Napoleon and the Remaking of Europe in Eight Documents, 1797 to 1815

Signed on 17 October 1797 by Napoleon Bonaparte for France and representatives of the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, it ended the War of the First Coalition. Austria ceded the Austrian Netherlands to France and the Republic of Venice was dissolved and partitioned between France and Austria.

A secret agreement of 1 October 1800 under which Spain retroceded the Louisiana territory to France in exchange for Bourbon dynastic concessions in Italy. The transfer stayed largely unannounced until Spanish officials handed over New Orleans in 1803.

Signed in 1802 at the close of the War of the Second Coalition, it briefly ended hostilities between France, Spain and the United Kingdom. Britain gave up most of its wartime conquests while keeping Ceylon and Trinidad, and France agreed to withdraw its forces from Naples and Egypt.

Napoleon sold France territory it had regained from Spain only three years earlier. The treaty signed in Paris on 30 April 1803 by Robert Livingston and James Monroe cost the United States 15 million dollars for roughly 828,000 square miles.

The Civil Code of the French was established during the French Consulate in 1804 and remains in force in France today, though heavily amended. A commission of four jurists drafted it, and Napoleon chaired many of the commission plenary sessions.

Two peace treaties concluded in July 1807 after Napoleon won the Battle of Friedland and ended the War of the Fourth Coalition. He and Alexander I of Russia signed the first on 7 July, and he and Frederick William III of Prussia signed the second on 9 July.

Dated 1 March 1814, though the signings took place on 9 March, it bound Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia to fight together until Napoleon was defeated. It became a foundation of the Quadruple Alliance and of the great-power cooperation that followed.

The treaty document of the Congress of Vienna, held from September 1814 to June 1815 to settle Europe after Napoleon fell. It embodied the separate treaties and was signed on 9 June 1815, with Klemens von Metternich chairing the Congress.