What was napoleons downfall

It was a critical juncture. In the snows of Russia, Napoleon had just lost the greatest army he had ever assembled — of his invasion force of ,, at most , had returned.

The reason for this, however, was unexpected. He told Schwarzenberg:. I am a new man, I need to be more careful of public opinion … If I signed a peace of this sort, it is true that at first one would hear only cries of joy, but within a short time the government would be bitterly attacked, I would lose … the confidence of my people, because the Frenchman has a vivid imagination, he is tough, and loves glory and exaltation.

Nowhere was this truer, he felt than in France, which had just undergone a revolution of unprecedented scale and violence. He genuinely feared that a sudden loss of international prestige could reopen the divisions he had spent fifteen years trying to close. This fear may well have originated in a particular early experience. On 10 August , as a young officer, Napoleon had witnessed one of the climactic moments of the French Revolution, the storming of the Tuileries by the Paris crowd and the overthrow of King Louis XVI.

It was the first fighting he had ever seen. He had been horrified by the subsequent massacre of the Swiss Guards and the accompanying atrocities. For Napoleon, this trauma also held a political lesson. Yet while the beloved homeland rejected him, his adopted nation offered opportunities to flourish. Revolution swept through the country bringing about a new era, allowing the ambitious Napoleon to rise through the ranks.

For his pivotal role in capturing the city of Toulon from royalists, during which he picked up a wound to the thigh, he became a brigadier-general at the age of Coming to the rescue of the republic again in October , he quashed a revolt in Paris that threatened to overthrow the National Convention.

For this, he became military adviser to the new government, the Directory, and commander-in-chief of the French Army of Italy.

While his marriage may have been tumultuous, the same could not be said about his record on the battlefield. The campaign gave early demonstrations of his military prowess: devastating speed of soldier movement, marshalling a mobile artillery, and concealing his true deployments to trick the enemy.

Although he quickly dismissed that idea, declaring that the French stood little chance at sea against the British Navy, he did suggest that an attack on Egypt could cripple British trade routes to India.

The campaign, however, fell apart when the British obliterated the fleet at the battle of the Nile on 1 August. With his army stranded on land, Napoleon marched into Syria in early and began a brutal series of conquests, only being halted at Acre, in modern-day Israel. Napoleon had a reputation for being loved by his men, but theories also suggest he tested their loyalty dearly by having plague-ridden soldiers poisoned so they would not slow the retreat.

Internal rifts and military losses had made the French government vulnerable, and he spotted an opportunity. Abandoning his army and hightailing it back to Paris, he and a small group staged a bloodless coup on 9 November, making him, at the age of 30, the most powerful man in France. The uncertainty that let Napoleon become First Consul had persisted since the start of the French Revolution , so he knew he needed stability.

By , he had managed to buy himself time by signing the Treaty of Amiens with the British to restore peace in Europe, albeit an uneasy one. It only lasted a year. The Napoleonic Code rewrote civil law, while the judicial, police and education systems all underwent significant changes. And although far from religious himself, Napoleon signed the Concordat in with the Pope, reconciling the Catholic Church with the Revolution.

What nothing will destroy, what will live forever, is my Civil Code. The Napoleonic Code replaced the confusing, contradictory and cluttered laws of pre-revolutionary France with a single, up-to-date set of laws.

Enacted on 21 March , the code concerns individual and group civil rights, as well as property rights compiled with a mix of liberalism and conservatism. So while all male citizens were granted equal rights, the code established women, in keeping with the general law of the time, as subordinate to their fathers or husbands. Its impact can still be seen in laws today. All the while, Napoleon made himself more powerful. Following the uncovering of an assassination attempt, Napoleon decided the security of his regime depended on a hereditary line of succession, so he made himself emperor.

So France went from monarchy to revolution to empire in 15 years. The corpulent ceremony must have upset a great number of revolutionaries, who saw too many similarities with the pomp of the royals they had removed.

But much remained to be done. In the second phase, Napoleon sought to defeat Britain through indirect means. Instead of direct invasion, he adopted economic blockade. The flaw in his thinking, though, was that the Berlin Decrees that codified his attempt to put an economic grip on the entire continent in order to destroy the British economy, upped the ante for all the states of the continent, as they came more directly under the thumb of France.

It provided the necessary wedge to drive between France and her allies. It was a daunting task. England remained the only European country not to forge an alliance with Napoleon or strike an armistice. Meanwhile, turmoil in London led to the formation of a new government, and King George III was incorrectly believed mad. His histories end with , with Napoleon still strong. Strangely, the need to document British grand strategy during this last crucial phase of the Napoleonic wars has to date been unfulfilled.

Rory Muir has attempted to plug this gap with Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, —, and does an admirable job. Despite some flaws that mar his effort, his is history in the Mackesy tradition.

Hence we see the influence of personalities, economic strength and weakness, political party bickering, diplomatic bungles and successes, even the jeering press, as well as military events in Europe and as far off as India, America, and the Caribbean, on policy made in London. Britain went to war against France not, as Edmund Burke had urged, against the French Revolution, but for the same reason she had so often in the past and would again in the future, to preserve the liberty of the Low Countries.

Yet at this early date we can see the emergence of another shibboleth of British security strategy, the reluctance to commit large British land forces to the continent, a reluctance slammed home by the realities of the meatgrinder war in Belgium and France a century later.

Against Napoleon the reluctance was more financial than humane, as Muir makes clear.