A white porcelain bust of Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) as First Consul, ca. 1800
Marked Toulon

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Napoleon’s wars

Napoleon Bonaparte rose from artillery officer to emperor of the French, and for a decade dominated Europe. Defeat in Russia in 1812 began his fall, which ended at Waterloo in 1815.

Place
Toulon · Austerlitz · Trafalgar · Moscow · Waterloo · St HelenaEurope, Africa
Laid out as
A campaignA run of marches and battles, step by step across a map.
Lessons
7 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IItaly and Egypt
  2. IIEmperor
  3. IIIAusterlitz
  4. IVTrafalgar
  5. VRestoring slavery
  6. VIMoscow
  7. VIIWaterloo

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Napoleon Bonaparte
  • Joséphine
  • Horatio Nelson
  • the Duke of Wellington
  • Mikhail Kutuzov

Objects

  • The Rosetta Stone (found by his army)
  • The Napoleonic Code

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1796 to 1815. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?