Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars are the wars fought between France under Napoleon Bonaparte and various alliances of other European states from 1803 to 1815. They followed directly on from the French Revolutionary Wars, which had begun in 1792, so that Europe was at war, with only short breaks, for more than twenty years.

Historians usually count five coalitions against Napoleon in this period (the Third to Seventh Coalitions), because the First and Second Coalitions had fought revolutionary France before 1802. Britain was the one power that stayed at war with Napoleon almost the whole time, using its navy and its money to support allies on the continent. Austria, Prussia and Russia each fought Napoleon, were defeated, made peace and later joined the fight again.

At their height, around 1810–1812, Napoleon's empire and dependent states covered most of Western and Central Europe. The wars involved armies of hundreds of thousands, and in 1812 more than half a million men. They killed millions, spread the laws and institutions of the French Revolution, destroyed the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire, and provoked national resistance from Spain to Russia.

In 1789 the French Revolution overthrew the old order in France, and in 1792 France went to war with Austria and Prussia. Monarchies feared the spread of revolutionary ideas, while revolutionary France declared that it would support peoples against their kings and also sought 'natural frontiers' on the Rhine and the Alps. France introduced mass conscription (the levée en masse of 1793), creating much larger armies than before.

Napoleon Bonaparte, born in Corsica in 1769, rose as an artillery officer and won fame in the Italian campaign of 1796–97. After an expedition to Egypt (1798–1801), he seized power in a coup in November 1799 and became First Consul. He defeated Austria again in 1800, and Britain and France signed the Peace of Amiens in 1802. The peace did not last: disputes over Malta, French expansion in Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands, and trade led Britain to declare war again in May 1803.

Why did war resume and last so long? Historians disagree. Some emphasise Napoleon's personal ambition and his dependence on military glory to keep power. Others stress the long rivalry between Britain and France over trade and empire, or the unwillingness of the old monarchies to accept French hegemony. Paul Schroeder argued that Napoleon repeatedly rejected the chance of a stable settlement, while others see the balance-of-power system itself as unstable.

Napoleon planned to invade Britain and gathered an army at Boulogne. In 1804 he crowned himself Emperor of the French. In 1805 Britain, Austria, Russia and Sweden formed the Third Coalition. Napoleon marched his army, now called the Grande Armée, from the Channel to Germany, surrounded an Austrian army at Ulm, and on 2 December 1805 defeated the Russian and Austrian armies at Austerlitz, the 'Battle of the Three Emperors'.

At sea the result was the opposite. On 21 October 1805 the British fleet under Horatio Nelson destroyed a combined French and Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar, in southern Spain. Nelson was killed, but Britain's naval supremacy was secure for the rest of the war, and invasion of Britain was no longer realistic.

In 1806 Napoleon created the Confederation of the Rhine from German states under his protection, and the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved. Prussia went to war and was crushed at Jena and Auerstedt on 14 October 1806. After the bloody battle of Eylau and the French victory at Friedland in 1807, Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I made peace at Tilsit, meeting on a raft on the river Niemen. Prussia lost about half its territory, and a Duchy of Warsaw was created from Polish lands.

Unable to invade Britain, Napoleon tried to defeat it economically. The Berlin Decree of 1806 and the Milan Decree of 1807 created the Continental System, which banned trade with Britain across the areas under French control or alliance. Britain replied with a blockade and its own orders in council. The system damaged trade on the continent, encouraged smuggling and produced resentment; enforcing it drew Napoleon into Portugal, Spain and eventually Russia. British restrictions on neutral shipping also contributed to the War of 1812 with the United States.

In 1807 French troops crossed Spain to occupy Portugal, whose royal family fled to Brazil. In 1808 Napoleon forced the Spanish Bourbons to abdicate and made his brother Joseph king of Spain. The people of Madrid rose on 2 May 1808 and were harshly repressed—events later painted by Francisco Goya. Revolt spread across Spain, and a French army surrendered at Bailén in July 1808.

The Peninsular War (1807/1808–1814) combined regular campaigns by British, Portuguese and Spanish armies—British forces were commanded from 1809 by Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington—with widespread irregular fighting by Spanish guerrillas ('little war'). Sieges such as Zaragoza and atrocities by both sides caused great civilian suffering, recorded in Goya's print series The Disasters of War. Napoleon later called Spain his 'Spanish ulcer'. The war also gave rise to the Spanish Constitution of Cádiz (1812), one of the first liberal constitutions in Europe, and the collapse of royal authority in Spain opened the way to independence movements in Spanish America.

Austria went to war again in 1809 (the Fifth Coalition). Napoleon suffered his first major check at Aspern-Essling but won at Wagram. Austria had to cede territory, and in 1810 Napoleon married the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise. In the Tyrol, a peasant uprising led by Andreas Hofer was crushed.

Relations with Russia broke down, partly over the Continental System, which Russia had stopped enforcing, and over Poland. In June 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia with an army of well over 400,000 men in the first line, and more than 600,000 counting reinforcements, drawn from across his empire: Frenchmen, Germans, Poles, Italians, Dutch and others. The Russian armies retreated, destroying supplies. At Borodino on 7 September 1812 both armies suffered enormous losses in one of the bloodiest single days of the century. Napoleon entered Moscow, but the city burned and Alexander I refused to negotiate.

The retreat that began in October turned into a catastrophe. Hunger, disease, cold, Cossack raids and partisan attacks destroyed the army; the crossing of the Berezina river in November became a byword for disaster. Only a small fraction of the men who crossed into Russia returned; historians' estimates of the losses vary, but most of the Grande Armée was lost. Russian soldiers and civilians also died in very large numbers.

In 1813 Prussia joined Russia, followed by Austria and Sweden, in the Sixth Coalition. In Prussia, reforms since 1807 and a wave of patriotic feeling produced what Germans later called the Wars of Liberation. Napoleon raised new armies and won several battles, but at Leipzig, the 'Battle of the Nations', on 16–19 October 1813, he was decisively defeated. Wellington's army meanwhile drove the French out of Spain and crossed into southern France.

The allies invaded France in 1814 and entered Paris on 31 March. Napoleon abdicated in April and was exiled to the island of Elba, while Louis XVIII of the Bourbon dynasty took the French throne. The victors began meeting at the Congress of Vienna to settle Europe's future.

In March 1815 Napoleon escaped from Elba, landed in France and returned to power for about a hundred days (the Hundred Days). The allies formed the Seventh Coalition. On 18 June 1815, at Waterloo in present-day Belgium, Napoleon was defeated by Wellington's Anglo-allied army and the Prussian army under Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. He abdicated again and was exiled to Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821.

The number of deaths can only be estimated. Totals for the wars of 1803–1815 range from about 3.5 million to 7 million people, including civilians; Charles Esdaile has suggested 5–7 million overall, while other historians give lower figures. French military deaths are often estimated at around 900,000 to 1 million for 1800–1815, and each of the major allied armies lost hundreds of thousands. Far more soldiers died of disease, exposure and hunger than in battle.

Civilians suffered through requisitioning, plunder, sieges, reprisals against guerrilla resistance, and epidemics such as typhus that followed the armies. Spain and Portugal, Russia, central Germany and parts of Italy were especially hard hit. Conscription reached deep into society: families across the French Empire lost sons, and resistance to the draft and desertion were widespread.

The wars also touched people far from Europe. Napoleon's attempt in 1802–1803 to restore French control over Saint-Domingue, linked to the reimposition of slavery in other French colonies in 1802, ended in French defeat, and Haiti declared independence on 1 January 1804. In Spanish America, the crisis of the Spanish monarchy after 1808 set off the wars of independence. The British navy's dominance protected Britain's growing empire in Asia and the Caribbean.

The Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), led by Austria's Metternich, Britain's Castlereagh, Russia's Alexander I, Prussia's Hardenberg and France's Talleyrand, redrew the map of Europe. It aimed to restore legitimate monarchies and create a balance of power that would prevent another French hegemony. Russia gained most of Poland, Prussia gained lands on the Rhine and in Saxony, Austria regained its position in Italy, and a German Confederation replaced the Holy Roman Empire. The Congress also condemned the slave trade in principle. The great powers then cooperated in the 'Concert of Europe', and no general European war followed for about a century, although there were many smaller wars and revolutions.

Napoleon's rule left lasting institutional changes. The Civil Code of 1804 (the Napoleonic Code) guaranteed equality before the law and property rights, while reinforcing the authority of husbands and fathers; it influenced legal systems in much of Europe and Latin America. Centralised administration, the abolition of feudal privileges in many conquered areas, the emancipation of Jews in some territories and the secularisation of church lands proved hard to reverse.

The wars also stimulated nationalism—both in the form of resistance to French rule in Spain, Germany and Russia, and in the hopes of Poles and Italians who had served in Napoleon's armies. Britain emerged as the leading naval, commercial and imperial power. Military thinking was transformed: Carl von Clausewitz, who fought against Napoleon, and Antoine-Henri Jomini, who served him, wrote theories of war that shaped military education for generations.

In France, Napoleon remains both a national hero and a controversial figure. His tomb in Les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe and street names recall his victories. Admirers praise his administrative and legal reforms; critics emphasise dictatorship, the human cost of war and his reimposition of slavery in 1802. The bicentenary of his death in 2021 sparked public debate over whether and how the French state should commemorate him.

Other countries remember the wars mainly as struggles against French domination. In Russia the campaign of 1812 is the 'Patriotic War', celebrated in Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace, in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. In Spain the Peninsular War is called the War of Independence (Guerra de la Independencia), a founding episode of modern Spanish national identity. In Germany the Wars of Liberation of 1813 were later drawn into nationalist narratives. Britain celebrates Trafalgar and Waterloo, remembered in Trafalgar Square and Nelson's Column.

Memory is more ambivalent elsewhere. Many Poles remember Napoleon positively, since the Duchy of Warsaw revived a Polish state, and the Polish national anthem mentions Bonaparte. In Italy and the Low Countries, French rule is associated with both modernisation and exploitation. In Haiti, the war against Napoleon's expedition is the story of the first successful slave revolution and the founding of the nation, while in Latin America the Napoleonic crisis of 1808 is remembered as the spark of independence.

The wars are documented by an enormous amount of material: official bulletins of the Grande Armée (notorious for propaganda, which gave rise to the saying 'to lie like a bulletin'), Napoleon's vast correspondence, published in the nineteenth century and more completely in a modern edition by the Fondation Napoléon, diplomatic archives of all the powers, military orders and returns, and parish and conscription records used by demographers.

Memoirs by generals, officers and soldiers are abundant and vivid but must be used critically, since many were written years later to defend reputations or to satisfy the demand for heroic tales. The memoirs dictated by Napoleon on Saint Helena, including those recorded by Las Cases in the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (1823), helped build the Napoleonic legend of a liberal emperor defeated by kings.

Visual and literary sources are also important for understanding how contemporaries experienced the wars: Goya's Disasters of War, caricatures by James Gillray and others in Britain, and later novels by Stendhal and Tolstoy. Civilian diaries, petitions and police reports help historians study the burdens of conscription, requisitioning and occupation.

Interpretations of Napoleon have always reflected politics. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl's Napoleon: For and Against (first published in Dutch in 1946, in English in 1949), written after his own imprisonment by the Nazis, surveyed how French historians from the nineteenth to the twentieth century had judged Napoleon, showing that each generation projected its own concerns onto him. The debate between those who see him as the heir of the Revolution and those who see him as its betrayer, or as a precursor of modern dictatorship, continues.

Military historians long focused on Napoleon's generalship and his 'system' of rapid manoeuvre, often reading it through Clausewitz and Jomini. Since the late twentieth century, scholarship has turned to international and social history. Paul Schroeder's The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (1994) argued that the Vienna settlement represented a real change in the way states managed their relations. Charles Esdaile's Napoleon's Wars: An International History (2007) examines the aims of all the powers rather than only France.

David A. Bell's The First Total War (2007) argued that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era saw a new culture of war aimed at the complete defeat of the enemy, with the mobilisation of whole societies; critics question whether 'total war' is the right term for this period. Other historians study the empire as an imperial system, comparing it to other empires, and investigate resistance, collaboration, conscription and the experiences of women, peasants and colonial subjects, including the connection between Napoleonic policy and slavery in the Caribbean.