Napoleon then drove into the Austrian heartlands. He pushed to within a hundred kilometres of Vienna before the Austrians sued for peace. The preliminary peace of Leoben in April 1797 gave France control of most of northern Italy and the Low Countries. Napoleon marched on Venice and forced its surrender, ending eleven centuries of Venetian independence. He authorised the looting of treasures — among them the famous bronze horses of Saint Mark's Basilica, shipped to Paris. His army had fought sixty-seven engagements, won eighteen pitched battles, and extracted an estimated forty-five million French pounds from Italy, along with hundreds of paintings and sculptures.

He also played politics. Napoleon founded two newspapers — one for his troops, one for circulation in France — and orchestrated a coup in Paris through a trusted general, purging royalists from the legislative councils. He finalized peace with Austria through the Treaty of Campo Formio and returned to Paris in December 1797 as a conquering hero. He met Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, France's foreign minister, and began planning an invasion of Britain. When he concluded that France's naval strength was insufficient to challenge the Royal Navy, he pivoted: he would strike at Britain's interests in India by seizing Egypt.

In May 1798, Napoleon sailed from France with a force of around thirty-five thousand soldiers and, unusually, a team of a hundred and sixty-seven scientists — mathematicians, chemists, naturalists, and more. The expedition eluded the Royal Navy and landed at Alexandria on 1 July. Napoleon defeated Egypt's ruling military caste, the Mamluks, at the Battle of the Pyramids on 21 July, fought within sight of Giza. But within two weeks the British admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed the French fleet at anchor in the Battle of the Nile, stranding Napoleon's army in Egypt.

The scientific expedition made enduring discoveries, including the Rosetta Stone, which would eventually unlock the hieroglyphic writing of ancient Egypt. But militarily the campaign grew increasingly difficult. In early 1799, Napoleon led thirteen thousand men into the Ottoman province of Syria, taking coastal towns by force. At Jaffa, he ordered the execution of up to five thousand prisoners by bayonet or drowning. He failed to take the fortress of Acre and marched his army back to Egypt in May, leaving thousands dead from combat and plague along the way.

Napoleon had stayed closely informed of events in Europe. France had suffered defeats in what was being called the War of the Second Coalition, and the government — the Directory — was faltering. On 24 August 1799, he left Egypt without orders from Paris, sailing for France and leaving the army behind. He arrived in October to a hero's welcome. The Directory was too weak to punish him for deserting his command. Within weeks, he had decided to destroy it.

On 9 November 1799 — 18 Brumaire by the revolutionary calendar — Napoleon and a circle of conspirators including Talleyrand and his own brother Lucien launched a coup. Backed by grenadiers with fixed bayonets, they forced the legislative Council of Five Hundred to dissolve the Directory and appoint three provisional consuls. Real power fell to Napoleon as First Consul. The revolution, which had begun a decade earlier with the storming of a prison, had produced a military dictator. He introduced a new constitution in December, approved by plebiscite in February 1800. The official count was over three million in favour, though Lucien had secretly doubled the yes votes.

Napoleon moved quickly to consolidate. He reformed French administration, appointing prefects to run regional departments and mayors to run towns. He introduced censorship, closed most opposition newspapers, and made his peace with the Catholic Church through the Concordat of 1801, which Pope Pius VII signed, recognizing the regime in exchange for recognition of Catholicism as France's majority religion. He secured France's military position by leading an army across the Swiss Alps into Italy in May 1800, surprising the Austrians who had reoccupied the peninsula. At the Battle of Marengo on 14 June, his forces were initially pushed back, but a division arriving late in the afternoon reversed the tide and the Austrians fled. The following day they signed an armistice.

In March 1802, France and Britain signed the Treaty of Amiens, ending nearly a decade of revolutionary war. The peace was brief and uneasy: Britain refused to evacuate Malta, and Napoleon annexed territories not covered by the agreement. By May 1803 Britain declared war again. Meanwhile, recognizing that his colony of Louisiana in North America would be impossible to defend, Napoleon sold the entire territory to the United States for fifteen million dollars, doubling that nation's size at a stroke.

In May 1802 a plebiscite made Napoleon consul for life. He reintroduced slavery in France's colonial territories that same month — the National Convention had abolished it in 1794 — and sent his brother-in-law with twenty-nine thousand troops to retake Saint-Domingue, the Caribbean colony then controlled by the formerly enslaved leader Toussaint Louverture. Toussaint was captured and sent to France, but the expedition failed, overwhelmed by disease and the forces of the rebel commander Jean-Jacques Dessalines. By May 1803 Napoleon acknowledged defeat. The following year, the former slaves proclaimed the independent republic of Haiti.

In February 1804, Napoleon's police uncovered a royalist plot to assassinate him involving the British government. On the advice of Talleyrand, Napoleon ordered the kidnapping of the Duke of Enghien, a Bourbon prince living in exile, violating the sovereignty of Baden. The duke was tried in secret and executed, despite no proof of personal involvement in the plot. The killing shocked every royal court in Europe. It also, paradoxically, accelerated Napoleon's next move: his supporters argued that only a hereditary monarchy could secure the regime against such plots.

On 18 May 1804 the French Senate proclaimed Napoleon Emperor of the French. His coronation took place at Notre Dame de Paris on 2 December, with Pope Pius VII present. After being anointed by the pope, Napoleon took the crown and placed it on his own head — an act of deliberate theatre, denying the Church the symbolic authority of the gesture. He then crowned Joséphine beside him. He had appointed eighteen of his leading generals as Marshals of the Empire the day before. He was thirty-four years old. He was now, in his own estimation and by the law of France, the heir to Charlemagne.

By September 1805, Britain, Russia, Austria, Sweden, Naples, and the Ottoman Empire had formed the Third Coalition against France. Napoleon had assembled a massive force around Boulogne, originally intended for an invasion of Britain. He now swung it east. His Grande Armée numbered three hundred and fifty thousand men, organized into corps, with mobile artillery reserves and an elite Imperial Guard. In a campaign of breathtaking speed, he outflanked the Austrian army at Ulm in October, forcing a surrender of sixty thousand men at the cost of two thousand French casualties.

French forces then occupied Vienna in November. Napoleon pushed north to confront the combined Russian and Austrian armies. At the Battle of Austerlitz on 2 December 1805 — exactly one year after his coronation — he feigned weakness on his right flank, drawing the allied forces down from the high ground at the Pratzen Heights. His centre then seized those heights and caught the allies in a pincer. Thousands of Russian soldiers fled across a frozen lake; between a hundred and two thousand drowned. About a third of the allied army was killed, captured, or wounded. Napoleon would later call Austerlitz the finest battle he ever fought.

By the Treaty of Pressburg, signed on 26 December 1805, Austria left the coalition, surrendered substantial territory, and paid an indemnity of forty million francs. The Holy Roman Empire, that ancient constellation of German statelets, was dissolved. Napoleon replaced it with the Confederation of the Rhine, a buffer zone of German states under French influence. A thousand-year institution had been erased in a season.

In 1806, Napoleon deposed the Bourbon king of Naples and installed his elder brother Joseph on the throne. He made his younger brother Louis king of Holland. Prussia, alarmed by French dominance in Germany, declared war. At the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt on 14 October 1806, the French shattered the Prussian army, killing or wounding many of its senior commanders. In the following month the French captured a hundred and forty thousand Prussian soldiers and over two thousand cannon. Napoleon issued the Berlin Decree, banning European nations from trading with Britain — the Continental System, as it came to be called, which was widely violated and never fully enforced.

He then marched east through Poland, fighting a bloody stalemate against the Russians at Eylau in February 1807 before crushing them at Friedland in June, inflicting casualties of up to thirty per cent of their army. The two emperors — Napoleon and Tsar Alexander the First of Russia — met on a raft floating in the River Niemen on 25 June to negotiate peace. The resulting Treaties of Tilsit were generous to Russia but devastating to Prussia, which lost half its territory and population and was occupied for two years at a cost of nearly one and a half billion francs. Napoleon was at the peak of his power.

After Tilsit, Napoleon turned to Portugal, which was reluctant to enforce the trade blockade against Britain. He sent French troops across Spain with Spanish consent and occupied Lisbon in November 1807. Then, in the spring of 1808, he summoned the Spanish king and his son to Bayonne and forced them both to relinquish the Spanish throne. He installed his brother Joseph as King of Spain. It was a fatal miscalculation. On 2 May 1808 an uprising broke out in Madrid and spread throughout Spain. The guerrilla war that followed tied down three hundred thousand French troops for six years. Napoleon later called the Peninsular campaign the unlucky war that ruined him.

In April 1809, Austria struck again, crossing into Bavaria. Napoleon hurried from Paris to lead the campaign, won the Battle of Wagram in July after a bruising encounter, and forced Austria to the peace table. The Treaty of Schönbrunn stripped Austria of further territory, reduced its army to a hundred and fifty thousand men, and imposed an indemnity of two hundred million francs. Napoleon then divorced Joséphine — their marriage had produced no heir — and in April 1810 married Marie Louise, daughter of the Austrian emperor. On 20 March 1811, she gave birth to a son, named King of Rome from birth. The dynasty seemed secure.

By late 1811, Napoleon had turned his attention to Russia. Tsar Alexander had grown increasingly resistant to the Continental System, opening Russian ports to neutral shipping and banning most French imports. Napoleon began planning the largest military operation in European history. By June 1812, his multinational Grande Armée numbered around four hundred and fifty thousand frontline troops. He called the invasion the Second Polish War, though he refused to promise Polish independence for fear of unsettling his Austrian and Prussian allies.

On 24 June 1812, the army began crossing the Niemen river into Russian Lithuania. The Russians retreated three hundred and twenty kilometres east, burning crops and stores as they went. Napoleon captured Smolensk in August at a cost of nine thousand men, but the Russians withdrew intact. The decisive engagement came on 7 September at Borodino, outside Moscow. The battle produced forty-four thousand Russian and thirty-five thousand French dead, wounded, or captured — one of the bloodiest single days in European history up to that point. The Russians withdrew overnight. Napoleon entered Moscow on 14 September.

The city burned. Moscow's governor had ordered it set alight rather than surrender it intact. For six weeks Napoleon waited in the smouldering city for Alexander to send peace terms. Alexander, in Saint Petersburg, did not reply. In mid-October, Napoleon ordered the retreat.

What followed was catastrophic. The French were attacked by Cossacks and peasant fighters, ravaged by cold, disease, and starvation. Around forty thousand to fifty thousand troops reached Smolensk by 9 November — a loss of sixty thousand in three weeks. In late November, under attack from all sides, the army crossed the Berezina river on pontoon bridges in temperatures of minus forty degrees. On 5 December, Napoleon left his disintegrating army and rode for Paris. By the time the remnants crossed back into allied territory, the Grande Armée had effectively ceased to exist. Russian military losses were up to three hundred thousand; total deaths on both sides approached one million.

The catastrophe in Russia opened the floodgates. Prussia and Sweden declared war in March 1813. Napoleon assembled a new army of two hundred thousand and won battles at Lützen and Bautzen in April, but Britain formally joined the coalition in June and Austria in August. The balance of forces shifted irreversibly. At the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 — the largest battle of the Napoleonic Wars — the coalition defeated Napoleon, inflicting fifty-three thousand French casualties and forcing a retreat to the Rhine. In November, the coalition offered peace terms that would have left Napoleon as emperor of a reduced France. He refused.

The coalition crossed the Rhine into France on 1 January 1814. Wellington's British forces crossed the Pyrenees from Spain in the south. Napoleon fought a brilliant defensive campaign in north-eastern France with roughly seventy thousand troops against two hundred thousand, winning a series of engagements in February. But the coalition pressed on. By late March, a coalition army of two hundred thousand began attacking the heights above Paris. Empress Marie Louise fled the city with the King of Rome. On 31 March, the French marshal commanding Paris surrendered the capital. On 2 April the French Senate declared Napoleon deposed.

Napoleon, at Fontainebleau with an army of forty to sixty thousand, contemplated a march on Paris. His senior marshals refused. On 6 April 1814, he abdicated unconditionally. In his farewell address to the soldiers of his Old Guard on 20 April, he told them: "For twenty years you have accompanied me faithfully on the paths of honor and glory... Farewell, my children!" He was exiled to Elba, a Mediterranean island of twelve thousand inhabitants off the Tuscan coast. The night after signing the treaty, he swallowed poison he had carried since the Russian retreat. It had lost its potency with age. He survived.

On Elba, Napoleon drew up administrative plans, managed the island's mines, and learned that Joséphine had died in France in May 1814. He locked himself in his room for two days. He also learned that King Louis the Eighteenth was deeply unpopular, that his promised financial allowance from the Treaty of Fontainebleau was not being paid, and that there were rumours he was to be transferred to a remote island in the Atlantic. On 26 February 1815, he escaped from Elba in a small brig with about a thousand men and seven vessels.

He landed on the French mainland at Golfe-Juan on 1 March and marched north through the Alpine foothills on the route now called the Route Napoléon. Near Grenoble, the Fifth Regiment intercepted him. Napoleon walked forward alone and called out: "Here I am. Kill your Emperor, if you wish!" The soldiers answered with "Vive l'Empereur!" and joined him. Two weeks later, the Marshal of the Empire Michel Ney — who had boasted he would bring Napoleon to Paris in an iron cage — joined him with six thousand men. On 20 March, King Louis the Eighteenth fled Paris. That evening, Napoleon entered the capital.

The powers at the Congress of Vienna declared Napoleon an outlaw on 13 March and pledged a hundred and fifty thousand men each from Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia to end his rule. Napoleon moved fast. He raised an army of about a hundred and twenty-four thousand and led them into Belgium on 12 June, aiming to split the British force under Wellington from the Prussian army under the commander Blücher before they could combine against him. He defeated Blücher at Ligny on 16 June, while a separate engagement at Quatre Bras left Wellington's force intact.

On 18 June 1815, Napoleon confronted Wellington at Waterloo, south of Brussels. Wellington's army of a hundred and twelve thousand held a ridge and withstood repeated French attacks through the afternoon. Late in the day, Blücher's Prussians arrived in force on Napoleon's right flank. The French lines broke. It was over. Napoleon returned to Paris, found the legislature had turned against him, and abdicated on 22 June in favour of his son. He fled to the Atlantic port of Rochefort, considered sailing for the United States, but found British ships blockading the harbour. On 15 July 1815, he surrendered to a British captain aboard HMS Bellerophon.

The British government transferred Napoleon to Saint Helena, a remote island in the South Atlantic, nearly nineteen hundred kilometres from the west coast of Africa. He arrived in October 1815 with twenty-seven followers, guarded by a garrison of two thousand one hundred soldiers and a patrol of ten ships. He was fifty-one years old and would never leave the island.

He was housed at Longwood House, a forty-room wooden bungalow that was damp, windswept, and rat-infested. He insisted on imperial formality regardless: dinner guests were expected in military dress, women in evening gowns. He dictated his memoirs, commented on his campaigns, and complained ceaselessly to the island's governor about conditions. He circulated accounts of his treatment in the hope that public opinion would force the allies to relent. It did not. In November 1818, the allies formally announced he would remain a prisoner for life.

His health deteriorated through 1820 and into 1821. His physician had warned as early as 1817 that the climate and lack of exercise were killing him. In March 1821 Napoleon was confined to bed. In April he wrote his wills, declaring that he had been assassinated by the English oligarchy, that the Bourbons would fall, and that his son would one day rule France. He distributed his fortune among ninety-seven legatees and asked to be buried by the Seine.

On 3 May 1821 he received the last rites. He died on 5 May 1821, aged fifty-one. His last words, variously recorded by those present, were either "France, the army, head of the army, Joséphine" or "France, my son, the Army." Both the French physician Antommarchi and the British doctors concluded at autopsy that the cause was stomach cancer, the same disease that had killed his father. Napoleon was buried with military honours in the Valley of the Geraniums on Saint Helena. He had asked to lie by the Seine. That wish, at least, was eventually granted: in 1840, his remains were returned to France, carried through Paris before seven hundred thousand to a million mourners, and interred at Les Invalides, where they rest today beneath a domed crypt designed by the architect Louis Visconti.

What Napoleon left behind is genuinely double-edged, and that tension is the honest measure of the man. The Napoleonic Code, implemented in March 1804, spread across Europe and beyond: it entrenched equality before the law, abolished the vestiges of feudalism, secured property rights, established equal inheritance, and guaranteed religious toleration. It remains the foundation of legal systems across France, much of western Europe, Louisiana, Quebec, and Latin America. The Legion of Honour, which he created in 1802, is still France's highest decoration. The prefectural system of regional administration he introduced in 1800 still governs France today. The metric system, spread by his armies, now covers most of the world.

He also abolished the Spanish Inquisition, closed Jewish ghettos across the territories he conquered, ended manorialism and the guild system, and spread the principle that a man's birth should not determine his fate. Wellington said Napoleon's presence on a battlefield was worth forty thousand soldiers. Military academies across the world still study his campaigns. The reorganization of the German states he imposed, however reluctantly, helped spark the nationalism that would eventually produce a unified Germany in 1871. The disruption of Spanish colonial authority in Latin America set in motion the independence movements led by figures like Simón Bolívar. Poland, the only country to name him in its national anthem, has never forgotten the duchy he created in Warsaw.

But the accounting cannot stop there. The wars Napoleon prosecuted cost an estimated six million lives and devastated the European economy for a generation. He reinstated slavery in France's colonies, banned black people and people of mixed race from entering France, and reduced the civil rights of women and children. He abolished the free press, shut down independent newspapers, exiled and imprisoned critics, and bypassed elected government whenever it inconvenienced him. He executed the Duke of Enghien on no real evidence. He massacred up to five thousand prisoners of war in Syria. He looted the art of a continent: the Louvre filled with what his armies had stolen.

Napoleon Bonaparte was a man of genuine brilliance who used that brilliance in the service of a will that recognized no limit. He rose from a mocked outsider on the edges of France to the ruler of forty per cent of the European population. He was shaped by his mother's discipline, hardened by the bullying at Brienne, launched by a cannon blast in the streets of Paris, and ultimately undone by the same appetite for total victory that had made him great. He died in a damp bungalow on an island in the South Atlantic, dictating his memoirs, insisting on formal dress at dinner, and dreaming of the Seine. The absences he left behind — the empires dissolved, the institutions erased, the lives never lived — are as much his monument as anything that stands.