Napoleon Bonaparte

1
Napoleon Bonaparte
2
Napoleons Rise to Power

• Napoleon distinguished himself in the campaigns
  against Austria
• Directors unpopular
• Napoleon and his army pull off a coup détat
• November 1799- Napoleon made First Consul of
  France (supreme civil and military power)
• Beginning of a new era

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Napoleonic Settlement

• As First Consul, Napoleon carried out a new
  series of acts solidifying his high standing
• Concordat with the papacy (declared Catholicism
  the semiofficial religion)
• Centralized administrative and judicial system
• Criminal and civil codes of law
• Crushed plots to return the Bourbons and crushed
  the Jacobin remnants

4
French Dominion Over Europe

• 1804- Napoleon crowns himself monarch takes
  formal title of emperor
• Popular as wars went well, and they did for
  several years
• Victorious campaign between 1796 and 1809
• Defeat at Battle of Trafalgar (1805)
• England a major enemy and fought almost without
  interruption from 1793-1814

5
Russian Invasion

• 1810- Napoleon convinced that Czar Alexander I
  was getting ready to attack and had allied with
  England
• Summer of 1812- 600K invade Russia
• Initially successful
• Lost about 2/3 of army
• Napoleon broken at the Battle of Nations (1813)
• Defeated
• Europe freed from French occupation
• March 1814- Paris occupied, Napoleon forced to
  abdicate

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The Congress of Vienna

• Napoleon exiled to Elba allies go to Vienna to
  work out a settlement
• The Big Four work out territory of new Europe
  (Austria, Prussia, Russia, and England)
• A new series of agreements give Europe its
  borders for the next 100 yrs
• Legitimacy in government
• International cooperation to maintain peace
• Discouragement of nationalism and liberalism in
  politics
• Balance of power

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• Criticisms
• Aristocratic negotiators ignored growing forces,
  democracy, national feeling, and social reform
• Territory boundaries drawn in ignorance of and
  disregard for popular emotions
• Kings restored to their thrones without support
  of the citizens
• Treaty makers were upper-class men that
  disregarded ordinary people and their right to
  participate in government

• Successes
• The borders established endured without serious
  challenge for fifty years
• With the exception of the Franco-Prussian
  conflict (1870), Europe did not experience an
  important costly war till World War I in 1914
• Europe had three generations of peaceful economic
  expansion
• A century of cultural and material progress for
  the middle class and toward the end, the common
  people