There are characters who have marked the course of history, whose actions have consequences even centuries after their death and defined the destiny of entire nations.
At Industry Leaders, we recognize 200 years after his death one of the most important political and military leaders in the history of humanity. He knows the biography of the French military and statesman, Napoleon Bonaparte, the first monarch of France.
“France, the army, Josephine”
Napoleon Bonaparte is well known to all as the military genius who commanded the French army in major battles that took control of almost all of Western and Central Europe.
In order to become the Emperor of France, Napoleon demonstrated his great aptitude for the front, carrying out the largest military operations known up to that time in Europe.
Napoleon was a great strategist who revolutionized the war and had to use all the tactics he learned during his years at the front and his ingenuity to end the political chaos with which he had come to power.
“The reason most people fail rather than succeed is that they trade what they want most for what they want right now.”
Bonaparte instituted important reforms, including higher education for all regardless of social class or religion, a new tax code, a central bank, new laws, and a system of roads and sewers.
During 1804 he established the Napoleonic Code, a single code that unified French civil laws. It was prepared by committees of legal experts under the supervision of Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, who served as Second Consul from 1799 to 1804; the “Little Corporal” as he was known since his first campaigns of, he participated in the sessions of the Council of State, where the proposed laws were reviewed. This code had a transcendental influence on the legal world, and serves as the basis for the laws of many countries.
Biography of Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleone di Buonaparte was born on August 15, 1769 in Ajaccio, the capital of the current French region of Corsica. He came from a large family of eight siblings, five boys; José, Napoleón, Lucien, Luis and Jeronimo; and three women: Elisa, Paulina and Carolina. All children of the marriage between María Leticia Ramolino and Carlos María Buonaparte.
His family was part of the local nobility, and his father was a lawyer, but they were far from having a life of luxury, on the contrary, they frequently found themselves in difficult economic situations from which they only escaped thanks to some lands that Carlos owned. owner.
Napoleon, as he called himself years later, along with his brother José, entered the French military school of Brienne-le-Château as scholarship holders at the age of 10.
I have obtained outstanding marks in Mathematics and Geography and barely got enough to pass the other subjects. Upon his graduation from him in 1784, he was admitted to the École Royale Militaire in Paris.
After his graduation in September 1785, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the artillery. He took the new duties from him in January 1786, at only 16 years of age.
His determination, his capacity for work and his coolness under fire made him the hero of the artillery of the French forces besieging the royalist fortress of Toulon, after which he was appointed brigadier general.
In 1795, Bonaparte was in Paris when on October 3 royalists and counterrevolutionaries organized an armed protest against the Convention. Bonaparte was entrusted with leading a makeshift army in the defense of the Convention at the Tuileries Palace. He obtained some artillery pieces with the help of a young cavalry officer, Joachim Murat, who would become his brother-in-law of him, and managed to repel the insurgents. This triumph gave him great fame and power over the new Directorate, particularly over its leader, Paul Barras.
In 1796 Bonaparte took command of the French Army in Italy, which successfully led to its invasion.
Just a year later he defeated four Austrian generals whose troops were superior in number and forced Austria to sign a peace agreement. During his nearly 10-year campaign in Italy, he became an influential figure in French politics. He published two newspapers for his troops from him, but they also circulated in France. In May 1797 he founded a third periodical, published in Paris, Le Journal de Bonaparte et des hommes vertues. Napoleon returned to Paris in December of the same year, was greeted as a conquering hero and the dominant force in the government, much more popular than his directors.
In March 1798 Bonaparte proposed an expedition to colonize Egypt, then an Ottoman province, with the aim of protecting French commercial interests and cutting off the route from Britain to India.
During his stay in Egypt, Bonaparte closely followed European affairs and finally on August 23, 1799, he took advantage of a temporary relaxation of the blockade of French ports by the British fleet and embarked for France.
One of the directors, Sieyes, asked Bonaparte for his support to carry out a coup against the existing Constitution. And on November 9 and 10, troops led by Napoleon seized control and dispersed the legislative councils, leaving Bonaparte, Sieyes, and Ducos as provisional consuls to govern the government.
Bonaparte was ahead of him, drafting the Constitution of the Year VIII (1799), which ensured his election as First Consul. This made him the most powerful person in France, a power that would increase in the Constitution of the Year X (1802), when he managed to name himself First Consul for life.
What served as a preamble so that on May 28, 1804 he proclaimed himself emperor of the first French empire.
Despite the fact that the emperor sought internal and external peace, sending letters proposing peace to others, it was clear that the United Kingdom did not want peace. From 1805 the most intense phase of the Napoleonic wars would begin, which would culminate in 1815. In this period the European monarchs would not tire of waging war on the French Empire.
In that same year, after years of war, Napoleon was finally imprisoned and exiled by the British to the island of Saint Helena, in the Atlantic, on July 15.
Bonaparte died on May 5, 1821 at 5:49 pm and was buried in Santa Elena. Almost 20 years later his remains of him were repatriated, they were deposited in Les Invalides in Paris. The arrival of the remains of Napoleon was highly anticipated in France. During his funeral of him, Mozart’s Requiem was played. Millions of people have visited his grave.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Throughout his military and political career, Napoleon belonged to important associations such as:
Founder and Grand Master of the Legion of Honour.
Founder and Grand Master of the Order of the Iron Crown.
Founder and Grand Master of the Order of the Meeting.
PRIVATE LIFE
Napoleon married on March 9, 1796, to the widow Josephine de Beauharnais, 5 years older than him and a well-known lover of various important politicians of the time, with whom, even in marriage to the general, he had relations.
In 1806, he met the Polish Countess Maria Walewska, with whom he had a son, Leon Bonaparte. And after his divorce from Josefina, he asked for the hand of Archduchess Maria Luisa of Austria, who gave him a son in 1811, to Napoleon II who died at only 22 years of age.
Napoleon, contrary to popular belief, was not a short man, as he measured 1.69 m, the average height of the French of the time.
Investigations carried out on samples of her hair reveal that they were impregnated with arsenic to such an extent that highly dangerous doses were needed to achieve that concentration. This suggests that he may have died from poisoning and not from stomach cancer as previously thought.
