Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader who rose from relatively minor Corsican gentry through the officer corps of the revolutionary army to rule France as First Consul and then Emperor, and whose wars reshaped the map and legal order of Europe. He built his early reputation on victories in the French Revolutionary Wars in Italy and Egypt, seized power in the 1799 coup of 18 Brumaire that replaced the Revolutionary government with the Consulate, and crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804. Over the following decade he defeated a succession of European coalitions and dominated most of the continent either directly or through allied and client states, while exporting the Napoleonic Code, a codification of civil law drawing on Revolutionary principles, to much of the territory he controlled, where in several countries it remains a foundation of civil law to this day. His invasion of Russia in 1812 ended in catastrophic retreat, and a renewed coalition forced his abdication in 1814; he returned from exile on Elba for the Hundred Days in 1815, only to be finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, after which he was exiled to the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died in 1821. Historians remain sharply divided over his legacy, between an assessment of him as a moderniser who consolidated and exported the legal and administrative gains of the French Revolution, and one that emphasizes the immense casualties of his wars and his re-establishment of authoritarian, hereditary rule.