Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1769 on the island of Corsica, just one year after France annexed it from Genoa.The son of minor Italian-speaking nobles, he arrived at the mainland military school of Brienne at the age of nine, speaking French with a heavy Corsican accent that made him the butt of his classmates' mockery.

That humiliation drove him to bury himself in books on history, mathematics, and strategy.Commissioned as an artillery officer at sixteen, he was still a junior lieutenant when the French Revolution swept the country in 1789.

The first turning point came in 1793 at the Siege of Toulon, where royalist forces and the British fleet held the strategic port.The twenty-four-year-old captain seized a coastal battery by brilliant positioning, forced the enemy to evacuate, and was promoted to brigadier general overnight.

A series of stunning victories in Italy and a bold, if ultimately failed, campaign in Egypt made him France's most celebrated soldier.In 1799 he joined the coup of 18 Brumaire and became First Consul, and in 1804, in a ceremony at Notre-Dame, he crowned himself Emperor of the French.

His second turning point was the shattering victory at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, where he destroyed the combined armies of Austria and Russia and became master of continental Europe.During these years he promulgated the Napoleonic Code, a single, rationalized body of law that established equality before the law, property rights, and religious toleration, and which still underpins civil law in dozens of countries.

But the disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia cost him most of his Grand Army, and after a brief exile on Elba he returned for the Hundred Days only to be crushed at Waterloo in 1815.Banished to the remote island of Saint Helena, he died there in 1821 at fifty-one.

Remembered as both liberator and tyrant, Napoleon reshaped the map of Europe and accelerated the rise of the modern nation-state.

“Impossible is a word found only in the dictionary of fools.”