His Military Accomplishments

        After his coronation, Napoleon became an artillery officer, which was an important and high ranked job. Napoleon’s generals were very astonished about Napoleon for his good memory and how he knows the smallest little detail about things, especially the army. He knew where everything and everyone were at any time. Napoleon was a supporter of many of the ideas in the French Revolution. He even became one of the youngest generals in the army because of his success in recapturing the city of Toulon from anti-revolutionary forces. Later on, in 1795, Napoleon was once again rewarded by being given command of a French army fighting in Italy because Napoleon ordered cannons to fire at rebellious citizens, killing hundreds. He was off to a wonderful start in his career.

          In 1797, Napoleon promised Italy freedom because he realized that is was important to gain the support of Italians. The reason being because Italy wanted to get rid of their unpopular Austrian rulers and when Austria went into war with France during the French Revolution, Italy was thrilled. In 1796, Napoleon won outstanding victories in Italy, at Lodi, Castiglione, and Arcole. He drove out the Austrians and set new French-controlled republics. Napoleon had overstated his promise with Italy, he saw Italy as a rich enemy territory. On command, his soldiers stole everything they could get their hands on. Napoleon made himself very wealthy, he paid his army using the spoils of Italy and shipped thousands of valuable art treasures to France for his own.

The New Map of Europe by Napoleon

         Napoleon then asked the government of France for permission to capture Egypt in 1798. He asked this because he theorized that it would cut Britain off from India. Once his permission was granted, Napoleon crushed the Egyptian army, but failed to crush the British at the Battle of the Nile. Thus, Napoleon retreated himself and escaped back to France, popular as ever.

          At the time after he crowned himself emperor, some time later, Napoleon realized that his own power came form his victories, which meant he had to stay strong. Napoleon then won many major battles with Ulm, Austerlitz, and Jena, where he defeated the armies of Austria, Russia, and Prussia. He had his enemies agree to sign the Treaty of Tilsit in1807, and by then Napoleon had gained a lot of ground in Europe. After the Treaty of Tilsit, most of Europe divided into new countries and provinces, but only Britain remained independent.

             After this big amount of success so far, many of the people were happy. They loved the ideals of revolution, how they basically remade their whole country, how proud of their country they were, and that they were a real nation. This was nationalism that they felt. This is close to the end of Napoleon’s great victories. Napoleon wanting more victories attempted and failed at the Russian Campaign, which really caused his empire to break up. Then, Napoleon stepped down from the throne, was exiled, and became an unhappy Emperor of a tiny island called Elba. After 10 months he returned back to France to rule for another 100 days, he went with his army to defeat Belgium, in the battle of Waterloo, and almost succeeded. Thus was the end of Napoleon’s career.

           “Napoleon won many victories, and had several huge losses.” He valued rapid movements and made effective use of large armies. He developed new plans for each battle, so the enemy could never figure out what was going to happen next.” (2)