Meanwhile back in France, the people allowed Napoleon to remove the Consulate and turn it into an empire. He decided to hand the throne down to his descendants. But he had no descendants. He ended his marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais in 1809 and remarried in 1810. He married Hapsburg Archduchess Marie Louise, who was the daughter of the Austrian emperor.
Well, he got what he wanted, a son. He named his son King of Rome. Napoleon had also made all the rulers of his kingdom either family members or good friends. This made him very secure. He wiped out most of the German states, which totally dissolved what was left of the Holy Roman Empire.
By this time, he was the ruler of a huge empire. He had over 42 million people at his control. A short time after napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon finally defeated both the Austrian and the Prussian forces. Austria was defeated at Wagram and began to withdraw from their territories in France.
After that, Napoleon eliminated the Prussians after he had defeated them at the battle of Jena-Auerstadt. Then, he annexed Prussia to his huge empire and stripped it of its dominions. Napoleon had goals for improving education in France. After coming to power he discovered he did not have enough trained personnel to administer his empire.
This included architects, engineers, and scientists. Additionally he viewed education as a means of teaching the masses with the right principles. This meant removing education from the control of the church and placing it under state control. (This was something the Revolution had only partially done.) That being said, he expected two things from the schools.
First was the training of middle-class boys to be civil and military leaders. Secondly, he wanted the educational system to be absolutely uniform. He wanted to be able to pull his watch out of his pocket at any time and tell what was going on at any school. . By 1812, it was estimated that only one child in eight was enrolled in a primary school.
The institutes of higher learning had a large percentage of its students in professional studies, with almost 30% studying medicine or science. However, the difficulty of finding subordinates with the technical training to execute his industrial and engineering projects, and the bent of his own genius, led Napoleon to emphasize the training of the scientist as equally important with the training of the scholar, and his efforts helped to make France the home of scientific thought in the early years of the nineteenth century. As an indoctrinating tool, it was more successful. In the latter years of the Empire, when manpower became scarce, French teenagers on the whole, responded to the call to arms even after almost twenty years of continual warfare. In 1807, Napoleon reached an agreement with the Russians after the Battle of Friedland, which was a bloody battle.
However, Russia did not lose any of its territories and agreed to cooperate with Napoleon in the future. After a series of military victories, Bonaparte finally defeated the Holy Roman Empire that existed since 926 A. D. In1812, Napoleon began his fatal Russian campaign, a landmark in the history of the destructive potential of warfare. Virtually all of continental Europe was under his control, and the invasion of Russia was an attempt to force Czar Alexander I to submit once again to the terms of a treaty that Napoleon had imposed upon him four years earlier. Having gathered nearly half a million soldiers, from France as well as all of the vassal states of Europe, Napoleon entered Russia at the head of the largest army ever seen.
The Russians, under Marshal Kutuzov, could not realistically hope to defeat him in a direct confrontation. Instead, they begin a defensive campaign of strategic retreat, devastating the land as they fell back and harassing the flanks of the French. As the summer wore on, Napoleon’s massive supply lines were stretched ever thinner, and his force began to decline. By September, without having engaged in a single pitched battle, the French Army had been reduced by more than two thirds from fatigue, hunger, and raids by Russian forces. Nonetheless, it was clear that unless the Russians engaged the French Army in a major battle, Moscow would be Napoleon’s in a matter of weeks. The Czar insisted upon an engagement, and on September 7, with winter closing in and the French army only 70 miles (110 km) from the city, the two armies met at Borodino Field.
By the end of the day, 108,000 men had died–but neither side had gained a decisive victory. Kutuzov realized that any further defense of the city would be senseless, and he withdrew his forces, prompting the citizens of Moscow to begin a massive and panicked exodus. When Napoleon’s army arrived on September 14, they found a city depopulated and short of supplies, a major comfort in the face of the oncoming winter. To make matters worse, fires broke out in the city that night, and by the next day, the French were lacking shelter as well.
After waiting in vain for Alexander to offer to negotiate, Napoleon ordered his troops to begin the march home. As the south route was blocked by Kutuzov’s forces (and the French were in no shape for a battle) the retreat retraced the long, devastated route of the invasion. Having waited until mid-October to depart, the exhausted French army found itself in the middle of an early and cold winter. Temperatures soon dropped well below freezing, food was hard to get, and the march was five hundred miles.
Ten thousand men survived. The campaign ensured Napoleon’s downfall and Russia’s status as a leading power in post-Napoleonic Europe. Yet even as Russia emerged more powerful than ever from the Napoleonic era, its internal tensions began to increase. By the 23rd of June 1812, all the troops had taken their positions.
Napoleon’s main army was between Kovno and Pilviszki. Eugene’s army was around Kalvaria. Jerome with his VII Corps was near Novrogod. Macdonald with X Corps was at Tilsit.
Swarzenberg’s Austrians were near Siedlice. All of these forces totaled up to 499,000 men, with 1146 guns. At the time, Russians had an army of 183,000 men and 15,000 Cossacks with 938 guns. Napoleon’s main army reached Kovno after crossing the river Niemen between June 24-25 1812. At the same time, Macdonald went over Niemen at Tilsit, eighty miles downstream. Jerome did not cross Neimen until the June 30th at Grodno.
Napoleon established headquarters at Kovno and remained in that town for three days. Until Kovno, everything had gone according to the plans, but the following days were to reveal much tougher challenges in terms of climate and road quality. After the Russian incident, Napoleon’s empire fell apart. England, Russia, Prussia, and Austria allied together to fight the French.
On June 13, 1813, Czar Alexander I, the head of the Russians, joined the Prussians and thus, the War of Liberation started. Lucky for Napoleon, he defeated the Russian and Prussian armies in Lutzen and Bautzen. In a three-day battle at Leipzig, also known as the Battle of the Nations, the French were outnumbered in every way. The French had to retreat. Then on March 30, 1814 the allies captured Paris. Even Napoleon’s generals realized it was a lost fight and gave up.
Napoleon was forced to give up the throne on April 6, 1814. Napoleon was exiled from France. He took a few soldiers to his new empire, the small island of Elba, a small island within sight of Corsica. He was allowed to keep his title of emperor and promised to pay two million francs every year to France.
After Napoleon’s Exile, European leaders quarreled upon the division of spoils of Napoleon’s empire. The work of deciding the fate of Europe was done at the Congress of Vienna. The congress was hosted by Austria and presided over by Prince Klemens von Metternich, the guiding genius of the conference. Meanwhile, Napoleon has been in Elba for 10 months and in the midst of the squabbles of the quarreling Congress, he had escaped from the island set forth back to France. In conclusion, Napoleon Bonaparte has been a great military genius.
He was one of the most powerful people, in my opinion, that I have ever read about. I have learned many things about warfare, strategic importance, and power while doing this paper. French history seemed very interesting to me. I will look forward to doing more history papers about the French.
