Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon’s Rise to Power

• Napoleon distinguished himself in the campaigns against Austria

• Directors = unpopular– Napoleon and his army

pull off a coup d’état – November 1799- Napoleon

made First Consul of France (supreme civil and military power)

• Beginning of a new era

Napoleonic Settlement• As First Consul, Napoleon

carried out a new series of acts solidifying his high standing– Established a 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

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

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

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

• 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