind of violence and terror to push for evolution forward the jacobins had a strong influence on napoleon and when he returned to france and rejoined his regiment in nice in june 1793 he wrote an account expressing his support for the radical republican group not long after perhaps as a result of this pro-jacobin writing napoleon was given his first big opportunity he was called upon to lead the french artillery as the republican forces laid siege to the strategic port city of toulon it's a natural harbour to this state remains the main port of a french mediterranean fleet it is so in 1793 so strategically immensely important for france about a third of its fleet is stationed there in this period the trouble is from a french revolutionary perspective is it's full of royalists it's full of people that don't like where france is heading politically so they surrender the city to an allied force not just a british force but spanish and saboyard as well who occupy that major strategic point which then the french revolutionary forces of which the young napoleon bonaparte is part they then besiege and this is where bonaparte really steps onto the stage as an artillery officer he comes up with a plan to take one of the forts surrounding toulon which has been resisting capture but if they can take the fort they'll then be able to dominate the city and the poor with their artillery and their enemy physician will become untenable so he puts this forward puts this forward particularly to a civilian politician called who himself is a nobleman by descent but is one of these radical jacobin representatives and napoleon is allowed to put this plan into action and it succeeds napoleon's contribution during the siege of toulon earned the 24 year old artillery officer a promotion to the rank of brigadier general however all was not so simple the tide in france was turning and the people were rising up again this time against the jacobins whose reign of terror was coming to an end the newly promoted general bonaparte whose connections to the jacobins that helped him reach this position now found himself on rocky ground the jacobins of course didn't last they tried to promote the idea of the republic and in doing so put to death about 40 000 of their enemies and people naturally became extremely suspicious that they were going to be the next being as the professional soldier is a bit dangerous in the french armies period because regimes come and go in paris with an ever-growing kind of rapidity so if you tie yourself to a particular regime that regime at some point is more than likely going to collapse and your career possibly your life might collapse along with it and napoleon is associated with the jacobins he's published a pamphlet which gets him some note from maximilian robspeer's brother and so when the committee of public safety under maximilian robsopia is overthrown in the coup of thermador napoleon is almost dragged down with that regime he's not dragged to his death but it does put his career on hold and his meteoric rise is is stopped for a period the fermidorian reaction as it became known introduced a new regime that hoped to bring together the now fractured left and right wing politicians but achieving this was easier said than done after the fall of rob speer in july of 1794 the survivors of the terror spend the next year really deciding how to put france back together again dealing with impulses towards revenge from both the left and the right so these thermadorians drift back towards a political center which is therefore always more right-wing than some of the other surviving jacobins would like but clearly much more left-wing a lot of surviving royalists would like and royalism itself comes to express a whole spectrum of opinions from absolute counter-revolutionaries who would who would hang everyone through to people who start thinking well maybe a constitutional monarchy wasn't such a bad idea since we've mucked up having a republic but all this is kind of stewing in the mix through into 1795 when these thermadorians decide to have a new constitution it provokes what is always referred to as a royalist uprising from the western districts of paris for napoleon this uprising offered him a shot at redemption in the eyes of the french government baja who is the chief politician in paris at the time picks on napoleon to have a role in combating the royalist plot not necessarily because he thought napoleon was a great guy but because of the memory of toulon and that what napoleon had been able to do there and napoleon bonaparte who is a junior general at this point with help manages to again get some artillery somebody who's going to be very important in in napoleon's later career as it develops he's this cavalry commander the 12th chaser cheval he's ordered by napoleon bonaparte to seize some nearby artillery and artillery is then deployed very ruthlessly uh using grape shot which are essentially some basketballs and bits of metal fragment and these are fired from the artillery into a mass of royalist insurgents and you know coup attempt over and you've got a very grateful french republican government which if you like owes napoleon one with a whiff of grape shot napoleon became a household name winning him favor with the directory the new power in france who reinstated the 26 year old as brigadier general and gave him his first real command the army of italy but before he embarked on his first campaign napoleon met josephine de boharne marrying her in a ceremony on the 9th of march 1796 josephine was a widow whose husband had been executed during the reign of terror josephine is old of a napoleon she's very much a kind of part of the insect in in this regime which is known as our directory it's a regime which has become associated with corruption both financial and moral and josephine is elegant charming and napoleon is by all accounts smitten by her i suppose what is significant is that she is connected to the higher echelons of french regime notably something called baga who's within the directorial government and you need that sort of connection really for your career to progress and this is just of course on the eve of possibly the most important breakthrough in napoleon's career which is his appointment as commanding general of the army of italy so the army of italy is relatively small 20 30 000 men poorly supplied neglected really compared to some of the other fronts on which there's been more fighting over the last year or two armies in the north have been winning some great victories in 1795. so napoleon goes to this army and presents himself in a sense as their savior that he is the man who is going to lead them onto greater things he famously says to them that you're new you're here and you've got nothing you've got no boots you've got no money you've got no food there is italy it's full of wealth and and we're going to go and get it and it'll be it'll be glory for you glory for us glory for me and that's very much the spirit that he takes into the campaign there is a kind of free booting almost piratical mixture of motives but at the same time it's also about france and glory and representing a wider ideal his enemy was the austrian empire whose forces vastly outnumbered his own not one to be intimidated by the task ahead of him napoleon immediately went on the offensive he moves fast he often moves unexpectedly as far as the enemy is concerned so there's that vigor which often is missing on the austrian side you follow through he's got that great eye for geography he can see where to advance where to cut off enemy supplies where to make the enemy feel that they can't treat if they need to along their own supply lines napoleonic warfare which really starts in this period is characterized by rapid movement and in italy through 1796 into 97 he consistently outmaneuvers the austrian enemy pushes them out of a whole range of different territories and the austrians by the autumn of 1797 sort of throw in the tower it's made easy for them in that napoleon bonaparte again acts pragmatically and as a trade with them so the austrians actually receive venice in return for territories which they're forced to give up in effect to france and i think what is significant there from the point of view of napoleon's career is that he's starting to act as a statesman as well as a soldier he is making high-level geopolitical decisions without much reference to the government in paris it might be said they have to basically accept what he signs up to napoleon's a great battlefield leader he's a great military leader in the in the narrow sense what he also starts to show during the years in italy is his very strong conviction of himself as being entitled to be a political leader as well of being entitled to be treated almost as a monarch and while he's there in milan he bases himself in what is effectively a palace and actually enlarges it and has big marquees put up in the gardens of the palace so that more people can come and pay court to him so that it becomes the kind of place where you have to come if you want anything from the french authorities and present yourself to bonaparte who is sitting there in a throne room waiting to have these audiences with you and he sets himself up like that very clearly and then when he goes back to paris at the end of 1797 he very carefully leaves all that behind and he goes into paris in an ordinary coach dressed in civilian clothes and presents himself very humbly to his political masters because he's playing both sides against the middle he he likes being in charge being being the unquestioned leader and ruler but he knows that if he's not careful he'll just get chucked in prison so he's he's playing a game of power very clearly from these days in italy onwards napoleon returned to paris a hero the 28 year old had defeated the austrian empire all while more experienced french generals had made little ground in the northern battlefields of germany now it was time to turn his attention to france's greatest enemy the british but rather than confronting this northern foe with a direct attack he looked to the east the idea of looking eastward looking to the levant for some kind of strategic advantage is not unusual it's been part of french long-term strategic thinking what they're looking at by 1798 it's it's an interesting amalgam of ideas one is that the confrontation with britain to the north west has really grown to a stalemate and they're looking around for another way to kind of break out of that sort of simple army versus navy dichotomy they've got there the mediterranean of course is much more difficult at least theoretically for the british navy to operate in napoleon persuades the politicians in paris who were easily persuaded because after all napoleon by now is rather popular he's extremely good at publicity and organizing publicity and organizing networks of influence and he is spoken of as someone who ought to have more of a political role in paris which the politicians of course the director don't want to know [Music] and so napoleon was allowed to set off for egypt following in the footsteps of two of his greatest idols from antiquity for napoleon you know he's going to be operating this exotic place where julius caesar and alexander the great have been conquerors you can see how it's going to trigger the imagination of napoleon napoleon wants to go to the east because as he said the east is where all great glory comes from and he very clearly wants great glory it's not about what he can do for other people it is very much clearly about what he can do for himself to become greater and he'll take to egypt both obviously his military force and also this remarkable scientific force that he puts together who several dozens hundreds of scientists and their associates who will found something called the institute of egypt paralleling the national institute of sciences which has been set up in paris they're going to investigate egypt as a source of economic power as a source of raw material as well as somewhere where the french can get more influence going east towards india they're going to egypt which has been most recently of course part of a muslim empire with a language which they didn't know almost no one on those boats going to egypt had any knowledge of arabic and what knowledge they had was classical arabic and what they given to inform them about egypt was what they'd read when they were students which was herodotus and his absolutely brilliant account of the society and culture of of ancient egypt most of them also had dual purpose these intellectuals so they do have a function of things like military logistics administration but in the other half of their their professional lives they're taking sketches of these wonderful monuments which they see of cataloging of collecting and of discovering objects like the rosetta stone and of in many ways creating that modern subject area of egyptology the egyptians hadn't really seen a military expedition on this scale certainly not the egyptians were alive at the time it is it is a colossal military expedition in terms of number of ships and in terms of number of troops who the french bring over so i think one could talk about shock and awe in in the initial sort of phase napoleon makes all sorts of promises he adopts language which he thinks will be appealing to egyptians looking at how napoleon approaches the the contemporary population of egypt there's also some very deeply negative aspects there they go in with this very superior enlightenment attitude that you can simply you can exploit islam you can you can lie to people and say that you're sympathetic to islam and then they will obey you and particularly early on in the french occupation there is some very cynical attempts to persuade the general population that french republicanism because it's anti-catholic is pro-islamic um and it is always entirely sort of superficial and cynical and manipulative and it's also associated again with projecting bonaparte as a kind of personal savior that he is somehow involved in this syncretic image they want to put forward not just as the leader of the army but as as himself as as a leader whose personal qualities will will bring good things to the egyptians but of course in practice as as many people will find when they get occupied by a napoleonic army it is a question of looting and requisition and theft and physical abuse and any in the end a thoroughly unpleasant occupation experience for the egyptians [Music] but things quickly turned sour for napoleon thinking he was out of reach of the british royal navy he was caught off guard when admiral horatio nelson destroyed the french fleet in the battle of the nile in true napoleonic fashion the french general did not stay put for long instead choosing to go on the offensive hoping to meet the british-backed ottomans who were marching towards him head-on the campaign which takes place ultimately is a failure for the french they don't achieve their objective which is to halt the ottoman advance but you do get a couple of episodes which are important for napoleon's reputation and one is that the massacre of ottoman prisoners which is is a dark episode even by the the low standards of a period it's controversial and the other is where he is seen to heal and to to sort of touch the plague victims plague is still rife in that part of the world in the late 18th century and there's this very famous painting which shows napoleon almost as a christ-like figure touching these people are afflicted with plague he's he's brave enough to to do that it's that sort of care which he shows the ordinary french soldier at least that reputation which he acquires which makes him so popular amongst the ordinary french soldiers the egyptian campaign was a failed campaign military but napoleon managed to get himself and his close associates back to paris quickly enough before the politicians in paris realized it had been it had been a failure what napoleon does is abandon his army in egypt and that again is one of those turning points in his life that we have to acknowledge he had no orders to return to france his army had partly successfully partly unsuccessfully expanded the area under control but it was becoming clear to him that a stalemate was going to ensue and he'd started to hear rumors that things were going on in france that might open up other possibilities for him so in in the middle of 1799 he is ironically welcomed back into france all that they have heard is his propaganda about how wonderfully things were going in egypt rather than facing a firing squad napoleon received a hero's welcome upon his return to france at a time when the country's political situation looked dire france is now confronting a new coalition of enemies not only britain and the ottomans but also the russians the austrians again so from a geopolitical standpoint it's not rosy and domestically the directory is imploding it's it's been swinging from left to right it's unstable there's a group of politicians in france who say this has got to stop we need to have a regime change but we need to have a general we need to have some military muscle to affect what is going to be a coup d'etat but these these coup plotters which come to be centered around the abbey sies who is a sort of wonderfully genteel intellectual to find at the heart of a coup plot who's been there since 1789 with you know good but slightly over complicated ideas about how to run a country he's still there in 1799 trying to find people who join him in actually overthrowing the directory and imposing a more authoritarian solution and this is the situation that bonaparte steps into after they've considered various other military leaders but once barna park gets his feet under their table he very clearly makes himself the the leader of what is going to happen it doesn't quite go as as planned because napoleon is not a great public speaker and he he might be good at haranguing his troops but he's not very good at sort of functioning as the parliamentary aesthetic so in effect he gets denounced as an outlaw and the coup almost goes alright but for the intervention with his brother lucian bonaparte and of his his troops who protect him from what he claims is an assassination attempt but you know it is more a bit of spitting and jostling are no worse than that and in the end the whole thing is decided rather brutally by armed troops pushing these legislators out of the assembly where they where they've gathered and telling them it's all over now you know there's no way back and having physically as it were dissolved the legislature the coup plotters are now in a position to think about what to put in its place napoleon now 30 years old managed to seize power and declare himself first council supported by two other consuls he now found himself at the head of the french state a position that was soon confirmed by something completely new to france a plebiscite the idea of of every adult male regardless of what tax they paid getting a vote sounded extremely revolutionary extremely liberating extremely egalitarian but of course the question that they're asked is actually very narrow it's are you going to take um napoleon campbell says and lebron as three consoles or are you not there's no alternative in addition napoleon's brother louis who did the counting in the plebiscites manipulated the figures the thing is that this regime wants near unanimity it wants to show that it's brought all french people together that it's above faction and you can't really show that if you simply get 51 of the vote as opposed to 49 of a vote so that's i think the reason for the cheating not that you want to win but you want to you want to show unanimity so the consulate presents itself very successfully as a peacemaking regime as something that will pacify france and there's different levels of which this is quite true a lot of law and order has already broken down in the later 1790s people no longer trust authority in terms of judicial procedures and so on the army has already had to be used extensively for combating banditry and other kinds of unrest so an openly authoritarian regime is quite widely accepted as something which will just stop the threats to property the threats to individual security the bloody vendettas which have been raging around the country through the 1790s you know and a thoroughly well-organized military effort to suppress all that kind of problem is very successful in the years after 1799. what people wanted was security and stability and an end to civil war and along with that a legal and judicial system that would work and the reform has been talked about reform has been discussed but nothing completed and it was under napoleon as first council that napoleon promoted first of all a new judicial structure which was centralized on paris where judges were appointed directly by the minister justice in paris and a codification of the laws which had been endlessly debated but not completed napoleon will negotiate a so-called concordat with the papacy he'll negotiate a return to an essentially collaborative relationship with the catholic church i'm ending the most deep seated conflict which is dog the 1790s while at the same time not having to give the catholic church back any of its money it's a very good deal for france in that respect and it's an even better deal for france because napoleon adds some additional articles to the document after the catholic church has left so that they actually he says they've got more out of it than the catholic church knew they were giving away but that again is a typically napoleonic move the napoleonic regime is more conservative and it it starts to talk about re-instituting old institutions which help preserve a kind of stable france and that means a kind of a patriarchal system amongst other things and that's bad news for those who had been arguing for things like the abolition of slavery but also for equal rights for women women as a result of the napoleonic codes have virtually no civil rights at all they almost cease to exist as people the father has total control over the children over how they're to be brought up where they're to be brought up how they're to be educated and married he makes those decisions he even makes the decision where his wife is to live and in theory he could insist upon his wife accepting a mistress living in the same house women's status is noticeably reduced napoleon was now the de facto ruler of france but his hold-on power was tenuous to say the least austria had reoccupied northern italy and a french garrison was under siege in genoa napoleon had to act quickly and decisively in order to secure his hold on france he needed a swift victory over austria and so he followed in the footsteps of hannibal and marched his army over the alps napoleon's crossing of the the alps is a quintessentially napoleonic action it catches the austrians by surprise it means that the french have quickly positioned themselves in such a way that they threaten the austrian lines of communication you know back into austria ultimately so it forces the austrian commander to be called michael von miller to turn around and to head towards the french army which has to neutralize napoleon met the austrian forces for a single decisive battle near the town of morengo moringo starts off with an austrian numerical advantage something like 28 000 troops outnumbering the french force under napoleon bonaparte which is is closer to 20 000 troops napoleon there has been caught by surprise he's managed to surprise the austrians by marching from the alps but on this occasion he doesn't believe that he is confronting the main austrian force and what napoleon has been doing perhaps unwisely is spreading out his own troops to try and cover various sort of lines of communication so he's dispersed his forces so the battle initially doesn't go very well for the french they are forced to fall back and so the austrian commander is actually he basically thinks he's one and there's a actually he he retreats himself to communicate that success back to his superiors but he's done it a little bit ahead of the close of play the french managed to call up reinforcements napoleon throws in his consular guard and he plugs some gaps in the french line and then you get the arrival of dese who comes in that's a crucial moment and really catches i think the austrians who really think they have won uh by surprise and bundles them back to to where they had started and inflict you know a substantial number of casualties in the on on the austrian side in terms of killed wounded but above all captured so that really wrecks uh the austrian army napoleon is is again saved from possible defeat by general desai who storms onto the battlefield of morengo and gets himself killed in saving the day enabling boeing apart to claim all the credit france will find itself by 1801 able to be at peace able even to bring the british to the peace table for the first time in this whole period because the british now have no continental allies no sense of how they could prosecute the war any further and so the piece of amir is initially agreed in late 1801 and formally signed in 1802 and for the next year or so napoleon really does appear as the the peacemaker of europe he's established a settlement where france is is as dominant as as a nation might want to be in that sphere of western europe but it will turn out to be only a pause in the larger military story as a consequence the regime becomes increasingly secure which no regime has been since 1789. it's important to realize that that this is three years of relative stability compared with the previous years and so napoleon then risks a new plebiscite which makes him counsel for life which again there's a victory of about three million yeses and a few thousand no's he was never going to lose any of these votes and it's simply a question of deciding how much he wants to win them by and this is a pattern that carries forth from the life consulate into his nomination as emperor which will happen a year after the war has restarted the argument which napoleon uses and his supporters say that you take out napoleon you know for an assassin's bullet or a bomb and our assassination attempts several against napoleon's period the only way of stopping that is to create a predatory system where it doesn't really matter if you take out napoleon because you've got a clear line of succession undoubtedly to be proclaimed emperor was going to be the top and particularly for a nation of men educated in the classics to have an emperor was better than to have a council and that is ratified by plebiscite in the spring of 1804 leading to the famous coronation at the beginning of december where napoleon very famously crowns himself that he he would not give up to anyone else the right to put the crown on his head so he takes it from the hands of the pope and puts it on his own head and at that point crystallized in a very deliberate propagandistic choice you can see exactly who napoleon bonaparte thought he was i mean napoleon knew his history and he knows the story of charlemagne who had been crowned by the pope on christmas day 800 and of course that relationship implies that the emperor of the west owes his authority legitimacy to the to the church as a mediator between god uh and the secular power napoleon doesn't really want to give that kind of impression in just 10 years napoleon bonaparte went from an unknown artillery officer to the emperor of the largest empire europe had seen in a thousand years his ambition did not stop there and would see europe through an almost constant state of war for the next decade an era aptly named the napoleonic wars napoleon had the opportunity as he'd had the opportunity before to sit back into being a great power but the future would prove that that was never enough for him there's always more to strive for and he of course after 1804 embarks upon the greater part of his territorial conquest conquests which will take him to to spain after 1808 and to russia in 1812. it's a regime ultimately founded upon not democracy but military victory and you really need to supply military victory after military victory and of course that means really a route to conquest without limit although napoleon's military successes ultimately faltered and his mastery over europe proved to be short-lived his legacy has endured to this day if you look at france it's really under napoleon's direction and encouragement that the institutions of modern france are really created its creation is promoted right down to all the codes of law in every direction you can say there is napoleon's hand you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 2,032,735

Keywords: Cultural impact, Emperor Napoleon, European dominance, Famous generals, French military, Global impact, Historical accomplishments, Historical biography, Historical conquerors, Historical insights, Historical leadership, Historical warfare, History buffs, Imperial rulers, Military campaigns, Military conquerors, Military strategy, Power struggles, Rise to power, Timeline - World History Documentaries, Warfare tactics

Id: uC8TK7GH85o

Length: 45min 37sec (2737 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 17 2022